"Sublime and Word-Painting in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho"

The word-painting technique is a verbal transposition − via detailed descriptive passages − of ‘pictorial’ and ‘cinematic’ scenes. The Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe was perhaps the first practitioner of the word-painting technique in fiction. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, Radcliffe undertook to provide verbal renderings of Italian landscapes (i.e., the Alps, Venice, the Apennines), despite the fact she had never been to Italy. For this reason, in order to describe these scenes, she was forced to refer to travel books and, most crucially, to some paintings. A critical commonplace about The Mysteries of Udolpho is the influence on its prose style of landscape painters such as Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, Domenichino . A closer examination reveals that Radcliffe’s word-paintings are characterized by a double textual attitude, cinematic (with the subdivision in dynamic and static) and pictorial. Far from being simple annotations of natural details, Radcliffe’s cinematic and pictorial descriptive passages - often referred to as anticipations of typical Romantic strategies - reproduce a reader-centred visual experience. Radcliffe employs them to move the focus from the writer to the reader. Instead of pre-romantic, in many respects Radcliffe’s prose may be considered as post-romantic, since it is reader-centred. Rather than expressing her own feelings, Radcliffe teaches us to see, and her word-painting technique helps to the reader improve his/her comprehension of the external world by attaining a more meticulous visual awareness of its phenomena. Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho today is probably out of fashion, but at its best – and in the right amount − it still may well be a successful route to achieving a deeper understanding and an ‘eye’ for the outer world.