The Preceptor as Fiend:
Radcliffe's Psychology of the Gothic
David S. Miall
This essay is a revised and
expanded version of that published in Laura Dabundo, Ed., Jane Austen and
Mary Shelley and Their Sisters. Lanham, MD: University Press of America,
2000. pp. 31-43.
From the perspective of the
1990s, we might regard the Britain of the 1790s as marked by a pervasive
neurosis of the social order. Nowhere is this more evident than in the position
assigned to women, who were subjected to a range of legal and social
disabilities. Although these disabilities were not new to the 1790s, they
acquired a special intensity in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the
reaction against all things Jacobin. One notable turning point was the eruption
of hysteria following the publication of the first edition of William Godwin's Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797,
which helped ensure that Wollstonecraft's Vindication
of the Rights of Women (1792) would quickly lose the regard it had
initially enjoyed and would soon fall into obscurity. Another instance is the
publication of the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, from The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) to The Italian (1797). The extraordinary popular success that the
novels enjoyed, together with the rash of third‑rate imitations that
immediately ensued, suggests that the novels fulfilled an urgent social need.
Despite different aims, the writings of both
Wollstonecraft and Radcliffe share one obvious preoccupation, concern with the
education of women. Both react, although differently, to the contemporary
emphasis in fashionable education on feminine accomplishments and the cult of
sensibility. The teacher's role in Radcliffe's novels, however, surpasses that
of parent or tutor. Suspense or terror, supernatural intimations, the use of
the sublime, and the persecution by powerful men also support pedagogical
issues; in this respect the novels point to another principle underlying the
neurosis of the 1790s. The novels play out the
implications of the regressive, semi‑childlike state which was enforced upon most
women by the prevailing culture ‑‑ that "perpetual
babyism" of which Mary Hays complained (97). To be more precise, the
Radcliffean Gothic is constructed from a psychological machinery that enacts
the predicament of the abandoned child, for whom the only resolution available
is the temporary one of wish fulfillment. The novels' significance, and their
attraction for their first readers, perhaps lies in that they capture the
borderline status of women, neither child nor adult, and portray, albeit in
disguised and symbolic form, the attendant disabilities to which their middle‑class
female readers were themselves victim.
Radcliffe probably did not
consciously design her novels to explore such issues; on the contrary, their
paradoxes of plot and character suggest conflicted, unconscious materials. No
record indicates that Radcliffe received any formal education, although her
novels show familiarity with English literature of the eighteenth century,
Shakespeare and Milton, and a wide range of travel literature.
Radcliffe as a girl is
likely to have been exposed to educational issues discussed within the Wedgwood
circle, which also conducted experiments in education involving children of
both sexes. The later publication of her novels coincided with an
intensification of the debate on female education, which peaked in the
1790s. Her novels make apparent that
Radcliffe studied some of the central issues with increasing seriousness and
depth of understanding, particularly the place of sensibility and the moral
education of women. But the failures of the educational model that Radcliffe
came to know, above all its failure to ensure the maturity of women and
meaningful social roles, are reflected in the Gothic form intrinsic to
Radcliffe's fiction. Thus I interpret the novels as studies in the
psychopathology of childhood. Although Radcliffe hoped for an education for
women that would secure their virtue and sensitivity, her novels actually hold
up to society a distorting mirror in which the preceptors of women appear
fiendish and predatory.
That Radcliffe was concerned
with education is apparent in all her novels from the first, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, the
opening pages of which consider the heroine's education. Radcliffe's reading of
Rousseau's Emile is
manifest in The Romance of the
Forest, in which the character of La Luc is modeled on Rousseau's Savoyard
vicar. The most elaborate treatment of female education appears in the early
chapters of Udolpho, where Radcliffe
dwells at some length on St. Aubert's upbringing of Emily and his valedictory
precepts to her before his death. Radcliffe's views on education cannot be
identified with those of St. Aubert, however, but they do correspond
significantly with contemporary discussions by such writers as Thomas Gisborne
and Hannah More. Her handling of the issues, however, suggests a profound, if
unconscious, distrust of the ideological implications of current practices in
female education, which she is likely to have encountered within the Wedgwood
circle and perhaps even in her own experience.
