by Steven Moore
By literary standards, Udolpho is circulating-library stuff, aimed at readers like Polly Honeycombe. It is filled with anachronisms, characters straight out of Central Casting, bathetic poetry, and bland, over-punctuated prose: leaving Venice en route to Udolpho, “Emily gave a last look to that splendid city, but her mind was then occupied by considering the probable events, that awaited her, in the scenes, to which she was removing, and with conjectures, concerning the motive of this sudden journey” (2.5).324 Radcliffe’s thick descriptions of scenery have some value as obvious metaphors for Emily’s psychic landscapes—picturesque and uplifting during her idyllic days with her father, foreboding and sublime during her nights in Udolpho—but they are too repetitious and unoriginal; Radcliffe worked them up from travel books, landscape paintings, and from Edmund Burke’s theory of the “sublime,” which argues that terrifying, oppressive sights are pleasurable if viewed from a distance with no real danger involved. That’s one drawback to the novel: despite some suspenseful moments, the reader knows that there’s no real danger involved, that nothing horrible will actually happen to our beautiful heroine. By the end of the novel, Emily should have learned that you can’t trust anyone over 30—every adult has withheld secrets from her, including her beloved father—but she remains “a voluntary victim” (like Lee’s Matilda) of class expectations regarding female decorum and propriety. The Mysteries of Udolpho is a competent commercial novel, but nothing more; midway through, Emily self-consciously compares her present life to “one of those frightful fictions in which the wild genius of the poets sometimes delighted” (2.9), but “wild genius” is precisely what’s missing in this workmanlike performance.
That quality electrifies the most notorious Gothic thriller of the 1790s, The Monk (1796) by the young Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775–1818). As a teenager he began a Gothic novel inspired by The Castle of Otranto, but it was Radcliffe’s Udolpho that caused him to revise and complete it. Set in Madrid in maybe the 17th century and narrated in what one character calls “a tone of burlesqued gravity” (2.1), The Monk is an olla podrida of Gothic elements: creepy monks and nuns, dungeons filled with rotting corpses, scary legends, bandits, Catholic superstitions, ghost stories, erotic dreams, Satanic invocations, bells at midnight, blasphemy, occultism, voyeurism, homosexuality, transvestism, matricide, and incest, climaxing in the torching of a convent, mob violence, and appearances by Lucifer himself. Unlike Radcliffe, Lewis doesn’t explain away the supernatural but revels in it, and where she hints at horrors, he shoves them in our faces. The protagonist is a 30-year-old monk named Ambrosio who, as a result of a twisted religious upbringing at the hands of other monks, has become vainglorious about his religiosity and fame. (He’s Madrid’s most popular priest.) He is tempted off his self-righteous perch by a cowled young novice named Rosario, who reveals himself to be a woman named Matilda (in homage to Walpole’s heroine) and then seduces him. Lewis adds a blasphemous touch by revealing later that she posed for the painting of the Catholic goddess Mary in his cell that Ambrosio ogles with a teenager’s lust. After a few sessions of R-rated sex—more explicitly narrated than in any mainstream novel since Fanny Hill—Ambrosio tires of her and sets his sights on a 15-year-old named Antonia (who also belongs to a subplot concerning two young Spanish aristocrats). Ambrosio’s attempted rapes fail, so he gives her a sleeping potion borrowed from Romeo and Juliet, has his way with her in a dungeon, and then murders her when he fears detection. Captured and tortured by officers of the Inquisition, he sells his soul to Lucifer in exchange for freedom, but Old Nick reneges, takes him to a mountainous region like that surrounding Udolpho, and drops him from the sky to his death.
Where Radcliffe embroidered the sentimental novel onto the Gothic pattern, the well-read Lewis drew upon German terror-novels, the legends of Faustus and the Wandering Jew, European folklore, the Garden of Eden myth, and possibly Sade’s Justine.325 Where she teases about horrors, he displays them in horrific detail, and where she lazily relies on flat character-types, Lewis molded Ambrosio into a well-rounded character with psychological depths and complicated attitudes toward religion, sex, and power. Matilda too is a fascinating character, a bold groupie who is so devoted to Ambrosio that she assists him with his seduction of Antonia. Their perverse, codependent relationship sounds quite modern, as does her hedonistic attitude toward life; she is such a refreshing change from the priggish virgins who fret and faint their way through most novels of the period. (True, Matilda is a crossdressing Satanist, but nobody’s perfect.) The Monk is a deliberately garish, over-the-top performance by a 20-year-old intent on épatering le bourgeois; like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it provides “terrible thrills” with cheeky aplomb and crude vitality. But it fulfills a more serious function as well: like The Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek (sometimes categorized as a Gothic), The Monk successfully challenges the hegemony of the post-1740s realistic novel and demonstrates that even the most absurdly supernatural novel can vie with the most realistic when it comes to psychological insights, cultural criticism, and the relationship between the individual and the community.
