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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press
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)
In the wake of the remarkable success of Otranto, however, Walpole admits to having written the book and undertakes to explain his reasons for doing so. A new set of concerns is articulated in his preface to the second edition (1765), concerns that have more to do with eighteenth-century England than sixteenth-century Italy. Otranto is now claimed, not as a found manuscript, but as a generic experiment in which the author self-consciously set out to "blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern."(5) The literary implications of this attempt are not only personal and self-promotional, but explicitly national as well: in writing his new form of romance Walpole sought to imitate the "mixed" style of Shakespeare rather than a classical model, and to defend the English bard--"our immortal countryman"--against the vilifications of his French detractor, Voltaire.(6)
The same domestic literary concerns mark The Italian, so that a text that seems to hold out to its late-eighteenth-century English readers the pleasures of a pure exoticism actually involves them as much in modern Englishness as ancient Italianness. The insistent presence of chapter epigraphs drawn from English literature--from Shakespeare and Horace Walpole himself to Milton, Collins, Gray, and Beattie--indicates that the novel seeks to belong, as did Otranto and Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) before it, to a specifically English literary tradition.(7) Other, less obvious borrowings demonstrate the same ambition. That The Italian is offered as a found manuscript, for example, serves at once to confirm as canonical a line of English writers from Samuel Richardson through Walpole to Clara Reeve and to announce Radcliffe's intention of belonging to this line. In addition to allying itself with desirable precursors, the novel rejects undesirables--most importantly Matthew Gregory Lewis. As David Punter has written, Radcliffe's novel must be seen as "at least in part a de-parodization of The Monk," Lewis's 1795 imitation of Radcliffean Gothic, which threatened to sensationalize the genre to the point that it could no longer be read.(8) Thus The Italian, which appears at the outset to be a simple object lesson in otherness, breaks down upon examination into a complex mixture of generic conventions driven by national literary aspirations.
There remains, however, much that is alien in the novel--villains whose demeanor and behavior are clearly foreign to English experience, exotic natural landscapes with no equivalents in England, even more exotic social landscapes: monasteries, convents, the prisons of the Inquisition. The simultaneous presence of this intransigent otherness and domestic sameness in The Italian provides but one example of the multifarious and often conflicting allegiances in Radcliffe's fiction. Her novels resist being read monologically: they promote aristocratic as well as bourgeois values, demonstrate both progressive and conservative political beliefs, and are at once feminist and anti-feminist. So pervasive is this unresolvable conflictedness that various twentieth-century critics of Radcliffe have elevated it to a definitive characteristic of Radcliffean Gothic.(9) These critics offer a variety of historical and social factors in explanation of divided allegiances in the fiction. Radcliffe wrote at a historical juncture between the aristocratic advance of the mid eighteenth century and the triumph of the middle class in the nineteenth; she succeeded as a novelist at a time when authorship posed problems of respectability for women; her novels span a tumultuous and unusually fractious decade in English history, the decade of the French Revolution.(10)
The circumstance most clearly responsible for the specific conflicts between foreign and domestic seen above, and one to which little attention has been given, is the novels' relation to English nationalism. The Italian, like the rest of Radcliffe's work, belongs to a period of particular importance in the formation of the English nation and the elaboration of a concept of English national identity. The text presents in its heroine an incarnation of Englishness. In addition, it employs a device enabled by eighteenth-century travel writing but nonetheless specifically attributable to the Gothic: the fictional presentation of foreign landscapes and foreign villains as anti-types, exempla of otherness.(11)
Though the fundamental opposition between heroine and villain is central to The Italian's contribution to the construction of English national identity, more significant still is the deployment in the novel of narrative techniques of terror. Like a conduct book, The Italian teaches young women how to behave: in the heroine it models proper behavior, in the villain improper and un-English behavior. The novel is more effective than a conduct book, though, insofar as it enacts the values that it promotes. That is, the structure of the reader's experience of the novel parallels that of the heroine as she negotiates an alien landscape. The effect of this experience--a decidedly Gothic series of betrayals, confused identities, nebulous malevolences, and opaque motivations--is to induce a wide-ranging paranoia. All-encompassing distrust of others and, especially, of the self leads mn turn to an internalization of surveillance--as Foucault has argued, precisely what distinguishes the modern bourgeois subject, the subject of discipline. Thus The Italian and novels like it contributed to the constitution of bourgeois subjectivity by promoting, via techniques of terror, the need incessantly to monitor the self. In the context of England in the 1790s, however, The Italian's deployment of these techniques is at the same time a deployment of a technology of nationality that aims at the formation, not simply of a bourgeois subject, but more particularly of that gendered national subject known as the "Englishwoman."
II
I must say first of all that description itself is a political act.
Salman Rushdie(12)
At one point in The Italian the book's male protagonist, Vincentio di Vivaldi, gently mocks his servant Paulo for displaying feelings of attachment to Naples. Admiring the mountains surrounding the lake of Celano, Paulo exclaims: "It reminds me of home; it is almost as pleasant as the bay of Naples! I should never love it like that though, if it were an hundred times finer." After Vivaldi and his beloved, Ellena, make obligatory observations on the sublime and beautiful aspects of the lake, the servant continues:
"Have the goodness to observe how like are the fishing boats, that sail towards the hamlet below, to those one sees upon the bay of Naples. They are worth all the rest of this prospect, except indeed this fine sheet of water, which is almost as good as the bay, and that mountain, with its sharp head, which is almost as good as Vesuvius--if it would but throw out fire!" "We must despair of finding a mountain in this neighbourhood, so good as to do that, Paulo," said Vivaldi, smiling at this stroke of nationality.(13)
Here Paulo admires a landscape merely because it resembles that of his birthplace and home. Admiration on such grounds betrays an insensitivity linked to class in...
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