A Note on Radcliffe’s The Italian

     The distinction between high and low art used to be largely a matter of venue and milieu. Poetry appreciated in court circles such as troubadour lyric and sonnets is easily differentiated from folk-song, and one could hardly confuse Sidney’s Arcadia with a penny dreadful title. The growth of a literate middle class, however, that accompanied the coming of capitalism led to a new market with its own demanding taste. The novel itself was regarded as an inferior literary form for years (in China as well as in Europe), often composed and consumed by women who were no longer required to spend their leisure doing needlework.
     The work of Ann Radcliffe, praised by the great Romantic poets and a best-selling author as well, illustrates characteristics of both popular and high art. Every piece of literature confirms some expectations while denying others, but popular works tend to be toward the reassuring side of that continuum while “high” art often raises contradictions and ambivalences if not outright denial of received ideas. Radcliffe’s books, like most television narratives, conclude with the happy ending that reassures the consumer that, in spite of temporary upsets, all is right with the world. Her characters are flattened and overdone: the heroes are most “manly,” possessing at once good looks, courage, and an unerring morality, while the heroines are lovely, pious, and proper to the degree that in The Italian Ellena Rosalba in The Italian is troubled by such scruples as worrying about keeping company with a male admirer while he is rescuing her from vicious persecutors. Meanwhile the villains are black-souled indeed, though Schedoni practices such titanic and self-controlled machinations that he has been compared with Milton’s Satan and considered influential in the Byronic anti-hero.
     Between these factions, Radcliffe regularly distributes retributive justice in the most predictable manner. One need fear no more than in a comedy that all might not come right in the end. The loftier social classes are uniquely capable of fine feeling, of sensibility. The fair heroine’s marriage is impeded by her presumed lower status, yet she turns out in fact to have been high-born after all and from a virtuous father, rendering irrelevant the issue about whether alliances between classes are possible. Paolo is a fair type of the lower strata. He is an exemplar of the best quality of the low-born, which is to say he is fiercely loyal to his master. His hound-like devotion is so great that he repeatedly makes a fool of himself to lighten otherwise serious scenes, and he is rewarded in the end by being allowed to sing a repeated chorus of good wishes to Vivaldi, “O! giorno felice!”
     Though there is no questioning of the old stereotypes about men and women, morality, or the order of society, Radcliffe did participate in her day’s more intellectual and aesthetic currents. The “Gothic” novel has become a popular genre little remarked by critics, but in the late eighteenth century, it was a new and ambitious orientation toward the sublime. To Edmund Burke “terror is in all cases whatsoever . . . the ruling principle of the sublime.” To him the “Astonishment” associated with the sublime is invariably accompanied by “some degree of horror.” [1]
     Mrs. Radcliffe expressed derivative notions in her posthumous essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” [2] where she argues that “obscurity” and grandeur” combine to generate sublimity. To her this recipe holds “not only on frivolous occasions,” “but in the “most important pursuits of life.”
     For all that, to the modern reader, it is almost as though fear is used to ratchet up the story’s impact like sex in a music video. The Italian setting announced in the title is itself a somewhat sinister place smoky with Roman Catholic incense and moral corruption. The Inquisition even appears. All these thematics are as expected; what is “modern” in Radcliffe is the delectation, the self-conscious reveling in a safe, emasculated horror, whose epigone we see in the young college graduate of today who likes nothing better than to dress as a zombie or a vampire.
     The effect is similar with her descriptions of nature which may provide grandeur as well as mystery. [3] Sometimes extensive and pictorial, they remain thoroughly conventional, a code that should elicit the proper response. The topographical poets had particularized; Radcliffe is always painting variations on the same few scenes.
     Her taste is surely influenced by the Graveyard School poets, or she was a product of the same trends in taste. The enjoyment of a sweet melancholy, colored perhaps by a faint hint of the beyond, either Christian or pagan, a breath of the sublime was evidence of a person of sentiment, an aesthete. Radcliffe broadened the audience for such a vision by washing her stories with the same elements and ameliorating the edgier elements (such as Cowper’s real depression).
     Radcliffe’s reader sought a domesticated horror. Her books are filled with spooky, seemingly preternatural events, but they are virtually always explained rationally. By rational, though, I do not mean likely, for Radcliffe inherits from the Hellenistic romances a fondness for formal symmetry in plot, welcoming all-but-impossible coincidence such as the revelations of the identities first of Schedoni and then of Olivia. Far from a failure of verisimilitude, this was a clear literary code. Scott defined the romance by its “marvelous and uncommon incidents.” [4]
     She added the newer aesthetic ideas of the time, including the taste for horror and for landscape and a lugubrious sense of mortality, and attracted a mass readership as well as impressing Shelley, Byron (who called her the founder of a school) and Keats (who refers to her enthusiastically as an influence in his letters). She raised the ambitions and altered the direction of the novel genre, adding to the woman-in-distress theme of Richardson the “sublimity” of terror and of landscape, the power of meditation on mortality, and the love of the exotic (which is to say the partially understood) which made her and Mary Shelley avid travelers and original travel writers.
     Her oeuvre at once advanced the prestige and popularity of novels. Though some writers in other genres before had addressed a general audience and found critical celebrity (such as Shakespeare) and others had addressed an educated audience yet found a broader readership (such as Milton), Radcliffe mediated the levels of literature, using familiar themes dressed up in the latest aesthetic styles, and created new readership and new tastes for the form whose very name means new.




1. Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757. Burke goes on to note that “obscurity” is effective as terror will dissipate with clear vision, adding that despots are secretive to excite fear in their subjects. He does not say whether such repression can result in the sublime.

2. First published in The New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 1826, 145-152

3. See Sir Uvedale Price's essay “On The Picturesque.”

4. See his “Essay on Romance.”

A Scholar’s Debut

     I have fond feelings toward my essay on Mechthild von Magdeburg. My first sustained analysis of a Middle German text, it was published in the Mystics Quarterly, a journal that had once been called the Fourteenth Century Mystics Newsletter (the original title appealed to me, for it gave me a mental picture of some bearded figure with a rope belt slipping a few mimeographed pages through the slot to Julian of Norwich, bringing news of colleagues’ birthdays and most recent visions).
     “Transformation of Convention in Mechthild von Magdeburg” is also the first paper I presented at a professional meeting. I was still taking courses in graduate school when the essay was accepted for the annual Patristic, Medieval, Renaissance Conference at Villanova University near Philadelphia. This seemed a positive sign, as, for my part, I had been deeply ambivalent about scholarship, whereas from their side, the academics doubtless saw much in what must have looked like my gypsy’s history to give them pause. We had decided to take a chance on each other, and now it seemed that perhaps it might work out.
     I decided that, since it seemed I might be on the point of acceding to the bourgeoisie after years of poverty, I should buy a new suit. The fact is, though I had spent whole years wearing almost nothing but blue jeans, I never taught without a coat and tie. I had a considerable collection of ill-fitting suits from the Salvation Army and dozens of antique ties with patterns I liked but which unfortunately had been made to end about the middle of the wearer’s chest when knotted properly. These served me well enough for the unlikely teaching positions I had held, but I decided my scholar’s debut required something grander.
     Taking advantage of a sale at the Iowa City Montgomery Ward, I purchased a two-vent three-piece navy pinstripe suit with alterations-to-fit. Or that was the idea at any rate. As I recall my unseemly bicyclist’s thighs stretched the fabric from the day the man was running tape measures over me. The upper elements which felt a bit snug at first, seemed to shrink rapidly. Nonetheless, I felt I could make a proper impression in this suit.
     My initial visual impact was threatened, however. Part of my eternal youth has been periodic manifestations of adult acne, and, rather like some teen’s prom nightmare, a sizable lesion appeared on my left cheek, giving my countenance a spot of unsettling roseate glow. I was building toward some sort of crescendo, but it was yet uncertain if it was to be dreadful or revelatory.
     With my graduate student’s income deep beneath the poverty level, I ground my teeth at conference registration fees and eschewed hotels. An acquaintance at the Friends’ Meeting gave me the number of a relative who was rehabbing a building in West Philadelphia. It may have been the presumptive virtue of the Quaker connection, but this person whom I had never met (and never did) sent a key and an invitation to sleep on the floor of a vacant apartment. I managed to buy a cheap ticket from Chicago, and my arrangements were complete.
     With the bus from the airport and the Main Line train, I made my way to Villanova where the meeting was in session. I attended panels faithfully, hearing, as one always does, some critics who put one in mind of Swift’s “projectors,” and others who provided occasional flashes of wit or insight. In my new suit, I felt quite at home. Even the alarming phenomenon on my cheek was subsiding.
