The theological component of
Gothic works is often overshadowed by the more sensational trappings of the
genre – the berserk villains, the tragic deaths, and the dark, crumbling
settings – and yet Christian morality (be it Catholic or Protestant, conventional
or revolutionary) has been a fixture of the Gothic tradition since its
inception in the 18th century.
In Gothic works, the
champion of morality is often a virtuous woman who represents the truest kind
of religious faith and moral fortitude.
This faith is put to the most rigorous possible test when this
pseudo-priestess falls into the hands of the enemies of God and is subjected to
every possible torment and temptation.
These Gothic villains represent Satanic evil in the form of murderers or
would-be rapists and they possess an unquestionable power that seems more than
a match for such a presumably weak protagonist. The suspense mounts as her Christ-like passivity and sensitivity
prevents her from meeting violence with violence, and her only recourse is to
prayer or hope for rescue from an outside champion. Just when all seems lost, an arguably deus ex macchina ending plucks “Danielle” from the lion’s den and
sees the villains invariably self-destruct, defeated by their own insatiable
lusts. And so, just as Job was rewarded
for his endurance in the face of mounting misery, our heroine’s suffering is
made recompense by the close of the final chapter, when she is granted a
generous inheritance, a happy marriage, and a large number of children.
In her work Gothic
Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes,
literary critic Diane Long Hoeveler explains that,
“the true female Gothic heroine always triumphs over evil
because she is totally good; her motives are always utterly pure;
her conduct and speech always above reproach. No spot of
corruption touches her, and thus she always fends off and destroys
her oppressors because good always triumphs over evil.
“This very powerful ideology—that professional femininity
or goodness always wins out—exists at the core of the
Gothic feminist mythology, assuring women that their carefully
cultivated façade, their masquerade of patience and long-
suffering will be rewarded. Again, we appear to be in the
terrain of ‘wise passiveness,’ of waiting for the tyrant to self-destruct
through the consequences of his own misguided evil deeds”
(Hoeveler 95).
A recent example of a Gothic
work with such a theme is Bernard Rose and Clive Barker’s 1992 screenplay Candyman, in which brave Helen Lyle
achieves spiritual immortality by sacrificing her life to save an innocent
baby, thereby exorcising the selfish, enraged spirit of her ghostly tormentor,
Daniel Robitaille.
The theme played out far
earlier in Dracula, when virtuous
Mina Harker proved to the men in the book that the only way to defeat a vampire
was to face him with hearts filled with faith and mercy, not mindless
hate.
Perhaps the most famous
Gothic heroine of all is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, a plain, sensitive woman
trapped in a Gothic universe who survives against every kind of dark
opposition, ranging from insanity to pious hypocrisy, due to her intelligence
and moral fortitude. Meanwhile, her
evil tormentors – among them pious hypocrite Brocklehurst, gambler John Reed,
and impassioned madwoman Bertha Mason – all meet horrible ends that are somehow
brought about by their own spiritual corruption.
But the model for all of
these Gothic heroines is Emily St. Aubert, the virtuous maiden of Anne
Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. In Udolpho,
“the keystone novel in Gothic horror” (Nolan 6), the saintly Emily’s quest to
find true happiness hinges on her ability to govern her passions while not
subsuming all emotion to intellect. The
challenge she faces, which is mirrored in the trials of the other heroes, is
she must learn to balance in herself every impulse that might lead her to the
corrupting extremes of behavior represented and personified by the villains of
the piece. During the course of the
story, Emily is tempted to despair and superstition by the apparent earthly
power of her enemies, but she chooses to remain faithful to the ideals she was
raised to hold dear.
By the end of the novel,
Emily and all those who manage to achieve the perfect balance between reason
and emotion, masculine and feminine, change and stability, emerge
victorious. Meanwhile, villains such as
the wildly passionate Laurentini or the evil, emotionless Montoni meet their
ruin and death. The fate of these
characters was no accident, and Radcliffe seems to have entertained hopes that
her readers would derive a moral lesson from her novel, despite (or because of)
the sensational elements of the genre it was a part of:
“O! useful may it be to have shewn, that, though the
vicious can sometimes pour affliction 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!
And, if the weak hand, that
has recorded this tale,
has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour
of sorrow,
or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it – the
effort, however
humble, has not been in vain, nor is the writer
unrewarded”
(Radcliffe 672).
