Natural Woman: Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho

Female authorship during the 18th century provides a complicated discourse for the role of women in arts and literature and this role’s reflection on the societal struggles of women at this time.  Throughout numerous works written by female writers a tension exists between the creative integrity of the author and what is deemed acceptable for them to write. In many of these writings this tension materializes through the use of dichotomous realms, virtues, and ideals.  One such female writer, Anne Radcliffe, uses Gothic literary traditions and welds them into a subtly subversive work in The Mysteries of Udolpho.  The role of patriarchy and the dominance of women are extremely prevalent in Gothic literature as a whole, so is the supernatural realm.  Radcliffe utilizes these traditions and rebelliously transforms their roles to fit into the dichotomy of female and male, using it as a social commentary on the oppression of women and the female mind.  In this novel the roles of the supernatural realm pairs up with all that is manmade and fabricated, as they are all first constructed in the minds of man, and then manifested into some kind of reality.

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the manmade and the supernatural are all sources of anxiety, fear, and anguish for the protagonist, Emily, so are the men around her.  However, the natural realm acts as a source of comfort to her, the same type of comfort she seeks and occasionally receives from her only female companions, Madame Montoni and Annette.  Therefore a metaphor is constructed with the natural realm acting as a source of feminine power and the manmade, supernatural realms acting as a source of patriarchal control.