The Mysteries of Udolpho (5 page)

21
. James Stevens Curl,
A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the Buildings. Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western European Tradition
(London: Constable, 1980), p. 136. John Evelyn's father-in-law had been disgusted by ‘the novel Costome of burying every body within the body of the
Church
& chancel, as a favour heretofore granted onely to Martyrs, & greate
Princes
, this excesse of making
Churches Charnel-houses
being of ill & irreverent example, & prejudicial to the health of the living: besides the continual disturbance of the Pavement, & seates, the ground sinking as the Carcases consume, & severall other undecencies' (entry for 24 February 1683, in
The Diary of John Evelyn
, ed. E. S. de Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 737).

22
. No action regarding this was taken until after the publication of George Alfred Walker's
Gatherings from Grave-yards, Particularly those of London, with a Concise History of Modes of Interment among Different Nations, from the Earliest Periods; and a Detail of Dangerous and Fatal Results Produced by the Unwise and Revolting Custom of Inhuming the Dead in the Midst of the Living
(1839; reprint edn New York: Arno Press, 1977). This work exposed the scandals of the Enon and Elim Chapels, which had been established in London in the 1820s. Walker (p. 154) is quoted in Hugh Meller,
London Cemeteries
(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 9. See also James Stevens Curl,
A Celebration of Death
, pp. 285–6. I am indebted to Bob Davenport for these three references, as well as for those from
The Diary of John Evelyn
cited in note 21 and Julian Litten's
The English Way of Death
cited in note 23.

23
. See Julian Litten,
The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450
(London: Robert Hale, 1991), p. 221. On the other hand many English, irrespective of social class, seem to have preferred to be buried in churchyards. Indeed, the serenity of the English rural churchyard was romanticized in Thomas Gray's immensely popular
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
of 1750. See Roger Lonsdale, ed.,
The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith
(London and Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41. Gray contrasts the simplicity of the grave sited ‘beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade' with the pomp and grandeur of ‘the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault' of the high-ranking or wealthy.

24
. Matthew Lewis,
The Monk
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). On p. 388 Lewis has his virtuous heroine ‘surrounded by mouldering Corses, breathing the pestilential air of corruption'. Earlier, on pp. 368–9, other characters have had to hurry through ‘a thick and pestilential fog' in vaults under his monastery of St Clare. In contrast, Radcliffe alludes to this reality of contemporary burial places only under the cover of one of her Miltonic epigraphs (see Vol. III, Ch. III):

Such are those thick and gloomy shadows damp,

Oft seen in charnel-vaults and sepulchres,

Lingering, and sitting, by a new-made grave.

(
Comus
, ll. 470–72)

In Chapter V, however, the ‘horrible' scene in the chapel of Udolpho is lit by ‘gleams, thrown between the arches of the vaults, where, here and there, the broken ground marked the spots in which other bodies had been recently interred'.

25
. See Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1757), ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958); William Gilpin,
Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty
, dated 1782 but published in 1783 (facsimile edn Richmond Surrey: Richmond Publishing, 1973); his
Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England: Particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cumberland, and Westmorland
(1786), and his
Remarks on Forest Scenery
(1791). See also Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld's essay ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror' in
Miscellaneous Pieces
, which she produced with her husband, John Aikin (3rd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1792), pp. 119–27. For Radcliffe's use of Barbauld's ideas, see note 4 to Vol. II, Ch. VI, of
Udolpho
.

26
. Here he stated his ‘preference for the more simple mode, of boldly avowing supernatural machinery'. See Ann Radcliffe,
The Novels Complete in One Volume
, p. xxv.

27
. Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
(London: Source Book Press, 1972), p. 79.

28
. Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Enquiry
, pp. 110–11.

29
. Robert Miles,
The Great Enchantress
, pp. 132–3.

30
. Thomas Noon Talfourd, ‘Memoir', pp. 116–17.

31
. Terry Castle, ‘The Spectralization of the Other in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
' in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, eds.,
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature
(New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 231–53.

32
. My translation. See Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg, 1772–1807),
Heinrich von Ofterdingen
, with
Hymnen an die Nacht
(Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1964), p. 124. Heinrich, a young artist in medieval Germany, tells his beloved, Mathilde, ‘Ja, Mathilde, die höhere Welt ist uns näher, als wir gewöhnlich denken. Schon hier leben wir in ihr, und wir erblicken sie auf das innigste mit der irdischen Natur verwebt.' Novalis wrote his novel in response to Goethe's
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrejahre
(
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
) (1795–6), which he considered to have ruined ‘the poetry of nature' and forgotten ‘the miraculous', ‘nature and mysticism'. Selections from his notebook entries on this are cited in John Neubauer,
Novalis
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), p. 127.