Unlike
novels such as A Simple Story, which
close with morals that seem tacked on to please the audience of the day because
they appear incongruous with the text as a whole, the message of Udolpho is imbedded firmly in the novel
alongside the suspenseful plot twists and atmospheric settings. And yet the combination of terror narrative
with religious allegory might seem odd in its own way. If moral instruction were Radcliffe’s goal
from the start, why would she choose a venue as unorthodox as the Gothic novel
to broadcast her message?
One
possible explanation is she wanted to tame a genre that she believed
essentially “contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates the faculties of the
soul, closing them to the sublime” (Hume 284-285). After all, her discomfort with the excesses of the horror novel
as a whole and the fanciful, unrealistic nature of the first Gothic work, The Castle of Otranto, in particular
is well documented. Even in her own
Gothic works, Radcliffe “is too conscious of the dangers of superstition
indulged not to keep warning us that madness, disintegration and chaos both
social and psychological lurk in the darkness, and she enters the gloom
cautiously, constantly taking the heroine’s pulse and offering her readers
gentle warnings” (McWhir 38).
Despite this supposed
reticence to shock her readers, Radcliffe’s works were renowned by critics as
famous as Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe for their ability to terrify. Radcliffe’s 20th Century heir
H.P. Lovecraft lauded her adeptness in creating mood through setting, citing it
as groundbreaking for the genre:
“To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors,
Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene
and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of
setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of
illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few
sinister details like a track of blood on the castle stairs, a groan
from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can
with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of
others. Nor are these images in themselves any less potent because
they are explained away before the end of the novel.
Mrs. Radcliffe’s visual imagination was very strong, and
appears as much in her delightful landscape touches – always in
broad, glamorously pictoral outline, and never in close detail –
as in her weird phantasies” (Lovecraft 27).
As Lovecraft indicated,
Radcliffe was adept at bringing Gothic settings to life in a manner far more
realistic than had been ever done before.
When Emily approaches Montoni’s castle by carriage in Book II, the
foreboding scene is described in such vivid detail that it has become a classic
of the genre and a template for similar scenes in future Gothic works, such as
the narrator’s approach to the house of Usher.
Although some (if not most) of the impact of the horrors crafted by Radcliffe has been muted by the passage of years, Lovecraft speaks of the unsettling effect Radcliffe’s prose traditionally had upon her readership. It appears that Udolpho produced sensations of dreadful suspense in Radcliffe’s readers that one might expect to be inimical to the work’s pious design, but critic Joel Porte believes that “terror” was seen by Radcliffe’s contemporaries as an emotion that actually brought one closer to God, not farther from Him. Following Porte’s logic, it is little surprise that a genre known for instilling fear in readers might be used as a tool for instruction by pious authors.
Porte describes the Gothic genre as “the expression of fundamentally Protestant religious disquietude” in his essay “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction”(Porte 43). He cites a movement, sparked by the publication of Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756, in which
“writers and readers began to commonly view emotions
of fear and terror as a potential channel to ‘the Sublime’ – a means
of meditating on the Divine, the All-Knowing, and
the Eternal.
“Mrs. Radcliffe, for
example, had conned her Burke and
knew that the proper business of the orthodox novel
of Terror was
to expand the soul religiously. So, in the very first chapter of The
Mysteries of
Udolpho,
and intermittently thereafter, the impeccably
well-instructed Emily St. Aubert is sent off, as to
a sylvan Sunday
school, not into the “soft and glowing landscape,”
but to “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.” (Porte 44)
In
this passage, Porte is aligning Radcliffe with a “Burkean” form of
Protestantism – one that searches for revelation of God’s works and wisdom
through contemplation of the natural beauty of the world. His deduction seems on target since
Radcliffe demonstrates how Nature can be a source of divine inspiration time
and again throughout the novel. Therefore,
when I refer to Radcliffe’s “Protestant” message (with “Protestant” being an
admittedly vague and loaded word), I am, in this context, using it in the same
manner as Porte uses it – as a label for her religious views concerning the
connection between Christianity and Nature.
Just as the long, beautiful
descriptions of the splendor of nature are used throughout Udolpho to encourage meditations upon Creation, the lairs of evil
in the work, the decrepit castles, and even the amiable-yet-foreboding convent,
act as conduits to an ethereal plane.
According to Porte,
“the iniquitous convents and
monasteries, the
moldering catacombs and graveyards, of high Gothic
writing represent more than a congeries of
discardable
props or the simple anticlericalism of Protestant
authors
…. [These settings provide] par excellence that dim
religious atmosphere where the union of Terror and
Sublimity which was alone considered capable of
transporting the soul beyond reason and decorum to
the
very confines of Being itself could be achieved”
(Porte 45).
