Rethinking Enlightenment ideas of the “horrible” in the novels of Ann Radcliffe

The article explores the premises of “horror” in the three most famous novels of Ann Radcliffe. Despite her reputation as the “Great Enchantress” and an advocate of sublime awe (terror), Radcliffe often lets her protagonists experience real horror, which, by her own definition, “contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates” mental faculties. Her vision of the “horrible” appears, in my opinion, innovative, that is to say pre-romantic, when compared with the aesthetic concepts of the Enlightenment. In the 18th century the “horrible” (that mostly mingled with the “terrible”) was considered (by Addison, Burke, Lessing, Kant, Schiller) as a derivative of the “sublime”, i.e. as a physical phenomenon whose power and size surpasses that of human beings. Besides, the “horrible” should contradict the self-preservation instinct, being perceived as a physical threat. Apparently, Radcliffe departs from the classical explanation of horror. Her heroines are not horrified by gigantic and enormously powerful forces - both in natural (panoramic and stormy landscapes) and social (mighty “villains”) environments. They show a lot of poise in the face of physical danger, whether actual (temporary imprisonment) or potential (death, injury, rape). Instead, pure “horror”, marked by stupor, muteness and paroxysms, can be observed in “mystical” episodes, which thematize “encounters” with the [un]dead - a ghost or a cadaver. Here, protagonists face such relics of the past, that have been excluded from the renewal cycle and that have not yet turned into a passive “thing”; their “residual” energy (“soul”), manifests itself in the swaying veils, in the disembodied voices, in the cadaveric spasms. Radcliffe’s characters are not drawn to the paternal grave by idle curiosity, rather, they need to enter into inheritance rights and to restore the interrupted generational relay race. As known, her main characters are dispossesed heirs who have lost contact with their parents: their genealogical lines were broken through a crime committed by usurpers, who murdered the testator and deprived him of funeral and grave. Thus, isolation, conservation and the following reanimation of the past (personified by older relatives, “testators”) becomes an essential premise for horror in Radcliffe’s novels; her characters are vulnerable not as much to physical dangers, but primarily to the psychophysical dependence on the [un]dead, which resembles a hypnotic rapport. What frightens them most of all is an involuntary assimilation to the elderly, the prospect of a passive, isolated, non-historical existence, which is foreshadowed by the very symptoms of horror. Different to the romantic Gothic fiction, Radcliffe’s “horrors” remain discrete experiences, they are mostly of no consequence, as common in sentimental novels. Nevertheless, her treatment of “horror” proved to be pathbreaking for the romantic “dark” tale and confirmed the writer’s fame as the “bride of romanticism”. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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