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Warm imaginings and proper conduct: ’s Mysteries of Udolpho

‘To a warm imagination, the dubious forms, that float, half-veiled in darkness, afford a higher delight, than the most distinct scenery, that the sun can show’ (‘Mysteries of Udolpho’, Vol. 4, chapter 12, p.598)

Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 novel engaged an ongoing intellectual/political project to draw a line between the excesses of the superstitious imagination and the pleasures of the aesthetic imagination. In so doing the novel is part of that long transition from religious aestheticism to a secular aesthetics in which Romanticism is a key player and which culminates in Matthew Arnold’s mid-nineteenth century calls for ‘culture’ to replace Christian belief as a means of providing ‘beauty’, ‘sweetness and light’ for a people who have lost their faith but not their craving for aesthetic fulfilment. In an essay by Radclifffe published in 1826 in the ‘New Monthly Magazine’, entitled ‘Of the Supernatural in Poetry’ we find a staged debate between a Mr. W- and a Mr. S- about the merits of Shakespeare, in which Mr. S- accuses Mr. W- of superstition and champions the cause of ‘Hamlet’ over ‘Macbeth’ as the most powerful of Shakespeare’s works. In a discussion of the witches of Macbeth, Mr. S- asserts ‘I am speaking of the only real witch --- the witch of the poet’. In ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’, the ‘witchcraft’ and ‘mystery’ lies ultimately in the narration/plotting/style while the narrative itself advocates a rigorous skepticism about the existence of the supernatural . Let us not forget that both heroines of the novel - Emily St. Aubert and Blance Villefort - are poets. Radcliffe provides us with eight original poems by Emily, one by Blanche - (‘from the Butterfly to his love’), one by Valancourt 1 (‘the shipwreck’), and one by Emily’s other ‘mystery’ lover Du Pont (the sonnet on wainscot at the fishing-hut). However, all these figures as poets are also prone to the inflammatory dangers of imagination - Du Pont believes the scandals about Valancourt, Valancourt falls prey to the pleasures of gaming as a sort of addiction to the belief in the working out of a fictional future, Emily and Blanche battle not to succumb to superstitious fears/belief in ghosts and the supernatural in the respective castles they come to occupy. The pleasure of ‘mystery’ is, then in the novel, an aesthetic one - the novel becomes the medium of a licensed ‘mystery’, where we can take pleasure in the unknown, the future conditional, read into narrative our own desires but find them ultimately tidied and contained by an ‘order’ which superstition and rebellion in ‘real life’ threaten to undermine.

On the level of plot: the novel is ABOUT a series of mysteries ‘dubious forms, that float, half- veiled in darkness’. Who is the mysterious woman whose picture Emily observes her widowed father weeping over? What is Montoni up to in his Italian castle - robbing, political sedition? What happened twenty years previously to Mlle Laurentini, prevous owner of that castle, who mysteriously disappeared? Who is the prisoner who sings French songs below Emily’s apartment in Udolpho which she heard previously in the fishing-hut near her familial home? What happens to Ludovico during his night spent in the dead Marchioness de Villeroi’s apartment at Chateau- le-Blanc? Who is the mysterious lute-player who sings Italian songs in the woods around that Chateau every night? Do all the sightings of mysterious figures point to ghosts or do they have rational explanations? As Emily points out, such explanations are unsatisfying. She comments on her escape from Udolpho only to encounter another series of mysteries in Languedoc at the Chateau-le-Blanc ‘I am lately come from a place of wonders; but unluckily, since I left it, I have heard almost all of them explained’. The key characteristic of Radcliffe’s contribution to the ‘Gothic’ mode which I will go on to discuss in more detail later is her use of the ‘explained 2 supernatural’ (a term coined by George Saintsbury in 1916 in his ‘The Peace of the Augustans’). This is usually interpreted by critics as evidence of her conservatism, her espousal of a rationalist anti-Jacobin position,which puts her more in line with novelists such as in advocating the importance of tempering the passions which may lead to revolutionary desires. I wouldn’t disagree radically with this understanding of Radcliffe,; however, I would want to complicate it by arguing that like Austen, Radcliffe is an advocate of the attractions of narrative fiction as an ordering, rather than disruptive, exercise of imaginative creativity by contrast with other cultural fictions - political, societal, religious - which are seen as inclined to move whole populaces,as well as individuals, toward transgression of social ‘forms’.

