NORTHANGER ABBEY IS MY BIATCH

NORTHANGER ABBEY IS MY BIATCH

1. CATHERINE

   • "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine"
   • "thin awkward figure, sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair and strong features"
   • "Catherine was awakened"
   • "Her folly which seemed almost criminal"
   • "Is it not a fine old place, just like what one reads about?" (about the abbey)
   • She never could learn anything before she was taught"
   • She shirked them [lessons] when she could"
   • "she looks almost pretty today"
   • "provided nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them...she had no objection to books at all"
   • I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible"
   • "But perhaps I do not keep a journal?"
   • "Dear Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?"
   • " "Oh! that arch eye of yours! - It sees through every thing." Catherine replied only by a look of wondering ignorance."
   • "Her thoughts being still chiefly fixed on what she had with such causeless terror felt and done, nothing could shortly be clearer than that it had been all a voluntary, self-created delusion"
   • "her mind about as ignorant and uninformed as the female mind at seventeen usually is"

2. SETTING

   • "large and loft hall, they ascended a broad staircase of shining oak" - The Abbey is more modern and well kept than C imagined or wanted - she also notes there are no cobwebs and all the windows remain intact
   • "there you shall enter a gloomy chamber" (Henry telling her what NA will be like when she gets there"
   • "It was a narrow winding path through a thick grove of old Scotch firs; and Catherine, struck by its gloomy aspect...eager to enter it"
   • "she was struck, beyond her expectation, by the grandeur of the abbey
   • "Now, there was nothing so charming to her imagination as the unpretending comfort of a well-connected parsonage, something like Fullerton, but better; Fullerton had its faults, but Woodston probably had none"
   • "smooth level road of fine gravel...old porch...every pane was so large, so clear, so light!" - The Abbey is not as Gothic as she had hoped
   • "her eye suddenly fell on a large high chest, standing back in a deep recess on one side of the fire place"
     • "she was struck by the appearance of a high, old-fashioned black cabinet, which, though in a situation conspicuous enough, had never caught her notice before"
       • C imagines places to be Gothic when in reality they are just normal
   • "the six or seven rooms she had now seen surrounded three sides of the court, she could scarcely believe it, or overcome the suspicion of there being many chambers secreted"
     • CATHERINE MAKES EVERYTHING SHE SEES, BE IT GOTHIC OR NOT, INTO PART OF THE GOTHIC

3. THE GOTHIC

   • "you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you -- and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten your door, you discover, with increased alarm, that it has no lock." - Henry telling C what will happen when they get to NA while they are in the carriage. He is drawing on his experience of Gothic novels, but C believes some of it later when she discovers the ebony chest of drawers in her room
   • Catherine entertains ideas that Mrs Tilney is locked up somewhere in the house, or that General Tilney had some hand in her death. This theory is put to rest when Henry finds out: "Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from?"
   • C is obsessed with the Gothic; "She mediated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.”
     • "the infatuation...might be traced to the influence of that sort of reading"
   • A seems to almost be trashing G books by her showing much of them to be OTT and unrealistic
     • "the English are in great parts an unequal mixture of good and bad people" - Catherine realises that there aren't really these terrible Gothic villains that she imagined
   • NA is a PARODY of the Gothic, and mentions Gothic works
     • “there has not been a tolerably decent [novel] come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk,” says John Thorpe
   • Catherine wants everything to be Gothic, she is delusional tho, as Austen points out later
     • "the very curtains of her bed seemed at one moment in motion, and at another the lock of her door was agitated"
     • "all a voluntary, self-created delusion"
   • When C realises the Gothic is a load of crap and not like reality: "The Abbey in itself was no more to her now than any other house. The painful remembrance of the folly it had helped to nourish and perfect, was the only emotion which could spring from a consideration of the building."