Mother Radcliffe (as Keats later called her) was disgusted by The Monk and outraged to learn that her Udolpho inspired it; not about to be upstaged by a punk kid, she responded with her own novel about a corrupt monk: The Italian (1797), her last and arguably best Gothic thriller. She frames it as a found manuscript to ease her English readers into the pool of Italian depravity; first she relates how some English travelers visit a church in Naples in 1764, are shocked to learn the church is harboring a known murderer, and are handed a manuscript written a few years earlier about an incident that occurred at the same church. Then Radcliffe destroys the illusion by affixing an epigraph to the first chapter than comes from a 1768 play (Walpole’s Mysterious Mother), typical of her indifference to anachronisms. The story is also typical: a young man (Vivaldi) falls in love-at-first-sight with a modest virgin (Ellena), who is of course an orphan “tremblingly jealous of propriety” living with a stern aunt; Vivaldi’s parents oppose their marriage because her family is unknown, and thus arrange to disappear the girl, but after the typical period of trials and tribulations, the young innocents are reunited and marry. Radcliffe darkens this boilerplate romance by adding an evil monk (Schedoni) who hopes to be rewarded with “a high benefice” by Vivaldi’s mother for murdering Ellena, which he is on the verge of doing when he discovers she may be his daughter. Looking like “a gaunt tiger” with a “vulture eye,” Father Schedoni is a more complex villain than Ambrosio or Udolpho’s Montoni; they were driven by simple lust and greed, respectively, whereas he is a twisted knot of ambition, anger, pride, melancholy, and remorse. Also, the malevolence of the adult world is more pronounced than in Udolpho: nearly every authority figure resorts to subterfuge, withholds secrets, and threatens the lives and happiness of the young protagonists. Near the end, both Schedoni and Vivaldi are arrested by officers of the Inquisition—nobody expects the Italian Inquisition, for it had been inactive in Italy for a century—and during a lengthier, blander version of Lewis’s trial scene, Schedoni confesses his crimes and poisons himself.
The Italian is a tauter work than The Mysteries of Udolpho, with fewer nature descriptions, and so few supernatural elements that it barely qualifies as a Gothic. In fact, Radcliffe often seems to express doubts about the genre she popularized (especially after seeing what Lewis did with it); repudiating the supernaturalism of The Monk (and perhaps that of her earlier novels), Radcliffe has Schedoni chastise Vivaldi at the end for “a susceptibility which renders you especially liable to superstition,” going on perhaps to indict fans of Gothic fiction as well: “what ardent imagination ever was contented to trust to plain reasoning, or to the evidence of the senses? It may not willingly confine itself to the dull truths of this earth, but, eager to expand its faculties, to fill its capacity, and to experience its own particular delights, soars after new wonders into a world of its own” (3.11). Yet this is the very reason that peop
le read novels like hers; if contented with “the dull truths of this earth,” they would read nonfiction, or read nothing at all. On several occasions an impatient character orders another to “Be brief” when giving a detailed, circumambulatory account of something, and yet that’s the very manner Radcliffe uses, or feels compelled to use by her genre, teasing out each scene with pages of suspense. During a moment of self-doubt (and self-consciousness on Radcliffe’s part?), Ellena seems to critique the virtuous virgin stereotype of romantic fiction that she exemplifies: “Her very virtues, now that they were carried to excess, seemed to her to border upon vices; her sense of dignity appeared to be narrow pride; her delicacy weakness; her moderated affection cold ingratitude; and her circumspection little less than prudence degenerated into meanness” (2.5).326 Near the end, with one revelation following another, Ellena exclaims, “When will these discoveries end!” (3.9), another self-conscious acknowledgment of the Gothic genre’s clichéd modus operandi. Monk Lewis (as he came to be known) pushed the envelope of the Gothic novel; Mother Radcliffe remains inside the envelope, but grumbles about it. Perhaps for this reason—and because she no longer needed the money (she banked £600 for The Italian)—she wrote no further Gothic romances.
