Where The Bodies Are Hidden Ann Radcliff PDF

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 18 | Issue 4
Article 3
7-1-2006
Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's

'Delicate' Gothic
Yael Shapira
Recommended Citation
Shapira, Yael (2006) "Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's 'Delicate' Gothic," Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Vol. 18: Iss. 4,
Article 3.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol18/iss4/3
Copyright 2013 by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, McMaster University. This Article is brought to you by DigitalCommons@McMaster. It has been
accepted for inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Fiction by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@McMaster. For more information, please
contact scom@mcmaster.ca.
Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's 'Delicate' Gothic

Abstract
Ellena, the heroine of Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1797), is kidnapped to a convent to prevent her marriage to
Vivaldi, a young aristocrat. He finds her and plots a daring rescue, taking advantage of a festive event held one
night at the convent. Monks, nuns, pilgrims, and well-dressed dignitaries attend the gathering, a room-length
partition segregating them by gender. Vivaldi disguises himself as a pilgrim, while Ellena dons a nuns habit
and veil. In order for the plan to succeed, they must identify each other through their costumes and across the
dividing grate.
Keywords
Ann Radcliffe, Gothic, body, decorum, The Italian, Matthew Lewis, The Monk, The Mysteries of Udolpho
This article is available in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol18/iss4/3
Shapira: Ann Radcliffe's 'Delicate' Gothic
Where the Bodies Are Hidden:

Ann Radcliffes Delicate Gothic
Yael Shapira
llena, the heroine of Ann Radcliffes The Italian (1797), is kidnapped to a convent to prevent her marriage to Vivaldi, a young
aristocrat. He finds her and plots a daring rescue, taking advantage of
a festive event held one night at the convent. Monks, nuns, pilgrims,
and well-dressed dignitaries attend the gathering, a room-length
partition segregating them by gender. Vivaldi disguises himself as a
pilgrim, while Ellena dons a nuns habit and veil. In order for the plan
to succeed, they must identify each other through their costumes and
across the dividing grate.
For Ellena, the terror of the moment exceeds the prospect of exposure and punishment: Though she had taken a station near the
grate, she had not courage indecorously to withdraw her veil before so
many strangers. When a man materializes on the other side of the
partition, his face partly muffled in his cloak, Ellena has no choice
but to proceed:
having reached the grate, [she] ventured to lift her veil for one instant. The
stranger, letting his cloak fall, thanked her with his eyes for her condescension,
and she perceived, that he was not Vivaldi! Shocked at the interpretation, which
might be given to a conduct apparently so improper, as much as by the disappointment, which Vivaldis absence occasioned, she was hastily retiring, when
E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U R Y F I C T I O N 18, no. 4 (Summer 2006)
Produced by The Berkeley Electronic Press, 2006
ECF 0840-6286
454
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 18, Iss. 4 [2006], Art. 3

another stranger approached with quick steps, whom she instantly knew, by the
grace and spirit of his air, to be Vivaldi; but, determined not to be exposed a
second time to the possibility of a mistake, she awaited silently for some further
signal of his identity.1
To the reader swept up in the suspense of the plot, this brief exchange is almost unnoticeable. The stranger does not expose Ellena,
and she and Vivaldi soon flee as planned. Her mistake remains only
a social gaffeembarrassing, but carrying no real consequences. Why,
then, did Radcliffe include it?
The heroine who gravely ponders etiquette while running for her
life is a peculiar feature of Radcliffes Gothic. Perhaps the best-known
example occurs in Radcliffes previous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), when Emily halts in mid-flight from the Castle of Udolpho to
buy a hat, because her bare head shocks the peasants. These moments
possess an odd hybridity, as though two very different narratives suddenly intersect and are straining against one another. Their incongruity evokes puzzlement, if not laughter: how can anyone fret about a
bare head or a misunderstood gesture while fleeing captivity, rape,
and death? But the decorous management of the body is not a trivial
matter, to the heroine or her creator. Neither is it extraneous to the
kind of fiction Radcliffe produced: the ideology of the polite body
and the challenges it presents to women are woven into the very fabric
of her writing.
Although many scholars have noted Radcliffes commitment to
propriety, much remains to be understood about its impact on her
Gothic, a genre whose sensationalism placed it in an uneasy relationship with polite eighteenth-century writing. This article examines
Radcliffes portrayal of the body through the prism of decorum, and
I begin by looking at the concept of delicacy as a code that seeks to
regulate female interaction with the bodys verbal representations.
The eras conduct manuals alert female readers to the dangers of
including even innocent aspects of corporeal life in public conversation. Exceeding the restrictions placed on sexual conduct and speech,
1
Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance, ed. Robert
Miles (1797; Hammondsworth: Penguin, 2000), 15455 (emphasis added). References are
to this edition. For helpful comments on this article at various stages, I thank Eitan BarYosef, Ruth Ginsburg, Baruch Hochman, Leona Toker, Dror Wahrman, and the anonymous
readers for Eighteenth-Century Fiction. I gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance provided by the Lafer Center for Women and Gender Studies, the American Studies Department, and the Department of English, all at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol18/iss4/3
WHERE THE BODIES ARE HIDDEN
455
the code of delicacy severly limits womens ability to represent the

body at all in language, a matter of obvious consequence for the
woman writer. Radcliffes Gothic, I then argue, is engaged in a twotiered dialogue with this ideology. The conventions of the Gothic
genre vividly mirror the corporeal fantasies underwriting the code of
bodily propriety; at the same time, Radcliffes unique deployment of
these conventions is itself shaped by the constraints of delicate
authorship. I then focus on The Italian, Radcliffes response to
Matthew Lewiss The Monk (1796), whose scandalous treatment of the
body was a challenge to her polite Gothic. In The Italian Radcliffe
explores the tension between the body and decorum on the level of
plot, while also grappling with it in the act of writing. The result is a
startlingly open commentary on the rationale of her artistic choices.
Radcliffes aesthetic agenda is by now a familiar voice in the ears of

Gothic scholars: Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first
expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life;
the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them, she wrote
in a much-cited essay, published posthumously in 1826.2 Geared
towards the Burkean sublime, her fiction avoided the direct portrayal
of shocking actions and objects, for where lies the great difference
between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that
accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?3 Ghosts, for
example, were much more likely to achieve the desired effect if suggested, but never shown; hence the delicate, evasive presence of the
supernatural in Radcliffes fiction.
As E.J. Clery has suggested, Radcliffes ghosts were not only the
product of an aesthetic consciousness but also the echo of a sociocultural one, reflecting the precariousness of the authors position
and reputation. Associated with un-Enlightened, lower-class vulgarity,
a supernatural plot exposed the eighteenth-century author to critical
disapproval; therefore, as Clery puts it, A woman wishing to publish
fiction in a supernatural vein needed to be prepared to negotiate.4
By providing a rational explanation for uncanny events, Radcliffes
2
3
4
Radcliffe, On the Supernatural in Poetry, New Monthly Magazine 16 (1826): 149.

