The Mysteries of Udolpho Read Online Free PDF Page A

generally suppose. Here already we live in that world and perceive it, closely bound up as it is with the web of earthly nature.’ 32
    References to the numinous are made explicitly in
Udolpho
’s recurrent deistic emphasis on the precedence of nature over culture. St Aubert has ‘retired from the multitude’ to live in the rural tranquillity of Gascony, where the grandeur of natural scenery frequently impresses on Emily’s heart ‘a sacred awe’ and her thoughts go winging to ‘the G OD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH ’. When Emily’s counterpart, Blanche de Villefort, leaves the convent in which she has spent many ‘dull years’, she is of like mind – and extremely critical of the religious practices of Catholic monasteries: ‘How can the poor nuns and friars feel the full fervour of devotion, if they never see the sun rise, or set? Never, till this evening, did I know what true devotion is; for, never before did I see the sun sink below the vast earth!’ Blanche opens a high casement to be again ‘cheered by the face of living nature’ and view the‘shadowy earth, the air, and ocean’; her thoughts rise ‘involuntarily to the Great Author of the sublime objects she contemplate[s], and she breathe[s] a prayer of finer devotion, than any she had ever uttered beneath the vaulted roof of a cloister’. On rising late next morning, she again exclaims:
    Who could first invent convents!… and who could first persuade people to go into them? and to make religion a pretence, too, where all that should inspire it, is so carefully shut out! God is best pleased with the homage of a grateful heart, and, when we view his glories, we feel most grateful. I never felt so much devotion, during the many dull years I was in the convent, as I have done in the few hours, that I have been here, where I need only look on all around me – to adore God in my inmost heart! (Vol. III, Ch. XI)
    Hers is enlightened spirituality.
    Arguably, the supernatural as metaphor also forms part of the scaffolding for Radcliffe’s conscious poeticization of her novel. While she was not the first novelist to exhibit her poems in a novel – Charlotte Smith had confidently inserted her poetry in her first novel,
Emmeline
, published in 1788 – the extent to which she uses poetry in
Udolpho
is remarkable. At a time when poetry, the literary sphere of men, was deemed the language and special indication of genius and aesthetic sensibility, its inclusion in
Udolpho
stakes a claim for the authority and respectability of female authorship and for the romance as a literary form.
    In order to provide contextual frames for ideas and to heighten atmosphere, Radcliffe utilizes some seventy-five quotations. Many of them are epigraphs to chapters – from Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Beattie, Collins, Sayers, Mason, and Rogers. But brief quotations from Shakespeare or other poets are also worked into the omniscient narration, while full-length poems, supposedly written by the characters themselves, are interpolated in the story. Here Radcliffe uses Emily’s sensibility, her feeling heart and continual receptiveness to the changing qualities of the landscape, to celebrate her creative ‘enthusiasm’. 33 During the course of
Udolpho
, Emily is inspired to compose thirteen poems, many of them about victims, and other poems are attributed to Du Pont, St Aubert, Count Morano, Blanche and Valancourt. Readers impatient for the story may find these tedious and be tempted to pass over them quickly, but it is worth stopping to consider the role which Emily’s poetic sensibility plays in giving her ‘sublime’ authority and the mental ‘fortitude’ to resist Montoni’s predatory demands that she hand over her inherited estates.
    While reviewers of the day certainly gave attention to Radcliffe’s verse – in particular ‘The