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COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectations and relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while, and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming the past.
(Augustine, Confessions 278; bk. 11, sec. 28)
In the decade of revolution that was the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe became a publishing phenomenon, emerging from anonymity to become one of the most successful novelists of her time. Although Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is widely regarded as having begun the Gothic genre in 1764, it was Radcliffe who really seemed to codify many of the characteristics that define the Gothic, and the term "Radcliffean Gothic" is almost a tautology? Four of the five romances Radcliffe published between 1789 and 1797 feature exotic settings in the historical past, from the feudal Scotland of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to the seventeenth-century France of The Romance of the Forest. (The Italian is the lone exception, set in Italy between 1742 and 1758). Yet her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho, is most thoroughly imbued with discourses on temporality, four aspects of which I will address in this essay: the novel's explicit references to time, for example, its past setting, or conversely its noticeable absence of definitive temporal markers such as seasonal descriptors; the castle as a trope of time; the role of repetition as a temporal motif; and the protagonist's prolonged suspension between memory and expectation in an extended present. I will argue that the novel's embedded discourses on temporality were a response to the unprecedented forces that were reshaping the concept of time in England, and that the novel's construction of an alternative temporality contributed to the novel's popular reception. In response to the gathering perception of a present growing increasingly detached from the past, The Mysteries of Udolpho offered an imaginatively compensatory version of this new temporal reality. I want to suggest that Radcliffe's novel served as an antidote to revolutionary fears and also to the whole idea of progress and its temporally dissociative effects, these antidotal properties contributing to its success during this decade.
1. REFERENCES TO TIME
In a nod to Cartesian specificity, Udolpho is nominally set in 1584, 210 years prior to its publication, but, as is common in Gothic fiction, the use of the past is more atmospheric than historical. (2) Despite the reference to the year, which occurs twice in the novel--including its opening sentence--we cannot really locate the novel in a particular era, and Radcliffe ignores references to particular historical events of the period. In fact, the discourses contained in the novel involve, not late sixteenth-century, but late eighteenth-century issues, such as sublimity, sensibility and taste, and the characters drink coffee (94) and use dinner forks (97) nearly a century before either practice was introduced to western Europe (Castle, notes 681). Radcliffe has established a discursive tension in the temporal realm, a state of dissonance between the supposed specificity and the vague historicity of her setting.
Robert Miles argues that Radcliffe sets the novel in a period that Miles calls "the Gothic cusp," a "moment of passage from a feudal to a modern world," so that she can dramatize the tensions between the two periods and their respective world-views (The Great Enchantress 175, 87-88, 144-45). Seen in this context, the apparent conflict between Radcliffe's choice of temporal settings with a particular purpose in mind (Miles's argument) and her disregard for historical accuracy, exemplifies discursively the very tension that her settings explore, the conflict between the feudal and the modern. This is just one of a whole network of dialectical relationships that Udolpho imaginatively resolves, dialectics of sense and sensibility, reality and fantasy, movement and stasis, difference and repetition, past and present, memory and expectation. Synthesizing these dialectics is the work of Radcliffe's narrative, and as we shall see, Augustine's recitation of the psalm becomes the figure for this great synthetic project. Augustine's example is particularly applicable to my analysis of Udolpho because the psalm's recitation emphasizes that the resolution of apparent paradoxes (in Augustine's case, that between time and eternity) takes place in the mind, is bound up with issues of temporality, and is accomplished narratively. Augustine's recitation is a narrating instance that is in turn described through an act of narration. This act fashions coherence by uniting past, present and future, memory and expectation, in an extended present. It is just such a model that Udolpho employs to accomplish its own peculiar coherence by its synthesis of temporalities.
