history of the form. If he fails at the level of plot or larger structures, here at the moment of Gothic intensity Walpole demonstrates just how and why the Gothic can succeed as it does.
Between the publication of The Castle of Otranto in 1764 and the apparent waning of interest in the Gothic novel in the 1820s literally hundreds of Gothic novels were consumed by the British reading public. (A bibliography of over three hundred Gothic titles, organized by year, can be found in Maurice Lévy's comprehensive Le roman «gothique» anglais.) Writers inspired by Walpole's experiment developed the Gothic in various directions. In the pages that follow, I will outline what I see as the most interesting of those directions and a few of the works that exemplify them.
Female Gothic Some writers took inspiration from the historical setting of Walpole's work and the narrative possibilities of an inherently threatening past: abandoned rooms may be haunted, locked chests may harbor dreadful secrets, tattered manuscripts may divulge horrifying transgressions. -223-
Although different from one another in countless ways, these writers shared the tendency to use the conventions of Gothic fiction to add excitement to tales that were primarily historical (and sentimental) romances, committed more to the heroine's tears than to her terrors. Often they used a heroine's own suspicions as a way of instructing her as to the foolishness of Gothic imaginings: the ghosts that wander unchecked in The Castle of Otranto here turn out to be explainable in physical terms, in obedience to rules of realism-'the limits of credibility,' as Clara Reeve calls them. Gothic writers like Clara Reeve and Charlotte Smith were unwilling to violate these limits, and they use Gothic effects simply to heighten the moral lessons of otherwise sentimental tales.
Reeve called The Old English Baron (published as The Champion of Virtue in 1777) 'the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto,' but it is a far cry from Walpole's lurid masterpiece. In it she tells a tale of wrongful usurpation and uses some of the less shocking devices of Otranto, such as 'incoherent dreams,' a «haunted» chamber, even «ghosts» and a skeleton. But her imagination is less engaged by scenes of haunting than by the legal squabbles of a group of petty aristocrats, and her attempts to articulate «sentimental» codes of social interaction seem far more deeply felt and dramatically persuasive.
Smith, in such novels as Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle (1788), Ethelinde, or, The Recluse of the Lake (1789), and The Old Manor House (1793), brings the use of setting to a new level of Gothic sophistication. As Lévy says, ''No one before Radcliffe could better transcribe the secret impulse of terror felt by a young girl given up to an architecture, where the softest sound and the lightest shade are amplified by the resonance and obscurity of the vaults to fit the dimensions of a nightmare'' (my translation). In the last of these novels, Smith tells the story of a persecuted heroine, Monimia, and her «lover-mentor» Orlando. Less interested than Walpole in the Gothic dimensions of her plot, she still uses such techniques as seemingly supernatural events and unreasonable persecution of the heroine to heighten the emotional intensity of her tale. In doing so she also insists on female education and the importance of female clear-headedness. She thus anticipates some of the central concerns of later writers and suggests the intersection of Gothic and sentimental fiction more directly than her contemporaries. Her novels also help to demonstrate the degree to which the Gothic became a crucial element in female education, and at the same time they help to -224- explain what may have inspired some of Radcliffe's less satisfying turns, especially in the direction of 'explanation.'
What both Reeve and Smith contribute to the Gothic novel cannot be summed up, however, in a list of techniques or literary concerns. Literary history, even in a volume of this kind, does not work that way. What they did, independent of their specific accomplishments, was to make the Gothic available for respectable female readers and writers. Their refusal to violate the letter of the law of realism has at times worked against their popularity with critics of the Gothic. But their works are never completely tame and rational. For what such writers achieve in the way of local emotional intensity can never be fully undermined by the stern dismissal of the supernatural with which they bring their works to a close. Moreover they pose challenges to any pat notions of what Gothic novels can accomplish.
