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.

At the same time, working against this critique is a discourse of the sublime which operates as a more or less unproblematic extension of the ‘real’ and which encourages belief in the uncanny workings of the ‘Great Author’ and the perceptional powers and sublime feelings of Emily St Aubert. Despite the strong emphasis on Emily’s need for ‘common sense’ and ‘fortitude’, her ‘romantic passion’ and ‘enthusiasm’ are vindicated in the continual allusions to the richness of her sublime responses to nature and her enlightened, unmediated apprehension of God. Here, Rictor Norton, in his monumental biography of Radcliffe, has intimated that, in her imaginative non-superstitious apprehension of the supernatural, Emily is positioned within the Unitarian Dissenting culture of Radcliffe herself. Norton argues that Radcliffe writes from a position of Unitarian belief in God which, reaching back to Joseph Priestley and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, necessarily entailed a rational sanction for the supernatural.42

Romance we have in plenty. What of realism in Udolpho? In the sixth chapter of Volume IV we come across a self-reflexive passage in which the author/narrator celebrates ‘old’ romance, ‘which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society in a former age’:

The fictions of the Provençal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadours accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident.

Timed, as this is, to correspond with Ludovico’s vigil in and mysterious disappearance from the supposedly haunted chamber at Chateau-le-Blanc, we are prompted to reflect upon the qualities of the ‘new’ romance before us. Earlier, in the tenth chapter of Volume III, there is a satirical quip to Blanche from Mademoiselle Bearn:

Where have you been so long?… I had begun to think some wonderful adventure had befallen you, and that the giant of this enchanted castle, or the ghost, which, no doubt, haunts it, had conveyed you through a trap-door into some subterranean vault, whence you was never to return.’

Here we have an allusion to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, with its melodramatic supernatural machinery. On both occasions it is clear that interwoven with Radcliffe’s romance are strong strands of rationality. But realism is apparent too, as Emily will reside at Chateau-le-Blanc or the convent of St Clair only until her estates are restored to her. Emily’s troubled relationship with her guardian aunt and her struggles with Montoni are realistically presented in the first half of the novel, but at Chateau-le-Blanc economic discussions about the possession of and laws regarding the estates Emily has inherited from her father, and about the fate of the estates of her Aunt Cheron, and of the true owner of Udolpho, contrast markedly with talk of hauntings. Arguably it is in Radcliffe’s treatment of this economic theme – one frequently taken up by feminist critics – that Udolpho’s Gothicity is closest to the real contradictions of life for women in eighteenth-century England.

Radcliffe represents the patriarchal family structure as being a relic of Southern European cultures of an earlier century, while, historically, in the England of her day, the vestigial values of such an arrangement had been, and were still, under attack.43 In the French society of Udolpho we find the historically true situation, especially among the aristocracy, that money and property do not automatically become the possession of a husband when a woman marries. (Indeed, when Emily regains La Vallée she inherits also her father’s maternal estate.) Having usurped Udolpho from its true female owner, Montoni must bully his wife and Emily into signing their estates over to him. This was contrary to the real situation in eighteenth-century England, where the law, which had been very slow to change to protect women in financial matters, would have made his acquisition automatic.44 Thus Emily’s feelings, efforts and statements concerning her financial independence and her various inheritances, which run consistently through Udolpho, and which show her as pragmatic, clear-headed and subversive of this unjust remnant of feudal patriarchy, would have had real-life resonances for her female readers.

Once we move into the area of gender and family relations, however, contexts for reading Udolpho begin to proliferate. Unfortunately, many of these contexts ignore both the role of Radcliffe’s (pseudo-) historical setting and the way in which her novel was positioned in the larger tension-filled discursive environment in which it emerged and was later reproduced.45 Yet it was these very factors which gave her readers the pleasures of recognition and allowed them to think differently of themselves and their own social relations. Modern readings which impose narrowly feminist or psychoanalytic modes of interpretation exclude much of the allusive richness of her work.

RADCLIFFE’S INFLUENCE ON LATER WRITERS

Radcliffe’s influence on later novelists was immeasurable. What critics of her day called her ‘rich vein of invention’, ‘pleasing suspence’ (sic), ‘boldness’ and ‘propriety’ of character, and ‘elegant description and picturesque scenery’ inspired a host of imitators whose Gothic romances dominated circulating libraries for the next decade. While most of these were deemed inferior works which helped bring the genre into disrepute and make it a target for parody, allusions to the novel’s characters and landscapes were to appear well into the nineteenth century in the writing of canonical authors such as Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackeray. Radcliffe’s influence on Sir Walter Scott was greater than he knew or cared to recognize.