[In the following essay, London explains how plot structure and characterization uphold moral and social principles in such works as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.]

At the end of Tom Jones Fielding's narrator assures the continued happiness of the eponymous hero by ascribing to him the qualities of “Discretion” and “Prudence.”¹ Discretion and Prudence are called into play here to reinforce the conjunction of the epistemological and ethical with the material reality of the estate Tom Jones has inherited. Only enclosed within the boundaries of this estate can be consciously limit possibility to accord with the desirable consonance of providence and prudence. The boundaries of the estate, in other words, image the reconciliation of self and social wisdom and thus impose an integrity of meaning which conforms to Fielding's preference for the truth of design over the sprawl of undifferentiated experience. That preference for order over anarchy is, of course, common to numerous writers throughout the century. But changing political and cultural realities put increasing pressure on the concept of exclusion, and on its narrative representation, the estate. Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho stands in a particularly interesting relation to the extremes of Fielding's circumspection on the one hand, and the romantic extension of a Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights on the other. Overtly committed to defending a version of the Augustan ideal, her fiction nevertheless reveals itself as a product of historical and literary developments which disallowed that ideal. An analysis of these contrary impulses helps to explain the failure of gothic to reconcile desired permanence with inevitable change.

Tom Jones is itself, as Martin Battestin reminds us, “at once the last and the consummate literary achievement of England's Augustan age.”² Even within Fielding's own corpus, the dissolution of the ideal he charts in Tom Jones is apparent. From its emblematic status as a positive goal in Joseph Andrews, the estate is slightly modified in Tom Jones to comply with the hero's final and deliberate withdrawal from the arena of much of the novel's action, and then more dramatically in Amelia to underline the concluding imposition, rather than discovery, of a measure of satisfactory order. In assuming Squire Western's “Family Seat, and the greater Part of his Estate,” and in yielding to “continual Conversation” with Allworthy and “Union with the lovely and virtuous Sophia” (p. 981), Tom Jones affirms the final meshing of the social and personal meanings of “estate”: worldly success here naturally follows Tom's restoration to his just estate as an Allworthy relative capable of discretion and prudence. Amelia, however, begins to upset the convention of retirement as a resolution of private and public imperatives by making the Booths' final happiness dependent upon a fortuitous acquisition of tainted wealth, wealth which has previously been the source only of corruption. In the novels of sensibility which succeeded Fielding's, this tenuous balance of private and public finally yields to the priority of individual feeling. Instead of boundaries and comprehensive analogic orders we find in such typical narratives as Mackenzie's Man of Feeling (1771) a morass of social inequities and miseries. Given that the narrative is literally self-consuming, it is no longer possible to suggest as Fielding does that the order realized in fiction is metaphysical fact. Instead, the novel obscures analogic relations through a continuous process of displacement and dissolution initiated by the physical artifact of the text: that mouldering manuscript of the ghost's attempt to recapture a past that itself forms a chronicle of deprivation and lost innocence. Accidently rescued from a heap of broken stones—all that remains of Harley's pathetic attempt to recover order through the construction of a miniature estate for Old Edwards—it testifies to the breaking of all ideals. With the integrity of reciprocal class relations fragmented by the power of money, temporal continuity here reduces to Cowper's “clock of history” in “Yardley Oak”:

Change is the diet, on which all subsist
Created changeable, and change at last
Destroys them.(3)

Driven from the contingency of an infected present, the hero of sensibility reverts to an ideal historical construct, fixing meaning in a golden past.

The antithetical structures of Fielding and Mackenzie—Fielding, analogic and relational; Mackenzie, metaphoric and sensible—intriguingly re-surface in the rhetoric of late eighteenth-century conservatives and radicals. The narrative expression of sentimental feeling had, however, undermined its social validity through its association of value with lost time. The radicals, in naming this capacity for sympathetic affinity “reason,” reformulated the golden past by looping it forward to a future period in which a perfect society would ultimately emerge. As Joseph Priestley says in An Essay on First Principles of Government (1768): “whatever was the beginning of this world, the end will be glorious and paradisaical, beyond what our imagination can now conceive.⁴ But as the millenarian strain suggests, the position demanded that the concepts of society and government be evaluatively re-interpreted. As early as 1776 Thomas Paine's Common Sense had inscribed the division: society based on affection, would found the new order of reason and oust government, the perpetrator of distinction and separation.⁵

