제인 오스틴의 『노생거 사원』에 나타난 여성의 성숙과 교육

Education of Heroine in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is about the education of the heroine, combining numerous literary genres, parody. The heroine, Catherine Morland seems unprepared for social threats that young women face in her society. For her education, Austen leads Catherine, to a larger extent, in Bath and Northanger Abbey from her family. Catherine learned a knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing to become an accomplished woman in Fullerton. In Bath, She is overwhelmed by the power of gothic romance when she encounters Mrs. Radcliffe’s work, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Then, her head is full of gothic imagination, she begins to make her own fiction, transforming the Northanger Abbey into the site of wife-murder and General Tilney into a villain, until ejected by him when her wealth proves illusory. In other word, by reading a gothic romance, she forgot the stable world of common sense and relied on the unreal, imaginative world. So she doesn’t recognize when she is in a domestic gothic crisis. However, Henry Tilney’s sudden appearance in his mother’s room and lecture on her overindulgence in gothic fantasy are therapeutic, Catherine fixed her mistakes. On the other hand, through the unreasonable imagination of a girl of seventeen, Austen tried to show the evil of the patriarchy which is invisible in the real world to her readers.