[In the following essay, Castle points out that although critics of Udolpho usually focus on the gothic episodes of the novel that occur at the castle, the events in the other sections of the book also deserve attention for their fantastical undertones and preoccupation with death and the dead.]

Friends came to be possessed like objects, while inanimate objects were desired like living beings.

Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death (606)¹

I

When it is not treated as a joke, Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is primarily remembered today for its most striking formal device—the much-maligned “explained supernatural.” Scott, we may recall, was one of the first to blame Radcliffe for supplying anticlimactic “rational” explanations for the various eerie and uncanny events in her novels, and in Lives of Eminent Novelists (1824) chastized her for not “boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery” in her greatest fiction.² Jane Austen's satiric depredations in Northanger Abbey are even better known.³ But modern critics have been similarly put out—that is, when they have bothered to write about Radcliffe at all. “A stupid convention,” says Montague Summers of her admittedly intrusive rationalizations. “The vice of her method,” writes another. A few hapless defenders merely compound the damage: “the poor lady's romances,” wrote Andrew Lang, “would have been excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures.”⁴Requiescat in pace.

It has always been easy, of course, to patronize Ann Radcliffe. No English writer of such historic importance and diverse influence has been so often trivialized by her critics. Granted, we have the occasional arch excurses on selected Radcliffean topoi—the Villain, the Fainting Heroine (with her much-vaunted Sensibility), the Scenery. But the point of such commentary is usually to demonstrate the superiority of the critic to this notoriously “silly” writer and to have done with Radcliffe as quickly as possible. Even among admirers of Gothic fiction, the clumsy device of the “explained supernatural” is often taken as the final proof of Radcliffe's irretrievable ineptitude and bathos. By way of a formula, the author herself is explained away.

Which is not to say that the formula is entirely misleading. Blatantly supernatural-seeming events are “explained” in Udolpho, and sometimes most awkwardly. Mysterious musical sounds, groans emanating from walls, the sudden movement of a supposedly dead body: however strained, rational explanations for such phenomena are inevitably forthcoming. At numerous points in the fiction, moreover, Radcliffe self-consciously condemns what she calls “superstition.” Not for her those primitive ancestral spirits described by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, who come back to earth to terrify, cajole, or exact various pious sacrifices from the living. Nor, despite occasional hesitations, has she any residual faith in the more benign ghosts of popular Christianity. St. Aubert, the father of the heroine in Udolpho, admits at one point to a hope that “disembodied spirits watch over the friends they have loved” (67), but later in the novel, when the enlightened Count de Villefort argues against the reality of specters, Radcliffe resolutely endorses his position, noting that “the Count had much the superiority of the Baron in point of argument” (549).⁵ In this denial of the traditional spirit-world, The Mysteries of Udolpho, like the Gothic in general, anticipates the thoroughly God-abandoned forms of modern literature.

Yet already we oversimplify perhaps, for the very concept of the “explained supernatural” depends upon a highly selective—indeed schematic—vision of the novel. We “read,” it seems, only part of The Mysteries of Udolpho: the famous part. As any survey of Udolpho scholarship will show, modern critics devote themselves almost without exception solely to those episodes in the novel involving the villainous Montoni and the castle of Udolpho—even though these make up barely a third of the narrative. Of the dreamlike wanderings of Emily St. Aubert and her father through the Pyrenees (which alone take up nearly one hundred pages at the outset of the work), of St. Aubert's drawn-out death scene and Emily's sojourn in a convent, of Emily's bizarre relationship with her lover Valancourt, of the episodes with Madame Cheron at Tholouse and Venice, of the lengthy post-Udolpho sections involving Du Pont, Blanche, the Marchioness de Villeroi and the Count de Villefort, we have heard little or nothing.

The crude focus on the so-called Gothic core of The Mysteries of Udolpho has been achieved by repressing, so to speak, the bulk of Radcliffe's narrative. Many modern critics implicitly treat the fictional world as though it were composed of two ontologically distinct realms—one extra-ordinary, irrational, irruptive, and charismatic (that of Montoni and Udolpho), the other ordinary, domestic, and uninteresting (the supposedly more “familiar” frame-world of La Vallée and the St. Aubert family). Emily, it is often argued, is temporarily caught up in the irrational Udolpho-world, and there subjected to much emotional dislocation, but returns safely to ordinary life in the end. Commentators differ, to be sure, over what exactly the irrationalism of Udolpho consists in, some claiming that the castle is in fact a violent realm of moral and political chaos, while others, more psychologically inclined, argue that its terrors are merely notional, the result of the heroine's supercharged sensibility. The assertion that Emily develops and learns to control her “hysteria” in the course of her ordeal is a common didactic embellishment in the latter sort of reading. Seldom at issue in any of these accounts, however, is the two-world distinction itself (with its normal/abnormal, rational/irrational, ordinary/extra-ordinary oppositions) or the implicit assumption that certain parts of Udolpho are intrinsically more interesting and worthy of discussion than others. This tendency toward bifurcation, it is worth noting, has reappeared even in the otherwise revisionist readings of the novel recently offered by feminist critics.⁶

But what happens if we reject such reductive impulses and try to read all of the fiction before us? For one thing, the supposedly ordinary parts of Udolpho may begin to look increasingly peculiar. Take, for example, the ostensibly normalizing ending. Montoni is dead, the putative terrors of Udolpho past, and Emily St. Aubert has been joyfully reunited with her lost lover Valancourt. Yet Radcliffe's language here, as elsewhere, remains oddly preternatural. Emily and Valancourt marry in an “enchanted palace,” the Count de Villefort's castle at Chateau-le-Blanc, under sumptuous banners “which had long slept in dust.” So exquisite is the ceremony Annette the servant is moved to exclaim that “the fairies themselves, at their nightly revels in this old hall, could display nothing finer,” while Dorothée, the old housekeeper, observes wistfully that “the castle looked as it was wont to do in the time of her youth.” The newlyweds proceed, as though entranced, to Emily's beloved childhood home at La Vallée. There, in the picturesque spot “so long inhabited” by her deceased parents, Monsieur and Madame St. Aubert, “the pleasant shades welcomed them with a thousand tender and affecting remembrances.” Emily wanders through her parents' “favourite haunts” in pensive slow motion, her happiness heightened “by considering, that it would have been worthy of their approbation, could they have witnessed it.” Bemused by souvenirs of the past, she and her lover seat themselves beneath a plane tree on the terrace, in a spot “sacred to the memory of St. Aubert,” and vow to imitate his benevolence (671).

The mood of hypnotic, sweetish melancholy carries over into the last sentence of the novel, where Radcliffe addresses an ideal reader, likewise haunted by personal history:

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.

(672)

Enchantments, shades, haunts, sacred spots, the revivification (through memory) of a dead father, a perpetually mourning reader: the scene is tremulous with hidden presences. Not, again, the vulgar apparitions of folk superstition—the ghosts entertained here are subjective, delicately emotional in origin, the subtle protrusions of a yearning heart. No egregiously Gothic scenery obtrudes; we are still ostensibly in the ordinary world. But the scene is haunted nonetheless, as Radcliffe's oddly hinting figures of speech suggest. Home itself has become uncanny, a realm of apophrades. To be “at home” is to be possessed by memory, to dwell with spirits of the dead.

