Dipyaman Bhowmick, Jadavpur University, India
A primary characteristic of Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Italian (1796) is the presence of female protagonists who get embroiled in violent power struggles against masculine forces in patriarchal spaces in a bid to control their physical and psychological autonomy. Both Julia and Ellena, the novels’ respective protagonists, become subject to scheming parental figures attempting to marry them off to less-than-favourable men while ignoring their daughters’ preferred suitors. In Julia’s case, it was her father, the Marquis, who had arranged her marriage to the devious Duke de Luovo to climb the ladder of social prestige. In The Italian, Ellena’s patriarchal foil was her paramour Vivaldi’s mother, the Marchesa, who orders Ellena’s assassination so as to preserve his social standing by preventing a marriage with an orphan of a lower social pedestal. This post will analyse how Radcliffe (1764-1823), a woman writing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, imbues her novels with a proto-feminist ethos by envisioning distinct female Gothic spaces in natural worlds far removed from the male Gothic universe of forced marriages, dark castles, and tyrannical figures of authority.
In her pre-eminent 1976 study, Literary Women, Ellen Moers credits Radcliffe as the progenitor of the genre of female Gothic writing by creating a world where the oppressed women, like Julia and Ellena, exhibit “heroinism” (Moers 113) to escape the confines of the male. Gothic world and taking refuge in female Gothic spaces. These proto-feminist locations are often located in the boundaries of the male Gothic world, providing them with the requisite freedom and agency to lead healthy and fulfilling lives. This is something exhibited in A Sicilian Romance and The Italian as well. In both of these novels, it is the natural world – often populated by women – which becomes a safe haven for those persecuted in the male Gothic spaces. For example, in A Sicilian Romance, it is the kind Madame de Menon who provides the motherless Mazzini sisters, growing up with an exacting father as their only biological parent, with tender love and care. Similarly, in The Italian, Ellena’s protectors take the form of her Signora Bianchi, whose early death left Ellena defenceless against the devious schemes of the Marchesa and Schedoni, and Sister Olivia at the San Stefano convent, later revealed to be her mother, who aids in her escapade from the Convent’s tyrannical Lady Abbess by clothing her in a dark veil.
In A Sicilian Romance, Julia is blessed with an affinity for the natural world. She was “uncommonly susceptible of the charms of harmony” (Radcliffe 4), and often “leaned forwards [to witness] “a fine effect of moonlight” (Radcliffe 9). Similarly, she often found comfort in the natural sounds of oars on lapping water whose “divine melody” generated “a sigh of ecstasy from her bosom” and succeeded in “calming the tumult of her mind” (Radcliffe 58) affected by the social cares of an impending forced marriage. Ellena, too, possesses a deep affection for the environment. It was during her imprisonment in the convent of San Stefano, overlooking the Alpine mountains, that she discovered her sense of “relief” (Radcliffe 75) while looking at the sublime natural world and confesses,
“If I am condemned to misery, surely I could endure it with more fortitude in scenes like these than amidst the tamer landscapes of nature! Here, the objects seem to impart somewhat of their force, their own sublimity to the soul.” (Radcliffe 75)
Nature, therefore, to quote Katherine McGee’s Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley (2014), plays a “liminal” role in the novels for women like Ellena and Julia who are receptive to the charms of the natural world, quite unlike the patriarchal characters stuck in the social mores of the male Gothic, like the Dukes and Schedonis hell-bent on forcing the Julias and Ellenas into undesirable, socially-sanctioned marriages instead of allowing them their heart’s desire to marry kinder, far less patriarchal figures like Hippolitus and Vivaldi.
The natural world plays an integral role in A Sicilian Romance even more significantly than in The Italian. When Julia escapes the confines of the Mazzini Castle – where she had to live under the iron grip of her father – she flees to a pastoral abode deep in the heart of nature under the loving care of her governess, Madame de Menon. In The Tale of Terror (1920), Edith Birkhead observes that Radcliffe relies on “natural terror… rather than on supernatural suggestions” (Birkhead 52). This observation aptly manifests in both the Romance and in The Italian where the sublime in nature wards off the brigands, led by the Duke, chasing the unhappy Juliaa and similarly provides Ellena with a refuge in the mountainous climes where the San Stefano Convent was located. Thus, within this framework, nature does not remain a mere passive agent, but acquires what Vandana Shiva calls the adi shakti of “Prakriti” – “a powerful and effective primordial source of power” (Shiva 38) in Staying Alive (1988). This awesome power of the sublime Prakriti (nature) could only be comprehended by the feminine characters of Radcliffe’s texts, primarily due to their ability to be more at home in the natural, ecofeminist space than their masculine foils.
To conclude, A Sicilian Romance and The Italian formulate two distinct social worlds that the characters inhabit. A masculine world about which Cannon Schmitt wrote in Alien Nation (1997), containing “betrayals, confused identities, nebulous malevolence and opaque motivations” (Schmitt 57) of forced marriages, intrigue and murder. The necessity for marrying to attain a ‘higher’ social status supersedes love between individuals, traits commonly found in the pages of canonical Gothic texts like The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole’s and in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Alongside the many male Gothic traits enunciated by Schmitt, characters inhabiting Radcliffe’s masculinist world exhibit a stark absence of harmonious contact with the natural world, in stark contrast to her female protagonists, which emerges as a theme around which both of these novels pivot.
This masculine world can thus be called, echoing Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings (1996) one “riven with crisis” (Johnson 2). Taking cues from the existing tropes of the genre, Radcliffe provides what Johnson calls an “imaginative response” (Johnson 2) by subverting the genre from within by pitting the masculine world against a feminine world where love reigns, and nature plays an active and nurturing role. The female Gothic world wins out in the end of Radcliffe’s texts as the intrigues of the Marquis and company are rebuffed in the conclusions to both the novels, where the Julia and Ellena can be found conjoined in marital bliss with their lovers, vanquishing the oppressive male Gothic forces that had subjected them in the past, thereby creating a victory of the female Gothic sentiments in the erstwhile pages of the male Gothic.
Works Cited
Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror: A Study of Gothic Romance. London Constable & Company Ltd., 1921.
Johnson, Claudia. Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
McGee, Katherine Marie. Responsibility and Responsiveness in the Novels of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. 2014. University of South Florida, PhD dissertation. Digital Commons, digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/5376.
Radcliffe, Ann. A Sicilian Romance. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. Penguin Books, 2004.
Schmitt, Cannon. Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Shiva, Vandana. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India. Kali For Women, 1988.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women, Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1976.