Although Ann Radcliffe's father was originally a haberdasher in Holborn,
she was related through her mother to a wider and more influential world. Her uncle was Thomas Bentley, who became the
partner of Josiah Wedgwood the potter in 1769.
Bentley was primarily responsible for managing the London showrooms of
Wedgwood, but he also appears to have been keenly interested in education. Josiah Wedgwood's first surviving letter to
Bentley in 1762 refers to "an excellent piece upon female education,
which I once had the pleasure of reading in MS." and which Bentley is
urged to publish.2 The
treatise unfortunately appears not to have survived, so we cannot know what his
views were, but it also seems certain that Bentley took a hand in the early
education of Ann. As a child Ann stayed
with Bentley at his Chelsea house: the longest period appears to have been
Autumn 1771 to Spring 1772 when Ann was age seven, while preparations were put
in hand for the Bath showrooms that Ann's father was hired to supervise;3
she also seems to have made later visits, others being during the three year
period when Bentley lived at Turnham Green prior to his death in 1780. Ann may have first met William Radcliffe
here; she would also have met several figures in the literary and scientific
world who were friends of Bentley, such as Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi, Mrs.
Barbauld, Joseph Banks, Sir William Hamilton, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and
Erasmus Darwin; the latter two were to produce their own treatises on education
during the 1790s.
Apart
from Bentley's direct influence, Ann would also have become aware of
contemporary educational practice in the example of Wedgwood's daughter
(Susannah [1765‑1817]), who was one year younger than Ann and who, upon
marrying Dr. Robert Darwin in 1796, became the mother of Charles Darwin.
Susannah stayed either with Bentley or at a nearby school in Chelsea called
Blacklands between October, 1775, and April, 1778. She seems to have received
the standard education for a girl. Wedgwood speaks in one letter of her
improvements "as well in her general carriage, & behavior, as in her
Music, Drawing &c." (ii:302‑03). After
she had been seen by the Edgeworths, Josiah reports his pleasure in their
report, which praised "her obliging behaviour, & good disposition
[which] give much pleasure to himself & Mrs. Edgeworth."4* But the quality of female boarding schools
was often extremely poor,5* and the two schools which Sukey attended
seem to have been no exception: Sukey suffered a succession of maladies from
her schooling, as other letters indicate.6*
As a child, therefore, Ann
had a vivid example placed before her of the ill‑effects of female
education, enforced by two powerful men at the forefront of radical capitalist
development. It is perhaps no accident
that her novels, notably Udolpho, were to emphasise control of property,
and point to the role of female victims caught up in the social machinery it
set in action. But there are additional
reasons for looking upon education as a particular preoccupation of Radcliffe.
Female education when Radcliffe was growing
up placed its primary focus on accomplishments. Many critics noted that these
were merely utilitarian and subverted any genuine educational achievement. In a
diary entry of 1784, for example, Mrs. Thrale (later Piozzi) writes that the
female student's "Mother only loads her with Allurements, as a Rustic lays
Bird Lime on Twigs, to decoy & catch the unwary Traveller" ‑‑
that is, a husband (i:590‑91). Yet these same accomplishments constitute
almost all that we first see of an Emily or an Ellena, to whom Valancourt or
Vivaldi respond in textbook manner by falling immediately and irrevocably in
love. Radcliffe's heroines, in fact, keep themselves occupied very much as
contemporary guides recommended. Gisborne's Enquiry
(1797) suggests improving reading (citing poets that Radcliffe particularly
prized, such as Milton, Thomson, Gray, Mason, and Cowper), including poems that
instill a sense of the sublime in nature; and he urges the performance of
regular acts of charity to poor neighbors (223). Ellena, in The Italian, supports herself by selling
fine work anonymously through the local convent, somewhat after the manner of
Mrs. Cooper's shop in London, noticed by Priscilla Wakefield, which discreetly
sold goods made by ladies in deprived circumstances (115).
