THE GOTHIC NOVEL
51
Difficult as romanticism may be to define, there would probably
be agreement that the "gothic" novel of Mrs. Radcliffe with its stress
upon Salvatorean "nature," mediaevalism, horror, and emotionalism
is a very "pure" instance of the romantic. Mrs. Radcliffe lacks, natu–
rally, the inward eye of Wordsworth, the inflammatory political
rationalism of Shelley or Godwin, the solipsism of Byron, the lethean
sensuousness of Keats-the impact of the great romantics; but she
illustrates almost every feature of romanticism in however slight di–
mension. She is relevant clinically, and not without present interest
through her influence upon Lautreamont and the surrealists.
If
one can force< himself to penetrate the obvious, there appears
beneath the surface of Mrs. Radcliffe's gothic fabrications a pattern
of socio-economic contradictions, paradoxes, ambivalences, and ambi–
guities that affords some criteria of the greater romantics and of
British romanticism generally. Other romantics may be more con–
sciously hostile to bourgeois morality, but Mrs. Radcliffe betrays her–
self more suggestively than the romantic intensely at discord with his
environment. In her, one more readily s;omprehends the total situa–
tion-the bourgeois standards and the oblique negation of those
standards. Mrs. Radcliffe has a complexity all her own.
Since her work is uneven, we may depend chiefly upon the
novel that was and is her best known,
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794).
II
The course of the
Mysteries
is what one expects of Mrs. Rad–
cliffe. Emily, daughter of the impoverished but well-born St. Aubert,
falls in love with the high-minded and equally sensitive Valancourt,
from
whom she is carried away by her guardians to the sham horrors
of a castle in the Apennines. After escaping from Udolpho, she learns
that Valancourt, driven by hopeless love, has recklessly involved him–
self in financial and sexual indiscretions that prove to be the blunders
of a generous spirit instead of depravity. Emily, of course, recovers
an amplitude of wealth and weds a sobered Valancourt, whose bro–
ther endows him nobly. There are synthetic horrors and scenery, syn–
thetic feelings and moralizing.
The customary historico-literary estimate of the
Mysteries
runs
about as follows: that here are Beauty and Terror; that gothicism
is apparent in Mrs. Radcliffe's mock-historical apparatus, in her
naive devices to effect "horror," in the obviously manipulated plot;
that the sublimities of "nature" and the pantheistic rapture it inspires,
