The Mysteries of Udolpho Read Online Free PDF Page B

Robert Mighall have suggested, the nightmare fear of losing hard-won liberties and being dragged back to the persecutions of the Counter-Reformation is a strong motivation of Gothic fiction. The old ghosts of Catholic Europe – in
Udolpho
the tyrannical Montonis and Laurentini – are raised in order to be dispelled, killed off, exorcised. 41 Both Montoni and Emily’s aunt are contemptuous of sensibility, while the ‘spectral’ Sister Agnes of the convent of St Clair, herself once a woman of ‘beauty and sensibility’, is well placed to warn Emily of ‘the first indulgence of the passions’, the ‘scorpions’ which will ‘sting… even unto death’. Her Gothic past, surfacing in and permeating Emily’s present, accords with St Aubert’s warnings to Emily about indulging a vicious ‘excess’ of feelings and with Emily’s own lessons in the constant need for restraint.
    At the same time, working against this critique is a discourse of the sublime which operates as a more or less unproblematic extension of the ‘real’ and which encourages belief in the uncanny workings of the ‘Great Author’ and the perceptional powers and sublime feelings of Emily St Aubert. Despite the strong emphasis on Emily’s need for ‘common sense’ and ‘fortitude’, her ‘romantic passion’ and ‘enthusiasm’ are vindicated in the continual allusions to the richness of her sublime responses to nature and her enlightened, unmediated apprehension of God. Here, Rictor Norton, in his monumental biography of Radcliffe, has intimated that, in her imaginative non-superstitious apprehension of the supernatural, Emily is positioned within the Unitarian Dissenting culture of Radcliffe herself. Norton argues that Radcliffe writes from a position of Unitarian belief in God which, reaching back to Joseph Priestley and Anna Laetitia (Aikin) Barbauld, necessarily entailed a rational sanction for the supernatural. 42
    Romance we have in plenty. What of realism in
Udolpho
? In the sixth chapter of Volume IV we come across a self-reflexive passage in which the author/narrator celebrates ‘old’ romance, ‘which had captivated the careless imagination in every rank of society in a former age’:
    The fictions of the Provençal writers, whether drawn from the Arabian legends, brought by the Saracens into Spain, or recounting the chivalric exploits performed by the crusaders, whom the Troubadours accompanied to the east, were generally splendid and always marvellous, both in scenery and incident.
    Timed, as this is, to correspond with Ludovico’s vigil in and mysterious disappearance from the supposedly haunted chamber at Chateau-le-Blanc, we are prompted to reflect upon the qualities of the ‘new’ romance before us. Earlier, in the tenth chapter of Volume III, there is a satirical quip to Blanche from Mademoiselle Bearn:
    Where have you been so long?… I had begun to think some wonderful adventure had befallen you, and that the giant of this enchanted castle, or the ghost, which, no doubt, haunts it, had conveyed you through a trap-door into some subterranean vault, whence you was never to return.’
    Here we have an allusion to Walpole’s
Castle of Otranto
, with its melodramatic supernatural machinery. On both occasions it is clear that interwoven with Radcliffe’s romance are strong strands of rationality. But realism is apparent too, as Emily will reside at Chateau-le-Blanc or the convent of St Clair only until her estates are restored to her. Emily’s troubled relationship with her guardian aunt and her struggles with Montoni are realistically presented in the first half of the novel, but at Chateau-le-Blanc economic discussions about the possession of and laws regarding the estates Emily has inherited from her father, and about the fate of the estates of her Aunt Cheron, and of the true owner