But in themselves
accomplishments are insufficient, as Radcliffe's novels imply. Numerous parents
in the 1790s enabled their sons and daughters to ape the manners of the upper
classes by attending boarding schools, but as Catherine Macaulay warned, such a
polite exterior "is liable to change into a determined rudeness whenever
motives of caprice or vanity intervene" (172)‑‑a change that
occurs only too readily in the case of a Madame Cheron. The touchstone of
Emily's virtue, as with Valancourt, is unswerving sensibility, whether to
poetry or to nature. Radcliffe thus accepts the prototype, which so many
boarding schools were designed to reproduce, in endowing her heroines with all
the fashionable accomplishments; but she shows its limitations at the same
time, a stance that ennobles her heroines but weakens their credibility as
protagonists.
The physical ideal of
womanhood that evolved toward the end of the eighteenth century was equally
damaging. Increasing restrictions on body shape and clothing meant, in Lawrence
Stone's account, "extreme slimness, a pale complexion and slow languid
movements, all of which were deliberately inculcated in the most expensive
boarding schools" (Family 445).
Weakness of body and mind seems to have given women greater sexual
attractiveness by increasing the scope for male control. As Fanny Burney's Mr.
Lovel in Evelina says, "I have
an insuperable aversion to strength, either of body or mind, in a female"
(361). Radcliffe's heroines, who are capable of little physical exertion and
often faint, seem close to this anorexic paradigm. The achievement of this
ideal formed the "hidden curriculum" of their schooling. Female
education in Radcliffe's period was not primarily about singing or embroidery,
it was the enforcement of an anemic, passive, and compliant disposition, which was designed to prolong the childhood state of woman and to keep
her constantly on the edge of adolescence.
Thus, in
Athlin and Dunbayne, Mary's
indisposition makes her more attractive to Alleyn since it gives her "an
interesting languor, more enchanting than the vivacity of blooming health"
(110). In her later novels Radcliffe achieves similar effects through the
emotional suffering of her heroines, which renders the countenance "more
interesting" (Udolpho 161).
Besides the heroines' illnesses, their
childlike qualities contribute directly to their attractiveness. This is stated
most blatantly in Romance of the Forest when
Theodore reflects that Adeline's charms are best described by the lines of a
poem: "Oh! have you seen, bath'd in the morning dew, / The budding rose
its infant bloom display; / When first its virgin tints unfold to view" (Forest 172). Wollstonecraft bitterly
complains about this view, speaking of women "hanging their heads
surcharged with the dew of sensibility" (149). Adeline is also said to be
amiable, beautiful, and possessing a simplicity of manners (29); she has a love of virtue that makes it difficult for her to dissemble
(160). She has just those virtues, in fact, that More advocates in her Strictures (1799) while complaining
about women's passion for dress and ornament: "Modesty, simplicity,
humility, economy, prudence, liberality, charity are almost inseparably, and
not very remotely, connected with an habitual victory over personal vanity and
a turn to personal expense" (i:336). Such a heroine is simultaneously
strong and weak; she has the finest, best‑honed moral sense yet is liable
to faint at every critical moment (although the frequency of fainting fits
steadily diminishes across Radcliffe's novels).2 The source of this paradox
emerges with the role of moral instruction in Radcliffe's fiction, that is, the
use of the precept.
