Radcliffe and the Spectral Scene of Reading

Abstract

In her 1995 study, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Terry Castle influentially interpreted Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho as symptomatic of a wide-ranging spectralization of the other marking the advent of Romanticism, and continuing unabated to the present day. Citing Philippe Ariès’s thesis that the late eighteenth century was characterized by ‘new and increasingly repressive attitudes towards death’,¹ Castle argues that Radcliffe’s writing represents a psychologically pathological blurring of the distinction between the living and the dead (136) which is symptomatic of nineteenth-century culture’s denial of mortality through its immersion in a state of ruminative reverie in which ‘objects are more compelling than people’ because, while ‘objects evoke memories, people disturb them’ (136). Castle suggests that Freudian psychoanalysis, conceived as a ‘theory of thought regulation’ (175), stands in a close and ambiguous relationship to this cultural pathology, exemplified by the way in which the ‘crucial stage in Freudian analysis is the moment of transference – when the analyst himself suddenly appears before the patient as a ghost’ (138).