Techniques of terror, technologies of nationality: Ann Radcliffe's 'The Italian.'

I

It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun, "Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes the laws." Might it not be said with as much propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let who will make the systems?

Anna Letitia Barbauld(1)

The place of nationality in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797) appears obvious: the text promises to reveal the secrets of an alien national identity to English readers. The novel's very title makes this promise, as does the much-admired frame tale that precedes the narrative proper. Anna Letitia Barbauld, in her introduction to Radcliffe's novels in The British Novelists (1810), writes of this frame:

Nothing can be finer than the opening of this story. An Englishman on his travels, walking through a church, sees a dark figure stealing along the aisles. He is informed that he is an assassin. On expressing his astonishment that he should find shelter there, he is told that such adventures are common in Italy.(2)

The Italian who has explained the mores of his strange country proceeds to give the English traveler a manuscript--one that, in good Gothic fashion, turns out to be The Italian itself. Though the assassin in the church does not figure in what follows, this lack of direct plot connection between prologue and tale confirms rather than negates the promise that the novel will exhibit and explain alien behavior. The otherwise unmotivated preamble on the ways of the Italians suggests that the text in its entirety should be taken as emblematic of Italianness, Catholicism, a mysterious and un-English way of life.

Similar promises and textual conceits may be found in many Gothic novels, including that work most often cited as the first Gothic, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). Walpole, writing under a pseudonym, claims in the preface to the first edition that the text of Otranto was "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and "printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529."(3) He offers his "translation" of this manuscript to the EngliSh reader--just as Radcliffe offers The Italian--as an entertaining artifact of another age and country, a window on a world displaced by time and distance: "I have no doubt but the English reader will be pleased with a sight of this performance."(4)