In previous two sections, the heroine’s mobility during the process of escape is explored from the perspective of either the escape subject or the rescuers. In this part,
20 The bonding between sisterhoods turns out to be familial as well, as Olivia is later revealed as Ellena’s mother.
I will proceed to examine the theme of concealment and the confusion of identities it incurs as an important technique in the heroine’s flight. While the secrecy of escape requires necessity to conceal the body and identity of the fugitive, this secrecy in turn leads to misunderstandings and mistaken identities during the escape. In Udolpho, Emily has mistaken Du Pont for Valancourt, an event of the most shocking
disappointment for the heroine. The episode of Agnes’ escape in The Monk also turns out to be a thrilling horror when Raymond recounts his discovery beholding the female figure he has rescued: “God Almighty! It was the Bleeding Nun! It was my lost companion! Her face was still veiled, but she no longer held her lamp and dagger.
She lifted up her veil slowly. What a sight presented itself to my startled eyes!” (167).
Disguises put these characters into a game of doubling, in which one stands for the alternative side of the other. Du Pont, for one, substitutes for the role that Valancourt should have played. Doubling also has a suggestive indication that the pair’s fates may coincide, so the Bleeding Nun’s tragic end might await Agnes should Lorenzo never have delivered her from misery.
Therefore, the veil Agnes and the Bleeding Nun both wear is not merely for concealment. It can be seen as a “mask” in the sense of performance. The veil not only covers Agnes’ face from recognition, but also enables her to “perform” as the Bleeding Nun, who in turn substitutes the role of Agnes, and plays the role of Ramond’s lover. Such exchangeability invites a broader interpretation for these characters. The Bleeding Nun’s obsessive repetition in appearing on the fifth of May every five years, along with her veil, lamp and dagger, are rendered representative of
the uncanny (unheimlich) because they are “token of repression” (Freud 222)—the repression of sexual desires, which, once unveiled, would “presented itself to [the male spectator’s] startled eyes!” (Lewis 167).
In this light, the veil is at the same time expressive and repressive to the
heroine’s quest for the romantic love and her own identity. Such repression applies to Agnes and the Bleeding Nun, as well as to all the regulated subjects in the Gothic novels. The existence of the veil and the consequent spectacle without it also bring out a debate over a woman’s “normal” body. As critic Yael Shapira points out, “the positive/negative fantasy of the body within the code of propriety is writ large in the eighteenth-century Gothic, which likewise imagines the body as caught between two extreme formulations: a radically purified ideal and a scandalous, spectacular
grotesque” (461). Contrary to the “intact” virginal body, which is perfectly veiled and protected, the disrupt body is threatened with the risks of rape, murder, illegitimate marriage or improper sexual desires that should best be repressed.
The dialectic between these “twin” bodies finds its correlation in the Gothic novel’s prohibition, enclosure and escape, which can be amply explained by a passage in The Italian, in which Ellena and Vivaldi both undergo a masquerade-like encounter, struggling to identify each other under the veil and the peasant hat while searching for a way to escape from the convent of San Stefano. It is a significant passage that I would quote at length:
…having reached the grate, [Ellena] ventured to lift her veil for one instant. The stranger, letting his cloak fall, thanked her with his eyes for her condescension,
and she perceived, that he was not Vivaldi! Shocked at the interpretation, which might be given to a conduct apparently so improper, as much as by the
disappointment, which Vivaldi’s absence occasioned, she was hastily retiring, when another stranger approached with quick steps, whom she instantly knew, by the grace and spirit of his air, to be Vivaldi; but, determined not to be exposed a second time to the possibility of a mistake, she awaited silently for some further signal of his identity. (130-31)
The “condescension” of Ellena’s revelation to a stranger supplies a hierarchical connotation to the original gender-oriented veil image. It recalls the decorum and polite culture that belong to the middle and upper class females. Notably, except for the heroine’s angelic countenance and her lovely form (which surely capture the hero’s admiration at the first sight), any physical presence that Radcliffe allows for her heroine is usually moderate and minimal, to the contrary of Lewis. As a result, we can easily imagine Ellena’s hesitation to search for the right one to “reveal her face to” in this scene. A wrong move is not only improper, but also violating the integrality of her body. Radcliffe solves this dilemma by providing Vivaldi’s appearance, which is instantly known “by the grace and spirit of his air” (131). In this regard, the grace of one’s air is not a physical existence; quite the contrary, it is an inner quality that seems to radiate from inside the soul, and shifts the narrative’s focus from the solidity of flesh to the virtues and morality within.
