31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Mysteries of Udolpho

Horace Walpole may have officially started the gothic romance genre with The Castle of Otranto, but it was Ann Radcliffe who popularized it 30 years later with The Mysteries of Udolpho. It wasn't her first gothic romance, nor her last, but it was her most famous. And with her other books, Udolpho turned gothic romance into a genre that people could take seriously.

Part of how she did that was Scooby Dooing the supernatural elements. Her novels are full of supposedly haunted castles and cottages and abbeys, but there's always some kind of rational explanation for the spookiness. That gives her stories the thrill of genre books, but with the deniability that they're not really genre books. Literature Snobs are not a new phenomenon.

The other thing she did was include large sections of poetry and travelogue-like descriptions of landscapes. This was really well-received and Radcliffe inspired other writers as diverse and important as Walter Scott and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. However, it does make her kind of slog for modern readers. At least, it did for this modern reader.

Hanging out. Talking about nature.

Udolpho is the story a young woman named Emily St Aubert, whose father passes away and leaves her in the care of her aunt. Before this happens, she takes trips with Dad and they look at a lot of nature and talk about nature and at some point meet a handsome, nature-loving man who'll become important later. Oh, and Emily's mom also died and Emily lost a locket. There's a lot of setup in this thing.

Unfortunately, Emily's Aunt Cheron doesn't really like nature or looking at nature or talking about nature, so she and Emily don't get along. Worse than that, Madame Cheron is a gold-digger and marries a mysterious guy named Montoni who claims to be Italian nobility. But Montoni is actually broke and also looking for a way to make a quick buck. He's got his eye on marrying Emily to a different nobleman to hook into that money, but when Montoni learns that there's no fortune to be had there either, he retreats with the women to his remote castle of Udolpho to figure out a new plan.

What he comes up with is to try to force Madame Cheron in signing over some property to him. And while he's working on that (by imprisoning her in a tower of the castle), Emily has time to investigate various Mysteries of Udolpho. It gets more complicated from there, with Emily's discovering another prisoner in the castle and eventually escaping with him. I'm skipping a lot of stuff about secret portraits and locked doors, but that's to keep from having to also talk about Italian politics and extended trips to the countryside that also take place around that same time.

Emily meets some forest bandits.

And we're not done once she leaves either. After that, she meets some friends of her fellow escapee and uncovers a whole other set of mysteries at their house. Except that they're actually tied into Udolpho and this convent that Emily and her dad stayed at one time and whatever happened to that handsome, nature-loving guy from earlier?

Udolpho is the only Radcliffe novel I've read, and for years I claimed that it would be my last. I had to force myself through its 700 pages, enjoying the parts where the plot actually moves, but hating the long passages of unnecessary backstory and details about scenery. I think I might need to give it another chance, though. From a different point of view, what I thought was endlessly dull could also be described as luxuriously immersive. Radcliffe invites requires you to spend a lot of time in her story with her characters and you can either begrudge that or give in to it. I made my choice at the time. I wonder if it's possible to go back and do it the other way.

I don't know that I'll revisit Udolpho soon, but I'm easing back from my decision to not read any more of Radcliffe's stuff. I'll talk a little about The Italian tomorrow, a book of hers that I put on my To Read list at the same time as Udolpho and have since taken off. I might need to give that one a shot, with the foreknowledge that it won't be as face-paced or thrill-filled as The Castle of Otranto.

Whaaaat?!

Why I Watch Under the Dome [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Damon Knight once reviewed a book thusly: "a plot that is kept in motion solely by the fact that everyone involved is an idiot." That very phrase could be applied to Under the Dome. Let's be honest right up front. Under the Dome is probably the stupidest show on TV. Any reasonable person would say - even science fiction and horror fans who have a much higher resistance to silliness - this show is garbage, let's watch something else. Despite this voice of reason in my head (and my wife's voice in my ears), I watch it anyway.

