IN THE CLUTCHES OF THE NETHER REACHES

Fate sits on these dark battlements, and frowns,
And, as the portals open to receive me,
Her voice, in sullen echoes through the courts,
Tells of a nameless deed. ( Anne Radcliffe )

Horace Walpole set a pattern with his  ”Castle of Otranto” that many of the later Gothic novelists followed; images from the darkest reaches of the subconscious and under the compulsive forces of some violent secret emotion. William Beckford was Walpole,s greatest successor, though for a Gothic setting he substituted the apparatus of a Middle Eastern fairy tale. During the 1770’s a number of second-rate writers had done their best to produce a new ”Otranto”. Beckford alone, a millionaire dilettante, showed the fiery touch of real genius. The English translation of ”Vathek: An Arabian Tale”, Beckford’s original French text had been written four years earlier, came out in 1786; and like Otranto, it embodies a waking dream in which the dreamer gives a symbolic shape to his hidden passions and anxieties.

Francisco Goya (1746-1828): "The Pilgrimage of San Isidro",1820-1821 (One of the "black paintings" from the Quinta del Sordo).

Francisco Goya (1746-1828): "The Pilgrimage of San Isidro",1820-1821 (One of the "black paintings" from the Quinta del Sordo).

Reading how Vathek, a restless seeker after truth whose occult researches include ” even sciences that did not exist”, leaves rthe Xanadu-like palace he has built on earth- it consists of five separate pavillions, ”destined for the particular gratification of each of the senses” , and descends into the ghastly realm of Eblis , the ”abode of vengeance and despair,” we remember Beckford’s own tragedy.At Fonthill he had constructed a private paradise, where, one fateful Christmas, he had spent a week of  ”delirium” in the company of a male and female love. But he was soon to be hunted down by stern contemporary moralists, and in 1784 he was obliged to leave England under a heavy cloud of scandal.

J M W Turner: Beckford's Fonthill

J M W Turner: Beckford's Fonthill

Although the modern critic might have no difficulty in finding a psychological key either to ”The Castle of  Otranto”  or to ”Vathek” he would be hard put to discover the secret problems and tensions that engendered ”The Mysteries of Udolpho”. Ann Radcliffe was a blameless married woman, and apart from occasional attacks of asthma, led, so far as we now can judge, a happy, healthy, unadventurous life. But she was fond of foreign travel and fond of firelit musing, and in her books and places she had visited abroad assumed a wonderfully phantasmagoric character. The Castle of Udolpho incorporates her recollections of grim medieval castles on the Rhine: ” …the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent lonely, and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene…”

. Nicolai Abraham Abilgaard (1743-1809): "The Shade of Caulmin appearing to his Mother, episode from Ossian", 1794

. Nicolai Abraham Abilgaard (1743-1809): "The Shade of Caulmin appearing to his Mother, episode from Ossian", 1794

The story itself is Mrs. Radcliffe’s account of the drama that she felt might have been, or should have been , staged against such a melancholy and ”awful” background. the first glimpse of the castle fascinated Sir Walter Scott, who went on to pronounce her narrative ”the most interesting novel in the English language”. What he particularly valued was her gift of creating suspense. Not until Radcliffe’s reader has traveled almost halfway through her second volume does her heroine, whose aunt has contracted an unfortunate marriage with a ruffianly Italian adventurer, sight the distant castle on its crag. But once arrived there, she becomes absorbed in the circumambient air of mystery and is exposed to a series of terrifying experiences that nearly undermine her reason.

Montoni, Emily’s gaoler and chief tormentor , is a dark, Byronic, hero-villain. He determines to break his victim’s spirit, but none of his deadly plans succeeds. Emily escapes from her long imprisonment after many strange vicissitudes, and at the end of Volume IV she is blissfully united with her chivalrous admirer, Valancourt.

