[In the following essay, Poovey explains the class values system of nineteenth-century English culture and how Udolpho, though it is set in the sixteenth century, actually reflects the class morality of the author's times. Poovey goes on to note that Radcliffe's insights into the coming rise in feminine values are not followed through to their logical conclusion because of the author's faithfulness to the old status quo.]

I

The system of “values, ideas and images” which cemented the position of the upper middle class within the social and political hierarchy of eighteenth-century England—and which perpetuated an illusion of power for that class even after the foundations of paternalism began to erode—was based on what eighteenth-century poets and philosophers called the “sentimental virtues.”¹ “Sentimentalism,” with its close kin “sensibility,” was the ideology generalized from the theories of such eighteenth-century moral philosophers as David Hume and Adam Smith. Adapting Shaftesbury's theory of an innate moral faculty, Hume and Smith proposed that moral action was based on man's characteristic sympathetic response and, ultimately, that virtue was desirable because it advanced one's own welfare and gratified the desire for approval. In the course of the century, the values associated with this theory were used by the bourgeoisie to ennoble and justify almost all facets of behavior: aesthetic, ethical, economic, and political. Together, the theorists of sentimentalism projected a mythical society in which individual desires and collective needs participated in perfect reciprocity, where “natural” inequality was sanctioned because the poor and dependent automatically benefited from the unforced benevolence of the “well-bred gentleman.” But during the last decades of the century, the contradictions between these myths of the patronage system and actual economic and political conditions began to surface with increasing and alarming speed, and, as a result, the contradictions in the ideological cement itself became increasingly apparent. From the minor crowd disturbances at Tyburn to the mob action of the Gordon riots in 1780 was a short but profoundly significant step, an undeniable sign that the ideology of sensibility did not accurately account for all of English society; for as social unrest became more frequent, the dependent masses no longer seemed “naturally” the grateful wards their governors had imagined, or at least desired.² Paradoxically, however, the ideology of sensibility itself contributed to this challenge from below: not only did sensibility lack theories to explain such social unrest, but its paradigms actually sanctioned the bourgeois individualism which increasingly exacerbated it.

A study of the ideology of sensibility, its power and its gradual decline, is essential to our understanding of one underprivileged subgroup within the dominant class.³ For with the gradual erosion of paternalism and the simultaneous, rapid growth of agrarian, then industrial capitalism, “the Third Estate of the Third Estate,” as one French pamphleteer called women, also began to experience a loosening of the mortar which had solidified its place within the traditional order. The challenge posed to sensibility, in fact, had a profounder significance for women than for any other group. For although the ideology rationalized the economic and political powerlessness of women, it also constituted the basis for their peculiar but undeniable power. In the course of the eighteenth century, sentimental virtues were increasingly identified as feminine virtues, until, by the end of the century, authors of conduct books for “women of rank and fortune” consistently described women's “natural” characteristics as a variation of sentimentalism: “the most amiable tendencies and affections implanted in human nature, of modesty, of delicacy, of sympathizing sensibility, of prompt active benevolence, of warmth and tenderness of attachment.”⁴ According to Rousseau and his numerous followers, these feminine qualities compensated for the “inequality of man-made laws” by assigning women very specific social responsibilities, and thereby assuring them of very specific powers.⁵ The anonymous conduct book writer already quoted describes women's unique contributions to social stability and happiness as follows:

First. In contributing daily and hourly to the comfort of husbands, of parents, of brothers and sisters, and of other relations and connections, in the intercourse of domestic life, under every vicissitude of sickness and health, of joy and affliction.

Secondly. In forming and improving the general manners, dispositions, and conduct of the other sex, by society and example.

Thirdly. In modelling the human mind during the early stages of its growth, and fixing, while it is yet ductile, its growing principle of action; children of either sex being, in general, under maternal tuition during their childhood, and girls until they become women.⁶

From our perspective, we can see that the most crucial “power” of middle class women actually resided in their ability to preserve in the home the sentimental values and behavior traditionally associated with paternalistic society—even as developments in the “real world,” made up of marketplace and mob, challenged those values and that behavior.⁷ By providing men a retreat from “the sordid occupations and degrading profits of trade,”⁸ an arena where feminine charm could momentarily humanize the aggressive, individualistic energies necessary to material success, women were able to perpetuate the comforting illusion that the harmonious world some poets already viewed with nostalgia was not, in fact, yet lost. Not incidentally, however, by keeping the theatre of humane values separate from materialistic activity, this illusion inadvertently contributed to the eventual success of the marketplace values it appeared to counteract.

It is not surprising that at the end of the eighteenth century the debate about woman's proper place and her peculiar power intensified, for as the paternalistic system began to lose its hegemony, women sensed the imminent destruction of both their dependent status and their power. Their response, predictably, was a deeply divided one. Mary Wollstonecraft, insisting that women's dependence was not “natural” but acquired, exhorted her sisters to protect themselves against the threat she already perceived by learning new habits of genuine strength:

I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonomous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.⁹

In reply, Hannah More reasserted Rousseau's argument from innate characteristics. The “original marks of difference stamped by the hand of the Creator,” More reminded women, dictated their “natural,” their “proper,” and therefore their “right” place, and to defy this order would not only pervert the natural law but invite absolute powerlessness.