On the level of descriptive prose, Radcliffe insistently returns to the idea of the pleasure of the not quite visible in nature. We often forget in following the intricacies of the plotting of this novel that the majority of its four volumes, 670 odd pages are given over to descriptions of natural scenery from the French Pyrennees to the Italian Appenines. Mysteries of Udolpho could be read as a travel narrative, in which an entire aesthetic theory is explained with reference to descriptions of landscape (which in the main the author had not seen but had experienced only through the hands of an Italian painter of which she was particularly fond, Salvator Rosa). Radcliffe, as numerous critics have noted draws her theory wholesale from Edmund Burke’s highly influential ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful’ (1757). Burke consistently uses visual metaphors to express the distinction between the two categories, most often referring to architecture, landscape and the human body. Beauty = smallness, smoothness, variation in the direction of parts without angularity, delicacy, clear and bright characters. Beauty is associated with femininity: ‘Observe that part of a beautiful woman where he is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface....’ (Section 25). Sublimity = obscurity, privation, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence. It is a response provoked by revolutions, sovereign power and ‘oblong forms’ ‘perpendicular planes’ , an impression of vastness even if the line is small. In other words it is associated with the masculine (a short line which symbolically suggests imense power). The sublime appears to be embodied in phallic symbols and objects. This contrast is acted out in terms of landscape in Radcliffe in the contrast drawn between valleys and hills - in particular ‘La Vallee’, Emily’s peaceful childhood home in Gascony, which in the first paragraph is carefully described as ‘bounded’, ‘contained’, a place of beauty beyond which exist sublime possibilities that Emily is soon to encounter: ‘On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert (in fact not a chateau as we learn later but really an extended ‘summer cottage’ - financial difficulties have obliged Emily’s father to rent out his nearby more magnificent estate to his wife’s brother, Mons. Quesnel). From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vines, and plantations of olives. To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their basse. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose. To the north, and to the east, the plains of Guinne and Languedoc were lost in the mist of distance; on the west, Gascony was bounded by the waters of Biscay’. 3

This beautiful, bounded landscape in France is contrasted with the wild sublimity of Montoni’s castle in Italy to which Emily is transported in the second volume of the novel. The contrast between France and Italy in the late sixteenth century is between an absolutist monarchical state and war torn competing city-states. Radcliffe is also exploiting the sixteenth century association of Italy with wild ‘revenge’ and internal conflict found in tragedies of blood and revenge of the period, from which so much of the paraphenalia of the Gothic derives: ‘At length, the travellers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine-forests, which , at that period, overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except that, now and then, an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimspe of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily’s feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination.... (vol 2, chapter 5, p.224) and the castle itself: ‘Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni’s; for, though it was now lighted up by the seting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskniess of evening. Silent, lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign’. (vol.2, chapter 5, pp.226-7)

It is significant that Radcliffe concludes with the comment ‘it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene’ . Montoni’s castle, is, like its owner and example of what Burke some years after his philosophical enquiry in a more overtly political work, ‘Reflections on the Revolution inFrance’ (1790; four years before ‘Udolopho’) was to define as ‘false sublimity’, which stimulates people’s feelings of sublimity in order to make them repudiate the beautiful (figured by the lovely and distressed Marie Antoinette) and the true sublime (monarchical power). Montoni is a tyrant passing himself off as a monarch, a petty criminal setting himself up as a military leader. The contrast between the beautiful and the sublime is resolved in the third major setting of the novel, French Languedoc, where the Chateau-le-Blanc, a village of peasants at its foot, looking out across the sea, and a monastery nearby, represents a combination of sublime and beautiful aspects to be returned to order and regularity by the return of a benevolent feudal authority in the shape of the Count de Villefort after being abandoned for twenty years to the depredations of time and its exploitation, as we later learn, by Spanish smugglers as a cache for stolen goods. Blanche retires the first evening of the chateau, looking out of her her casement window and celebrates her closeness to the order of God now that she is liberated from her years in a convent. An almost Wordsworthian pantheism is expressed in this version of the ‘true sublime’ but carefully bounded and ‘framed’ through the view from a window (a common device of Radcliffe’s): ‘The shadowy earth, the air, and ocean---all was still. Along the deep serene of the heavens, a few light clouds floated slowly, through whose skirts the stars now seemed to tremble, and now emerge with purer splendour. Blanche’s thoughts arose involuntarily to the Great Author of the 4 sublime objects she contemplated, and she breathed a prayer of finer devotion, than any she had ever uttered beneath the vaulted roof of a cloister.’ (Vol 3, chapter 10, p.475)

