Strange Embedded Fellows: The Socio-Narrative Radicalism of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Romance

Through a close narratological analysis of Ann Radcliffe's romances, this thesis will demonstrate that the form of Radcliffe's novels is fundamentally linked to her contemporary cultural contexts. Although traditional criticism of Radcliffe rather dubiously labels her a conservative writer and regularly cites her heroines and servants as idealized and submissive stock devices, this project will demonstrate that her characters have significant subversive agency based in narrative structure, which subtly points to the radicalism of Radcliffe's politics. These conventional readings of Radcliffe's novels have too long separated the concerns of servants, women, and Radcliffe's own politics. It is only when we integrate the three concerns that we may arrive at a comprehensive appreciation of Radcliffe's politics and her complex design. This project will demonstrate that Ann Radcliffe is surprisingly radical in her social politics and in her use of narrative structure as a covert device. A new class of character function, the intratextual director of narrative action, will serve as the basis for identifying these nuanced moves by Radcliffe. Throughout Radcliffe's canon, the intratextual director of narrative action is a visible and subversive use of character function that promotes the agency of women and servants in a deep plot mode. In order to determine the pervasiveness and relative significance of this narrative device in her canon, this thesis closely analyzes a survey of Radcliffe's novels. This narratological inquiry into the social politics of Radcliffe's romances will trace the progression of this functional role played by women and servant characters throughout her early, middle, and later novels. Specifically, this investigation will demonstrate that there is a conscious shift in the relationships between the women and servants, which suggests greater autonomy for the servant character as an intratextual director of narrative action. Ultimately, the objective of her novels' complex narrative structure is to prove that the speech rights denied to women and peasants along with the social stratification dating from the medieval feudal hierarchy necessitate the revolutionary climate of Western Europe.