Is it not then more wise as well as more honorable to move contentedly in the plain path which Providence has obviously marked out to the sex, and in which custom has for the most part rationally confirmed them, rather than to stray awkwardly, unbecomingly, and unsuccessfully, in a forbidden road? to be the lawful possessors of a lesser domestic territory, rather than the turbulent usurpers of a wider foreign empire? to be good originals, rather than bad imitators? to be the best thing of one's kind, rather than an inferior thing even if it were of an higher kind? to be excellent women rather than indifferent men?¹⁰

Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More, in their polemical zest, take extreme and particularly clear positions. In the fiction written (and read) during this period by middle class women, these two antithetical attitudes more frequently lie side by side, causing competing tendencies which rupture the bland optimism their narrators assert. The novels of Ann Radcliffe, “the Great Enchantress,” provide a particularly good example of the tensions the challenge to paternalism and its values caused such women, for in her romances Radcliffe investigates specifically the paradoxical role sensibility plays in simultaneously restricting women and providing them power and an arena for action. Moreover, in the process of her investigation, Radcliffe uncovers the root cause of the late eighteenth-century ideological turmoil, the economic aggressiveness currently victimizing defenseless women of sensibility. But despite her penetrating insight, Radcliffe does not abandon sentimental values; instead, she retreats from the terrifying implications of her discovery and simply dismisses the threat sentimentalism cannot combat. Rather than proposing an alternative to paternalistic society and its values, she merely reasserts an idealized—and insulated—paternalism and relegates the issues she cannot resolve to the background of her narrative. Thus, in Radcliffe's romances, we have an excellent example of an ideology in practice, a testing of its images and values by one member of that class which had most at stake in it. In the tonal and structural dissonances, the competing ideas which characterize even Radcliffe's most successful novel, we see the conflicts within the ideology realized—acted out, as it were, in one woman's attempt to imaginatively resolve the instability that threatened her. And in her return to the very values she has questioned, we see the way in which her investment in these values delimited the range of her response.

“Sensibility” and “sentiments” were understood in the eighteenth century to be the products of that innate moral faculty Shaftesbury postulated in his Characteristics (1711). During most of the century, “sensibility” embraced both consciousness—the ability to feel strongly—and conscience—the capacity for rational feeling.¹¹ The values associated with sensibility were therefore moral (benevolence, generosity) as well as aesthetic (sensitivity, responsiveness), and the interdependence of these categories helps explain how sensibility could constitute the foundation for an ethical as well as an aesthetic theory: virtue was held to be its own reward because generous behavior automatically returned aesthetic pleasure. Shaftesbury's proposal that man possessed “natural affections,” that his benevolence was innate, was one of many attempts to answer that persistent eighteenth-century question of how legitimate self-interest could be linked to the desire for social good. But while the proposals of several of Shaftesbury's early followers, most notably Francis Hutcheson and Alexander Gerard, continue his emphasis that the moral gesture was simply a natural response of an innate faculty, other moral theorists subjected this moral sense to a more searching analysis. In particular, David Hume, in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), and Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), advanced explanations that prepared the way for more secular and less disinterested theories of man's generosity.

David Hume, for example, makes sympathy the basis for all moral responses, but he goes on to explain that sympathy causes pleasure because through it we perceive how the “good of mankind” advances our own welfare. According to Hume, sympathy

produces our sentiment of morals in all the artificial virtues. From thence we may presume, that it also gives rise to many of the other virtues; and that qualities acquire our approbation, because of their tendency to the good of mankind. … We have no such extensive concern for society but from sympathy; and consequently, 'tis that principle, which takes us so far out of ourselves, as to give us the same pleasure or uneasiness in the characters of others, as if they had a tendency to our own advantage or loss.¹²

Hume openly acknowledges that “men are, in a great measure, govern'd by interest, and that even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, 'tis not to any great distance.”¹³ Only the knowledge that one's individual interest will ultimately be advanced by justice causes man to desire government and practice self-control. Hume, in other words, does not assume that man is naturally benevolent—only that his natural self-interest can be turned to benevolence as sympathy convinces him that his welfare is intimately connected with others'.¹⁴

Adam Smith agrees with Hume's notion that sympathy is the basis of moral action, but in expanding this idea to claim that all desires originate in the desire for sympathy itself, Smith suggests the extent to which the values of sensibility can be made to accommodate the practices of marketplace competition. For Smith insists that even ambition and the desire for “place” spring from man's “regard to the sentiments of mankind,” his desire “to be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency, and approbation.”¹⁵

It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. But vanity is always founded upon the belief of our being the object of attention and approbation. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those aggreable emotions with which the advantages of his situation so readily inspire him. At the thought of this his heart seems to swell and dilate itself within him, and he is fonder of his wealth, upon this account, than for all the other advantages it procures him.¹⁶

Although Smith postulates an internal “impartial spectator” to assure the morality of man's actions, in claiming that man's fundamental desire urges him to improve his material well-being, Smith anchors the rationale for laissez-faire competition in the theory of moral sentiments itself. In his Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith extends this assumption to its logical conclusion, for his explanation that individual and national enrichment stroll hand-in-hand in the healthy glow of unregulated competition suggests that in a free market economy many men simply strive simultaneously, “naturally,” for the essentially non-economic goal of universal respect.¹⁷

Eighteenth-century poetic formulations of the sentimental virtues almost always deny this hospitality to material desire or individualistic competition. But with the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that the ideology of sensibility helped underwrite both laissez-faire capitalism and the self-regulating society the English bourgeoisie desired. Its explanation of human behavior legitimized the bourgeoisie's desire for a weak central government, while its hierarchy of values helped control potentially disruptive religious and political differences. Moreover, as Albert Kuhn has suggested, the man who cultivated sentimental virtues within his position of power also created the impression of aristocratic grace: “he who acquired it [sensibility] was enobled, and was enobling in his society.”¹⁸ We should not forget, of course, that these values also promoted very real beneficial effects: in advocating humanitarian treatment of the poor, a liberal attitude toward the American revolution, and compassion for enslaved Negroes, sensibility contributed to most of the genuinely liberal accomplishments of the period. But sentimental values provided only the rationale, never the power for social or political action. Sentimental virtues, which Edmund Burke called the “softer virtues,” may have helped control or humanize aggression and energy, but by definition, the genuine creature of sensibility was self-effacing and could only influence action indirectly. Thus, however “amiable,” the true practitioner of sensibility was essentially passive, dependent, inferior. In fact, cultivating sensibility without an underlying foundation of political or economic power effectively contributed to keep its practitioner weak.¹⁹

Because women were considered the primary vessels of the sentimental virtues, and because these virtues constituted virtually their only source of social power, women's prescriptive literature generally assumed a cautionary tone, advocating acceptance of limitations but celebrating the indirect power of influence and love. In her poem “Sensibility” (1782), for example, Hannah More voiced many of the feminine commonplaces, assuring her readers that self-denial itself was a significant social contribution.

