[In the following essay, Flaxman declares that critics need to recognize Radcliffe's work as innovative for its time, emphasizing the author's descriptive skills and highlighting her particular techniques in painting a scene.]

The new scholarship on women has extended our sense of the novel tradition by bringing hitherto neglected works by women to the attention of critics. Although Ann Radcliffe's work has never been completely neglected, reassessment reveals her importance as a formal innovator in the history of the English novel. Often she is praised for her attention to setting and story and for softening and romanticizing the conventional Gothic novel's atmosphere from horrific effects to merely terrifying ones. But she has never been recognized sufficiently for establishing a new descriptive mode and technique for the novel. In so doing, she effectively expands the novel's rhetorical possibilities.

Radcliffe was one of the first English novelists to elevate extended, visually oriented landscape description—previously nearly the exclusive province of poetry—to a position of prominence in English fiction. In addition to establishing a new subject—subsequently developed by writers as diverse as Scott, Ruskin, Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf—she was the first to apply a genuinely cinematic technique to these descriptions. This technique, which I have labeled cinematic word-painting, refers to landscape descriptions that borrow pictorial techniques from the visual arts, with one significant addition. From the visual arts word-painting adapts framing devices, a consistent visual perspective, and compositional strategies, such as attention to volume, mass, the contrast between light and dark, and careful application of coloristic effects. In addition, the mode relies on a narrator/viewer who scans visual data according to a coherent point-of-view allowing the reader to visualize the general compositional configurations as if through a camera eye. This cinematic technique renders a spatially coherent landscape and gives the illusion of kinesis that emerges from a clear spatial progression from foreground to background, much as a modern camera zooms over a scene. Obviously, Radcliffe knew nothing of modern cinematography, but her technique for capturing landscape in language closely resembles filmic “visualization through perspective” that combines object and seer.¹

Although cinematic word-paintings often appear to “freeze” narrative progression, the viewer's metaphorical journey through a landscape represents kinesis within stasis and may amend Ephraim Lessing's famous distinction between poetry and painting.² It also allows novelists to integrate description with narration by relating the object being observed to qualities of the viewer or its mood to anticipations of future events. Although Radcliffe rarely achieves such a symbolic interchange of significance—indeed, she was relatively uninterested in these relationships—her landscape description sometimes achieves the effect of a “narrative of landscape.” Such a technique implies progression from one element to another focused through the unique consciousness of a particular spectator and, echoing the form of narrative itself, may represent one of English fiction's first dramatizations of the visual imagination itself.

The “dual modes of vision” to which this essay's title refers acknowledges that Radcliffe only rarely achieves the consistency and kinetic effectiveness of a genuine word-painting. In her most famous work. The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, descriptions mostly adhere to conventional stylistic eighteenth-century modes. Radcliffe's dominant descriptive mode presents static “catalogues” of elements in a landscape that are described in generalized, abstract terms and ordinarily rely heavily on contemporary formulas for the obligatory balancing of the sublime with the beautiful. The opening paragraph of the novel exemplifies such an approach.

On the pleasant banks of the Garonne, in the Province of Gascony, stood, in the year 1584, the chateau of Monsieur St. Aubert. From its windows were seen the pastoral landscapes of Guienne and Gascony, stretching along the river, gay with luxurient woods and vines, and plantations of olives. To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrennees [sic], whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose. To the north, and to the east, the plains of Guienne and Languedoc were lost in the mist of distance; on the west Gascony was bounded by the waters of Biscay.³

A disembodied voice opens the novel by enumerating elements characteristic of pastoral scene: gently winding river, noble mansion, cultivated slopes, and flocks grazing on soft, green mountain pastures near the cottages of simple peasants. The identity of the observer is not important, and our ability to visualize the scene is hampered by the illogical perspective and the inert passivity of the language. Although there is a faint attempt to move our mental eye from the chateau to the Pyrenees to the south and then to north, east, and west in turn, it is impossible to understand how the observer can describe the chateau and the view from its windows simultaneously. The passive voice allows no rhythmic enlivening of the stilted, choppy phrases that build complex, often confusing, sentences. Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs lack specificity and color, but all elements contribute to depicting a natural landscape of peace and harmony between human beings and nature where “the eye after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose” at an appropriately moderate mid-height.

