A Map to the Panorama: Intellectualized Vision and the Unrestrained Power of Shifting Forms in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

Abstract

The chapter examines the modalities of vision and the distinctive discursive fields charted by Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho to posit in literature a print-based mechanical apparatus of vision that is crucial in the definition of the observer at what is perceived the crucial divide between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century modalities of vision. The chapter questions the model of immersive realism provided by the camera obscura to describe the extended descriptions of landscapes that punctuate the novel and rather tracks how reality is constructed through the subjective alignment of perception along the combined impact of aesthetic theory and older print media, such as cartography and the printed guide to the earliest panoramas. The chapter argues that the phantasmagoria effect appearing among the visual phenomena experienced inside the castle constitutes the affirmation of the potential disruption of a new economic order, which the teleological triumph of aristocratic sentimentality and the discourse of domesticity and rationalism somehow dispel.