[In the following essay, Fawcett explores the underlying sexual themes in The Mysteries of Udolpho, and theorizes that gothic novels can be seen not just as escapist literature but, when viewed psychoanalytically, as symbolic explorations into thoughts and desires that are suppressed within the mind.]

The eternal gates terrific porter lifted the northern bar:
Thel enter'd in & saw the secrets of the land unknown;
She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

The Book of Thel, IV, 1-5

In Ann Radcliffe's novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, a daughter wishes to know the secrets of her father's past and to understand events which occurred twenty years ago, at the time of her own birth, but which her father has, on his deathbed, forbidden her to search out. Curiosity and taboo, desire and restraint—we readers are drawn into a magic circle of deathbeds and birth anxieties. Mrs. Radcliffe hints at a truth, at a scene to be re-animated; Emily St. Aubert, her main character, looks repeatedly at scenes which remind us of obsessional neurotic dreams, dreams which a psychoanalytic patient might have in order to screen the primal scene, the child's vision of the sexual act between the parents, proleptically that act at which the child was engendered.¹ Readers who become involved in Mrs. Radcliffe's fiction are drawn into this search for the primal scene, and many readers have testified to the compelling power of the novel's pursuit—structure. As an early reviewer said of another of Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, it “engages the attention strongly, and interests the feelings very powerfully.”² Leslie Fiedler recognizes that this engagement is essentially sexual:

The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then, lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction. The titillation of sex denied, it offers its readers a vicarious participation in a flirtation with death—approach and retreat, approach and retreat, the fatal orgasm eternally mounting and eternally checked.³

We feel that we may be granted a sight of some kind, so we keep reading and Emily keeps looking. This source of narrative interest may speak especially to women, whether of Mrs. Radcliffe's time or our own, because it promises to reveal, through suggestion and imagery, some of the facts of sexual life, and to re-create, through Emily's desire to “see” the place of her own engendering, some of women's psychic states.

Gothic fiction used to be regarded primarily as a symptom of degenerated taste and a longing to escape from everyday reality.⁴ Increasingly now, critics are thinking of it as a kind of psychoanalysis. They use the rich material within the narratives to show how the genre of the gothic embodies the unconscious yearnings of characters and readers. As Fiedler says, the terror in such works as The Castle of Otranto is not less true than it seems, but more true, since the imagery of such fictions (for example, the maiden fleeing endlessly through a hostile landscape) is the imagery of our dreams and our repressed guilts and fears.⁵ Tzvetan Todorov says that the supernatural in fantastic works of literature (under which rubric the gothic novel falls) provides the reader with a sense of “pan-determinism,” just as does the technique of Freudian dream-analysis. These fictions allow writer and reader to sneak subversive themes past both society and their own superegos. Todorov claims that psychoanalysis “has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature of the fantastic.”⁶ The aim of psychoanalysis is to make clear the reasons for the symptoms of an individual's disturbance; if a literary work is like a person, the critic may perform such an analysis for it, too.

Beyond such practical psychoanalysis of each work, the critic must also discuss the truth of the symbology discovered. That is, we need to look at what the novel is openly and secretly telling us about its world. Emily discovers scenes which match her need; she also discovers, as I hope to show, scenes which body forth the condition of sexuality in the world of the 1790s. A parallel contemporary perspective on this condition can be found in passages from Blake. One can hardly imagine a meeting between Mrs. Radcliffe and Blake, but in 1794 she had published The Mysteries of Udolpho, and he had completed The Book of Thel, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Their ideas seem diametrically opposed. St. Aubert, Emily's father and the moral arbiter of the novel, declares “All excess is vicious”; Blake answers that “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”⁷ Yet the novel oddly but indirectly affirms Blake's verdict that contemporary love is sick, crippled by contention between desire and restraint, both murdered and murderous.

