Abstract
Scholars often view Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) as ‘The Great Enchantress’ whose novels helped to establish and develop the Gothic mode. As for her private life and beliefs, biographers and critics alike agree that while there is a scarcity of information, it is generally believed that Radcliffe was taught at a female school by Sophia Lee (1750–1824), author of the Gothic novel The Recess (1785), and her sister Harriet Lee (1757–1851), both of whom were actively involved in the instruction of children. Radcliffe was known to be a recluse in her adult life. Nevertheless, I argue that she actively participated in the 1790s debates concerning what constituted a proper female education through her writing and employed the Gothic mode as a way of transforming her child characters, including those in adolescence, through their pedagogical upbringing. While I discuss multiple texts, I focus on Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which is representative of how women writers during this time used depictions of children as ways of exploring various educational theories.
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Notes
- 1.
See Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999); Deborah D. Rogers, Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996); Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Aline Grant, Ann Radcliffe: A Biography (Denver: A. Swallow, 1951).
- 2.
See Rebecca Garwood on ‘Sophia Lee (1750–1824) and Harriet Lee (1757–1851)’ (Chawton House Library).
- 3.
See also Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation, (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- 4.
Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835, 196.
- 5.
Ibid., 100.
- 6.
Margaret Maxwell, ‘The Perils of the Imagination: Pre-Victorian Children’s Literature and the Critics,’ (Children’s Literature in Education 5.1 [1974]: 45).
- 7.
Sarah Trimmer, ed. The Guardian of Education, 5 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801–1805). See also Andrew O’Malley’s The Making of the Modern Child (New York: Routledge, 2003) and M. O. Grenby’s ‘“A Conservative Woman Doing Radical Things”: Sarah Trimmer and The Guardian of Education,’ in Culturing the Child: 1690–1914, ed. Donelle Ruwe (Lanham, MD: The Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, INC., 2005).
- 8.
See Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child, (Routledge, 2003).
- 9.
For other discussions and critical approaches to Gothic novels, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Methuen, 1986); Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., A Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, The Female Gothic: New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Rictor Norton, ed., Gothic Readings: The First Wave, 1764–1840 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000); Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel: 100 Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen (London: Pandora, 1986); Nelson C. Smith, ‘Sense, Sensibility, and Ann Radcliffe,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13, no. 4 (1973): 577–590; Yael Shapira, ‘Where The Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe’s ‘Delicate’ Gothic,’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 18, no. 4 (2006): 453–76; and Patricia Whiting, ‘Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ Eighteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 4 (July 1996): 485–501.
- 10.
Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791) even calls it an ‘absurd notion’ to educate girls differently than boys. See Catharine Macaulay, Letters on education. With observations on religious and metaphysical subjects. (London: printed for C. Dilly in the Poultry, 1790). Likewise, Wollstonecraft’s admirer Mary Hays (1759–1843) decries the belief of women’s inferiority, arguing for changes to women’s education. See Eleanor Ty’s ‘Introduction’ to The Victim of Prejudice, xv. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998).
- 11.
Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 1799 (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995).
- 12.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792, Ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin, 2004); and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798 (New York: Norton, 1975).
- 13.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, (London: printed for A and J. Churchill, at the Black Swan in Pater-Noster-Row, 1705); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, 1762, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979). Margarita Georgieva also points this out in The Gothic Child (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 79: ‘Similarly, Radcliffe’s Udolpho (1794), Roche’s Clermont (1798), and Crandolph’s Mysterious Hand (1811) are all about fathers whose chief employment is teaching their daughters in a countryside setting using a model inspired by a combination of Lockean and Rousseauvian ideas of education.’
- 14.
Betty Rizzo, ‘Renegotiating the Gothic,’ Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 62. See also Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). While not explicitly concerned with issues of education, Margarita Georgieva’s discussion of the characteristics of the Gothic child is worth noting here: the child’s exposure to the death of a loved one, the child’s subjection to an adult’s experiments at raising him or her, the impact of parental figures, the role of mystery, and the relation to sublimity. Miriam Leranbaum also recognizes that education plays an important part in this novel. See Miriam Leranbaum, “Mistresses of Orthodoxy’: Education in the Lives and Writing of Late Eighteenth-Century English Women Writers,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121, no. 4 (Aug. 1977): 281–301, 300.
- 15.
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho. 1794. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–2. References are to this edition, and will appear parenthetically.
- 16.
Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women: Cultivating Science, (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.
- 17.
Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792. ed. Miriam Brody. (London: Penguin, 2004), 28 (my italics). Parenthetical references are to this edition.
- 18.
The need for a rational heroine who uses logic to dispel ‘supernatural’ events and provide logical explanations is one of the trademarks of Maria Edgeworth’s protagonist in Belinda (1801). See Robert Miles’s Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress for a discussion of how Radcliffe uses the explanations of the supernatural. Miles is interested in the sensibility of the heroine as well.
- 19.
Ann Radcliffe, A journey made in the summer of 1794, through Holland and the western frontier of Germany, with a return down the Rhine: to which are added, observations during a tour of the lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland. 1795.
- 20.
See Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, “No Colour of Language’: Radcliffe’s Aesthetic Unbound,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39, no. 3 (2006): 377–90. Lewis provides an application of aesthetic and linguistic theories to Radcliffe’s descriptions.
- 21.
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), the eponymous protagonist must wait to marry his true love until he completes his two-year-long Grand Tour.
