Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho

1 Warm imaginings and proper conduct: Ann Radcliffe’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 Jane Austen 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.

Load more