Radcliffe knew Shakespeare's work well: it might be argued that she took
her cue on precepts from him. In
Shakespeare's usage the term is deprecated on several occasions: our judgment
of Polonius, for example, is not influenced in his favour by the string of
precepts he impresses on Laertes, when his own behavior clearly springs from
principles that differ from these (Hamlet, I.iii.58‑80). In Udolpho the
most important education received by the heroine is largely in the form of precepts;
yet Radcliffe manages this ambiguously. Emily's father appears to subscribe to
a model of female education similar to More's, although his precepts may not be
intended at face value. Valancourt's elder brother is described
"haranguing on the virtues of mildness and moderation" (117), which
seems to caricature St. Aubert's advice to Emily. Madame Cheron frequently
talks in precepts: "she failed not to inculcate the duties of humility and
gratitude" (121). More disturbingly, however, Montoni also speaks in
maxims, referring to "friends who assisted in rescuing you from the
romantic illusions of sentiment . . . they are only the snares of childhood,
and should be vanquished the moment you escape from the nursery" (196) ‑‑
an even more brutal version of St. Aubert's advice to Emily. Also, Cheron's
precepts, based as she claims on "a little plain sense" (204) or
"only common sense" (205), are shown actually to involve an
acceptance of and complicity in the world of Montoni. Thus, common sense is
invoked to disguise patriarchal tyranny. Not coincidently, then, while Montoni
attempts to gain control over Emily's property, he talks to her in precepts:
"you should learn and practice the virtues, which are indispensable to a
woman ‑‑ sincerity, uniformity of conduct and obedience"
(270).3 Compliance and self‑control are demanded by the preceptor in
contrast to the method of the teacher, who emphasizes development in the
pupil's own interests ‑‑ a role rarely found in Radcliffe's fiction
(except perhaps Madame de Menon in A
Sicilian Romance).
Therefore, precepts may be
the primary agents of the patriarchal perspective, like Polonius's toward his
children; preceptors invariably stand against sensibility. Feeling must be
controlled by the patriarchal force of reason since feeling is an agent of
discovery and would enable its possessor to challenge the preceptor's
authority. Thus although Radcliffe seems on the one hand to applaud the
precepts of a St. Aubert, on the other hand the tenor of her novels points not
only to the inadequacy of such precepts, but also suggests that those who wield
them are agents of repression or terror. In educating Emily, St. Aubert strives
"to teach her to reject the first impulse of her feelings, and to look,
with cool examination, upon the disappointments he sometimes threw in her
way" (Udolpho 5). But as Robert Kiely notes, "the
incongruity between human behavior and moral principles which increases as the
book progresses is strangely prefigured in Emily's philosophical father"
(71), who fails to abide by his own precepts. While he speaks to Emily of
controlling her feelings by reason or mind on the day of her mother's funeral
(20‑21) ‑- surely a highly premature injunction ‑‑ he
is himself unable in 20 years to overcome his grief at the death of his sister,
the poisoned Marchioness de Villerois (660). This prevents his letting Emily
know that he even had such a sister, and his silence borders on the culpable,
since her knowledge of this piece of family history might have alerted her to the
danger of Montoni's guardianship. Whether Radcliffe expected readers to infer
that is not clear; her plot lacks internal consistency. The surface structure
of her fiction, with its notorious explanations of the supernatural, supports
the principles of reason and a rational control over sensibility, and St.
Aubert is rendered a mouthpiece for precepts from contemporary treatises on
female education. Yet these same principles are repeatedly subverted by
Radcliffe's focus on extreme states of feeling. By placing her heroines at the
borders of perception and rationality, she enables their aroused sensibilities
to acquire knowledge essential for survival.
Radcliffe's handling of sensibility is thus
equivocal at a critical juncture of cultural change. More, for example, in her
early poem to Mrs. Boscawan "Sensibility," written in 1782, gives her
subject high praise: "Unprompted moral! sudden sense of right!"
(i:34). In the Strictures of 1799,
however, several pages warn of the dangers of sensibility, and she withdraws
her earlier trust in its moral powers. Women of sensibility, she declares,
"are apt to employ the wrong instrument to accomplish the right end. They
employ the passions to do the work of the judgment" (i:380). Richard
Edgeworth, who brought up his first son on principles of freedom and
sensibility inspired by Rousseau, later moved away from sensibility. When
considering female education with his coauthor Maria Edgeworth he advises,
"we must cultivate the reasoning powers at the same time that we repress
the enthusiasm of fine feeling" (i:380). Radcliffe occupies
both sides of this debate. She accepts the high valuation placed on women's
moral judgment in shaping society through the men they influence (a role on
which More and others insisted). For example, Adeline, Emily, and Ellena decide
to reject immediate marriage with their suitors at a critical moment, thus
becoming moral guides to the men. At the same time, Radcliffe values the
impulses of sensibility in ways that More and Edgeworth reprobated. Anticipating
the Edgeworths, she makes St. Aubert warn Emily, in terms very similar to ones
used by More or the Edgeworths, "do not indulge in the pride of fine
feelings, the romantic error of amiable minds" (Udolpho 80). Yet such
rational caution has serious limitations.
