Northanger Abbey: Where's the villain?

When a character is described as a villain, they have a very large role to live up to. A villain, in my own definition, is someone who is constantly trying to ruin a hero’s (or heroine’s) objective or intention and shows up around every corner to do so. The villain wants to ruin everything good and even conquer the world. As a classmate mentioned during a discussion, for there to be a great villain, there needs to be an even greater hero. 

Northanger Abbey, in all of its gothic parodistic and sentimentally fictitious glory, does not have a great villain, or even a great hero. Catherine Morland is a young, naïve 17 year old girl who wants for an adventure. She wants to be the hero of her own reality. But in searching for this gothically inspired high emprise (and coming up empty every time she goes looking for a dark secret), she discovers that in pursuing this fantasy, she loses track of what her 18th century society tells her she should be pursuing. In this novel, there are several antagonists, but the word villain is too strong a description for any of them. While the parody of Catherine looking for a gothic twist at every turn is poking fun at Catherine’s search to be a hero, the antagonistic approach to many of the characters is vital to Catherine’s development, not only as a character in an Austen novel, but as a young woman. Her discovery that while there are terrible people in the world who are just products of a highly developed, wealth focused society, there are no villains looking to destroy the world. This realization is key to her development throughout the story from a naive girl who had never left Fullerton, to one who is beginning to see and meet new things and new types of people. 

 During our class discussion, the point of Catherine being her own antagonist really brought the details of Catherine’s search for a heroic conquest to light. While she did look for mystery and intrigue, at every turn she only found her own delusions and misled hopes. Going along with this idea, Catherine’s own misconceptions are her actual downfall, as well as the reality she’s living in. Her expectations of what her life should be like, and what experiences she should have are so highly diluted that when she does actually have an adventure at her fingertips, (Volume 2, Chapter XIII) she cannot even recognize it. At this point, what many consider to be the climax of the novel, she has matured enough out of her previous notions of a gothic emprise and into the reality of her circumstances, to where she only considers the offenses she might have caused the General instead of the epic journey that lies ahead. (Vol. 2, Ch. XIV).