To bless mankind with tides of flowing wealth,
With rank to grace them, or to crown with health,
Our little lot denies; yet lib'ral still,
Heaven gives its counterpoise to every ill;
Nor let us murmer at our stinted powers,
When kindness, love, and concord may be ours.
The mild forbearance at a brother's fault,
The angry word suppress'd, the taunting thought;
Subduing and subdued, the petty strife,
Which clouds the colour of domestic life;
The sober comfort, all the peace which springs
From the large aggregate of little things;
On these small cares of daughter, wife, or friend,
The almost sacred joys of home depend:
There, Sensibility, thou best may'st reign,
Home is thy true legitimate domain.(20)

More's climactic celebration of the home points up that characteristic tendency, increasingly prevalent in the last decades of the century, to relegate sentimental virtues to the “woman's sphere.” There, these virtues could still exercise their ameliorative effect, as women provided a calm, still center to the otherwise turbulent life of the enterprising bread-winner, and preserved the valuable illusion of stability and continuity even after political and social turmoil undermined that ideal. A woman might be forbidden to own property in her own right, to sue for divorce, or even to visit her children in the wake of a separation, but in the home she embodied and superintended the sentimental virtues and thus the values of a social system already under fire.

In England as abroad, the event which brought the basic assumptions of the sentimental ideology into the range of conservative critics was not increased capitalistic activity or even mob unrest but the outbreak of the French Revolution.²¹ While Thomas Paine, spokesman for those liberal political theories of enlightenment reason so dependent upon the assumptions of sensibility, returned to the argument for “natural” virtue to justify “natural rights,”²² Edmund Burke exposed the contradiction always implicit in the marriage of laissez-faire economics with sentimental morality. Although Burke was primarily arguing against unrestrained reason, in his discussion of the consequences of misplaced confidence in man's nature, he also pointed out that the self-interest the moral philosophers had already acknowledged as compatible with benevolence could easily become that “lust of selfish will” which was currently threatening Church property and social stability. One of Burke's many telling insights was that if one accepts the possibility that virtue is not disinterested, the sentimental rationalization collapses from within. “Self-love and Social” are not necessarily the same in the absence of external regulation; the goal of material well-being may be cloaked with a rationale based on sympathy, but the means of acquiring it and its social consequences may be neither virtuous, benevolent, nor humane.

Burke does not abandon the sentimental virtues; he simply insists that sentiments, like reason, must be regulated by an external authority. Man's natural self-interest must be closely governed by those “just principles” institutionalized in “civil society” so that this sentiment will not erupt into passionate, materialistic desire. According to Burke, only government can protect men—and women—from what he believes would be the inevitable, terrifying result of unregulated feeling: “a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions.” Burke's dramatic presentation of the French Queen, “the morning-star” of sentimental virtues, roused from her bed, forced “to fly almost naked” from the poignards of “cruel ruffians and assassins,” is his nightmare of the social consequences of sensibility loosed, allowed to grow into avaricious passion.²³

II

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) may be seen as a middle class woman's version of Burke's revealing nightmare. Like Burke, Radcliffe perceives the viper of passion sensibility nurses within its breast; remarkably, she even recognizes its economic component. But seeing the crisis in “sentiments, manners, and moral opinions” from inside, as it were, from the perspective of its most likely victim, Radcliffe presents a very different vision of the causes and consequences of Burke's idealized feminine terror. Dramatizing the internal instability of sentimentalism as well as its vulnerability to avarice, Radcliffe explores in detail a woman's psychological responses to the enemy sensibility has bred. But rather than proposing, as Burke does, a paradigm of institutional control, Radcliffe focuses on the moment at which the institutional and familial guardians of paternalistic society simply disappear. And in the wake of that disappearance she sees, clearly if reluctantly, the viper of unleashed passion emerge.

Even though Radcliffe claims that The Mysteries of Udolpho is set in sixteenth-century France, the psychological situation she dramatizes belongs to late eighteenth-century England and to the ideological complexities I have been describing. Only distancing the story, in fact, permits Radcliffe to unmask the implicit threat sensibility poses without challenging its contemporary importance. For, even the limited arena of power sensibility provides women is too valuable for Radcliffe to jeopardize. Thus, by distancing the story Radcliffe prepares from the beginning to displace the threat, to return the sentimental virtues to their admittedly embattled throne.

In The Mysteries, sensibility first helps to establish the stability of that ideal, paternalistic society described in Volume One. There, within a series of protective enclosures—the chateau of La Vallée and her father's care—Emily St. Aubert is able to cultivate, then indulge sentimental virtues—a quick responsiveness to nature and an unreflecting generosity to others. Radcliffe clearly believes that these virtues are valuable, for, initially at least, she sets them up as a counter to that lust for material gain threatening both Emily's society and her own. In Volume One, Radcliffe explicitly establishes an opposition between sentimental virtues—“tenderness, simplicity, and truth”—and their materialistic counterparts—“selfishness, dissipation, and insincerity.” Only by exercising the first can one earn the true “luxury” of aesthetic gratification, as the chevalier Valancourt learns when he donates his last coins to the poor. Valancourt's enrichment is immediate: “his gay spirits danced with pleasure; every object around him appeared more interesting, or beautiful, than before.”²⁴ Beside this, Radcliffe suggests, the “frivolous” pleasures of material wealth are artificial, cold, and unsatisfying.

In her descriptions of sensibility, Radcliffe preserves the marriage of ethical and aesthetic components we saw in earlier theories: “Virtue and taste are nearly the same,” Emily's father explains, “for virtue is little more than active taste, and the most delicate affection of each combine in real love” (I, v, 49-50). But aesthetic rewards automatically follow virtuous actions only as long as sensibility operates in an environment regulated by a moral authority. Emily's youthful pleasures and Valancourt's aesthetic delight are possible only in the gentle French countryside, where “the sublime luxuries” of God's natural world always greet the questing heart. In order to be effective, sensibility needs some such external governance, for, as Radcliffe is quick to note, sensibility itself is inherently unstable: it is susceptible to “excess.” And “all excess is vicious,” as St. Aubert warns Emily.²⁵ St. Aubert's dying words convey his deep suspicion of indulged sensibility:

“Above all, my dear Emily … do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those, who really possess sensibility, ought early to be taught, that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery, or delight, from every surrounding circumstance. And, since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them.”