The genre had been taken over by hacks by this time, who continued to feed the reading public’s tacky taste for “horrid” Gothic thrillers.327 But the better examples of the genre resonated with better readers and writers, beginning with the Romantics and continuing to this day. What may have seemed like the most ephemeral genre of the 18th century has become one of the most enduring, preying upon our sense of the uncanny, our suspicions about conspiracies and malevolent power structures, and our sensual enjoyment of suspense as the young and innocent fend off the old and evil.
POLITICAL NOVELS
In his “Essay on Novels,” the Marquis de Sade reports that the Gothic novel “was the necessary offspring of the revolutionary upheaval which affected the whole of Europe. . . . There was hardly a soul alive who did not experience more adversity in four or five years than the most famous novelist in all literature could have invented in a hundred. Writers therefore had to look to hell for help in composing their alluring novels, and project what everyone already knew into the realm of fantasy . . .” (13–14). But a small number of novelists during the 1790s preferred to stay in the realm of reality and confront revolutionary upheaval directly rather than metaphorically. Of course political concerns had been in the background of many English novels from Wroth’s Urania onward, but after the American Revolution and the early events of the French Revolution, some English novelists pushed their political concerns to the foreground as they pondered the possibility that England might be next in line for a revolution—an idea that thrilled some and terrified others.328
One can literally see the genre shifting in that direction in the third novel by Charlotte Smith (1749–1804). Needing money after leaving her dissolute husband, Smith first wrote two romance novels with some Gothic touches—Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788) and Ethelinde; or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789)—and began planning her third novel, Celestina (1791), in the summer of 1789, the same summer that saw the Estates General convention in France and the storming of the Bastille. Smith was one of those who, before things got ugly, supported the revolutionaries’ goals to abolish the feudal system enforced by the monarchy and aristocracy, to reduce (if not eliminate) the power of the church, and to foster equality by privileging individual merit over birth or class. The first three of Celestina’s four sluggish volumes are an old-fashioned romance: Celestina is a standard-issue heroine—a beautiful, financially independent orphan who speaks and writes like a middle-aged moral philosopher—and is loved by a sentimental young man named Willoughby. Their desire to marry is of course thwarted by various rivals and obstacles, especially class discrimination (Celestina’s parentage is unknown and presumed common), until they overcome them and marry near the end. Been there, read that. Smith self-consciously acknowledges the hoariness of her form when she inserts an interpolated “history” of a secondary character, who admits “It is something like the personages with whom we are presented in old romances, and who meet in forests and among rocks and recount their adventures” (2.11), complete with old letters and dialogue recited verbatim from memory. But in the fourth volume there are increasing potshots at feudal aristocracy and talk of revolution: in another interpolated history near the end, a Frenchman who fought in the American Revolution states that the experience “awakened in my mind a spirit of freedom” (4.11), and while Willoughby is in France researching the secret of Celestina’s birth (she was dropped off as an infant at a Celestine convent, hence her name), we hear of the outrages committed during the ancien régime. What begins as a conventional romance ends in early 1790 as a politicized novel reporting the latest news from France, though the message is muddled when we learn that Celestina is not a commoner of outstanding merit but the daughter of an aristocratic mother. But the infusion of politics in the traditionally apolitical romance genre makes Celestina a bellwether of a new direction in the British novel.
“The first full-blown revolutionary novel” in Joyce Tompkins’s informed opinion (300) is Anna St. Ives (1792) by Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809), the self-educated son of a shoemaker. Like Celestina, this epistolary novel is structured along the lines of a traditional romance: beautiful, aristocratic Anna must choose between two admirers: Frank Henley—the self-educated son of her father’s steward/gardener—and Coke Clifton, a Lovelacy rake whom Anna believes can be reformed into a great person, enlisting selfless Frank’s help in doing so. Unlike Smith, Holcroft doesn’t make any reference to the French revolution, but both Anna and Frank are committed to its radical ideas: Frank looks forward to “the felicity of that state of society when personal property no longer shall exist, when the whole torrent of mind shall unite in inquiry after the beautiful and the true, . . . when individual selfishness shall be unknown, and when all shall labour for the good of all!” (letter 82). Similarly, Anna believes “that it is not only possible, but perfectly practicable and highly natural, for men to associate with most fraternal union, happiness, peace, and virtue were but all distinction of rank and riches wholly abolished; were all the false wants of luxury, which are the necessary offspring of individual property, cut off; were all equally obliged to labour for the wants of nature, and nothing more; and were they all afterward to unite and to employ the remainder of their time, which would then be ample, in the promotion of art and science, and in the search of wisdom and truth!” (63). They both consider themselves among “those beings who justly claim superiority of understanding, and thence a right to direct the world” (49).
