LITERARY ARCHEOLOGY

by Janice Law

Inspired by the big white square on the computer screen, I’ve been off on some literary archeology this week, 697 pages worth, to be exact, of the early gothic novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho. Published in 1794 by Ann Radcliffe, always known to her admirers as Mrs. Radcliffe, The Mysteries brought the gothic to the height of its popularity and ushered in the blockbuster novel that has been with us ever since.

Why should we care about a tome that is on graduate school life support? Several reasons. First, it still reads well, brightening many a doctoral student’s reading list on the way to comprehensives. Second, Mrs. R found out a formula for broad-based success which still works pretty well. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, we have the ever popular “woman in jeopardy,” the haunted castle—more recently modernized as the “old dark house”—the star crossed romance, the foreign villain, lots of local color, and a good handful of misunderstandings, bad timings, and coincidences. The heroine is beautiful; the hero, handsome, the sixteenth century clothes occasionally splendid. All attitudes are resolutely of the 1790’s.

Naturally, over two hundred years readers’ requirements have changed. A great deal of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with descriptions of scenery; we are treated to travelogues of the Pyrenees, Tuscany, Venice and its hinterlands, as well as the heroine’s native Gascony. No thrill today when we can see live footage from around the globe on our phones and watch cyclists maneuver on the formerly banditti-infested Pyrenees and Dolomites.

At the end of the 18th century, however, such armchair travel was a big treat, and Mrs. R. obliged, even if she had to beef up her own experience with a bit of literary research of her own. She is supposed to have made liberal use of Dr. Johnson’s buddy Hester Thrale Piozzi’s firsthand account of Venice.

Either way, Radcliffe’s descriptions were not just pretty scenery. The dawning Romantic era had a big taste for the sublime, for what might be called the terrifyingly beautiful. Snow covered mountains were ceasing to be a horror for travelers and becoming a spectacle for tourists. Ditto plunging waterfalls, dizzying chasms—and do please note their proper epithets. Ruins, no longer either an obstacle or a stone quarry, were promoted to décor highly suitable for fashionable melancholy. Even banditti, once the scourge of the mountains, became, in more settled times, an accent of local color. Mrs. R served all this up in spades.

But what interests me in particular was her attitude toward mystery, both of the criminal and of the supernatural type. While Poe, whom she influenced, split the genre into tales of the supernatural and accounts of his rational detective, Radcliffe combined them into one large, tasty literary bonbon.

We have mysteries and horrors aplenty especially in Udolpho, but sooner or later the supernatural aspects are undercut by rational explanations. Mysterious music has a source and even spectral visitors turn out to have their feet on terra firma. Indeed, Radcliffe manages to have things both ways—she gets every bit of suspense out of the possibilities of decaying castles, ancient crimes, vaults, dungeons, towers and chains, strange noises and old crimes, while maintaining a rational universe and the rule of reason.

Her heroine, Emily St. Aubert, fits this scheme very nicely. Raised in rural seclusion by loving and cultivated parents, she is very much the sheltered Regency belle. Neither her living arrangements nor her personality smack much of the 16th century, but then as now the best-selling author is wise to let current attitudes trump historical accuracy.

Balanced between the Enlightenment and the dawning of the Romantic era, Emily is prone to tears and “sensibility,” to ecstasies over scenery and swoons over music—¬just the sort of gal Jane Austen would later satirize. Emily’s a delicate flower and her mortally ill father warns her against over-emotionalism, a caution which she takes to heart. Fortunately so, for later, orphaned and friendless, she proves equal to combating not only her difficult aunt but the evil Signor Montoni. She weeps, she sighs, she faints in high Romantic style, then pulls herself together and behaves like a proper child of the Enlightenment with reason for her guide and a good deal of what we would today call self-esteem.

Emily’s a rationalist with a tender heart. Disillusioned with her lover, she weeps and mopes but resolutely turns her face from him. Confronted by the blustering villain, she refuses to sign away her inheritance until it is clear that she is out of options, and she wanders around the unlit castle in search, first of information, then of her aunt, and later of her lover. She’s proper but intrepid in her own way, and while she gives in to her emotions, her ultimate resource is reason. Jane Austen clearly admired Mrs. R as much as she mocked her conventions.

With women protagonists popular in our genre, it seems fair to salute the great-grandmother of all those intrepid snoops and avengers, those investigators of low crime and unexplained phenomena, and, yes, women in jeopardy—Ann Radcliffe.