I

When Blake's Thel “saw the couches of the dead,” the source of the heart's “restless twists,” at the end of The Book of Thel, she asked the question which Emily asks throughout the novel: “Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?” The Mysteries of Udolpho is made up of a repetitive series of revelations, veils (or curtains) pulled aside, and beds, especially death beds, questioned for meaning. The bedroom is the novel's dreamlike center. Whatever chateau or palazzo Emily enters, we readers soon find ourselves in some bedroom, usually dark, with heavy furniture and ancient hangings. Maria Edgeworth gently mocked this focal point in her description of a hotel-room in Bruges: “It was so large and dark that I could scarcely see the low bed in a recess … covered with a dark quilt. I am sure Mrs. Radcliffe might have kept her heroine wandering about this room for six good pages.”⁸ The bed, the recess, and the veil are all here. If Emily goes to the window to look at the view, the scenery often reinforces the sense of sexual duality: she sees mountains on one side and fruited plains on the other, or a rampart walk on the left and sun-illumined hills on the right.⁹ A reader of this novel will easily remember, or confuse, ramparts, walls, galleries, turrets, wings, passages, and staircases surrounding the crucial bedroom with its veiled recess. Emily spends nights not sleeping, but wondering, in anxious and wakeful anticipation of something as yet unknown. The bed itself is thus a locus of questioning anxiety, as well as a thing to be searched out and seen; it is a powerful central symbol.

When we turn to the human setting, we ask ourselves what Emily can learn about the primal scene and about sexual relations in general by observing married people—people of the age to have, not merely to look towards or back to, sexual experience. We notice immediately that Emily's parents are the only happy couple in a well-populated novel, and that the St. Auberts are not seen in their private apartments or anywhere near a bed; they are placed in the countryside, in favorite “retreats,” or at their fishing cottage. Neither parent is robust or vital; the wisdom of both is the wisdom of weakness and restraint. Mme. St. Aubert, the only biological mother in a novel filled with abbesses, aunts, mistresses, and stepmothers, dies of a lingering fever by the end of the first chapter. “The progress of this disorder was marked, on the side of Madame St. Aubert, by patient suffering, and subjected wishes.”¹⁰ Her father, also, is a figure in retreat, although it takes him longer to succumb. We first see him despondent over the future destruction of trees on his former estate, a destruction which he is helpless to prevent. Later he languishes on Emily's hands during an abortive trip to recover his health, and he dies of the same wasting fever after thinking himself ruined. “St. Aubert lingered till about three o'clock … and, thus gradually sinking into death, he expired without a struggle, or a sigh” (p. 82).

The resignation and passivity of this one “happy” couple is strongly contrasted with the conflicts within other married couples. Each time Emily or the reader is admitted, actually or vicariously, into the private apartments of married people, she finds open anger or wasting silence. When Emily's aunt marries the infamous Montoni, the quarrels begin soon after a brief period of disappointment and coolness. Montoni has sexual experience and energy, but he withholds himself from his wife and directs his aggression into his condottiere schemes, sitting up late with his warrior vassals. In bedroom scenes overheard by Emily and by Annette, the maid, he threatens his wife with deprivation unless she signs over her settlements to him.¹¹ Rather than sign over what is rightfully hers, Mme. Montoni dies, partly of starvation and partly of a fever. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this situation—and a modern reader may feel that Mme. Montoni is not accorded dignity enough in this novel (since she is a stupid woman, she resists him for the wrong reason)—the marriage seems founded on deprivation and fever, and consummated only in her death.

We see another couple, newly married, disintegrate into stifled conflict when the second plot-line introduces the marriage of the Marchioness de Villeroi (Emily's other aunt) and the Marquis. Each of them has an outside attachment. The (good) wife was really, virtuously in love elsewhere, but has given up her lover to marry her father's choice. The (bad) husband has a distempered Italian mistress, whom he has deceived and abandoned and by whom he is in turn deceived into murdering his wife. Through the words of Dorothee, the servant, we “see” them in privacy—the modesty, grace, and humility of the wife and the “gloomy and fretful” jealousy of her husband (p. 524). We especially “see” the mixture of realization and horror on the face of the Marquis when he hears his wife has been poisoned. If this is, as I think, a vision of sexual knowledge, it is a gnosis of violation. Once again marriage is consummated in death. Mme. Montoni, with her unfeeling pride and stupidity, and the Marchioness, her eyes mildly raised to heaven, present themselves to us much more vividly than Emily's own mother, as two versions of the effect sexual experience has on women. Though neither woman is Emily's mother, both are, during this narrative, paradoxically both newly married and old enough to be her mother. The men react in turn with war schemes or settled melancholy, that is, with aggression or passivity.

