Multiple Reading Personalities

“As her sight glanced again upon the grave, she could not forbear enquiring, for whom it was prepared. He took his eyes from the torch, and fixed them upon her face without speaking.”

Strike 3 for the R.I.P. Challenge! The most authentic gothic novel in my reading list, The Mysteries of Udolpho is book-ended by scenes of simple happiness in the Gascony house of the Saint-Aubert family; in between these, much travel, much adversity and many preposterous twists and turns sprawl on the pages of Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 novel. There’s good fun to be had in dark castles and secret passages, among mysterious voices and ghostly apparitions, but there’s also a quantity of unnecessary devices and digressions. If a modern editor were to travel back in time and inform Radcliffe that more is not always better – and if she also decided to put in a good word for consistency in point of view – I believe I would be a perfectly content reader.

When we first meet Emily Saint-Aubert, she seems to have the perfect life: loving and wise parents, a comfortable house with a well-stocked library, a lovely park. Emily is her parents’ only surviving child, having lost two brothers a few years back (an information given by Radcliffe with amusing  offhand brutality:  after describing a charming pastoral scene, she mentions that Emily’s father’s “first interruptions to the happiness […] since his retirement were occasioned by the death of his two sons”). This last is an example of unnecessary information. Nobody in the novel cares, neither therefore does the reader, and the fact has no bearing on the plot. Why bother?

The first seven chapters are similarly protracted, and I frankly felt that they belonged to the back-story, or at the very least should have been summarized in one chapter. In jest, Emily’s parents both die, leaving her in an embarrassed financial situation, and she meets a young man, Valancourt, whom she is attracted to. That’s it for the plot – the rest is all description of nature, gay peasant dances (I kid you not) and philosophical musings. One of these asides was about Emily’s education, in particular about teaching her to govern her sensitivity (Emily’s father teaches her that “sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions” and illustrates his point with the example of “persons [who] turn from the distressed […] because their sufferings are painful to be contemplated”). This type of moral education, so obvious until the 19^th century, seems to have gone out of fashion with the emergence of the ideas of “teaching by example”, “letting children become themselves”, and probably with the idea that human beings are born good (merci Rousseau!). I for one feel that I would have benefited to be taught what to do with excessive sensitivity – or with laziness, vanity, discouragement, etc. – but I’m not sure how other modern readers would enjoy these passages.

So back to the action: it picks up when the now-orphaned Emily is assigned to the care of her aunt, Mme Cheron. A silly, insensitive woman who delights in having power over others, she immediately indulges her petty impulses by coming between Emily and Valancourt. She also marries an Italian nobleman of suspicious character, and takes Emily away to Italy. There, amid enemies sly or brutal, Emily will have to fight for her virtue and her happiness in settings ranging from magnificent Venice palazzi to a ruined gothic fortress in the Apennines (and more – it is the rare chapter that doesn’t involve some change of setting). Bucolic promenades finally give way to treason and supernatural apparitions. The story from this point on is convoluted and coincidental to the point of absurdity, but with such lavish imagination, the only way to not enjoy oneself is to be impervious to the genre entirely. Of course, in the end, reason (if not probability) and courage will prevail, the worthy will be rewarded and villains will be punished.

I think it might read Radcliffe again in the future, but with a slightly different approach. As a writer, she is able of surgical wit, especially when criticizing fashionable society (for instance: “Madame Clairval, though a woman of fashion, was far less advanced than her friend in the art of deriving satisfaction from distinction and admiration, rather than from conscience”, or “the party continued to converse, and, as far as civility would permit, to torture each other by mutual boasts”); this ability to encapsulate realms of meaning in a short sentence sometimes even shines through without irony, an even rarer gift (for instance, when talking about the process of falling in love, she mentions “the danger of sympathy and silence”). She is unfortunately also inclined to great enthusiasm and lengthy descriptions for all things nature and heroines “full of timid sweetness” – not my cup of tea. I might just skip these passages in the future, as I skipped a majority of the poetry - editing as I read, in a way.

“Arm yourself, my dear child, for the worst; and resolve to lose your life sooner than your virtue.”

I am afraid Pamela will not be treated here with my customary enthusiasm… In short I found it a very silly book. I could have stretched my tolerance to accept its trying morals as being simply outdated, but the writing itself (long-winded, pretentious and frankly repetitive) did not help much. In the end I was pretty much reduced to use Pamela as a learning aid for such expressions as “sauce-box” (impertinent) or “rake” (libertine). It would be a lie to pretend that I did not take the party of the rakes against the sauce-box more than once.

Pamela is a fifteen year-old maid and protegee to Mrs B, an apparently excellent woman, who recommends her to the care of his son with her dying breath. Alas! The young Mr. B, though perfection itself in every other regard (by which apparently Richardson means fortune, birth and beauty) is not as serious as he should be. Pamela’s attractions decide him to have her; but the girl is virtuous, and will not succumb to seduction. As it is quite unimaginable to court a servant, and even more that he should renounce his pleasures, he then decides to rape her. Alas again, he does not manage it: Pamela keeps fainting with fear, and apparently his delicacy will not accept an unconscious unwilling partner. Over the course of many, many letters written by Pamela, we learn of all Mr. B’s tricks and of her imprisonment in not one, but two of his houses. Friends betray her, bad advice is given, fear and promises are alternatively pressed on her, but Pamela never falters in her resolution to be dead rather than lost. This admirable behavior, coupled from everything he learned from reading her letters, finally overcomes the last of Mr. B’s reticence, and he marries her in an effusion of feelings.