The passage, though inert, introduces two favorite Radcliffian framing devices borrowed from the visual arts. We often find the heroine, Emily St. Aubert, gazing through a window onto a beautiful scene. This window helps to limit and organize what the observer sees; in addition, as in the passage above, a line of trees, a body of water, or the horizon line demarcates the farthest limit of her vision.

Radcliffe's dominant descriptive mode is characterized by descriptions of beautiful landscapes expressed in generalized diction that fails to capture their uniqueness. Her cinematic word-paintings, however, contrast vividly with the technique illustrated above. Her imagination, when thoroughly aroused by her concept of sublime landscape, struggles to free itself from generalized description to achieve an almost scientific particularity of observation. Not only does she include acute visual detail in such passages, but she also works out a kinetic technique to make the reader believe she or he sees the wild scenes she so obviously loved. Interestingly, Radcliffe's word-paintings represent the only places in The Mysteries of Udolpho where I sense the presence of a unique, impassioned voice. It is clearly the voice of Radcliffe herself.

There are five major word-paintings in Udolpho inserted among long narrative passages and briefer descriptive ones.⁴ Their distribution may be structurally significant, for one important word-painting appears in each volume of the novel except for volume 3. A major cluster of extended landscape descriptions occurs in volume 2 and visualizes the heroine's journey through the Alps to Italy, her first brief look at Venice, and her journey through the Apennines to the Castle of Udolpho, a climactic moment in the complex plotting of the work. Through a close reading of the journey to Udolpho itself, I hope to demonstrate my claim for Radcliffe: that, although we might consider her “fetter'd” by the formulaic plots, characters, and themes of the Gothic tradition, she felt relatively freer than her male counterparts to explore the unknown territory of the cinematic word-painting and to contribute an innovative subject and technique to the English novel.

A brief sketch of the three major settings for Emily St. Aubert's literal and symbolic journey toward knowledge and happiness orients us to the complicated plot of The Mysteries of Udolpho. The novel begins in La Vallée, Emily's childhood home, where Emily lives harmoniously with nature in a version of the pastoral ideal, and no terrifying mysteries intrude. Although the author pays lip service to its picturesque beauties, the second major setting, the forbidding Castle of Udolpho, set amid the splendor and sublimity of the Alps, is the one that fully arouses the author's powers of description. This setting also provides the context for Emily's most lurid trials at the hands of the villainous Montoni. In the third setting, Chateau-le-Beau, Emily encounters her most sophisticated test, for she is required to discriminate between subtle manifestations of good and evil as the pastoral and gothic, the rational and irrational intermingle. Once Emily has learned to separate reality from illusion, her education is complete and her reward is marriage to the pallid, imperfect, but nonetheless lovable Valancourt.

At La Vallée the mountains and cliffs, safely remote, rim the horizon, providing a useful contrast with the cultivated valley. The light in this valley is clear, bright, and gay, permeated by soft greens and blues. But, as the recently orphaned Emily, her aunt, and the menacing Montoni (her aunt's new husband), journey through the Alps toward Montoni's castle, the landscape changes dramatically, as do the organizing mode of perception and the general level of intensity in the language. Here, finally, Radcliffe's writing achieves the sweep and vivid detail of a cinematic word painting that distinguishes this mode from the static catalogue this essay previously examined.