While Radcliffe refrains from a detailed description of the flesh and blood, Lewis chooses to deliberate upon the spectacle of unveiled female bodies. In the
beginning chapters of The Monk, the young novice Rosario is reported to be
“continually muffled up in his cowl; yet such of his features as accident discovered, appeared the most beautiful and noble” (47). Women’s veiling and Rosario’s cowl symbolize the ritual of the repression. The repressed objects may be improper sexual desires, supernatural phenomena, or secret crimes that should not be disclosed.
Radcliffe endeavours to regulate and explain them away, but in The Monk, the
repressed will often return will a vengeance. In the case of Rosario’s cowl, it is not as much an instrument of concealment as it is a tantalizing teaser, inviting the man’s curious exploration. The exploration goes further, and in a moment of haste, reveals Rosario’s true identity as the beautiful but demonic Matilda “to [Ambrosio’s]
enquiring eye” (85). The latter is quickly amazed at the “exquisite proportion of features,” the “profusion of golden hair,” and the “rosy lips, heavenly eyes, and majesty of countenance” (85). This obsession with corporal appearances and carnal desires of course is offensive to Radcliffe’s polite Gothic, and later on, the publication of The Italian seems to be a corrective response to Lewis, by its exploration of the tension between the female body and decorum.
After escaping from the domestic tyranny of their previous hardship, Radcliffean heroines return to the security of a well-matched marriage without exception.
Radcliffe’s sense of delicacy and her bourgeois happy ending reflect her limit as an eighteenth-century middle-class author. However, the textual configuration still allows a temporary get-away. Susan Wolstenholme in her Gothic (Re)vision argues that the veil image sets up a performance in The Italian. It determines an “interior
space” as theater, for the performers to stage their escape (26). The ceremony of receiving veil at the convent of Sab Stefano, for example, distinguished the veiled nuns as performers and everyone else the audience. Agnes’ plan of escape, too, presents a temporary freedom and mobility in her role-playing as the Bleeding Nun.
This seems to suggest the freedom lies not in the euphoric ending designed for the heroine after escape, but in the very act of escape itself.
In the introduction of her Textual Escap(e)ades, Lindsey Tucker plays upon the word escapade, which means “a ‘reckless proceeding’ or ‘wild prank’” (2). Like the childish games of hide-and-seek or costume-play we have played in our childhood, the process of escape brings out the carnivalesque feelings of being reckless, prankish and defiant. Though I do not suggest Radcliffean heroines can self-consciously subvert the existent social order, their escapes nevertheless possess the quality to confuse the boundary of rigid regulations. Escape constructs an ambivalent space of indiscernibility where “femininity encounters the possibility of becoming something other” (Botting 160). Therefore, before the moment of unveiling, they are granted a temporary freedom.
Chapter III
Anxiety behind the Escapist Reading
In the previous chapters, I have discussed the theme of escape at the levels of plot narrative and characters’ plans of escape, both of which, I argue, reflect Radcliffe’s confidence in female developments. As a Bildungsroman, novel of education, Radcliffe’s novel models its heroine as a paradigm of virtue whose example the readers are expected to follow suit. St. Albert’s instruction for Emily to be a sensible and rational reader, for instance, speaks for Radcliffe’s expectance towards her own readers. On the other hand, readers undergo the same Gothic adventures as Emily does, to experience a sense of wish fulfillments or vicarious pleasures in their course of reading. The most conspicuous example, perhaps, is Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Gothic parody Northanger Abbey. Being a cordial reader of Udolpho, Catherine’s own adventure imitates and parallels Emily’s in the castle of Udolpho, a Gothic locus veiled by the former mistress’ mysterious death. By identifying with the heroine, readers internalize the values Radcliffe tries to instill into them. Not only that the experiences of the readers echo that of the heroine, but the reading behavior itself can also be seen as a parallel to the performed escapes in the Gothic novels. As a parallel to its subject matter, reading demonstrates an attempt to and a process of escape as well. This is the main idea I would center on in this chapter.
I would first explore novel reading in its historical, social and economical
context in order to draw forth the meaning of escape behind reading. Then, I intend to
explore the impact of novel reading to the construction of an ideal “home” and a perfect “woman” in the end of the eighteenth century. By putting Gothic novels into their own social context, we can see how novel reading negotiates with social issues related to the roles of women in their society, particularly those concerned with the female identity in marriage and the domestic life. This negotiation thus marked a long literary dispute since the end of the eighteenth century with regards to what the women should read, and when the women should read. In a way this dispute leads to the modern debate on the roles of women, the disposal of leisure time in a
consumerist society in the formation, criteria on literary tastes, and the making of modern readers.