[In the following essay, Graham discusses the narrative pace of Udolpho and how it works to build suspense in a storyline that contains very little actual action.]

In a metaphor that Ann Radcliffe probably and perhaps rightly would have found lacking in taste, Robert Scholes compares the act of fiction with the act of sex:

For what connects fiction … with sex is the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation. In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.¹

Although the quotation is taken from a discussion of John Fowles' The Magus, it shows a startling aptness to Mrs. Radcliffe's fictional method which is to draw out a situation longer than seems possible by delaying the climax. The amplitude of her accomplishment becomes apparent when one measures the majesty of the three to four bulky volumes that comprise each of her novels against the modest paragraph that could contain a just summary of her plot. That so much impends in Ann Radcliffe's fictions and so little happens is surely evidence of an astonishing degree of narrative sophistication.

It is precisely in the attenuation of threatening situations that Mrs. Radcliffe's chief success and chief fascination as a writer of Gothic romances lie. Her employment of suspense entraps her readers in a mounting rhythm of excitement and irresolution as terror succeeds terror, while the climax, a total and satisfying release from tension, is continually promised and continually postponed. Because the terrors themselves derive intensity from vague threatenings of moral dissolution, a sexual metaphor for the rhythm of tension and intermission seems an appropriate one. Thus her narrative method, approximating that described by Scholes, operates through delaying climax within a framework of both fear and desire.

That she employed such a method, and repeated it in most of her romances, suggests that Mrs. Radcliffe was addressing her narratives to a human psychology more complex than those of the reductionist theories current in eighteenth-century Britain from Locke's tabula rasa² to Hartley's materialist associationism. To direct, as I think she does, a significant overtone of her narratives at pre-rational levels of human consciousness is to commit something of a revolutionary act. While it may appear absurd (and, indeed, ill-bred) to argue an affinity between the refined Mrs. Radcliffe and the sans-culottes who stormed the Bastille, it is fruitful to consider the Marquis de Sade's observation that the Gothic novel was an inevitable result of the revolutionary shocks that all Europe was feeling during these revolutionary times.³ For Sade, what links the Gothic novel to the revolution is its willingness to extend the boundaries that convention ascribes to the concept of human nature, its willingness to call for the aid of hell to present the whole truth of human depravity. Those impending calamities on which Mrs. Radcliffe's narratives focus such lingering attention are the product of an imagination prepared to acknowledge the diabolical. When Dr. Johnson dismissed the poems of Ossian with the declaration: “Sir, a man might write such stuff for ever, if he would abandon his mind to it,”⁴ he was voicing a traditional ethical distrust of the unregulated imagination, a fear of the monsters the abandoned mind might spawn. Ann Radcliffe's are the novels of a respectable woman. They manifest an apparent capitulation to all the restraints, decorums and tyrannies of late eighteenth-century conventionalities in erotic and ethical matters. Yet she overcame many restrictions with subtle audacity: her narratives insinuate the dissolution of the very conventionalities they uphold. They continually anticipate perils, contemplate imminent assaults on the social order in the crimes of murder, incest and rape, and thus extend an imaginative validity to evil in its most vicious forms. To recall Dr. Johnson's warnings in Rambler No. 4 against the romance for its “wild strain of imagination,” its heating the mind “with incredibilities,” its creation of men “splendidly wicked” whose “resemblance ought no more to be preserved, than the art of murdering without pain,”⁵ and to note how her romances return repeatedly to situations in which moral values seem threatened by splendidly wicked men is to perceive how wholeheartedly Ann Radcliffe had embraced a revolutionary aesthetic.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is vitally revolutionary in a manner that the marquis would approve and Dr. Johnson might well protest. The momentum of the account builds towards a situation rich in imaginative possibility that Mrs. Radcliffe hastens to establish and labours to prolong: the maiden is in perilous proximity to the villain in the castle and the hero is locked out. It is one of those situations that we have come to recognize as typically, even archetypically, Gothic. The castle, its centrality underlined in the very title of Mrs. Radcliffe's romance, is prison-like in its function of keeping people in and out. But it is more intricate than a prison or bastion: it is described as “a strange, rambling place.”⁶ Emily is “perplexed by the numerous turnings”; “she feared to open one of the many doors that offered”; she “began to fear that she might … lose herself in the intricacies of the castle” (I 262). Such passages show Radcliffe's Gothic castle to be a kind of labyrinth and a labyrinth is, of course, a place of peril and misdirection where a monster lurks and where the maiden may be held in bondage. Versions of the labyrinth that resound through Cretan legend, Sleeping Beauty's wall of thorns and Brünhilde's wall of fire point to contrasting interpretations: it is a place of sterility from which the hero's rescue of his bride betokens a return of fruitfulness to the wasteland, or it is a place of fearful virility in which the demon-lover has entrapped the enthralled maiden. In the Gothic novel the second emphasis predominates: the monster in the labyrinth is Manfred in his castle, looking to beget an heir to Otranto upon the frightened Isabella; it is Ambrosio in the catacombs, holding Antonia in thrall to his lust; and, of course, it is Montoni, whose ominous presence forms the forefront of Emily's anxious apprehensions. The allure of the Gothic situation lies chiefly in the vulnerability of the maiden to the dark designs and unpredictable violence of the Gothic villain.