Although catacombs,
graveyards, and monasteries are obviously absent from Radcliffe’s Udolpho, Porte’s commentary still
applies to Radcliffe’s use of Montoni’s dark, medieval castle occupied by
Rosary-praying assassins such as Bertrand and by strange Catholic relics such
as the dummy death-mask.
Radcliffe’s efforts to reinvent Horace Walpole’s archetypal Gothic novel as a medium for moral instruction were met with some skepticism on the part of her critical contemporaries. Critic Maggie Kilgour notes,
“As a hybrid between the
novel and romance, the
Gothic was accused on both accounts. The gothic was seen as encouraging a
particularly intimate and insidious relationship
between text and reader, by making the reader
identify with
what he or she read. As one contemporary reviewer said of
Radcliffe: “it may be true that her persons are cold
and formal;
but her readers are the virtual heroes and heroines
of her story
as they read.’ Ideally, this identification served a
moral purpose,
as it allowed readers to exercise safely and so
educate their
emotions; the danger was when the means became an
end in
itself. To
many early concerned critics, gothic novels were the
unlicensed indulgence of an amoral imagination that
was a
socially subversive force”(Kilgour 6-7).
Martin
Tropp, in his book Images of Fear,
also wrote about the strong identification between reader and heroine inherent
in horror fiction, yet he placed his emphasis on the Gothic woman’s morbid fascination
with death. He believes that the Gothic
heroine is intended to explore the unspeakable – death, forbidden sexual
passions and actions, etc. – on behalf of the reader, who is too proper or
frightened to confront such a fascination in any way but vicariously through
the heroine. He notes that characters
like Emily “served as stand-ins for the readers and acted out for them the
dangerous urge to draw aside what they knew contained their deepest fears”
(Tropp 197).
This is exactly the kind of
element of the genre that Radcliffe wants to underplay, not emphasize. The eternal problem for any horror story
that attempts to deliver a religious message is that it needs to create a
credible enough menace to frighten the audience, but not present an evil that
is so powerful or attractive that it encourages the belief that evil is
stronger than good. The Exorcist is a perfect example of
this since the devil’s presence in the novel is felt far more acutely than
God’s, and this undercuts William Peter Blatty’s attempt to prove the value of
faith in the face of adversity. Also,
although it isn’t a horror story per se, Paradise
Lost has often failed to deliver its moral message to readers who admire
Satan’s cunning over God’s grandeur and righteousness.
And yet Radcliffe skirts all
these issues nicely by presenting supposedly real supernatural menaces and then
explaining them away. When she presents
Emily (and, by extension, her audience) with a supposed ghostly apparition, she
tempts both Emily and the reader to indulge in a vulgar, superstitious flight
of fancy. Any time either Emily or the
reader begins to fall prey to the “false God” superstition, Radcliffe responds
with chastisement by demonstrating the foolishness of looking for magic and
majesty anywhere but in God and his glorious works of Nature.
“[Emily] mistakes a waxen
image for a decaying corpse behind the black veil; she assumes that Montoni has
murdered his wife and the Signora Laurentini; she believes that her dead father
is playing the lute; and she is certain that the prisoner Du Pont is
Valancourt,” critic Bette B. Roberts explains, articulating what, for many,
represents the prosecution’s case against Emily as an insightful heroine
(Roberts 96). But Emily learns from
these errors, and comes away from her experience stronger in her pledge to keep
a rational, well-ordered mind. The
reader, who should feel just as foolish as Emily for believing that ghosts
might actually populate the novel, is supposed to follow her example and make
the same pledge.
And so, Lovecraft missed the
whole point of the novel when he complained of Radcliffe’s “provoking custom of
destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical
explanations” (Lovecraft 27). Radcliffe
would see Lovecraft’s irritation with the solutions to the mysteries as proof
that he needed to pay close heed to her moral and tame his predilection for
gullible acceptance of myth and rumor.
Emily and the reader, since their sins against the rational mind are slight, are only slightly chastised. Those fictional characters that drift even farther from what Radcliffe deems an acceptable mode of behavior are punished with disgrace or death.
And so, “like the carnivalesque, the Gothic appears to be a transgressive rebellion against norms which yet ends up reinstating them, an eruption of unlicensed desire that is fully controlled by governing systems of limitation. It delights in rebellion, while finally punishing it, often with death or damnation, and the reaffirmation of a system of moral and social order” (Kilgour 8). Therefore, those critics of Radcliffe’s time who were afraid that Udolpho would corrupt readers made the same mistake that Lovecraft made – they didn’t read the book carefully enough or pay close enough attention to the behavior of its heroine.
