Austen’s Gothic Satire: So Funny, It’s Scary

By Mary Smythe, author of Pemberley

The Romantic movement in art and literature arose throughout Europe in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the period spanning 1760 to 1840 when societies shifted from agrarian to industrial economies. Romanticism, a response to these changes, was not ‘romantic’ in the modern sense of a couple falling into blissful love, but rather a rosy look to the past and all its naturalistic elements—bucolic splendour, wild moors, daffodils, and so on. The Romantics’ enthusiasm for yesteryear, in turn, gave rise to the re-emergence of the Gothic aesthetic, which had been popular in the Middle Ages. An interest in traditional folklore and superstition was its natural bedfellow, and from there, novelists like Horatio Walpole—arguably the first author of what we now consider the Gothic literary tradition—Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, and various other imitators flourished in popular culture.

We know for certain that Jane Austen read and enjoyed these works, amongst other types of novels, because she mentions more than a dozen of them within the text of Northanger Abbey. She might have used her characters to call them ‘horrid’, but she did so with the fervour of delight rather than disgust.

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid,” opines Henry Tilney in Chapter 14. As an avid reader myself, it’s impossible to disagree with him, but Austen’s contemporaries very well might have scoffed at this observation. “There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit and taste to recommend them,” complains the narrator in Chapter 5, breaking down the fourth wall for us in order to editorialize directly.

Austen was responding to the overall disparagement of society which considered novels as unworthy and full of nonsense—sort of like how one might view reality television today. Primarily consumed by female readers, these books were largely of what we would now consider a Gothic bent, featuring outrageous plotlines and fantastical elements. In 1797, a letter was written to The Monthly Mirror—a publication referenced by Austen via Mrs Morland in Chapter 30 of Northanger Abbey—entitled ‘Novel Reading a Cause of Female Depravity’. It, and other opinion pieces like it, accused novels of essentially spoiling the minds of young women with piffle.

No doubt, Austen herself suffered the sneering censure of those who could not appreciate her own works and those she admired by others. To her further exasperation, even her fellow authors were prone to, as Northanger Abbey’s narrator says,

“…Adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally takes up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! If the heroine of one novel be not patronised by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”

Who, indeed? It’s worth noting here that various characters within Austen’s works have come down on one side or the other of this issue and those that are ‘great readers’—from Catherine Morland to Elizabeth Bennet—tend to be the ones that we admire. Those who take the opposite stance, like John Thorpe and Mr Collins, are generally far less respected for their intellectual prowess. ‘Intolerably stupid’ is right!

It’s fairly clear that Austen had strong opinions on the value of novels based on her fervent defense of them within the pages of Northanger Abbey. Even so, she wasn’t above poking a bit of fun at them, either. Austen was a clever, astute reader herself and, having perused a vast deal of Gothic novels in her day, she was well aware of the tropes inherent in the genre. Instead of abiding by the accepted formula, however, she turned it on its head in various ways.

Take Catherine Morland as a heroine. In the traditional Gothic style, a female protagonist is meant to be ethereally beautiful and delicate, meek and submissive as she quietly suffers under patriarchal tyranny (her father, uncle, etc). She is often orphaned or lacking at least one parent, usually her mother (who may or may not be locked in the attic). Added to her troubles, she is also beset by supernatural forces beyond her kin. In short, the perfect damsel in distress waiting for a hero to come and save her—very Disneyesque in representation.

The opening line of Northanger Abbey reads: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine.” And this sums her up perfectly. Contrary to what a heroine was supposed to be, Catherine is an everywoman, extraordinary only in her ordinariness, not especially beautiful, gentle, or otherwise special. She’s fond of ‘boys plays’ (i.e., she was a tomboy), and her only contact with the supernatural is in books. She even still has both of her parents—who are perfectly nice, by the by—and shows a great deal of curious agency as she searches the titular Northanger Abbey for clues about the demise of the late Mrs Tilney. Honestly, she could star in her own Hanna-Barbera cartoon series with an anthropomorphic animal sidekick.

Do you know who does check every box on the gothic heroine wish list? Eleanor Tilney. She, as the narrator accuses in her diatribe about hypocritical heroines, even prefers history to novels! But don’t hold that against her because she still thinks they’re pretty great, even if her brother is the true enthusiast. Much like the mousy Fanny Price versus vivacious Mary Crawford debate, Austen has subverted our expectations of which lady is featured in the starring role. Her choice is a clever one, too; with Eleanor at the helm, how could the plot move forward? Catherine is willing and eager to rifle through chests and cabinets for ancient manuscripts, search out clues in rooms she doesn’t belong in, and even manage to get herself safely home when cast out by the dastardly General Tilney. Catherine isn’t your average heroine, but she is your average nosy adolescent young woman ready to take us along on her adventure.

An adventure which, sadly, does not feature any ghosts, vampires, or other creatures which go bump in the night—unless one counts Catherine herself. No matter how much snooping she partakes in, she never turns up any of the horrors Henry teases her about as they approach the abbey. This was a novel—pardon the pun—approach at the time, given the number of spirits, witches, goblins, and—I kid you not—giant falling helmets one might see in other Gothic tales. This aspect is where Austen’s satire, lovingly crafted, really shines; she hints and taunts the reader with the possibility of the paranormal, but disappoints them at every turn. Poor Catherine, so certain that she had uncovered an ancient manuscript, only to discover (spoiler alert) a receipt for laundry instead! Austen’s sense of the satirical gothic has since been adopted and carried into the present day by the likes of Scooby Doo, The Addams Family, Ghostbusters, and anything created by Tim Burton. No doubt General Tilney was a shady real estate developer the entire time.

Amusing as Catherine’s exploits are, Austen does take care to remind her readers to keep their heads and remember that fiction does not always accurately reflect reality. Towards the end of the novel, Henry rightly chastises Catherine:

“Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.”

It’s true, Catherine has gotten carried away in her self-appointed investigation of Mrs Tilney’s death. She imagines something dreadful, something right out of a horrid novel, and realizes that she has behaved foolishly.

That said, she wasn’t entirely off the mark, either. The general might not have harmed his wife, but he does behave as a tyrannical father in preventing Eleanor from marrying the man of her choice, and he also casts Catherine out of Northanger simply because he belatedly learned that she wasn’t as wealthy as John Thorpe reported her to be. Indeed, Catherine reflects later, ‘[she had] heard enough to feel that in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty’. Austen, again, has subverted our expectations by reminding us that, while one is unlikely to meet with vampires or diabolical Italian nobles, there is still villainy in the world that is perfectly real.

Much as Austen poked fun at the Gothic, she did so in a friendly fashion which both respected and elevated the genre. She was not like those ‘ungenerous and impolitic’ writers who created and cut down her own work with the same quill. Her heroine was ordinary and unexpected at the same time, standing in for the reader as they unsuccessfully hunted ghosts and proudly thwarted real villains. She both satisfied expectations, and undermined them handily. Northanger Abbey is her satirical love letter to the admirable and the absurd found within the Gothic tradition.

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Public Domain Images:

BBC

Plates from Raymond and Agnes, or, The bleeding nun: of Lindenberg : an interesting melo-drama, in two acts

Woman Reading in a Wooden Landscape, by Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman

Frontispice du livre Les Mystères d’Udolphe, by Victorine de Chastenay

Hanna-Barbera

Northanger Abbey, Vol II, Chapter 9, by C.E. Brock

Reference and Resources:

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

The Female Gothic New Directions Edited by Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith (“Disturbing the Female Gothic: An Excavation of the Northanger Novels”)

Ghosts by Zachary Graves