Out of Time: Temporal Conflict in Ann Radcliffe’sThe Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

This essay offers a new interpretation of Gothic temporality through a case study of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Whereas most scholarship on Gothic temporality focuses on the relationship between past and present, I consider how the Gothic interrogates multiple, conflicting forms of time within the historical moment of the 1790s. Drawing on the sociology of time, I argue that Radcliffe dramatizes a conflict between two competing temporal modes: sentimental time, embodied in the “moment,” and aesthetic time, embodied in the “day” and “scene.” Whereas the moment had functioned as a crucial formal principle in both sentimental fiction and empiricist philosophy, for Radcliffe it becomes a threatening emblem of social fragmentation and psychic disintegration. Udolpho contrasts the fragmentary moment with the unifying, aestheticized forms of the “day” and the “scene,” developed in the protagonist’s encounters with sublime and picturesque landscapes. However, if aesthetic time reestablishes a sense of harmony, it also entails an escape from the conflicts of social life and the temporal character of narrative itself. I conclude that the multiplication of temporal forms in Udolpho is intimately linked with anxieties about both social cohesion and psychological continuity in the 1790s.

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