These passages epitomize a phenomenon in Radcliffe we might call the supernaturalization of everyday life. Old-fashioned ghosts, it is true, have disappeared from the fictional world, but a new kind of apparition takes their place. To be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to be “haunted,” to find oneself obsessed by spectral images of those one loves. One sees in the mind's eye those who are absent; one if befriended and consoled by phantoms of the beloved. Radcliffe makes it clear how such phantasmata arise. They are the products of refined sentiment, the characteristic projections of a feeling heart. To be haunted, according to the novel's romantic myth, is to display one's powers of sympathetic imagination; the cruel and the dull have no such hallucinations. Those who love, by definition, are open to the spirit of the other.

The “ghost” may be of someone living or dead. Mourners, not surprisingly, are particularly prone to such mental visions. Early in the novel, for instance, Emily's father, St. Aubert, is reluctant to leave his estate, even for his health, because the continuing “presence” of his dead wife has “sanctified every surrounding scene” (22). The old peasant La Voisin, likewise bereaved, can “sometimes almost fancy” he sees his dead wife “of a still moonlight, walking among these shades she loved so well” (67). After St. Aubert dies and Emily has held a vigil over his corpse, her fancy is “haunted” by his living image: “She thought she saw her father approaching her with a benign countenance; then, smiling mournfully and pointing upwards, his lips moved, but instead of words, she heard sweet music borne on the distant air, and presently saw his features glow with the mild rapture of a superior being” (83). Entering his room when she returns to La Vallée, “the idea of him rose so distinctly to her mind, that she almost fancied she saw him before her” (95). When she and Valancourt sit in the garden, she finds her father's image “in every landscape” (106).

But lovers—those who mourn, as it were, for the living—are subject to similar experiences. The orphaned Emily, about to be carried off by her aunt to Tholouse, having bid a sad farewell to Valancourt in the garden at La Vallée, senses a mysterious presence at large in the shades around her:

As her eyes wandered over the landscape she thought she perceived a person emerge from the groves, and pass slowly along a moon-light alley that led between them; but the distance and the imperfect light would not suffer her to judge with any degree of certainty whether this was fancy or reality.

(115)

A haunted lover can do nothing, it seems, but haunt the haunts of the other. To love in the novel is to become ghostly oneself. When Valancourt, defying Madame Montoni's prohibition against meeting Emily, finds his way back to her, he exclaims, “I do then see you once again, and hear again, the sound of that voice! I have haunted this place—these gardens, for many—many nights, with a faint, very faint hope of seeing you” (152). Near the end of the novel, after Emily rejects him for supposed debaucheries, he makes obsessive “mournful wanderings” around her fateful garden: “the vision he had seen [of Emily] haunted his mind; he became more wretched than before, and the only solace of his sorrow was to return in the silence of the night; to follow the paths which he believed her steps had pressed, during the day; and, to watch round the habitation where she reposed” (627).

Such porous lovers, to be sure, may sometimes be mistaken for the cruder, traditional kind of specter. But the lover's ghostliness is somehow more febrile and insistent. Emotionally speaking, it is not susceptible to exorcism. When Emily's gallant suitor Du Pont, the Valancourt-surrogate who appears in the midsection of the novel, traverses the battlements at Udolpho in the hope of seeing her, he is immediately mistaken by the castle guards (who seem to have read Hamlet) for an authentic apparition. He obliges by making eerie sounds, and creates enough apprehension to continue his lovesick “hauntings” indefinitely (459). Similarly, at the end of the fiction, when Emily is brooding once again over the absent Valancourt, her servant Annette suddenly bursts in crying, “I have seen his ghost, madam, I have seen his ghost!” Hearing her garbled story about the arrival of a stranger, Emily, in an acute access of yearning, assumes the “ghost” must be Valancourt (629). It is in fact Ludovico, Annette's own lover, who disappeared earlier from a supposedly haunted room at Chateau-le-Blanc and is presumed dead. Annette's own joy at seeing him, we note, “could not have been more extravagant, had he arisen from the grave” (630). Whoever he is, wherever he is, the lover is always a revenant.

Already, given what we might call Radcliffe's persistently spectralized language, one cannot merely say with aplomb that the supernatural is “explained” in The Mysteries of Udolpho. To speak only of the rationalization of the Gothic mode is to miss one of Radcliffe's most provocative rhetorical gestures. The supernatural is not so much explained in Udolpho as it is displaced. It is diverted—rerouted, so to speak, into the realm of the everyday. Even as the old-time spirit world is demystified, the supposedly ordinary secular world is metaphorically suffused with a new spiritual aura.

II

Why this pattern of displacement? And why have modern readers so often been impervious to it? The questions are deceptively simple, yet they bear profoundly both on the reception of the novel and the history of Western consciousness. The Mysteries of Udolpho became one of the charismatic texts of late eighteenth-century European culture (a fact all too easily forgotten) not merely because it gratified a passing taste for things Gothic—many contemporary works did this—but because it articulated a new and momentous perception of human experience. Like Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse or Goethe's Werther, which shared a similar shaping influence on contemporary psychic life, the novel owed its vast popularity across Europe to its encompassing emotional power—its paradigmatic role in what one writer has called “the fabrication of romantic sensitivity.”⁷Udolpho was more than simply fashionable; it encapsulated new structures of feeling, a new model of human relations, a new phenomenology of self and other.

We often sum up such developments, of course, with the phrase romantic individualism. In what follows I will argue that a crucial feature of the new sensibility of the late eighteenth century was, quite literally, a growing sense of the ghostliness of other people. In the moment of romantic self-absorption, the other was indeed reduced to a phantom—a purely mental effect, an image, as it were, on the screen of consciousness itself. The corporeality of the other—his or her actual life in the world—became strangely insubstantial and indistinct: what mattered was the mental picture, the ghost, the haunting image.

The twentieth century, I hope to show, has completely naturalized this historic shift toward the phantasmatic. We are used to the metaphor of the haunted consciousness—indeed hardly recognize it as metaphoric. Often enough, we speak colloquially of being haunted by memories or pursued by images of people inside our heads. In moments of solitude or distress, we may even seek out such “phantoms” for companionship and solace. Not coincidentally, the most influential of modern theories of the mind—psychoanalysis—has internalized the ghost-seeing metaphor: the Freudian account of psychic events, as I will suggest in my conclusion, is as suffused with crypto-supernaturalism as Radcliffe's. Yet this concern with so-called mental apparitions, and the sense we have come to share, thanks to Sigmund Freud, of their potentially daemonic hold over us, is itself the historic product of late eighteenth-century romantic sensibility. Radcliffe's novel remains one of the first and greatest evocations of this new cognitive dispensation—of a new collective absorption in the increasingly vivid, if also hallucinatory, contents of the mind itself. We feel at home in Radcliffe's spectralized landscape, for its ghosts are our own—the symptomatic projections of modern psychic life.

