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Saturday, April 3, 2010

Which Austen Heroine am I?


I am Catherine Morland!


Take the Quiz here!

"You are Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey! You love a good Gothic romance - so much, in fact, that you'll fool yourself into thinking you're living one! You are imaginative and naive, which is at once endearing and perplexing. Perhaps your heart is TOO pure...but it is adventurous. After all, you love a trip to Bath or a stay at an ancient Abbey."

I'm not surprised. I actually dislike Austen for a number of reasons, namely that she is way too Neoclassical for my taste, a bit too rational where romanticism might have kicked in. I prefer Ann Radcliffe or the later Bronte sisters. I suppose I'm horrid because I like shocking things to happen to the main characters---I mean "I left my abusive alcoholic husband in the Victorian era and I'm about to change social norms FOREVER" type things, not "oops that guy wasn't as much of a jerk as I thought" type things (Tenant of Wildfell Hall versus P&P). I must admit, the Gothic is an overlooked genre--I encourage everyone to read a good gothic, preferably one with a strongly-defined heroine like those of the Bronte sisters' novels. Male writers also produced some salicious Gothics, and many see the Gothic as the most hyper-sexualized of literary genres (makes sense--Victorian sexuality was fairly repressed). Not that Austen isn't wonderful, but she's the tip of a delicious iceberg of women writers of the late 18th and 19th century.

So, if you were an Austen character, who would you be?

1 comments/comment?:

Mariko said...

Marianne Dashwood from Sense and Sensibility. She's so romantic and passionate, she loves fiercely, and she wears her heart on her sleeve. I'm pretty much the same, I'm extremely emotional, I'm romantic, and I believe in love.
I like Jane Austen, her stories are lovely. Her romances may not be as steamy as later writers, but I kind of enjoy that. Not that I don't like the steamy romances. People like the Bronte sisters came later, Charlotte Bronte was born a year before Jane Austen died actually. Austen predates the romantics even, so her stories don't have that same rebellious quality that the Victorian writers had.