If you haven't read any of Radcliffe's novels and intend to read only one, let it be The Mysteries of Udolpho. You might want to do so before proceeding beyond this paragraph. In that case, see you again, perhaps, in a month or two. (It's well over 600 pages.)
A writer of popular fiction working in America today might set an eerie tale in, say, eighteenth-century England for atmosphere while sparing American readers much cultural dislocation. Ann Radcliffe, working in eighteenth-century England, set The Mysteries of Udolpho in sixteenth-century France and Italy while sparing English readers. It's not quite The Mikado, but broad-mindedness about verisimilitude is the price of a good time. In return, Radcliffe gives us a damsel cut out for distress; a young chevalier cut out for heroics; a villain with a castle with hidden passages leading to surprises; a similarly-equipped Mediterranean château, said to be haunted; mysterious music in the night; and a funny servant of the type described above.
Radcliffe gives us something hypnotically beautiful as well: a prelude that immerses us in the developing sensitivity of the protagonist, Emily St. Aubert, to things mysterious.
It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then, the gloom of the woods; the trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the breeze; the bat, flitting on the twilight; the cottage lights, now seen and now lost — were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry.
Emily seems to have inherited this enthusiasm, along with a hint at mature understanding of it, from her gentle father.
"The evening gloom of woods was always delightful to me," said St. Aubert.... "I remember that in my youth this gloom used to call forth to my fancy a thousand fairy visions, and romantic images; and, I own, I am not yet wholly insensible of that high enthusiasm, which wakes the poet's dream: I can linger, with solemn steps, under the deep shades, send forward a transforming eye into the distant obscurity, and listen with thrilling delight to the mystic murmuring of the woods."
We soon follow Emily from her idyllic home in Gascony on a journey over the Pyrenees with her father. As she ascends, her mind completes its awakening to the sublime and, at the same time, to analytical thought.
The thinness of the atmosphere, through which every object came so distinctly to the eye, surprised and deluded her; who could scarcely believe that objects, which appeared so near, were, in reality, so distant. The deep silence of these solitudes was broken only at intervals by the screams of the vultures, seen cowering round some cliff below, or by the cry of the eagle sailing high in the air; except when the travellers listened to the hollow thunder that sometimes muttered at their feet. While, above, the deep blue of the heavens was unobscured by the lightest cloud, half way down the mountains, long billows of vapour were frequently seen rolling, now wholly excluding the country below, and now opening, and partially revealing its features. Emily delighted to observe the grandeur of these clouds as they changed in shape and tints, and to watch their various effect on the lower world, whose features, partly veiled, were continuously assuming new forms of sublimity.
The descent from that fantastic height into the Rousillon country brings us back to worldly concerns. Meanwhile, Emily and her father have met the chevalier Valancourt and shared several adventures in the mountains before parting ways.
For narrative purposes, that 65-page excursion is a false start. Emily goes right back where she started and is then uprooted by a series of domestic events (the foremost of which, the death of her father, has occurred from natural causes on the last leg of the journey). That uprooting could have come soon after the peaceful rhythms of her life were established. However, Radcliffe accomplishes two things by taking us through the Pyrenees first. The lesser of these is the dramatic introduction of Valancourt. The greater is the setting of the mental stage for sensational things to come. As Terry Castle notes in her introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of 1998, The Mysteries of Udolpho is a novel of the mind.
[T]o dwell overmuch on the clumsy device of the "explained supernatural" is to miss a more fundamental point: that Radcliffe represents the human mind itself as a kind of supernatural entity. If ghosts and spectres are resolutely excluded from the plane of action, they reappear — metaphorically at least — in the visionary fancies of the novel's exemplary characters. Indeed, to be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to be "haunted" by the spectral mental images of those one loves. ... To be haunted, according to the novel's romantic myth, is to display one's powers of sympathetic imagination.
...
In part if not wholly, Udolpho's exorbitant popularity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers seems to have derived from this profoundly magical rendering of human consciousness. By giving themselves up to the nostalgic reveries of its characters, Radcliffe's readers also gave themselves up to a fantasy about mind itself: that by its godlike powers of spiritual transformation, the imagination itself might assuage longing, provide consolation, and reinfuse everyday life with mysterious and fantastic beauty.
Jane Austen, though she famously lampooned the gothic genre in Northanger Abbey, did not dismiss it. She had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and other gothic novels and evidently appreciated Radcliffe's superior examples of the genre. After all, Udolpho's Emily manages to do from the outset of her story what Northanger's Catherine fails to do until the end of hers: to rule the transforming eye with an analyzing mind. Austen's purpose was to show, affectionately, how runaway romanticism can lead to embarrassing consequences. At any rate, the delayed publication of Northanger Abbey in 1817 had the effect of reviving the market for gothic fiction.
After Emily St. Aubert's return to earth and mundane life, we face many pages in which she's distressed by cold-hearted relations and unwelcome suitors before fate brings her to Castle Udolpho and its labyrinthine mysteries. Readers who have stayed the course (or who have skipped ahead) are richly rewarded. No castle could be better endowed with suspicious inmates or unsuspected chambers and passages. Something of the sublimity we felt with Emily at the top of the world, we now feel at the entrance to an underworld.
Radcliffe presents two contending ways of proceeding into the underworld: the way of the natural mind, and that of the cultivated mind.
"O, ma'amselle! I would not tell you for the world, nor all I have heard about this chamber, either; it would frighten you so."
