Major Themes
- The intricacies and tedium of high society, particularly partner selection.
- The conflicts of marriage for love and marriage for property.
- Life lived as if in a Gothic novel, filled with danger and intrigue, and the obsession with all things Gothic.
- The dangers of believing life is the same as fiction.
- The maturation of the young into skeptical adulthood, the loss of imagination, innocence and good faith.
- Things are not what they seem at first.
- Social criticism (comedy of manners).
- Parody of the Gothic novels' "Gothic and anti-Gothic" attitudes.
In addition, Catherine Morland realises she is not to rely upon others, such as Isabella, who are negatively influential on her, but to be single-minded and independent. It is only through bad experiences that Catherine really begins to properly mature and grow up.
Read more about this topic: Northanger Abbey
Famous quotes containing the words major and/or themes:
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
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“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
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