How to recognize that which has become too much a part of us? A series of vignettes, extracted, again, from the supposedly banal parts of the novel, will help to focus our attention on the historical phenomenon I am calling the spectralization of the other: this new obsession with the internalized images of other people. I present these Radcliffean “souvenirs of the other” in a somewhat paradoxical form in order to bring out both the uncanniness of the fictional world and its oddly familiar emotional logic:

1. To think of the other is to see him. Whenever Emily St. Aubert thinks about her lover, Valancourt, he suddenly appears. This is especially likely to occur even when she (and the reader) have been led to assume he is far away. After Emily's first engagement to Valancourt is broken off by Madame Cheron (later Madame Montoni), Emily is beset by a painful “remembrance of her lover” and fantasies a clandestine reunion: “As she repeated the words—‘should we ever meet again!’—she shrunk as if this was a circumstance, which had never before occurred to her, and tears came to her eyes, which she hastily dried, for she heard footsteps approaching, and the door of the pavilion open, and, on turning, she saw—Valancourt” (127). Later, after escaping from Udolpho, Emily walks in the woods at Chateau-le-Blanc and broods about the time when her father was alive and she had just met Valancourt. Then: “She thought she heard Valancourt speak! It was, indeed, he!” (501).
2. The other is always present—especially when absent. The familiar “objects of former times,” pressing upon one's notice, writes Radcliffe, make departed loved ones “present” again in memory (92). Hats, books, chairs, rooms, pets, miniatures, gardens, mountains, graves—all possess this affecting metonymic power. Pieces of furniture in the study of the dead St. Aubert bring his “image” forcibly into his daughter's mind (94-98). Elsewhere at La Vallée, Emily finds that her parents seem “to live again” in the various objects in their rooms (591). Picturesque landscapes (La Vallée, the Pyrenees, Languedoc, Chateau-le-Blanc) provoke visions of the person with whom one first saw them (92, 97, 116, 163, 490). Valancourt, as he is about to leave Emily at one point, says to her that they will “meet … in thought” by gazing at the sunset at the same time of day (163). Similarly, by retracing a page in one of Valancourt's books, and “dwelling on the passages, which he had admired,” Emily is able to summon her absent lover “to her presence” again (58). His “vacant chair” prompts an image of him sitting beside her (521), while the garden, with “the very plants, which Valancourt so carefully reared,” supplies further remembrances (583). Graves and grave monuments are obviously the most fascinating and paradoxical relics of the other, for even as they officially confirm absence (and indeed take on all the displaced pathos of the corpse), they also evoke powerful “living” images of the person they memorialize. Forcing herself after an “hour of melancholy indulgence” to leave the site of St. Aubert's grave, Emily remains “attached” to the place in her thoughts, “and for the sacred spot, where her father's remains were interred, she seemed to feel all those tender affections which we conceive for home” (91).
3. Every other looks like every other other. Characters in Udolpho mirror, or blur into one another. Following the death of her father, Emily is comforted by a friar “whose mild benevolence of manners bore some resemblance to those of St. Aubert” (82). The Count de Villefort's benign presence recalls “most powerfully to her mind the idea of her late father” (492). Emily and Annette repeatedly confuse Du Pont with Valancourt (439-40); Valancourt and Montoni also get mixed up. In Italy Emily gazes at someone she believes to be Montoni who turns out, on second glance, to be her lover (145). But even Emily herself looks like Valancourt. His countenance is the “mirror” in which she sees “her own emotions reflected” (127). She, in turn, also looks like the deceased Marchioness of Villeroi. Dorothée comments on Emily's resemblance to “the late Marchioness” (491). The dying nun Agnes is maddened by it: “it is her very self! Oh! there is all that fascination in her look, which proved my destruction!” (644). This persistent deindividuation of other people produces numerous dreamlike effects throughout the novel. Characters seem uncannily to resemble or to replace previous characters, sometimes in pairs. Even as they assume quasi-parental control over the heroine, M. and Mme. Montoni become, in the mind of the reader, strangely “like” a new and demonic version of M. and Mme. St. Aubert. The Count and Countess de Villefort are a later transformation of the Montoni pair—and of M. and Mme. St. Aubert. Du Pont, of course, is virtually indistinguishable from Valancourt for several chapters. Blanche de Villefort is a kind of replacement-Emily, and her relations with her father replicate those of the heroine and St. Aubert, just as the Chateau-le-Blanc episodes recombine elements from the La Vallée and Udolpho episodes, and so on. The principle of déjà vu dominates both the structure of human relations in Udolpho and the phenomenology of reading.

One is always free, of course, to describe such peculiarly overdetermined effects in purely formal terms. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, would undoubtedly treat this mass of anecdotal material as a series of generic cues—evidence of the fantastic nature of Radcliffe's text. The defining principle of the fantastic work, he posits in The Fantastic, is that “the transition from mind to matter has become possible.”⁸ Ordinary distinctions between fantasy and reality, mind and matter, subject and object, break down. The boundary between psychic experience and the physical world collapses, and “the idea becomes a matter of perception.” “The rational schema,” he writes,

represents the human being as a subject entering into relations with other persons or with things that remain external to him, and which have the status of objects. The literature of the fantastic disturbs this abrupt separation. We hear music, but there is no longer an instrument external to the hearer and producing sounds, on the one hand, and on the other the listener himself. … We look at an object—but there is no longer any frontier between the object, with its shapes and colors, and the observer. … For two people to understand one another, it is no longer necessary that they speak: each can become the other and know what the other is thinking.⁹

The fantastic universe, he concludes—with a nod to Jean Piaget—is like that of the newborn infant or psychotic. Self and other are not properly distinguished; everything merges—inside and outside, cause and effect, mind and universe—in a vertiginous scene of “cosmic fusion.”¹⁰

Radcliffe's fictional world might be described as fantastic in this sense. The mysterious power of loved ones to arrive at the very moment one thinks of them, or else to “appear” when one contemplates the objects with which they are associated—such events blur the line between objective and subjective experience. Magical reunion is possible. Thoughts shape reality. In such instances Radcliffe indeed creates a narrative simulacrum of that sense of omnipotence briefly experienced, according to D. W. Winnicott, in our infancy: wishes seem to come true; the hidden desires of the subject appear to take precedence over logic or natural probability.¹¹

But the fantastic nature of Radcliffe's ontology is also manifest, one might argue, in the peculiar resemblances that obtain between characters in her novel. When everyone looks like everyone else, the limit between mind and world is again profoundly undermined, for such obsessive replication can only occur, we assume, in a universe dominated by phantasmatic imperatives. Mirroring occurs in a world already stylized, so to speak, by the unconscious. Freud makes this point in his famous essay “The Uncanny” in which he takes the proliferation of doubles in E. T. A. Hoffmann's “The Sandman” as proof that the reader is in fact experiencing events from the perspective of the deranged and hallucinating hero.¹² And once more, infantile psychic life provides the appropriate analogy. For we can indeed imagine, if not recollect, a stage in our early development at which we did not fully distinguish individuals from one another, or recognize other people as wholly separate beings. Our powers of physiognomic comparison must have once been quite crude, and our sense of the difference between the faces we observed somewhat precarious. Everybody did look like everybody else at one period in our lives. That various forms of literature, and the Gothic and romance in particular, atavistically dramatize this primal stage in human awareness, is an idea implicit, though not fully articulated, in the recent work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.¹³

The formalist description, however, can only go so far. As the psychoanalytic gloss already intimates, the Todorovian notion of ontological transgression—this breakdown of limits between mind and matter—invites historicization. By invoking Freud or Piaget, we add one kind of diachronic dimension: fantastic works like Udolpho, we imply, return us symbolically to an earlier stage of consciousness, a prior moment in the history of the individual psyche. But we still do not contend with larger shifts in human consciousness itself. Todorov himself makes only a few comments on the place of fantastic themes in the changing psychic history of the West.