II

Admitted to the private apartments, then the inner chamber, then the veiled, recessed bed itself, what privileged sight does Emily see? She looks upon a corpse, in fact, upon several corpses. “Within, appeared a pale and emaciated face. She … shuddered as she took up the skeleton hand, that lay stretched upon the quilt; then let it drop, and then viewed the face with a long, unsettled gaze” (p. 364). Mme. Montoni is still alive at this time, and she lingers for another chapter, never revealing exactly “what had reduced her to this present deplorable state” (p. 365). After Montoni abandoned her, she caught a raging fever, perhaps a more virulent strain than the one which killed the St. Auberts. Mme. Montoni dies, it seems, of the consequences of female passion, as a warning to the woman who chooses the wrong husband.

This vision of the actual corpse on the bed is anticipated by two other recess-visions and followed by still a third, all with remarkably similar content. When the mysterious Barnardine leads Emily through a portal (into a literally sub-liminal experience) and locks her in a disused torture chamber, Emily imagines the poor wretch who might have starved to death fastened to that chair in that room. She imagines deprivation, but she sees violation. Drawing aside a bed curtain in order to find a place to sit, she sees

a corpse, stretched on a kind of low couch … the features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible, and more than one livid wound appeared in the face. Emily, bending over the body, gazed, for a moment, with an eager, frenzied eye.

(p. 348)

Death in the chamber can come in two ways, by starvation (in imagination) and by blows (to the real body); we may be tempted to call these the female and the male possibilities. Emily's “eager” look does not disclose the corpse's identity; she releases the curtain before she can “know” the sight completely. For not very probable reasons, the sight of this corpse must be kept secret; it is seen but not known or told. Emily's personality, while itself changeless, is filling up with more and more sights, and they are discharged less and less often. She becomes, as I hope to indicate later, a kind of romantic nature-lover, almost pure eye-ball.

The other recess-vision is held within her even longer; further knowledge of it is withheld from the reader for over three hundred pages. Emily is curious about the “picture” behind the veil; because it is reported to depict Signora Laurentini, the mysterious former owner of Udolpho who left the castle to Montoni after her disappearance twenty years ago (again, at the time of Emily's birth). Emily and the servants imagine Montoni has had her murdered. Drawn by curiosity, Emily stands in front of this massive object. The action which follows her “high expectation” of this sight is curiously muted and suppressed: “She paused again, and then, with a timid hand, lifted the veil; but instantly let it fall—perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture” (pp. 248-49). The thing she sees, about which we are not told, is, she thinks, not art but reality, not a representation which would call for her sympathy but an actuality which calls for identification. This object, when it is finally revealed to us, is in fact mid-way between art and reality, and closely akin to the bed-room corpse revelations. Behind the black veil is “a recess of the wall” containing “a human figure of ghastly paleness, stretched at its length … the face appeared partly decayed and disfigured by worms” (p. 662). The lifted veil again reveals a bedroom of death, a scene thought to have come from the period of her birth. Actually this is a wax figure, a grisly memento mori. The more Emily investigates her origins, the more such mementi she comes upon in the form of progressive, replicated corpses.

One further instance of this primal discovery will suffice to show that the “horrors” spaced throughout the novel seem to replicate themselves, seem, as in a recurring dream or a hall of mirrors, to force Emily to see the same thing each time, in each chateau. In the Count's chateau, Emily, accompanied by the garrulous Dorothée, goes into the bedroom of the Marchioness who died twenty years ago. There, her things are set out in Miss Havisham-like clutter and stasis. Dorothée throws the Marchioness's black veil over Emily, who disengages herself from it. They proceed to the bed—the object of their visit, and almost their reverence. There they see the black pall over the bed shake; then “the apparition of a human countenance rose above it.” The two run out “as fast as their trembling limbs would bear them” (p. 536). The bed of death, which ought to memorialize the past, now appears still alive, perhaps still copulating, and able to transfer its shakings to their trembling limbs.