The passage beginning “at length, they reached a little plain, where the drivers stopped to rest the mules” organizes the dramatic ascent of the Alps as a progression through vistas—framed “scenes”—that provide suspense as Emily and her group near their destination. The journey gives Radcliffe the opportunity to describe visual elements that almost always appear as part of a Radcliffian landscape of the sublime and that clearly excite her imagination in a way entirely different from landscapes merely beautiful. The pictorial motifs might well remind us of a canvas by Rosa, Claude, or Poussin, whose paintings provided Radcliffe's only idea of how the Alps looked at the time she was writing The Mysteries of Udolpho. The cult of the picturesque dictated recurrent elements in Radcliffe's descriptions such as forbidding precipices, gnarled trees abutting tortuous narrow paths into high mountains, and the pastoral landscape stretching into the mists below. Often—though not in the passage before us—other sense impressions augment the visual, such as the perfume of flowers or the faint sounds of lute, oboe, or violin music wafting up from some unknown source. This characteristic merging of sense impressions to heighten the moment's emotion anticipates a favorite strategy of Romantic poets.

As the little group of travelers ascends, we are treated to magnificent panoramas that dramatize the landscape by a frequent reiteration of contrasts between heights and depths, and between sheltered and expansive spaces. In the first paragraph of the word-painting, the stilted abstract language of La Vallée suddenly gives way to more colorful and precise adjectives, adverbs, and verbs, a more coherent point-of-view, and a livelier sense of rhythm and movement.

Beyond the amphitheatre of mountains, that stretched below, whose tops appeared as numerous, almost, as the waves of the sea, and whose feet were concealed by the forests—extended the Campagna of Italy, where cities and rivers, and woods and all the glow of cultivation were mingled in gay confusion.

(p. 225)

Opening the description from the foreground anchor of the little band of travelers and their mules to the vista below, we understand the reference to the “immensity of nature” because the narrator describes, progressively, the foreground figures, mountain tops below them, forests at mountain base and, beyond the mountains, the countryside of Italy laid out in bird's-eye view. The little word painting sweeps us along with its vivid, active verbs (stretch, mingle, bound, pour) in the sentence that follows. The rhythms of the syntax echo the necessary quickness of the eye in taking in such a breathtaking varied scene.

In spite of the series of visually confusing figurative clichés in which the mountains are described simultaneously as amphitheatre, ocean waves, and feet, Radcliffe's intention here is both bold and original. She is trying to write movement into a progressive description, first, of ranges of mountains, then their tops (like waves) and, finally their bases in forests. Her similes may trip her up, but the excitement and intensity of the writing is palpable! Three bodies of water frame the vista and contribute a further sense of motion to the scene. We are able to visualize how elements in this sublime landscape interrelate as the “camera eye” sweeps the scene. Radcliffe has applied an essentially cinematic technique to landscape descriptions here.

Repetition of the transitional phrase “at length” in the several preceding paragraphs constitutes a rather clumsy attempt to signal the passage of time. Both travelers and the reader enter a seemingly timeless realm as they ascend the Alps, for time and space seem to expand endlessly in the gradually multiplying vistas that unfold before our eyes. Unfortunately, the narrator's excitement about the scene fails to animate the heroine, whose loneliness only increases with the sublimity of the landscape.

As the party climbs higher into the Alps, and ever closer to the Castle of Udolpho, the description becomes progressively more exciting, vivid, and dramatic. It is a dangerous ascent, and clearly represents the approach of an important test in Emily's symbolic journey toward maturity. The second paragraph contains some of the most particularized descriptive writing in this word-painting, for here, at last, Radcliffe allows the magnificence of the scene to unroll before us, unimpeded by the balancing of the pastoral. Contrast between enclosed and expansive space again accentuates and dramatizes the progress through the very heart of the Apennines—a scene inherently dramatic.

First we see very little, other than the narrow pass that surrounds us, its wild overhanging cliffs, and gnarled, windswept oak clinging stubbornly to rock inimical to human intrusion. This narrow entry only intensifies the sense of freedom when daylight returns with the long perspective of mountain range and rolling mist, “a scene as wild as any the travellers had yet passed” (p. 225). Radcliffe's use of the word “perspective” here indicates she is thinking like a painter as well as a writer.

