The Columbia History of the British Novel

And he regards his niece by marriage as his personal property, to dispose of in marriage as he chooses, or, when she resists, to abandon to the metaphorical wolves, withdrawing his protection so that the rapist Verezzi may pursue her. Radcliffe's point is clear: in her novels, the deepest terror women face lies with the exercise of patriarchal authority within the home.

Radcliffe emphasizes this point by showing just how easily such tyrants can gain access to vulnerable young women. Montoni is Emily's legal guardian. Blanche de Villefort's chateau has been penetrated through a secret passageway by cruel pirates, who kidnap her faithful guard Ludovico. More subtly, Radcliffe draws a parallel between Valancourt, the noble and heroic young man with whom Emily St. Aubert has fallen in love, and her captor Montoni. Emily's father first assumes that Valancourt is a highwayman and actually wounds him in the belief that he is a bandit about to attack them. Both Valancourt and Montoni are gamblers who have lost their fortunes in play. Both spend time in prison. Both marry real or putative inheritors of the St. Aubert estates. Although at the end of The Mysteries of Udolpho, Valancourt is redeemed by his enduring love for Emily, his remorse, his generosity, and his innocence of the added crimes of whoremongering and blackmail, it is actually Emily, as Ellis has argued, who has been responsible for preserving the virtue of the home. By refusing to marry Valancourt when he has lost her esteem, she aggressively upholds a standard of moral purity and rational prudence that the novel endorses and from which Valancourt lapses. Despite the novel's final assertion that 'the bowers of La Vallée became, once more, the retreat of goodness, wisdom and domestic blessedness,' to the reader the marriage of Emily and Valancourt may seem to rest on less secure foundations; having fall-341- en once, Valancourt may all too easily fall again into violent passion and criminal excess.

Radcliffe again depicts the vulnerability of the Edenic home to the «snake» of patriarchal power in The Italian, where the «father» (Schedoni) is a priest as well as the murderer of his brother, the rapist of his brother's wife, and the man who encourages and almost carries out the desire of the Marchioness di Vivaldi to murder her future daughter-inlaw. Ellena Rosalba is saved from both incest and death at the hands of her villainous uncle only because, at the last moment, Schedoni mistakenly concludes that he is her biological father and has more to gain from her marriage to Vivaldi than from her murder. Here, Radcliffe drives home her argument that the greatest evil women must fear arises within the sanctified family-both the patriarchal family and those institutions, such as the Catholic church, that purport to protect it. By locating masculine tyranny in the Roman Catholic Inquisition and the celibate priesthood, Radcliffe (like such other devout Christian women writers as Susan Ferrier, Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane West, Hannah More, and even Mary Wollstonecraft) leaves open the possibility that an enlightened, Protestant, married, and thereby domesticated clergy might come to recognize and espouse the values of feminine Romanticism.

In opposition to Edmund Burke and Salvator Rosa, Radcliffe constructs an alternative, entirely positive representation of the sublime. Burke had insisted that the psychological experience of the sublime originates in fear for one's life, aroused by the instinct of self-preservation in the face of the overwhelming power of nature, manifested by huge cliffs, raging rivers, or violent storms; as one's fear recedes, one emotionally progresses from astonishment to awe to a grateful and pleasurable acknowledgment of the power of the divine. But Ann Radcliffe, following the more positive vision of the sublime found in the writings of Immanuel Kant and anticipating the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth, suggests that one can reach a consciousness of the power and glory of divine creation without fear and trembling. Significantly, her heroines respond to the magnificence of Alpine scenery with pleasure rather than fear. For Emily St. Aubert and her father, the majestic Pyrenees 'soften, while they elevate, the heart, and fill it with the certainty of a present God.'

Radcliffe's work diverges from later poetic treatments of the sublime-in which the male Romantic poets appropriate and speak for -342- 'the mighty mind' of Nature-by imbuing the experience of the sublime with a recognition of the separateness of the perceiving self from nature. She thus insists upon a subjectivity constructed in relation to an other that cannot be possessed or absorbed into a transcendental ego. For Radcliffe, the experience of the sublime in nature is one that is beyond language, one that impresses the finite self with the presence of an infinite, never-fully-knowable other. At the same time, this confrontation with the divine elevates the perceiving self to a sense of her or his own integrity and worth as a unique product of divine creation. Rather than assuming Wordsworth's stance of the spectator ab extra, Radcliffe presents this heightened self-esteem as a means to a renewed appreciation of the equal value and dignity of other people. The feminine Romantic sublime is thus quintessentially democratic, as Emily St. Aubert, consoling her father upon his financial ruin, argues: 'Poverty cannot… deaden our taste for the grand, and the beautiful, or deny us the means of indulging it; for the scenes of nature-those sublime spectacles, so infinitely superior to all artificial luxuries! are open for the enjoyment of the poor, as well as of the rich.'