Ironically, if one of the
chief complaints against the novel is that it is too realistic in its
insistence on dispelling ghosts, one of the chief complaints against it is that
it is too fanciful. A number of literary
critics (Anthony Trollope and Joseph Wiesenfarth included) have enjoyed finding
the seams in the novel’s narrative, thereby proclaiming its mission to morally
instruct an insipid failure.
Wiesenfarth believes that
Radcliffe fails in her attempts to make the Gothic logical, claiming that “she
searches for sublimity but finds confusion” (5). He believes that the confusion results from a failed attempt to
analyze the jointly psychological and Christian “problem of evil” (4). He quotes a critic who essentially agrees
with him, Anthony Trollope, as saying: “What may be done by impossible castles
among impossible mountains, peopled by impossible heroes and heroines, and
fraught with impossible horrors, The
Mysteries of Udolpho has shown us.”
It seems to me that the confusion
Wiesenfarth refers to is easily resolved if the modern reader is able to accept
the notion that a force for justice governs Radcliffe’s universe that metes out
rewards and punishments to the characters as deserved. If one also believes, as Radcliffe seems to,
that such a force (or God) also governs the real world, then the distinction
between the fictional world of Emily St. Aubert and the real-life world of the
reader of The Mysteries of Udolpho is
far less extreme.
Since modern readers often
remove God from the equation when reading Gothic works such as Udolpho and Dracula, the plot’s “holes” become all the more obvious and the
books are easily deconstructed to the point that the entire thesis of the work
is turned on its head. And so, the
actions of the Christian heroes, once seen as virtuous, now suddenly become
abominable. A modern skeptic’s reading
of Dracula casts the titular
character as a romantic hero and his opponents as sexist, sexually frustrated
religious zealots – the exact opposite reading Stoker intended. Those who refuse to buy into Radcliffe’s
brand of “Protestantism” can also easily turn The Mysteries of Udolpho
on its head as well by attacking its heroine, Emily, as far too saintly, too
weak, too haughty in her class, and too impossible to emulate.
While many of these
complaints are justifiable, I find that they are too harsh. Radcliffe succeeded
in rendering a Gothic world filled with evils far more realistic and
recognizable than those crafted by Horace Walpole, therefore making her story
far more relevant to her readers, and certainly more potentially instructive.
Any novel that portrays the real-life vices of gambling, murder, superstition
and patriarchal oppression is far from being too allegorical to reach. And so, despite the protests of critics who
find the book irritatingly prosaic and those who find it too unrealistic, I
maintain that the Radcliffe was essentially successful in proving her
theological thesis within the context of the fictional world that she crafted.
And the key to that fictional world is Nature.
As numerous critics of Udolpho (including Kilgour and Bette B. Roberts) have indicated, “Nature” emerges as the key metaphor for goodness in the book, as well as for God himself, and each character’s relationship to nature is seen as a key to their level of piety. Thus “character is revealed by the response to external surroundings, architectural space as well as the natural world” (Kilgour 125).
Both heroines, Emily and Blanche, fancy the outdoors and meditate on the greatness of God when they look upon Nature, whereas figures such as Montoni, Mons. Quesnel, and Laurentini are associated more with the indoors – Montoni with Udolpho, Quesnel with the decadent city life of Paris, and Laurentini with the dark inside of a convent – and a desire to shut out the glory of Creation and thus deprive themselves of a true opportunity to reform.
Although Dante, a Roman Catholic, wrote his Commedia in the early 1300s, his epic poem expresses a notably similar scheme of salvation and damnation as revealed through nature and dramatic setting. In Dante’s world, the Inferno is located at the core of the earth, as far indoors as one can get, and it’s a place with no music, no camaraderie between the spirits, and no hope of reconciliation with God. Heaven, on the other hand, lies beyond outer space, as far out into the open and into the vastness of Creation that one might get. It is a place of music, union with God, and “love and freindship” between the spirits of the saved.
Beatrice, Dante’s Heavenly guide, leads him through the cosmos, telling him that the secret to attaining piety is to contemplate the glory of God’s Creation through the beauty and well-ordered nature of the stars. Ideally, she explains, the contemplator will calm the wild animal passions in his or her heart and match the tranquility and order in nature within, thus achieving communion with God. Beatrice herself winds up being representative of that very glory in Creation that should be meditated upon, because she is so pious, beautiful, and intelligent. And so, Dante the Pilgrim grows more virtuous by contemplating Beatrice, just as he grows more beautiful by contemplating the stars.
