Theft, Terror and Family Values: the Mysteries and Domesticities of Udolpho

Abstract

From the perspective of the realist and sentimental novelists who followed her, Ann Radcliffe’s gothic terrors were both too frightening and not frightening enough. This dual response is encapsulated, most famously, by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which in its first volume ironically deflates the exaggerated terrors invoked by gothic novels, and in its second volume rewrites these fantastic dangers as real threats to the safety and happiness of a modern, middle-class heroine. Catherine Morland, Austen’s unremarkable protagonist, learns that she need not fear murder, ghosts or incarceration, only to be threatened instead by slurs to her reputation, romantic mishaps and distressing machinations concerning the property which she is erroneously believed to possess. Yet by domesticating as well as demystifying novels such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Northanger Abbey does not simply satirize them, but rather calls attention to the interplay between sentimental and supernatural plotting which structures Radcliffe’s novel.1 What is at stake here is not simply the ambivalent self-parody which characterizes the gothic from its genesis in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and which, in Udolpho, is reflected in the protagonist’s own contradictory responses to ‘superstitious terror’: ‘though she sometimes felt its influence herself, she could smile at it, when apparent in other persons’ (247).