Escaped: Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance

Abstract

Irigaray argues that the female body is represented as a lack or atrophy by phallogocentric discourse.¹ This lack or atrophy is represented openly in A Sicilian Romance as a result of the patriarchal suffocation of women’s desires and selves. As soon as women take matters into their own hands, this lack can be eliminated and new perspectives open up, both for the heroine and society as a whole. Radcliffe explores in fictional form what Irigaray later theorizes: ‘their fatherland, family home, discourse, imprison us [women] in enclosed spaces where we cannot keep on moving, living, as ourselves’, so how can we ‘[d]isengage ourselves, alive, from their concepts’ and achieve the positive revaluation of the feminine?² Radcliffe’s novel explores the nature of patriarchy and the male unconscious, its effects on women and children, as well as possible resistance to it.