Although it comes from a different time and a somewhat different religious tradition, the message of the Radcliffean heroine is essentially the same as Beatrice’s message, and so it is fair to say that Emily emerges as the Gothic heir to Beatrice. The central difference between Beatrice and a Radcliffean heroine, however, is that Beatrice is already dead and enthroned in Heaven along with the other just souls, so Beatrice has already won her battle over evil, whereas Emily’s battle has just begun at the start of Udolpho. Beatrice, therefore, is not challenged to find the power to confront and defeat evil while lost in an evil world, and that is one of the main conflicts Emily must face.
Kate Ferguson Ellis, author
of The Contested Castle, argues that
“Radcliffian heroines can
exhibit a hyper-sensitivity
to God’s hand working through what seems to be the
most
intense disorder in nature, thereby exhibiting a
quality that
became a mark of virtue to a class that did not work
outdoors.
Then, having established their virtue in this way,
they can
assert their rationality as a response (though
invariably a
delayed one) to a supernatural that is ‘wild nature’
in its most
extreme form.
Thus they could be fiercely rational without really
moving outside a definition of femininity that
denied this
resource to women” (Ellis 100).
But Radcliffean heroines are made, not born, and Emily is honed to become one at the outset of the novel through her proper education in the idyllic La Valle, hinting to the readers that all children should be educated in a similar fashion.
“The idealization of La
Vallee as a place where
opposites are harmoniously intertwined is itself,
however,
part of a pattern of oppositions within the
text. One of the
most common of these is a contrast …between the
natural,
simple, happy, and loving country, a private realm
of the
family governed by sentiment and sympathy, and the
artificial, cruel, mercenary, and hypocritical city
(especially
Paris, seen as the centre of decadence), inhabited
by isolated
individuals who are ruled by self-interest” (Kilgour
115-116).
The well-ordered person,
like the well-ordered, Eden-like garden, contains passion and fancy as well as
order and tranquility, so the most admirable characters in Udolpho possess the courage and fortitude of the traditional male
personality as well as the piety and sensitivity of the classical female
mold. Hence Emily emerges as a manly
woman and her father and Valancourt emerge as womanly men (Hoeveler 91). Those who have centered themselves, finding
the virtuous Aristotelian mean in their hearts, emerge as saintly and perfect,
while those who personify unrestrained passion (Laurentini/Sister Agnes) or
all-consuming materialism (Mons. Quesnel), are cast as evil.
Those who represent the
coldly logical male mind in its most extreme form are also evil because they
lack any sense of feminine compassion or Christian virtue, and the
personification of this other evil extreme is Montoni, who comes off as a sort
of “a secular Miltonic Satan figure” (Hoeveler 99). All of these characters are compared unfavorably to St. Aubert,
who is elevated beyond sainthood to achieve a position as the first among men,
a pre-“Fall” Adam figure. St. Aubert’s
piety, by extension, grants him authority to speak as an earthly representative
of God or a personification of God’s will.
“The psychic equation Emily makes here between God and her earthly father is revealing, particularly in light of Radcliffe’s own devout form of Anglicanism. This is a woman who would reject the ‘supernaturalism’ of Catholicism in favor of the more sensible anthropological basis of Protestantism. Heaven must be understood as analogous to what we know of this world, God must be like good fathers, while the devil must be like Montoni” (Hoeveler 98).
If St. Aubert is cast in the
role of God and La Vallee his Eden, and Montoni represents Satan, than Udolpho
must, therefore, be Hell. Kilgour stops
short of saying this implicitly, but she does describe Udolpho as
“a gothic version of La
Vallee. Like La Vallee it is
detached from society, but its isolation is a sign
of the total
power of its ruler who, far from social restraints,
is able to
exercise his own will. It is a private space where the freedom
of uncontrolled individualism is destructive, as
also in the
case of Laurentini whose abandonment to her own
passions
within these walls – we learn later – had murderous
consequences.
La Vallee was isolated to keep out exactly the forces, passions,
and conflict, that Udolpho, like the castle in Poe’s
‘Masque of
the Red Death’, will wall in” (Kilgour 119).
Just as Eden has its serpent herald an expulsion from Paradise, the poisoning of La Valle was brought about by a series of earthly tragedies – the death of Emily’s mother, the financial ruin of her father, and the specter of the unavenged death of her aunt. The combined effect of each of these tragedies is the same: a “Fall” that Emily must suffer although she had no personal hand in instigating any of these hardships. And so, Emily was forced to begin her Gothic quest to free herself of the influence of these earthly tragedies so that she can redeem her parents and forge a new, untainted Eden. The first, and easiest of these tasks was to find a new Adam, Valancourt, who was approved of by the original Adam figure in the text, St. Aubert.
