The Mysteries of Udolpho Read Free Page A

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 nomention of cadaverous odours in the