For this kind of analysis we must turn elsewhere, though one of Todorov's own remarks will again prove suggestive. He cites the following passage from Freud—

A young woman who was in love with her brother-in-law, and whose sister was dying, was horrified by the thought: “Now he is free and we can be married!” The instantaneous forgetting of this thought permitted the initiation of the process of repression which led to hysterical disturbances. Nonetheless it is interesting to see, in just such a case, how neurosis tends to resolve the conflict. It takes into account the change in reality by repressing the satisfaction of the impulse, in this case, the love for the brother-in-law. A psychotic reaction would have denied the fact that the sister was dying.

And in the last sentence he uncovers one of the central themes of the fantastic: “To think that someone is not dead—to desire it on one hand and to perceive this same fact in reality on the other—are two phases of one and the same movement, and the transition between them is achieved without difficulty.”¹⁴ Only the thinnest line separates the experience of wishing for (or fearing) the return of the dead and actually seeing them return. Fantastic works, he argues, repeatedly cross it. Here indeed is the ultimate fantasy of mind over matter.

Just such a fantasy—of a breakdown of the limit between life and death—lies at the heart of Radcliffe's novel and underwrites her vision of experience. To put it quite simply, there is an impinging confusion in Udolpho over who is dead and who is alive. The ambiguity is conveyed by the very language of the novel: in the moment of Radcliffean reverie as we have seen, the dead seem to “live” again, while conversely, the living “haunt” the mind's eye in the manner of ghosts. Life and death—at least in the realm of the psyche—have become peculiarly indistinguishable. Yet it is precisely this essentially fantastic ambiguity that is most in need of historical analysis. Why should it be in a work of the late eighteenth century, especially, that the imaginative boundary between life and death should suddenly become so obscure?

III

The work of the French historian Philippe Ariès provides, to my mind, the most useful insight into this problem, for he, more than any other recent writer, has speculated on the complex symbolic relationship between life and death in the popular consciousness of recent centuries Ariès's magisterial L'Homme devant la mort, published in 1977 and translated into English as The Hour of Our Death in 1981, is a study of changing attitudes toward death and dying in European culture since the Middle Ages. I cannot do justice here, obviously, to the grand scale of Ariès's project, or to his richly idiosyncratic, even lyrical response to this profound intellectual theme. Let me focus instead merely on one thread of his argument—his assertion that new and increasingly repressive emotional attitudes toward death in the late eighteenth century constituted a major “revolution in feeling” with far-reaching social and philosophic consequences (471). If Ariès is correct, Radcliffe's spectralized sense of the other may be understood as an aspect of a much larger cognitive revolution in Western culture.

In brief, Ariès's hypothesis is this—that in contrast with earlier periods such as the Middle Ages, when physical mortality was generally accepted as an organic, integral and centrally meaningful facet of human existence, late eighteenth-century Western culture was characterized by growing dissociation from corporeal reality, and a new and unprecedented antipathy toward death in all its aspects. Changing affectional patterns, the breakdown of communal social life, and the increasingly individualistic and secular nature of modern experience played an important role, Ariès argues, in engendering this new spirit of alienation. The twentieth century, he claims, has inherited the post-Enlightenment attitude. Through a complex process of displacement, he claims, Western civilization has repressed the body and its exigencies; in the face of death, it retreats into anxious mystification and denial.

Ariès finds, in essence, a new spiritualization of human experience beginning in the late eighteenth century. His evidence for such a shift is twofold. A break with traditional patterns was first apparent, he suggests, in the practical sphere, in the period's obsession with what he calls the “beautiful death”—its concern with hiding or denying the physical signs of mortality and decay. Where death was once a public spectacle of considerable magnitude, it now became primarily a private event, witnessed only by one's closest relations. The cosmetic preservation of the corpse took on a new emotional urgency: the arts of embalming and even mummification (one thinks of Bentham's corpse) became common practices among all but the very lowest classes. Funerals were carried out more and more discreetly. And in contrast with the relaxed practice of earlier centuries, the dead were increasingly segregated from the living. Cemeteries were removed from their once-central locations in cities and towns to outlying areas, and their necrological functions obscured. The romantic “garden of remembrance,” with its idealizing statuary, landscaped walks and prospects, was a quintessentially eighteenth-century invention.¹⁵

Just such an urge toward mystification, we note, may be allegorized at various points in Udolpho. It is interesting to find, for example, how many moments in the novel traditionally adduced by critics as classically “Radcliffean” have to do with supposed deaths that have not really taken place, or with corpses that turn out not to be corpses after all. Radcliffe often flirts with an image of physical dissolution, then undoes it. Thus Emily at Udolpho, thinking she has found the dead body of her aunt, follows a trail of blood toward a horrible “something” that turns out to be a pile of old clothes (323). An open grave in the castle crypt is empty (345). A body suddenly jerking under a pall on a bed in the abandoned apartments of the dead Marchioness of Villeroi is found to be a pirate who has hidden there and frightens off intruders in this manner (634). And most strikingly of course, the famous terrifying object under the black veil that Emily thinks is the “murdered body of the lady Laurentini” (248) is a piece of trompe l'oeil: an old wax effigy of a decomposing body “dressed in the habiliments of the grave,” formerly used as a memento mori (662). While such moments provide an undeniable frisson, they also hint at new taboos. Uneasy fascination gives way before the comforting final illusion that there is no such thing as a real corpse. (Radcliffe delicately refers to the memento mori as an example of that “fierce severity, which monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted on mankind” [662]). If we are now inclined to recoil from Radcliffe's ambiguous thanatological artifacts, or indulge in nervous laughter over the “morbid” or “macabre” nature of Gothic literature in general, our responses, if Ariès is correct, merely indicate how much further the process of repression has advanced in our own day.¹⁶

But the most important sign of shifting sensibilities in the period, according to Ariès, is the emergence of a “romantic cult of the dead”—a growing subjective fascination with idealized images of the deceased. Older ideas of the afterlife—those of the Middle Ages, for example—had not typically emphasized the possibility of meeting one's family and friends after death. Death meant rupture, a falling asleep, or a falling away into “the peace that passeth understanding.” In the era of romantic individualism, however, the theme of sentimental reunion became paramount. The coming together of husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or parents and children after death, the blissful renewal of domestic life in a new “home” in the hereafter became staple images in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century popular belief. Consolatory literature, grave inscriptions and monuments, and the keeping of mementos of the dead all bespoke the new fantasy of continuity, while a host of theories, not necessarily theological in origin, regarding the eternal life of disembodied spirits reinforced popular emotion. Death was no longer ugly or frightening, supposedly, because its physical separations were only temporary. Much of nineteenth-century spiritualism, Ariès argues, was simply an extenuation of the notion that the familiar souls of the dead continued to dwell in a nearby invisible realm, invited communication with the living, and awaited a happy future meeting with those who had mourned them in this life (432-60).

