The Mysteries of Udolpho Read Free

Walter Scott before him, Talfourd considered Radcliffe ‘the inventor of a new style of romance’. It was, he claimed, ‘equally distinct from the old tales of chivalry and magic, and from modern representations of credible incidents and living manners. Her works partially exhibit the charms of each species of composition; interweaving the miraculous with the probable, and breathing of tenderness and beauty peculiarly her own.’ 12
    RADCLIFFE’S USE OF HISTORY AND
THE SUPERNATURAL
    Unlike Walpole, Radcliffe in
Udolpho
does not admit the frankly supernatural or marvellous. Nor does she take up the possibility, suggested by Reeve, of situating her fiction in a Gothic world of folk superstition in which belief in the supernatural is universally accepted. She chooses instead the late sixteenth century, which, in popular historical understanding, was considered the transitional period between the Gothic era and the modern – the ‘Gothic cusp’ as Robert Miles has aptly termed it. 13 Consequently Radcliffe can people her romance with two sorts of characters: those whose attitudes and practices are those of the old feudal order of tyranny, Machiavellian intrigue and popish superstition (Montoni, Madame Montoni, Laurentini di Udolpho), and those who embody the new order of liberty and enlightenment, anachronistically having the fashionable sensibility, manners, and tastes of eighteenth-century England (Monsieur St Aubert, Count de Villefort, Valancourt, Emily, Blanche, Henri). So, while the convent of St Clair with its gloomy cloisters and the castle of Udolpho with its cruel torments and macabre relic are both Gothic or medieval to the core, elsewhere in the novel anachronism is frequently in evidence. St Aubert’s ‘botanizing’ at his chateau and his tastefor the sublime and picturesque, his dispute with his brother-in-law, Monsieur Quesnel, about the re-landscaping of his boyhood home, Emily’s creative sensibility and accomplishments, Montoni’s conversing with ladies about ‘the French opera’, and Emily’s being offered coffee by La Voisin at his cottage and ‘coffee and ice’ and ‘collations of fruits and ice’ in glittering Venice – these are all obviously characteristic of Radcliffe’s own century. What is more, such anachronism is not to be disparaged. This is anachronism with a purpose.
    Robert Mighall, discussing the motivations and development of Gothic fiction, has argued convincingly that, from its inception, ‘the idea of Gothic carries a (pseudo-) historical inflection, and testifies to one culture’s view about its perceived cultural antithesis’. He takes up Chris Baldick’s important reminder that Radcliffe’s romances derive their ‘Gothicity’ primarily from the fact that the main events occur in Catholic countries. 14 Although the word ‘Gothic’ was originally associated with the barbarism with which the ancient northern Germanic tribes, the Goths, had sacked Rome, in the hands of Radcliffe it becomes synonymous with the Latin South, a region still considered to harbour despotic power and Catholic superstition even in 1824, when Sir Walter Scott remarked on it. 15 Only from an enlightened, modern perspective could such despotism and irrationality take on their full meaning and significance as barbarous cultural adversary. As Mighall puts it,
    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,