Contemporary education
manuals emphasize keeping females occupied, hence the ceaseless cultivation of
accomplishments such as embroidery, etching, drawing, or ribbon work. A woman
should carefully avoid reverie, as More stresses: "she, who early imposes
on herself a habit of strict attention to whatever she is engaged in, begins to
wage early war with wandering thoughts, useless reveries, and that
disqualifying train of busy, but unprofitable imaginations. . ." (i:336).
But Radcliffe likely would have disagreed with these prescriptions. Although
Emily, for instance, feels some guilt when she notices that she has dropped her
needlework and fallen into a reverie or has lingered in communion with the
falling dusk and the sounds of nature, this is when her sensibilities, thus
activated, register the signals that contribute in the long run to her safety.
For Emily ‑‑ and Ellena after her -- reverie provides a training in
anticipatory reflection on her plight; it becomes soon enough a more urgent canvassing of what various critical events may mean, and the mental
arguing through of the logic of different possible outcomes. To imagine a particular outcome is to gain some
control over its actuality. Radcliffe heroines spend an increasing amount of time
doing this, as the ratio of action to cogitation decreases over the course of
her novels. Reverie strengthens, not weakens, the preparedness of the Radcliffe
heroine.
Thus to debate the priority of reason or
sensibility in Radcliffe is perhaps fallacious. The novels demonstrate the
convergence of these faculties, that sensibility itself is a form of reason.
"Despite its elaborate assertions of the need to dominate feeling by
reason," as Spacks observes, "The Mysteries of Udolpho dramatizes the
power of feeling to guide people accurately" (174). Hence, Radcliffe
presents an insight that Coleridge or Wordsworth shortly offers more
explicitly: for example, Coleridge claims in 1803 that his philosophy is
"to make the Reason spread Light over our Feelings, to make our Feelings
diffuse vital Warmth thro' our Reason" (Notebooks i:1623).
Thus feelings, far from coming under the control of reason, increasingly guide
the heroine's behavior. Conger, noting this, points to Ellena's sudden
suspicion of Spalatro's food in The
Italian (216): "Here is one of Radcliffe's most successful fictional
demonstrations of the finely tuned sensibility in action, and one that presents
that sensibility unequivocally as an instinctive survival skill" (135). Radcliffe also extends the heroine's clairvoyance to premonitory
dreams, such as Adeline's, which lead her to her murdered father's manuscript (Forest
108‑110), a device in which Radcliffe improves upon a predecessor's
strategy (Clara Reeve's Old English Baron
[1778]).
Despite these significant
accomplishments, however, the Radcliffe heroine oddly fails to mature either
socially or psychologically. Although she survives her ordeals in order to
marry and, presumably, bear children, she seems quite untouched by the
succession of terrifying experiences she has had to endure. Udolpho, in the words of Macdonald
(1989), is "a novel of education in which her heroine starts out with
nothing to learn, a novel of maturation in which her heroine ends up as
innocent, and as infantile, as she began" (203; also Kiely 78, Howells 9).
This analysis applies to the heroines of all the novels. Radcliffe's vision,
then, cannot encompass maturation.
At the same time, the Gothic
heroine is a survivor, as Punter has suggested (11). Representative of some aspect
of actual female experience, she survives amidst the social disruptions and
gender politics of the late eighteenth century, but only at the cost of
considerable psychological injury. She is the plaything of a Gothic machinery
that involves removal of parents, extreme social isolation, prolonged
incarcerations, and states of excessive terror, all of which symbolize a
predicament that in reality is too threatening to be adequately comprehended.
The repetitive nature of
Radcliffe's plots, not only within each novel but from one novel to the next,
points to a version of the repetition compulsion which, as Freud pointed out,
lies at the root of the uncanny (xvii:238). Endlessly replicating situations of
terror, the novels point to a primary source in the experience of women of
Radcliffe's generation, the repeated failure to master a trauma. The remarkable
success of the Gothic genre she created shows that the representation of
woman's predicament in her novels met an urgent cultural need, not just in the 1790s,
but in the several decades and numerous imitators that followed.