John Pettie, A State Secret. 1874

John Pettie, A State Secret. 1874

When ”The Mystery of Udolpho” appeared in 1794, it had an enthusiastic welcome. It was one of those books that popular literary journalists claim they cannot put down, and despite its leisurely pace and remarkably involved plot, it is a novel that still deserves rereading. Again, its great charm is its strange, somnambulistic atmosphere. ”To the warm imagination,” wrote Ann Radcliffe, ”the forms which float half-veiled in darkness afford a higher delight than the most distinct scenery the sun can show”. And at its best, her narrative recalls the weird pictorial fantasies of Giambattista Piranesi and Salvator Rosa, where tiny human fi

s are seen painfully making their way through a perspective of tremendous rugged arches.

Giambattista Piranesi

Giambattista Piranesi

For Coleridge and his fellow critics one of the book’s attractions was its unexceptionable moral message. Virtue triumphs; every problem is solved; every occurrence that has inspired the heroine with a tremor of supernatural dread at length receives a natural explanation. Very different was the effect of ”The Monk”, which Coleridge denounced as heartily as he had applauded Mrs. Radcliffe. if not the most original of the Gothic novelists, its author Matthew Gregory Lewis, next to William Beckford, was unquestionably the oddest and the most arresting.

Salvator Rosa. The Witch.

Salvator Rosa. The Witch.

Like Beckford, Lewis derived his large inherited fortune from plantations in the West Indies. But, unlike the self-centered Beckford, he had a soft heart and an uneasy conscience. He was deeply perturbed by the miserable lot of his slaves and twice visited his Caribbean property to investigate the conditions under which they lived and worked. Indeed, his early death ( 1775-1818 ) , was a direct result of this benevolent enterprise. Yelow fever attacked him; he died on the journey home and was buried at sea. But the coffin that enclosed his body refused to sink, and part of the hammock that had been wrapped around it struggled loose and formed a sail. The sail was immediately caught by the trade wind, and from the deck his shipmates helplessly watched poor Lewis go bobbing back toward Jamaica.

''"Cliches anonymes, Six tableaux vivants realises a partir du Moine, de Lewis"  Six tableaux vivants for The Monk by Matthew Lewis, a book Artaud translated and abridged.''

''"Cliches anonymes, Six tableaux vivants realises a partir du Moine, de Lewis" Six tableaux vivants for The Monk by Matthew Lewis, a book Artaud translated and abridged.''

When Byron heard the news, they were London acquaintances, he was deeply shocked and saddened. Lewis , he wrote, though at times a ”damned bore” was also an excellent fellow, ”a jewel of a man”; and most of the novelists contemporaries would appear to have held the same opinion. In his writings, on the other hand, he showed a far less reassuring character. His imagination was dark, perverse, and sadistic; qualities that may have been due to the troubled circumstances of his youth and childhood. His father, a cold, pompous, dignified man, had separated, while Lewis was still young, from his gay, volatile, attractive wife. Lewis, of course, was his mother’s darling, and he often attended her toilette to give expert advice about her clothes and jewels. Sometimes she took him with her to the theatre, where he learned to imitate, with ”thrilling accuracy,” a celebrated actress’s shriek of horror.

Artaud. Illustration. French version. The Monk

Artaud. Illustration. French version. The Monk

”Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakes the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend that neither Shakespeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and there lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreader evil. ”– Ann Radcliffe

”After writing a travel book of her trip through Holland and Germany, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794 (1795), Ann Radcliffe retired from the literary scene. In 1816, she was assumed dead, and a compilation published of her verse, The Poems of Ann Radcliffe. Earlier, in 1810, ‘Ode to Terror’ was published, in which it was claimed that Ann Radcliffe had gone mad and died of the ‘terrors’. In later life Ann Radcliffe suffered from asthma and died of an attack (7 February 1823). It was claimed in the Monthly Review that ‘she died in a state of mental desolation not to be described’.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is one of the classics of Gothic horror. Together with The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) by Horace Walpole (1717-1797) and The Monk (1776) by Mathew Lewis (1775-1818), it helped to create the genre. It was to influence both Mathew Lewis and Mary Shelley (1797-1851).

As Mathew Lewis noted in a letter to his mother, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which he had recently read (May 1794), inspired him to continue with his work on The Monk (1796), ‘I was induced to go on with it by reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, which is in my opinion one of the most interesting books that ever have been published’. Other writers who were strongly influenced by Ann Radcliffe included The Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), who described her as ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction’, a ‘mighty magician’, and ‘the Great Enchantress’.”

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