The stridency of these radical calls for reform provoked an inclusive conservative ideology which answered point for point the arguments of the opposition. Underlying this programmatic complexity, however, was a single informing principle: the notion of property. The primacy of the concept of property in part derived from the conservatives' sceptical reading of human nature. Edmund Burke thus frames his reading of character in terms of an inherent predilection toward formlessness, aesthetically coded in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful as our attraction to sublimity, and politically formulated in Reflections on the Revolution in France as tyranny or its logical opposite, anarchy. Both aesthetic and political interpretations assume that this formlessness follows inevitably from a self-referential mode of perception. What Burke does, in other words, is use the radicals' own identification of reason with individualism as a weapon against their vision of future perfection. Semantically, he reduces their philosophy to the status of romantic metaphor: the emergence of a third term—a supposedly perfect egalitarian future—which to him would necessarily destroy the existing and essential hierarchy that places reason over passion, judgment over intuition, and society over the individual.

His own defense of English constitutional policy turns instead upon a “philosophic analogy”⁶ in which state and estate are seen as reciprocally confirming. Conventionally (as we see in Tom Jones and a host of popular narratives) the individual estate appealed to the civic state for ratification as a system of order. Burke not only retains this analogic defense of private property but further asserts that the state itself rests its claim to authority on the principle of entailed inheritance: “we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives” (p. 31). In his recourse to property as the foundation of the state the notion of temporal continuity plays a key role: “a nation is not an idea only of local extent, and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity, which extends in time as well as in numbers, and in space.”⁷ This extension in time accords with an analogous extension from smaller to greater orders. The perpetuation of property in families, Burke thus maintains, “tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself” (p. 49). In the end, government and society, by virtue of the interdependence of domestic and political, are seen as intimately allied and mutually confirming. Against the radicals' program of a future bliss which rejects history in favor of progress, the conservatives assert the claims of continuity, stability, and permanence.

But property not only sanctions existing social and governmental hierarchies, it also serves to define character. Here again Burke's writings offer a definitive statement of conservative ideology:

The most poor, illiterate and uninformed creatures upon earth are judges of a practical oppression. It is a matter of feeling; and as such persons generally have felt most of it, and are not of an overlively sensibility, they are the best judges of it. But for the real cause or the appropriate remedy, they ought never to be called into council about the one or the other. They ought to be totally shut out; because their reason is weak; because, when once aroused, their passions are ungoverned; because they want information; because the smallness of the property, which individually they possess, renders them less attentive to the measures they adopt in affairs of moment.⁸

The assumption underlying this passage—that property confers character—was widely accepted throughout the century. It forms part of an associative complex of beliefs that worked, as Burke's statement suggests, to ratify the existing order. Briefly stated, property was held to assure the virtues of independence and leisure sufficient to the creation of a moral personality. The patriot citizen expressed these virtues in the political realm through his devotion to the public good. This landed disinterestedness defines itself against the emergent capitalist structure of the monied interest, identified with the instability of moveable goods, the hysteria of investment in a paper economy, and the self-seeking of political faction.⁹

The semantic shift in the meaning of “propriety” further evidences the relation of property to character. The now accepted definition of “conformity with good manners or polite usage” did not in fact appear until the time of Burney's Cecilia (1782); Hobbes, for example, uses “propriety” and “property” as equivalent terms in Leviathan (1651). Where a distinction is made, propriety simply refers to appropriateness to circumstances. Burke's assumption in the passage quoted above is that this perception of appropriateness depends on the possession of judgment, a quality he explicitly denies the unenfranchised. Lacking property, the lower classes necessarily lack propriety. For the good of society they must therefore unthinkingly respect tradition, accept inequality as their lot, and as creatures governed by feeling expect to “be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection” (p. 57). For Burke, of course, such subjugation had an intrinsic social value since it “kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom.” His famous encomium on the “age of chivalry” thus assumes that the ideal order prompts an atavistic attachment to what he terms a “sensibility of principle,” a sensibility inherent in an upper class and consolidated by a static concept of the self. The ruling class, rendered inviolate by its adherence to this “chastity of honour,” thus elicits from its inferiors the constant of “dignified obedience” (p. 73). These abstract virtues, rooted in the solidity of property and its concomitant propriety, formerly secured an order which was self-sustaining and of comprehensive utility. Burke characteristically evokes the dissolution of chivalry through images which sink this high abstraction to a sensory morass. Speaking of “our civil troubles in England” he lashes out at those “men who helped to subvert that throne to which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor”:

Confounded by the complication of distempered passions, their reason is disturbed; their views become vast and perplexed; to others inexplicable; to themselves uncertain. They find, on all sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed order of things. But in the fog and haze of confusion all is enlarged, and appears without any limit.

(p. 45)

The leveling fog of uncertainty, cutting across class boundaries, has its roots in the glorification of subjectivity. The radicals' assumption of a universal capacity for thought would thus in practice inevitably be expressed as the collective anarchy of irresponsible individuals acting out momentary feelings.

Radcliffe's conservatism is clearly similar in order and intensity to Burke's, relating property to propriety in its ideological formulations and “sensibility of principle” to an entrenched class structure in its assumptions about fictional character. But her attempt to inscribe these values of temporal continuity and permanence in narrative form posed special problems. Neither Fielding nor Mackenzie could serve here as adequate models since both located their fictions within frames of reference inimical to the conservative endorsement of the status quo. Mackenzie's naive historicism, dismissive of the present, disallowed the role of prescription, while his advocacy of unmediated feeling denied the authority of reason. Conversely, while Fielding's thought corresponded to Burkean distinction, his confident allusions to Providence as the avatar of meaning seemed an outmoded Augustanism. In order to satisfy the demands of fictional contingency without contravening doctrinal permanence Radcliffe therefore modifies Fielding's referential order. Instead of appealing to Providence to dissolve what had appeared irreconcilable conflict, she encloses within her fiction both the exemplars of value and their precisely matched antagonists. At the most basic level, then, the text witnesses a struggle for supremacy between inverted orders, each carrying a specific burden of ideological intent. The structure of the novel—harmony disrupted and then restored—suggests Radcliffe's unequivocal commitment to the triumph of conservative principles. But, as we shall see, at certain key moments in the text, specifically in the episodes concerning Montoni, the evils of individual wilfulness acquire a power which radically threatens those principles.

The grounds of conflict emerge early in the novel through the use of property as an evaluative gauge of male character. In his attachment to La Valée, St. Aubert realizes the intimate correspondence between moral worth and respect for tradition and the sanctity of place. His brother-in-law, M. Quesnel, introduced in the first chapter as an antithetical type to St. Aubert, is in perpetual transit between country and city; “unplaced,” he typifies the commercially orientated and therefore ethically bankrupt. Radcliffe enforces the distinction between the two through pointed contrasts encompassing virtually every aspect of their lives. Each is systematically called to the bar and qualitatively compared on the grounds of marriage, taste, judgment and intelligence; M. Quesnel is invariably found to be the crass inferior. Propriety, the contrast finally suggests, is sustained through active commitment to property; simple possession of estates indicates nothing.¹⁰ St. Aubert's retrospective glance at his own past, suggests that the source of his mature relation to property lies in a youthful enthusiasm for nature. The key to the distinction between the two men and to the comprehensive values accorded to each emerges again in the reflection prompted by the “romantic picture of felicity” (p. 49) that Emily and her lover Valancourt present to the father:

The world … ridicules a passion which it seldom feels; its scenes, and its interests, distract the mind, deprave the taste, corrupt the heart, and love cannot exist in a heart that has lost the meek dignity of innocence. Virtue and taste are nearly the same, for virtue is little more than active taste, and the most delicate affections of each combine in real love. How then are we to look for love in great cities, where selfishness, dissipation, and insincerity supply the place of tenderness, simplicity and truth?