(I, vii, 79-80)

The “painful circumstances” St. Aubert describes are those anarchic situations beyond the purview of paternalistic guardians, where the feeling heart is exposed to the tyranny of others or the riot of its own excess. Emily St. Aubert soon experiences both of these dilemmas, for, when her father dies, she is exiled from her protected childhood home and taken to the city, where there is no moral protector. Instead, Emily is placed in the custody of her aunt and Signor Montoni, Italian incarnation of excess itself. Subjected to Montoni's unprincipled tyranny, Emily learns the terrible meaning of her father's words: without external protection the creature of sensibility has no power over herself or others. In the avaricious anarchy of Montoni's circle, feelings do not become principles, and thus the sentimental heroine is helpless before both real and imaginary villains.

Radcliffe's twofold critique of sensibility achieves its clearest articulation in the episodes that take place within Montoni's decaying Alpine retreat, the castle of Udolpho. Udolpho is the sinister inverse of La Vallée, an enclosure whose boundaries oppress rather than protect, a prison which shelters hatred rather than love, a bastille which excludes both law and moral nature itself. Within Udolpho Emily is totally helpless: Montoni dictates her confinement and her virtual isolation. But the external tyranny is, on the surface at least, less oppressive than the terror generated by Emily's own undisciplined imagination. There is, as time will tell, nothing supernatural in Udolpho's winding corridors, but there are evil agents; and Emily's overly sensitive imagination, deprived of external guides, all too readily converts the unnatural into the supernatural. Thus Radcliffe's first critique of sensibility focuses squarely on the imagination itself.

For Radcliffe, as for Adam Smith, the imagination is the faculty responsible for the aesthetic—and thus the ethical—response of sensibility. A capacious faculty, the imagination prompts the feeling heart to project itself into another's situation; by transforming the beneficiary's gratitude into the benefactor's pleasure, the imagination therefore presides over that reciprocity between virtuous actions and aesthetic rewards we have already seen. But Radcliffe insists that the imagination may also be the principle agent in victimizing its vessel, for the imagination is not inherently moral; it is merely susceptible. Only as long as Emily is protected by a moral environment can her imagination receive the divine benefits embodied in the natural world.²⁶ And only as long as her own feelings are calm can she trust her imagination even to extend itself outward toward that comforting landscape. Within Udolpho, Emily is persecuted by “those mysterious workings, that rouse the elements of man's nature into tempest” (II, xi, 329), and consequently her senses become “dead” to the awe-inspiring scenery outside the castle. Repeatedly during her imprisonment Emily laments the “irresistible force of circumstances over the taste and powers of the mind” (III, v, 383). In “painful circumstances” such as these, a cruel new reciprocity is established: the imagination turns back upon itself and exudes demons which feed its own excess.

The interior of Udolpho is a maze of dimly lit corridors, murky recesses, and obscure stairways. This darkness only exacerbates Emily's condition, for Udolpho's gloom completely baffles perception. In such complete obscurity the imagination is cut loose from all governing images, moral or otherwise. Aroused yet unguided, its innate susceptibility becomes an aggressive force, rushing to fill the void with its own projected images, creating, in effect, an external “reality” as idiosyncratic as the psyche itself. Just beyond the responsiveness of feeling, Radcliffe warns, there lurks this completely amoral, uncontrollable force: “the wild energy of passion, inflaming imagination, bearing down the barriers of reason and living in a world of its own” (II, xi, 329).

Like many women novelists of this period, Radcliffe is using the spectral arena of the Gothic castle to dramatize the eruption of psychic material ordinarily controlled by the inhibitions of bourgeois society.²⁷ It is revealing that Radcliffe explicitly links this “energy” with “passion,” for Emily's response, like those of her numerous sisters, enacts what we now think of as the see-saw of liberated desire and repression. Vacillating between curiosity and fear, Emily is bold enough to explore the castle's darkest recesses, but when she imagines a corpse “crimsoned with human blood,” she retreats from confrontation by fainting. Again, she boldly lifts the forbidding veil of an ominous painting, but falls senseless to the floor before she can identify its contents. Within Udolpho, desire wrestles with dread, even though the heroine is too discreet to recognize the sexual component of her energy.

Radcliffe, however, does acknowledge the kinship between imaginative responsiveness and sexual desire. Through the character of Sister Agnes, Radcliffe suggests that, given slightly different circumstances, Emily's intense susceptibility could have taken a more destructive incarnation. Because Agnes is rumored to be Emily's real mother, her anguished cry implicates her astonished listener:

“Sister! beware of the first indulgence of the passions; beware of the first! Their course, if not checked then, is rapid—their force is uncontroulable—they lead us we know not whither—they lead us perhaps to the commission of crimes, for which whole years of prayer and penitence cannot atone!—Such may be the force of even a single passion, that it overcomes every other, and sears up every other approach to the heart. Possessing us like a fiend, it leads us on to the acts of a fiend, making us insensible to pity and to conscience.”

(IV, xvi, 646)

The crime of Sister Agnes, born the Lady Laurentini, was giving in to passion, agreeing to become the mistress of the Marquis de Villeroi. In Radcliffe's world, the devastation Agnes describes inevitably follows such liberation of feminine feeling, for, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has noted, “to submit to passion means to abandon the controls by which women even more than men—given their social conditions—must live.”²⁸ Abandoning the “controls,” those moral feelings internalized as “principles,” catapults a woman into the anarchy of sexual desire and tears from her the last remnants of her social power, even her identity. This, then, is at the heart of Radcliffe's critique of sensibility's affinity to “excess”: the amoral energy beyond responsiveness is the “fiend” of sexual desire, whose crimes neither prayers nor regrets can undo.

