Todorov's The Fantastic, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Deferred Desire

               In The Fantastic (1970/5), Tzvetan Todorov constructs the literary genre of the fantastic in terms of the “hesitation” a narrative provokes in its reader when the events of that narrative break the laws of physics and/or reality as the reader knows them. For Todorov, the entire genre of what contemporary audiences would call “the supernatural” boils down to an interval of time, short or long, wherein the reader and sometimes the protagonist has to question what is “real.” Given that all literature plays on this question, language’s capacity and incapacity to render the truth, and its potential for producing whole new species of truth (“true” within the fictional universe of the story, non-literal figurative images etc.), Todorov, at times, flirts with the idea that the “fantastic” and therefore the supernatural is at the heart of literature generally.

               Dealing in representations that vary in their connection to a lived “reality,” Todorov adds that the fantastic is associated with motifs of abjected, repressed, and marginalized desires. The reader and/or protagonist, inside an interval period where the distinction between real and unreal is up for grabs, can experience a taboo without its repercussions, because, in fact, even when the taboo-ed behavior at least appears to happen, it might not be real. And if it is “real” in some sense then it is cast as horrific and re-abjected. As far as normativity-and-transgression is concerned, the fantastic acts as a zone of plausible deniability and narrative “red light district” where the reader and protagonist might take pleasure in what is elsewhere inconceivable.

               Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), the very apex of the Gothic novel, where disembodied voices and ominous music provoke the protagonist, Emily Aubert, to question whether she is being haunted by a ghost, sits firmly within Todorov’s fantastic (41-2). Given that the phenomena that elicit Emily’s hesitation turn out to be generated by forces that do not break any laws of physics, Udolpho represents the “uncanny” sub-species of the genre. The “uncanny,” nowadays, is probably best represented by the modern day children’s gothic, Scooby Doo Where Are  You?, an animated cartoon where at the end of each episode, a rock band of canny (and probably very horny, very perverse) teenagers discover that a given supernatural manifestation is, in fact, the ruse of a very natural, if extraordinarily hokey, criminal mind. If the ghosts in Scooby or Udolpho were in fact real and the supernatural existed beside the natural in its own right, as in The Monk, then Todorov explains, those narratives would participate in the “marvelous.” Either way, the genre’s play within a liminal space where appearance and “reality” are disjointed is a perfect opportunity for representing abjected desires without committing them to or in “reality.”       

               In Udolpho, the abject desires expressed are incest, homosexuality, and rogue heterosexuality. Emily Aubert, upon the death of her mother, shares an especially close relationship to her father that’s sentimental sensuousness borders on the erotic. Emily’s more or less kosher relationship with the young Valancourt doesn't supercede or block but rather re-signifies the incestuous bond between her and her father. Valancourt and Emily’s relationship is rendered in terms of Edenic – read: sinless – sentiment; they appear “like two lovers who had never strayed beyond these their native mountains.” (49) But this Eighteenth century Adam and Eve are not alone in their mountainous, Burke-ean garden. Valancourt, after all, is in fact, St. Aubert’s friend, and the three often wander the mountains together. If Emily and Valancourt are, as the narrative says, a “romantic picture of felicity,” it is Emily’s father that composes the picture, his point of view that gives it its frame. It’s sin and incest – or at least the desire for them - that inscribes and produces sinless sentiment.  

               Like the painter in Las Meninas, St Aubert disappears from his own painting as he is rendering it only occasionally invading his creation when he stops to inspect its progress. If, as Foucault says, Las Meninas’ circular contortion of perspective that captures its own production is emblematic of modernism generally, than perhaps what I am getting at is that Udolpho similarly renders a distinctly “modern” view of desire that positions legitimate desire as surreptitiously produced by an only intermittently visible taboo, which begs the question: Am I trying to pull a “Claude-Levi Strauss” on Anne Radcliffe?”

               If St. Aubert paints the picture of Valancourt and Emily’s relationship, and as the painter, he is positioned outside or at the margins of his own production then Aubert also maintains his presence even when painting (that is: not visible in his own production) WITHIN the painting by rendering the young Valancourt as his own youthful stand-in. “I remember when I was his age,” says Aubert, “and I thought and felt exactly as he does. The world was opening upon me then – it is closing (now).” Given that Aubert describes Valancourt, his daughter’s only suitor, as a younger version of himself, it’s not a huge logical leap to conclude that Aubert, in some way, positions himself as his own daughter’s suitor.

               What’s funny is the way Aubert displaces the kinship taboo with a concern as to age and health. It’s not his paternal relationship to Emily that distinguishes him from Emily’s lover, it is his age, as if to say: “the only reason I’m not hitting on my own daughter is that I am too old for her.” Valancourt isn’t a more appropriate suitor for Emily because he isn’t related to her, he is more appropriate because he is younger. Aubert’s incestuous desire generates and structures a more appropriate heterosexuality via Valancourt-as-proxy and then displaces itself with a less controversial difference, that of age.