(pp. 49-50)

This near identification of virtue and taste, conventional in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, echoes Burke's “Introduction to Taste” in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful:

On the whole it appears to me, that what is called Taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and actions.¹¹

The hierarchy of faculties here, advancing from sense, to imagination, to reason, complements Radcliffe's characterization of Valancourt and his development into a fit partner for Emily St. Aubert. Valancourt's enthusiastic response to natural beauty allies him with the youthful St. Aubert and indicates his innate propensity to virtue. But, in accordance with the terms of Burke's model, this virtue must be strengthened by the conditioning of imagination “within the province of the judgment, which is improved by attention and the habit of reasoning” (Philosophical Enquiry, p. 29). When virtue and taste finally merge with judgment, Valancourt's singular emoting on the beauties of nature will be converted into a quality which signals his participation in an inclusive social ideal. That quality—propriety—is achieved when Valancourt moves from his initial aesthetic appreciation of landscape to a tenurial relation with the estate, the socialized image of landscape.

By contrast, the propriety of female description demands that the principles of real property be rendered psychologically. In counselling his daughter St. Aubert therefore transcribes his code of action into a code of behavior which advocates internalized boundaries: “self-command,” he asserts is necessary, since it “limits the indulgences which are termed virtuous, yet which, extended beyond a certain boundary, are vicious, for their consequence is evil” (p. 20). Eagerly embracing this sentiment, Emily can declaim after the loss of their estates the substantial virtue of propriety over property: “poverty cannot deprive us of intellectual delights. It cannot deprive you of the comfort of affording me examples of fortitude and benevolence; nor me of the delight of consoling a beloved parent. It cannot deaden our taste for the grand, and the beautiful. … We retain, then, the sublime luxuries of nature, and lose only the frivolous ones of art” (p. 60). But as the succeeding adventures abundantly prove, alienated propriety offers no defense against acquisitive evil. Female integrity, Radcliffe seems to suggest, depends upon the interdependence of property and propriety, a necessary relation which she emphasizes by invoking a further distinction between imagination and reason. Her argument against imagination proceeds along two fronts: it is a faculty not subject to any external check, and it is not rooted in any concrete form of differentiation, as opposed to reason whose operations replicate those of real property, i.e., defining, delimiting, ordering. Reason and imagination are, in other words, key terms in a political dialectic which conservative ideologists figured as an endless struggle between rational hierarchy and the natural (or innate) tendency of the human mind to anarchy. Radcliffe's adaptation of these terms can be seen in her treatment of propriety which, when divorced from property, has qualities that skirt dangerously close to the imagination's sanction of individual will. Only when it is buttressed by truly substantial property and reason, does propriety avoid this radical taint.

The enclosed world of La Vallée initially serves as a material figure of such rational virtue, unobtrusively accommodating domestic and social in a whole which is at once functional and aesthetic. To convey this contextual order, Radcliffe employs the metonymic “eye” favored by early eighteenth-century landscape poets. From the chateau, “the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose” (p. 1); “from the windows the eye caught, beneath the spreading branches, the gay and luxuriant landscape stretching to the west” (p. 3); “upon the little lawn that surrounded the house, the eye was led between groves of almond, palm-trees, flowering-ash, and myrtle, to the distant landscape” (p. 3). The chateau, symbol of domesticity, is the first vantage from which we survey the surroundings. In what had become a conventional trope of the contemporary novel,¹² we are then moved out of the house into the landscape:

Above the woods, that screened this glen, rose the lofty summits of the Pyrenées, which often burst boldly on the eye through the glades below. … Emerging from the deep recesses of the woods, the glade opened to the distant landscape, where the rich pastures and vine-covered slopes of Gascony gradually declined to the plains; and there; on the winding shores of the Garonne, groves, and hamlets, and villas—their outlines softened by distance, melted from the eye into one rich harmonious tint.

(pp. 6-7)

Here extended vision is not simply an aesthetic ideal, but a functional one, as the prospective view incorporates evidence of husbandry: rich pastures, vine-covered slopes, valleys and plains. The nexus in this progression from domestic to agricultural is the peasant, described in terms which mirror the universal order which the estate symbolizes:

The peasants of this gay climate were often seen on an evening, when the day's labour was done, dancing in groups on the margin of the river. Their sprightly melodies, debonnaire steps, the fanciful figure of their dances … gave a character to the scene entirely French.