He attributes this new and fantastical mode of belief to changing patterns in family structure and the historic transformation of affectional relationships:

The various beliefs in a future life or in the life of memory are in fact so many responses to the impossibility of accepting the death of a loved one. …

In our former, traditional societies affectivity was distributed among a greater number of individuals rather than limited to the members of the conjugal family. It was extended to ever-widening circles, and diluted. Moreover, it was not wholly invested; people retained a residue of affectivity, which was released according to the accidents of life, either as affection or as its opposite, aggression.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, affectivity was, from childhood, entirely concentrated on a few individuals, who became exceptional, irreplaceable, and inseparable.

(472)

The underlying dream, of course, was that the precious dead were not really dead. He calls this hope the “great religious fact of the whole contemporary era” and notes its continued survival in the late twentieth century, despite all the incursions of “industrial rationalism.” Even in the secular societies of the modern West, interviews with the dying and the recently bereaved reveal the same vestigial hope of an afterlife, “which is not so much the heavenly home as the earthly home saved from the menace of time, a home in which the expectations of eschatology are mingled with the realities of memory” (471). There, all shall be united “with those whom they have never ceased to love” (661).¹⁷

A poignant fantasy indeed—but what is perhaps most interesting here is not so much the emotional content per se, but the connection between this affective content and a new kind of introspection. What Ariès's work suggests, it seems to me, is not just a new response to death, but a new mode of thought altogether—a kind of thinking dominated by nostalgic mental images. The fear of death in the modern era prompts an obsessional return to the world of memory—where the dead continue to “live.” But so gratifying are the mind's consoling inner pictures, one becomes more and more transfixed by them—lost, as it were, in contemplation itself. One enters a world of romantic reverie.

Certainly, returning to Radcliffe, we sense both a new anxiety about death, and a new reactive absorption in mental pictures. Radcliffe is fixated, first of all, on the idea of reunion, and dramatizes the romantic fantasy of futurity more explicitly than any previous novelist. Of course dreams of posthumous intimacy had appeared before in eighteenth-century fiction: in Richardson's Clarissa, Anna Howe's affirmation, while grieving over Clarissa's coffin, that they will “meet and rejoice together where no villainous Lovelaces, no hard-hearted relations, will ever shock our innocence, or ruffle our felicity!” anticipates the new sentimental model.¹⁸

What is new in Radcliffe, however, is the fervor with which the finality of death is denied. Continuity is all. Thus the dying St. Aubert discoursing on the afterlife with the noble peasant La Voisin:

‘But you believe, sir [says La Voisin], that we shall meet in another world the relations we have loved in this; I must believe this.’ ‘Then do believe it,’ replied St. Aubert, ‘severe, indeed, would be the pangs of separation, if we believed it to be eternal. Look up, my dear Emily, we shall meet again!’ He lifted his eyes toward heaven, and a gleam of moonlight which fell upon his countenance, discovered peace and resignation, stealing on the lines of sorrow.

(68)

Later, after her father dies, Emily is comforted by the thought that he indeed “lives” still, invisible yet otherwise unchanged, in a nearby spiritual realm: “‘In the sight of God,’ said Emily, ‘my dear father now exists, as truly as he yesterday existed to me; it is to me only that he is dead; to God and to himself he yet lives!”’ (82) Gazing on his corpse (“never till now seen otherwise than animated”), she fantasizes for a dizzying moment that she sees “the beloved countenance still susceptible,” and soon after has the first of those uncanny mental images of her father's living form (83). His convent tomb rapidly becomes the inviting “home” to which she is repeatedly drawn, and La Vallée—the counter-Udolpho—the privileged site around which his presence seems palpably to linger.¹⁹

Nature itself becomes a mere screen—the sublime backdrop against which the potent fancies of mourning are played out. The vast peaks of the Pyrenees, the picturesque valleys of Gascony and Languedoc, even the rocky scenes around Udolpho—all become part of the same elegiac landscape: the zone of reverie itself. Nature in Udolpho sets the stage for phantasmagoric dramas of memory (“‘There, too, is Gascony … O my father,—my mother!”’ [580]) or falls away against a fantastic mental picture of the blissful life to come: “She … fixed her eyes on the heaven, whose blue unclouded concave was studded thick with stars, the worlds, perhaps, of spirits, unsphered of mortal mould. As her eyes wandered along the boundless aether, her thoughts rose, as before, toward the sublimity of the Deity, and to the contemplation of futurity” (72). In either case, the emptiness of the world is filled: “How often did she wish to express to him the new emotions which this astonishing scenery awakened, and that he could partake of them! Sometimes too she endeavoured to anticipate his remarks, and almost imagined him present” (163). One is put in mind here of that patient of Freud's, mentioned in the case history of Schreber, who having “lost his father at a very early age, was always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and sublime in nature.”²⁰

IV

What Radcliffe articulates so powerfully, as our detour through Ariès helps us to see, is not just the late eighteenth century's growing fear of death, but the way in which this fear was bound up with a new, all-consuming and increasingly irrational cognitive practice. In the Radcliffean thanatopia, immediate sensory experience gives way, necessarily, to an absorption in illusion—an obsessional concentration on nostalgic images of the dead. Yet these recollected “presences,” it turns out, are paradoxically more real, more palpable-seeming, than any object of sense. No external scene, not even the most horrid or riotous, can undermine this absorbing faith in the phantasmatic. Even the castle of Udolpho, where every hallway is plunged in gore, is but the deceptive “vision of a necromancer” and yields before the mind's “fairy scenes of unfading happiness” (444). Unpleasant realities cannot compete with the marvelous projections of memory, love, and desire.

Which is not to say that people in previous epochs had been unaware of, or uninterested in, the mysterious “images” and “pictures” of the mind. Aristotle spoke of phantasmata, and Aquinas of the “corporeal similitudes” present to the memory.²¹ In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, mental imagery played an important part in the devotional practices of Christianity. Employing the traditional mnemonic techniques known as the “arts of memory,” for example, one might contemplate a certain complex mental image—a house, say, with many adjoining rooms—as a way of remembering an associated sequence of spiritual disciplines or sacred themes.²² And needless to say, though in a somewhat different register, poets and mythographers had invoked the “shapes of fancy” for centuries before The Mysteries of Udolpho.

What emerges so distinctively with Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century, however, is an unprecedented sense of the subjective importance—the ontological weight, if you will—of these phantasmatic inner “pictures.” In earlier times, mental simulacra, especially images of other people, had been clearly distinguished as such—as fanciful, nostalgic, or unreal. (An exception, of course, were the ambiguous visionary phenomena known as ghosts or specters. These uncanny entities were felt to exist outside the self, as real—if not material—objects of sense.)²³ At the end of the eighteenth century, however, through a complex process of historical change, phantasmatic objects had come to seem increasingly real: even more real at times than the material world from which they presumably derived. Powerful new fears prompted this valorization of illusion. Above all, as Ariès suggests, a growing cultural anxiety regarding the fate of the body after death conditioned an unprecedented collective flight into fantastic ideation.