Although critics have noted
that Radcliffe's Gothic fictions occupy a borderland poised between natural and
supernatural, the suspense this causes mainly serves plot machinery. It is their evocation
of a more important borderland state that generates their true emotional power,
that between childhood and adulthood. Punter's point that readers
of Gothic fiction are free to indulge in regressive visions does not fully
account for the experience of women writers such as Radcliffe and their first
female readers.4 Our regressive vision was their historic reality. In this
sense, the infantilism imposed on women during the Romantic period perpetuates
the psychodrama of early childhood, manifest in the plot of such a novel as The Italian as uncanny appearances and
connections, meaningful coincidences (portrayed as providence), and the
omnipotence of the prevailing powers of church and class. The reader's
emotions, in short, reproduce the response to the oppressors that controlled
women's lives.
Above all, the hallucinatory
symptoms that occur in terror reflect as in a distorting mirror the ethical
framework of 1790s patriarchy, with its extravagant and psychotic ethical
demands on women. In this world, even the suspicion of a single ethical slip by
a woman precipitates a fall into the abyss of ruin; a scale of retribution both
disproportionate to the degree of guilt incurred and radically different from
that under which men operated.5 This primitive and savage ethical order imposed
upon women suggests one source for the atavism of the Gothic novel, the fear of
pollution springing from women's sexuality. As Paul Ricoeur comments on the
fear of defilement: "When [man] first wished to express the order in the
world, he began by expressing it in the language of retribution" (30).
Working out this problematic, Gothic fiction partly desexualizes its heroine by
pushing her back across the borders of adolescence, at the same time visiting
upon her massive and not entirely explicable sufferings. These serve to
increase her sensibilities, sometimes to hallucinatory intensity, but this
supplies the heroine's strength as well as her liability. As Emily reflects,
"when the mind has once begun to yield to the weakness of superstition,
trifles impress it with the force of conviction" (Udolpho 634‑35).
Yet much of the behavior that preserves her at Udolpho derives from just such
conviction based upon apparent trifles -- a few words, gestures, remote sounds.
As Coleridge put it in The Friend,
imagination builds on slight evidence: "what small and remote
resemblances, what mere hints of likeness from some real external
object, especially if the shape be aided by colour, will suffice to make a
vivid thought consubstantiate with the real object, and derive from it an
outward perceptibility."33
Coleridge goes on to relate this tendency to the appearance of
apparitions and Luther's hallucination of the devil in particular. Hallucinatory episodes, as one modern authority
remarks, tend to occur when "there is a high expectancy and a high level
of ambiguity in available stimuli."34 This ambiguity in stimulation certainly corresponds to the
conditions in which Radcliffe's heroines often find themselves.
But the heroine's hallucinatory perceptions
are not merely fantasy, even though they are often factually mistaken at the
banal level of plot. A hallucination
intimates repressed unconscious thoughts. As Freud remarks in speaking of "conversion
hysteria," a hallucination reproduces in disguised form the actual
experience when the repression occurred (xx:111). In this way Radcliffe
disguises experiences that properly belong to childhood animism, in which no
events are unexplained or random; every strange sight or sound holds a meaning
with felt personal significance, even though this significance may be obscure
or inexplicable. Just so does a Radcliffe heroine respond with hallucinatory
intensity to the sights and sounds around her. Although the animism is later
withdrawn in the bathos of explanation (Macdonald 199), the intimated meaning
often remains in force and fails to dispel the atmosphere of threat or
providence surrounding the heroine. For example, the improbable coincidences on
which a Radcliffe plot depends are never adequately explained.6 Such animism
belongs normally only to childhood, but it is likely to be reawakened later in
life during crises, such as separation or bereavement. Radcliffe seems to
replay such a crisis in the plot of each of her novels, given that her heroines
find themselves bereft of one or, usually, both parents, leaving the heroine
exposed to vengeful or providential powers beyond her understanding or control.
