Importance, Naturalness and Femaleness: Using Fay as an Access Point to Radcliffe

In “Women and the Gothic: Literature as Home Politics,” Elizabeth Fay brings numerous Gothic novelists into her discussion of the role of women within the genre. Within this course we have already been exposed to one of the novelists she spends the most time with: Ann Radcliffe. Throughout our discussion of Radcliffe the class brought up several themes Fay addresses in her paper, including the sublime, the focus on a villainous patriarch or patriarchal institution, the tendency to set the plot in a remote location, and the beautiful heroine. However, Fay provides a new access point for the discussion and appreciation of Radcliffe’s take on the Gothic novel, so in this post I summarize Fay's views on the Gothic in conjunction with Ann Radcliffe and then relate them to what we have seen in A Sicilian Romance.

(Portrait of Ann Radcliffe)

The Gothic, and more specifically women within the Gothic, were heavily influenced by the realities of what it meant to be a woman at the time of writing. For someone like Radcliffe who was writing relatively early on in the movement there was still a sense of hope to her writing. A Sicilian Romance (1790) ends with the line “Thus surrounded by her children and friends, and engaged in forming the minds of the infant generation, she seemed to forget that she had ever been otherwise happy” (Radcliffe 199). After the excitement of discovering the marchioness as well as Hippolitus are alive, Julia will get to live in peace, even if she is still living under the patriarchy. The important thing is the hope that the patriarchy she is immersed in now it kinder to her.  

Upon first reading this seems like an appropriate, if boring ending to the novel. However, Fay brings up that the French Revolution was occurring while Radcliffe was writing and the social upheaval of the time would have heavily influenced her voice. The social upheaval of the French Revolution brought with it the possibility of change for women and how they were seen by society.  With this context we know Radcliffe is not pushing an idyllic ending into the void with the hope that one day people will read it and change. Instead, she is calling out to what a future might look like should the revolution have an effect on the roles of women as well as examining the “possibilities that social upheaval offers women” (Fay 124).

   Another topic touched on is Radcliffe’s relationship with the sublime. Other resources on the topic, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” and A Sicilian Romance, were both written by Radcliffe herself. Fay offers an outsiders view on Radcliffe’s use of the sublime. However, before moving into the sublime, it is worth mentioning another woman publishing Gothic literature a few years prior to Radcliffe: Clara Reeve. Clara Reeve published her novel The Old English Baron in 1778, early enough that Radcliffe would have been familiar with it at the time of writing. Perhaps as a result of this, Radcliffe and Reeve were both concerned with “distinguishing her works in terms of its moral quality” (Fay 126). It seems likely that Radcliffe would have drawn from her predecessor in categorizing her heroines as morally superior, which is why it is significant that Radcliffe would have broken away from Reeve in her use of the sublime. 

 Fay points out that where Reeve’s influence did not extend was into Radcliffe’s use of terror over horror. When Radcliffe writes the sublime she does so in a way that heavily incorporates terror, because to her terror is a manifestation of the sublime. In one scene, as Julia is being taken to an abandoned castle, Radcliffe attempts to make the reader feel her terror, “the gloom of the place inspired terrific images. Julia trembled as she entered; and her emotion was heightened, when she perceived at some distance, through the long perspective of the trees, a large ruinous mansion” (Radcliffe 111). In this moment Radcliffe builds a sense of wonder that builds and takes the reader and Julia into themselves as a result of the greater magnitude of the castle. Fay discusses this use terror in the Gothic in her explanation of the external. External in relation to the gothic refers to and outside force that “drives inwards in order to intrude on the privacy and supposed protection of domestic space” (Fay 110), so Julia’s feeling at the sight of the castle is her feeling overwhelmed at the extent of the outside world and how it threatens her as an individual.

Having Fay’s explanation of the Gothic and Radcliffe in particular helps in understanding the way in which Radcliffe entered the genre and how she deviated from previous examples to make it her own. 

*For more information on the Gothic versus the Romantic, check out this.

*And on an only semi-related note, this song was going through my head the entire time I was               writing this because of the note about the French Revolution.   

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you think having the context provided by Fay helps in understanding the novel as a whole? Did the context change your opinion on Radcliffe's writing at all?  
2. Does having Radcliffe's style of the Gothic novel described as external make sense in relation to what we have read?
3. How does the definition of the sublime in relation to Radcliffe provided by Fay affect your understanding of the sublime.