Early eighteenth-century popular epistemology, to be sure, had prepared the ground for this conceptual shift. John Locke, interestingly enough, had hinted at the uncanny “life” of mental images in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the section “Of Retention” (II.x), we may recall, he set out to describe in mechanistic terms the mind's curious ability to bring back into view those sensory impressions “which, after imprinting, have disappeared, or have been, as it were, laid out of sight.” Locke's would-be scientific description of the memory is everywhere confused, however, by an imagery of supernatural reanimation. The mind, he asserts several times, has the power to “revive” its old impressions—i.e., to give back life to the dead. Revived ideas reappear in the mind like revenants:

This further it is to be observed, concerning ideas lodged in the memory, and upon occasion revived by the mind, that they are not only (as the word revive imports) none of them new ones, but also that the mind takes notice of them as of a former impression, and renews its acquaintance with them, as with ideas it had known before.

These strangely “lively” images are in turn bound up with the life of the mind itself. A sad contingency, Locke is forced to admit, is that our ideas can “decay” in times of illness, and crumble like forgotten monuments: “the flames of a fever in a few days calcine all those images to dust and confusion, which seemed to be as lasting as if graved in marble.” But elsewhere he celebrates the mind as a kind of magical daemon or demiurge—one that infuses life, brings back the dead, paints “anew on itself” things that are “actually nowhere.”²⁴

Writers on the imagination—Burke, Hartley, Baillie, and Blair (and after them Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge)—took up the transcendental implications of Lockean theory in various programmatic ways throughout the century.²⁵ But it was Radcliffe, without question, who gave the supernaturalized model of mental experience its most charismatic popular brief. She injected the Lockean metaphor of mental reanimation with a rapturous emotional reality. In the ardent, delirious world of Udolpho, the “soaring mind” indeed makes dead things live again, including dead people. Like a new and potent deity, it turns absence into presence, rupture into reunion, sorrow into bliss—aspiring in the end to “that Great First Cause, which pervades and governs all being” (114).

One can speculate, of course, on the wishful content in this new-style devotionalism: to undo the death of another by meditating on his visionary form is also a compelling way of negating one's own death. Romantic mourning gave pleasure, one suspects, precisely because it entailed a magical sense of the continuity and stability of the “I” that mourned. To “see” the dead live again is to know that one too will live forever. Thus at times Radcliffe hints at a peculiar satisfaction to be found in grief. The vision of life-in-death is so beautiful one wants to grieve forever. In the final paragraph of Udolpho, for example, when she hopes that her fiction will help the mourner to “sustain” his sorrow, the subtle ambiguity of the verb suggests the underlying appeal of the new immortalizing habit of thought. Lugeo ergo sum: I mourn, therefore, I am.²⁶

That this supernaturalization of the mind should occur precisely when the traditional supernatural realm was elsewhere being explained away should not surprise us. According to the Freudian principle, what the mind rejects in one form may return to haunt it in another. A predictable inversion has taken place in The Mysteries of Udolpho: what once was real (the supernatural) has become unreal; what once was unreal (the imagery of the mind) has become real. In the very process of reversal, however, the two realms are confused; the archaic language of the supernatural contaminates the new language of mental experience. Ghosts and specters retain their ambiguous grip on the human imagination; they simply migrate into the space of the mind.

The Radcliffean model of mourning nonetheless presents certain problems. The constant denial of physical death results, paradoxically, in an indifference toward life itself. Common sense suggests as much: if one engages in the kind of obsessional reflection that Radcliffe seems to advocate—a thinking dominated by a preoccupation with the notion that the dead are not really dead (because, after all, one can still “see” them)—the real distinction between life and death will ultimately become irrelevant. If the dead appear to be alive in the mind, how does one distinguish between them and one's mental images of the living? Is such a distinction necessary? For, if seeing the dead in visionary form is more comforting than seeing them in the flesh, doesn't it pay to think of the living in this way too? The emotional conviction that the dead “live” in the mind can easily grow into a sense that the living “live” there too—i.e., that one's mental images of other people are more real in some sense, and far more satisfying, than any unmediated confrontation with them could ever be. One can control one's images of other people; their very stability and changelessness seem to offer a powerful antidote to fear. In the end one begins to mourn the living as well as the dead—to “see” them too—but only in this spectral and immutable form. Life and death merge in the static landscape of the mind.

I spoke at the outset of a new sense of the ghostliness of other people emerging in the late eighteenth century. I meant this in two senses. First, as we have seen, the “ghost” of the dead or absent person, conceived as a kind of visionary image or presence in the mind, takes on a new and compelling subjective reality. In the moment of romantic absorption, one is conscious of the other as a kind of mental phantom, an idée fixe, a source of sublime and life-sustaining emotion. But this subjective valorization of the phantasmatic has a profound effect on actual human relations. Real human beings become ghostly too—but in an antithetical sense, in the sense that they suddenly seem insubstantial and unreal.²⁷ The terrible irony—indeed the pathology—of the romantic vision is that even as other people come to hold a new and fascinating eminence in the mind, they cease to matter as individuals in the flesh. One no longer desires to experience flesh at all, for this is precisely what has become so problematic. The direct corporeal experience of other people, what Locke called “bare naked perception”—seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, hearing the other—has become emotionally intolerable, thanks to the new and overwhelming fear of loss and separation. Real people, needless to say, change, decay, and ultimately die before our eyes. The successful denial of mortality thus requires a new spectralized mode of perception, in which one sees through the real person, as it were, towards a perfect and unchanging spiritual essence. Safely subsumed in this ghostly form, the other can be appropriated, held close, and cherished forever in the ecstatic confines of the imagination.

We have seen certain consequences of this cognitive reorientation in the mummified emotional world of Udolpho. Absence is preferable to presence. (An absent loved one, after all, can be present in the mind. One is not distracted by his actual presence.) The dead are more interesting than the living. (If the dead are alive in Udolpho, the living might as well as dead.) Objects are more compelling than people. (Objects evoke memories; people disturb them.) But most unsettlingly perhaps, living individuals—as opposed to the visionary forms of the mind—are curiously inconsequential. A new indeterminacy enters into human relationships. Is so and so who he claims to be? He looks like St. Aubert. He makes me see the ghost of St. Aubert; I must really be with St. Aubert. Other people seem bizarrely amorphous—lacking in specificity. Anyone can summon up the image of another. Everyone reminds us of someone else.

It's an interesting question, of course, whether the habit of seeing those who aren't there, once firmly established, can ever be broken. No one, certainly, seems able to give it up in Udolpho. For Radcliffe's heroes and heroines, visionary experience of this kind has become indistinguishable from consciousness itself. The issue persists, however, as a historical problem. For once mental images have been linked with powerful subjective fantasies, such as the wish for immortality, can their strange hold on us ever be weakened? Put most bluntly, do we not continue to exhibit the fantastic, nostalgic, and deeply alienating absorption in phantasmatic objects dramatized in Radcliffe's novel?