(pp. 3-4)

The representation of communal values in the figure of the dance completes the image of the estate as a contained world animated by the interplay of nature and art. But this description occurs, of course, at the beginning rather than the end of the novel and consequently helps differentiate the relative commitment of father and daughter. To St. Aubert, schooled in the ways of the world, La Vallée is an achieved ideal; to Emily, it simply marks the limits of her experience. As with each of Radcliffe's heroines, then, her innocence must be tested; she must be brought to a full and conscious recognition of the meaning of property.

Exiled from La Vallée, Emily thus finds the boundaries between self and other constantly shifting, becoming indistinct, and occasionally, as in her first glimpse of Udolpho, suffering complete obliteration: “Silent, lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign” (p. 227). The castle is here personified as dark and monstrous in proportion to Emily's own less sure grasp of her selfhood. During her captivity in Udolpho the sense of impending fatality again emerges through the projection of her exacerbated sensibility on to the surroundings. But the environs do not threaten through any intrinsic quality; instead they reflect her failure to contain her terror and distinguish fact from fantasy. The enemy, in other words, lies within and later is implicitly identified as the imagination. We are initially told that “hers was a silent anguish, weeping, yet enduring; not the wild energy of passion, inflaming imagination, bearing down the barriers of reason and living in a world of its own” (p. 329). Reason here serves as a desirable barrier or medial point between the world outside and self-consumption—like the walls of the estate it marks out proper limitations which ensure a balance between participation and detachment. Yet shortly after she succumbs to imagination as a “superstitious dread stole over her” (p. 330). Radcliffe immediately proffers extenuating conditions: “human reason cannot establish her laws on subjects, lost in the obscurity of imagination, any more than the eye can ascertain the form of objects, that only glimmer through the dimness of night” (p. 330). The choice of physiological analogy suggests not only that this ascendancy of imagination is ‘natural’ but also that its formlessness ultimately defeats reason. In a later reversion to the dark and obscure power of imagination, spatial metaphors again predominate: “She blamed herself for suffering her romantic imagination to carry her so far beyond the bounds of probability, and determined to endeavour to check its rapid flights, lest they should sometimes extend into madness” (p. 342). Both passages play against the model of perception figured as ideal in the novel's opening chapter. Imagination is limitless extension, unbounded by (natural) horizon or (mental) “barriers” of rationality.

In the conservative, comic novel of the eighteenth century imagination and feeling are also the special province of the female—Lydia Melford in Smollett's Humphry Clinker is just one among many heroines whose skittish or susceptible natures are smoothed into complacency by marriage with a rational partner. Emily St. Aubert's “romantic imagination” offers a variation on this theme of an inherent and dangerous female sensibility which can be made subservient to the higher principle of reason only through the active influence of the male. At Udolpho she has been removed by death from her father, whose monitory presence at the beginning of the novel encouraged self-command, and by design from Valancourt to whom she will finally be restored. Her lapses into singular terror while at Udolpho, then, are a function of sex conspiring with circumstance and do not disturb Radcliffe's central contention that the interrelation of property and propriety, vested in the male, ensures social stability.

The correlative to the association of female with imagination is, of course, male with reason and, again, the eighteenth-century novel offers a wealth of characters who prosper by adhering to this second norm and a number who are damned for their deviation from it. Among the latter are Lovelace in Richardson's Clarissa and Booth, before his eleventh-hour conversion, in Amelia. Both of these characters elect to deny their proper role as agents of reason and instead adhere to alternated codes, Lovelace to that of the rake, and Booth to that of the freethinker. Montoni seems at first to be another of this type, but in his case special conditions prevail which make him not only an exceptional eighteenth-century villain but also a precursor of the romantic hero. For Montoni does not deny right reason in favor of an alternate code of belief or action which the author can then reveal to be fallacious, as rakishness is in Clarissa or free-thinking is in Amelia. Instead, his denial is a pure expression of will which, functioning as an active and autonomous force, has the capacity to subvert the lynchpin of Radcliffe's conservatism, the prescriptive authority of reason. When Emily asks Montoni, “by what right he exerted this unlimited authority over her?” his answer—“By what right … by the right of my will” (p. 216)—at once asserts his ascendancy and mocks the terms of her question. Recognizing no boundaries, Montoni's power is indeed unlimited; “right” and “just authority” have at a stroke been rendered meaningless. His henchman Bertrand offers a further instructive parable of the rules governing this radical voluntarism:

if a fellow has got possession of property, which I think ought to be mine, why I may wait, till I starve, perhaps, before the law will give it me, and then, after all, the judge may say—the estate is his. What is to be done then?—Why the case is plain enough, I must take it at last.