Radcliffe, On the Supernatural in Poetry, 150.
E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 17621800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 106.
456
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
narratives didactically mirrored the move from superstition to enlightenment and thereby claimed a greater respectability.5 The social
usefulness of this strategy was perhaps one reason why Radcliffe
continued to use it despite much criticism on aesthetic grounds.6 It
enabled her to include the supernatural while signalling her distance
from it; to incorporate ghosts into her text and at the same time
qualify, and ultimately negate, their presence. 7
Ghosts were not the only culturally suspect component of eighteenth-century Gothic writing. Prefiguring the modern horror film,
authors of Gothic literature were intrigued by the possibility that the
body, normally closed and neat, would be disordered, penetrated,
exposedthat it would be made a spectacle for the protagonists and,
through them, for the reader as well. Sex, torture, rape, and death
were ever-present in the Gothic, whether they actually occurred or
only hovered as ominous possibilities. For an eighteenth-century
woman author seeking respectability and acceptance, writing about
the disrupted, sensational bodyor, for that matter, about the body
at all was no simple matter, and it likewise called for quite a bit of
negotiation. As in the case of the supernatural, this negotiation
manifests itself in Radcliffes subtle blend of evocation and denial,
which allowed the text to disavow what it simultaneously suggested.
Like her ghosts, Radcliffes bodies are often equivocal figures, whose
evanescence, beyond its thematic meanings, was also a useful defence
against critical and social censure.
Previous studies have focused on the Gothic body as a site of intense
sensation (such as pain or sexual desire) that evoked a similarly
powerful response in the fascinated observera mode of representation that, it has been argued, carried a particular resonance within the
aesthetic and political climate of the period.8 Yet Radcliffes corporeal
5
7
8
As is often the case with her ideological commitments, Radcliffe is more equivocal in her
embrace of rationalism than would first appear; see Kim Ian Michasiw, Ann Radcliffe and
the Terrors of Power, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6, no. 4 (1994): 32746. For additional
perspectives on ideology in Radcliffes novels, see David Durant, Ann Radcliffe and the
Conservative Gothic, SEL 22 (1982): 51930; and Mary Poovey, Ideology and The
Mysteries of Udolpho, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 21 (1979): 30730.
The explained supernatural, according to Deborah D. Rogers, aroused critics resentment,
exasperation, annoyance, and animosity, if not outright hostility; among modern scholars,
she argues, the irritation persists. See her introduction to The Critical Response to Ann
Radcliffe, ed. Rogers (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), xxxiii.
In The Italian Radcliffe went a step further and transformed the possibility of ghosts into a
psychological phenomenon; see Robert Miles, introduction to The Italian, xxvi.
Steven Bruhm examines the phenomenon of physical pain as both experience and spectacle
457
images had another immediate context: they were embedded in a

matrix of contemporary ideas about womens proper interaction with
the body. Radcliffes own polite identity, as well as the presumed
propriety of her largely female readership, required that corporeality
be shown in her novels through a particular filtre, constructed according to the norms of her time.
Within the eighteenth-century polite feminine ideal, most directly
articulated in the conduct manual, an aura of danger surrounded the
body: if not properly handled, it was liable to arouse the scorn and
abhorrence of society. Clearly, as scholars have long argued, control of
female sexuality was a primary goal of this discourse.9 Yet the emphasis
on sexual continence was, in fact, amplified within the ethos of female
propriety into a broader notion of delicacy, which might be loosely
defined here as a set of attitudes towards the body, including a particular kind of relationship to the bodys appearances in language.
Delicacy, as Mary Poovey has noted with regard to modesty in general,
is a paradoxical quality, at once innate and carefully cultivated.10 It
is both a sensibility and a performance, or rather, it is a presumed
sensibility whose existence must be constantly signalled by action. 11
If the discourse of politeness created the familiar mechanism by
which the woman imagines herself as a set of signs for male consumption,12 a central medium of this semiotic system was the human body,
whether as an object presented to public scrutiny ormore importantly for the present discussionas the subject of verbal communication. 13 In the cautionary tales spun by conduct-book writers,
10
11
12
13
in Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1994). See also Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and
Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 11737; and Eleanor Ty, Catherines Real and Imagined Fears: What
Happens to Female Bodies in Gothic Castles, Persuasions 20 (1998): 24860.
On conduct literature and its relationship to eighteenth-century writing, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987); Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct:
Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York: Methuen, 1987); and Poovey, The
Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley
and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Poovey, The Proper Lady, 15.
For a related analysis, see Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Troping the Body: Gender, Etiquette and
Performance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).
Vivien Jones, The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature, in Pleasure in
the Eighteenth Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey-Roberts (New York: New York
University Press, 1996), 123.
On the legible or eloquent body in eighteenth-century culture and fiction, see Juliet
McMaster, Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
458
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
corporeal semiotics were presented as volatile: unless carefully managed, womens bodies were liable to convey a shamefully wrong
message. The most dangerous form of miscommunication was, of
course, an unintended romantic or sexual signal, such as when Ellena
unveils herself before the stranger. Wetenhall Wilkes was perhaps
imagining a similar kind of mishap (minus the Gothic trappings)
when he wrote in A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady
(1740): The double Temptation of Vanity and Desire is so prevalent
in our Sex, that we are apt to interpret every obliging Look, Gesture,
Smile, or Sentence of a Female we like to the hopeful Side ... we often
gather more Encouragement from a pleasing Glance than from [a
womans] softest Words. The Language of the Eyes is very significant.14 But the bodys semiotic danger extended beyond the physical
gestures actually performed in public space: Consider every species
of indelicacy in conversation, as shameful in itself, and as highly disgusting to us, wrote John Gregory in his influential A Fathers Legacy
to his Daughters (1774). The prophylactic campaign against disrepute
must also be tirelessly waged on the level of language. 15
Most dangerous of all were words evoking the bodys sexual aspects:
She that listens with pleasure to wanton Discourse defiles her Ears;
she that speaks it defiles her Tongue, and immodest Glances pollute
the Eyes.16 The phrasing of the advice effectively cancels the distinction between a sexual act and words alluding to one. Even when
it is merely words, the body pollutes women through their orifices; in
the process, it transforms their image in mens eyes: The dissoluteness of mens education allows them to be diverted with a kind of wit,
which yet they have delicacy enough to be shocked at, when it comes
from your mouths, or even when you hear it without pain and contempt. If flesh and word are almost synonymous, then warding off
linguistic pollution requires women to signal an almost physical inability to tolerate indelicacy: No man, but a brute or a fool, will insult a
woman with conversation which he sees gives her pain, Gregory
wrote; even if a woman finds herself accused of prudery, it is better
to run the risk of being thought ridiculous than disgusting.17
14
15
16
17
2004); and Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (Dublin, 1740), 108.
John Gregory, A Fathers Legacy to His Daughters (1774; New York: Garland, 1974), 34.
Wilkes, 111.
Gregory, 3536.
459
Just as the code of delicacy extends beyond corporeal action to