Despite her undeniable responsiveness, however, Emily's curiosity never becomes full-fledged sexual desire—largely because Radcliffe presides over her situation. For Radcliffe does not stop with uncovering the internal instability of sensibility; beyond a woman's natural susceptibility to passion Radcliffe intuits an even more threatening fiend. Sensibility is dangerous, as Emily's hysteria shows, because it encourages imaginative and libidinal excesses; but its more telling liability resides in its inability to resist the masculine version of desire—the lust of unregulated avarice.²⁹

For most of the two central volumes of The Mysteries, Emily's external circumstances are almost completely controlled by Montoni. The Italian has the power to tyrannize her helpless virtue because his position is protected by law and, more importantly, because his energy is a purely aggressive force, immune to the socializing reciprocity of sensibility.

Delighting in the tumult and in the struggles of life, he was equally a stranger to pity and to fear; his very courage was a sort of animal ferocity; not the noble impulse of a principle, such as inspirits the mind against the oppressor, in the cause of the oppressed; but a constitutional hardiness of nerve, that cannot feel, and that, therefore, cannot fear.

(III, ii, 358)

Montoni's calculating passion is the most powerful force Radcliffe dramatizes in The Mysteries, for his purely materialistic appetite scorns the aesthetic rewards of sensibility. Through her depiction of Montoni and in the network of economic themes centering on him, Radcliffe delivers her second, and most telling, critique of sensibility: this is the viper its assumptions have allowed—the masculine passion of unregulated, individualistic, avaricious desire. This monster operates wholly outside the moral universe, and sensibility's amiable “principles” will never take root in its icy heart. The surfacing of this force as a figure in Radcliffe's fiction attests to her remarkable ability to penetrate the surface of the sentimental ideology, to see through to its economic base. Yet even as she unmasks the hideous incarnation of capitalistic energy she returns to the very values she has just proved inadequate. For Radcliffe can imagine no force apart from sensibility's feminine principles to control this masculine force.

In what Robert Kiely has called “the male world of Udolpho,”³⁰ the most significant confrontation is that between Emily's sentimental virtues and Montoni's materialistic desire. Money, in fact, lurks behind every turn of The Mysteries' plot. Emily's hysteria within Udolpho is ultimately a consequence of her legal dependence on Montoni; as an orphan, she is penniless and powerless; as a female she has no legal rights. Her immediate poverty, however, will soon be replaced by comparative wealth, for upon coming of age Emily stands to inherit several valuable estates in Gascony. This situation—not sexual desire—motivates Montoni's original interest in Emily: as an imminent heiress, Emily is a potentially valuable commodity on the marriage market, and, quite simply, Montoni needs Emily's estates to pay off his gambling debts. Emily is shocked to learn the truth from Count Morano, her would-be purchaser: “‘You hear, that Montoni is a villain,’ exclaimed Morano with vehemence,—‘a villain who would have sold you to my love! … Emily! he has no principle, when interest, or ambition leads’” (II, vi, 262). Morano himself, although he seems to Emily to pose a sexual threat, is also motivated by materialistic desire. “A man of ruined fortune,” Morano has plotted to defraud Montoni of Emily's estates. In fact, it was the discovery of this design that prompted Montoni to imprison Emily in Udolpho in the first place (II, vii, 273-74).

In a society in which a single woman's value is intimately tied to both sexual purity and endowed property, the consequences of sexual and economic exploitation are effectively identical: either would curtail Emily's chance of attaining social identity through the only avenue open to her—marriage. But Radcliffe depicts masculine avarice as more powerful than lust because she recognizes that the “unfeeling” energy Montoni embodies is actually a denial of feeling. It therefore threatens to undermine the entire system of social values that protects the vulnerable woman.³¹ Montoni's passion “entirely supplie[s] the place of principles” (III, viii, 435), and once such feminine, sentimental principles as sensitivity, responsiveness, decorum and generosity are no longer also considered “manly” there will be no governing code to socialize aggressive energy. Radcliffe diagrams this lesson explicitly in Valancourt's experience in Paris. There, despondent over his separation from Emily, the susceptible young man falls prey to the charms of salons and the temptations of the gaming table. Artificial beauties and the lure of a quick fortune conspire “to dazzle his imagination, and re-animate his spirits,” and the passion he develops for gambling displaces his feeling for Emily, leads him into debt, and culminates in imprisonment. Only when incarcerated—protected, that is, from his own passion—can Valancourt benefit from Emily's socializing image:

In the solitude of his prison, Valancourt had leisure for reflection, and cause for repentance; here, too, the image of Emily, which, amidst the dissipation of the city had been obscured, but never obliterated from his heart, revived with all the charms of innocence and beauty, to reproach him for having sacrificed his happiness and debased his talents by pursuits, which his nobler faculties would formerly have taught him to consider were as tasteless as they were degrading.

(IV, xv, 652)

If Valancourt's passion had been left to pursue its natural course, the chevalier's “nobler faculties” would presumably have become as unresponsive as Montoni's. And without “taste” to principle his behavior, Valancourt's desire for Emily would hardly have remained virtuous. In this lesson, Radcliffe implies that the feminine values of sensibility could socialize masculine energy—if there were some sure way to enforce them, if, in other words, there were some authority strong enough to keep masculine energy from becoming Montoni's fatal power.

III

The “solution” Radcliffe offers in Valancourt's story obviously does not resolve the problem of Montoni or his materialistic desire. For the sentimental ideology, delegating responsibility for moral action to the individual's own aesthetic taste, provides for no institutional watchman to discipline the “unprincipled” man. In fact, the absence of this provision virtually invites such calculating fiends to prey on sensibility's defenseless creatures. But even more frightening is the possibility that, in yoking self-interest to the desire for sympathy, sensibility has actually assisted in the birth of this beast. Hydra-like, its antithesis emerges from the sentimental ideology, promising to devour it as it grows.

