Technologies of Vision in Radcliffe’s The Italian

Abstract

This essay deals with what a recent critic calls “the preoccupation in Gothic fiction with the power of the [penetrating] gaze” as envisaged in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian. In particular, it examines the way in which the gaze, as it offers a key to unlocking the world of ambiguity and uncertainty, adopts metaphors or analogies of contemporary visual technology. I want to argue that these technological parallels or analogues in the gothic gaze are not incidental, but stand in keeping with the way in which modern vision in its pursuit of understanding and knowledge increasingly became a field of technological applications and strategies. To underscore the parallels, I will also highlight the way in which the narrative arrangement is often accompanied by an analogous tendency to eliminate elements of corporeality in scenes of visual experience, a tendency that mirrors in no small degree what Martin Jay calls “the valorization of the disembodied eye” in the representation of modern vision. The relevance of such elements of modern vision to gothic as a literary form thus remains in the essay at a level of theoretical kinship; namely, how modern optical technologies and mechanical conversion of vision both foster a strategically formulated narrative backdrop to the gothic theatre of “epistemological crisis.” Borrowing technological or ideological motifs of analogy from optical apparatuses such as camera obscura and Panopticon, this narrative backdrop adopts the bodiless gaze as the ideal condition of visual experience. It potentially suggests that seeing and understanding in gothic is an act of control and surveillance, an intellectual and ideological effort to maintain the world of knowledge and representation without all the complications of modern experience fraught with ambiguities and uncertainties.