Devious Clifton plays upon the egotistic idealism of these “catechumenical inspectors of morality, these self-appointed overseers of the conscience” (54), pretending to believe in their radical philosophy in order to win Anna’s hand. (She admires Frank, but fears it would set a bad example to marry below her station.) But when she sees through Clifton’s pretense and spurns him, he vows revenge and abducts them, confining Frank in a private lunatic asylum and Anna in an isolated house, where he tries and fails to rape her. This part is obviously indebted to Richardson, along with his dramatic but unrealistic “writing to the moment.” The altruistic kids triumph over the selfish villain, and Anna decides to marry the lower-class Frank in defiance of custom, and in defiance of the romance genre, because Frank is not revealed at the end to be “an aristocrat kidnapped in infancy,” as Stevenson notes is the case in so many novels of the period, and thus becomes “the first proletarian hero in the English novel” (168).
In what is arguably the best use of the epistolary form in English since Humphry Clinker, Holcroft allows other characters to exemplify in their stylistically diverse letters the various social prejudices Frank and Anna hope to eradicate. In fact, he allows Clifton to make so many witty, disparaging remarks about their utopian dreams that the novel can almost be read as an exposé
of social idealism. Frank is too good to be true—a Christ figure in a secular-humanist novel blessedly free of religious cant—but Anna, while inanely idealistic, is a truly admirable character. Worried at first that she may set a bad example by marrying Frank, she sets a splendid example near the end by repulsing Clifton’s attempts to rape her, and then by escaping over what her timid maid describes as “a high wall which no woman could climb.” Anna retorts, “it was weakness and folly to suppose that men were better to climb walls then women” (126), and manages to scale it and escape. If Holcroft’s female readers took nothing else away from Anna St. Ives, it is that women need not remain behind walls built by men. Anna comes to realize the utopia she and Frank envision is premature—“Well, well!―Another century, and then ―!” (63)—but her “daring defiance of the world and its opinions” (which Burney’s Mrs. Delvile Cecilia condemned as an “odious” attitude in a woman) makes Anna one of the most heroic heroines in 18th-century fiction.
Holcroft was friends with William Godwin (1756–1836), the former dissenting minister-turned-philosopher whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) is partly indebted to Anna St. Ives, and who decided to emulate his friend by dramatizing his political views in a novel. Things As They Are, better known as Caleb Williams (1794), is a gripping, startlingly original novel that works on several levels. It takes the form of a confession by a man unfairly accused of robbing his former employer—the wealthy, benevolent Ferdinando Falkland—and who has been hounded, imprisoned, and persecuted ever since he left Falkland’s service because he discovered his secret shame: that Falkland once killed a man for publicly humiliating him—a brutish neighboring squire who deserved to be exterminated—and unforgivably framed two other good men for the murder. At a surface level, Caleb Williams reads like a crime novel in which Caleb, an amateur sleuth driven by what he admits is “fatal” curiosity, uncovers the crime and forces a confession from Falkland, who then threatens to kill him if he reveals it, causing Caleb to flee and live life on the lam. Falkland hires a bounty hunter to stay on his tail, forcing Caleb to don disguises, serve time in prison and escape, and attempt to leave the country, foiled at every step to start a new life. He finally gets his day in court, and in the published conclusion, he is exonerated after Falkland confesses, an ending Gary Kelly rightly calls “wishful thinking” (196). (In the more realistic ending Godwin first wrote—which is included as an appendix in most modern editions—the court sides with Falkland and condemns Caleb to house arrest, where he goes mad.) Even at this literal level, Caleb Williams is a compelling novel of Dostoevskian power and intensity: both a psychological study in guilt, crime, and punishment, and a searing attack on England’s landowning squirearchy, its corrupt legal and penitentiary systems, and an oppressive government devoted to maintaining the feudal privileges of the aristocracy with police-state tactics.