Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors of Power

Abstract

Ann Radcliffe and the Terrors Of PowerKim Ian Michasiw The program of the Enlightenment was the disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy.1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno Late in Ann Radcliffe's last novel, Gaston de Blondeville, the narrator pauses to consider the burdens of kingly and other authority: Sorrow and remorse ... alone seemed to occupy the King, who now, with the intention, as he persuaded himself, of preventing further evil, was about to execute an act of injustice and stern cruelty. And thus it is, if kingly power pertain to a weak head, not carefully warned by early instructions against the dangers, which must beset all power, whether public or private, whether in Prince or subject; for, the passions are the helm, whereon designing men seize to steer into action, as they wish. And thus was pity about to be made the instrument of cruelty.2 1 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adomo, Dialectic ofEnlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury, 1972), p. 3. 2 Ann Radcliffe, Gaston de Blondeville, or The Court of Henry in Keeping Festival in Ardenne, intro. Devendrá P. Varma, 2 vols. (New York: Arno, 1972), 2:392, hereafter CB. Other Radcliffe novels cited in this essay are The Castles ofAthlin andDunbayne, intro. Frederick Shroyer (New York: Amo, 1972), hereafter A&.D; A Sicilian Romance, intra. Devendrá P. Varma, 2 vols. (New York: Arno, 1972), hereafter SR; The Romance ofthe Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), hereafter RF; The Mysteries ofUdolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), hereafter MU; The Italian, ed. Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), hereafter TI. References are to these editions. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 6, Number 4, July 1994 328 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION The passage reflects the guiding concerns of the Radcliffe canon: the passions, their influence on action,3 and power in its public and private manifestations, a concern that has, perhaps, been overlooked.4 Were the reasons for this oversight accounted, they might suggest much about the institutionalized study ofliterature's logic and its self-serving disregard of the fates of its ostensible objects. Such an accounting, however, is not the present concern, which takes as given that, despite readerly ignorings or misrecognitions, the novels' and their narrators' obsessings over "power, whether public or private" remain. The urge to domination is the prime characteristic of all Radcliffe's villains; the struggle for even a limited autonomy is the task set each of her heroines; the drive to exert authority over the world outside the self determines the complex structures of her descriptive passages; the need to achieve government of conflicting passions afflicts all her characters. This complex apprehension of the webs of power manifests itself in Radcliffe's first novel, The Castles ofAthlin and Dunbayne, when in an inspired moment Baron Malcolm "invents" his creator's aesthetic: [Malcolm] was agitated with all the direful passions of hate, revenge, and exulting pride. He racked imagination for the invention of tortures equal to the force of his feelings; and he at length discovered that the sufferings of suspense are superior to those of the most terrible evils ... of which the contemplation gradually affords to strong minds the means of endurance. (A&D, pp. 36-37) Here Malcolm achieves power over himself through torturing his imagination only to discover that tormenting the imagination of another is the best revenge. Power is achieved through the mastery of the imaginative faculties, one's own and those of others. Malcolm is, however, fortunate that his is a lonely career of villainy. Unlike Henry m he is free from "designing men" who would seize the helm of his ungoverned passions to steer him into action as they wish. These designing men are of interest 3 For a summary of the earlier debates concerning Radcliffe and that indulgence of the passions called "sensibility," see Nelson C. Smith, "Sense, Sensibility and Ann Radcliffe," SEL 13 (1973), 577-90. Smith's conclusions, and indeed most critics' conclusions regarding sensibility and Action, are in need of revision in light of recent reappraisals of the concept of sensibility. See especially John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language...

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