The first villain to
challenge the natural, organic order to life is M. Quesnel, who has no respect
for nature or the noble traditions of the past and is fully caught up in the
trends of the present. The other end of
the spectrum are those who are unable or unwilling to modernize at all, like
Montoni, who alters his castle only with profound reluctance, and the nuns who
exist outside of time and space in a stagnant, cloistered environment. Emily looks upon both men as corrupt and
tailors her personality accordingly, trying to find the proper balance between
the two extremes.
She does the same with the
women she meets;
“she repulses or is repulsed
by virtually every
female character so that she can shape herself more
fully
in the image of the father. Every woman in the text fails
Emily’s high standards because each and every one of
them
is too unprofessionally feminine, that is, too
emotional, too
sexually passionate, too vulnerable to the wiles and
snares
of her own feelings. Emily seeks to make herself a “manly
woman,” much as her father and Valancourt make
themselves
“womanly men” (Hoeveler 91).
This very act of spiritual evolution and self-awareness makes Emily an active heroine, shattering any assertion by critics such as David Durant that she remains unchanged during the course of the book. Also, Emily is not only pro-active mentally and emotionally, but in her interactions with other characters. She shows tremendous defiance to the impious authority figures Cheron, Montoni, and Quesnel, particularly in the early sections of the novel, when her betrothal to Morano is planned for against her wishes. Her placid-yet-unyielding rebellion serves only to enrage those whom she opposes, who offer further proof of their corruption by their emotional replies.
When she first shows signs
of a will of her own in an interview with Mons. Quesnel and questions the
wisdom of his actions, he replies to her “with the air of a man, who is
conscious of possessing absolute power and impatient of hearing it
questioned.” As it becomes clearer to
Quesnel that Emily has no intention of following his orders, he grows still
more discomposed. But Emily, since she
is a strong heroine, can face such violent upbraiding with a faith in the
essential correctness of her actions.
“She opposed his turbulence
and indignation only by the mild dignity of a superior mind; but the gentle
firmness of her conduct served to exasperate still more his resentment, since
it compelled him to feel his own inferiority” (Radcliffe 213-214). Here she is following the advice Christ gave
to his disciples in the Bible, entreating them to be “As innocent as lambs and
as cunning as serpents.”
Later, Emily proves that
even country-born girls can be wise when she refuses to sign Montoni’s contract
unread. She then bolsters the positive
impression she gives to readers by refusing to sign the contract and surrender
her lands, meeting danger with pious bravery.
It is only when her courage and fortitude runs the risk of becoming extreme
and romantic and idolatrous, as Cheron’s bravery became, that she bends to
Montoni’s will and signs. Thus she
skirts the sin of pride that damned Satan and that would eventually lead
Montoni to his just execution.
Emily also changes during
the course of the book when she accepts the gradual conversion of Madame Cheron
from villain to heroine. Although Emily
remains uncomfortable in the face of Cheron’s emotional nature, she
nevertheless places her sympathy and favor squarely in Cheron’s corner during
the scenes in which Montoni is tormenting her aunt. In fact, one of the most physically heroic (and strikingly
“masculine,” especially when paired off against the absent Vallancourt’s
penchant for tears) moments afforded Emily arises when she is struck down by
Montoni defending her hysterical aunt.
Despite the terrible wound to her head, Emily selflessly tends to her
aunt when the cliched, weak heroine would be fainting in the corner, sickened
by the sight of her own blood.
“Emily’s face was stained with
blood, which continued to fall slowly from her forehead: but her attention had
been so entirely occupied by the scene before her, that she had felt no pain
from the wound. She now held a
handkerchief to her face, and, notwithstanding her faintness, continued to
watch Madame Montoni, the violence of whose convulsions was abating” (Radcliffe
306).
In addition, although Emily
is womanly enough to mourn the loss of her hat during her escape from Montoni
and fear for the breach of etiquette, she is “manly” enough to have left the
castle hatless in the first place, which is another side of the issue not oft
commented upon.
And, despite objections to
the haughtiness with which Emily regards her servants, she feels compassion and
affection for them as well, especially during times of strife. During one of the several occasions that
Montoni’s lair has been compromised by violence, Emily shows more concern for
the safety of Annette than for her own survival: “Meanwhile, Annette did not
appear, and Emily was surprised and somewhat alarmed for her, whom, in the
confusion of the late scene, various accidents might have befallen” (Radcliffe
319).
Emily is tempted to a number
of heresies during the course of her journey.
