The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann
Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho” is touted as THE gothic novel to read,
containing ghosts and old castles and mysterious murders. Sounds juicy and true
enough, the story has all these elements, but not in that undiluted form we are
used to expect in our time.
For the
first third of this tome of a book (my version counted 672 pages), this resembled
a romantic novella from a Readers Digest. Wholesome romantic fantasies in beautiful
settings. Okay, there are parents that die, but even that is very pretty. A
voyage through the mountains is mainly a highly detailed and sentimental
description of the scenery and how it resonates the feelings of the characters.
We hear of
Emily, a young French woman of the lower nobility and how she makes a journey
from Gascony to Languedoc to improve the health of her father. On the way they
befriend the young chevalier, Valancourt and a romance blossom. Emily’s father
does not get better, but dies near the haunted castle of Chateau le-Blanc. Left
on her own Emily falls under the guardianship of her aunt, Madame Cheron. She
is not exactly a pleasant woman and when she marries the mysterious Montoni,
Emily must go with them to Italy, far away from her Valancourt.
In Italy
she becomes the de-facto prisoner of Montoni in a dilapidated castle, Udolpho,
in the Apennines and this is where the novel turns gothic. Montoni is a mobster
and an opportunist who seeks to achieve wealth and power through dominance and underhanded
villainy. Emily’s part in his schemes is to be married away for his personal
winning, a fate Emily consider too horrible to contemplate. Emily also fears
for her life, but mostly for her virginity and then there are the ghosts in the
castle…
“The
Mysteries of Udolpho” is apparently often being considers a flawed, maybe even
laughable novel. Radcliffe is good at building up tension, when she finally gets
to that point, but her resolutions are terrible. There are several convoluted
mysteries in the story. Supernatural, criminal or otherwise. They tend to scare
or confuse Emily or her impressionable maid, Annette, but they almost uniformly
deflate when they get resolved. Sometime revealed in an off-hand way, there is always
a prosaic, even boring, explanation and Emily usually get out of her trouble
surprisingly easy and with little or no effort. Her major quality being her
ability to faint from fear and to be modest when tempted.
It is also
obvious this is a story from Radcliffe’s fantasy. It is deeply anachronistic,
the geography is all wrong and the men and women are cliché characters from a
teenage girl’s day-dream. It is often difficult not to roll the eyes and groan.
Yet, in the build-up phase there are these moments of brilliance that makes it
worthwhile to read this book. The riddles are really quite impressive. So much
more disappointing is it when they deflate in the resolution.
I am
probably of the wrong gender for this novel, and I certainly belong to the
wrong century. It is very possible a female reader two hundred years ago would
find this a masterpiece and I could also see this be made into a telenovela.
For me though it is merely okay and certainly way too long.
