Durham E-Theses THE FACE, THE MIND, THE TEXT: READING FOR CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF ANN RADCLIFFE WHITCROFT, ERIN,BARBARA How to cite: WHITCROFT, ERIN,BARBARA (2014) THE FACE, THE MIND, THE TEXT: READING FOR CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF ANN RADCLIFFE , Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/10732/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 CAN A MAN OF GOOD CHARACTER HELP HAVING A DISAGREEABLE FACE? -------------------------------------------- THE FACE, THE MIND, THE TEXT: READING FOR CHARACTER IN THE NOVELS OF ANN RADCLIFFE DISSERTATION SUBMITTED FOR MASTERS BY RESEARCH IN ENGLISH STUDIES BY ERIN B. WHITCROFT UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 1 Contents Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................................ 3 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 Chapter One: The Mind ......................................................................................................................................... 9 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 10 Characterisation: Surface vs. Depth in the Eighteenth-Century Novel .................................................... 10 Radcliffe’s Language of Private Feeling ...................................................................................................... 18 Re-writing Ann Radcliffe’s Characters ....................................................................................................... 42 Chapter Two: The Face ....................................................................................................................................... 44 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................................... 45 Physiognomy in Eighteenth-Century England............................................................................................ 45 Physiognomy in the British Novel before 1775 ........................................................................................... 51 Johann Caspar Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy ..................................................................................... 54 The Reception of Lavater’s Physiognomy ................................................................................................... 63 Physiognomy and Character ........................................................................................................................ 65 The Physiognomic Countenance in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novels .......................................................... 66 The Physiognomic Eye .................................................................................................................................. 79 Chapter Three: The Text ..................................................................................................................................... 93 Introduction ................................................................................................................................................... 94 The novel's visual field .................................................................................................................................. 95 The portrait narrative in fiction ................................................................................................................... 96 Portraits: the eighteenth-century critical commentary .............................................................................. 99 Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomic Portraits ................................................................................... 104 The Portrait in the work of Ann Radcliffe ................................................................................................ 106 The Frame of the Parergon......................................................................................................................... 109 ‘She almost fancied that the portrait breathed’: the Portrait as Representation and Reality .............. 113 The Frame and the Text: The Body in the Landscape ............................................................................. 118 The Character of the Text........................................................................................................................... 124 The End of the Text ..................................................................................................................................... 136 *Supplement .................................................................................................................................................... 143 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................ 146 Reading the ‘Characters’ of the Text: ....................................................................................................... 147 Appendix 1: *Quantitative Methods .............................................................................................................. 151 Appendix 2: Illustrated Editions .................................................................................................................... 155 Appendix 3: Anonymous Versions of The Italian and A Sicilian Romance ............................................... 157 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Critics have noted that Gothic literary criticism often replicates the nature of the form it critiques. Consequently, my thesis felt at times as though it was continually expanding. This expansion, which is not only a constitutive aspect of the Sublime experience, is also, as Gary Kelly notes, Radcliffe’s approach to writing. In a project of this nature there have been many people who have helped me along the way. At the University of Durham I am deeply indebted to my supervisor Dr O’Connell for her continued support throughout the writing of this dissertation. Her advice and patience has been invaluable. Thanks must also go to the archivists at the British Library, the DeWitt Library and Chawton House Library. During my search for illustrated editions of Ann Radcliffe novels they were helpful and kind every step of the way. The British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies’ invitation to share parts of this dissertation as a paper at their annual conference in January 2012 and 2013 meant I was able to gain from the experience and lively debate of other researchers. Additionally, receiving the BSECS President’s Prize gave me the much needed confidence to persevere. Finally, I could not have completed this dissertation without the help of my parents; it is written for them. 3 INTRODUCTION 4 Ann Radcliffe’s novels held an extraordinary power over her contemporaries. In Lives of the Novelists Sir Walter Scott describes the excitement that greeted the publication of Ann Radcliffe’s fourth novel in 1794, ‘when a family was numerous, the volumes flew, and were sometimes torn from hand to hand, and the complaints of those whose studies were thus interrupted were a general tribute to the genius of the author.’1 The expectation attendant upon the publication of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho reflects the extent of her popularity and she was referred to as ‘the Shakespeare of Romance Writers.’2 After the height of her fame in the eighteenth century Radcliffe’s reputation dwindled, only to rise again in the late 1970s when literary theorists and post-structuralists began to champion Gothic as a genre. When Ellen Moers first used the term ‘Female Gothic’ in Literary Women she used it to define ‘the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called ‘the Gothic.’ A definition of ‘the Gothic’ was, she admitted, less easily stated, ‘except that it has to do with fear.’3 Moers’ analysis of Female Gothic texts as a coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment in domestic environments and within the female body was extremely influential. It not only generated a body of critical work that focused on the ways in which the Female Gothic articulated women’s dissatisfactions with patriarchal society, addressing the problematic position of the maternal within that society, but also placed the Gothic at the centre of the female tradition. The approaches to texts based on this tradition fore-grounded the importance of the narrative of the persecuted heroine in flight from a villainous father or, as Kate Ferguson Ellis’s study prioritizes, the