Radcliffe's insight that economic forces underlie the challenge to feminine values is, therefore, potentially subversive to those values themselves. But Radcliffe does not pursue this insight to its logical conclusion. For, although by the 1790's the social and ideological revolution Burke had feared was clearly underway, compelling Radcliffe to respond to sensibility's limitations, the attendant possibility of complete social and ethical chaos was simply too disturbing for Radcliffe—or her largely middle class female audience—to confront.³² Rather than sacrifice the sentimental virtues, therefore, Radcliffe tries to manage these anxieties by imaginatively insulating the ideology's feminine virtues from the masculine threat of material self-interest. Radcliffe insists, first of all, that, despite all evidence, passion can be governed by principles. And, in order to insure their victory, she simply abolishes the “painful circumstances” that undermined their power. By taking Emily out of Udolpho, restoring her to nature's inspiring influence and to a moral, paternalistic society, Radcliffe is able to substitute ethical dilemmas for the unresolvable threat of avarice and to return the plot complication to a harmless encounter between virtue and error. Radcliffe's strategies are conspicuous, and more than anything, they call attention to the difficulties materialism posed for sentimental values, but her very insistence attests to her investment in saving the sentimental ideology from itself.

The first of these substitutions occurs even before Emily is liberated from Udolpho. Having imagined that the recurring sound of a French ballad must mean that Valancourt is imprisoned in the castle, Emily is shocked senseless to discover that the hidden singer, into whose arms she has thrown herself, is a complete stranger. This dilemma, of course, is one which sentimental principles can resolve. Upon regaining consciousness, Emily assures Monsieur du Pont that she mistook him for someone else and appeals to his virtue to pardon her indecorous behavior. Emily is correct in judging du Pont to be a harmless creature of sensibility like herself. Du Pont is so responsive, in fact, that his impassioned apology brings Montoni's ruffians crashing into their secluded hiding place.

Emily escapes from Udolpho with surprisingly little trouble, given Montoni's previous absolute power. But she must still endure two important dilemmas which take the place of and, by implication, are meant to resolve the anxieties generated within Udolpho. First, rumors of Valancourt's behavior in Paris endanger Emily's future happiness; then the suggestion that her beloved father might have nursed an illicit affection threatens to undermine the authority of her cherished sentimental education. Radcliffe invests these possibilities with enormous thematic and emotional significance, for Valancourt's passion for gambling and St. Aubert's promiscuity seem to be embryonic versions of the destructive energy Montoni embodies. By dramatizing the socialization of passion—or denying its presence altogether—in these good characters, Radcliffe simultaneously constructs a model of how excess can be contained and attempts to negate those disturbing suggestions Montoni aroused.

Valancourt's rehabilitation, which I have already described, demonstrates Radcliffe's strategy most clearly. By permitting him to be infected by and then cured of the same “unnatural,” avaricious passion that characterizes Montoni, Radcliffe offers the possibility that this disruptive force can be controlled—if it could remain sufficiently responsive to the aesthetically gratifying principles of feminine virtue. With some kind of infallible external control, perhaps even the male, possessed of the more dangerous energy, could be taught to internalize virtue, to attune his desires to the principles dictated by his “nobler faculties.”

Neither Emily nor the reader learns of Valancourt's reformation until very late in the narrative, however, for Radcliffe uses this uncertainty to demonstrate the wisdom of St. Aubert. Emily believes Valancourt has fallen; therefore she must choose between the restraint advocated by her father and the special pleading of her own desire. When she resolutely follows her father's advice, subduing her implicitly sexual passion by means of principled feeling, she proves herself capable of managing her own sensibility—in such strictly benign circumstances, of course. Radcliffe immediately rewards Emily with both the “rational happiness” of marriage and the knowledge that St. Aubert's loved one was, appropriately, his own sister.

Radcliffe completes her strategy of substitution by sustaining the mystery of Valancourt's fall and the identity of St. Aubert's other love for almost 500 pages. Just as the perceptual obscurity of Udolpho jeopardized Emily's self-command, so the opaqueness of ignorance threatens her ethical security. By having Emily overcome the second trial, Radcliffe attempts to eradicate the ominous implications of the first. Radcliffe's notorious revelations contribute to this same strategy: just as time can erase the apparent moral failings of Valancourt and St. Aubert, so the narrator can provide natural explanations for most of Udolpho's apparently supernatural horrors. Even if these explanations do not successfully offset the anxieties Udolpho and Montoni originally generated, Radcliffe clearly wants to create the effect of having resolved the ideological complexities by working through the less intractible, newly centered moral problems. Radcliffe disposes of the remaining loose ends with equal ease: Montoni is arrested and dies in prison, mysteriously and offstage (presumably, a victim of evil's natural attribution), Emily regains her father's and her aunt's estates, Valancourt's brother gives him entail to his family's “rich domain,” and Udolpho passes into the possession of a female relative—thus, we assume, into socializing control.

Not surprisingly, the new order ushered in at the end of the romance simply restores the traditional, paternalistic community of Emily's childhood, with the social contract of marriage now presiding in St. Aubert's place. Marriage sanctifies and socializes the desires of Emily and Valancourt and they retire to Emily's reclaimed ancestral estate, to bask happily ever after in the glow of virtue rewarded. The undisputed possession of property protects them from the temptations of avaricious desire, and perfect reciprocity is reestablished between the aesthetic charms of moral nature and the ethical responses of a sympathetic, but principled heart. Those subversive traces of sexual and materialistic passion engendered in Udolpho might almost vanish in the mist of this protective, pastoral harmony. In the last paragraphs of the novel, Radcliffe cannot help but applaud her artful contrivance:

O! how joyful it is to tell of happiness, such as that of Valancourt and Emily; to relate, that, after suffering under the oppression of the vicious and the disdain of the weak, they were, at length, restored to each other—to the beloved landscapes of their native country,—to the securest felicity of this life, that of aspiring to moral and labouring for intellectual improvement—to the pleasures of an enlightened society, and to the exercise of the benevolence, which had always animated their hearts; while the bowers of La Vallée became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness!