The conflict between feudal and modern that Miles addresses was a particularly late eighteenth-century concern, especially in the decade of the French Revolution, which played such a prominent role in disrupting history. Such a disruption prompted Burke to write his Reflections on the Revolution in France, which invokes the British national past and emphasizes, in contrast to France, its lineal relationship to the present, from the "hereditary succession" of the crown (24) to the "sure principle of transmission" of government, property and life itself (38). Radcliffe's temporal setting accomplishes a connection to the past in a more complicated way. The past invoked by Udolpho is reminiscent of M. M. Bakhtin's epic past in several ways. First, it is set in "the national heroic past ... a world of 'beginnings' and 'peak times' in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, a world of 'firsts' and 'bests'" (Bakhtin 13). This national heroic past is a "Gothic" past, because, in the eighteenth century, "Gothic," as applied to literature, art, and architecture, becomes an especially desirable attribute. With specific application to Britain, what had been regarded as wild and barbaric begins to be valued. Describing this shift in cultural attitudes, David Punter states that "the fruits of primitivism and barbarism possessed a fire, a vigour, a sense of grandeur which was sorely needed in English culture ... and ... the way to breathe life into the culture was by re-establishing relations with this forgotten, 'Gothic' past" (6). And yet, in Bakhtin's schema, the epic past is sealed off from the present: "The epic world is constructed in the zone of an absolutely distanced image, beyond the sphere of possible contact with the developing, incomplete and therefore re-thinking and re-evaluating present" (17). We can see this absolute distance in the way that there is no apparent line of descent from Emily St. Aubert to Ann Radcliffe's present. The St. Auberts are a mythic family rather than a real one, yet Bakhtin notes that the authorial perspective of the epic is that of "the reverent point of view of a descendent" (13). The St. Auberts become ancestors of us all. If not their literal descendants, we are at least their spiritual and moral offspring through a Burkean kind of national descent. (Of course, the St. Auberts are not British, but neither does such a detail prevent the British appropriation of the Goths as paragons of Britishness). Bakhtin's construction of the epic past as simultaneously "walled off absolutely from all subsequent times" (15), and as an age of heroes from whom "we" nevertheless descend, embodies exactly the kind of discursive tension between past and present that we have been considering. It is 1584 and it is not, because the characters drink coffee and talk about sensibility and taste. In the postmodern era, we perceive such details as anachronistic because we think of different periods of the past as separate and distinct objects. But Radcliffe was invoking a past in which time was imagined as being continuous rather than dissociated into discrete segments, a fitting antidote to the "dissociation of sensibility" that characterized the late eighteenth century (Miles, The Great Enchantress 38).
This representation of time as continuous and unsegmented may explain the novel's nearly total absence of references to days of the week, months, or seasons, and helps to reinforce the dreamlike quality of the novel. (3) Udolpho constantly works to frustrate the linearity of time. Its time is more akin to the "miraculous" time of the chivalric romance, exhibiting "a subjective playing with time, an emotional and lyrical stretching and compressing of it" (Bakhtin 155, emphasis original). Near the end of the novel, after Emily's return to France, she reflects upon having been "tossed upon the stormy sea of misfortune for the last year," so clearly the novel's events are meant to comprise approximately a year. However, there is no way for the reader to determine this in the absence of any specific durational cues, and what seasonal references there are suggest that more than a year has passed. (At the time of her reflection, we've seen two summers, and this must be the second autumn). The lack of precise dateability, which we associate with public, or calendar, time, signals that Udolpho's time is not what Paul Ricoeur terms "the time of the world." We use the calendar to bridge the human and astronomical universes, "mak[ing] historical time conceivable and manipulable" (Ricoeur 3: 182), but Udolpho's rhythms are not those of the heavenly bodies, whose movements order the passage of time (as Aristotle noted when he observed that, while time is not motion, time is still a measure of motion and cannot exist without it [Physics 105; 219a, 109; 221b]). Nor can we say that the novel's rhythms are those of Emily's various travels, because, as we shall see, the descriptions of those excursions resemble each other so much that they seem more like a single journey, endlessly repeated.
It is easy to see why the novel has so often been read as a story of an inner journey--or perhaps not a journey at all, for "journey" implies "progress" and whether any occurs in Udolpho is debatable--but read at least as a narrative of inner space. D. L. Macdonald states that "since Emily learns nothing she does not already know from her experiences, there is no reason for them not to repeat themselves over and over.... Since nothing is happening in the novel, there is no reason for it ever to stop" (199). Certainly, the situation at the end of the novel is remarkably similar to the one at the beginning, suggesting that nothing really did happen. Ian P. Wart's discussion of Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is just as applicable to Udolpho's often dreamy quality: "In dreams, time is intensely real in the sense that we are immersed in a series of scenes which...
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