The Mysteries of Udolpho (4 page)

At the same time, working against this critique is a discourse of the sublime which operates as a more or less unproblematic extension of the ‘real' and which encourages belief in the uncanny workings of the ‘Great Author' and the perceptional powers and sublime feelings of Emily St Aubert. Despite the strong emphasis on Emily's need for ‘common sense' and ‘fortitude', her ‘romantic passion' and ‘enthusiasm' are vindicated in the continual allusions to the richness of her sublime responses to nature and her enlightened, unmediated apprehension of God. Here, Rictor Norton, in his monumental biography of Radcliffe, has intimated that, in her imaginative non-superstitious apprehension of the supernatural, Emily is positioned within the Unitarian Dissenting culture of Radcliffe herself. Norton argues that Radcliffe writes from a position of Unitarian belief in God which, reaching back to Joseph Priestley and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, necessarily entailed a rational sanction for the supernatural.
⁴²

Romance we have in plenty. What of realism in
Udolpho
? In the sixth chapter of Volume IV we come across a self-reflexive passage in which the author/narrator celebrates ‘old' romance, ‘which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society in a former age':

The fictions of the Provençal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadours accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident.

Timed, as this is, to correspond with Ludovico's vigil in and mysterious disappearance from the supposedly haunted chamber at Chateau-le-Blanc, we are prompted to reflect upon the qualities of the ‘new' romance before us. Earlier, in the tenth chapter of Volume III, there is a satirical quip to Blanche from Mademoiselle Bearn:

Where have you been so long?… I had begun to think some wonderful adventure had befallen you, and that the giant of this enchanted castle, or the ghost, which, no doubt, haunts it, had conveyed you through a trap-door into some subterranean vault, whence you was never to return.'

Here we have an allusion to Walpole's
Castle of Otranto
, with its melodramatic supernatural machinery. On both occasions it is clear that interwoven with Radcliffe's romance are strong strands of rationality. But realism is apparent too, as Emily will reside at Chateau-le-Blanc or the convent of St Clair only until her estates are restored to her. Emily's troubled relationship with her guardian aunt and her struggles with Montoni are realistically presented in the first half of the novel, but at Chateau-le-Blanc economic discussions about the possession of and laws regarding the estates Emily has inherited from her father, and about the fate of the estates of her Aunt Cheron, and of the true owner of Udolpho, contrast markedly with talk of hauntings. Arguably it is in Radcliffe's treatment of this economic theme – one frequently taken up by feminist critics – that
Udolpho
's Gothicity is closest to the real contradictions of life for women in eighteenth-century England.

Radcliffe represents the patriarchal family structure as being a relic of Southern European cultures of an earlier century, while, historically, in the England of her day, the vestigial values of such an arrangement had been, and were still, under attack.
⁴³
In the French society of
Udolpho
we find the historically true situation, especially among the aristocracy, that money and property do not automatically become the possession of a husband when a woman marries. (Indeed, when Emily regains La Vallée she inherits also her father's
maternal
estate.) Having usurped Udolpho from its true female owner,
Montoni must bully his wife and Emily into signing their estates over to him. This was contrary to the real situation in eighteenth-century England, where the law, which had been very slow to change to protect women in financial matters, would have made his acquisition automatic.
⁴⁴
Thus Emily's feelings, efforts and statements concerning her financial independence and her various inheritances, which run consistently through
Udolpho
, and which show her as pragmatic, clear-headed and subversive of this unjust remnant of feudal patriarchy, would have had real-life resonances for her female readers.

Once we move into the area of gender and family relations, however, contexts for reading
Udolpho
begin to proliferate. Unfortunately, many of these contexts ignore both the role of Radcliffe's (pseudo-) historical setting and the way in which her novel was positioned in the larger tension-filled discursive environment in which it emerged and was later reproduced.
⁴⁵
Yet it was these very factors which gave her readers the pleasures of recognition and allowed them to think differently of themselves and their own social relations. Modern readings which impose narrowly feminist or psychoanalytic modes of interpretation exclude much of the allusive richness of her work.

RADCLIFFE'S INFLUENCE ON LATER WRITERS

Radcliffe's influence on later novelists was immeasurable. What critics of her day called her ‘rich vein of invention', ‘pleasing suspence' (
sic
), ‘boldness' and ‘propriety' of character, and ‘elegant description and picturesque scenery' inspired a host of imitators whose Gothic romances dominated circulating libraries for the next decade. While most of these were deemed inferior works which helped bring the genre into disrepute and make it a target for parody, allusions to the novel's characters and landscapes were to appear well into the nineteenth century in the writing of canonical authors such as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Radcliffe's influence on Sir Walter Scott was greater than he knew or cared to recognize. Again, the Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron, owed much to the mode that Ann Radcliffe established. While their praise of her is qualified, traces of her language can often be discerned in theirs. We also find echoes of Radcliffe in Dickens's
Little Dorrit
(1855–7) – especially in the dark secrets of William Dorrit and the Clenham mansion – and again in Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White
(1860). The Brontës, too, were influenced by Radcliffe; for example, the inscrutable Montoni, with his magnetism and ‘animal ferocity', is a prototype for the brooding and enigmatic Mr Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's
Jane Eyre
(1847). Radcliffe's legacy has continued through to popular twentieth-
century novels, such as Daphne du Maurier's
Rebecca
(1938), and to the less well-known
Possessed, or The Secret of Myslotch: A Gothic Novel
(1939) by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz;
⁴⁶
while innumerable Radcliffean motifs have found their way into modern small-scale magical stories, such as some of those by Angela Carter, Isak Dinesen, Christina Stead and Isabel Allende.

