Invalidation and the Education of Emily St. Aubert
Laura was told that, if she ever wanted to secure the tenure-track job of her dreams, she needed to convince a certain high-profile professor to serve as her dissertation advisor. That’s how she ended up like Emily St. Aubert—the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho whose life is dominated by one very imposing figure. Find out exactly what makes these figures so imposing and how each heroine makes her escape in this chapter of My Gothic Dissertation.
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Footnotes
15:46 – “Over the years, several critics have pointed out that The Mysteries of Udolpho can be read as a kind of bildungsroman—a story of education, or the forming of a sense of self as Elzy would say—since the narrative primarily follows Emily St. Aubert’s maturation from innocence to experience.”
For instance, see Pierre Arnaud, “Emily ou de le’éducation: The Mysteries of Udolpho, Bildungsroman féminin (Bulletin de la Société d’Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siécles 43 [Nov 1996]: 39-50), and Isabelle Naginski, “Consuelo and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt: From Gothic Novel to Novel of Initiation” in The World of George Sand, eds. Natalie Datlof, Jeanne Fuchs, David A. Powell (New York: Greenwood, 1991): 107-117. In “From Emile to Frankenstein: The Education of Monsters” (European Romantic Review 1.2 [1994]), Alan Richardson argues convincingly that the typical Gothic novel is essentially an education narrative. He points specifically to The Mysteries of Udolpho, claiming that its “thematization of pedagogy […] helps bring out the element of social criticism implicit in its opposition of naïve heroines and knowing villains, who often (like Montoni) assume a paternal position, suggesting the line between pedagogy and tyranny is an uncomfortably fine and unstable one, particularly given the agenda for perpetuating male domination built into most of the period’s programs for female education” (148). In Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (Leicester UP, 1999), Rictor Norton goes so far as to call Radcliffe’s novels Künstlerroman, because their “central importance lay in the fact that their heroines are themselves literary creators, not passive women whose sole function is to be either educated or abused by men” (85).
16:02 – “Although of course Ann Radcliffe would never have used that term [emotional invalidation], that doesn’t mean she hadn’t witnessed or experienced the phenomenon herself.”
In Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester UP, 1995), Robert Miles characterizes Radcliffe as a sharp social critic with “a hard edge, one sharpened by the robust, liberal, critical energies of the dissenting ‘middle classes’ to which she belonged” (4). He also argues that Radcliffe’s novels “belong within the category of the ‘aesthetically satisfying’” because they “make power visible in unexpected ways” (19).
19:37 – “[Emily’s father] uses the very same language Montoni will later echo.”
In Literature, Education, and Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 1994), Richardson makes a similar point: “The power/knowledge dynamic underlying the relation of Emily St. Aubert and her father is structurally cognate with that which facilitates Emily’s exploitation by the villain Montoni, who cruelly plays on this resemblance, taking on the voice of the father-instructor, when she balks at his designs” (204).
31:23 – “In another recent article, Skakni studied the reasons behind people’s decisions to pursue doctoral education, and she found that, for many, the Ph.D. is a kind of ‘quest for the self.’”
According to Skakni’s research in “Reasons, motives, and motivations for completing a PhD: a typology of doctoral studies as a quest, (Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education 9.2 [2018]: 197-212), this is especially true for first-generation students who see the Ph.D. as a route to self-actualization or social mobility. She reports that they also tend to be highly vulnerable to criticism (206).
45:48 – “But maybe that feeling of frustration over her continued entrapment is, in the end, what we’re supposed to walk away with as readers.”
There is an ongoing debate among scholars whether Radcliffe’s stance on gender politics—and the commentary on gender politics within the Gothic genre at large—is conservative or progressive. See, for instance, Charlie Bondhus “Sublime Patriarchs and the New Middle Class in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian” (Gothic Studies 12.1 [May 2010]:13–32); JoEllen DeLucia, “From the Female Gothic to a Feminist Theory of History: Ann Radcliffe and the Scottish Enlightenment” (The Eighteenth Century 50.1 [Spring 2009]: 101–115); Lauren Fitzgerald “Female Gothic and the Institutionalisation of Gothic Studies (Gothic Studies 6.1 [May 2014]: 8–18); Diane Long Hoeveler, “The Construction of the Female Gothic Posture: Wollestonecraft’s Mary and Gothic Feminism” (Gothic Studies 6.1 [May 2014]: 30-44).