(IV, xix, 672)

The aura of fantasy that enchants this final arrangement suggests that it does not constitute a convincing solution to the problem of how virtue is to be protected from internal or external threats. Radcliffe dramatizes no “enlightened society” to offset the power of Montoni's tyranny, she has emphatically shown this harmony not to be “secure,” and the retreat to the domestic comforts of La Vallée hardly illuminates the darkness of the castle Emily has left behind. The anxieties generated by Montoni's avarice simply continue to haunt the formulaic resolution Radcliffe asserts. Having admitted the genuine spectre of aggressive, individualistic energy into her fiction, Radcliffe cannot effectively disarm its threat. Having uncovered the material forces which actually endanger the sentimental ideology, she cannot successfully contain their subversive threats without abandoning those sentimental values she cherishes. The dissatisfaction registered by generations of readers testifies to the discrepancy between the complexities Radcliffe has raised and the simplistic solution she proposes. “Curiosity,” as Coleridge remarked of The Mysteries, “is raised oftener than it is gratified; or rather, it is raised so high that no adequate gratification can be given it.”³³

One point still needs to be made. For despite the fact that Radcliffe dramatizes, in no uncertain terms, the inherent liabilities of the sentimental ideology, she nevertheless suggests that there is a positive as well as a defensive reason for preserving feminine values. Even at the moment of Emily's greatest victimage, within the oppressive walls of Udolpho, Radcliffe attributes to her a very real—if indirect—power. Much of the interest of the romance centers, in fact, on how Emily will be able to exercise this power given the extremity of her “painful circumstances.”³⁴ Radcliffe postpones Emily's marriage to Valancourt, promised early in Volume One, not primarily so that the young chevalier can prove himself or make his fortune, but so that the young woman can have an opportunity to test her power, to enjoy an intense (if harrowing) adventure before settling into her “proper sphere.” Udolpho obviously poses unexpected psychological complexities for Emily, but it also offers her this chance to exercise an ingenuity which the rules of propriety will soon deny her. Exploring the labyrinthine corridors virtually at will, penetrating into secret passageways and eavesdropping on Montoni's midnight revels, Emily answers the Italian's blatant bravado with a quiet resourcefulness that eventually enables her to elude him. Even at her moment of greatest danger, when Montoni demands the transfer of her ancestral estates, the girl demonstrates a remarkable power in denying him his desires. The roots of her strength lie in that particularly feminine gesture of passive aggression, but Montoni's frustration is no less for the delicacy of his antagonist.

Thus we can see in The Mysteries that Radcliffe affirms the sentimental values at least partly because they do provide women power, even if it is only the indirect or negative power of influence and resistance. By elevating women's dependent position, their victimage, to the status of myth, Radcliffe is even able to suggest a degree of heroism in these gestures. Emily's ability to frustrate Montoni's designs at least retards, if not actually undermines, his triumph, and in so doing she proves an important agent in protecting—in the fiction—the status quo against the threat of encroaching materialism. But, significantly, Radcliffe allows Emily such extraordinary power only within Udolpho. After her escape Emily returns to a more typical position of dependence, ward first of du Pont, then of the father-surrogate Count de Villefort, then of the exonerated Valancourt. In the realm of bandetti and political intrigue outside the castle men once more take the initiative, and the tension and complexity of the narrative diminish proportionately. Like Emily, Radcliffe is only willing to elaborate the feminine potential for power within definite bounds; only the extremity of Udolpho's oppression sanctions such unorthodox fantasies of resistance become heroism. Radcliffe's final moralistic apologia returns her romantic dreams to their appropriate, humble proportion:

And, if the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it—the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.

(III, xviii, 672)

The legacy Ann Radcliffe bequeathes us is neither a singleminded call to abandon the sentimental values nor a wholehearted endorsement of them. Rather, hers is a complex, even contradictory response which reveals, most significantly, the power of sentimentalism and the competing tendencies within the ideology. Her romance reminds us that sensibility was not just a minor literary movement but a set of values and images which legitimized economic and political behavior as well; and that it, like any system of values, was never monolithic but harbored, even nurtured, its ideological opposite. As the foundation for the decidedly ambiguous power granted women in the late eighteenth century and as one theory hospitable to capitalism before its triumph, sensibility deserves more careful attention than it has yet received.

Radcliffe's romance also reminds us that all art—even specifically non-political art—constitutes a response to material conditions and the systems of ideas they generate. The Mysteries of Udolpho is, on the surface, merely an escapist fantasy, providing vicarious thrills for thousands of homebound, altogether proper ladies. But these fantasies announce the frustrations and desires of an important social group at an important historical moment. Responding to the threat revolutionary turmoil posed to sentimentalism, Radcliffe sees to the heart of the sentimental code by which she lives; she sees its price and its rewards; she sees its bitter economic root and its beautiful flowering in feminine virtue. Even her refusal to explore the implications of her insight is an important aspect of her response, for it tells of the shelter sentimental values offered their middle class proponents. The Mysteries of Udolpho reminds us, in short, that the imagination's response to reality involves testing, rejecting, and affirming values; and that in the process of creating meaning it may offer insights into changes deep in the social system itself.

Notes

1. My use of “ideology” as a lived system of values follows the definition provided by Terry Eagleton in Marxism and Literary Criticism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), pp. 16-17. “Ideology is not in the first place a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class-society, the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions and so prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole.” In this sense, an ideology is largely class-specific, although even the dominant ideology must contain values or images meaningful to other classes if it is to retain its power. See also Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 55-71, for a discussion of the history, ambiguities, and limitations of this term. Following Williams' critique of critics' tendency to limit ideology to separable concepts, I try here to show how, even for its proponents, ideology necessarily involves a process of producing meaning, the lived experience of testing, rejecting and affirming that system of values which defines one's position within a culture.

2. For discussions of the social turmoil of the late eighteenth century and the ongoing resistance of urban and rural poor to the values of paternalism, see Douglas Hay, “Property, Authority, and Criminal Law,” Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,” and E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Hay et al. (New York: Random House, 1975; Pantheon Books), pp. 17-118, 255-308. For a discussion of the challenge posed to paternalism by the development of a class society, see Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society 1780-1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969; paper edition, 1972), pp. 176-217.

