THE GOTHIC NOVEL
57
The Monk-are
entirely physiological; these physiological reverbera–
tions turn out to be the aesthetic reverberations, and vice versa. This
sort of "decadence" is, in its extreme, a bourgeois effect. It signifies
the ultimate alienation of the writer from society and attests an
art
socially and religiously bankrupt, one result of a system of "naked
self-interest and callous cash payment." The situation can be accounted
for by the ambiguity of Mrs. Radcliffe's moral/unmoral orientation.
Her novel purports to inculcate a bourgeois morality, as its closing
words expound:
Oh! useful may it be to have shown, that though the vicious can
sometimes pour affiiction upon the good, their power is transient and
their punishment certain ; and that innocence, though oppressed by
injustice, shall, supported by patience, finally triumph over misfortune!
These platitudes, morally, have no bearing upon the aesthetic signifi–
cance of the book-the specific aesthetic effect being that of horror.
But the horror is extraneous to the morality, in a vacuum of "pure"
horror. This customary bourgeois moral/unmoral dichotomy in
art
results in a morality without aesthetic import and aesthetic responses
of limited moral significance; in other words, myth is deprived of its
deepest, most human resources. Mario Praz has recorded tlJe history
of this romantic agony.
v
Other ethical ambiguities are implicit in the
Mysteries,
notably
the ambivalence of urban: bourgeois/pastoral: anti-bourgeois. The
first terms condition the moral practices of the characters; the second
terms condition their moral ideals. The bourgeois: urban virtues of
diligence, poise, suavity, caution, calculation, sobriety are every–
where set against the anti-bourgeois: pastoral virtues of indolence,
unsophistication, naive impulse, and the peasant-like innocence and
improvidence transcendentally elevated by Wordsworth. A similar
ambiguity appears even in Byron, e.g., Manfred's admiration of the
chamois-hunter. The "pensive tranquillity" of Mrs. Radcliffe's hero–
ines is possible only to "honorific" leisure. Admiring the "culture"
that civilizes urban society, St. Aubert, like his daughter, scorns
"great cities, where selfishness, dissipation, and insincerity supply the
place of tenderness, simplicity, and truth." The old Theocritean
ambivalence takes a singularly bourgeois (substantially Victorian)
cast in Mrs. Radcliffe's attitude toward wealth, which seems admir–
able
if
productive of "culture"-appreciation of scenery, the fine
arts,
sensitivity to
suffering-bu~
is depreciated
if
it is manifest in the
bourgeois "coarseness" of Quesnel, a Parisian of affairs who "lived