verbal behaviour, it also spans a broader conception of the body than
the obvious hazards of sexuality. When put into words, even the
bodys innocent aspects can evoke distaste. Gregory encouraged his
girls to walk and ride horses, to give vigour to your constitutions, and
a bloom to your complexions.18 Yet such substantial corporeality
should be kept out of conversation: We so naturally associate the idea
of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution, that when a woman speaks of her great strength, her
extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil
at the description in a way she is little aware of. 19 The point is more
vividly illustrated by a letter in Spectator no. 217 (8 November 1711):
It is my Misfortune to be in Love with a young Creature who is daily committing
Faults, which though they give me the utmost Uneasiness, I know not how to
reprove her for, or even acquaint her with. She is pretty, dresses well, is rich, and
good-humored; but either wholly neglects, or has no Notion of that which Polite
People have agreed to distinguish by the Name of Delicacy. After our Return from
a Walk the other Day, she threw her self into an Elbow Chair, and professed
before a large Company, that she was all over in a Sweat. She told me this Afternoon that her Stomach aked; and was complaining yesterday at Dinner of something that stuck in her teeth. I treated her with a Basket of Fruit last Summer,
which she eat so very greedily, as almost made me resolve never to see her more.
In short, Sir, I begin to tremble whenever I see her about to speak or move.20
That the code this hapless girl so shockingly violated persisted into
the latter decades of the century is indicated by an entry in Hester
Thrale Piozzis diary some seventy years later: I read [the Spectator
letter] aloud to my little daughters of 11 & 12 Years old, Piozzi wrote
in 1782, and even the Maid who was dressing my Hair, burst out o
laughing at the Idea of a Lady saying her Stomach achd, or that
something stuck between her Teeth. Sure if our Morals are as much
mended as our Manners, we are grown a most virtuous Nation!21
18
19
20
21
Gregory, 4849.
Gregory, 5051.
Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2:34647.
Hester Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi),
17761809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951),
1:547. Poovey accepts Piozzis suggestion that the code of delicacy became more deeply
entrenched in the course of the century: In the seventeenth century even champions of
women felt it necessary to admit that most women live as if they were all Body, but, by the
last decades of the eighteenth century, even to refer to the body was considered unladylike
(The Proper Lady, 14).
460
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
The scene Piozzi describes suggests an illuminating analogy. The

servants appropriate burst of laughter occurs while she dresses her
mistresss hair. Within the intimate, edifying circle of mother, daughters, and maid, the ladys body undergoes the ablutions that make
it fit for public presentation. This same circle, as Piozzi notes with satisfaction, also shares an understanding about the bodys proper verbal
representation, which implicitly correlates with the private/public
rationale of her toilette. The lived body and the verbalized body are
both subject to social regulation: both must undergo a parallel process
of cleansing to become fit for public display.
The idea that the female body is a distasteful, dangerous entity in its
uncontrolled state is hardly exclusive to the eighteenth century; this
idea has roots in the ancient tradition of the female grotesque and
is still a vibrant part of Western culture, most obviously in the contemporary cult of female beauty and weight control.22 Whether found
in an eighteenth-century conduct manual or in a twenty-first-century
fashion magazine, authoritative discourse on the proper body relies
for its effect on a powerful double fantasy: first, that the unchecked
female body is hazardous and disgraceful; and second, that the proper
form of discipline can transform it into an object of desire.23 While
the unruly female body is frequently depicted in sexual terms, the
danger it represents is not reducible to sexuality and its practical
consequences. The negative fantasy of decorum constructs the body
22 On ancient and medieval manifestations of the female grotesque tradition, see Anne Carson,
Dirt and Desire: The Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity, in Constructions of the
Classical Body, ed. James I. Porter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 77100; and
Margaret Miles, Carnal Abominations: The Female Body as Grotesque, in The Grotesque in Art
and Literature: Theological Reflections, ed. James Luther Adams and Wilson Yates (Grand Rapids:
W.B. Eerdmans, 1997), 83112. For a discussion of the contemporary form of the controlled
body obsession, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
23 This argument has a strong grounding in theory that cannot be adequately discussed here.
The double formulation of the female body is consistent with Mikhail Bakhtins categories
of the classical and the grotesque, while the practices of cleansing evoke the Foucauldian
notion of the docile body. Both thinkers have been subjected to feminist critique for failing to note the gendered aspects of the phenomena they theorize, aspects that are obviously
of importance in this case. See Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968); and Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish:
The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 138. For
relevant feminist commentary, see, respectively, Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess
and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Sandra Lee Bartky, Foucault, Femininity,
and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and
Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia
461
as a specifically social hazard, and the threat it poses to womens public perception and reputation is not necessarily contingent on their
sexual conduct.
Delicacy emerges here as a verbal parallel to the practices of fashion
and hygiene: each seeks to transform a potentially disgraceful corporeality into a socially acceptable one, and thus to remove the threat
of humiliation. Yet the verbal cleansing is more extreme than the
physical regime, suggesting the point when custom becomes symbolic
wish-fulfilment. The bodys near-erasure from public languageincluding, to a large extent, the language of the conduct manuals themselves24suggests that the ultimate way to avoid male disgust is to have
no body at all. Clearly, such an idea flies in the face of reality, in which
a womans body not only exists but also is an indispensable asset to be
polished and displayed. This reality only enhances the soothing fantasy
offered by its verbal erasurea practice that, on a symbolic level, denies
the uncomfortable knowledge that the bodies of modest women are
routinely exhibited for sexual and economic gain.
The positive/negative fantasy of the body within the code of propriety

