Northanger Abbey

In the opening pages of Northanger Abbey, the narrator explicitly describes the novel’s protagonist, seventeen-year-old Catherine, as distinctly lacking in the sort of qualities usually associated with the heroines of gothic or romantic fiction: She is from an ordinary family in a small English town, and she is neither especially beautiful nor talented. In introducing Catherine in this fashion, the narrator immediately sets up the humorous contrast between Catherine’s mundane life and character and the melodramatic and macabre tales she enjoys reading. While this vein of humor will be important throughout the novel, it also introduces some of the novel’s key thematic preoccupations, such as the difference between fantasy and fact, or between appearances versus reality.

Due to her youth and rather naïve personality, Catherine has many lessons to learn over the course of the novel. When Catherine goes to Bath early in the novel, she is unaware of the oftentimes hypocritical nature of high society, which initially leaves her vulnerable to the manipulations of people like Isabella and John Thorpe. As a huge fan of Gothic novels, Catherine often imagines herself as a heroine on a thrilling adventure, which makes it difficult for her to distinguish between what is fact and what is fiction.

Over the course of the novel, Catherine slowly matures by learning to look more deeply into the motives of other people and develops more self-control in terms of regulating her own imagination and conduct. Isabella’s influence over her wanes as time goes on, with Catherine learning to recognize Isabella’s selfishness and hypocrisy. When Isabella’s engagement to James unravels because of her flirtation with Frederick Tilney and Isabella tries to manipulate Catherine into patching things up with James on her behalf, Catherine realizes how she has been used and resists. Her break with Isabella is a high point in her character development, signaling that she has become wiser and also more confident in standing up for herself.

While the Thorpes prove to be fake friends, Catherine finds true friendship and loyalty with the Tilneys: She falls in love with Henry and becomes close friends with Eleanor. Significantly, she realizes that her gothic fantasies at Northanger Abbey have real-world consequences: She is unfairly slandering the General by thinking him capable of murder and could potentially hurt the feelings of Henry and Eleanor by using their personal tragedy as mere fuel for her imagination. The shame and regret she feels when caught by Henry in his mother’s rooms is an epiphany for her, helping her to understand that she needs to see things as they really are. When Catherine is later expelled from the Abbey, she shows how she has grown in empathy and understanding by suppressing her disappointment to spare Eleanor’s feelings. By the novel’s end, Catherine is ready for marriage with Henry because she is now a more mature and thoughtful person who has a stronger sense of who she is.