Victorian Novel Essay Questions:

1.)     Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which she did not see published in her lifetime, might be considered a kind of manifesto (or at least manual) for a new kind of novel dominated by realism.  One might think of Catherine Morland as an emblem of that transition by expressing, as she does, the intellectual movement from a world formed by reading (and false impressions) to a world shaped by very real and material factors.  Austen uses Catherine then as both an emblem and a device to explore a new way of addressing the world.  Develop an argument about Austenπs commitment to realism.  You might want to explore the ways in which Austen is directly prescriptive, or perhaps the ways in which she--as a novelist--encourages the reader to believe untenable Gothicisms (with Catherine)--only to explode the whole notion of unreasonable horrors.

 

2.) Austen's Northanger Abbey is also a critique of social practices that have emerged in the growing bourgeois culture of the early 19^th century.  Her playful use of the Gothic genre as a background, foregrounds social horrors that, for Austen at least, threaten the idea of the polite and civilized England that she believe must be sustained.  Consider the detail of the social construction of Northanger Abbey and situate them in terms of Austen's intentions to promote and sustain a clever, proper, and urbane society.

3.) Both Catherine Morland and Pip have, as young adults, absorbed certain kinds of perceptions about class and elite society.  Both, of course, find reasons to be both bitterly disappointed and pleasantly surprised by elements from every class level.  Both also find their way into a comfortable, industrious, and unostentatious middle class.  This mode of concluding both novels suggests something about class perceptions (and realities) that certainly deserves examination.  But it would not do to begin any examination without actually considering the fact that the novel ≠as a genreãis very much a middle-class genre, intended for a wide readership and expected to generate revenue like other bourgeois commodities.  Write a paper about either Northanger Abbey or Great Expectations (or both) that addresses issues of class in terms of plot and the representation of characters.

 

4.) Great Expectations creates, within a realistic context, an array of characters for whom expectations change dramatically from what they originally anticipated.  Some characters, like Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch, try to manipulate fate in order to realize their expectations through others.  Some characters, like Jaggers, try to resist expectations entirely and still others, like Wemmick and perhaps Herbert, have learned to adapt expectations to circumstance.  Dickens, in his own right, wrestles with the idea of expectations in the sense that he considers multiple endings for his creation.  Consider the nature of how "expectations" function in the framework of the novel.  How do they respond to novelistic conventions, or to social practices, or to conventions of realism?