Commonplace Entry 16: Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
...and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. Can you stand such a ceremony as this? Will not your mind misgive you?Its walls hung with tapestry exhibiting figures as large as life, and the bed, of dark green stuff or purple velvet, presenting a funeral appearance" (115).
Jane Austen successfully uses gothic tropes to craft her satirical novel. Henry Tilney descriptions of the abbey to Catherine Morland are gothic in every sense as they depict mystery, heavy, intricate and dark decor, large haunting images, and invoke images of funerals and death, the macabre. Readers are invited into the mysteries right alongside Ms. Morland.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.115.














