The Mysteries of Udolpho (3 page)

In any case, for many readers, Radcliffe's hints of the supernatural could not be entirely subordinated to her apparent didactic framework. This is evident in Talfourd's comment that ‘even when she has dissolved mystery after mystery, and abjured spell after spell, the impression survives'.
³⁰
After all the rational explanations (of which he, too, was critical), we are still left with the uncanny, the supposed workings of Providence. For example, we can point to the respective presentiments of St Aubert and Emily early in the novel which are in some way confirmed by subsequent happenings, or the strange conjunctions of events such as the conveying of the dying St Aubert to the woods near Chateau-le-Blanc, the residence of the deceased Marchioness, and later, of the return of the shipwrecked Emily to that same place after her escape from Udolpho. We may even feel that Emily's illusory fears have not been altogether disproportionate to the chaotic violence and vestigial practices of tyranny and ‘monkish superstition' which she has suffered at Udolpho.

But there is more than this. Despite the repeated warnings about the excesses of sensibility, our confidence in Emily's powers of perception and intensities of imagination is continually wooed. From early in the first chapter, a ‘good' expansion or continuation of the finite world is seen in Emily's poetic responses to the landscape. Consider the following passage which occurs in the first chapter of Volume I:

she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain's tremendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the G
OD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH
. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then the gloom of the woods…

On the one hand, as we have seen, it is but a small step from such suggestive images to hidden presences and hauntings, the human source of which is eventually explained. On the other, such scenes themselves romantically endure, peopled not by spirits but by phantasms of memory, projections of the mind set in motion by nostalgia and yearning for those who are loved but now absent:

Drying her tears, she looked, once more, upon the landscape, which had excited them, and perceived, that she was passing the very bank where she had taken leave of
Valancourt, on the morning of her departure from Tholouse, and she now saw him, through her returning tears, such as he had appeared, when she looked from the carriage to give him a last adieu – saw him leaning mournfully against the high trees, and remembered the fixed look of mingled tenderness and anguish, with which he had then regarded her. (Vol. IV, Ch. X)

At various points Emily sees again in her mind's eye Valancourt or her dead parents in their ‘favourite haunts' as they were wont to be. Even Montoni, ‘such as she had seen him in his days of triumph, bold, spirited and commanding', rises to her ‘fancy'. Such visions are glossed by Radcliffe's epigraph to Chapter X of Volume IV, taken from Samuel Rogers's popular piece of verse
The Pleasures of Memory
, published in 1792:

Lull'd in the countless chambers of the brain,

Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain:

Awake but one, and lo! what myriads rise!

Each stamps its image as the other flies!

(i. 169–73)

The dejected Valancourt, too, ‘haunts' La Vallée, ‘haunted' by visions of Emily. Near the end of
Udolpho
, however, the projected memories themselves become the agents in Radcliffe's sentences. When Emily decides to reside at her childhood home, La Vallée, it is because ‘its pleasant scenes and the tender remembrances that haunted them had claims upon her heart'. There, too, as she enters with Valancourt, ‘the pleasant shades welcomed them with a thousand tender and affecting remembrances'. In such metaphoric use of the supernatural, the distinction between mind and matter, subject and object, breaks down. Terry Castle, drawing attention to Radcliffe's ‘persistently spectralized language', argues that ‘the supernatural is not so much explained in
Udolpho
as it is displaced… the supposedly ordinary secular world is metaphorically suffused with a new spiritual aura'.
³¹

POETRY AND SENSIBILITY IN
UDOLPHO

Castle goes on to link this feature of Radcliffe's style to repressive emotional attitudes towards death and desire, perceiving it as an aspect of a shift in consciousness in the late eighteenth century. However, before we reach for Freud's
Mourning and Melancholia
, it is worth pointing out that melancholy, reverie, nature and the departed are recurrent themes or motifs in much earlier eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry'. They can be found in Edward
Young's
Night Thoughts
(1742–5), Thomas Warton's
On the Pleasures of Melancholy
(1747) and Gray's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
(1750), as well as the work of the ‘pre-Romantics', William Collins, James Thomson, and James Beattie. All of these poets deal in shadows and obscurity. In, for instance, ‘Ode: “Tell me, thou soul of her I love”' by James Thomson (1700–1748), one of Radcliffe's favourite poets, the soul of the beloved is addressed thus:

Oh! if thou hoverest round my walk,

While, under every well-known tree,

I to thy fancied shadow talk,

And every tear is full of thee –

(ll. 9–12)

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 G
OD 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-Reformation 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.