Thursday, October 14, 2010
Coming of Age? Again...?
Maybe, it is just me, but I feel that every novel we have read thus far has had a underlying theme that refers back to "coming of age." With Wieland, The True History of the Kelly Gang, and Northanger Abbey, each story tells of how the main character almost jumps into the reality of the world and they grow up within just a few chapters. Differing from The True History of the Kelly Gang, I see Clara and Catherine as very similar characters. Though Clara is obviously more worldly and knowledgeable than Catherine is, they are both naive to the horrors of the real world. Catherine, hers being a little less mature than the experiences of Clara. Catherine's life almost reminds me of a high-schoolers life. She experiences the pressures of her peers when Isabella and the boys want her to go on carriage rides. At the end of the novel, as the narration is coming to an end, we are able to note that the journey she has endured has been her coming of age story. Trying to find her future husband, through these superficial balls, was her journey, and then the people she has encountered, Isabella and Tilney have helped her find herself.
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ReplyDeletei find it extremely humorous that you interpreted the novel that way...because I did the exact same thing! I don't know if anyone would agree with me, but I saw many parallels between Northanger Abbey and the movie Mean Girls staring Lindsay Lohan. Catherine enters the world of Bath and high society after living a sheltered existence in the country with only her enormous family for company. Cady, the main character of Mean Girls, was homeschooled in Africa until her parents moved her to America and she was thrown into public high school life. She is swayed by Regina and her friends, the popular girls at school, just like how Catherine is taken in by Isabella and the Thorpes. Catherine falls in love with Henry Tilney, while Cady falls in love with Aaron Samuels. Both of these characters are forced to confront both their true feelings about these men, and who they really are as people. In Cady's case, she gives into the superficiality of high school life, whereas it is debatable if Catherine did or not. As a whole, I think the similarity that the "coming of age" theme has produced in both works, obviously of completely different times, is very telling of the universality of Jane Austen's work.
ReplyDeleteI agree that all of the books we have read are coming of age stories, but I don't really think that this constitutes too much of a real similarity between them, because each presents the coming of age concept in a unique way. You say that in each book the main character "jumps into the reality of the world and they grow up within just a few chapters," but we need to remember that a few chapters is a very different time frame depending on the book. In Northanger Abbey it's only a few weeks; in Wieland it's a longer period of time; in The True History of the Kelly Gang it's an entire lifetime.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Catherine and Clara are similar characters, and I think their similarities would be more prominent if the stories were presented either both from a 1st or both from a 3rd person point of view. In Wieland, the narrative is cluttered with Clara's numerous praises of herself, both expressing her own thoughts and (allegedly) those of others. If we heard the story from a 3rd person point of view, I think we would have found that Clara didn't actually possess the unsurpassed genius that she attributes to herself. On the other hand, Northanger Abbey is filled with comments about Catherine's stupidity and plainness, and the narrator tends to highlight the blunders that she makes. If we were told these stories from similar points of view, rather than points of view that have seemingly opposite biases, I think the similarities between the two characters would have been even more striking.