The Mysteries of Udolpho

by Ann Radcliffe

  The modern heroine or hero (the reader’s counterpart who is equipped with an appropriate sensibility and liberal principles) is located in the Gothic past, forced to contend with the supposed delusions and iniquities of its political and religious regime. It is the conflict between the civilized and the barbaric, the modern and the archaic, the progressive and the reactionary which provides the terrifying pleasures of these texts.

  Thus Radcliffe’s geographical choice of the southern Catholic culture of sixteenth-century Europe, articulated with eighteenth-century sentiments and practices, reinforced for her contemporary readers ‘a distance between the enlightened now and the repressive or misguided then’. It also allowed her to depict ‘the anachronistic survival of vestigial customs into the enlightened present’.16 This important structuring principle frequently contributes, among other things, to the evocation of the frissons of terror for which her work is renowned.

  Consider, by way of example, the creepy incident in Volume I, Chapter VIII, of Udolpho, when Emily decides to make a nocturnal visit to the grave of her father. At his own wish, Monsieur St Aubert has been interred in the church of the convent of St Clair. Here Radcliffe’s historical representation is accurate: in France in the late sixteenth century almost all people of ‘quality’ were buried in churches.17 It had also been common for centuries for a burial to take place in a community of monks or nuns if the episcopal cemetery of the deceased was far away from the place in which he or she had died. In that way the deceased would have the advantage of the intercession of the prayers of the conventual community, as does St Aubert. It was also common for testators to state the desired location within the church, as St Aubert does ‘in mentioning the north chancel, near the ancient tomb of the Villerois’, and even ‘point[ing] out the exact spot’. The incident of the visit itself, with its hint of spectral visitation and clash between enlightened sensibility and archaic custom, has a twofold narrative effect for Radcliffe’s eighteenth-century Protestant readers. On the one hand, they can thrill to a scene of ‘Catholic superstition’ in the knowledge that they are safe from such bugbears. On the other hand, Emily’s visit to the church offers them disquietening reminders of a Gothic custom surviving in and ‘haunting’ their present.

  For, even though it had been expressly forbidden by the councils of the Counter-Reformation,18 the medieval practice of burial in churches had continued until late into the eighteenth century, especially in France, where it was condemned by Enlightenment thinkers. In 1764, in his critiques of priestcraft and ecclesiastic abuses, Voltaire, for example, had written:

  You go into the Gothic cathedral of Paris. You step over ugly, ill-aligned, uneven stones. They have been lifted over and over again to throw boxes of corpses under them. Walk through the charnel-house known as the Saint-Innocents. It is a vast enclosure dedicated to the plague. The poor who die very often of contagious diseases are buried there pell-mell; sometimes dogs come and gnaw at their bones, and thick, cadaverous, infected vapor rises from them. It is pestilential in the heat of summer and after rain.19

  However, not until the 1776 Déclaration Royale of Louis XVI was burial in churches and private chapels forbidden in France. And only after a public outcry in 1780 about leakage of mephitis from les Saint-Innocents in Paris were eight or nine centuries of corpses exhumed from churches and removed to tracts of land set aside for the purpose.20 In Protestant England, both Sir Christopher Wren and John Evelyn had advocated the creation of large cemeteries outside the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666.21 But their proposals were not taken up, and the medieval practice of interment within churches had continued in London and other centres, particularly among the privileged.22 Again, in 1711, the Fifty New Churches Act for London had laid down that there was to be no interment within the Churches themselves, but ‘Not one of the completed thirteen churches obeyed this rule’ and in fact they ‘provided for intramural burial on a scale never seen before in England’.23

  Radcliffe, in describing St Aubert’s place of burial, decorously makes no mention of cadaverous odours in the church. Unlike Matthew Lewis, who responded to Udolpho with his own explicit brand of Gothic in The Monk (1796), she avoids graphic descriptions of horror.24 But Emily is warned by the nun who offers to accompany her that ‘in the east aisle, which [she] must pass, is a newly opened grave’ where a friar of the convent has been buried on the preceding evening, and that she must ‘hold the light to the ground’ to ensure that she does not ‘stumble over the loose earth’. This, in the chill and silence of the aisles, with moonlight streaming through a distant Gothic window, Emily does – but not without a fleeting perception of ‘a shadow gliding between the pillars’, which she immediately rationalizes as her ‘fancy’ deceiving her. Radcliffe thus achieves suspense and a shudder in employing this disturbing Gothic vestige, while imbuing her Catholic heroine with Protestant enlightenment. Emily has insisted on unmediated privacy for her ‘melancholy tenderness’ and resisted superstition in trying circumstances.

  This was a technique for introducing apprehensions of the supernatural which late-eighteeth-century custodians of Enlightenment virtue could applaud, as can be seen from William Enfield’s comment in the Monthly Review:

  Without introducing into her narrative any thing really supernatural, Mrs Radcliffe has contrived to produce as powerful an effect as if the invisible world had been obedient to her magic spell; the reader experiences in perfection the strange luxury of artificial terror, without being obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason, or yield to the weakness of superstitious credulity.

