"Searching after the Splendid Nothing": Gothic Epistemology and the Rise of Fictionality

Abstract

By investigating the rhetoric of enchantment, shame, and disillusionment evident in contemporary reviews of Radcliffe's fictions, my paper argues that the fictionality uniquely elicited by the late-eighteenth-century Gothic parallels the epistemology of speculative Enlightenment philosophy. In particular, Radcliffe's repetitive use of the "explained supernatural" illustrates and elevates the potency of affect in the absence of causal objects that justify such responses, and echoes the Humean paradigm that substitutes efficacity—the "force and vivacity" an object affects on the mind—for mimetic representation. Radcliffe's gothic texts demonstrate that fiction solicits belief, which contributes to and depends upon readerly absorption in the text, and resides in the effects produced within the mind rather than in a stable correspondence between the experience and the object of perception. Extrapolating from eighteenth-century philosophy, I argue that belief is susceptible to reflection, which—as Radcliffe's readers emphasize—shatters the pleasure of the illusion with a disappointingly naturalistic explanation. The impossibility of sustained belief in the face of disillusioning reflection separates the Gothic from the Romantic novel of manners and helps to explain the rapid disappearance of this rendition of gothic popularity.