page_title: Styles and themes of Jane Austen
section_title: Parody and burlesque
hierarchical_section_title: Styles and themes of Jane Austen / Styles / Parody and burlesque
context_page_description: Jane Austen's distinctive literary style relies on a combination of parody, burlesque, irony, free indirect speech and a degree of realism. She uses parody and burlesque for comic effect and to critique the portrayal of women in 18th-century sentimental and gothic novels. Austen extends her critique by highlighting social hypocrisy through irony; she often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech in which the thoughts and words of the characters mix with the voice of the narrator. The degree to which critics believe Austen's characters have psychological depth informs their views regarding her realism. While some scholars argue that Austen falls into a tradition of realism because of her finely executed portrayal of individual characters and her emphasis on "the everyday", others contend that her characters lack a depth of feeling compared with earlier works, and that this, combined with Austen's polemical tone, places her outside the realist tradition.
  Often characterized as "country house novels" or "comedies of manners", Austen's novels also include fairy tale elements.
context_section_description: 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". Her interest in these comedic styles, influenced in part by the writings of novelist Frances Burney and playwrights Richard Sheridan and David Garrick, continued less overtly throughout her professional career.
  Austen's burlesque is characterized by its mocking imitation and its exaggerated, displaced emphasis. For example, in Northanger Abbey, she ridicules the plot improbabilities and rigid conventions of the Gothic novel. However, she 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. Austen uses parody and burlesque not only for comedic effect, but also, according to feminist critics, to reveal how both sentimental and Gothic novels warped the lives of women who attempted to live out the roles depicted in them. As Susan 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".
caption: In Northanger Abbey, Austen parodies the Gothic literary style popular during the 1790s.
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