Jane Austen’s Reception and Reinvention of German Gothic in "Northanger Abbey"

The article investigates a less known aspect of Jane Austen's writing: the influence of the German Gothic. Using the methodology of gender studies and historical approach, this study explores the critical debate about the German influence on the English press which reached its peak in the 1790s, and focuses on the Gothic almost unknown works cited by Austen in "Northanger Abbey" that epitomise the influence of the German Gothic in England during her lifetime. Considered for years a simple mock-Gothic novel, it is often referred to when discussing German influence on English Gothic stories because it includes an exhaustive debate about the role of such books during the Romantic period. Far from including naive references to foreign literature into a proper English novel, I instead suggest that Austen is engaging with the contemporaneous familiarity with the label ‘German Gothic’ in order to draw her readers into a discussion about the use and abuse of Gothic romances during her time, especially from a political and gender-focused perspective. As a matter of fact, Austen emphasises the reinvention and misuse of a ‘wrong’ reading of Gothic romances in order to unveil an even more subtle kind of Gothic lived experience that English women were enduring during the Regency period, which is conveyed through the novel as a form of narration. Detecting the sexual and political liberalism of many late eighteenth-century Continental texts, Austen thus employs references to German Gothic fiction as a powerful and subversive literary metaphor to disclose the injustices and prejudices of her conventional, patriarchal society.