Beyond the stilted writing of a beginning author and the outdated morality of the book, I took issue mainly with the protagonists. Mr. B I think I need not dwell on. As for Pamela, her virtue is unassailable, and she is presented as a paragon of all that is good in a woman: yet she appears coquettish (always very aware of her clothes and beauty, though to protest to the contrary at all times), judgmental (“Sir Simon, it seems“, says she, ” who has been a sad rake in his younger days” before treating him as one) and quite a gossip. She also lacks sadly in intelligence, if not in invention: she can envision nothing more beautiful than a future spent toiling by her poor parents’ side, never thinking of any other plan than to join them, and resisting Mr. B rather in all the right ways to excite his ardors. There’s not one original thought in her: presumably I should blame it on the author rather than on her (I guess he thought it the height of art to inform us that she was very good looking by having her protest at lengths others’ reports of it), but the result is the same annoyance.

Part of the problem springs from the work being a morality piece for a public expected to be unsubtle (young women); a contributing factor is that Richardson was so intent on creating a young and modest Pamela that he did not realize her naivete made for a very dull narrator. I love epistolary novels, but they’re easier to read when their voices are those of brilliant cynics like Choderlos de Laclos’s characters than when they are insubstantial little prudes such as Pamela.

“Crois-tu qu’on puisse être bien tendre lorsqu’on manque de pain?”

What has come over the young Chevalier Des Grieux? He is a young, gifted gentleman noted for his virtue and his intellect; yet the moment he sets sight on Manon Lescaut, reason deserts him, and he embarks upon a life as — in turns — a libertine, a cardsharp, a prisoner, a murderer, and finally an exile cast away to the French colonies in America.

L’Abbé Prévost introduces the reader to Des Grieux at a low point in his life: Manon has been sentenced to deportation for immoral behavior, and he is following her – and taking much abuse from her guards while doing it, as he doesn’t have sufficient funds to bribe there anymore. On seeing his state of despair, Renoncour – the gentleman who introduces the story – offers some financial relief which Des Grieux accepts gratefully. They meet again a few years later in Paris: Des Grieux is back from America where Manon died an untimely death, and rewards the generosity of his benefactor with the tale of his life.

Said life appears to be uneventful to the point of blandness until the 17-year old Des Grieux happens on Manon as she is preparing to enter a convent. She too is from a good family, and her parents have decided to shelter her from the worldly temptations she already seems all too likely to succumb to. Des Grieux falls in love at first sight. The pair decides to flee to Paris to get married and start a life together. Alas, they cannot contain themselves and become lovers long before reaching their destination, apparently a major impediment to marriage. They nonetheless decide on living in sin together. It is soon apparent that poverty is threatening, a problem Manon quickly solves by dumping the Chevalier for a richer lover. The Chevalier is betrayed to his father, who arranges to have him kidnapped and sequestered for a while, that he might recover his sense of propriety. The harsh medicine seems to work when Des Grieux takes up studying theology in the hope of a clerical life. Manon however finds him again, and they resume their relationship. This time, Des Grieux realizes how important financial safety is to Manon and stops at nothing to ensure it, becoming a professional grifter. However, when Manon and he get robbed, she once again slips between his fingers to remake their fortune through the generosity of another. The same misadventures is repeated several times, with Des Grieux resorting to more and more dramatic solutions to be reunited with his mistress, until at last Manon is banished and the Chevalier decides to follow her. In New-Orleans, far from the temptations of the world, it seems for a while that they will finally live a life of honor of virtue, but when they seek to crown it with a legal union, the nephew of the governor of the colony seizes the news that Manon is not legally married to claim her hand. Des Grieux and Manon flee, and she dies in the wilderness, finally leaving him free to go back to France, to an honorable life – and to solitude.

Manon Lescaut would seem a fairly inconsequential book but for two innovations in a female character: Manon evolve in the book, and she is a mix of good intentions and weaknesses. That the realization is rather heavy-handed, making her a stilted character, does not alter the historic significance of the intent. Moreover, whether that was the intention of the writer or not, one cannot but be struck by the differences in status of the Chevalier and Manon: despite being of comparable birth (a point one should not underestimate given the casual abuse, including murder, that Prévost, without a second thought, heaps on his less distinguished secondary characters), it is clear at every turn that Manon is lost the minute she flees the convent life, whereas all Des Grieux ever has to do is to give her up to find his old life waiting for him. He is born noble, and is received everywhere and given money and assistance by perfect strangers on this basis; she has nothing but her sexual power, and while she can get extravagantly paid for it, it can just as easily be used to cast her in the worse prisons.

All in all the literary merits of the book are nothing extraordinary, neither in the positive nor in the negative, though I always enjoy a little dose of XVIII century French for sheer exoticism of it, and the morale seems fairly outdated today; it is however a good reminder of where women stood only 3 centuries ago in our very progressive world.