Each of these bed-manifestations is finally explained in the style of rationalized gothic.¹² But even the explanations add something to the mystery and complexity of the image itself, since in each case the horrible sight has, for Emily, a profound sexual ambiguity. Emily apparently thinks the hacked corpse of one of Montoni's male soldiers is the body of her aunt. She thinks the “picture” is the body of Signora Laurentini, but it is presumably male since it was made for an early lord of the line. The Marchioness's bed with its rising countenance proves to be the trick of smugglers who, we later hear, are particularly masculine, rough and evil-looking. All of Emily's “mistakes” about the sexual identities of the corpse figures indicate the real content of these visions: behind the veil is an image of the generating marriage bed of her parents, of the violence and “death” of the sexual act. The single image is composed of two sexes, the beast with two backs. The contorted, wounded, or gnawed faces are like faces in orgasm.

To complete our primal picture, there are two other recess-visions to consider, this time of living people. Emily “sees” the Marchioness through the reminiscences of the servant Dorothée, who saw her in the oriel the night she died. Now, “in this closet … a robe and several articles of her dress were scattered … as if they had just been thrown off” (p. 533). Then, “the tears fell upon her cheeks, while she sung a vesper hymn. … She had been at prayers, I fancy, for there was the book open on the table beside her—aye, and there it lies open still!” (pp. 534-35). The past and the present are simultaneously alive in this description; the one evokes the other. This picture of the Marchioness in despair in a recess recalls to us Emily's sight of her father, early in the novel. Through “panes of glass … of a closet-door,” she has seen the figure of her father looking over some papers “with a look so solemn … which was mingled with a certain wild expression, that partook … of horror.” He considers a picture (of the Marchioness, we learn later), then prays silently: “When he rose, a ghastly paleness was on his countenance” (p. 26). Emily is spying, out of a concern for his health, but also, as the narrator tells us, out of a “mixture of curiosity and tenderness” (p. 26). It is this combination of motives which suggests the unconscious component, her desire to piece out the primal scene.

If, taking liberties with Mrs. Radcliffe's sequence, we conflate these two scenes, we may recapture something of the scene Emily almost “sees” throughout the novel. A woman is ready for sex, unveiled before a man, her clothes “scattered.” The man's expression partakes of “horror”; “When he rose, a ghastly [ghostlike, deathlike] paleness was on his countenance.” The combined scene behind the veil suggests the woman's passion and its continuance, its ever-open posture, together with the man's horror of that too-great need. We may think of Blake's tautological little poem, and how far it is from Mrs. Radcliffe's primal scene:

What is it men in women do require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire
What is it women do in men require
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.

(p. 466)

The “lineaments” of these corpse images complete the picture of sexual wounding, deprivation, and mutual disappointment. In this novel what is dead comes to life again; what is over, starts over again. The plot itself mirrors this sexual discontinuity. As Fiedler says: “the middle of Mrs. Radcliffe's books seem in their compulsive repetitiveness a self-duplicating nightmare from which it is impossible to wake.”¹³ The central act represented is stymied in a cycle of need and despair—female openness and male horror. Through the texture of the plot, readers may feel implicated in this act, and even part of the cycle.¹⁴

