The Mysteries of Udolpho

by Ann Radcliffe

And in Rogers’s The Pleasures of Memory, quoted earlier, we find a similar sentiment:

  For ever would the fond Enthusiast rove,

  With Julia’s spirit, thro’ the shadowy grove;

  Gaze with delight on every scene she planned,

  Kiss every flower planted by her hand.

  (ii. 356–9)

  Radcliffe’s ubiquitous ‘supernaturalization of everyday life’ in Udolpho is largely derived from such poetry, as well as from Milton and Shakespeare. In her hands it becomes a romantic affirmation of the value of the imagination in perception, and a source of the spiritual belief and poeticization of the world which the German Romantic writer Novalis, in his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, was to assert eight years later: ‘the higher world is closer to us than we generally suppose. Here already we live in that world and perceive it, closely bound up as it is with the web of earthly nature.’32

  References to the numinous are made explicitly in Udolpho’s recurrent deistic emphasis on the precedence of nature over culture. St Aubert has ‘retired from the multitude’ to live in the rural tranquillity of Gascony, where the grandeur of natural scenery frequently impresses on Emily’s heart ‘a sacred awe’ and her thoughts go winging to ‘the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH’. When Emily’s counterpart, Blanche de Villefort, leaves the convent in which she has spent many ‘dull years’, she is of like mind – and extremely critical of the religious practices of Catholic monasteries: ‘How can the poor nuns and friars feel the full fervour of devotion, if they never see the sun rise, or set? Never, till this evening, did I know what true devotion is; for, never before did I see the sun sink below the vast earth!’ Blanche opens a high casement to be again ‘cheered by the face of living nature’ and view the ‘shadowy earth, the air, and ocean’; her thoughts rise ‘involuntarily to the Great Author of the sublime objects she contemplate[s], and she breathe[s] a prayer of finer devotion, than any she had ever uttered beneath the vaulted roof of a cloister’. On rising late next morning, she again exclaims:

  Who could first invent convents!… and who could first persuade people to go into them? and to make religion a pretence, too, where all that should inspire it, is so carefully shut out! God is best pleased with the homage of a grateful heart, and, when we view his glories, we feel most grateful. I never felt so much devotion, during the many dull years I was in the convent, as I have done in the few hours, that I have been here, where I need only look on all around me – to adore God in my inmost heart! (Vol. III, Ch. XI)

  Hers is enlightened spirituality.

  Arguably, the supernatural as metaphor also forms part of the scaffolding for Radcliffe’s conscious poeticization of her novel. While she was not the first novelist to exhibit her poems in a novel – Charlotte Smith had confidently inserted her poetry in her first novel, Emmeline, published in 1788 – the extent to which she uses poetry in Udolpho is remarkable. At a time when poetry, the literary sphere of men, was deemed the language and special indication of genius and aesthetic sensibility, its inclusion in Udolpho stakes a claim for the authority and respectability of female authorship and for the romance as a literary form.

  In order to provide contextual frames for ideas and to heighten atmosphere, Radcliffe utilizes some seventy-five quotations. Many of them are epigraphs to chapters – from Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Beattie, Collins, Sayers, Mason, and Rogers. But brief quotations from Shakespeare or other poets are also worked into the omniscient narration, while full-length poems, supposedly written by the characters themselves, are interpolated in the story. Here Radcliffe uses Emily’s sensibility, her feeling heart and continual receptiveness to the changing qualities of the landscape, to celebrate her creative ‘enthusiasm’.33 During the course of Udolpho, Emily is inspired to compose thirteen poems, many of them about victims, and other poems are attributed to Du Pont, St Aubert, Count Morano, Blanche and Valancourt. Readers impatient for the story may find these tedious and be tempted to pass over them quickly, but it is worth stopping to consider the role which Emily’s poetic sensibility plays in giving her ‘sublime’ authority and the mental ‘fortitude’ to resist Montoni’s predatory demands that she hand over her inherited estates.

