The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

*contains spoilers*

‘NATURAL things affect us, by the laws of that connexion, which providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds. Painting affects in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of imitation; […] as to words; they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural things, or by painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as any of these, and sometimes a much greater than any of them’. Edmund Burke from A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

The disparity between one’s experience and the words one uses in attempting to apprehend it in writing is a gulf that has proven a perennially yawning one. What number of words, if one had the time or the inclination, could so fully and accurately express an experience as it was? Or even how it remains in the memory, tied up with all the various impeding and contributing factors, past or present? Such problems are broached in the choicest post-Enlightenment literature of the eighteenth century -- and particularly in the gothic romances that followed Horace Walpole’s seminal The Castle of Otranto (1764). Not least of these is Ann Radcliffe’s genre-defining The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), whose heroine, Emily St Aubert, acts as the reader’s primary gateway to the ever-arising disjunct established when one beholds the sublimity of a natural landscape, and then attempts to encapsulate it in communicative expression:

‘She felt how infinitely inferior all the splendour of art is to the sublimity of nature.’ (p.189)

Interestingly, Emily’s realisation of this disjunct, of art’s ‘inferiority […] to the sublimity of nature’, is communicated to the reader by proxy, in the voice of Radcliffe’s omniscient narrator. The reader’s attempt to render in the mind the vision that Emily beholds is therefore set doubly at a distance, as second-hand information, to the original scene. However, by virtue of this distancing effect, the reader is conversely made more familiar and sympathetic to Emily’s predicament. Nature’s sublimity will never be encapsulated in the form of words – but the difficulty of attempting to achieve this encapsulation can, nonetheless, be shared as common experience between Emily, narrator, and reader.

There is no such common experience when it concerns the predicaments in which Emily finds herself, however. Indeed, as Emily’s struggles become greater and therefore more encumbering upon her mind, the disjunct between experience and expression grows – stretched to the point of utter ineffability for her, and silent incredulity for the reader. This arises as her mind gives way to the immediacy of horrific and traumatic moments, catalysing her losing touch with what it is to experience a moment in and of itself – as something that is present, in the present:

‘At length, considering, that reflection could neither release her from her melancholy situation, or enable her to bear it with greater fortitude, she tried to divert her anxiety, and took down from her little library a volume of her favourite Ariosto; but his wild imagery and rich invention could not long enchant her attention; his spells did not reach her heart, and over her sleeping fancy they played, without awakening it.’ (p.284)

Here, Emily cannot simply disregard ‘her melancholy situation’, relax, and allow her mind to be receptive to the tales that typically facilitate her desire to enjoy the moment, even as the stories themselves appear to be ‘wild’ and violent (consider the barbarity of Orlando’s madness in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso [1516]). In fact, as Emily’s anxiety intensifies, particularly in moments of genuine threat or fright, she gives way to bouts of fainting and crying, losing all touch with consciousness of the present, and thereby the means to address it. Such reactions are staples of eighteenth-century sentimental fiction, which occur when a character becomes so overwhelmed with heightened feeling that they find themselves caught in period of disconnect between experience and expression: words fail them, and so too do their bodies. For examples of such genric idiosyncrasy, see Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771); and, for a more parodical take, you can’t go wrong with Laurence Sterne’s glorious A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), in which The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman’s (1759-67) Yorick is fleshed out (to the degree that writing can adequately manage) in all his sentimental feeling.

In light of my previous points concerning what it means to apprehend and then express the sublime and the beautiful, Radcliffe’s Udolpho presents itself as a novel that questions what it means to be consciously receptive to one’s feelings of the world as we come to terms with it, both in the ‘now’ and looking back. The conscious reception to one’s feelings is, naturally, undertaken in the wake of the guidance one receives preceding, during, and after the adventures that define our time on this earth. In fact, to illustrate this, Emily’s father’s voice echoes throughout the novel as a tonic to Emily’s impulse to fall towards too much feeling, and her succumbing to them in the abandonment of reasoned assessment. An example of this is Emily’s propensity to allow her romantic mind to run away with embellished deductions. Emily’s father’s voice is the counterintuitive product of the Enlightenment, tutoring her into a more pragmatic focus on the situation at hand. David Hume suggests that the correct, or ‘moral’, course of action would be to fall somewhere in between, ‘since virtue and vice [and therefore beauty and deformity] are not discoverable merely by reason’ (A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.1.2.1, 1740). Nevertheless, Emily’s ‘romantic mind’, and the ‘embellished deductions’ in which she engages (the terrors she imagines) have nothing on the horrors that actually await her.