III

The veiled content of this primal scene, the passionate woman and the exhausted man, illuminates, I think, some aspects of both the novel's characterization and its moral. The novel educates its women readers to the dangers of too-great sexual energy and desire. For example, the women who surround Emily are a gratuitously unpleasant breed; they want too much, and, even worse, are proud of their desires. Mme. Quesnel, an Italian heiress, wishes to “excite” envy by describing “the splendour of the balls, banquets, and processions … in honour of the nuptials of the Duke de Joyeuse.”¹⁵ The Countess of Villefort, step-mother of Blanche, “could occasionally throw into [her manners] an affectation of spirits, which seemed to triumph over every person” (p. 500). Valancourt, the hero (or “male ingenue”),¹⁶ nearly falls prey to one of these women, a Countess whose “wit prolonged the triumph of [her beauty's] reign” (p. 293). Emily's aunt is the most notable proof that women of some sexual experience become insatiable, almost inhuman. She “expatiated on the splendour of her house, [and] told of the numerous parties she entertained” (p. 118). There is a strong sexual undercurrent in these entertainings and prolongings; these women are voracious and insatiable, and they stare out at us from the novel, replicating the author's demand that we learn to fear our own desires. Emily's aunt “knew nothing of the conduct of a mind, that fears to trust its own powers” (p. 118). And yet, such portraits, heavily drawn as they are, may allow the female reader to recognize something of herself in them.

In the primal scene, the partner of this gaping, insatiable woman is the pale, exhausted man; accordingly, Emily's father articulates the moral burden of the novel. After his two sons die, St. Aubert turns his attention to his remaining child: “While he watched the unfolding of her infant character, with anxious fondness, he endeavoured, with unremitting effort, to counteract those traits in her disposition, which might hereafter lead her from happiness” (p. 5). Thus the father sets himself against the daughter's openness, her “unfolding,” her high “degree of susceptibility” (p. 5). He sets himself, in fact, against the distinctive quality of her character. After the death of Mme. St. Aubert, he chastises Emily's grief:

I have endeavoured to teach you, from your earliest youth, the duty of self-command; … as it preserves us in the various and dangerous temptations … [and] as it limits the indulgences which are termed virtuous, yet which, extended beyond a certain boundary, are vicious, for their consequence is evil. All excess is vicious.

(p. 20)

His “endeavours” already sound weary and exhausted, she is so easily “led” “beyond” his boundaries. What is true for grief could very well be true for love, since women's sexual response is, strictly speaking, unnecessary to the sexual act. Emily is like Oothoon, “open to joy and to delight,” while St. Aubert is like Theotormon, who “sits / Upon the margind ocean conversing with shadows dire” (Visions of the Daughters of Albion, plate 6, line 22; plate 8, lines 11-12). In a curious way, St. Aubert would agree with Blake: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

Thus, the novel opposes the restraint of the father to the passion of the daughter.¹⁷ Their differing experiences in nature are evidence of this struggle. Both love nature. Emily's is the new love of landscape, as we can hear in her question to her father:

But hark! here comes the sweeping sound over the wood-tops;—now it dies away. … Now the breeze swells again. It is like the voice of some supernatural being—… Ah! what light is yonder? … it gleams again, near the root of that large chestnut: look, sir!

(p. 15)

Her enthusiasm is not only for the isolated beautiful moment, but for its recurrence, its again-ness. She likes what sweeps and dies away and swells again; the effects she admires in nature have the rhythm of female orgasm. Her father's reaction is to deflate and miniaturize her enthusiasm. He sees a glow-worm where she feels divinity, and he “gaily” invites her to step further and see fairies. On their ill-starred trip for his health, he botanizes over “curious plants,” while she wanders “wrapt in high enthusiasm … listening in deep silence to the lonely murmur of the woods” (p. 37). The cadence is Wordsworthian. Thus, he implicitly corrects her; by a concentration on the singular and the minute, he de-sexualizes experience in nature.

Her father's view of nature is fanciful; hers is imaginative. The two stances might almost be said to stand for or anticipate Coleridge's categories of Fancy and Imagination (here, the secondary Imagination). St. Aubert sees fairies; Coleridge says that “the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.”¹⁸ Emily “loved … still more the mountain's stupendous recesses” (p. 6); her imagination is, in Coleridge's terms, “essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” She eagerly looks out to nature's recesses, just as she looks into the corpse-bed recesses.¹⁹ In looking behind the veil, her mind goes beyond the objects she sees; her imagination, in Coleridge's words, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates” the actual fixed and dead objects, “in order to recreate” them in the primal scene she discovers. For Coleridge, the Imagination “struggles to idealize and to unify.”²⁰ As we have seen, Emily's visions of the bed constitute a unity. Further, she does idealize what she sees. Her visions are both “ideal” and “idle” (Mrs. Radcliffe's spelling varies)²¹—idle in that her conclusions are mistaken and finally irrelevant to the plot, but ideal in that her visions pertain to a conception in her mind. As in a recurring dream, the corpse visions open her mind to its own powers and images; over the real bodies lies the ideal unity of her vision.