That we take for granted the uncanny Radcliffean metaphor of the haunted consciousness is one proof, it seems to me, that the romantic habit of thought has not gone away. Indeed the preference for the phantasmatic may have strengthened its grip on Western consciousness over the past two centuries. Even more than Radcliffe and her contemporaries, we seek to deny our own corporeality and the corporeality of others; even more deeply than they, we have come to cherish the life of the mind over life itself. What The Mysteries of Udolpho shows so plainly—could we begin to acknowledge it—is the denatured state of our own awareness: our antipathy toward the body and its contingencies, our rejection of the present, our fixation on the past (or yearnings for an idealized future), our longing for simulacra and nostalgic fantasy. We are all in love with what isn't there.

The reader may object that the kind of illusionism that Radcliffe advocates is clearly an aberration: we all know that our mental fabrications are not “real,” and have a name for what happens when we lose this knowledge: psychosis. Yet, as the history of attitudes toward death suggests, it is precisely the distinction between so-called normal and psychotic patterns of belief that has become increasingly confused since the eighteenth century. The everyday has come to seem fantastic; and the fantastic more and more real.

In a much longer study, it would be possible to document the growth of this psychic confusion in more detail. Nineteenth-century romanticism, for example, undoubtedly owes much to the new belief in the reality of mental objects. Indeed, the celebrated romantic concept of the creative imagination is itself a displaced affirmation of faith in “life” of one's mental perceptions. Certain tendencies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical thought may likewise arise out of a similar emotional shift toward the phantasmatic. In particular the rise of modern skepticism—and the fact that we have come to speculate about the nature of reality with an urgency and insistence unknown to our forebears—may paradoxically have resulted from a subliminal faith in the reality of thoughts: for only when mental phenomena assume a powerful and disorienting emotional presence does the boundary between mind and world in turn become a pressing, philosophical problem. Finally, any study of the spectralizing habit in modern times would have to take into consideration what might be called its technological embodiment: our compulsive need, since the mid-nineteenth century, to invent machines that mimic and reinforce the image-producing powers of consciousness. Only out of a deep preference for the phantoms of the mind, perhaps, have we felt impelled to find mechanical techniques for remaking the world itself in spectral form. Photography was the first great breakthrough—a way of possessing material objects in a strangely decorporealized yet also supernaturally vivid form. But still more bizarre forms of spectral representation have appeared in the twentieth century—the moving pictures of cinematography and television, and recently, the eerie, three-dimensional phantasmata of holography:²⁸

V

In lieu of any such extended investigation, however, let me conclude with some remarks that may point up in a more suggestive way the preeminence of the spectralizing habit in modern Western consciousness. Apart from that of Ann Radcliffe, the most important ghost haunting this essay has perhaps been that of Sigmund Freud, whose description of psychic experience and the uncanny offers an interesting perspective on the theme of the supernatural in The Mysteries of Udolpho. And yet to think of Freud and the invention of psychoanalysis is to see what one might call the Radcliffean paradox inscribed in a new form. Freud, of course, like Radcliffe, often felt compelled to explain the supernatural. The following passage from The Interpretation of Dreams is as complacent (and amusing) a rationalization as anything to be found in Udolpho:

Robbers, burglars, and ghosts, of whom some people feel frightened before going to bed, and who sometimes pursue their victims after they are asleep, all originate from one and the same class of infantile reminiscence. They are the nocturnal visitors who rouse children and take them up to prevent their wetting the bed, or lift the bedclothes to make sure where they have put their hands in their sleep. Analyses of some of these anxiety-dreams have made it possible for me to identify these nocturnal visitors more precisely. In every case the robbers stood for the sleeper's father, whereas the ghosts corresponded to female figures in white nightgowns.²⁹

Ghosts, for Freud, have ceased to exist anywhere but in the mind: they are representatives (in white nightgowns) of “infantile reminiscence”—visitants from the realm of unconscious memory and fantasy. The psychoanalyst supposedly has the power to raise these troubling specters—yet in a controlled fashion—and exorcise them. In the course of the therapeutic process, Freud observed, the analyst “conjures into existence a piece of real life,” calling up those shapes from the “psychical underworld” that have begun to obsess or disturb the patient.³⁰ These figures carry with them all the frightening “power of hallucination,” but can ultimately be laid to rest by the skillful clinician.³¹

Or can they? The crucial stage in Freudian analysis is the moment of transference—when the analyst himself suddenly appears before the patient as a ghost: “the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past.”³² At this stage the patient experiences a near-total “recoil from reality” and responds to the analyst as a “re-animated” form of the “infantile image.”³³ It is up to the analyst to draw the patient out of his “menacing illusion” and show him that “what he takes to be real new life is a reflection of the past.”³⁴

There is a tremendous paradox, however, in the central Freudian notion that by calling up ghosts one will learn, so to speak, to let go of them. Psychoanalysis proposes that we dwell upon what isn't there, the life of fantasy, precisely as a way of freeing ourselves from it. Yet can such a liberation ever really take place? Freud himself, it turns out, was often strangely uncertain whether the process of transference could ever be completely resolved, and sometimes hinted that for certain patients the spectral forms of the past might continue to haunt them indefinitely.³⁵ In his most pessimistic statement on the matter, the essay “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” written late in his career, he even began to entertain the notion that the idea of a “natural end” to analysis might itself be an illusion and “the permanent settlement of an instinctual demand” an impossible task.³⁶

The problem, of course, is that even as it tries to undo it, psychoanalysis recreates the habit of romantic spectralization in a new and intensified form. Freud's goal was to help his patients escape the sense of being “possessed” by the past—yet his very method involves an almost Radcliffean absorption in the phantasmatic. One denies ghosts by raising them up, frees oneself of one's memories by remembering, escapes the feeling of neurotic derealization by plunging into an unreal reverie. That such a paradoxical process should inspire mixed results should not surprise us. Seen in historical terms, as an offshoot of the radically introspective habit of mind initiated in the late eighteenth century, psychoanalysis seems both the most poignant critique of romantic consciousness to date, and its richest and most perverse elaboration.

It may be that any attempt to domesticate the daemonic element in human life will inevitably result in its recurrence in a more intense and chronic form. Ann Radcliffe, as we have seen, dismissed at a blow the age-old vagaries of Western superstition, and sought, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, to create a new human landscape: one in which no primitive spirits harassed the unwary, and no horror—even that of death itself—could disrupt the rational pleasures of the soul. Yet, as would be the case with Freud later, this urge toward exorcism created its own recoil effect, a return of irrationality where it was least expected—in the midst of ordinary life itself. This effect, even now, is difficult to acknowledge. No wonder we prefer to reduce Radcliffe to banalities; to see the full depth of illusion in her work would be to acknowledge our own predicament. Ann Radcliffe explained many things, but she also saw ghosts, and in these we too, perhaps, continue to believe.

Notes

1. Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 606. All citations are from this translation; parenthetical notation refers to page numbers in this edition.

2. Sir Walter Scott, Lives of Eminent Novelists and Dramatists (London: Frederick Warne, 1887), p. 568.

3. Because Austen made it so difficult to take certain aspects of Udolpho seriously, modern critics have often refused to take any aspect of the novel seriously. Certainly Radcliffe can be vulgar in the extreme, but her impact on the modern life of the emotions cannot be dismissed. It is one aim of the present essay to read Radcliffe against the current Austenian caricature, and to restore to view the powerful current of feeling in her work, however awkwardly or crudely this feeling is expressed.