- 22.
Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1990), 52.
- 23.
William Stafford, ‘The Gender of the Place: Building and Landscape in Women-Authored Texts in England of the 1790s,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (2003): 317–318.
- 24.
Margarita Georgieva, The Gothic Child (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89.
- 25.
In ‘Renegotiating the Gothic,’ Betty Rizzo makes a similar observation: ‘Writers like Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft, who may be seen as suspicious of sensibility in women, are, in fact, only suspicious of sensibility unregulated by reason, and rightfully so’ (99). For an excellent discussion on reason and sensibility (with special attention to Radcliffe’s other well-known Gothic novel The Italian), see the rest of Rizzo’s essay. Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel also makes many brief but valid observations of Radcliffe’s preference for both reason and sensibility. However, I am much more concerned with tying reason and sensibility with Emily’s education and contextualizing that within the 1790s, looking at Emily as a Gothic child of education.
- 26.
See also Patricia Demers, The World of Hannah More, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
- 27.
Maria and Richard Edgeworth, Practical Education, 1798 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003), 282–83. See also Sarah Trimmer, ed. The Guardian of Education, 5 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1801–1805).
- 28.
See Robert J. Mayhew, ‘Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44, no. 3 (2002): 273–301. Mayhew provides an in-depth look at Radcliffe’s religious educational background. In the article, Mayhew posits that ‘[t]he element of Radcliffe’s ‘old-fashioned society’ that is the key to her writing lies in her religious beliefs. It would appear that Radcliffe was imbued with the tenets of the so-called Latitudinarian school of Anglicans’ (274). Mayhew attempts to tie in the landscape descriptions in Radcliffe’s novels with the Latitudinarian connection to nature and its relation to proving the existence of God. Mayhew also discusses the Latitudinarian belief in reason and a distrust of the supernatural. See also Rictor Norton’s Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe where he argues that Radcliffe may actually be more of a Unitarian Dissenter than a strictly religious Anglican, thereby connecting her with more radical female contemporaries, such as Wollstonecraft, Inchbald, and Hays.
- 29.
See Georgieva’s last chapter ‘The Sublime Child’ from The Gothic Child (2013).
- 30.
See Diana Wallace and Andrew Smith, The Female Gothic: New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
- 31.
See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and even his Reflections on the Revolution of France (1790). Also, see Bonamy Dobrée, who claims that ‘Radcliffe’s debt to Burke is profound’ (The Mysteries of Udolpho, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 675).
- 32.
Georgieva, The Gothic Child, 191.
- 33.
See Rizzo, ‘Renegotiating the Gothic.’
- 34.
According to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, moral was typically defined as ‘1. Relating to the practice of men towards each other, as it may be virtuous or criminal; good or bad … 2. Reasoning or instructing with regard to vice and virtue … 3. Popular; customary; such as is known or admitted in the general business of life,’ Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, vol. 2, London: printed for J. F. and C. Rivington, L. Davis, T. Payne and Son, et al., 1785,150. Moral could also be used to distance humans from physical influences or differentiate themselves from animals. See Jenny Davidson, Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 2009), especially 96. Also according to Johnson’s Dictionary, intellectual as an adjective could be defined as ‘1. Relating to the understanding; belonging to the mind; transacted by the understanding … 2. Mental; comprising the faculty of understanding; belonging to the mind … 3. Ideal; perceived by the intellect, not the senses … 4. Having the power of understanding,’ 1068. Emily had to continually exercise her understanding throughout her journey, and it is this intellectual improvement that would most likely be referenced and promoted as a necessary part of female pedagogy.
- 35.
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 338.
- 36.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83.
- 37.
Johnson’s Dictionary defines enlighten as ‘1. To illuminate; to supply with light … 2. To quicken in the faculty of vision … 3. To instruct; to furnish with the increase of knowledge,’ 698–99. It is interesting to note that when Emily becomes part of this enlightened society, she is freed from superstition; she has learned her lesson and prefers a rational outlook and the company of others who share this outlook as well.
- 38.
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda. 1802. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- 39.
Johnson’s Dictionary defines benevolence as ‘1. Disposition to do good; kindness; charity; good will,’ 247.
- 40.
Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child, 125.
- 41.
Mary V. Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 163.
- 42.
Maria Edgeworth, ‘The Birth-Day Present,’ The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature, ed. Jack Zipes et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005), 2111–21.
- 43.
Maria Edgeworth, ‘Simple Susan,’ The Parent’s Assistant (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003).
- 44.
Richard S. Albright, ‘No Time Like the Present: The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 49–75, 53.
- 45.
David Durant, ‘Anne Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 22, no. 3 (1982): 519–530, 519–520.
- 46.
David Durant, ‘Anne Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic,’ 528.
- 47.
Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress. 1782. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) and Evelina. 1779, 2nd ed., ed. Susan Kubica Howard, (Toronto: Broadview, 2000). Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice. 1799. (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1998).
- 48.
In Belinda (1801), Edgeworth ends by specifically challenging her readers to figure out the moral.
- 49.
I would like to thank Lisa Zunshine, Andrew O’Malley, Alfred Lutz, and Judith Prats for their feedback and encouragement through the various stages of this work.
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Evans, J.R. (2018). Redefining the Gothic Child: An Educational Experiment?. In: O'Malley, A. (eds) Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_13
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