The Columbia History of the British Novel

scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign.

Emily's first view of the castle connects it to its owner, and there is every reason to think that the castle itself, 'gloomy and sublime,' is a constant reminder of the evil Montoni. Such descriptions were inspired by the philosophy of Edmund Burke, whose Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) popularized the notion of pleasurable terror and outlined an entire range of techniques for engaging the emotions associated with the Gothic. Radcliffean «sublime» always involves a fascination with what is fearful. This fascination could be equated with desire, but it is not necessarily a desire for the «owner» of the castle. Later, when Emily has suffered enough mental abuse from her stepfather to realize that she is in real danger, she finds the dreary castle itself more terrifying and more attractive than anyone who inhabits it: in seeking her aunt in a distant tower, for instance, she 'proceeded through a passage adjoining the vaults, the walls of which were drooping with unwholesome dews, and the vapours, that crept along the ground, made the torch burn so dimly, that Emily expected every moment to see it extinguished.' She then looks through 'a pair of iron gates' to see 'by flashes of uncertain light, the vaults beyond, and near her, heaps of earth, that seemed to surround an open grave.' These descriptions are more specific than Walpole's 'long labyrinth of darkness,' and the details help to draw a picture that makes understandable the critics' desire to connect passages of the castle and passages of memory. Emily seems drawn into these dim, — 227- vaporous, and unwholesome spaces; she sees them uncertainly, and she fears for her own safety, even as she insists on penetrating further into the gloom and secrecy of this dark interior. The spectral presence of the castle itself has an alarming 'uncanniness,' as if Emily, trapped in the passages of repressed memory, recognized in these threatening spaces something about herself that she had always known.

Kahane argues persuasively that when the «secret» of the castle turns out to be the history of the sexually transgressive Madame Laurentini, this threatening maternal figure becomes, in a way, the «meaning» of the work. 'As a victimizer victimized by her own desire,' Kahane says, ' Laurentini is presented as Emily's potential precursor, a mad mothersister-double who mirrors Emily's own potential for transgression and madness.' 'Female Gothic,' in other words, confronts the heroine with her own desires and thrills her with the possibility of transgression. In Radcliffe's novels the impulse toward transgression is not acted upon but remains only a threat-one that is always contained by the forced conclusions upon which the author insists. Emily as heroine cannot transgress, and readers do not for a moment imagine that she will.

As heroine, however, she can-indeed she must-suffer. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the attraction a heroine like Emily comes inexplicably to feel for the inward reaches of the castle is in fact the sign of a repressed masochistic desire for the dark hero himself. Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls this figure the demon-lover: 'Despite the fact that the man is darkly attractive, the woman generally shuns him, shrinking as from some invisible contamination. Too often to be insignificant, this aversion is justified when he eventually proves to be a long-lost relation: an uncle, a step-father, sometimes the biological father himself-lusting after the innocent daughter's chastity.' In Wolff's analysis, the demon-lover, who 'dominat[es] the fiction as its undeniable emotional focus,' is secretly attractive to the heroine and becomes the source of a power that releases her from the confines of a sentimental world.

Such a description seems even more appropriate to Radcliffe's earlier Romance of the Forest (1791) than it does to The Mysteries of Udolpho. Not only is the Marquis de Montalt, the villain of that novel, physically attractive and almost kind to Adeline, the heroine, he is urbane; and his chateau, unlike the usual Gothic setting, is beautifully if oppressively decorated and showy in its luxuriance-'fitted up in the most airy and elegant taste.' -228-

It would be tempting to say that this world of negative possibility is in some way deeply attractive to the novelist and her heroine and that Radcliffe gives voice to secret desires in her depiction of this powerful paternal figure. But from another perspective, the world of male prerogative gives rise to Gothic experience throughout the text. The terror invoked is not a thrilling and titillating frisson but real, uncompromising fear. According to this reading, Radcliffe portrays female experience as fraught with actual rather than imagined danger.

