52
PARTISAN REVIEW
the exoticism of the setting, and the pseudo-Byronic excitements are
"romantic"; that the moralizing affixed to the preposterous story is a
dull conventionality. From the psychological view there is additional
interest because of the apprehension, suspense, and anatomy of sen–
sibility.
From a socio-economic point of view Mrs. Radcliffe is more per–
plexing. Her actual performance may be artless to the degree of
naivete. This performance is possible, however, only by certain
assumptions on the part of both Mrs. Radcliffe and her reader. These
assumptions-the social context of the novel-form a scheme of
ambivalence that amounts to paradox and indicates ·deep cross-fis–
sures running through bourgeois-romantic consciousness itself, the
result of a contradiction arising between the artist and society.*
What happens
if
one substitutes for the customary platitudes-gothi–
cism, melodrama, sentimentality, mediaevalism, feeling for nature–
another set of platitudes, an evaluation in terms of Plekhanov's dia–
lectical materialism? According to the first system of platitudes the
novel is simple; according tQ the second it is astonishingly equivocal.
The disabilities inherent in Mrs. Radcliffe's bourgeois romanticism
become very plain. Critically, the platitudes remain platitudes, of
course; we are not concerned with them but with their implications,
particularly in regard to the inherent "vulgarity" of an art that half
retai~,
half rejects bourgeois standards. Mrs. Radcliffe, writing as a
tradesman's daughter from the "quiet shade of domestic privacy,"
occupies personally a somewhat ambiguous position.
III
The thoroughgoing ambiguity in her novel lies between aesthetic
values and moral values, the conservative or bourgeois values being
moral, the aesthetic values being "romantic" and in a limited sense
"revolutionary." Both orders of values are, ultimately, those of the
bourgeoisie-the moral values in direct, the aesthetic values in inverse,
relationship to that class. Insofar as the novel satisfies the bourgeois
moral code, it is in danger of being aesthetically unattractive, and
insofar as
it
succeeds in evoking its intended aesthetic responses, it
is in peril of violating a bourgeois moral code. Possibly such an oppo–
sition can be resolved only in a non-bourgeois society.
*
Criticisms of Mrs. Radcliffe by Alida Wieten,
J.
M. S. Tompkins, Ernest
Baker, and others perceive inconsistencies but do not indicate their significance–
a fact demonstrating the need of a fresh approach to "romanticism."