The Montoni that emerges from Mrs. Radcliffe's narrative is a potentially-explosive force of obscure purposes who smoulders in the shadows of his castle like a monster in its labyrinth. She makes him alien to the novel's system of values. He is cruel, unresponsive to domesticity and indifferent to the picturesque, yet he is handsome: his eyes are somber and sparkling and his features “manly and expressive.” Radcliffe underlines his sexual attractiveness with repeated references to his terrible energies, desperate temper and vigorous passion. Each turn of the page threatens to reveal a feudal noble of barely-bridled sensuality, l'homme fatal, the enslaver of woman, a perilously absorbing mixture of Don Juan and Bluebeard.

As is usual with Radcliffe, the illusion is more potent than the reality. Viewed objectively, Montoni's life forms a pattern of unfulfillment. He gambles in casinos but loses. He is ambitious to be a military leader but becomes only a robber captain, one whose capture is perfunctory when the narrative has no further use for him. Despite his displays of passion and energy, he lacks sexual drive. He marries Mme. Charon to obtain her money; yet he does not see through her pretensions of wealth, nor does he make sure of what fortune she has before he marries her. Since Mme. Charon has neither wit nor beauty with which to beguile him, his lack of judgment in these matters is astonishing. After marriage he grumbles, blusters and threatens in order to obtain her property. He does not succeed and after Mme. Charon's death he has to make Emily the target of blusterings and threatenings, with similar unsuccess. To sustain the role given him, Ann Radcliffe made Montoni surprisingly impotent.

When we seek the source of the lasting impression of Montoni as the smouldering, passionate demon-lover, we discover the figure to be almost wholly the creation of Emily, the chaste, pure maiden. At an early meeting “Emily felt admiration, but … it was mixed with a degree of fear she know not exactly wherefore” (I 23). When through marriage Montoni becomes head of her family, Emily watches him eagerly, trying to fathom from his gloomy features the thoughts concealed beneath. “Emily observed these written characters of his thought with deep interest and not without some degree of awe, when she considered that she was entirely in his power” (I 195). We might assume this last reflection to be accompanied by a frisson of anxious apprehension. Emily's mind dwells on Montoni, creates of him a figure of Burkean sublimity that both attracts and repels her. He frightens and fascinates her because he undermines her notions of patriarchy and domesticity. Her father had been a man of feeling; Montoni is a man of action and cruelty. His “stern manners” contrast with “the tenderness and affection to which she had been accustomed till she lost her parents” (I 239). He disorients her and threatens her conditionings. Domesticity and filial affection become disturbingly intermingled in her mind with vague shadowings of slavery and incest. She is agitated by his presence: “… Montoni is coming himself to seek me! In the present state of his mind, his purpose must be desperate” (II 100). Montoni represents a vital disorder foreign to Emily's values and she exaggerates his power and makes of him an erotic fantasy based on terror.⁷ Consciously Emily fears and deplores Montoni, yet his presence lingers in her mind as if her spirit is reaching out after him, longing for the unspeakable fulfillment that he represents.