The plot, in other words, replays the regression to animism, in which nothing
is meaningless. As Freud says, animism is the "most consistent and
exhaustive" and "truly complete" explanation of the universe
(xiii:77).
Another dimension of such
animism is that the internalizing of the preceptor's voice, which
psychoanalytically produces the superego or conscience, is incomplete. Thus the
threatening behavior of a Montalt, a Montoni, or a Schedoni echoes the paternal
language of the late eighteenth century toward Radcliffe's generation. These
men are indeed the "monstrous and phantastic" parental images of
which Melanie Klein speaks (250), but in Radcliffe they are not merely
outgrowths of the inner aggressive impulses to which Klein attributes them;
they correspond to the actual forces that shaped the lives of women and sought
to confine them to a state of perpetual adolescence. The Gothic thus embodies
the chronic paranoia imposed upon women, easy to ridicule or disregard, as the
high culture of the period did only too readily, but representing a genuine
persecution nonetheless.
Radcliffe's novels thereby reproduce the kind
of persecution often seen in modern clinical reports of hallucinations,
especially those of children (Cain 205, Pilowsky 10). At the same time, her
heroine's stories invariably replicate the precipitants for hallucinations ‑‑
being orphaned, isolated, and set adrift in conditions of sensory deprivation
(imprisoned in a castle or a convent); in addition, the novels follow a wish‑fulfillment
pattern, repeated across all the novels, of ultimate rescue by a hero of
similar adolescent attributes, following successive failures at deliverance. As
the problems faced by women outside the novel are insoluble, neither is
development possible for the fictional heroines; they have virtually nothing to
learn that would be of use, and they contribute nothing to the society to which
they supposedly return after their persecutions cease (and it should be noted
that the social structures that facilitated their persecutions remain intact,
whether class, religion, or gender). Protagonists such as Ellena and Vivaldi
are thus given only the most elementary and contingent of concerns, arising
from their love and the various predicaments that follow from it. This is in
striking contrast to a Montoni or Schedoni, whose concerns relate to a complex
social system of rewards, privileges, and duties. While their concerns are
ended only by their deaths, the concerns of Ellena and Vivaldi, by contrast,
end with marriage. Hence, the aptness of the refrain that sounds through the
last chapter of The Italian, "O! giorno felice!" signifying the story's end. With their
elementary problems resolved, Ellena and Vivaldi's story has nothing to sustain
it beyond a single day. This final freeze frame betrays the stasis in which the
women Radcliffe portrays are trapped. Another century must elapse before such
Gothic congealment would begin to loosen its regressive grip.
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Endnotes
1. Miller lists the number of publications
devoted to the "character, duties and education of women" in Britain:
in the decade beginning 1760 there were 16, in 1770, 23; 1780,25: 1790, 41;
1800, 35; 1810,13 (492‑98).
2. Someone faints on average after every 11
pages in Athlin (converting the page
sizes of the Arno reprint to those of the Oxford editions), 18 pages in Sicilian, 40 pages in Forest, 48 pages in Udolpho, and 52 pages in The
Italian.
3. Anne Mellor's recent
discussion of the sublime in Udolpho touches
on this question: "Radcliffe's point is clear: the deepest terror aroused
by the masculine sublime originates in the exercise of patriarchal authority
within the home" (93).
4. Punter refers to our pleasure in
"being able to peer backwards through our own personal history, because
all psychotic states are simply perpetuations of landscapes which we have all
inhabited at some stage in our early infancy" (8).
5. Even Radcliffe's preoccupation with the
incarceration of her heroines seems less a mere fantasy in light of how often
wives were forcibly and legally confined by their husbands (Stone, Road 164‑69).
6. Perhaps the most absurd examples are from Forest, where the fleeing La Mottes and
Adeline end up at the Abbey of St. Clair, which just happens to be owned by
Adeline's uncle, and when Peter and Adeline flee to his village in the Savoy,
Adeline just happens to end up living with La Luc, the father of her lover
Theodore; but all the novels depend in some degree on such coincidences.