is writ large in the eighteenth-century Gothic, which likewise imagines
the body as caught between two extreme formulations: a radically
purified ideal and a scandalous, spectacular grotesque. In the plot
formula popularized by Radcliffe and Lewis, a supremely modest
young woman, often veiled and/or secluded from society, experiences
a series of threats against her physical integrity, so that the potential
or actual violation of her virgin body holds near-hypnotic sway over
the entire novel. The twin images of the intact body (veiled woman,
virgin, nun) and the disrupted body (victim of rape, murder, or an
unwanted marriage) find an amplifying correlation in the genres
persistent tropes of enclosure (within castles, convents, and chambers) and its breaching (escape or infiltration).
24 Armstrong points out that eighteenth-century conduct manuals never represented the
female body at all, except to mention the particularities of dressing or to recommend a
modest bearing when a woman presented herself to the public view (Desire and Domestic
Fiction, 109). Her claim is consistent with a general trend that Norbert Elias has traced in
European literature on manners: in the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, conduct books become more polite, glossing over aspects of bodily existence that earlier literature of this kind had discussed openly and in detail. Elias, The Civilizing Process: The
Development of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).
462
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
Gothic novels were not alone in exploring the hyper-body/nonbody dialectic. Echoes of this double formulation can be detected, for
example, in the epistolary fiction of Richardson and Burney, with its
complex relation of body and text.25 Both Pamela (1740) and Evelina
(1778) reflect the threat posed by female corporeality, and their
happy endings validate the conduct-book promise that the controlled
body can reap romantic and financial rewards. In these novels, the
epistolary form itself helps sidestep the bodys dangers: the construction of the respective heroines as words, not flesh, causes a vital
shift in the balance of power. As Nancy Armstrong has argued, the
near-rape scene in Pamela transforms an erotic and permeable body
into a self-enclosed body of words. Mr B.s repeated failures suggest
that Pamela cannot be raped because she is nothing but words.26
Evelina echoes the conduct manuals in contrasting the body-less ideal,
represented by the heroines abstract and cultivated epistolarity,
with the hyper-materiality of Madame Duval.27 The threat of the
material female body glosses Evelinas marriage to Lord Orville as the
triumph of a proper corporeality, successfully subdued by social
custom and abstracted into words by the letter format. 28
The Gothic had a much blunter vocabulary for articulating both the
bodys radical effacement and its transformation into a distasteful
spectacle. The quasi-disembodiment afforded by epistolarity could be
exaggerated into the utter seclusion of the virginal Gothic heroine;
and where Burney needs to throw Madame Duval into a puddle of
mud to underscore her offensive physicality, the Gothic novelist had
the option of turning her into a vividly rotting corpse. But it was
precisely in choosing whether or not to realize this potential for
25 In epistolary narratives, the letter serves as a metonym of the body of the writing subject,
vulnerable like it to markings, invasion, violence of all sorts. ... While reading, we are
intended to imagine a scene of writing: behind the printed page is a manuscript bearing the
traces of a bodily origin. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, The Limping Woman and the
Public Sphere, in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea
Von Mcke (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 23.
26 Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 116.
27 Helen Thompson, Evelinas Two Publics, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39,
no. 2 (1998): 152.
28 Judith Lowder Newton argues that Burney, although she never protests or makes a point
of the fact that it is a womans destiny to display herself on the market, is one of the few
writers in the century to describe the experience in such a way as to emphasize its discomfort
and oppressionand she is one of the very few to take this discomfort seriously. Newton,
Women, Power and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 17781860 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1981), 29. See also Kristina Straub, Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and
Feminine Strategy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 98108.
10
463
bluntness that the Gothic of the 1790s began to move in two distinct
directions. The code of delicacy and the manoeuvres required for the
bodys polite representation are a vital context for understanding
Radcliffes development of the genre, especially in relation to the rival
mode of Gothic epitomized by The Monk.
The notorious difficulty of defining the Gothic genre lies in its
being at once highly formulaic and subject to great variability.29 In the
case of its most influential eighteenth-century practitioners, Radcliffe
and Lewis, the differences were so pronounced that critics have come
to see their works as falling into two sub-genreswhether terrorGothic and horror-Gothic, or, in other accounts, female Gothic
and male Gothic.30 One obvious point of contention was the supernatural, which Lewis used unapologetically, while Radcliffe explained
it away. Yet it was perhaps in the treatment of the body, and specifically of the female body, that the two authors reached their most
profound dispute, a dispute in which ideology and aesthetics become
especially hard to separate.
The imaginative dialectic between a pristine body and a disordered
one is present in Radcliffes fiction, especially through the persistent
(if unspoken) fear of rape. But the strong control exerted over this
dialectic, Radcliffes care in moulding its textual emanations, suggests
the decorous cleansing of the body performed at the level of language. As a result of this cleansing, Radcliffes texts are not only
politely written, but also offer effective dramatizations of the fantasy
ideal promoted in the conduct books. The sexual virtue of Radcliffes
heroines is above reproach; yet she does not stop there. Like the
conduct-book writers, she expands the ideal beyond chastity, giving
embodiment itself an uncertain status. The Radcliffean heroine has
a body, of course; how else could she be whisked away to the mountains by villains, fall to the ground in a fearful swoon, or tremble with
hunger and fatigue? Nor does her physicality go unnoticed by the
Gothic hero, who typically registers a nymph-like figure and lovely
face alongside the heroines many other virtues. Yet the physical
29 On the Gothics resistance to definition, see, for example, Jerrold E. Hogle, Introduction:
The Gothic in Western Culture, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Hogle
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002), 120.
30 The terror/horror distinction is examined in Robert D. Hume, Gothic versus Romantic:
A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel, PMLA 84 (1969): 28290; on the division into gendered
sub-traditions, see, for example, Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and
the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); and Anne
Williams, Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
11
464
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
presence Radcliffe allows her heroines is usually minimal, and it is

further mitigated by other elements in her fiction.31 The strong
emphasis on affect systematically shifts the textual focus from the
solidity of flesh to the intangible thrills and tremors of response. The
bodyits beating heart, shaking hands, trembling frameis important only as the means of registering acuity of feeling; in insisting on
this, Radcliffe de-emphasizes the bodys material presence and
implicitly contains its scrutiny within a polite discourse of sensibility.
It is interesting to consider in this context the long-standing critical
assertion that Radcliffes prim texts offer a coded articulation of
female desire. Eager to decipher this code, scholars have looked for
the covert ways in which the novels express forbidden sexuality. The
Mysteries of Udolpho has proved especially responsive to this kind of
probing, not only because of Emilys charged interaction with Montoni, the villain, but also because of the novels suggestive architecture. Ann Ronald, for example, argues that Instead of the castle of
Udolpho one can easily imagine a variety of sexual organs and
actions, both female and malethe gigantic court, the two round
towers, the wild plants taking root, the sigh, the curtain that should
protect but now hangs pierced and embattled.32 Rictor Norton reads
the same passage as denoting the breasts, belly, and hips of the
mother, while Emilys chamber is a womb.33 Cynthia Wolff has
commented that danger is palpably equated in [Radcliffes] fictions
with a specialized form of inner space; and if the heroine can
manage to stay away from the treacherous cavetunnel, basement,
secret roomshe will usually be safe. The overtly sexual implications
of this recurrent situation are inescapable, even in eighteenth-century
Gothic fiction.34 In turning to symbolism and nuance for glimpses of
the female body, these readings inadvertently underscore the nearabsence of an actual body from the verbal surface of the text. While
the sexual tension written into the narrative is hard to deny, the
31 Radcliffes delicacy exceeds that of her straitlaced Gothic predecessor Clara Reeve: The
peasant woman in Reeves [The Old English Baron] is glad to adopt the foundling Edmund,
because her infant has just died and her excess milk is troublesome, so she is glad to be
eased of it ... Mrs Radcliffe would never indulge in such coarse realism. Rictor Norton,
Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London: Leicester University Press, 1999), 58.
32 Ann Ronald, Terror-Gothic: Nightmare and Dream in Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Bront,
in The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden Press, 1983), 179.
33 Norton, 143.
34 Cynthia Wolff, The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Female Sexuality, in The Female
Gothic, 209.
12
465
possibilityindeed, the relative easeof reconstructing in critical

