The Mystery of the Proper Lady and the Gothic Writer: Ann Radcliffe's Politics in The Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

This paper aims to show that the liberal context of the Dissenting culture can help us understand how Ann Radcliffe, the uncompromisingly proper lady of British fiction, can also harbor views that smack of revolutionary fervor and a commitment to female rights. Her choice of Gothic romance is a conundrum when viewed against the model of the rise of the realistic novel in the period. It is also quite a mystery that so proper a lady as Radcliffe should have chosen to write in the most sensational genre of her time. I hope to show that the choice of Gothic and of romance can be read as rational and progressive in the context of contemporary political thought. I re-examine the positive connotations of the term “Gothic” in relation to its eighteenth-century use as a term designating a virtuous and homegrown independence rooted in Saxon history as opposed to the tyrannies imported by the Normans. The vogue for Nature is also explained as part of the revival of Britain’s Gothic past in the formulation of a new nationalism. The civic language of the commonwealth tradition, paradoxically, is the very language adopted by a radical and republican urban sector opposed to a corrupt oligarchy. The paper reads Radcliffe as harnessing the ideal of commonwealth independence to the character of the Gothic heroine, who must maintain dignity and courage in the face of continuous and horrifying male assaults on her independence.