"If that is all, you have frightened me already, and may therefore tell me what you know, without hurting your conscience."
"O Lord! they say the room is haunted, and has been so these many years."
"It is by a ghost, then, who can draw bolts," said Emily, endeavouring to laugh away her apprehensions; "for I left the door open, last night, and found it fastened this morning."
Annette turned pale, and said not a word.
"Do you know whether any of the servants fastened this door in the morning, before I rose?"
"No, ma'am, that I will be bound they did not; but I don't know: shall I go and ask, ma'amselle?" said Annette, moving hastily towards the corridor.
"Stay, Annette, I have another question to ask; tell me what you have heard concerning this room, and whither that staircase leads."
"I will go and ask it all directly, ma'am; besides, I am sure my lady wants me. I cannot stay now, indeed, ma'am."
She hurried from the room, without waiting Emily's reply, whose heart, lightened by the certainty, that Morano was not arrived, allowed her to smile at the superstitious terror, which had seized on Annette; for, though she sometimes felt its influence herself, she could smile at it, when apparent in other persons.
The word superstition or superstitious, which would not occur at all in a story told from Annette's point of view, occurs fifty times in this story told from Emily's — and Radcliffe's — point of view. Emily is constantly aware of the vital difference between mere receptiveness and objective observation. Though she feels the pull of superstitious terror, she bears in mind what she owes to her self-respect as a thinking person. Radcliffe never lets her down. All the mysteries Emily encounters at Udolpho and beyond turn out to have rational explanations. An uncanny thrill can be a glimpse of danger, but not of supernatural danger.
Emily's balance of sensitivity and self-awareness recommends her to us across the centuries. Despite all those elaborate sentences with commas inserted like carpet tacks, we recognize her as one of us. Her mental life has the essence of modernity. The Radcliffean model of gothic entertainment travels well and has traveled far.
With The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe set a standard of extravagance that must remain unsurpassed even by Hollywood: sojourns in two mysterious castles. Emily and Annette escape from Udolpho with Annette's resourceful boyfriend, Ludovico, and a gentleman separately imprisoned who has become devoted to Emily. That's happy enough, but it's no ending; the gentleman, after all, is not Valancourt. The book still has more than 200 pages to go. Very briefly:
The ship carrying Emily's party from Marseille across the Gulf of Lyon is nearly wrecked in a storm but succeeds in anchoring below the ancient Château-le-Blanc, just re-inhabited by members of the noble family that owns it. These kind people, who take in the weary travelers, are themselves strangers to the castle and its lore, part of which is that its north wing is infested with ghosts. Annette, fresh from her sensational adventures at Udolpho, becomes a celebrity among the frightened servants. Emily has her rationality put to the test once more.
Emily turned to look within the dusky curtains, as if she could have seen the countenance of which Dorothée spoke. The edge of the white pillow only appeared above the blackness of the pall, but, as her eyes wandered over the pall itself, she fancied she saw it move. Without speaking, she caught Dorothée's arm, who, surprised by the action, and by the look of terror that accompanied it, turned her eyes from Emily to the bed, where, in the next moment she, too, saw the pall slowly lifted, and fall again.
Emily attempted to go, but Dorothée stood fixed and gazing upon the bed; and, at length, said — "It is only the wind, that waves it, ma'amselle; we have left all the doors open: see how the air waves the lamp, too. — It is only the wind."
She had scarcely uttered these words, when the pall was more violently agitated than before; but Emily, somewhat ashamed of her terrors, stepped back to the bed, willing to be convinced that the wind only had occasioned her alarm; when, as she gazed within the curtains, the pall moved again, and, in the next moment, the apparition of a human countenance rose above it.
Screaming with terror, they both fled, and got out of the chamber as fast as their trembling limbs would bear them, leaving open the doors of all the rooms, through which they passed. When they reached the staircase, Dorothée threw open a chamber door, where some of the female servants slept, and sunk breathless on the bed; while Emily, deprived of all presence of mind, made only a feeble attempt to conceal the occasion of her terror from the astonished servants; and, though Dorothée, when she could speak, endeavoured to laugh at her own fright, and was joined by Emily, no remonstrances could prevail with the servants, who had quickly taken the alarm, to pass even the remainder of the night in a room so near to these terrific chambers.
Stout-hearted Ludovico voluntarily stands watch in those terrific chambers, only to vanish during the night. And so on and so forth. Ann Radcliffe does not stint.
If you haven't read The Mysteries of Udolpho yet, would you care to guess what or who it is that haunts the Château-le-Blanc? Smugglers using it as a storehouse for their contraband and playing ghost to scare off the inquisitive? Ah, then you've seen that device in some movie, TV show, or comic book. No, there's an encounter with smugglers later on, but the "ghosts" in the château are pirates guarding their hidden treasure. Not quite the same thing.
Will you also hazard a guess as to whether such a tale of horror and suspense can have a happy ending — even for Ludovico? Well, well. Like me, you're steeped in the Radcliffean tradition. Nothing can surprise us anymore. Still, Radcliffe's bewitching prose alone makes this a book worth taking to bed for the approach to Halloween.
The midnight chant of the monks soon after dropped into silence; but Emily remained at the casement, watching the setting moon, and the valley sinking into deep shade, and willing to prolong her present state of mind. At length she retired to her mattress, and sunk into tranquil slumber.
