Northanger Abbey

Between pages 112 and 115 in Northanger Abbey there are two scenes in which Austen does one of two things, and I have not been able to decide which. At first, I thought it was pretty obvious that she was satirizing the gothic genre. The scenes are almost too dramatic, too intense, to be taken seriously. The first one involves a chest that Catherine believes to be special and important enough to become really involved in a deep study of it. The second a cabinet that catches her eye, and she simply must know what it contains. She finds a collection of papers amounting to little more than bills and shopping lists, but as she is discovering them and reading them, it is described feverishly, as though she is in some sort of danger or committing a crime in which seconds decide the success or failure. Of course it's all over the to, and of course the papers and the cabinet are essentially meaningless, as if Austen, at the end of the scene is to say, "Of course there was nothing to it. It's a cabinet. In a house, where people live. Why would there ever be some sort of hidden horrible mystery hidden in the cabinet in the very room they assigned to you?" 
And yet, and perhaps it is just me, but I actually felt Catherine's anxiety. Even knowing that this was not intended to be a horror or suspense novel, but a parody, I felt the way I might while reading one. We might account for this on the skill of Austen as a writer, to parody a genre so well, and make the reader feel so foolish as to get caught up in the same nothingness as Catherine. The scenes, the descriptions, and Catherine's own disappointment verge on being so well done that it becomes difficult for me, as the reader, to not be disappointed in the contents of the papers. So then I am left to wonder, how much of the novel may be read as a caution to believing to strongly, or being to entirely caught up in the world of fiction, and how much of it is an admission to how easy it might be to so completely lull the reader into that state of acceptance? A further turn might be to consider if the novel is perhaps about learning that the real world does not so often reflect the world in books, how does that affect the reading of John Thorpe, the character least given to reading novels and being under their influence? He is rarely portrayed in a good light, and in one scene this is directly attributed to his aversion towards novels.