In his ‘philosophical enquiry’ Burke distinguishes with great care between the feature of the ‘true sublime’ - obscurity - and the dangers of the ‘false sublime’ - confusion. This distinction also plays an important role in his conservative account of the revolution in France, where magnificent and appealing obscurity of monarchy is overtaken by confusion and chaos of revolutionary activity. Burke glosses the viewer’s response to obscurity as opposed to cconfusion as that of terror rather than horror and this is a distinction that is also important in Radcliffe’s novel. Burke writes that: ‘Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.... To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes’

Radcliffe’s essay ‘On the supernatural in poetry’ returns to the theme:

‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.... Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate; confusion, by blurring one image into another leaves only a chaos in which the mind can find nothing to be magnificent, nothing to nourish its fears and doubts, or to act upon in any way’ (Ann Radcliffe, ‘Of the Supernatural in Poetry’ New Monthly Magazine, vol 16 (1826)).

It is significant that in moments of utter confusion - when she is taken away from Udolpho by two ruffians on the orders of Montoni to avoid a battle and does not know where she is going or what her fate is to be - she loses her ability to respond to the landscape around her ‘She now looked, with little emotion, on the wild dingles, and the gloomy road and mountains’ (chapter 6, vol 3, p.407). By contrast, the frisson of terror she enjoys when approaching the veil over the picture in a chamber at the castle of Udolpho is presented as a source of imaginative energy: ‘a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink’ (vol 2, chapter 6, p.248).

In this contrast too we can see then the pleasure even in fear evoked by imaginative fictions/art objects/landscape which Radcliffe offers to her readers as an alternative or surrogate to the ‘horror’ evoked by ‘real’ dangers/political and social upheaval and machination. OF course the mystery of the veil is finally revealed to be very much a ‘fiction’, a wax effigy as momento mori established by an ancestor, an image of death rather than its grim reality.

On the level of narration: this distinction between pleasurable obscurity (achieved aesthetically) and disturbing confusion (a product of social/political reality) is also enacted on the level of narrative. Radcliffe distinguishes between a narration which carefully spins out mystery in order to instruct and please its reader and a narration which frustrates and distracts/misleads its audience by having no structure, direction or sense. The contrast is drawn by the careful staging of such ‘disorganised’ narration in the figures of a succession of garrulous but honest female 5 servants. Another often overlooked feature of Radcliffe’s writing is its comedy and in particular her use of the garrulous superstitious servant: In Udolpho, Theresa (housekeeper at La Vallee), Annette (maid to Mme Cheron) and Dorothee (housekeeper at Chateau-le-Blanc) provide a succession of frustrating encounters with directionless loquacity for the heroine, Emily, as well as examples of the silliness of falling prey to superstition which she must avoid. The inability of hte servant to get to or see the point of the story is responded to with impatience by the aristocratic heroines, Emily and Blanche. Radcliffe termed her novels ‘romances’, partly in homage to the romance narratives of the fifteenth century of which she was so fond, but another way of reading the term romance is in the terms derived from that same period proposed by Patricia Parker in her Literary Fat Ladies where she argues that romance is a feminised term used in opposition to the masculine epic. ‘This association ofthe dilation of romance narrative with the figure or body of a female enchantress is...extended in the debate over romance itself as a Circean, female (or even effeminate) form’ (p.10). The romance narrative is a dilatory technique which defers ending/closure associated with the figure of the female enchantress (a term used for Radcliffe in Philadelphian ‘Museum of Foreign Literature and Science’ no 8 (January 1826), p. 94) who distracts the epic hero from completion of his quest by spinning attractive fictions. Female story- tellers - Scheherezade is only the best-known example- divert men from their ends/aims through spining fictions, just as Radcliffe’s spinning fictions continually ‘delay’ and ‘dilate’ the story. In putting forward the figures of Annette, Dorothee and Theresa, she offers negative images of female dilatoriness/dilatoriness (Annette is always late!), but also puts herself as narrator in disturbing proximity to them. Here as elsewhere Radcliffe seeks to make a fine act of discrimination. Two figures may look the same (the garrulous servant spinnin gher tales and the loquacious narrator) but a fine discrimination can distinguish between pure ‘confusion’ and well- placed ‘obscurity’ which heightens tension . Annette does not know what she is letting slip, whereas Radcliffe as narrator carefully withholds ‘disclosure’ from her readers (what Emily read in her father’s papers/what Emily saw behind the veil in the Chamber of Udolpho) in order to heighten suspense and also encourage a discerning skeptical reading practice on the part of the reader.