Recent feminist rereadings of Gothic fiction have added considerably to the sophistication with which these novels and other examples of 'female Gothic' are discussed. The place of female characters within Gothic works has always been problematic, as the description of Isabella's plight in The Castle of Otranto might suggest. No Gothic novel is without its suffering heroine, who is both «sexualized» as an object of desire and «victimized» by a powerful aggressor who is also a potential rapist. The first task of feminist criticism was to articulate the problem of the abuse of the female in Gothic fiction and to explore the ways in which female novelists subverted or reinscribed the cultural norms of female sexualization and victimization. Just as feminist theory moved from simple 'identity politics' to a more rigorously theoretical stance, which emerged from rereadings of Marx and Freud and, more recently, Lacan, so feminist criticism of the Gothic has moved from descriptions of the role of women in the tales themselves to a more sophisticated analysis of how women could be drawn to Gothic fiction as both writers and readers and what they could discover in it for themselves.
One of the most intriguing of such rereadings of the Gothic, Claire Kahane's 'The Gothic Mirror,' articulates a position that challenges previous modes of understanding the Gothic. Kahane suggests that the Gothic castle offers the typically motherless heroine a setting in which her own victimization can be confronted and somehow overcome. She does this by «maternalizing» the space that threatens her-the subterranean regions of the castle. These secret spaces, dark and womb-like as they are, come to represent the maternal space that the heroine both -225- desires and fears. Kahane says, 'What I see repeatedly locked into the forbidden center of the Gothic which draws me inward is the spectral presence of a dead-undead mother, archaic and all-encompassing, a ghost signifying the problematics of femininity which the heroine must confront.'
This kind of interpretation offers a great deal to critics who are attempting to understand the attraction Gothic fiction might have held for the thousands of females who read and wrote them. It is too easy to say that female readers are attracted to the thrill of illicit sexuality or the masochistic enjoyment of their victimization that the Gothic everywhere represents. Kahane's position offers another way to understand what is attractive to women in these works and why the plight of the Gothic heroine has such seemingly universal power.
A key work in this regard is Sophia Lee's Elizabethan romance, The Recess (1783). The peculiar space signified by the novel's title comprises a set of subterranean chambers constructed under an abbey, which in the near past of the novel is a retreat in which the sister-heroines of the work, Matilda and Ellinor, spend their childhood. Formerly a convent, the space is cavelike but consists of various rooms, centered on 'a vaulted passage' whose light 'proceeded from small casements of painted glass so infinitely above our reach that we could never seek a world beyond.' This remembered space assumes a suggestive, womb-like quality, and the distinctly charged memories of this childhood world are suffused with the idea of the girls' mother, the majestic but threateningly distant (and doomed) Mary, Queen of Scots. Just as Mary is a mother both inaccessible and dangerous-should the girls be acknowledged publicly, their lives would surely be in danger-the maternal space is the scene of horror (the incestuous relation of their foster parents, their own brutal incarceration and near-rape) as well as love (both between the sisters and between them and their historically important male companions, Leicester and Essex). The tale of unhappiness and loss that besets them-each is doomed to misery in love and to wretchedness in life-returns repeatedly to this exotic space and the ominous happiness that it represents. In the end, however, it can only torment these girls with all they lack. The literally absent mother, glimpsed distantly only once before her execution, hovers over the work with a similarly threatening presence that always seems to promise happiness but in fact brings misery and despair. If later Gothicists create maternal specters to challenge heroines with the limits of their own -226- subjectivity, Lee tries to maternalize history itself as harrowing and fraught with danger in a particularly female way. By doing so she offers Gothic fiction as a medium for female novelists, perhaps most especially for her student Ann Radcliffe.
Ann Radcliffe's evocation of female anxiety in works such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) has earned her the title 'Mistress of Romance.' When Emily St. Aubert first sees the Castle of Udolpho, where she will live with her aunt and her aunt's villainous husband, Montoni, it has an almost animate presence for her:
Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, which she understood to be Montoni's; for though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object… Silent, lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the
