Abstract
From the perspective of the realist and sentimental novelists who followed her, Ann Radcliffe’s gothic terrors were both too frightening and not frightening enough. This dual response is encapsulated, most famously, by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which in its first volume ironically deflates the exaggerated terrors invoked by gothic novels, and in its second volume rewrites these fantastic dangers as real threats to the safety and happiness of a modern, middle-class heroine. Catherine Morland, Austen’s unremarkable protagonist, learns that she need not fear murder, ghosts or incarceration, only to be threatened instead by slurs to her reputation, romantic mishaps and distressing machinations concerning the property which she is erroneously believed to possess. Yet by domesticating as well as demystifying novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey does not simply satirize them, but rather calls attention to the interplay between sentimental and supernatural plotting which structures Radcliffe’s novel.1 What is at stake here is not simply the ambivalent self-parody which characterizes the gothic from its genesis in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and which, in Udolpho, is reflected in the protagonist’s own contradictory responses to ‘superstitious terror’: ‘though she sometimes felt its influence herself, she could smile at it, when apparent in other persons’ (247).
Of all the romances in the world, this is perhaps the most romantic.
T. Talfourd
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Notes
Devendra Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, Its Origins, Efflorescence, Disintegration, and Residuary Influences (London: Arthur Barker, 1957), p. 211, see also pp. 106–8. Critics such as J. M. S. Tompkins have in fact extrapolated from the fact that Radcliffe’s novels contain no supernatural threats to assume that they contain no threats at all, and that their plots are purely psychological: Radcliffe’s ‘theme is not the dreadful happening very often nothing dreadful happens — but the interval during which the menace takes shape and the mind of the victim is reluctantly shaken by its impedance’.
For Tompkins, Radcliffe is therefore notable primarily for her ‘analysis of fear’ (J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1770–1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 258).
Similarly, referring to works as disparate as Nelson Smith’s ‘Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe’ (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 12, 3 [1973]: 557–70),
D. L. MacDonald’s ‘Bathos and Repetition: The Uncanny in Radcliffe’ (Journal of Narrative Technique 19, 2 [1989]: 197–204),
and William Patrick Day’s In the Circles of Fear and Desire: a Study of Gothic Fantasy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
all of which focus on the ‘non-events’ of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Steven Bruhm has recently concluded that since ‘supernatural events are all exposed as having natural causes, and perceived dangers are mostly constructions of Emily’s frenzied imagination’, ‘it has become a critical commonplace that one of Udolpho’s most outstanding characteristics is that nothing happens in it’ (Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: the Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 153, n. 3).
See, for example, Cynthia Griffin Wolff, ‘The Radcliffean Gothic Model: a Form of Feminine Sexuality’, in The Female Gothic, ed. Julian Fleenor (London: Eden Press, 1983), pp. 207–23,
Kenneth Graham, ‘Emily’s Demon-Lover: the Gothic Revolution and The Mysteries of Udolpho’, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 163–71, and Leona Sherman’s attention to Emily’s alternating ‘moral and sexual masochism’ (Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Romance: a Psychoanalytic Approach [New York: Arno, 1980], p. 128). Notably, although Sherman recognizes that Emily’s final seclusion at La Vallée is simply another form of self-denial, her emphasis on emotional, moral and sexual power to the exclusion of material considerations, makes her unable to perceive the difference in Emily’s position at the end of the novel.
See Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Of course, Radcliffe’s novel, set in France, was written in the midst of a revolution which had everything to do with how the inherited distribution of property constitutes a kind of material haunting. Following Marx’s comments on another French revolution, Jacques Derrida has theorized this ghostliness which constitutes ‘the condition of inheritance. Appropriation in general, we would say, is in the condition of the other and of the dead other’, Specters of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 108. Roland Paulson has also written perceptively about the historical situation of the gothic: ‘the popularity of gothic fiction in the 1790s and well into the nineteenth century was due in part to the widespread anxieties and fears in Europe aroused by the turmoil in France finding a kind of sublimation or catharsis in tales of darkness, confusion, blood, and horror’, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) pp. 220–1. Studies like Paulson’s are, however, limited, since they sidestep the novels’ property-plots to focus only on how they encode the psychic turmoil of the French revolution.
Claire Kahan, ‘The Gothic Mirror’, in The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Criticism, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahan and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 334–51. Similarly, Bette Roberts argues, in The Gothic Romance: Its Appeal to Women Writers and Readers in Late Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Arno, 1980), that ‘by the end of the eighteenth century, the writer of gothic novels could assume both the premium placed upon female propriety and the female legal and financial dependence upon men, within a social context characterized by the emergence of the tenets and practices of economic and social individualism. Unlike the domestic novel, which allowed for the parallel reinforcement and idealization of the female status quo in the domestic sphere, the gothic novel provided an outlet for the literary expression of repressed female wishes and fears’ (p. 225).
Also see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 147–74,
and Katherine Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 121–4.
In other words, as Claudia Johnson has convincingly argued, in Udolpho ‘the civilized practices of sentimentality conceal rather than alleviate the wrongs of women’, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 116. Johnson traces a pattern in which men are rewarded for their sentimentality, while ‘the many stories about dying, murdered, abandoned, and otherwise wronged women which Emily hears, imagines and exemplifies — are presented finally not as cumulative evidence of male oppression, but as misrecognitions borne of excess of the wrong, pathological, female sort, and accordingly are demoted to “superstitious” tales (the adjective is always a pejorative in Radcliffe) believed only by credulous servants, paranoid maidens, and (for a time) spell-bound readers’ (p. 97). While I agree with Johnson that The Mysteries of Udolpho suspiciously incriminates women for all of men’s sufferings, she dismisses the corollary of this argument — that Radcliffe thereby empowers her female agents — somewhat too quickly (p. 115). While, to borrow Foucault’s terms, Emily is compelled by the codes of sentimentality to practise strict self-discipline, the novel’s shift from Montoni’s anti-sentimental perspective to Emily’s moral code ultimately punishes his more overt transgressions. After all, Emily ends up in control, not only of herself, but also of the lion’s share of the novel’s power and property. Thus, while I agree with Anne Williams’ provocative suggestion that ‘Gothic romance is family romance’, this is not, as she suggests, because ‘a new assertion of power by the family (and by a state operating according to the implicit rules of patriarchy) in conflict with a new impulse toward “self-fashioning” is precisely the materials of which eighteenth-century Gothic is made’, since this assertion of power by the family and the state relies on precisely this impulse towards individual self-fashioning (see Anne Williams, Art of Darkness: a Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 32).
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 14.
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Freeland, N. (1999). Theft, Terror and Family Values: the Mysteries and Domesticities of Udolpho . In: Buse, P., Stott, A. (eds) Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374812_7
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