The first, despair in the face of powerful, heretical, masculine
opposition, she overcomes by virtue of kindness and intellect. Through her amiability, she forges alliances
with servants, fellow prisoners, and those who would call themselves enemies of
Montoni. Through the sheer force of her
will, she is able to keep herself from undergoing the emotional collapse that
prevented her aunt from escaping.
Thanks to these virtues, she is able to rescue herself and DuPont from
the castle with the help of Annette and Annette’s soldier beau.
The second temptation Emily
must face is the aforementioned temptation to believe in the occult and give
credence to the superstitious in the form of castle ghosts and seemingly
amiable Catholicism. The problem is
that superstition is more attractive to Emily than the kind of evil that
Montoni represents, since the superstition is romantic and thrilling. Also, those who do Emily the most kindness,
the servants and the nuns, are the ones most afflicted with a heretical belief
in the supernatural.
Although she chides Annette
and Dorothee for telling ghost stories, Emily jumps at the sounds of ghostly
music and booming spectral voices shortly thereafter, clinging to her servants
for comfort in the dark of the night.
When Emily fears the body
beneath the veil, she can be seen as foolish since it turns out at the end to
be a mere dummy. And yet, the dummy is
symbolic of Catholic salvation since it was used as a tool for penance – an
ineffective tool of a kind that “monkish superstition has sometimes inflicted
on mankind” (Radcliffe 662). The dummy
was meant for the spiritual improvement of the Marquis of Udolpho, whom
Radcliffe criticizes because he “superstitiously observed this penance himself,
which he had believed was to obtain pardon for all his sins” (Radcliffe
662). I italicized the words “he” and
“believed” because I believe it is significant that Radcliffe does not state
that the penance worked. Given the
suggestion that only a contemplation of nature can lift ones thoughts to God,
any kind of indoor penance should not work.
Certainly, Laurentini dies in a fit of such disquietude that her years
of indoor penance seem to have afforded her soul no peace. Therefore, the entire passage regarding the
dummy can be fairly read as comical and lightly critical of the superstition of
the Roman Catholic Church.
The explosion of all the supernatural elements in the novel – the fake ghosts, the easily explained eerie voices – wind up being, as a whole, symbolic of the false miracles and the phony salvation provided by the Catholic Church. With its interest in religious truth, most of the British Gothic novels do take a number of shots at the Church, particularly at its doctrine of confession, penance, and reconciliation. Mary Shelly uses the character of Justine to demonstrate the evils of confession in Frankenstein, and Rochester labors under the delusion that he can atone for his sins in the fashion of the Catholics - through good deeds - by raising Adele in Jane Eyre.
It isn’t completely clear to
what extent Radcliffe is attacking the Catholic Church in The Mysteries of Udolpho.
According to Hoeveler, “The
Mysteries of Udolpho attacks, in the final analysis, the corruption of the
propertied, aristocratic, and privileged family, buttressed as it had been by
the power of the Catholic Church.”
Since the theme of fake
ghosts and disproved miracles permeates Radcliffe’s text, critic Ann McWhir’s
remarks on the evils of fraudulent priests in Gothic also seems
appropriate. As she deduces, “if the
greatest witches are Roman Catholic priests, defrauding their victim-converts
by false miracles and marvels … then Catholicism is the work of the devil in a
more literal sense and must be the arch-enemy of reason and truth” (McWhir
33).
These critics are not alone
in the belief that the Catholic Church is somehow the secret, central enemy of The Mysteries of Udolpho, the little old
man orchestrating the frightening face of The Great and Powerful Oz. The idea seems to be fanciful at best and
wildly inaccurate at worst when one considers that Radcliffe does allow some
kind nuns to populate the text. And
yet, Kilgour argues that the friendly nuns only underscore the evils of Roman
Catholicism, because it cloaks its corruption in a friendly façade:
“The convent is the most
frightening private space of
all because of its enticing appearance as a haven
from strife,
an all female bower of harmonious sisterly relations
that could
protect Emily from the male Oedipal world of trouble
and desire.
The all-girl world of the convent seems to offer a
benign version
of the family, made up of ‘sisters’ and a maternal
abbess. The introduction of Blanche,
previously cloistered by her jealous
stepmother, allows Radcliffe to expose the duplicity
of convents;
as Blanche tells Emily, they are places where nature
and religion
are kept out rather than in. What Emily will also discover – and
this is part of Radcliffe’s Gothic and anti-Catholic
sentiment, which
Lewis will take even further – is that, inversely,
convention doesn’t
wall passion
out, but rather wall it in. Here
repressed desire takes
the extreme form of a mad nun, Sister Agnes, who is
haunted by
her own passions and some crime she committed about
twenty
years ago” (Kilgour 126).