33
. In his
Essay on Original Genius
(1767; reprint edn New York: Garland, 1970), pp. 170–71, William Duff described this capacity as the emotional speed with which the impassioned heart could externalize its effusions in language.

34
. [Thomas James Mathias,]
The Pursuits of Literature, or What You Will: A Satirical Poem in Dialogue
. Part the First (London: T. Beckett, 1797), p. 14. As the anonymous author's satire pilloried other female authors for what he saw as their political and literary failings, his praise was considered high indeed.

35
. I translate Ariosto's archaic Italian literally as ‘the nursed-at-the-sacred-cave Damsel Trivulzia'. In Ariosto it is ‘e la notrita/Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco', but ‘notrita' and ‘nudrita' seem to be ancient variants. Rictor Norton (
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 133) glosses ‘Trivulzia' with an annotation from John Hoole's translation of
Orlando Furioso
(London: Otridge & Son, 1783; Vol. 5, pp. 259–60):

Trivulzia, a virgin of Milan, who at fourteen years of age gave surprising marks of genius; she was learned in the Latin and Greek languages, and from her excellence in poetry is said to have been bred in the cave of Apollo, where the Sybils delivered their oracles in verse.

36
. Walter Scott, ‘Prefatory Memoir', p. iv.

37
. See note 25.

38
. Green comments, ‘Read the first volume of Mrs Piozzi's Travels in Italy. Tolerably amusing, but for a pert flippancy, and ostentation of learning. Mrs Radcliffe has taken from this work her vivid description of Venice, and of the Brenta, but oh! how improved in the transcript',
Gentleman's Magazine
, New Series, 1 (January 1834), p. 10; quoted in Rictor Norton,
Mistress of Udolpho
, p. 75.

39
. See
Childe Harold
, IV.xviii.

40
. Ann Radcliffe,
A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return down the Rhine: To Which are Added Observations during a Tour to the Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland
(London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1795), p. 109. Radcliffe makes this comment apropos the ‘severe rules' of the convent of the Order of Clarisse in Cologne, which forbade its members to see even their parents, allowing conversation with them only on rare occasions, and then from behind a curtain and in the presence of the abbess. Radcliffe continues (pp. 109–10), ‘The poor nuns, thus nearly entombed during their lives, are, after their death, tied upon a board, in the clothes they die in, and with only their veils thrown over the face, are buried in the garden of the convent.' In Bonn (pp. 125–6) she is critical of ‘relics… pretending to a connection with some parts of Christian history, which it is shocking to see introduced to consideration by any means so trivial and liable to ridicule'.

41
. See Robert Mighall,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction
, p. xviii; Chris Baldick, ed.,
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
, pp. xiii–xiv.

42
. Rictor Norton,
Mistress of Udolpho
, pp. 66–70.

43
. See Susan Moller Okin, ‘Patriarchy and Married Women's Property in England: Questions on Some Current Views',
Eighteenth-Century Studies
, Vol. 17, No. 2 (winter 1983/4), pp. 121–39.

44
. This can be seen from the following comment from Sir William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765):

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and
cover
, she performs everything.

Quoted by E. J. Clery in her essay ‘The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s' in Philip Martin and Robin Jarvis, eds.,
Reviewing Romanticism
(London: Macmillan, 1992),

p. 78. As Clery goes on to comment, ‘the doctrine of coverture was one of those ancient feudal relics which were readily integrated within the new structure of capitalism'.

45
. See Jacqueline Howard,
Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 64, 106–144.

46
. English version by J. A. Underwood (London and Boston: Marion Boyars, 1982). In some editions, the novel goes under the title of
The Enchanted
.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Frank, Frederick S.,
Gothic Fiction: A Master List of Twentieth-Century Criticism and Research
(London: Meckler Corporation, 1988)

Rogers, Deborah D.,
Ann Radcliffe: A Bio-Bibliography
(Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1996)

The sickly taper
, a website dedicated to Gothic bibliography, run by Fred Frank, Professor Emeritus of English, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania:
http://www.toolcity.net/~ffrank/Index.html

BIOGRAPHY

Norton, Rictor,
Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe
(London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999)

Talfourd, Thomas Noon, ‘Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs Radcliffe' in
Gaston de Blondeville, or the Court of Henry III Keeping Festival in Ardenne, a Romance
(reprint edn New York: Arno Press, 1972), Vol. I, pp. 2–132

CRITICAL WORKS

Baldick, Chris, ‘Introduction' in Chris Baldick, ed.,
The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. xi–xxiii

Birkhead, Edith,
The Tale of Terror
(London: Constable, 1921)