IV

Thus we have the paradox of the seeker who looks out only to find what is inside herself—in this novel, the fresh, virginal young woman who repeatedly finds wounded and rotting corpses. Emily is especially prone to that “love, so natural to the human mind, of whatever is able to distend its faculties with wonder and astonishment” (p. 549).²² “Distend” has an unpleasantly full sound here, reminding us of a kind of pregnancy of mind, following a desire to be filled, to take in sights, to have knowledge. The suggestion of multiplicity, of openness, againness, and repetition is muted but present in this passage, too. The idle terror is void, empty, insubstantial, and needs to be filled. The experience which Emily, and to some extent also the reader of this very long novel, undergoes throughout is an opening, a filling, almost a cramming. The narrator explains this human need in more attractive language, when describing why Emily draws the veil to see the “picture” of Laurentini, even though the prospect terrifies her: “But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object from which we appear to shrink” (p. 248). The aesthetic has come full circle here, as language used about sublime experience in nature is a prelude to the revelation of the primal corpse-scene.²³ This language could also be applied to a woman's wooing posture in a society which overtly denies her a direct sexual expression: a “high expectation” coming from a “kind of fascination“makes women “seek even the object from which [they must] appear to shrink.”

Emily is an aching center, unchanging; she seeks and finds only to seek again. The narrator occasionally interjects explanations, but for the most part remains an absolutely unselfconscious window onto an unselfconscious character. Thus with a peculiar vividness the scenes are conveyed directly into the minds and even the viscera of readers. To end this endless process, the author calls on marriage.²⁴ Emily's curiosity is superficially satisfied, and she marries the re-validated Valancourt; morality and moralizing triumph over gnosis. But ominously, they marry under banners representing the “exploits of Charlemagne” in subduing the Saracens: “here, were seen the Saracens, with their horrible visors, advancing to battle; and there, were displayed the wild solemnities of incantation, and the necromantic feats … before the Emperor” (pp. 670-71). The marriage takes place under the aegis of continuing conflict between reason and restraint (Charlemagne) and magic and desire (the Saracens). The war is not won or lost; it is stopped, in an ending which illustrates the Blakean process of atrophy:

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.

And being restrained it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.

(The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, pl. 5)

Emily, her sexual gnosis incomplete, retreats into marriage, her desire already, on the last pages, becoming a shadow of itself. In Blake's work, Thel flees backward into the vales of Har; Emily returns to “the pleasant shades” of La Vallée, her childhood home (p. 671). Both of these retreats, both shadowy valleys, signify failure of gnosis. But before each young woman retires, she has seen a vision which continues to bear meaning for the reader:

She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists: A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

Emily's and Thel's twin corpse-visions give out the secrets of sexual love; in this world, sexual relations are wounded or murdered, and female sexual needs will not be satisfied. This much the corpse in the veiled recess tells us. On the “couches of the dead,” the heart still twists restlessly. Mrs. Radcliffe's imagery of the corpse in the recessed bed, and its implied message, is even stronger than the imagery of the diseased bed which Blake uses in The Songs of Experience:

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Notes

1. Compare, for example, Freud's analysis of the Wolfman's recurring dream in “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 17: esp. pp. 29-47.

2. From the Critical Review notice of The Romance of the Forest, quoted in Dan J. McNutt, The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography (Kent, England: William Dawson and Sons, 1975), p. 216.

3. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, rev. edn. (New York: Stein and Day, 1966), p. 134.

4. See, for instance, James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York: Modern Language Association, 1949), p. 262, or Lowry Nelson, Jr., “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel,” YR [The Yale Review] 52 (December 1962):238.

5. Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 140.