The key attack on
Catholicism in the novel is actually voiced by Blanche, and not Emily, because
Emily is sympathetic with Catholicism for much of the novel due to her
comforting time in the convent following the death of her father. Blanche spots the false salvation that
Catholicism offers its believers when she awakes one morning at home and looks
out of her window upon a beautiful, early morning panorama of the sea, the
woods, and the mountainsides.
“ ‘Who could first invent convents!’ said she, ‘and
who could first persuade people to go into them? And to
make religion a pretense [italics mine], too, where all that it
should inspire it, is so carefully shut out! God is best blest
with the homage of a grateful heart, and, when we view his
glories, we feel most grateful. I never felt so much devotion,
during the many dull years I was in the convent, as I have
done in the few hours, that I have been here, where I need only
look on all around me – to adore God in my innermost heart!’”
(Radcliffe 475-476).
Emily doesn’t discover the
lies and limitations of Catholicism until later in the novel, when the mad nun
provides patently false intelligence as to Emily’s lineage. Other than piling on the suspense, the
strange, misleading theories spun out by Agnes seem to have no purpose in the
novel until one realizes that they vividly demonstrate to Emily that no truth
can come of Catholicism. Neither can
Catholicism offer redemption, because Agnes sought to redeem her crimes locked
within the walls of the convent, away from the beauty of God’s nature, and thus
never escaped from the overwhelming guilt of her crimes.
Before the death of Agnes,
Emily had come across a long series of clues that Catholics are really pious
hypocrites - the most humorous and appalling of which is the figure of
Bertrand, the assassin who prays the rosary (Radcliffe 410) – but it is only
through Agnes that she is able to rid herself of her last vestiges of heretical
Catholic superstition and remember that the truest connection to God can be
found by contemplating the majesty of nature, not languishing indoors in Gothic
cathedrals. If the Church is, indeed,
the behind the scenes “main villain” of the book, as critics such as McWhir
argue, then that explains why Laurentini and the dummy are the key figures in
the final chapters of the novel, whereas Montoni is defeated far earlier in the
story.
Although Catholicism does
not provide the solution to the mystery of her parentage or her father’s pain,
Emily does indeed succeed in discovering all and avenging her father in a
heroic role that Claudia Johnson likens to Hamlet.
“Through her uncalculated mediation, moreover, crimes are brought to light, and even though she uncovers enough about her paternal birthright to make us wonder whether it is worth redeeming, the novel recuperates it with (so to speak) a vengeance: Emily’s crowning act is to recover the paternal estates her father and forefathers had lost” (Johnson 100).
Despite critical claims that
Emily is perfect and passive and unchanging, she is often tempted to heresy
against her Edenic “Protestant” faith, she is often active in fighting evil,
and she does develop in faith and understanding throughout the narrative. And
so, as Hoeveler remarks:
because she learns to control her emotions; she
learns to
stop seeing people running around the trees; she
learns to
stop hearing haunting music … She learns to gather
whatever information she can from the servant
Annette;
that is, she taps into the folk sources of wisdom
and gossip
that the patriarchy has suppressed or marginalized”
(Hoeveler 96).
Therefore, by the end of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily has
successfully met the temptation to succumb to superstition and extremes of
emotion in all their various forms and rejected them, thereby becoming attuned
“to a natural supernaturalism through which the ways of God are revealed to the
chosen” (Ellis 118-119).
When one considers the
evidence as a whole, it seems to me that Emily emerges as a wholly successful
attempt on Radcliffe’s part to create a more earthbound, Protestant Beatrice
charged with leading readers away from superstition and impious excesses of
emotion to the salvation offered by the one true faith. And given how successfully and adeptly Emily
St. Aubert filled her role as virtuous heroine, it is of no surprise to me that
she almost immediately earned the honor of becoming the archetypal Gothic
heroine.
Works Cited and Consulted
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle:
Gothic novels and the subversion of
domestic ideology. 1938. 1989 edition. University of Illinois.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven and
London Yale University
Press. 1979.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism: The
Professionalization of Gender from
Charlotte Smith to the
Brontes.
Penn State Press. 1998
Hume, Robert D.
“Gothic versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel.” PMLA
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Johnson, Claudia L.
Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s:
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Burney, and Austen. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. 1995.
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Routledge: London and New York.
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Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. Supernatural Horror in Literature. Dover Publications, Inc.:
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