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The Social Norms Of Women In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey

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In Jane Austen’s novel, Northanger Abbey, she explores the societal norms of women in the late 1700s through the protagonist, Catherine Morland. She takes an alternate route in dissecting how women of different social classes and upbringings acted by following the middle class sheltered schoolgirl as opposed to a wealthy upper class woman. Catherine has little to no real life experience. Austen shows the innocence of Catherine and how oblivious she is to the real world through conversations where she does not pick up on the underlying meanings, the depiction of her wild imagination, and specifically through the interaction between her and John Thorpe in the middle of chapter 9. The first way Jane Austen conveys the innocence of Catherine is …show more content…

There are many times throughout the novel where Catherine’s imagination gets the best of her and she must explore some silly fantasy. When she first arrives at Henry Tilney’s home, Northanger Abbey, she immediately wants to explore as if she were a little kid at Disney World. Her room has a mysterious chest that she tells herself she must get open because it has to contain some dark secrets inside. However, it only held a cloth and a few grocery lists inside. This scene is a perfect description of how her young 17 year old mind got the best of her. It shows how foolish she is to believe that one of the many Gothic novels she reads would actually come to life in the Tilney’s house. Her wild thoughts become so strong that she begins to question if General Tilney murdered his own wife. Catherine says that General Tileny “certainly had been an unkind husband” and that “he must have been dreadfully cruel to her” (181). Anyone else would be crazy to have these suspicions of the General, but Catherine wants to satisfy her imagination by creating a Gothic novel story line during her stay at the Abbey. Just because he is not the nicest man does not mean he would commit murder to the woman he loved. This again shows her childish tendencies in real world situations and makes it obvious to the reader that her fantasies are not practical and would never come

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