As it strengthens self-esteem, the feminine Romantic sublime produces a sympathy or love that connects the self with others. A shared enthusiasm for the grandeurs of Alpine scenery is what draws Emily and Valancourt together in love; the memory of those shared experiences unites them through their separate sufferings whenever they invoke their commitment to think of each other as the sun sets; and Emily's inability to forget those shared moments keeps alive her love for Valancourt even after she has prudently rejected an offer of marriage from her dishonored lover.

The feminine Romantic sublime both inspires and sustains love by giving each individual a sense of personal value and significance. It thus enables the women who experience it to achieve a mental escape from the oppressions of a tyrannical social order. Imprisoned by Schedoni in the convent of San Stefano in the Italian Alps, Ellena climbs a turret to a balcony above her bedroom and immediately loses both 'the consciousness of her prison' and her fear of her jailer:

Here, gazing upon the stupendous imagery around her, looking, as it were, beyond the awful veil which obscures the features of the Deity, and conceals Him from the eyes of his creatures, dwelling as with a present God in the midst of his sublime works, with a mind thus elevated, how insignificant would appear to her the transactions, and the sufferings of this world! How poor the -343- boasted power of man, when the fall of a single cliff from these mountains would with ease destroy thousands of his race assembled on the plains below!.. Thus man, the giant who now held her in captivity, would shrink to the diminutiveness of a fairy; and she would experience, that his utmost force was unable to chain her soul, or compel her to fear him, while he was destitute of virtue.

For Edmund Burke and Salvator Rosa, the contemplation of sublime nature roused an Oedipal anxiety caused by the overwhelming power of the father. For Kant and Wordsworth, the joy of the sublime experience depended upon the annihilation of otherness, upon the erasure of the female. In the novels of Radcliffe and other Romantic women writers, the contemplation of sublime nature produces, first, the recognition that the self is separated from the other. If that other is an oppressor, the sublime arouses a sense of personal exaltation and an awareness of one's virtue and worth. Thus it produces tranquillity, a mental freedom from the tyrannies of men and women, whom it reduces to impotence. If the other is beloved, then the experience of the sublime mediates a renewed connection between the lovers based on individual integrity, self-esteem, and mutual respect.

This second experience of the sublime-as the achievement of mutual love-is most fully rendered in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. A spirited defense of all things Irish against a host of British imperialist prejudices, this novel employs Burke's and Rosa's categories of the masculine sublime only to undercut them. Morgan's English protagonist, Horatio M-, travels fearfully among the desolate, rugged mountains of western Ireland, but instead of Rosa's life-threatening banditti and outlaws, he encounters first a group of women spinning, led in their Irish songs by an improvisatrice who celebrates the harmony between their work and a female Nature; then a helpful English-speaking guide; and finally, on the high road, instead of a murdering highwayman, a destitute but dignified peasant who shares his meager home and food with a 'manly courteousness' that puts Horatio to shame. Morgan here suggests that in Ireland the confrontation with a sublime and feminine Nature inspires not fear and trembling but a life of dignity and natural grace lived in peaceful harmony with one's fellow human beings, however difficult it may be to eke a living from the 'rigid soil.'

Horatio's journey is then interrupted by the music of an Eolian lyre, accompanied by 'the voice of a woman.' Thus Morgan introduces her -344- heroine Glorvina, the wild Irish girl with whom Horatio is to fall passionately in love. Morgan's subversion of the masculine sublime then takes a comic turn. Just before hearing the seductive song of Glorvina, Horatio had indulged a desire to conquer and possess the landscape upon which he gazed ('I raised my eyes to the Castle of Inismore, sighed, and almost wished I had been born the lord of these beautiful ruins, the prince of this isolated little territory, the adored chieftain of these affectionate and natural people'). Entranced by Glorvina's siren song, he eagerly climbs the ruined walls, only to lose his footing and fall precipitously into the castle