Emily's irrational attraction to Montoni reflects one facet of Mrs. Radcliffe's awareness of the potency of that central Gothic situation that brings together maiden, villain and castle over which her narrative lingers with such unconscionable sophistication. As Mrs. Radcliffe seems to have been aware, the ambivalence of Emily's love-hate attitude to her demon-lover reflects the ambivalence of her century towards the unregulated imagination. Mrs. Radcliffe may have held the belief with Dr. Johnson that “he that thinks reasonably must think morally”⁸ but her works manifest a stronger interest in the statement's corollary about the irrational and the immoral. In the inclination of her narratives to contemplate human kinship with mystery and human fascination with evil, Mrs. Radcliffe seems to reveal an attitude that has more in common with the Marquis de Sade than with Dr. Johnson. Sade's own attraction to the Gothic novel is connected to a similar willingness to suspend ethical concerns in order to contemplate the perils of the maiden perplexed in a Gothic labyrinth where each turning may carry her into the clutches of the monster. Such willingness means for Sade a shadowing forth of his own revolutionary credo that the unnatural is natural. What is revolutionary about the Gothic novel in general and The Mysteries of Udolpho in particular is an assumed license to contemplate levels of human thought and behaviour hitherto almost ignored in literature of the eighteenth century. In Emily's disconcerted mind are opposed versions of reality. One is a comforting world of pastoral domesticity and sensibility centered on two almost interchangeable male figures, her father St. Aubert and her lover Valancourt. They inhabit the providential and ordered world that begins the novel

On the pleasant banks of the Garonne … stood … that chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxuriant woods and vines, and plantations of olives.

(I, 1)

and ends it:

Oh! how joyful it is to tell of happiness such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate that … they were at length restored to each other—to the beloved landscape of their native country—to the securest felicity of this life … while the bowers of La Vallée became once more the retreat of goodness, wisdom, and domestic blessedness!

(II, 344)

The other world flourishes in the secret inner spaces of Emily's nervous apprehensions; it is the disordered and labyrinthine world of barely-controlled passion and energy centred on the male figure of Montoni. The demonic world looms in the body of the narrative. Ann Radcliffe is careful to emphasize that this world is an aberration, yet her narrative lingers there. Her imagination abides unjustifiably long in conditions of ambivalence, where, at least aesthetically, the rational is not superior to the irrational, the moral to the immoral, the providential to the demonic. When considering the Gothic in a revolutionary perspective, it is easy to underestimate Ann Radcliffe's achievement. Compared to the projections of fragmented psychologies in Godwin's Caleb Williams and the audacious portrayals of living evil in works of Beckford and Lewis, Radcliffe's hintings and suggestings may appear unduly hesitant. In the tension between conventional sanctities and the desire to transgress limits, the sanctities are explicitly dominant and the woman wailing for her demon lover remains well beneath the levels of Emily's consciousness. That woman's existence is never acknowledged yet her presence is felt as Emily is haunted by apprehensions both supernatural and sexual. Ann Radcliffe's art lies in the careful balancing of the explicit and the implicit that permits her to be revolutionary without ceasing to be conventional. Triumphantly, her art leaves the unspeakable unspoken.

Notes

1. Robert Scholes, “The Orgastic Fiction of John Fowles.” The Hollins Critic, VI, 5 (December, 1969), 1.

2. Indeed, Locke's tabula rasa theory, by cutting man off from his unconscious, gave impetus to a general rejection of the total psyche in eighteenth-century psychological theory.

3. “… il devenait le fruit indispensable des secousses révolutionnaires dont l'Europe entière se ressentait.” Marquis de Sade, “Idée sur les Romans” in Les Crimes de L'Amour, Oevres Complètes, vol. 10 (Paris: Au Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1966), p. 15.

4. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, n.d.), IV, 211.

5. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4 in Selected Writings, ed. R.T. Davies (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 76-79.

6. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent, 1931; rpt. 1962), I, 234. Subsequent citations from the novel will be taken from this edition and page references enclosed within parentheses and inserted in the text.

7. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 86, 65.

8. Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vol. VII of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, p. 71.