  For all that, Enfield does exaggerate in stating that the reader is not ‘obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason’. Readers soon find that the explanations of apparently supernatural events are frequently withheld for many chapters, and ‘the strange luxury of artificial terror’ in fact depends on this device. Like Emily herself, we work through the ‘mysteries’ which give rise to fanciful and fearful thoughts and feelings, to a comprehension of the true state of affairs in which all is explained and reason reigns.

  Radcliffe’s further stroke of invention in this respect is her close linking of Emily’s late-eighteenth-century consciousness to landscape and architecture perceived in the picturesque and sublime modes. Utilizing a rich aesthetic lexicon,25 she presents her scenes as a series of painterly subjects. These are described in sweeping, physical detail, often after the manner of the seventeenth-century painters Salvator Rosa, Claude Gelée (Lorrain) and Nicolas Poussin. Sometimes ‘purely sublime’ barren rocky outcrops or the darkness of tall woods seem ‘the very haunt of banditti’ and awaken ‘terrific images in [Emily’s] mind’. At others, ‘sublime’ views of the Pyrenees, ‘exhibiting awful forms’ and ‘tremendous precipices’ but softened by the variety of woods, pastures or rustic dwellings at the margins, or the hazy luminosity of early morning or late afternoon, are inspirational, calling forth the ‘enthusiasm’ of Emily the poet. Yet again, beautiful and wild garden scenes at La Vallée or Chateau-le-Blanc, heightened by obscurity and chiaroscuro, produce melancholy or a ‘thrilling awe’; while charming valleys and plains, offset by the savage texture of surrounding mountains, are seen as ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror’. What may strike readers as overly frequent scenic descriptions can be seen on closer inspection to be cumulatively essential not only to the illusion of a past reality – France and Italy in the year 1584 – but also to the smooth incorporation of uncanny and seemingly supernatural or unnatural elements in the narrative. For example, the powerful and lengthy description of the approach to the precipitous castle of Udolpho, followed by Emily’s perception of ‘the Gothic greatness of its features’, gives plausibility to her presentiments of terrors, prison, ‘long-suffering and murder’, despite the narrator’s disclaimer of ‘unaccountable convictions which sometimes conquer even strong minds’. And the mysterious music which Emily hears in the woods near Chateau-le-Blanc and while confined to her room at Udolpho is linked to her perceptions of
the night and to strange conjunctions of events, past and present – events which remain uncanny even after the actual source of the music is explained many chapters later:

  While she raised her streaming eyes to heaven, she observed the same planet, which she had seen in Languedoc, on the night, preceding her father’s death, rise above the eastern towers of the castle, while she remembered the conversation, which had passed, concerning the probable state of departed souls; remembered, also, the solemn music she had heard, and to which the tenderness of her spirits had, in spite of her reason, given a superstitious meaning. At these recollections she wept again, and continued musing, when suddenly the notes of sweet music passed on the air. A superstitious dread stole over her; she stood listening for some moments, in trembling expectation, and then endeavoured to recollect her thoughts, and to reason herself into composure. (Vol. II, Ch. XI)

  While such fantastic events are hedged with the narrator’s or Emily’s own enlightened reminders about superstition and the dangers of a ‘distempered’ imagination, the physical details offered in Udolpho give Radcliffe’s remote past a type of Gothic suggestiveness which, for her contemporary readers, was entirely new and which kept them in a ‘sublime’ state of uncertainty. In this respect her ‘mysteries’ anticipate nineteenth-century writers’ development of the literary fantastic, such as we find in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale ‘The Black Cat’ (1845) and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). In this first-person narrative mode, contrary to Radcliffe, the reader’s hesitation or uncertainty regarding the fictional reality of preternatural phenomena remains unresolved.

  Radcliffe’s method of eventually giving rational explanations for apparently supernatural occurrences has been the subject of much adverse comment by modern critics and readers. The tide began to turn in this direction with Sir Walter Scott’s criticisms in book reviews and his introduction to the Ballantyne reprint of Radcliffe’s works.26 While he is right about the clumsiness and, at times, downright bad faith of her explanations, Scott missed the point. As Robert Miles has pointed out, Radcliffe had more in mind than avoiding the impropriety of allowing a supernatural order when she caused all of Emily’s terrifying experiences eventually to be explained. Her thematic purpose was also at stake.