The alternation between the specificity of foreground details and dramatic background vistas, between darkness and light, enhances that very sense of movement and rhythm that characterizes Radcliffe's very best word-paintings:

Still vast pine-forests hung upon their base, and crowned the ridgy precipice, that rose perpendicularly from the vale, while above, the rolling mists caught the sunbeams, and touched their cliffs with all the magical colouring of light and shade. The scene seemed perpetually changing, and its features to assume new forms, as the winding road brought them to the eye in different attitudes; while the shifting vapours, now partially concealing their minuter beauties, and now illuminating them with the splendid tints, assisted the illusions of the sight.

(p. 226)

Here Radcliffe's language captures the visual excitement of forms that shift rapidly with the changing perspectives of the eye as it moves across a landscape. The specificity of diction reflects an active creative engagement with wild nature—words such as impending, hung, rose, rolling, shifting—that emphasize motion and drama. Although the final phrase of this passage reminds us that Radcliffe ordinarily prefers suggestive, rather than explicit descriptive language, the vivid particularity in her successful word-paintings represents an opposing aesthetic tendency.

As if to frame and contain the wild energy of this writing, the passage continues with two brief paragraphs that return us—in one case, in mid-sentence—to the sentimental “sweet picture of repose” that recalls the pastoral opening of the novel.

But, not content to rest on the “green delights” of the pastoral, “smiling amid surrounding horror,” the narrator quickly turns her discriminating eye back to the landscape that thrills her. The pace and vividness move quickly toward the climax both of the descriptive writing and of Emily's journey. The novel's title reminds us that we are approaching the structural center of the work at last. A fully realized cinematic panorama represents the climax of this word-painting as well.

Towards the close of day, the road wound into a deep valley. Mountains, whose shaggy steeps appeared to be inaccessible, almost surrounded it. To the east, a vista opened, that exhibited the Apennines in their darkest horrors; and the long perspective of retiring summits, rising over each other, their ridges clothed with pines, exhibited a stronger image of grandeur, than any that Emily had yet seen.

(p. 226)

In her eagerness to help us visualize precisely how Emily moves through this dramatic landscape toward the castle of Udolpho, Radcliffe jams both light effects and compositional placement into a single long sentence. One feels her again straining to encapsulate motion in the essentially static medium of language.

The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she was descending, whose long shadow stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest, that hung upon the opposite steeps, and streamed in full splendor upon the towers and battlements of a castle, that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above. The splendour of these illuminated objects was heightened by the contrasted shade, which involved the valley below.

“There,” said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, “is Udolpho.”

(p. 227)

Montoni's announcement accentuates the importance of this moment, and light—particularly vivid here—dramatizes the contrast with encroaching darkness as the sun sinks behind the mountains and the landscape chills. At such moments, Radcliffe's evocations of the precise look of light on landscape are far superior to those of James Thomson, whose passages from The Seasons receive the greater critical praise. Radcliffe shares a fondness for setting climactic events at twilight with Victorian poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Swinburne. At the transitional moments of dusk or dawn strange visions sometimes occur, realities are blurred, and irrational fears may conquer rational thought. Twilight increases suspense and lends an air of drama to things seen.

The transitional nature of this moment between day and night provides a fitting context for the discovery of the castle, seen in all its picturesque and lurid detail. As Emily gazes “with melancholy awe” at Udolpho, the sloping rays of the sun shoot through, touch, and stream with splendor dramatically in contrast to the encroaching shadows of night. A moment of stasis allows Radcliffe to describe with care how the rays of the setting sun gradually travel up the castle wall to battlements and clustering towers, leaving behind “a melancholy purple tint.” The “darkest horrors” of the Apennines—in the language of the Burkean sublime—and the darkening landscape foreshadow Emily's quasi-imprisonment in the sinister castle that hangs above her. Sublime and imposing mountains which have thrilled and terrified the narrator—if not Emily—find ominous echo in the castle—“silent, lonely, and sublime”—fitting emblem of the inscrutable and defiant Montoni.

