A Gothic Affair
By PATRICK ANDERSON
TN June of 1816, when Byron and Shelley were 'living by the lake of Geneva, a rainy spell led them and their party to reading ghost stories. The discussion moved on to the famous occasion when, on Byron's quoting the description of Geraldine's deformity from `Christabel,' Shelley suddenly shrieked, picked up a candle and fled, because he had had a vision of his wife's nipples turned into eyes. This—to use an unavoidable but imprecise term—was a quintessentially 'romantic' occasion. Ghost stories, like 'Gothic' novels, . appealed to those who placed a particular em- phasis upon feeling and who, by cultivating the emotions of wonder, awe and terror, liberated what we should now call the unconscious. Simi- larly, Shelley's horrifying vision looked back to the guilt-ridden atmosphere of Beckford's orien- tal tales or the drops of blood falling from the great helmet in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, as well as pointing the way forward to modern surrealism.
One is reminded that Wordsworth, in his pre- face to Lyrical Ballads (1800), had complained of the current craze for 'frantic novels' and 'this degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,' although himself admitting, in Book Eight of The Prelude, that at one time he, too, had been in- fluenced by the literature about him at least to the extent of indulging in 'wilfulness of fancy and conceit' by giving each yew its ghost, turning a withered foxglove into the symbolic resting- place of some melancholy vagrant and her babes, and imagining a gleaming rock in a wood to be a knight's shield or the entrance to a fairy palace.
He, of course, turned to a purer, more bracing course (but not necessarily a more human one); plenty would be left for the researches of a Mario Praz. All of Byron's party began to write ghost stories as a result of the rainy spell. The slowest to start was Mary, whose Frankenstein outdid for years the popularity of her husband's poetry. Like Keats's `St Agnes' Eve,' it owed something to the work of Mrs. Radcliffe.
Now a handsome reprint of Ann Radcliffe's ,influential novel,* published in 1794, praised by Coleridge, De Quincey and Scott, a best-seller for fifty years and regarded by Mr. Walter Allen as the ancestor of the poetic novels of William Faulkner and Elizabeth Bowen, enables us to inquire further into these matters. As a novel, the Mysteries of Udolpho is clearly better than Wal- pole's cold and clumsy piece of grand guignol; it is also far less sensational than the subsequent works of Monk Lewis and Charles Robert Maturin, influenced by Teutonic Schauerromane, As Mrs. Radcliffe herself explained in a post- humous article, 'Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them'
Nevertheless, the novel has its faults. It is too long and diffuse; several elaborate incidents neither further the plot nor affect the principal
• THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO. Edited with an introduction by Bonamy Dobree. (Oxford English Novels, 35s.)
character, while the constant manipulation of suspense, the strains of ethereal music, the dim figures flitting through groves and along terraces, the veils to be shrinkingly lifted, the hidden door- ways and subterranean passages, the ex- planations broken off ' or postponed, become repetitious to the point of tedium. Furthermore, it is overburdened by trying to do so many different things. Like much of the poetry of Byron, 'the man that Lord Byron tried to be was the invention of Mrs. Radcliffe,' it contains an element of the travelogue, although Mrs. Rad- cliffe had never travelled through the Pyrenees, Alps and Apennines, and never visited Venice, and consequently drew upon the reports of others and the paintings of Claude Lorraine and Sal- vator Rosa. (As for the sixteenth-century his- torical background, she makes no attempt at act uracy.)
Combined with this, but altogether transcend- ing mere reportage, is the extraordinary em- phasis laid upon landscape, either savage and reinforced by castles and thunderstorms, or pastoral and embellished by cottages, pavilions and Rousseau-esque peasants; landscapes and characters melt into each other without, I think, any precise symbolism being involved. And this, which is often splendidly done, means both pages of prose-poetry and the actual inclusion, not only of quotations from a number of poets from Shakespeare to Thomson, but also of the numerous verses of the heroine, Emily St. Aubert, and of a late-arriving secondary heroine, Blanche, together with those of more than one loving young man. Alongside this plethora of feeling, hOwever, there exists the controlling element of good sense imparted by her father to Emily, who is no Marianne Dashwood, let alone a goose like Catherine Morland, but has learned to check the excesses of sensibility and who, when not fainting with terror, is full of fortitude, delicacy of feeling and a proper moral scorn for the snobberies and artificialities of fashion- able life. Add to this that the book is also a thriller and you have some idea of its complexity.
Since the mysteries, 'the fallacies of Udolpho,' as Emily describes them, are all eventually given logical explanations, it is tempting to speculate what the novel would have been like without its conventional terrors. The first 250 or so pages combine the interpenetration of landscape and feeling with what is almost a Jamesian theme. A talented, intelligent innocent, in love with the noble Vallancourt, is forced by the death of her father to move into the cold fashionable world of her aunt and of her aunt's lover, the sinister Montoni; her own wedding is postponed and then forbidden when these two marry; she is borne off to Venice to be sold to a Venetian count and then, when the count is found to be unexpectedly poor, she is sequestered in the lonely castle in the Apennines where Montoni gathers a group of malcontents, half banditti, half political rebels.
What next? He will bully and finally kill with unkindness the aunt he only married for her money—but in what sense will he then turn to Emily, whom he could just conceivably fascinate and corrupt with his 'high chivalric air,' his desperate exploits and wild parties, perhaps first seducing her and then using her as a pawn in his political manoeuvres? Nothing like this hap- pens. Montoni is too flat a character, contemp- tuous of women, interested only in action and money, and eventually dismissed in a few lines; Emily is too perfect: sex is kept in the back- ground; instead of psychological drama, we get the creaking doors, distant music, ghostly gossip and shuddering but relentless curiosity. The lively, garrulous and, in the case of Ludovico,
brave and resourceful servants come out of the terror best.
Nevertheless, as a piece of 'creative writing,' and notably as a document of romanticism, and particularly of the persistence of Augustan atti- tudes to nature, simplicity, retirement, philo- sophic melancholy and so on in the later movement, the book makes indispensable reading.
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