60
PARTISAN REVIEW
army," Adeline finds him acceptable enough. The urban: bourgeois/
pastoral: anti-bourgeois ambiguity is inherent in the relationship of
all
Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes and heroines. This ambiguity conditions,
by attraction or repulsion, the nature of the Wordsworthian female
growing in sun and shower, the Shelleyan sister: spouse, the Byronic
victim: vixen, the Tennysonian
hausfrau.
Dimly understanding how
"the bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production," the
romantics protested by either sentimentalizing or emphatic uncon–
ventionality. Again, whatever romantic revolt occurs against pro–
prietorship in woman is partial- a revolt by sensibility rather than
by principle.
Now it is perfectly true that Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley,
or Ruskin are often characterized by their differences from Mrs.
Radcliffe. Yet their very differences are to be measured against the
ambiguities implied in
The Mysteries of Udolpho.
The socio-economic
milieu in which they thought and wrote was the same as hers. It was
a milieu that subjected the writer, in England at least, to the necessity
either of compromise (the escapist direction of romanticism is a form
of compromise) or of intransigence. Mrs. Radcliffe is no intransigent,
and her awareness of her predicament is so imperfect that she cannot
be said to compromise. Her fiction is meaningful because it so inade–
quately conceals the naked contradictions intrinsic in bourgeois roman–
ticism, a revolt so radically inhibited that it failed to be in a deep
social sense creative.
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
RANDALL JARRELL