     After returning to the city center late at night, I took the elevated train line to the West Side. Unfamiliar with the city, I overshot my destination by a stop or two and found myself, shortly after midnight, resplendent in my suit, carrying the large, old-fashioned pre-attaché style briefcase in which I kept papers, toiletries, and underwear alike, down the middle of the Friday night urban African-American business strip. I walked the twenty blocks or so to the address at which I had aimed, past the loungers outside bars and bodegas to whom I may have seemed a bit of an apparition. Doubtless they thought I had a better reason to be there than in fact I did.
     Fortunately, the key I had been sent worked. I unrolled my sleeping bag on the floor of the empty apartment.
     The next day I returned to the conference and reveled in the semi-medieval ambiance created by the Catholic institution. I was delighted to attend the only panel I have ever witnessed conducted entirely in Latin: papers, questions, even a good deal of the chit-chat afterwards. I heard also about the work which had been going forward for over a hundred years already, the preparation of a critical edition of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas at the Pontifical Institute in Toronto. Not only was Aquinas productive, his books were preserved and copied to such an extent that the editor must consider all-but-countless variant readings and choose the best from hundreds of manuscripts, while noting all the rest. The publishing task was Herculean in its demands. In recent years some chores had been relieved by the analytical advantages of mainframe computers, and the decision had been made that, rather than the ponderous volumes they had been issuing for generations, which possessed gravitas in the extreme. only digital editions would appear in the future. The speaker said that some of the elder monks participating in the project, who had worked their entire lives on earlier volumes as assistant editors and were only just advanced to the point of having a book bearing their own names as editor, were broken-hearted at the change in format. Surely their merciful Lord will be tolerant of such bookish vanity.
     Sunday morning I made my way again to the transit line and out to Villanova. My paper was scheduled for 8:30, the first session of the day. I shared the stage with a professor speaking on an unpublished collection of Florentine lay sermons, and another dealing with the fourteenth canto of Immanuel of Rome’s Mahberoth. Scattered about the front rows of a sizable lecture hall half a dozen scholars had got their faces washed and their coffee down in time to catch my debut. Or they were faithful friends (or underlings) of one of the other speakers. Several were loath to break off their exchanges of gossip. They probably see each other every year at PMR and never at any other time and each likes it that way, or at least that is how they looked to me as I entered. I was pleased enough with my work and no one else there had even read my author (as I in turn had never seen a page of Immanuel of Rome), so there could be no difficult questions, and I had a reasonably good time delivering my ideas on Mechthild. A couple of my listeners lingered to discuss related issues with me, and I felt as though I had earned an honorable position among the mandarins, all my youthful anti-academic prejudices conveniently invisible if persistent.
     A week or so later I was elated to receive a note from one of the people with whom I had chatted. He was editing a book of selected papers from the conference and wished to include mine. I immediately sent him a revision, but, sad to say, I never heard from him again in spite of an inquiry. Ah well, each of us savants had gained a line on the c.v.