THE GOTHIC NOVEL
53
Throughout the
Mysteries
the moral responsibility (one cannot
call it gravity) of the author, of her characters, and of her readers
stands opposed to their aesthetic irresponsibility (not to call it fri–
volity). So far as the characters- and the author and reader-are
morally exemplary, they embody or subscribe to bourgeois faculties
for providence, caution, dependability, self-interest, discreet benevo–
lence, and sexual reliability or "purity." So far as characters, author,
and reader are regarded aesthetically, they embody or tolerate anti–
bourgeois impulses toward improvidence, instability, imprudent bene–
volence, and, in the case of Valancourt, a sexual waywardness that
amounts to vacillation rather than Byronic naughtiness. Mrs.
Rad–
cliffe viewed in the light of socio-economic relations is thus uninten–
tionally subversive, unwittingly ambiguous-an implied priggishness
is set against an implied bohemianism: caution/incaution, selfish- /
ness/generosity, purity/ impurity, etc.
All such ambiguities are left as ambiguities, without being any
further resolved than Tennyson resolved the ambiguities within
"Locksley Hall" or than Gray did within the "Elegy." Historico–
literary criticism, dwelling upon the mechanism and literary ante–
cedents of the novel, is prone to ignore them. Nor do the ambiguities
exist in any tension or any metaphysical balance or reconciliation of
discordant qualities. The ambiguities in Mrs. RadG:liffe and in the
bourgeois
con~ciousness
in general- in
J.
S. Mill or Ruskin, for exam–
ple-are latent; they do not exist so "effectively" as they do in the
metaphysical mind, that is entirely conscious of its equivocations and
struggles between them (as Donne struggled less blindly than Mill or
Ruskin) . The metaphysical mind, also, in the era of "primitive
accumulation of capital," with its activity of will imposed an order
of its own upon discordant impulses. In contrast, Mrs. Radcliffe's
values are definite but unrealized. She is not fully conscious of what
she is doing. Consequently the danger in reading this sort of romanti–
cism-and the more urgent need for this kind of criticism of Mrs.
Radcliffe than for that of more "conscious" writers like Henry James
-is tha11 we do not really see what it is "about," what it involves.
Clearly Mrs. Radcliffe's romanticism differs from the Byronic,
Shelleyan, or Wordsworthian one, since there is a mode of resolution
in these poets, who consciously rebel against the bourgeoisie by con–
tempt, utopianism, or retreat. Intuiting the bourgeois-romantic dilem–
mas-urban/ pastoral, caution/ incaution, selfishness/ selflessness-they
attempt a resolution by simplification; Wordsworth's resolution being
pastorali~m,
Byron's incaution, and Shelley's selflessness. Such "revo–
lutionary" romantics exist by their commitments, into which they are
