Parody and burlesque

In Northanger Abbey, Austen parodies theGothic literary style that was popular during the 1790s.

Austen's juvenile writings are parodies and burlesques of popular 18th-century genres, such as the sentimental novel. She humorously demonstrates that the reversals of social convention common in sentimental novels, such as contempt for parental guidance, are ridiculously impractical; her characters "are dead to all common sense".^[2] Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan and David Garrick,^[3] continued less overtly throughout her professional career.^[4]

Austen's burlesque is characterized by its mocking imitation and its exaggerated, displaced emphasis.^[5] For example, in Northanger Abbey, she ridicules the plot improbabilities and rigid conventions of the Gothic novel.^[6] However, Austen does not categorically reject the Gothic. As Austen scholar Claudia Johnson argues, Austen pokes fun at the "stock gothic machinery—storms, cabinets, curtains, manuscripts—with blithe amusement", but she takes the threat of the tyrannical father seriously.^[7] Austen uses parody and burlesque not only for comedic effect, but also, according tofeminist critics, to reveal how both sentimental and Gothic novels warped the lives of women who attempted to live out the roles depicted in them.^[8] AsSusan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert explain in their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Austen makes fun of "such novelistic clichés as love at first sight, the primacy of passion over all other emotions and/or duties, the chivalric exploits of the hero, the vulnerable sensitivity of the heroine, the lovers' proclaimed indifference to financial considerations, and the cruel crudity of parents".^[9]

[Edit]Irony

"She [Mrs. Bertram] was a woman who spent her days in sitting, nicely dressed, on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, of little use and no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the latter when it did not put herself to inconvenience..."^[10]

— Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

Irony is one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary techniques.^[11] She contrasts the plain meaning of a statement with the comic, undermining the meaning of the original to create ironic disjunctions. In her juvenile works, she relies upon satire, parody, and irony based on incongruity. Her mature novels employ irony to foreground social hypocrisy.^[12] In particular, Austen uses irony to critique the marriage market.^[13] Perhaps the most famous example of irony in Austen is the opening line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." At first glance, the sentence is straightforward and plausible, but the plot of the novel contradicts it: it is women without fortunes who need husbands and seek them out. By the end of the novel, the truth of the statement is acknowledged only by a single character, Mrs. Bennet, a mother seeking husbands for her daughters, rather than the entire world.^[14] Austen's irony goes beyond the sentence level. As Austen scholar Jan Fergus explains, "the major structural device inPride and Prejudice is the creation of ironies within the novel's action which, like parallels and contrasts, challenge the reader's attention and judgment throughout, and in the end also engage his feelings."^[15] Austen's irony illuminates the foibles of individual characters and her society. In her later novels, in particular, she turns her irony "against the errors of law, manners and customs, in failing to recognize women as the accountable beings they are, or ought to be".^[16]