Since its publication,
Udolpho
has been continuously in print and has continued to sell well. Current critical reassessment of Ann Radcliffe's work will ensure that
The Mysteries of Udolpho
remains required reading. For those who are not driven by reading for plot and the need for closure, but have the leisure and receptiveness to catch and savour her echoes of the past, the experience is well worth the effort.

NOTES

1
. Michael Gamer, ‘“The Most Interesting Novel in the English Language”: An Unidentified Addendum to Coleridge's Review of Udolpho',
Wordsworth Circle
, Vol. 24, No. 1 (winter 1993), pp. 53–4. Rictor Norton in
Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe
(London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), pp. 105–6, argues convincingly that the anonymous review of Udolpho attributed to Coleridge (
Critical Review
, August 1794, pp. 361–72) was not in fact written by him. The review appears in T. M. Raysor, ed.,
Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism
(London: Constable, 1936), pp. 355–70.

2
. See Edward Jacobs, ‘Anonymous Signatures: Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, and the Production of Gothic Romances',
ELH
, Vol. 62, No. 3 (fall 1995), pp. 620, 628, for an account of how, once they had literally ‘made a name' through their success, authors like Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney abandoned – for more esteemed, established, better-paying publishers – the circulating-library publishers who had fostered their talent but paid them little. See Rictor Norton,
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 94, for details of the promotion of
Udolpho
, which was advertised more often in the
London Chronicle
than any other novel.

3
. Fanny Burney,
Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World
(1778) (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 4.

4
.
British Critic
, Series 1, Vol. IV (August 1794), p. 121.

5
.
Monthly Review
, New Series, Vol. XV (November 1794), p. 281. Enfield's comments about the novel's ‘suspence' (p. 280) and ‘rich vein of invention' (p. 279), and his approving comments about vivid character portrayal and Emily's ‘habit of self command' and ‘steady firmness to her conduct' (p. 280), far outweighed his criticism.

6
.
British Critic
, Series 1, Vol. IV (August 1794), p. 121.

7
.
Critical Review
, August 1794, in T. M. Raysor, ed.,
Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism
, pp. 356–7. See also
Analytical Review
, New Series, Vol. XIX (1794), p. 144.

8
. ‘Ann Radcliffe',
Gentleman's Magazine
, Vol. XCIII, Pt 2 (July 1823), p. 87, cited in Robert Miles,
The Great Enchantress
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 9.

9
. Ioan Williams, ed.,
Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 105.

10
. It is likely that Radcliffe knew and admired Lee's
The Recess
, but there is no evidence that she attended the school of Sophia and Harriet Lee, as is often stated. As Rictor Norton points out (
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 47), the school opened in 1781, when Ann Radcliffe was seventeen – an age when most girls offered an education would leave school.

11
. Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones
(London: Dent, 1962), Pt I, pp. 315–16.

12
. Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe' in Ann Radcliffe,
Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance
(1826) (reprint edn New York: Arno Press, 1972), Vol. I, pp. 105–6.

13
. Robert Miles,
The Great Enchantress
, p. 87.

14
. Chris Baldick, ed.,
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xiii–xiv.

15
. Scott's comment was as follows:

She [Radcliffe] has uniformly selected the south of Europe for her place of action, whose passions, like the weeds of the climate, are supposed to attain portentous growth under the fostering sun; which abounds with monuments of antiquity, as well as the more massive remnants of the middle ages; and where tyranny and Catholic superstition still continue to exercise their sway over the slave and the bigot, and to indulge the haughty lord or more haughty priest, that sort of despotic power, the exercise of which seldom fails to deprave the heart, and disorder the judgement.

See ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author' in Ballantyne's Novelist's Library. Vol. X, facsimile edn,
Ann Radcliffe
,
The Novels Complete in One Volume
. (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), p. xxiii.

16
. Robert Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. xv, xvii, 9, 21.

17
. On this and the points that follow about burial requests and location in the church, see Philippe Ariès,
The Hour of Our Death
(London: Penguin, 1983), pp. 71–90.

18
. Ibid., p. 47: ‘They invoked the principle
in ecclesiis vero nulli deinceps sepeliantur
(henceforth let no one be buried in church).'

19
. Voltaire,
Dictionnaire philosophique
(Paris, 1764), quoted in Michel Ragon,
The Space of Death: A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration and Urbanism
, trans. Alan Sheridan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), p. 199. Ragon (p. 200) also quotes from Louis-Sebastien Mercer's
Tableau de Paris
(Amsterdam: new edn, 1782–3):

The cadaverous smell is noticeable in almost all churches, which is why many people no longer want to set foot in them. The wishes of the citizens, the decrees of the
Parlement
, demands of all kinds have been of no avail. The sepulchral exhalations continue to poison the faithful.

In 1774 the Decree of the Parliament of Toulouse repeated the medical argument of ‘enlightened men devoted to the public interest'. This decree was affirmed in the following year by the Archbishop of Toulouse, Monsignor Lomènie de Brienne, who also condemned ‘the vanity of the great' and ‘that of the small' in his edict absolutely forbidding the burial in church of ‘any person, ecclesiastic or layman… even in private chapels, oratories, or any other enclosed spaces where the faithful gather together'.
Moreover, the churches were told to renovate their floors. (See Philippe Ariès,
The Hour of Our Death
, pp. 493–4).

20
. This was done over four winters at night by torchlight – a truly Gothic undertaking. See Michel Ragon,
The Space of Death
, p. 201, and Philippe Ariès,
The Hour of Our Death
, pp. 495–6.