Butler, Marilyn, ‘The Woman at the Window: Ann Radcliffe in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen' in Janet Todd, ed.,
Gender and Literary Voice
(New York and London: Holmes & Meier Publishers Inc., 1980), pp. 128–48

Castle, Terry, ‘The Spectralization of the Other in
The Mysteries of Udolpho
' in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, eds.,
The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature
(New York and London: Methuen, 1987) pp. 231–53

Clery, E. J., ‘The Politics of the Gothic Heroine in the 1790s' in Philip Martin
and Robin Jarvis, eds.,
Reviewing Romanticism
(London: Macmillan, 1992)

——,
The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

DeLamotte, Eugenia C.,
The Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Ellis, Kate F.,
The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989)

Epstein, Lynne, ‘Mrs Radcliffe's Landscapes: The Influence of Three Landscape Painters on Her Nature Descriptions',
Hartford Studies in Literature
, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1969), pp. 107–20

Fawcett, Mary Laughlin, ‘Udolpho's Primal Mystery',
Studies in English Literature
, Vol. 23 (1983), pp. 481–94

Fleenor, Juliann, ed.,
The Female Gothic
(Montreal and London: Eden Press, 1987)

Haggerty, George E., ‘Fact and Fancy in the Gothic Novel',
Nineteenth Century Fiction
, Vol. 39, No. 4 (March 1985), pp. 379–91

——,
Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form
(University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987)

Howard, Jacqueline,
Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994)

Howells, Coral Ann,
Love, Mystery and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction
(London: Athlone Press, 1978)

Jacobs, Edward, ‘Anonymous Signatures: Circulating Libraries, Conventionality, and the Production of Gothic Romances',
ELH
, Vol. 62, No. 3 (fall 1995), pp. 603–29

Johnson, Claudia,
Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)

Kiely, Robert,
The Romantic Novel in England
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972)

Kliger, Samuel, ‘The “Goths” in England: An Introduction to the Gothic Vogue in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Discussion',
Modern Philology
, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1945), pp. 107–17

Kostelnick, C., ‘From Picturesque View to Picturesque Vision: William Gilpin and Ann Radcliffe',
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature
, Vol. 18, No. 3 (1985), pp. 31–48

Macdonald, D. L., ‘Bathos and Repetition: The Uncanny in Radcliffe',
The Journal of Narrative Technique
, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1989), pp. 197–204

McIntyre, Clara Francis,
Ann Radcliffe in Relation to Her Time
(New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920)

Madoff, Mark, ‘The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry',
Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture
, Vol. 8 (1979), pp. 337-50

Mighall, Robert,
A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)

Milbank, Alison, ‘Introduction' in Ann Radcliffe,
A Sicilian Romance
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)

Miles, Robert,
Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress
(Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

——,
Gothic Writing 1750–1820: A Genealogy
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993)

Murray, Eugene Bernand,
Ann Radcliffe
(New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972)

Napier, Elizabeth,
The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)

Paradise, Nathaniel, ‘Interpolated Poetry, the Novel and Female Accomplishment',
Philological Quarterly
, Vol. 74, No. 1 (1995), pp. 57–76

Poovey, Mary, ‘Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho',
Criticism
, Vol. 21, No. 4 (1979), pp. 307–30

Punter, David,
The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day
(London: Longman, 1980)

Rogers, Deborah D., ed.,
The Critical Response to Ann Radcliffe
(Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1994)

Sage, Victor,
Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition
(Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1988)

Scott, Sir Walter, ‘Prefatory Memoir of the Author' in Ann Radcliffe,
The Novels Complete in One Volume
(facsimile edn Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1974), pp. i–xxxix

Sedgewick, E. K.,
The Coherence of Gothic Conventions
(New York and London: Methuen, 1986)

Smith, Nelson, C., ‘Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe',
Studies in English Literature
, Vol. 13 (1973), pp. 577–90

Tarr, Sister Mary Muriel,
Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820)
(Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1946)

Tompkins, Joyce Marjorie Sanxter,
The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800
(London, Constable, 1932)

——, ‘Raymond De Carbonnières, Grosley and Mrs Radcliffe',
Review of English Studies
, Vol. 5, No. 19 (July 1929), pp. 294–301

Ware, Malcolm,
Sublimity in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe: A Study of the Influence upon her Craft of Edmund Burke's ‘Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful'
(Uppsala: Lindequist, 1963)

Warner, William B., ‘The Elevation of the Novel in England: Hegemony and Literary History',
ELH
, Vol. 59 (1992), pp. 577–96

Watt, James,
Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

RELEVANT JOURNAL

Gothic Studies
, ed. Robert Miles and William Hughes, Manchester University Press