discourse the physicality that Radcliffe effaces should not obscure the
act of effacement itself. Not only desire, but also anatomy itself has
been displaced from the heroines to the landscape.
Radcliffes careful manoeuvring is perhaps most apparent when it
comes to the other extreme of corporeality, the dead body. Corpses
make an occasional appearance in her fiction, but their presence is
limited and highly uncertain. Perhaps the best-known example is the
black-veil episode in The Mysteries of Udolpho: what Emily believes to be
a worm-riddled corpse is finally revealed as an unusually realisticlooking wax statue.35 The Italian reflects a similar strategy, concealing
the dead body within layer after layer of equivocation. In most cases
there is no body at all, only its alleged remnants: bloody garments that
appeared to be those of a person who had died by violence (459),
or a collapsed tower rumouredbut never provento be the grave
of a vanished nobleman. Moreover, these pseudo-corpses are often
displaced from the primary diegetic surface and embedded in visions,
anxious fantasies, tales of dubious truth-value. Distanced from the
author, transformed from an organic object into a verbal and psychic
phenomenon, the dead body shimmers through the text as a possibility, a promise, but only rarely materializes.36
Just as the controlled body is locked in an unrelenting dialectic
with its unruly antithesis, so Radcliffes fiction, after 1796, came to be
defined by its difference from Lewiss The Monk.37 In redeploying the
35 These and other moments in the novel have led Terry Castle to comment on Radcliffes
fondness for supposed deaths that have not really taken place, or ... corpses that turn out
not to be corpses after all. Castle, The Spectralization of the Other in The Mysteries of
Udolpho, in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 130. Andrea Henderson likewise points out that
The gothic novel constantly threatens us with images of ... red blood, body, matter, reproductive nature. ... Often, however, especially in Radcliffe novels, the effort to turn the
narrative to something palpable fails or is simply cut shortthe rape of the heroine never
actually takes place, the corpse turns out to be a wax effigy. Henderson, An Embarrassing
Subject: Use Value and Exchange Value in Early Gothic Characterization, in At the Limits
of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and
Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 23738. For a recent discussion of Radcliffes corporeal substitutions, see Courtney Wennerstrom, Cosmopolitan
Bodies and Dissected Sexualities: Anatomical Mis-stories in Ann Radcliffes The Mysteries of
Udolpho, European Romantic Review 16 (2005): 193207.
36 On Radcliffes transformation of mutilated bodies into imaginative constructs, see Bruhm,
3744.
37 For gender-based comparative discussions of Lewis and Radcliffe, see Kari J. Winter,
Sexual/Textual Politic of Terror: Writing and Rewriting the Gothic Genre in the 1790s,
in Misogyny in Literature, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley (New York: Garland, 1992), 89103; and
13
466
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
Radcliffean plot, setting, and imagery, Lewis did not simply choose a
different authorial path; he tore off the decorous exterior of
Radcliffes fiction and offered a look at what lay beneath. Uncanny
sightings became real ghosts; the prospect of violence was realized in
detail as rape and murder. Above all, the body that Radcliffe laboured
to conceal returned, with a vengeance, and took its place at the forefront of the Gothic. Put simply, The Monk overflows with bodies. Live
or dead, chaste or sexual, all are depicted with the same brash disregard for delicacy, and allwith perhaps a single exceptionare
female. Women in the novel are trapped in physicality. Seen from
outside primarily through masculine points-of-view, they are repeatedly reduced to erotic surface parts.38 This is especially true of Antonia,
one of the young heroines, whose body is ogled from every possible
direction, visually and literally fondled, and finally raped and stabbed.
Lewis devotes as much detail to less appealing bodiesthe animated
Corse39 of a ghost known as the Bleeding Nun, the liquefying remains
of nuns in the convent vault, and (in a comic tone) Antonias spinster
aunt Leonella, with her leathery skin and strong odour of garlic.
The Monk displays a voyeuristic fascination with the pure body of the
virgin, alongside an equally intense preoccupation with the shapechanging, stomach-turning female grotesque. In their insistent copresence, the two icons of femininity attest to their own status as
linked imaginative elements in a centuries-old tradition of misogyny.40
Using the realities of the body to transform women into horrific
spectacles or (in Leonellas case) into the butt of mens jokes,
Nina da Vinci Nichols, Place and Eros in Radcliffe, Lewis, and Bront, in The Female Gothic,
187206.
38 Syndy M. Conger, Sensibility Restored: Radcliffes Answer to Lewiss The Monk, in Gothic
Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 122.
39 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk: A Romance, ed. Howard Anderson (1796; Oxford: Oxford
40 On the intimate link between misogynistic imagery and idealizations of the feminine, see F.
Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1991). Read together, Blochs discussion of early Christian writing and
medieval romance and my own subject here, the Lewis-Radcliffe dialogue in the 1790s, demonstrate the remarkable endurance of misogynys constitutive elements and inner dynamics.
Lewiss grotesques replicate in their details much earlier portraits of hateful womanhood; yet
more strikingly, Blochs account of the poetics of virginity, a concept rendered profoundly
paradoxical by the ever stricter terms of its definition, is illuminating for both the eighteenthcentury conduct book and the Radcliffean Gothic. Radcliffes manoeuvres in constructing her
modest heroines resonate intriguingly with Blochs claim that there is ... no way of speaking
about virginity that does not imply its loss, no poetics of praise that is not already complicit in
the violence of rape, no magnification of the perfection of woman abstracted that is not a
taking of possession (11112).
14
467
The Monk makes a mockery of the conduct-book notion that the

female body can ever be cleaned up.41 With a repetition that suggests inevitability, the novel dramatizes the opposite process, turning
women virtuous as well as evilinto displays of materiality. Agnes,
one of the heroines, is driven into a convent by the pressure and deceit
of her family, becomes pregnant and is imprisoned in an underground
cell; she gives birth there and is found months later, a near-corpse
herself, clutching the remains of her dead infant. The abbess who
imposed the punishment, an emblem of celibacy, suffers a strikingly
similar fate: she is killed by angry rioters, who exercised their impotent
rage upon her lifeless body. They beat it, trod upon it, and ill-used it, till
it became no more than a mass of flesh, unsightly, shapeless, and
disgusting.42 The benevolent Elvira undergoes a metamorphosis of the
same kind: her murdered body, that once noble and majestic form,
becomes a Corse, cold, senseless and disgusting.43
The Monk was a nasty gloss on Radcliffes fiction: it shone a revealing
light on the unspoken elements of her texts, includingperhaps
especiallythe flickering, barely-there corporeality of her heroines.
The Italian, critics generally agree, was Radcliffes response. She used
the story of Ellena and Vivaldi to reassert her aesthetic stance and
rewrote some of Lewiss scenes on her own terms.44 Remarkably, the
novel is not simply a manifesto reiterating Radcliffes view of the
genre; by exploring, on the level of the plot, the tension between
corporeality and female dignity, it offers a reflection of Radcliffes
own dilemma and of the conflicted, troubling place that the body
occupies in her art.
The Italian gives voice to a womans impossible desire, a desire that