3. Although some of the values and attitudes of middle and upper middle class women were emulated by lower classes, my discussion of the values of sensibility is confined to those middle class women who largely made up the female reading public.

4. The Female Aegis, Or, the Duties of Woman from Childhood to Old Age, and in Most Situations of Life, Exemplified (London: Sampson Low, 1798; rpt. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1974), p. 9.

5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (1762; New York: Dutton, 1911), p. 324.

6. Female Aegis, pp. 3-4.

7. See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 64-74.

8. Female Aegis, p. 30.

9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792; New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1967), p. 34.

10. Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education with a View of the Principles and Conduct Prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799), 2: 23.

11. In his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), Raymond Williams explains that the word sensibility was, throughout the eighteenth century, informed by its root affiliation with sensible and that it was closely associated with both sentimental and sentiments. “The significant development in ‘sense’ was the extension from a process to a particular kind of product: ‘sense’ as good sense, good judgment, from which the predominant modern meaning of sensible was to be derived. … Sensibility in its C 18 uses ranged from a use much like that of modern ‘awareness’ (not only ‘consciousness’ but ‘conscience’) to a strong form of what the word appears literally to mean, the ability to feel. … The association [of sentimental] with sensibility was then close: a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption of feelings.” See Keywords, pp. 235-38. I use sensibility and sentimentalism interchangeably.

12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (1739 and 1740; Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 628-29, 630.

13. Treatise, pp. 385-86.

14. “In the execution and decision of justice, men acquire a security against each others weakness and passion, as well as against their own, and under shelter of the governors, begin to taste at ease the sweets of society and mutual assistance.” Treatise, p. 589.

15. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; or, An Essay Towards an Analysis of the Principles by Which Men Naturally Judge Concerning the Conduct and Character, First of Their Neighbours, and Afterwards of Themselves (1759; London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861), pp. 70-72.

16. Moral Sentiments, p. 71.

17. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 100-13.

18. Albert J. Kuhn, “Introduction” to Three Sentimental Novels (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, Inc., 1970), p. vi.

19. When Edmund Burke discusses the “softer virtues” (“easiness of temper, compassion, kindness and liberality”), he makes it clear that these qualities, though more “amiable,” are “inferior in dignity” to the “sublime” virtues such as “fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like.” See A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757; Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968), pp. 110-11. It is also clear from Burke's entire discussion of the “beautiful” that he associates these charming but decidedly inferior virtues with women and womanly behavior. A man could also cultivate sentimental virtues and sensibility (as Valancourt and du Pont do) but, as Sterne's Yorick proves, that man will incur feminine weakness and vulnerability along with feminine feeling.

20. Hannah More, “Sensibility: An Epistle to the Honorable Mrs. Boscawen,” in The Works of Hannah More, 7 vols. (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, & P. Jackson, 1834), 5: 338-39.

21. This fact helps explain why most critics of the sentimental ideology, as Burke, for example, did not turn their critique of liberal politics to economic laissez-faire activities at home. Burke, in fact, supported liberal economic policies in England. See his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795).

22. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1790; 1791; Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973), p. 350.

23. Reflections, pp. 84-89, 111.

24. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance, Interspersed with Some Pieces of Poetry, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (1794; London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), I, v, 53. All future references to this edition will be cited in the text by volume, book, and page numbers.

25. A common adage, even in the last decade of the century. Cf. Burke, “No excess is good.” Reflections, p. 179.

26. Before entering Udolpho, Emily's experiences with nature are decidedly religious. For example: “From the consideration of His works, her mind arose to the adoration of the Deity, in His goodness and power; wherever she turned her view, whether on the sleeping earth, or to the vast regions of space, glowing with worlds beyond the reach of human thought, the sublimity of God, and the majesty of His presence appeared. Her eyes were filled with tears of awful love and admiration; and she felt that pure devotion, superior to all the distinctions of human system, which lifts the soul above this world, and seems to expand it into a nobler nature; such devotion as can, perhaps, only be experienced, when the mind, rescued, for a moment, from the humbleness of earthly considerations, aspires to contemplate His power in the sublimity of His works, and His goodness in the infinity of His blessings.” Mysteries, I, iv, 47-48.

27. See especially Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 72-78, and Norman N. Holland and Leona F. Sherman, “Gothic Possibilities,” New Literary History, 8 (1977), 279-94.

28. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 85.

29. Nelson C. Smith, in his article “Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe,” (Studies in English Literature, 13 [1973], 577), also observes that Radcliffe was critical of sensibility, “Far from being an advocate of sensibility, she, like Jane Austen two decades later, shows its weakness and flaws.” But Smith, and most of the critics who have followed him, asserts that the cure for indulged sensibility is simply a “return to reason.” Radcliffe's insight that sensibility is intimately connected to sexual and avaricious passion clearly makes such a solution, while attractive, impossible.

30. The Romantic Novel, p. 75.

31. It is interesting to note here the reversal in priorities that has occurred since Richardson's Clarissa. In the earlier novel, the threat to Clarissa's virginity was foregrounded and the economic “rape” by the aristocrat Lovelace was subordinated. Richardson's Christian plot focuses specifically on the spiritual dimension of the heroine's physical fall. For Radcliffe, on the other hand, otherworldly consolation is intimately linked to earthly conditions; without sufficient money to protect herself, Emily's physical integrity would always be in danger. Thus Radcliffe foregrounds the economic threat as endangering both sexual and spiritual security.

32. Radcliffe's was not, of course, the only possible fictional response to this situation. Other middle class women novelists, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft, explicitly repudiated both the sentimental ideology and the emergent capitalism that threatened it. But we should remember that Radcliffe's romances found a much larger audience than did Wollstonecraft's Maria or Mary—no doubt because Radcliffe voiced the fears and fantasies of a majority of the female reading public.

33. S. T. Coleridge, “Review of The Mysteries of Udolpho, A Romance,” in Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), p. 357.

34. Robert Kiely also discusses this point. See The Romantic Novel, p. 73.