No Time Like the PresentThe Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

Suppose that I am going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expectation is engaged by whole of it. But once I have begun, as much of psalm as I have removed from province of expectations and relegated to past now engages my memory, and scope of action which I am performing is divided between two faculties of memory and expectation, one looking back to part which I have already recited, other looking forward to part which I have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all while, and through it passes what was future in process of becoming past.(Augustine, Confessions 278; bk. 11, sec. 28)In decade of revolution that was 1790s, Ann Radcliffe became a publishing phenomenon, emerging from anonymity to become one of most successful novelists of her time. Although Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto is widely regarded as having begun genre in 1764, it was Radcliffe who really seemed to codify many of characteristics that define Gothic, and term Radcliffean Gothic is almost a tautology.1 Four of five romances Radcliffe published between 1789 and 1797 feature exotic settings in historical past, from feudal Scotland of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to seventeenth-century France of The Romance of Forest. (The Italian is lone exception, set in Italy between 1742 and 1758). Yet her most famous novel, The Mysteries ofUdolpho, is most thoroughly imbued with discourses on temporality, four aspects of which I will address in this essay: novel's explicit references to time, for example, its past setting, or conversely its noticeable absence of definitive temporal markers such as seasonal descriptors; castle as a trope of time; role of repetition as a temporal motif; and protagonist's prolonged suspension between memory and expectation in an extended present. I will argue that novel's embedded discourses on temporality were a response to unprecedented forces that were reshaping concept of time in England, and that novel's construction of an alternative temporality contributed to novel's popular reception. In response to gathering perception of a present growing increasingly detached from past, The Mysteries of Udolpho offered an imaginatively compensatory version of this new temporal reality. I want to suggest that Radcliffe's novel served as an antidote to revolutionary fears and also to whole idea of progress and its temporally dissociative effects, these antidotal properties contributing to its success during this decade.1. REFERENCES TO TIMEIn a nod to Cartesian specificity, Udolpho is nominally set in 1584, 210 years prior to its publication, but, as is common in fiction, use of past is more atmospheric than historical.2 Despite reference to year, which occurs twice in novel-including its opening sentence-we cannot really locate novel in a particular era, and Radcliffe ignores references to particular historical events of period. In fact, discourses contained in novel involve, not late sixteenth-century, but late eighteenthcentury issues, such as sublimity, sensibility and taste, and characters drink coffee (94) and use dinner forks (97) nearly a century before either practice was introduced to western Europe (Castle, notes 681). Radcliffe has established a discursive tension in temporal realm, a state of dissonance between supposed specificity and vague historicity of her setting.Robert Miles argues that Radcliffe sets novel in a period that Miles calls the cusp, a moment of passage from a feudal to a modern world, so that she can dramatize tensions between two periods and their respective world-views (The Great Enchantress 175, 87-88, 144-45). seen in this context, apparent conflict between Radcliffe's choice of temporal settings with a particular purpose in mind (Miles's argument) and her disregard for historical accuracy, exemplifies discursively very tension that her settings explore, conflict between feudal and modern. …