Northanger Abbey and the Limits of Parody

Northanger Abbey opens by positing two kinds of readers and two kinds of texts: the naive readers of romance who would expect a heroine to be an orphan and to engage in ‘the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rosebush’ (13); and the more sophisticated readers who reject romance and who know a parody when they see one. Readers of the first type will find that this work disorients or disrupts their expectations, but the second type can apparently enter a comfortable world of shared beliefs.1 In Northanger Abbey itself, however, Austen does more than invite her reader to join in a collaborative effort to debunk the conventions of sentimental novels, more even than to witness the emergence of a new kind of novel based on probabilities and psychological realism.2 She mocks and undermines her own chosen method — parodic discourse — so that both narrative and reader are kept off-balance. In working towards her own conception of what constitutes novelistic discourse, Austen makes the reader a participant, now perhaps colluding with, now perhaps resisting the narrator’s evaluation of her own novel.