               St. Aubert triangulates a relationship between his own younger self, Valancourt, and his daughter in such a way as to express or maybe gratify his incestuous desire for Emily. However, at the same time, Aubert seems to position Emily to triangulate his desire for Valancourt, whose presence he finds especially, errr, stimulating. “There is something in the ardour and ingenousness of youth,” Aubert gushes over Valancourt, “which is pleasing to the contemplation of an old man . . . it is cheering and reviving . . . his mind catches somewhat of the spirit of the season, and his eyes are lighted up with a transient sunshine. Valancourt is the spring to me.” (57) Now, there might be something of the “sweet old man” to St. Aubert’s feelings for Valancourt, but Aubert’s delectation of Valancourt’s mind comes off like Platonic pederasty and his going on about the “transient sunshine” in Valancourt’s eyes gives a distinctly “Death in Venice" kind of feeling. Aubert’s homosocial fondness for Valancourt could plausibly indicate a very sexual desire.

               Aubert’s desire for Valancourt is not seemlessly sublimated through Emily’s desire.  Later on in the text, Emily’s desire will serve as an indirect sign of Aubert’s. After St. Aubert dies, Emily is assigned to the care of her aunt, Madam Cheron. Cheron is pretty vile. She occupies the "corrupt older woman" role so recurrent in early novels of sentiment. Cheron, like Madame Delacourt in Belinda and Mrs. Duval in Evelina, both covets and resents the heroine, Emily’s, youth and innocence. The inter-generational conflict between women – really maybe just jealousy - is a pretty strong through line in these novels, but in Udolpho especially, it serves to high-light the circuits of desire described above. Valancourt, faithful to Emily, pursues her even after her father’s death. But, like a good sentimental heroine, Emily will not receive Valancourt’s advances without the approval of her guardian. And his visit results in her, despite her feelings for him, mostly looking away and blushing. Nevertheless, Cheron ignores Emily’s respectful restraint and tries to make her feel like a heartless whore.    

'So, niece!' said Madame Cheron, casting a look of surprise and

enquiry on Valancourt, 'so niece, how do you do?  But I need not ask,

your looks tell me you have already recovered your loss.'

'My looks do me injustice then, Madame, my loss I know can never be

recovered.'

'Well--well!  I will not argue with you;  I see you have exactly your

father's disposition; and let me tell you it would have been much

happier for him, poor man! if it had been a different one.' (57)

This scene is interesting because Cheron – irrespective of Emily’s selfless and deferent behavior - obviously resents the fact that Emily is attractive to young men like Valancourt, and tries to make her feel the less for it. Cheron, while Valancourt is still in the room, implies that the interest Emily is in fact curbing for Valancourt constitutes wanton disrespect for her father, that Emily does not grieve her father's loss or regret his passing. In short, Cheron tries to make the prospect of Emily’s happiness morally culpable. But this is just cunty bullshit designed to embarrass and shame Emily. And Madame Cheron knows it. Madame Cheron, being able to read Emily’s desire for Valancourt on Emily’s blushed face, is sensitive – if not sentimental – when it comes to desire. It is meaningful then, that at the same moment that Cheron clocks Emily’s desire for Valancourt, she says “I see you have exactly your father’s disposition.” If Aubert positioned Emily as his proxy in creating a romantic triangulation with Valancourt, then Cheron does the equal and opposite operation, identifying Emily’s desire (for Valancourt) as shared with her father. On one level, Cheron is saying, yes, Emily and her father share the “disposition of sensibility” Cheron so loathes. But in another, more indirect, more Sedgwick-ian way, Cheron is marking Emily and her father’s shared disposition towards young men. The importance of the indirect, the negative, and the ambiguous trace of a queerness sequestered in all kinds of epistemological binds, closets, and silences from overt expression is a consistent theme in queer theory from Sedgwick’s foundational Epistemology of the Closet to Amy Villarejo's cutting edge Lesbian Rule, and Cheron’s monstrously cutting stunt is just such an indirect, elliptical reading. Not only is Emily a horrible daughter and a blush-marked whore, Cheron is saying, but her dead father was a similarly blushing queer.     

               Of course, Aubert’s triangulated and sublimated homosexuality is subject to a narcissistic slippage. If Aubert positions Valancourt as his own youthful self in terms of his daughter and then positions his daughter as a proxy for enacting his romantic feelings for Valancourt then Aubert is, by extension, also expressing a desire for his own youthful self. St. Aubert’s two triangulated projects meet forming a self-referential "closed-circle triangle." Aubert desires himself.

               Here, one could split hairs, and say that perhaps Aubert doesn’t so much want to make love to his younger self but in fact wants to be young again. To that Supercuts hair technician I would suggest, along with the feminist psychoanalyst Young-Bruehl, that those two desires can never be completely teased from one another, that they constitute a hair that never fully splits, because sexual desire is often at least partially an expression of the desire to not only possess but “be” the loved object. St. Aubert, the philosopher of sentiment who exults in lived sensation, cannot fully inure himself to the prospect of diminished and finally extinguished sensation and so constructs interlocking identifications that allow him at least the phantastic prospect of reclaiming his youth. But this phantasy apparatus of identification and sublimation subsumes both Emily and Valancourt as proxies for himself. Seen in a certain way, there is no one left but St. Aubert. And that Udolpho’s gloss on desire as structural, triangulated, and always deferred through sublimation, points to modernity’s always incomplete complication and interpenetration of desire and identity. What is "uncanny" about Udolpho is not so much the horror we feel at doubting our faith in the predictability of the natural world, but the ways in which that world, no matter what our desires, continually returns us to the space of deferral that not only holds in tension the real and the unreal, but represents as two sides of the same coin the self and that which the self desires.