Northanger Abbey

The conventions of the gothic are an important motif throughout the novel. While Austen satirizes many gothic tropes by using the gap between Catherine’s melodramatic fantasies and the humdrum reality of her existence to create humorous situations and misunderstandings, the gothic also serves as a means by which Catherine gradually learns to “read” the world around her. At first, Catherine’s naivety makes her very literal-minded: She tries to impose what she reads in her gothic novels onto the world around her, without moderating her expectations. For example, she decides that General Tilney is a gothic-style villain who has murdered his wife, simply because his gloomy character and the Abbey in which he lives seems to line up with the tropes in her novels. The reality is dangerous in a different way: The General is seeking to manipulate her based on a mistaken belief in how wealthy she is, leaving her to fend for herself on her journey home once he discovers she is not what he expected her to be. Catherine gradually realizes that while the gothic makes for good reading material, “reading” people accurately in the real world requires more maturity, subtlety, and a different kind of skill.