involves her body, but that does not emanate from it. The novel
41 Lewiss logic in depicting women is similar to that of Jonathan Swifts The Ladys Dressing
Room (1732), in which the toilette itself is the subject of an attack that exposes women
as incorrigibly grotesque. For a discussion of Swift in this context, see Thompson, 15152.
42 Lewis, 356.
43 Lewis, 304.
44 On the intertextual play between The Italian and The Monk, see Conger; Robert Reno, The
Gothic Visions of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew G. Lewis (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 15668; and
Joseph F. Bartolomeo, Matched Pairs: Gender and Intertextual Dialogue in Eighteenth-Century
Fiction (Newark: Delaware University Press, 2002), 15175. For a rejection of the intertextual
view, see Norton, 12627.
15
468
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
quietly expresses the longing to escape the body altogether, not

because of its own urges, but because it is complicit as an object in an
oppressive system. What Ellena wishes to flee is the body constructed around her by culturea body that men see, desire, evaluate,
but which she cannot experience except as a liability imposed from
the outside.
This desire is not the explicit heart of the novel, as the plot is
structured around courtship and identifies marriage as the happy
ending. In typical Gothic fashion, the road to the altar runs through
many dramatic challenges, in this case masterminded by Vivaldis
mother and her confessor, the evil monk Schedoni. By the time the
couple finally take their wedding vows, Ellena has survived two
abductions and a near-murder, whereas Vivaldi has been incarcerated
by the Inquisition and questioned under threat of torture. All ends
well, of course: Schedoni and the Marchesa di Vivaldi conveniently
die, and Ellena discovers her noble ancestry, removing the last
obstacle to marriage. Yet running through this conventional narrative
is another, implicit drama, in which Ellena struggles to control the
meanings that society assigns to her body.
Like the conduct manuals, the novel minimizes its references to the
virtuous heroines body by replacing it with a sartorial metonymy, in
this case the veil. The significance of veils in the construction of
Gothic femininity has been widely discussed: as a barrier between a
concealed sexuality and a modest exterior, the veil is an ambivalent
symbol of both erotic appeal and its chaste public denial.45 Yet
narrative context has a powerful role in determining the precise
formulation of this ambivalence and the relative weight of eroticism
and modesty. In The Monk, the veil clearly functions as an aphrodisiac.46 In The Italian, by contrast, the veil is a symbol of the bodys
scrupulous effacement by women themselves, and it helps clarify the
function of this practice.
45 This insight, like most critical explorations of the Gothic veil, is indebted to Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel, PMLA
96 (1981): 25570. For further discussion, see Susan Greenfield, Veiled Desire: MotherDaughter Love and Sexual Imagery in Ann Radcliffes The Italian, The Eighteenth Century:
Theory and Interpretation 33, no. 1 (1992): 7389; and Johnson, 12528.
46 This happens most clearly in the opening scene of The Monk: Antonia is first ogled then
politely stripped of her veil. Radcliffes rewriting of the scene in The Italian is discussed by
Greenfield, 77; and Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1995), 17071.
16
469
The deep emotional significance of the veil, its specific load of

fantasy and fear, emerges at the moment with which this article
beganas Ellena, standing by the gender divider, finally bares her
face and is rewarded with a strangers leer. Presented from a womans
point of view, the removal of the veil leads to an encounter with a male
gaze that reads sexuality where it is not intended. The scene not only
repeats the conduct-book warnings about misunderstood gestures, it
also validates the manuals emotional scheme by dramatizing the unveiling as a painful transition between two opposed statesone of relative
sovereignty and dignity, and the other of mortification, vulnerability,
and terror. The first state is made possible through the bodys invisibility; the latter is brought about by its exposure. The veil, thus construed,
becomes a feminine line of defence against the humiliating reactions
that the body is liable to trigger in public.
In this scene, the veil is explicitly identified as a disguise, an
assumed facade that shelters Ellena from a hostile environment. The
convent gathering as a whole, with its crowd of elaborately attired
guests, suggests a kind of masqueradea social practice and literary
topos that, as Terry Castle has shown, carried strong overtones of
sexual danger in the eighteenth-century cultural imagination.47 Yet
the scene is also strikingly different from the intoxicating scenario
Castle describes, in which society as a whole briefly indulges in joyous
free play with borrowed selves and false exteriors. The gathering at
the convent more strongly evokes the pageantry of official culture, in
which the outward emblems of identity, here dominated by the many
kinds of ecclesiastical garb, reflect and sustain the reigning structures
of power.48 This orderly affair strengthens, rather than undercuts,
social boundaries, organizing the costumed attendants into strictly
marshalled groups and concretizing the distinction between genders
as an actual partition.
47 Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque and Eighteenth-Century English Culture and
Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986). Ellenas misidentification of the stranger directly echoes
the rhetoric surrounding the masquerades: according to Castle, cautionary tales in
periodicals and elsewhere described how rape might ensue from a ghastly sartorial accident (45), in which a young woman leaves the masquerade with a costumed assailant whom
she mistakes for her brother or husband.
48 As Bakhtin writes, Rank was especially evident during official feasts; everyone was expected
to appear in the full regalia of his calling, rank, and merits and to take the place corresponding to his position. It was a consecration of inequality (10). This hierarchical pageant is
contrasted with the freedom of carnival, the same freedom that Castle finds in the
eighteenth-century masquerade.
17
470
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
Within this rigidly stratified pageant, Ellenas private masquerade

(surely an oxymoron from the perspective of Castles study) is a tense,
fearful foray into duplicity, forced upon her by a social context that
regularly subjects her to the most unflattering kind of scrutiny. Ellena
has already experienced this first-hand: entering the dining hall in a
previous scene, she found that the eyes of the whole company were
immediately fixed upon her; the young ladies began to whisper and
smile, and shewed, by various means, that she was the subject of
conversation, not otherwise than censorious (110). Among the many
evils that the Monastery of San Stefano represents is the uncomfortable pressure of this collective gaze: not only men, but society as
a whole can become a hostile interpretive community, reflecting back
to Ellena an image of herself that she finds mortifying. Her disguise,
then, is less an adventure than a symbolic prefiguring of the escape
she craves from a constant and debasing visibility.
Radcliffes fiction consistently presents humiliation as a more
daunting prospect than the mundane Gothic terrors of violence
and death. Loss of dignity, especially if it involves the body, seems to
the Radcliffean heroine a far worse fate than loss of life. Significantly,
this fear extends to Ellenas seemingly benign and desirable bond
with Vivaldi. Although elopement would greatly diminish the threat
to her physical well-being, Ellena fears that it would also crack the
protective facade of decorum: Pride, delicacy, good sense seemed to
warn her against a conduct so humiliating and vexatious in its
consequences, and to exhort her to preserve her own dignity by
independence (142). In keeping with the demands of delicacy,
Ellena does not openly reflect on the particular kind of disrepute she
will suffer. Radcliffe, however, fills in the blanks for the reader.
Although Ellena does not know itas an ultra-modest eighteenthcentury heroine, she cannot knowsexual rumours have already
tarnished her reputation. This plot detail, kept out of Ellenas
delicate consciousness, spells out the specifics of the threat that
Ellena only vaguely intuits. If she tries to marry a higher-born man
without his familys permission, society will utilize her body against
her, making it the centre of a smear campaign. Her sexual conduct
may be impeccable, but the unauthorized marriage will suffice to
trigger her defamation. Radcliffe essentially places Ellena in a similar
position to Richardsons Pamela, but rejects his ending as wishful
thinking. No bundle of demure clothing can counteract the power
18
471
of the body that society imagines, verbalizes, and wields as a tool of