  While reviewers of the day certainly gave attention to Radcliffe’s verse – in particular ‘The Sea-Nymph’, which she has Emily compose while in Venice – the poems did not prove memorable. Without doubt, it was for her sublime and picturesque scenic travel descriptions, including her use of the supernatural as metaphor, that Thomas James Mathias, in his The Pursuits of Literature (1797), lionized Radcliffe.34 She was, he affirmed, ‘a poetess whom Ariosto would have acknowledged as “La nudrita Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco”’.35 And, following him, Sir Walter Scott in 1824 acknowledged her as ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction’.36

  THE GOTHIC AS A HYBRID GENRE AND CONTEXTS

  FOR READING UDOLPHO

  As we have seen, in Walpole’s terms, Udolpho blends more than ‘old’ and ‘new’ romance. What is more, poetry is not the only genre which it appropriates to its purpose. In creating an illusion of a past reality, it also takes into itself travel literature, drawing liberally on aesthetic discourses about the sublime, beautiful and picturesque for its characters’ viewing of landscapes and various venerable Gothic piles, as well as for their tours of Languedoc, the Pyrenees and the Alps. Radcliffe herself did not travel abroad until 1794, just after the publication of Udolpho and even then, because of the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands and Belgium, her tour was cut short. But she was obviously an avid reader of travel literature as well as of Shakespeare and much else. She had read the works of William Gilpin, who, with his illustrated tours of rivers, lakes, forests and mountainous regions in Wales and England, had played a major role in popularizing picturesque travel and in the viewing of nature picturesquely.37 Her juxtapositions of sublime and beautiful views, as well as her creative use of obscurity, owe more to his work than to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry.

  For her truly splendid views of Venice, with its approach along the Brenta to the Grand Canal, ‘its islets, palaces and towers rising out of the sea’, and its gondoliers singing verses from Tasso and Ariosto, she drew on Hester Lynch Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1789), capturing Piozzi’s public. Thomas Green, in his Diary of a Lover of Literature for 25 November 1800, exclaimed on the stunning improvement wrought by Radcliffe’s transcription,38 while Byron’s debt to Udolpho in his description of Venice in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818) is obvious.39

  Yet another influence, in relation to what Emily sees behind the dreaded veil at Udolpho, was Pierre Jean Grosley’s New Observations on Italy and Its Inhabitants (1769). Radcliffe’s own record of travel in Holland and Germany, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, with its criticism of Capuchin monastery-church relics and impressions of convents where ‘horrible perversions of human reason make the blood thrill and the teeth chatter’,40 throws into relief her anti-Catholic motivation in drawing on Grosley’s macabre account and description.

  The interactions between these competing genres in Udolpho, as well as certain shifts in tone in the last third of the novel, raise questions about how the novel should be read. The tension generated between rationalism and enthusiasm, sense and sensibility, has already been noted. Sensibility – the eighteenth-century feeling heart – is repeatedly criticized by the narrator and by some of the characters for its dangerous potential to destabilize and weaken individuals – particularly women – making them susceptible to every fleeting emotion, and instilling illusory fears, superstition, and obsessive passion. In its capacity to render individuals thus vulnerable, it has, it seems, the potential to readmit the unenlightened beliefs and practices of a feudal age, a despotic culture which Udolpho explicitly repudiates. As Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall have suggested, the nightmare fear of losing hard-won liberties and being dragged back to the persecutions of the Counter-Refo
rmation is a strong motivation of Gothic fiction. The old ghosts of Catholic Europe – in Udolpho the tyrannical Montonis and Laurentini – are raised in order to be dispelled, killed off, exorcised.41 Both Montoni and Emily’s aunt are contemptuous of sensibility, while the ‘spectral’ Sister Agnes of the convent of St Clair, herself once a woman of ‘beauty and sensibility’, is well placed to warn Emily of ‘the first indulgence of the passions’, the ‘scorpions’ which will ‘sting… even unto death’. Her Gothic past, surfacing in and permeating Emily’s present, accords with St Aubert’s warnings to Emily about indulging a vicious ‘excess’ of feelings and with Emily’s own lessons in the constant need for restraint.

  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.