Lack Of Morality In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey, a Victorian novel written by Jane Austen tells the story of an ordinary young heroine, Catherine Moreland. The plot follows her adventure into the city of Bath with family friends, the Allen’s. While in the city she gains many life experiences enabling her to transition from a girl into a young woman. In the few months that she is away from her countryside home which she’s known all her life; she falls for Henry Tilney, is manipulated by the Thorpes and is able to gain a deeper understanding of true human nature. The theme of morality throughout the novel makes these developments in Catherine’s character possible. Austen maintains a particularly focuses on the everyday ethics and values a young woman living in England’s society would or should have in this time period. A critical reading of both Northanger Abbey and outside sources exploring the morality in Austen’s novel will help to demonstrate how Catherine’s primary lack of moral knowledge is the principal force that drives the changes in her character to become the unlikely heroine. Austen achieves this

She lives an ordinary and secluded life with her parents and siblings at their countryside home in Fullerton. This sheltering, causes her to have a lack of experiences leading her to be innocent in terms of morality and propriety. As Butler says in Jane Austen and the War of Ideas: “she is especially vulnerable because she is solitary” (172). This restricted society of her hometown ultimately leaves her in an innocent and susceptible state. In Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, Emsley describes Miss Moreland as “the almost blank slate of human nature – not yet educated in the ways of the world either for good or bad” (49). Again, putting emphasis on the unlikely heroines: naïve, inexperienced, trusting and idealistic nature which causes her to be morally