discipline.49
The threat of being slandered through the body is made more
explicit by the nagging prospect of Ellenas death. Although Ellena
survives her adventures intact, the prediction that she will soon die
keeps flashing through the narrative. Time and again the text alludes
to her imminent transformation into an object: remains (252), a
body (265, 267), something that can simply be tossed into the sea
and buried, with her sad story, beneath the waves (265). In death,
the novel hints, Ellenas materiality will reassert itself. Decorums act
of effacement will be reversed, and she will be reduced, once again,
to a mere bodythe stark antithesis of her decorous, un-embodied self.50
Again, this possibility not only is evoked in the heroines encounters
with the Gothic villain, but also, strikingly, colours her relationship
with the gentle hero. The mere rumour of a death in Ellenas
household is enough to trigger in Vivaldis mind a detailed reverie
about her metamorphosis into a corpse: He saw her wounded, and
bleeding to death; saw her ashy countenance, and her wasting eyes,
from which the spirit of life was fast departing, turned piteously on
himself, as if imploring him to save her from the fate that was dragging her to the grave (51). So maddening is this image that Vivaldi
rushes to Ellenas villa and, instead of waiting for the servant to call
her mistress, charges in to see for himself. As it turns out, Ellena is
alive, and her aunt Signora Bianchi has died. Yet Vivaldis subsequent
actions only strengthen the link between death and the end of female
sovereignty over the bodys enclosure. He comes at night, without
Ellenas knowledge, to show the aunts body to a doctor who will
determine if she was poisoned: There was something repugnant to
49 Radcliffe ultimately sidesteps the problem of interclass marriage by giving Ellena a noble
background; see Gary Gautier, Ann Radcliffes The Italian in Context: Gothic Villains,
Romantic Heroes, and a New Age of Power Relations, Genre 32 (Fall 1999): 2068. The
kinship between Richardsons fiction and the Gothic is discussed in Frederick S. Frank,
From Boudoir to Castle Crypt: Richardson and the Gothic Novel, Revue des Langues Vivantes
41 (1975): 4959.
50 According to Elisabeth Bronfen, a similar anxiety about the nature and perception of the
female corpse finds complex expression in Richardsons Clarissa, whose heroine minutely
plans every moment of her cadaverous presence between death and interment, owing to her
contempt for this supremely vulnerable status of being nobodys, during which her body
is open to an infinite array of incursions, be they of a bodily or hermeneutic kind. Bronfen,
Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1992), 98.
19
472
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
his feelings in going thus secretly, or, indeed, at all, to the residence
of Ellena at this delicate period, yet it was necessary (57). Death here
leads to a suspension of decorum, making female exposure a matter
of male judgment.
Moreover, the novel insists that the transformation into a corpse will
make Ellena the centre of a scandal. In a sense, her bodys ability to
speak independently will run wild when she dies, turning her into
a shocking verbal commodity. During Ellenas confinement in the
Monastery of San Stefano, the nun Olivia (later revealed as her
mother) cautions her not to disobey the abbess: wayward nuns, Olivia
reveals, are incarcerated until only their poor remains [are] laid at
rest in the convent garden (147). Both the laws of the convent and
the laws of genre identify Olivias tale as a prophecy for Ellena. After
all, the metamorphosis of an imprisoned woman into a corpse is a
Gothic topos, used by Radcliffe herself in Udolpho and retold with gory
detail by Lewis. It is a familiar piece of Gothic narrative, in which
Ellena, to her horror, may find herself playing a predetermined role.
The intertextual play between The Italian and The Monk makes this
possibility all the more palpable. Ellenas escape from the convent can
be read as a Radcliffean retelling of Agness escape from Lindenberg
Castle. Both young women, facing a life of forced celibacy, disguise
themselves (Ellena as a nun, Agnes as the Bleeding Nun) to escape
the castle/ monastery and get married. Agness failed escape from the
castle ultimately brings her to the Convent of St Clarethat is, to
pregnancy, punishment, and the underground vault where she and
the dead baby are later discovered. As Ellena seeks a way out of her
convent, she implicitly retraces Agness steps to this forced immersion
in corporeality. While fleeing the convent, she even passes through
the cell where, she believes, the unfortunate nun must have perished.
By making Ellena into Agness twin in an intertextual tug-of-war, The
Italian suggests that Ellena may well end up in this cell, on this same
straw mattress. She will become not only a spectacle, but also a story
one so outrageous that decorous ladies will need to tell it only by
indirection. When Olivia tells Ellena of the nun who died in the
convent prison, she does so haltingly, bit by bit, breaking off the story
altogether at one point. The Italian repeats the conventional Gothic
tale of a woman transformed by imprisonment into a corpse, but
frames it as a problem for the polite female narrator. Olivias hesitant
recitation mirrors Radcliffes role in the dialogue with Lewis: Radcliffe
20
473
too is a reluctant storyteller, only partly repeating what The Monk has
already painted in vivid colour.
The Monk enables Radcliffe to signal her own propriety by
presenting a cleaned up version of Lewiss text. But the relationship
between the two novels, and especially the ominous shadow that
Agness tale casts over Ellenas quest for dignity, also perhaps reflects
an uneasy social reality. The forces of both patriarchy and formulaic
fiction seem determined to see Ellena end up in a crypt, a victim and
a spectacle. And while Ellena does not become a grotesqueshe
becomes a wife insteadthe sheer power of the social and narrative
conventions working against her highlights the limited protection that
decorum offers. The determinism of formulaic writing implicitly
parallels the social determinism that leaves women permanently
vulnerable to the slander of the body, even when they follow decorum
to exemplary lengths.
If conduct literature offers a fantasy of control, the heroine of The
Italian is a conduct-book paragon, who both indulges in this fantasy
and quietly points to its limitations. Read this way, Radcliffes endorsement of decorum emerges as not quite complete, demonstrating what
Coral Ann Howells has described as her subtle transgressions
those eccentric moments which evade the constraints of conventional narrative and social order, lifting the veil to reveal other possibilities
not contained within the traditional story at all.51 This reading is
supported by an episode towards the end of the novel, when Ellena
finds herself in a different sort of convent. The evil Monastery of San
Stefano finds a benign counterpart in the Convent of Santa Maria
della Pieta, a lush haven of gardens and fruit groves. Governed by a
gentle abbess, the nuns of this Utopia live like a large family, engaged in every innocent and liberal pursuit, which might sweeten the
austerities of confinement (348). The celibate, all-female existence
made possible by this institution offers a complete tranquillity that not
even the most impeccable conduct can bring.52 Significantly, here
Ellena is also reunited with Olivia and discovers that she is her long51 Coral Ann Howells, The Pleasure of the Womans Text: Ann Radcliffes Subtle
Transgressions, in Gothic Fictions: Prohibition/Transgression, ed. Kenneth Graham (New York:
AMS Press, 1989), 151.
52 As Conger comments, Radcliffe is envisioning a retreat to ... the feminine self, something
at that point in human history, still very ill-defined (137). On the double view of the
convent in womens Gothic, see Eugenia Delamotte, Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of
Nineteenth-Century Gothic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16162.
21
474
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
lost mother; the convent becomes a maternal paradise, where mother

