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A large portion of the beginning of The Mysteries of Udolpho is taken up with Emily and her father traveling through the Pyrenees of France. It seems on nearly every page there are comments on the “sublime charms of nature” with long descriptions on the craggy mountains, the deep valleys, rushing torrents, and the quality of the light. In fact, there is so much of this I began to think Radcliffe was up to something. So it wasn’t long before I found myself borrowing a copy of Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. And now this early sentence in the book makes so much more sense:

This landscape with the surrounding alps did, indeed, present a perfect picture of the lovely and the sublime, of ‘beauty sleeping in the lap of horror.’

I have vague recollections of reading Burke back in college as part of a class in literary theory but my memory has been wiped out to save myself from the trauma that was Hegel, Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva. Poor Burke never had a chance. Since he is associated in my mind with that class I assumed he was going to be hard going and I’d be scratching my head. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Burke is so very concerned with everyone understanding him that large portions of the essay are given over to explaining his words. I appreciated his precision to a point, after that point I found myself muttering, okay okay, can we just move on? All that to say that if you ever feel inspired to read Burke, you don’t need to worry about not “getting him” because if this essay were a math problem, he’d be getting full credit for showing his work so his readers can follow along with his arguments and not be left in doubt.

If you are like me you equate sublime with beautiful, maybe not every day beautiful but startlingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that moves you to tears. But no, beauty and the sublime have nothing to do with each other. Beauty, you see, inspires pleasure and love in the beholder. It is sunshine and rainbows.

The sublime? It is composed of delight derived from terror, pain, distress and danger. It is a feeling far more intense and elevated than mere beauty. The sublime, according to Burke, is the “strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling.” This is because pain, the root of the sublime, is more powerful than pleasure.

Now the pain Burke refers to is not necessarily physical pain caused from tumbling over a cliff while hiking in the mountains in search of the sublime. It is a physical pain but more of one caused by extreme emotion than a broken leg. It’s a hurts so good kind of pain caused by an “unnatural tension of the nerves.”

What elements go into producing the sublime? Burke is kind enough to explain each one in great detail but I will spare you and just list out a few for you:

• Obscurity. This is because you can’t see something clearly and so you are thrown into a state of fear and uncertainty. Obscurity can be caused by darkness or fog, or lots of trees.
• Power. Anything powerful is dangerous and potentially destructive and terrifying. Like a king or a bull or flash flood or God.
• Vastness. As in size. This can be a tall mountain or a deep valley or great plain, lake or ocean. Infinity is also a source of the sublime. Think of the size of the universe and your mind will likely be filled with a sort of delightful horror as you try and fail find the edges.
• Magnificence. As in a great profusion of things as in the stars in the night sky or millions of buffalo on the Great Plains before settlers killed them all.
• Color. Pink is not the color of the sublime. The sublime is not cheerful. The color of the sublime is dark and gloomy, a cloudy sky not a clear blue one, dark brown jagged rocks not a gentle verdant slope.

Can you kind of see a little how Emily and her father’s travels through the mountains was so sublime? And why Radcliffe might want all that in a gothic novel? Because the whole point of a gothic novel is horror (and romance) and since the source of the sublime is terror, perfect combination, right? Radcliffe didn’t write a book based in the supernatural so she pulls much of her gothic horror in early on by using the sublime. We don’t feel it like the readers in 1794 would have, but no doubt much of the scenic descriptions would have been terrifying.

Also of note is that Radcliffe uses the sublime to clue us in to who the good and bad characters are. The good ones all experience the sublime at one time or other while out in nature. The bad characters, not one has a sublime experience. They are too small-minded and petty and the sublime scene that moves Emily so produces nothing but boredom to those who are not good.

That is a bit of what Radcliffe is about with so much mention of what is sublime. While it gets a bit repetitive for a modern reader, she wasn’t just rambling on and on to add padding to the story. Instead, the sublime is an integral part of her approach to the gothic, at least in this novel. I’ve not read any of her others so I can’t say whether it holds true for them. Perhaps next RIP Challenge I will read Romance of the Forest and find out.

What a fun book Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe turned out to be! Sure it’s a long book, and sure there is lots of wandering and admiring the sublime scenery, but oh, when I got down to the end and all the secrets and mysteries began to be revealed, what fun! All the revelations at the end could have been handled better. Instead of making them part of the narrative, they end up feeling like Radcliffe knew she had to end the book and disclose all the secrets and she wasn’t sure how so she just tells us in one long rush. She does manage to tie up everything which was good because I was starting to wonder if she was going to remember to say what was behind the black veil at Udolpho. Now I know why there is so much wondering about this very thing by Catherine in Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

The Mysteries of Udolpho was published in 1794 in four volumes. It is a Gothic Romance with love, bad men, castles, hidden passages, ghosts, bandits, murder, coincidences, and secrets galore. But Radcliffe did not write a supernatural gothic novel, for her there is an explanation for everything. And to make extra sure we know we are not to believe in the supernatural, she makes fun of the people in the novel who do.

The story follows Emily St. Aubert who becomes an orphan at the tender age of seventeen. Because she is not yet of age, she is given to the care of her father’s sister, Madame Cheron, a vain, ambitious woman with a mean streak. Not long after Emily goes to live with her aunt, Madame Cheron agrees to marry Count Montoni, a handsome, passionate and agreeable Italian. Almost immediately they set out for Venice. Montoni turns out to be other than he represented himself and his sins, to the horror of the good and pure Emily, begin to mount up fast as soon as they arrive in Venice. After a few months in Venice where Montoni tries to trick Emily into marrying Count Morano, Montoni suddenly packs up his household and hurries his servants and women off to Udolpho, his crumbling and remote castle in the Pyrenees. The only thing that sustains Emily’s spirits throughout her trials at Venice and Udolpho is her love for the Chevalier Valancourt who loves her in return.

Poor Emily’s road is never smooth but in spite of the river of tears she cries, the horrors she must face, the many moments of fainting and insensibility, she remains true and kind and good so is therefore rewarded in the end.

There are many things the book is about but I think the one that stands first in line is, in the words of Emily’s father:

‘A well-informed mind,’ he would say, ‘is the best security against the contagion of folly and of vice. The vacant mind is ever on the watch for relief, and ready to plunge into error, to escape from the languor of idleness. Store it with ideas, teach it the pleasure of thinking; and the temptations of the world without, will be counteracted by the gratifications derived from the world within. Thought, and cultivation, are necessary equally to the happiness of a country and a city life; in the first they prevent the uneasy sensations of indolence, and afford a sublime pleasure in the taste they create for the beautiful, and the grand; in the latter, they make dissipation less an object of necessity, and consequently of interest.’

Of course Emily has a well-informed mind and it is from all this her goodness and many virtues flow. It is also because of this that she is the only one in the book who, while suffering more than anyone, comes through it all unblemished. We are subtly and not so subtly reminded of this throughout the book.

We are also to learn what it means to have good taste as well as gain an appreciation of the sublime. In fact, there is so much sublime this sublime that in the book I was prompted, by the suggestion of Tom, to read Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. Which I did, mostly, and about which I will write tomorrow and attempt to relate it to Udolpho without boring you too much.

The completion of this book also concludes my RIP Challenge reading. It has been great fun, as usual, and I even managed to read one more book than I had planned. Yay!