Where Adeline does find consolation is in the bosom of a sentimentalized family structure, that of the sympathetic M. La Luc, and more specifically in the person of his ineffectual son, Theodore. Adeline's attraction to Theodore is immediate and compelling. The structure of the novel, however, requires that they be separated for most of it. This is convenient in two ways: first, it allows Adeline to undergo the ordeal of her repeated flight and incarceration on her own and to discover the kind of power that even her attachment to Theodore would deprive her of; second, it allows her to imagine him, as she does at regular intervals throughout the bulk of the novel, in terms like these:

Even when sleep obliterated for a while her memory of the past, his image frequently arose to her fancy, accompanied by all the exaggerations of terror. She saw him in chains, and struggling in the grasp of ruffians, or saw him led, amidst the dreadful preparations for execution, into the field: she saw the agony of his look and heard him repeat her name in frantic accents, till the horrors of the scene overcame her, and she awoke.

Such moments of fearful imagination abound in The Romance of the Forest, as they do in each of Radcliffe's novels, and their function is clear. Adeline heightens suspense and her own dread by imagining Theodore in chains, Theodore bleeding, Theodore suffering untold torments. But she also challenges the assumptions of patriarchy by finding this ineffectual and indeed emasculated hero a desirable alternative to the stern and powerful Marquis de Montalt. The 'exaggerations of terror,' in other words, offer Radcliffe a way of imagining an alternative to the ideology that places women under the power of men. Her «man» is never depicted as powerful, nor does he seem particularly able to extricate himself from the hold that law and society-in the form of the army and the Marquis-have over him. Insofar as the Marquis de Montalt comes to represent the source of power in a phallocentric system, Theodore, pathetic as he is (or as Adeline imagines him), — 229- represents a conceivable alternative. In his suffering lies his power, both to capture the heart of Adeline and to undermine the unequivocal power of the Marquis. Theodore's suffering, and Adeline's imagination of his pain, place him in the only relation that will allow her to feel attraction. Theodore plays on Adeline's emotions precisely to the degree that he is restrained, controlled, victimized, and emasculated. To the degree, that is, that Theodore becomes like a woman, he is attractive to the heroine of The Romance of the Forest.

If Adeline can become a sister-lover to the suffering Theodore, that is not to say that the relation is naturalized in an unerotic way. For Radcliffe the Gothic centered upon discovering the threat of desire in the domestic realm, to which female novelistic characters were increasingly restricted, and then learning how to accommodate that desire to lived experience in the world. The Radcliffean endings, which have been decried for chasing away the ghost in disappointing 'explanations,' are nevertheless an attempt to bring the fantasy of female power back into a space in which it might have some real meaning. That space for Radcliffe is a maternalized space, just as her novels establish the maternal as the area of Gothic exploration. With this focus Radcliffe looks forward to later female writers, such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, for both of whom the maternal specter holds a particular fascination and whose vision of male subjectivity is complicated in similar ways.

The other Radcliffe, Mary-Ann, whose publications traded on the popularity of her predecessor, can serve to suggest some of the more lurid contours Radcliffean «sublime» can assume. In Manfroné, or, The One- Handed Monk (1809), the demon-lover, who appropriately loses his hand in a duel with the heroine's father at the moment of attempting to rape her, soon returns as the mysterious monk who mumbles from behind his obfuscating cowl to «haunt» the heroine, Rosalina, first in the candlelit aisles of the abbey adjoining her father's castle; then in the subterranean passages that elaborately connect the abbey and the castle and contain in assorted dungeons pathetic prisoners variously thought to be murdered or otherwise victimized by Rosalina's hotheaded father; and finally as her father's guest in the castle itself. Rosalina laments the loss of her mother and learns the details of her history, slowly coming to realize that her father is a murderous tyrant who only stops short of killing her, in a crucial scene, because he is distracted by the shouts of his soldiers. -230-

The novel is replete with midnight trysts, threatened sexual violence, and mere physical brutality, and it creates a «Gothic» atmosphere of unrelieved gloom. Nowhere are there the shimmering vistas of Ann Radcliffe, the picturesque moments that dispel the darkness with rays of hope. Here the misery and the victimization are total. The hero, Montalto, in this case a strong if ineffectual rival of both the father and Manfroné, manages to fight to save Rosalina from the villain, who has finally decided to stop at nothing to «possess» her. Montalto, like Theodore before him, must suffer symbolic castration before earning the right to rescue the heroine: 'Twice was the murderous dagger upraised and twice did it drink the blood of Rosalina's fond lover! — Groaning, he sunk on the pavement, and the shades of death encompassed him.' Later, surprisingly, he rises from this symbolic death of his