All these factors - plot, descriptive prose, narration - lead to a wider question of how (and indeed whether) to classify Radcliffe’s work generically. The stress on the importance of self- government and the novel as a medium for the narration of an education in self-control suggests that Radcliffe’s fiction is more easily understood as in the tradition of the conduct book and domestic fiction of the eighteenth century than the Gothic, the traditional generic ‘home’ in which it is located.

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the ‘Gothic’

Ann Radcliffe: Life and Works Born London 1764, descendent of Dutch Protestants, only child of business people with connections to landed gentry. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto published in the same year as her birth. At 23, married William Radcliffe, journalist and later owner and editor of the ‘English Chronicle’. No children. 1789 published The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne: A Highland Romance 1790 published A Sicilian Romance 1791 published The Romance of the Forest 1794 published The Mysteries of Udolpho receiving sum of £500 1795 published A Journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany...to which are added Observations during a Tour of the Lakes 1797 published The Italian receiving sum of £600 1802 wrote Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III. Published 1826 after her death with her St. Alban’s Abbey: A Metrical Tale 1826 essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ published in the ‘New Monthly Magazine’, vol 16.

Other ‘Gothic’ works of the period 1764 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto 1778 Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron 1783-5 Sophia Lee, The Recess: A Tale of Other Times 1786 William Beckford, Vathek: An Arabian Tale 1788 Charlotte Smith, Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle 1793 Charlotte Smith, The Old Manor House 1794 William Godwin, Caleb Williams 1796 Matthew Lewis, The Monk: A Romance 1810 Percy Bysshe Shelley,Zastrozzi: A Romance 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus 1820 Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer: A Tale 1824 James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Suggested Reading Bronfen, E., Over her Dead Body:Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992) Butler, M., Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, Revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) Castle, T., ‘The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ in Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum eds., The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 237-57. Clery, E.J., ‘The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s,’ in P.W.Martin and R. Jarvis eds., Reviewing Romanticism (London: MacMillan, 1992), pp.69-85. Doody, Margaret, ‘Deserts, Ruins, Troubled Waters: Female Dreams in Fiction and the Development of the Gothic Novel,’ Genre 10: 529-72. Durrant, D., ‘Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic,’Studies in English Literature 22L 519- 29. Ellis, K.F., The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 1989). Flaxman, R.L., ‘Radcliffe’s Dual Modes of Vision’ in M.A. Schofield and C.Macheski eds., Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670-1815 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 124-33. Graham, K.W. ed., : Prohibition/Transgression (New York:AMS Press, 1989) Heller, W.T., Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992) Holland, N. And Sherman, L., ‘Gothic Possibilities’, New Literary History 8: 278-94. Kahane, C., ‘The Gothic Mirror,’ in S.N.Garner et.al.eds., The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpertation (Ithaca and New York: Cornell UP, 1985), pp.334-51. Miles, R. Gothic Writing 1750-1820: A Genealogy (London: Routledge, 1993). ---, Ann Radcliffe. The Great Enchantress (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1995). Morris, D.B., ‘Gothic Sublimity,’ New Literary History 16: 299-319. Parker, P. ‘Literary Fat Ladies and the Generation of theText,’ in Literary Fat Ladies. Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987). Paulson, R., Representations of Revolution, 1789-1820 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983). Poovey, M., ‘Ideology in The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ Criticism 21: 307-30. Restucchia, F.L., ‘Female Gothic Writing: “Under Cover to Alice”,’ Genre 18: 245-66. Sage, Victor ed., The Gothick Novel: A Casebook Casebook Series (London: MacMillan, 1990) Sedgwick, E.Kosofsky, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1980