Aug 21, 2019

Reading the Classics: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe




Hey, I'm back and I've got a new Reading the Classics post for you! At 672 pages The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe isn't exactly a beach read, but summer's almost over anyway, right? If you've been reading the blog, you probably know I've got a soft spot for Gothic novels, and I've come across references to Udolpho many times in modern and period fiction (most notably Jane Austen's Gothic novel parody Northanger Abbey), so I finally decided to give it a go.

Udolpho tells the story of Emily St. Aubert, a young Frenchwoman who gets orphaned and placed in the care of her unfeeling aunt, Madame Cheron. Emily has fallen in love with Valancourt, who she met while traveling with her father, but her aunt forbids her to marry him. When Madame Cheron marries the unscrupulous Signor Montoni, Emily is forced to leave her home and the man she loves to accompany her aunt to Italy, where Montoni's true character is revealed and the two women are placed in mortal peril.     

Radcliffe's novels were hugely popular in their time, and Udolpho, published in 1794, is widely considered to be her defining work. I was expecting atmospheric passages of description, an intriguing plot, and some element of the supernatural, but most of all I was expecting to be entertained. Unfortunately that didn't happen: I found this book a chore to get through. 

The book is filed under speculative fiction at the library of Turku, but while Radcliffe teases the reader with supernatural happenings, they always get explained away. And the passages of description, while atmospheric, were just too numerous and tedious for the modern reader. The plot could have been intriguing, had the book been about 300 pages shorter, and I also disliked the way Radcliffe tries to create suspense by locking the reader out at key points of the story, like the bit where Emily looks behind the veil at Castle Udolpho and sees something horrible. The revelation comes at the end of the book, but at that point it's quite anticlimactic.

The structure of the book is also a bit weird. The main conflict gets resolved, but the story goes on for hundreds of pages after the fact fuelled by a revelation of Valancourt's misdeeds that make Emily reject his proposal again.  For me this felt a bit forced. I tried to figure out what bothered me about the structure, and I realised that it's the way the love story is handled: Valancourt is absent for most of the book, and as you need obstacles for the whole star-crossed lovers thing to work, something has to get in the way of their happy ending. The problem is that this didn't feel organic or natural to me, perhaps because of a lack of foreshadowing. The introduction of Blanche at the end of the book annoyed me, because at that point I was pretty frustrated with the book and just wanted to finally finish it, especially after Radcliffe tested my patience with that pointless bit where Emily is taken to a cottage and then back to the castle. And don't get me started on the bad poetry Emily writes.

Emily as a character didn't really resonate with me. Mostly it feels like (bad) things just happen to her and she doesn't really do much about it. And boy, does she faint a lot! While it's a good thing that Emily doesn't get rescued by Valancourt, she doesn't exactly get herself out of Castle Udolpho either. Most of the other character feel quite stereotypical, too, but is that because Radcliffe has been widely imitated later?

So, what did I learn as a writer? Radcliffe is great at atmospheric descriptions, and that's something to pay attention to, but too much of a good thing is really too much.

I can't actually recommend this novel to anybody, but if you're interested in the evolution of the novel form and Gothic literature, by all means pick up a copy from the library.

And if you're reading Udolpho as an assignment for class, I've got a little something to make it more bearable. I present to you:

The Castle of Udolpho Drinking Game

The rules: take a sip every time:

- Emily admires the landscape
- Something is described as "melancholy"
- Emily faints
- Montoni does something villainous
- Emily thinks she's going to get attacked by bandits and isn't
- Valancourt gets shot