  We are told from the outset that with Emily’s ‘uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence’ goes ‘a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace’. That her romantic sensibility can render her more vulnerable in adversity is also the tenor of St Aubert’s deathbed warning:

  do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be taught, that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight, from every surrounding circumstance. And, since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them. (Vol. I, Ch. VII)

  St Aubert here could be echoing Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which had dwelt forcibly on the grim outcomes for women of nurturing ‘a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling’, ‘an overstretched sensibility’ which ‘relaxes the other powers of the mind’.27 Indeed, throughout Udolpho frequent emphasis is given to Emily’s need to acquire and maintain ‘fortitude’ – a quality which Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) had listed as a virtue ‘of the sublimer kind’.28 As mentioned earlier, Emily must not allow her imagination to become ‘distempered’ by giving in to baseless fears, illusions, superstition. However, in spite of her best efforts at restraint, we find the wild imaginings engendered by the uncertainty of her situation still causing her to lose control. And this is Robert Miles’s point. ‘It was important for [Radcliffe’s] characters to return to the “daylight” rational world of the dawning Enlightenment, but only after an irrational interregnum, when the mind was allowed to wander, to believe, and conjecture, as it would.’ Radcliffe’s explained supernatural could provide this contrast between the rational and irrational. Bold supernatural machinery could not.29

  In any case, for many readers, Radcliffe’s hints of the supernatural could not be entirely subordinated to her apparent didactic framework. This is evident in Talfourd’s comment that ‘even when she has dissolved mystery after mystery, and abjured spell after spell, the impression survives’.30 After all the rational explanations (of which he, too, was critical), we are still left with the uncanny, the supposed workings of Providence. For example, we can point to the respective presentiments of St Aubert and Emily early in the novel which are in some way confirmed by subsequent happenings, or the strange conjunctions of events such as the conveying of the dying St Aubert to the woods near Chateau-le-Blanc, the residence of the deceased Marchioness, and later, of the return of the shipwrecked Emily to that same place after her escape from Udolpho. We may even feel that Emily’s illusory fears have not been altogether disproportionate to the chaotic violence and vestigial practices of tyranny and ‘monkish superstition’ which she has suffered at Udolpho.

  But there is more than this. Despite the repeated warnings about the excesses of sensibility, our confidence in Emily’s powers of perception and intensities of imagination is continually wooed. From early in the first chapter, a ‘good’ expansion or continuation of the finite world is seen in Emily’s poetic responses to the landscape. Consider the following passage which occurs in the first chapter of Volume I:

  she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain’s tremendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then the gloom of the woods…

  On the one hand, as we have seen, it is but a small step from such suggestive images to hidden presences and hauntings, the human source of which is eventually explained. On the other, such scenes themselves romantically endure, peopled not by spirits but by phantasms of memory, projections of the mind set in motion by nostalgia and yearning for those who are loved but now absent:

  Drying her tears, she looked, once more, upon the landscape, which had excited them, and perceived, that she was passing the very bank where she had taken leave of Valancourt, on the morning of her departure from Tholouse, and she now saw him, through her returning tears, such as he had appeared, when she looked from the carriage to give him a last adieu – saw him leaning mournfully against the high trees, and remembered the fixed look of mingled tenderness and anguish, with which he had then regarded her. (Vol. IV, Ch. X)

  At various points Emily sees again in her mind’s eye Valancourt or her dead parents in their ‘favourite haunts’ as they were wont to be. Even Montoni, ‘such as she had seen him in his days of triumph, bold, spirited and commanding’, rises to her ‘fancy’. Such visions are glossed by Radcliffe’s epigraph to Chapter X of Volume IV, taken from Samuel Rogers’s popular piece of verse The Pleasures of Memory, published in 1792:

  Lull’d in the countless chambers of the brain,

  Our thoughts are link’d by many a hidden chain:

  Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise!

  Each stamps its image as the other flies!

  (i. 169–73)

  The dejected Valancourt, too, ‘haunts’ La Vallée, ‘haunted’ by visions of Emily. Near the end of Udolpho, however, the projected memories themselves become the agents in Radcliffe’s sentences. When Emily decides to reside at her childhood home, La Vallée, it is because ‘its pleasant scenes and the tender remembrances that haunted them had
claims upon her heart’. There, too, as she enters with Valancourt, ‘the pleasant shades welcomed them with a thousand tender and affecting remembrances’. In such metaphoric use of the supernatural, the distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, breaks down. Terry Castle, drawing attention to Radcliffe’s ‘persistently spectralized language’, argues that ‘the supernatural is not so much explained in Udolpho as it is displaced… the supposedly ordinary secular world is metaphorically suffused with a new spiritual aura’.31

  POETRY AND SENSIBILITY IN UDOLPHO

  Castle goes on to link this feature of Radcliffe’s style to repressive emotional attitudes towards death and desire, perceiving it as an aspect of a shift in consciousness in the late eighteenth century. However, before we reach for Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, it is worth pointing out that melancholy, reverie, nature and the departed are recurrent themes or motifs in much earlier eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’. They can be found in Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5), Thomas Warton’s On the Pleasures of Melancholy (1747) and Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750), as well as the work of the ‘pre-Romantics’, William Collins, James Thomson, and James Beattie. All of these poets deal in shadows and obscurity. In, for instance, ‘Ode: “Tell me, thou soul of her I love”’ by James Thomson (1700–1748), one of Radcliffe’s favourite poets, the soul of the beloved is addressed thus:

  Oh! if thou hoverest round my walk,

  While, under every well-known tree,

  I to thy fancied shadow talk,

  And every tear is full of thee –

  (ll. 9–12)