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 GOD 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.