6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1973), pp. 160-61. Of the two psychoanalytic critics who have written at length on this novel, one, Leona Sherman, psychoanalyzes Emily, and the other, Pierre Arnaud, psychoanalyzes Mrs. Radcliffe. Both approaches are risky and suffer alternately from too much or too little information, but Arnaud is more daring and sounds right more often. Leona Sherman, “Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Romance” (Ph.D. diss., SUNY at Buffalo, 1975), Pierre Arnaud, Ann Radcliffe et le Fantastique: Essai de Psychobiographie (Paris: Aubrier Montaigne, 1976). I propose an analysis of the novel's central actions, or, to put it another way, of the novel's process and its effect on the reader.

7. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 35. All references in the text are to plate and line numbers in this edition. Blake used the trappings of gothic prose fiction in “Fair Elenor,” from “Poetical Sketches” of 1783—a fleeing heroine, a tower, “dreary vaults,” a mysterious object wrapped in a gory napkin, and a talking severed head. These were uncongenial atmospherics, but one may catch echoes of gothic themes in Blake's concern with polarized states of innocence and experience and in his depictions of repressive and imprisoning father figures, such as Urizen and Nobodaddy. David Punter, in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions (London: Longman, 1980), pp. 99-104, discusses Blake's political use of gothic themes. See also Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), 1:34.

8. Quoted in Aline Grant, Ann Radcliffe: A Biography (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1951), p. 145. For a fine discussion of the permutations of veil imagery, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character of the Veil,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 96 (March 1981):255-70.

9. Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 67.

10. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 19. All references in the text are to this edition.

11. For an excellent discussion of the “economic base” of the novel, see Mary Poovey, “Ideology in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” Criticism 21 (Fall 1979):307-30.

12. The explanations at the end are like “reverse incantations,” J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, 1700-1800 (London: Constable, 1932), p. 262.

13. Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 127.

14. The repetition of this scene is the distinctive note of this novel, I believe. Many discussions of gothic novels concentrate on generic connections between works; the best such discussion is in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1976; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1980), ch. 1. However, such generic continuities may mask significant differences between works. Udolpho has one repeated action, while Matthew Lewis's The Monk, like a pornographic fiction, reveals a series of different, progressively more “unspeakable” scenes. In Mrs. Radcliffe's fiction we see one thing, the same thing, over and over; in Lewis's, we see something new and more horrible each time. Udolpho tends to “double situations and repeat motives,” while Lewis wishes to “thrill” the mind. J. M. S. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe and Her Influence on Later Writers (1921; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1980), pp. 25 and 133. David Punter's Literature of Terror, pp. 87-97, contains a brilliant analysis of the different author/reader relationships Radcliffe and Lewis establish.

15. The feminine ending of this Duke's name is intriguing, suggesting that in his marriage he is to be enjoyed. I am reminded of the current vogue in French feminist criticism of the noun jouissance with its multiple meanings. See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, trans. Gora, Jardine, and Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), pp. x, 15-16, and 164.

16. Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), p. 27, invents this delightful phrase.

17. Patricia Spacks notes that, in general, women novelists often convey simultaneously “the energy of impulse as well as of repression,” Imagining a Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 63.

18. Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1907), 1: ch. xiii, 202.

19. For a related discussion of the issues of identity, body image, and vacancy (or recess), see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 150-51.

20. Robert D. Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic,” PMLA 84 (March 1969):284, treats this distinction differently.

21. See, for instance, pp. 255 and 548.

22. In Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen also shows that the mind is in love with terror. Catherine Morland “has been craving to be frightened”; her curiosity is called an “infatuation” (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972), ch. 25, p. 201.

23. On the language of the sublime, see Samuel Holt Monk's chapter on Burke. Later, Monk says that “the relationship between the Radcliffean heroine and nature consists of a sort of emotional coquetry,” The Sublime (1935; rpt. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960), p. 220.

24. The ending has “a specially female melancholy and weariness,” says Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 140. Pierre Fauchery says that this happy ending is a substitute for the tragic ending we have the right to expect. La Destinée Féminine dans le Roman Européen du Dix-Huitième Siècle (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1972), p. 764.