Our example of word-painting—Radcliffe's second mode of vision—ends with the ascent of the carriages, but here ascent is simultaneously a descent into darkness, cruelty, superstition, and terror. Significantly, when Emily, at the chapter's end, sits at the window of her new home, all is “sunk in darkness” (p. 229); she can discern nothing. The next step in her education will depend on her learning how to see and to interpret both visual and psychological realities at Udolpho.

Radcliffe's Gothic narratives overwhelmingly participate in the eighteenth-century aesthetic preference for balance and moderation, for limiting the ecstasies and perils of the sublime with the orderliness of the beautiful. But, occasionally, as I hope I have demonstrated, when her imagination is completely aroused, she reaches for a proto-Romantic descriptive technique, where the emotions of the narrator—if not the heroine—color the reporting of precise visual detail. At such moments, Radcliffe abandons generalized description in favor of an aesthetic of particularity and passion and brings her framed landscapes to life through a cinematic technique. The new cinematic approach described here dramatizes a landscape as a kind of journey of exploration anchored by a precisely placed perceiving figure who is often part of the foreground of the scene.

For the most part, Radcliffe's word-paintings lack the interchange of significance with character, action and theme, highly metaphoric in nature, to which post-Modernist readers are accustomed. The description of the arrival at Udolpho, however, is one passage where extended visually oriented material cooperates with narrative to contribute structural coherence to a climax in the novel. Though the writer is uninterested in linking the thing seen with the emotions of the heroine, Radcliffe's landscape visions express the narrator's interest in capturing the visual sublime in a verbal medium, though the elaborateness of the description itself is not balanced by a similar weight in the writing of the narrative sections.

Radcliffe's word-paintings are among the most daring and innovative in the history of English literature, for she was one of the first to see the possibilities for a dramatized descriptive mode that accurately captures the look of a particular landscape. Radcliffe often struggles to find specific descriptive language to express her vision. At times of transport, she abandons conventional personification in order to suggest important new possibilities for using a cinematic narrative technique within landscape description, such as when she describes what she imagines the sublime features of wild mountains to be.

With Radcliffe's word-paintings, one begins to discern an interplay between narrative and descriptive modes that was to lead to a kind of blending of the genres of prose and poetry by the end of the nineteenth century. The primitive relationship between narration and description in Radcliffe's fiction establishes a base-line with which to compare later attempts to fuse or intermingle story and scenery in English fiction. Word-painting, beginning in the Gothic novel as an interruption in narrative flow, gradually invades the story in subsequent fiction, becoming inseparable from it, and alters the nature of narrative and the form of nineteenth-century fiction as it moves toward the more fused symbolic techniques of writers like Dickens, Hardy, and Virginia Woolf. The narrative of landscape contributes significantly to the development of so-called hybrid literary works of the late Victorian period.

In addition, word-painting may contribute to the attrition of narrative that is such a prominent feature of some recent phenomenological and “poetic” fictions that seem to have abandoned “story” altogether in favor of a dramatized descriptive mode, one that has taken narrative movement into itself. Radcliffe's word-paintings, in this sense, serve as forerunner to the prose-poems of Virginia Woolf, and the contemporary antistories of Robbe-Grillet, Barth, Pynchon, and Coover. Her interest in wordpaintings—Radcliffe's second mode of vision—signals one of her most important contributions to the evolving forms of English fiction. Therefore, although one might see her as “fetter'd” by some eighteenth-century novelistic conventions, occasionally Radcliffe achieves a passionately emotive, sensual descriptive mode that demonstrates her freedom to explore new content and new techniques for fiction.

Notes

1. Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 33.

2. Word-painting, which often appears to move verbal art into the realm of the spatial rather than the temporal, may be one element that blurs Lessing's famous distinction between poetry as exclusively a temporal and kinetic art and painting as exclusively a spatial and static one. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoön, ed. Dorothy Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).

3. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1. The first edition was 1794. All subsequent quotations from Radcliffe are drawn from this, the authoritative modern edition.

4. Word-paintings are found on pp. 1-5, 175-76, 224-28, 263-70, and 596-604 of the authoritative Oxford edition.