and daughter can be nuns side by side.53
Read retrospectively from this later narrative moment, the nuns
disguise that allowed Ellena to escape from the Monastery of San
Stefano gains a certain ambivalence: by this point, the nuns habit
has come to represent both a fate that Ellena wishes to flee and one
to which she secretly aspires.54 In the panoptical world of the first
convent, the nuns habit is paradoxically equated with an intense and
unwavering visibility; in the second convent, monastic life itself is
redefined as a haven from the constant anxiety of Ellenas travels. It
is not any veil but a particular kind, supported by the values of the
surrounding community, that offers genuine relief from societys
derogatory gaze. The convent here becomes a contiguous figure to
that of the veil, denoting an enclosure of femininity that extends the
bodys decorous erasure.
Only the invisibility afforded by the walls of the good convent
enables Radcliffe to imagine a way out of what Clery aptly calls the
curious ambiguity of existing simultaneously as both a thing and a
person in a twilight zone of being.55 One can imagine Ellena in the
convent as a disembodied flurry of sensibility, almost a pair of eyes
floating happily through the gardens. Unobserved, the body finally
becomes unobtrusive, but its erasure should not be reduced to the
repression of sexuality. Erasure is the symptom of an estrangement
from the body, caused by a culture that appropriates it for social and
political use. Eventually, Ellena must abandon the convent fantasy
and join Vivaldi at the altar; yet the happy nuptial ending does little
to dispel the impact of this dreamlike interlude.
53 Compare Greenfield, who views Ellenas strong attachment to other women as romantic and
erotic: the mother-daughter bond functions as an obstacle to heterosexuality and
relationships between mothers and daughtersas well as between women in generalare
represented as a source of romantic pleasure (74).
54 Reading Ellenas costume as a secret fantasy brings Radcliffes text slightly closer to the masquerade topos: The idea that a specific masquerade disguise might betray the underlying
nature of the person wearing itthat costume could be a way of acting out repressed
desireswas not foreign to the eighteenth century (Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 73).
The novels incomplete, ambivalent invocation of the masquerade, and especially its transformation into a private experience tinged with terror, might be read as a reflection of historical processeswhether the broad transmutation of carnival forms in modernity discussed
by Bakhtin, or the shift in cultural attitudes towards identity-play recently traced by Dror
Wahrman, The Makings of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). The exploration of these intriguing possibilities
falls outside the scope of the present article.
55 Clery, 120.
22
475
The Italian, Radcliffes fifth novel, was also the last published in her
lifetime (a sixth book appeared after her death). The abrupt end of
her successful career naturally caused much speculation. Rumours
circulated that Radcliffes imagination had driven her mad; some
even claimed that she had been confined to a remote mansion. A less
Gothic explanation is that the author, as sensitive to censure as any
of her heroines, was shamed to silence by recurrent anti-Gothic
diatribes in the periodical press.56 Although her own novels were
largely well received, Radcliffes name was repeatedly invoked, directly
or indirectly, as critics disparaged her imitators. Not surprisingly, The
Monk had a crucial effect: in the words of Radcliffes most recent
biographer, Everyone recognized the inescapable link between the
two novelists; it became common to speak of them in the very same
breath, and the moment Lewisian impropriety became attached to
Radcliffes name, the battle to preserve her decorum was doomed.57
Perhaps this explanation for Radcliffes literary silence is more
Gothic than would first appear, even if it does not go so far as to
lock the author in a secluded castle. While we may never know for
certain what caused Radcliffe to retire from literary life, evidence
suggests that her decorous management of the Gothic was undone by
a questionable body of writing, the polluting touch of which she
could not escape. It is tempting to see Radcliffes career as validating,
in an ironic and rather sad way, her heroines dread of corporeal
slander. To cite one resonant example, the body-centred humiliation
envisioned in The Italian is painfully fulfilled in T.J. Horsley Curtiess
preface to his novel Ancient Records, or, The Abbey of Saint Oswythe
(1801). After an extravagant tribute to Radcliffe, Curties comments
on the incompatibility of Gothic materials with female decorum:
Ought the female Novelist, in order to display a complete knowledge
of human nature, to degrade that delicate timidity, that shrinking
innocence which is the loveliest boast of womanhood in drawing
56 Norton surveys and analyzes the attacks on the Gothic in chap. 12 of his biography (15274).
For further discussion of the anti-Gothic sentiment in its social and political context, see
Bradford Keyes Mudge, The Whores Story: Women, Pornography, and the British Novel, 16841830
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 89117.
57 Norton, 158.
23
476
ECF
18:4
SHAPIRA
characters which would ruin her reputation to be acquainted

with?Ought she to describe scenes which bashful modesty would
blush to conceive an idea, much less avow a knowledge of? No, as
Curties answers his own questions, such uncouth matters are best left
to the other sex, for when female invention will employ itself in
images of the grosser sort, it is a fatal prediction of relaxed morals,
and a species ofat leastLITERARY PROSTITUTION.58 The veil of
propriety cautiously drawn across Radcliffes fiction ultimately proves
a flimsy barrier, one that leaves her, just like her heroines, all too
vulnerable to the bodys disrepute.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
58 Cited in Norton, 174.
24

Where The Bodies Are Hidden Ann Radcliff PDF

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Where The Bodies Are Hidden Ann Radcliff PDF

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's

Where the Bodies Are Hidden: Ann Radcliffe's 'Delicate' Gothic

This article is available in Eighteenth-Century Fiction: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol18/iss4/3

Shapira: Ann Radcliffe's 'Delicate' Gothic