Gothic Trajectories: Latitudinarian Theology and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe

Gothic Trajectories: Latitudinarian Theology and the Novels of Ann Radcliffe RobertJ. Mayhew Critical Trajectories and the Misprision ofRadcliffe Since the earliest biographical writings—Sir Walter Scott's assessment and the memoir attached to Radcliffe's posdiumously published novel Gaston de Blondeville1—the novels of Ann Radcliffe have been located in the trajectory by which the generic norms of Gothic fiction developed. Criticism has placed Radcliffe by anticipation in the context ofsubsequent developments in the Gothic genre. She is accepted as an important innovator but is also seen as having fallen short ofrealizing the genre's full potential, largely owing to her penchant for explaining away supernatural events by naturalistic means. The overall assessment of this mode of criticism is well summarized by T.N. Talfourd: "Mrs Radcliffe may fairly be considered as the inventor ofa new style ofromance; equally distant from the old tales of chivalry and magic, and from modern representations of credible incidents and living manners. Her works partially exhibit the charms of each species of composition."2 Such criticism was written some thirty years after the novels diemselves, and dius has the benefit 1 See Sir Walter Scott, Prose Works (Edinburgh: R. Cadell, 1834-36), 3:337-89; and [T.N. Talfourd], "Memoir ofthe Life and Writings ofMrs Radcliffe" in Gaston deBlondeville, m Vie Court oflleniy111. KeepingFestival in Ardenne, A Romance, 4 vols (London: H. Colboum, 1826). 2 [Talfourd], pp. 105-6. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 15, Number 3-4, April-July 2003 584 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURYFICTION of seeing the generic trajectory of Gothic fiction in a way Radcliffe herself could not at the time ofwriting. More recendy, critics have sought to place Radcliffe's novels in the contemporary contextofthe 1790s. Here die argument has been over the ideologies Radcliffe was utilizing rather than the genre in which she operated, or rather, over die ideological resonances ofthe Gotiiic genre itself. Radcliffe, then, is assessed with respect to her surroundings —what might be called an "ecology" rather than a "trajectory."3 It has been suggested that Radcliffe's work has radical strains in its presentation ofwomen and more generally in its portrayal ofpatterns of feminine sensibility. She is seen as representing a middle-class, radical Dissenting tradition opposed to a Burkeian reassertion of aristocratic values. Yet even in this ecological approach, there is a proleptic angle, which sees Radcliffe as the incomplete realization of a generic trajectory: the limitations of her radicalism are discussed, her providential endings of marital bliss being as problematic today as dieywere to early nineteenth-century critics. She emerges from this criticism, as she did from trajectory-based generic criticism, as at best a liminal figure. Her novels point towards radicalism, while she pulls back from endorsing such a position. As an influential statement of this approach to Radcliffe puts it: "By taking Emily out ofUdolpho, restoring her to nature's inspiring influence and to a moral, paternalistic society, Radcliffe is able to substitute ethical dilemmas for the unresolvable threat ofavarice and to return the plot complication to a harmless encounter between virtue and error."4 Radcliffe highlights die tensions in paternalism, while finally reverting to an endorsement ofa more benevolent version of the same ideology. Further light can be shed on the aims of Radcliffe's novels by treating them neither in a generic context, nor in the historical context of the 1790s, but by setting them in the context of the intellectual milieu from which she came. Such an approach reactivates a line of inquiry signalled but not taken by Radcliffe's early biographers. All diese memoirs emphasized that Radcliffe's education inculcated values from a generation previous to her birth; her ideas I take the term "ecology" from J.GA. Pocock's Baibarism and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Mary Poovey, "Ideology and VieMysteries ofUdolpho," Criticismi (1979), 307-30, at 325-26. Many of the claims in the previous paragraph are summarized in Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). GOTHIC TRAJECTORIES585 derived from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century intellectual arena. Discussing Radcliffe's reclusivity, Ann Elwood argued she got her ideas from "the early impressions of education, and ... die somewhat primitive and old...