4. See Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), p. 139; J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 261; and Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longman's, Green & Co., 1905), p. 127.

5. All citations are from the World's Classics edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée, notes by Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Parenthetical notation refers to page numbers in this edition.

6. See, for example, Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 78; and among psychoanalytic and feminist critics, Norman Holland and Leona Sherman, “Gothic Possibilities,” New Literary History 8 (1976-77): 279-94; Claire Kahane, “The Gothic Mirror,” in The (M)Other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner, Claire Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 334-51; Mary Poovey, “Ideology and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’” Criticism 21 (Fall 1979): 307-30; and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality,” Modern Language Studies 9 (1979): 98-113.

7. See Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1985), pp. 215-56. On Udolpho's contemporary appeal, see J.M.S. Tompkins, Ann Radcliffe and Her Influence on later Writers (New York: Arno Press, 1980) and the Dobrée introduction to the Oxford edition.

8. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 114.

9. Todorov, The Fantastic, pp. 116-17.

10. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 118.

11. D.W. Winnicott, Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), p. 30.

12. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), XVII. 218-52.

13. In “Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel” (PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 96 [March 1981]: 255-70), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that Gothic fiction typically presents “a (novelistic) world of faces where the diacritical code is poor”—i.e., where the differences between characters' physiognomies are so slight as to challenge the “fiction of presence” the novel also tries to ensure. One effect of this impoverished physiognomic code, she writes, is to create “unbounded confusions of identity along a few diacritical axes: any furrowed man will be confusable with any other furrowed man (Schedoni with Zampari with Zeluca, for example), and so forth” (p. 263). Sedgwick's rigorously poststructuralist perspective forbids her to interpret this phenomenon in any psychological sense (she treats it instead as a formal convention—part of the play of the “surface” in Gothic fiction), but a fruitful connection might nonetheless be made, following the developmental model of Freud and Piaget, between such “confusability” and the early stages of cognitive perception in the human infant.

14. Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 148.

15. See Ariès, Hour of Our Death, chaps. 10 and 11, esp. pp. 409-11 and 475-99. On the relocation of cemeteries see also Richard A. Etlin, The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985).

16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York: Arno, 1980), takes modern critics like Lowry Nelson and Robert Heilman to task for speaking of the sinister ambiance of Gothic fiction as “mere decor,” “stage-set,” “claptrap,” and so on. In so doing, she argues, they fail to see that objects such as bloodstained veils, burial crypts, and open graves actually serve complex formal functions in the fictions in which they appear. While this is certainly true, Sedgwick misses a more obvious point: that the twentieth-century urge to trivialize may have something to do with the fact that the typical Gothic setting foregrounds precisely those artifacts—tombs, corpses, shrouds and so on—that modern society now views with particular fear and revulsion. The very assertion that such details are silly or melodramatic—or even as Sedgwick herself puts it, merely “formal” elements—suggests something of the extreme emotional defensiveness that the death-obsessed Gothic milieu now inspires. We have accustomed ourselves to finding hidden sexual plots in Gothic fiction (and indeed delight in them); we have still not reconciled ourselves, however, to its far more obvious concern with death and dissolution.

17. Ariès's description of romantic mourning, it should be noted, is very close indeed to the picture of chronic or disordered mourning familiar to modern psychology. Freud spoke of the inability to let go of mental images of a dead loved one (“loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall the dead one”) as one of the classic symptoms of normal grief in his famous essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). He also noted, however, that this obsessional state might be unnaturally prolonged if the mourner possessed strongly ambivalent feelings toward the dead loved one. Modern clinicians, notably in Britain, have enlarged on this Freudian notion of chronic grief in a number of recent case studies. See in particular Geoffrey Gorer's Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (London: Tavistock Publications, 1965) and John Bowlby's magisterial Attachment and Loss (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 3 vols.

18. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: or, the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985), p. 1403. Compare also Tony Tanner's comments on the theme of sentimental reunion in Rousseau in Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 144-46.

19. Emily St. Aubert's sensation that her father's corpse still moves resembles the fantasy frequently held by children faced with death—i.e., that the dead body can somehow be made to move again. Likewise, the vision of the tomb as a home is also close to the projections of young children, who as Bowlby points out, often believe that by dying themselves they can be reunited with a dead parent. See Loss: Sadness and Depression (Vol. 1 of Attachment and Loss), pp. 274 and 354-58.

20. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911), in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963), p. 155. For a further development of the notion that the cultivation of sublime emotion can be a paradoxical psychic mechanism for obviating loss or threats to the self, see Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 17-18, 137-45, and 157-58; and Neil Hertz, “The Notion of Blockage in the Literature of the Sublime,” in The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 40-60.

21. On Aquinian notions of mental imagery see Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Viking Penguin, 1984), p. 13.

22. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (New York: Penguin Books, 1969); and Spence, Memory Palace, pp. 1-23.

23. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), p. 587.

24. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. and abr. A.D. Woozley (London: Wm. Collins Sons, 1964), pp. 123, 125, and 124-25.

25. See M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 62-63; and Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, pp. 17-19.

26. Burke, as Radcliffe probably knew, also wrote of the curious satisfaction to be found in grief: “The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it: but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.” And Burke too connected this pleasure with certain self-affirming mental operations: “It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness …” See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 37.

27. I purposefully echo the title of Fredric Bogel's Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). This rich discussion of “the perception of insubstantiality” in later eighteenth-century English literature relates in interesting ways to the concerns of the present essay.

28. Iconic images have always been used to inspire visions of the dead or absent. What have changed are the forms of commemorative imagery and the technological means by which such images are produced. In Udolpho characters habitually use small painted portraits of loved ones to evoke nostalgic thoughts: Du Pont steals a miniature picture of Emily and uses it throughout the novel as a sentimental aide-mémoire; St. Aubert keeps a miniature of his dead sister for a similar purpose; the nun Agnes has yet another miniature of the same woman, with whom she is obsessed. Because of its size and portability, the miniature had become the natural accessory to romantic mourning by the late eighteenth century: a talismanic device, so to speak, through which one might enter the idealizing space of the memory. As the capacity for image-reproduction improved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the invention of photography and similar processes, so undoubtedly was the spectralizing habit itself reinforced. What I am suggesting, however, is that the preference for mental imagery may in some sense have preceded and conditioned this new technology: that the very pattern of human invention was determined by preexisting emotional needs. On the role of commemorative objects in modern bourgeois culture, see also Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

29. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), p. 439.

30. The phrase “a conjuring into existence of a piece of real life” is from the essay “Recollection, Repetition and Working Through” (1914), trans. Joan Rivière, in Therapy and Technique, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1963), p. 162. Freud also uses the conjuring metaphor at several points in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), reprinted in the Rieff volume. The phrase “psychical underworld” is from this last essay, p. 249.

31. Freud, “Dynamics of the Transference” (1912), trans. Joan Rivière, in Therapy and Technique, p. 114.

32. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), p. 31.

33. Freud, “Dynamics of the Transference,” pp. 108-9.

34. Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis, p. 34.

35. See Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” on “the still unresolved residues of transference,” pp. 236-38.

36. Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” p. 242.