The Surprising Mrs Radcliffe: Udolpho's Artful Mysteries
2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09699082.2015.1037982
ISSN1747-5848
Autores Tópico(s)Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies
ResumoAbstractThis essay argues that despite the tendency of modern scholarship to resist the condescension of much of the early criticism of Radcliffe, there is still a lack of appreciation for the surprising complexity of her art. The reception history of the explained supernatural may be taken as a case in point. Sir Walter Scott cited it as an example of what made Radcliffe's model of fiction a dead end in the history of the novel. In particular, he argued that the explanation of the mystery behind Udolpho's black veil was an exercise in fatal bathos. Modern criticism has tended to overlook the alleged deficiencies in Radcliffe's method, rather than defend it. Taking The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) as an example, this essay argues to the contrary that Radcliffe's method of the explained supernatural is at the satisfying core of Radcliffe's complex art. Rather than a cheap “get out of jail” card, the device is artfully managed to build meaning. Radcliffe's novels are minutely structured in a highly sophisticated fashion—one that works by keeping antithetical meanings in solution, creating internal difference where the meanings are. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. Thomas Noon Talfourd, “Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe,” Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III, by Ann Radcliffe, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 1: 3–132; The Annual Biography and Obituary, for the Year 1824, vol. 8 (London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green), 89–105.2. For Radcliffe's connections to Dissenting and Unitarian culture, see Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester UP, 1999). On the other hand, Robert J. Mayhew sees Radcliffe as falling on the latitudinarian side of Anglican orthodoxy in “Latitudinarianism and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 44.3 (2002): 273–301.3. Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (New York: Barnes, 1968), 89–90. For Coleridge on Radcliffe's explained supernatural, see Dale Townshend and Angela Wright, “Gothic and Romantic Engagements,” Ann Radcliffe, Romanticism and the Gothic, ed. Dale Townshend and Angela Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014), 3–32 (8).4. Scott, 117–18.5. Scott, 188.6. William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Oxford UP, 1907), 165.7. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, a romance; interspersed with some pieces of poetry, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 1: 180. Subsequent references are to this edition and given parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.8. Terry Castle, “The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum (London: Methuen, 1987), 237–53.9. I am indebted to Caroline Winter for noting the literalization of Radcliffe's metaphor of throwing over a veil of mystery.10. Syndy M. Conger, “Sensibility Restored: Radcliffe's Answer to Monk Lewis's The Monk,” Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth W. Graham (New York: AMS, 1989), 113–49.11. Reggie Oliver, “The Poisons Affair,” History Today, 51.3 (2001): 28–34 (31).12. I go into this material at greater length in Robert Miles, “Popular Romanticism and the Problem of Belief,” Townshend and Wright, 117–34.13. See Miles, “Popular Romanticism”.14. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), 12.15. Taylor, 38–41.16. Martin Price, “The Sublime Poem: Pictures and Powers,” Yale Review, 58 (1969): 194–213.17. John and Laetitia Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror,” Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, ed. E. J. Clery and Robert Miles (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 127–32 (127–29).18. Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” Clery and Miles, 163–72 (168).19. Isabella van Elferen, Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny (Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2012), 22–23.20. Peggy Kaufman, “Burke, Freud and the Gothic,” Studies in Burke and His Time, 13.3 (1972): 2179–92.21. David Morris, “Gothic Sublimity,” New Literary History, 16.2 (1985): 299–319.22. Lauren Fitzgerald, “Gothic Properties: Radcliffe, Lewis, and the Critics,” Wordsworth Circle, 24.3 (1993): 167–70.23. Claire Kahane, “Gothic Mirrors and Feminine Identity,” Centennial Review, 24.1 (1980): 43–64 (58).24. Steven Behrendt, “Response Essay: Cultural Transitions, Literary Judgments, and the Romantic-Era British Novel,” Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750–1832, ed. Miriam L. Wallace (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 189–205 (201).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRobert MilesRobert Miles is Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Canada. A past president of the International Gothic Association, he is the author of Romantic Misfits (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester University Press, 2002) and Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester University Press, 1995).
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