(p. 404)

Tyrannical will, unchecked by self-regulation, possesses a supreme authority which human laws cannot begin to limit: neither propriety nor property can escape its depredations. This, it seems, is the lesson Emily is in the process of learning at Udolpho when, after her aunt's death, she and Montoni struggle over the lands left to her by Mme Cheron.

The use of contested property as the grounds of conflict is ironically apposite. The novel has to this point forwarded property and propriety as terms which have both a reciprocal integrity and a capacity to ensure order. The initial stages of the contest seem to vindicate Emily's faith in this construct of values, as the higher claim of her personal and social right to the estate seems to quell Montoni's naked assertation of power. His declaration that “his will was justice and … she should find it law” (p. 380) is thus countered with “mild dignity” by her assertation “that the strength of my mind is equal to the justice of my cause. … I can endure with fortitude, when it is in the resistance of oppression” (p. 381). While Montoni denies the conceptual validity of “justice” and “law,” Emily restores to these words an objective significance: they are the social imperatives which guarantee her right to her property and bolster the “strength of mind” and “fortitude” necessary to assert that right. She, in effect, acts as a true Lockean, assuming that society originates in, and is sustained by, a contract to protect property. Montoni, however, not only nullifies the contract by his refusal to accede to the terms of civility, he also denies the elementary relation between principle and possession by reducing female propriety to the conditions of real property. Recognizing that “strength of mind” and “fortitude” are, for the female character, inextricably bound to chastity of person, he threatens possession of her body as a means of securing possession of her lands. Accosted by one of his henchmen, Emily realizes

that Montoni had already commenced his scheme of vengeance, by withdrawing from her his protection, and she repented of the rashness, that had made her brave the power of such a man. To retain the estates seemed to be now utterly impossible, and to preserve her life, perhaps her honour, she resolved, if she should escape the horrors of this night, to give up all claims to the estates, on the morrow, provided Montoni would suffer her to depart from Udolpho.

(p. 385)

That it is in fact her honor for which she fears becomes clear when the relinquishing of the titles is deferred to allow for yet another attempt on her virtue. Following Montoni's “open declaration” (p. 346) that his protection and her release from Udolpho are conditional on her giving up the estates, she signs the papers only to discover that she has been deceived in the promise of freedom:

Montoni smiled. “It was necessary to deceive you,” said he—“there was no other way of making you act reasonably; you shall go, but it must not be at present. I must first secure these estates by possession: when that is done, you may return to France if you will.”

The deliberate villainy, with which he had violated the solemn engagement he had just entered into, shocked Emily as much, as the certainty, that she had made a fruitless sacrifice, and must still remain his prisoner.

(p. 436)

That Montoni must “secure these estates by possession” is an ironic twist of the knife that has already pinioned his victim; Emily signs the papers to avoid “tenancy” of her person only to discover that tenancy of her lands sanctions Montoni's claim to them. The language of “violation” and “sacrifice” further suggests the degree to which female self and real property have been made subject to the same territorial law. Emily's faith in a social contract that protects both her propriety and her property now seems credulous, for Montoni has triumphed by manipulating the very conventions that she assumed safeguarded her. This becomes clearer when one examines the paradoxical similarities between Montoni's course of action and Burke's political philosophy. In his recourse to property as the basis of the state. Burke asserted prescription as the “first principle of law and natural justice.” That same law of prescription presumably vindicates Montoni's claim, since the coercive measures taken to secure Emily's signature are nowhere mentioned as debarring him from her estate.

