"Her ideas arranged themselves": re-membering poetry in Radcliffe.(Ann Radcliffe)(Critical essay)

IN 1810 ANNA LAETITIA BARBAULD WROTE SOMEWHAT ANXIOUSLY ABOUT the tendency of readers to skip over the poems in Ann Radcliffe's novels:

 
   It ought not to be forgotten that there are many elegant pieces of 
   poetry interspersed through the volumes of Mrs. Radcliffe.... The 
   true lovers of poetry are almost apt to regret its being brought in 
   as an accompaniment to narrative, where it is generally neglected 
   ... and the common reader is always impatient to get on with the 
   story. (1) 

The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Radcliffe's immediately preceding novel, The Romance of the Forest (1791), carry the subtitle, Interspersed with some pieces of Poetry. These subtitles are dropped from modern editions and bibliographies, but they ask us to pay attention to "interspersed" poetry as a distinctive aspect of these novels' forms. (2) The phenomenon of the blended novel--the novel that incorporates actual verses and lyric moments in prose into the novel--is a distinctively 1790s form of heteroglossia which has attracted increasing critical attention in recent years. Other writers of the period, including Charlotte Smith, Thomas Holcroft and Matthew (Monk) Lewis, also interpolated poetry into their novels; Mary Robinson, in Walsingham, or, the Pupil of Nature (1797), would go so far as to provide an "Index to the Poetry," inviting her readers to approach her text as a poetry collection as much as a novel.

What does it mean, though, to read a novel as a "true lover of poetry" would? What happens if we take seriously the idea that this does not mean excising poems from the novels through which they are interspersed and considering them on their own merits, as Leah Price has shown contemporary reviewers of Radcliffe tended to do, and Robinson indeed invites them to? (3) If we endeavor not to skip over the poetry within these novels but to read it as a genuine and vital complement to the prose narrative, will these novels read differently? To date, research on blended novels has suggested that the placement of lyric poems within these texts tends to be "chaotic," performing, if anything, the difference between lyric and narrative, often at the expense of lyric. (4) However the self-consciousness with which Radcliffe uses quotations and poems within her novels suggests that, at least for its most famous proponent, there were thematic as well as generic issues at stake in the use of this form. For Price, Radcliffe's contemporary popularity came from her novels' presentation to her readers of a choice of discourses. (5) By paying localized attention to the labor to which Radcliffe puts poetry in Udolpho, I contrast the relationship of this idea of choice in reading to the compulsions of the gothic text. For Radcliffe, the presence and absence of poetry becomes a tool for exploring the implications of the gothic itself. In the case of Udolpho, both quoted and original interpolated poetry provide vital companionship and support--a kind of musical "accompaniment"--to isolated individuals and single voices within the gothic narrative.

In parts of Udolpho quotation occurs so frequently that it represents individuals as kinds of permeable, porous beings, who could as easily think the thoughts of another as their own thoughts. Radcliffe deliberately marks this form of sociability by having quotation disappear from the gothic third of the text in which the heroine, Emily St Aubert, is imprisoned in the castle of Udolpho. Just as quotation disappears in the face of terror and isolation, during this part of the novel Radcliffe has Emily become unable to write, or even read. This unpoetic core has been the focus of most criticism of Udolpho and as a result the role of poetry in the novel has received little comment. (6) But if gothic imprisonment--the limitation of physical and imaginative options--is isolation from poetry, then to remember, to read, and to write literature must, in some sense, be to move free of confinement. The hero of this text--markedly lacking in more material heroes--may be the poetic imagination. In the increasingly politically repressive period of the mid-1790s, Radcliffe's gothic novel as a whole presents this imagination as being under attack. In effect, the argument of her text as a whole depends upon scenes that stage the blocking and enabling of sympathetic communication through quotation and poetry, so that actually reading the poetry in Udolpho, and paying attention to its careful placement, produces a new journey through the novel, and a new understanding of the literal, imaginative and literary wanderings of its heroine.

I

Blocking out the Literary