In Season One we had faith in Stephen King. We thought, okay this is strange but slowly we will get answers. At this point we thought, "King has a plan." We trusted him because he gave us so many great thrills in the past. And there was a book - which I haven't read - but perusing its pages I see familiar names and characters, even if they've been changed a bit. (Though I noticed the show was never sold as Stephen King's Under the Dome. Oddly, Steven Spielberg hasn't been very vocal about his involvement either. Hmm...) Still, 11.2 million viewers in Season One.

During Season Two, things begin to fall off the tracks. Stephen King writes and does a cameo in the opening episode and we hang on tight, hoping things will improve. (This episode was by far the best of the series. Even if the whole show falls into a smouldering pile of rubble, we will still have Season 2, Episode 1.) For example, characters start having things happen to them because, well, something has to happen this episode. My favorite of these MacGuffins is when Julia and Barbie crash in the ambulance and Julia gets a piece of rebar through her leg, then they re-enact a seen from James Cameron's The Abyss. Does it further the story of Chester's Mill? Not at all. Does it give Barbie a chance to be heroic, of course. But you know it's filler. Still 7.2 million viewers...

Worse yet, the woman who was shot twice in the chest and had rebar shoved through her leg will be up and running around Nancy Drew-style for the rest of the season. Each season is a week in the life of Chester's Mill and in Season Three (a week later), Julia's all better and the bandage over her jeans (that's all you need for a rebar puncture, I guess) is there, but it's on the wrong leg at one point and pretty much forgotten.

And that's when you realize what Under the Dome is. Like Lost before it, with its ever-shifting ideas, you see the truth. It's Varney the Vampire time. Under the Dome is a modern penny dreadful. (I'm not referring to the show Penny Dreadful, which is probably my favorite show this year. I have only the highest respect for John Logan.) I mean it is the television form of the old penny dreadfuls or penny bloods as they were known. These cheap serials were sold to the masses at a time when novels were very expensive. The average three part novel (The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example) was published in separate parts and sold largely to libraries. The wealthy or middle class didn't buy the books, but paid for a yearly subscription to mobile libraries. So if you had money, you only had to wait three times for the whole story. But if you were poor, you paid a penny a week and got the story a hundredth at a time. Or in the case of Varney, 220ths at a time. Anyone reading the story in this fashion could not be expected to remember all the details. And they certainly expected something to happen in each chapter.

The penny bloods offered up characters like Varney the Vampire by Thomas Preskett Prest (or James Malcolm Rymer, you decide) with 876 double-sided pages equalling 667,000 words. (To put that in perspective, that's the length of two GRR Martin Song of Fire and Ice books.) There was also Wagner the Wehr-Wolf by George WM Reynolds at over 211,000 words. This seems less impressive but Reynolds also wrote The Mysteries of London at a whopping two and half million words. Writing this kind of story required the author to add more and more incidents, dropping story lines, adding new characters. Sound familiar?

Despite having the ability to remember what happened in Episode 1, Under the Dome fans don't bother to recall certain details. Like the fact that Big Jim Renny has murdered a lot of people to keep his illegal gas business secret. That he converted to believing the Dome was heaven-sent and needed to be worshipped. That he got the egg outside the Dome. None of that matters. All you need to know in Season Three is he is one of the Good Guys, interfering with the alien-possessed Kinship, led by Marg Helgenberger's character, Christine. (Helgenberger should be familiar with King-style alien takeovers, because she was in the miniseries of The Tommyknockers in 1993.) Can't keep up? It doesn't matter, because something else will happen this week. An apocalypse may wipe out the world outside the dome. Or not, depending on which week you watch. By next season (if God help us there is a Season Four!) it will al be co-opted by a new explanation.

And that's why I watch Under the Dome. I may be one of the dwindling numbers, (down twenty percent from last week's episode), but I watch to see how crazy it will be this week. What previous story details will be conveniently ignored? Which of the good guys will become bad guys and vice versa? I sit there, daring the writers to outrage me. To come up with the crazy, stupidest crap imaginable. It's not what TV is supposed to be, but this is the 19th Century - I mean, 21st Century. (And if I get tired of it I can always go watch The Strain. Del Toro wrote three books and the show has a plan!) The penny dreadful has returned and it is called Under the Dome!

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.