Radcliffe, of course, does not pursue these implications; in fact, she obscures them. Montoni's ignominous death off-stage, while the reader's attention is directed toward the final episodes of Emily's history, is part of a process by which the author attempts to deflate his villainous power and to suggest that he has been defeated, however indirectly, by the forces of passive virtue. This diminishment of Montoni is also accomplished by the counterpointing of his ascendancy against alternate configurations which work finally to suggest that the novel's closing restoration of order follows a natural, rather than fictively contrived, pattern. One of these alternate relationships involves an implicit comparison both of the female characters who own land—Emily, Mme Cheron, Laurentini—and of their abilities to enjoy that possession, abilities gauged by the test of decorum. Having infringed the code of female behavior through the prior sin of sexual indiscretion, Mme Cheron loses her life to her male equivalent in lawlessness, Montoni. Laurentini's narrative extends the catalogue of vice by linking vengeful murder to licentiousness. But it is not simply their violent ends which mark their distinction from Emily; more significant is the fact that although they retain a technical right to their property, their impropriety determines that they are denied both its privileges and those of marriage. Emily's fortunate retention of propriety, by contrast, leads directly to that reward for female innocence, the recovery of the estate in the form of marriage. With Valancourt's restoration to virtue—he has, like Tom Jones, involved himself only in venial sins—the circle seems complete. Emily assumes her proper place in the hierarchy by becoming another's property, and together they affirm their commitment to prescriptive title by purchasing from Quesnel the “ancient domain of her father” (p. 672).

This concluding harmony completes the pattern set in the La Vallée section of the novel and so imposes a symmetry that tends to overshadow the Udolpho adventures. St. Aubert's protection of Emily is now assumed by Valancourt, the lands which were lost are restored, and with this restoration Emily again enjoys the coincidence of property and propriety formerly experienced before her father's death. More importantly, by focusing in the final volume on the specific issue of female propriety and its rewards, Radcliffe is able to resolve certain of the problems raised in the middle sections of the novel in terms that do not threaten conservative doctrine. It was suggested, for example, at Udolpho that imagination (or anarchy) could potentially defeat reason (or order). But in the controlled male world of the novel's ending, the explanation of the events which provoked Emily's “superstitious terror” emphasizes her credulity; the implication is that female susceptibilities have an anarchic power only when removed from the curb of male reason.

Emily St. Aubert, then, is at once the specific character whose innocence is rewarded and a representative figure of an order renewed by overcoming threatened chaos. Throughout the novel Radcliffe, in attempting to clarify and strengthen conservative values, uses the affective image of the victimized female in a way reminiscent of Burke's iconic glorification of Marie Antoinette in Reflections on the Revolution in France. The difference between the two figures, of course, is that Emily survives. Her survival, the novel's ending suggests, is the natural expression of her virtue: goodness and innocence do triumph; but in fact it owes much more to Radcliffe's peculiar shift of focus which magically dispells the power of Montoni by the expedient of his fortunate death, thus allowing a new cast of characters who uphold the status quo to dominate the final volume. Radcliffe's encomiastic portrait of concluding harmony is accomplished, in other words, by a closural sleight of hand which contravenes the implicit meaning of the novel's psychological and political insights. Following from the precepts of the text, as opposed to its ending, individual will still retains the ability to destroy collective reason. Only with the romantic novel will this power be acknowledged through such heirs of Montoni as Frankenstein, the satanic Wringhim, and Heathcliff, figures who act out the chaos that Radcliffe here circumvents.

Notes

1. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, intro. Martin C. Battestin, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ., 1975), 2:981.

2. The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), p. 141.

3. Ll. 72-74, in The Poetical Works of William Cowper, ed. H.S. Milford (London: Oxford Univ., 1934), p. 411.

4. Quoted in H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 201.

5. “Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one …,” Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner, 2 vols. (N.Y.: Citadel, 1945), 1:4.

6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1910; rpt. London: Dent, 1971), p. 32.

7. Works (London: Rivington, 1803-27), 10:97.

8. Quoted in Dickinson, p. 303.

9. See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology” in Theories of Property: Aristotle to the Present, ed. Anthony Parel and Thomas Flanagan (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Univ., 1979), pp. 141-66.

10. A similar point is made later in the novel when Montoni reveals to Emily that her signing over of her aunt's property will not suffice; he must inhabit his late wife's estates in order to assure his title to them. See Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, notes by Frederick Garber (London: Oxford Univ., 1970), p. 436.

11. (Menston: Scolar, 1970), pp. 30-31. For a succinct discussion of the sources of this truism, see Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983) p. 394, n. 2.

12. See, e.g., Sarah Scott, A Description of Millennium Hall and the Adjacent Country (London: 1762), pp. 14-15.