Ann Radcliffe's _The Mysteries of Udolpho_

Yesterday I finally finished reading Ann Radcliffe's Gothic Romance The Mysteries of Udolpho on the wonderful BookGlutton website. Ann Radcliffe was an English novelist who lived between the years 1764-1823. Encouraged by her husband to write, she published a few novels and some poetry during her life. The Mysteries of Udolpho is a typical Gothic Romance with the requisite young, innocent, and naive heroine who finds her true love only to be separated from him by avaricious relatives after her parents' death. I was surprised to read that Ann Radcliffe influenced other authors such as Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Wollstonecraft--all of them among my favorite authors. Considering Radcliffe's extensive descriptions of landscape, though, I shouldn't be surprised.

As I read, I couldn't help but think about Carl Jung's theory of Archetypes and especially the anima, or feminine archetype--the soul, and the animus, or masculine archetype--logic and reason, and their eventual union in a "Holy Wedding," or coniunctio, the union of opposites. One could follow the lovers in a typical Gothic Romance, assigning the role of animus to the male, and the role of the anima to the young lady. In order for a young boy to come to full maturation, he must first go on a quest and conquer the dragon, which is really the "terrible mother" (a negative aspect of the Great Mother archetype), and usually the "old king" (usually his father, or the "old man") must die. When the boy accomplishes this, he becomes the "new man"--i.e. he becomes the fully matured man he was meant to be. Gothic Romances usually do not contain a whole lot in the vein of illustrating this process (look to the Arthurian legends for this), but they do contain a lot about the maturation process of the innocent girl. In order for a girl to become a woman, she has to accomplish tasks, which usually involves a lot of waiting around for a man to come and rescue her. Archetypically, she is really working at those things peculiarly feminine, i.e. patience, nurturance, and love, while learning the masculine art of logic and reason. When the masculine traits of logic and reason are formed in her in a healthy manner (accomplished with the help of the positive aspects of her animus), there is a union of opposites--a coniunctio oppositorum. The trick is to be able to identify both the negative and positive aspects of the archetypes. The desired coming to consciousness, or adulthood, is also a process described in alchemy, in which the prima materia, having been split into various forms, finally comes back together in a "Holy Wedding," or conjunction--coniunctio.

The Mysteries of Udolpho is full of this process, but I think it would spoil the story for you if I outlined all this. Suffice it to say that Emily St. Aubert faces her negative Great Mother, in the aspect of her aunt, and suffers terribly under the avaricious and sadistic negative animus in the aspect of Montini who marries her aunt. Fortunately, there are plenty of the positive aspects of Emily's animus who come to her rescue and help her along her path to adulthood and happiness.

Once I got past the schmaltz of Radcliffe's romantic descriptions, I really liked this book. Actually, I learned a few things in the process, too. I recommend it to your attention.

*A Glossary of Jungian Terms

Animal visitors

Since I've posted here, I have had several adventures with various animals. The first animal thing was that I discovered an animal track that I could not identify early one morning as I was going up to my poultry yard to let out and feed my small flock of Marans chickens. I'm used to seeing the usual raccoon and o'possum tracks, and I can identify these easily, but I was stumped on this one. So, I set up my stealthcam to watch the area for several nights to see what I could see. Finally, after a few nights, my stealthcam took a photo of the armadillo that has been living on my property. I blogged about this new visitor to my land a few months ago. The stealthcam takes very good pictures, but the photo it captured of the armadillo is hard to read. For one thing, the armadillo is in the background and is behind a small tree, so he's hard to distinguish. If it were a clearer picture, I would post it, but, sad to say, it's not.

Then one morning my husband came speeding back home just after he had left for an appointment. I thought maybe he had forgotten something, but instead he handed me his hat into which he had put a fledgling. He said he had found it in the middle of the hot, asphalt road literally baking to death, and he had to try to rescue it. So, I got out my dropper bottle and my filtered water and managed to get enough water into the little thing so that it began to stand up and look around. I knew it was going to make it when I saw the fear go out of its eyes. I brought up the old bird cage from the basement, dusted it off, and put him in there. Then I rummaged around the yard turning over rocks and logs looking for bugs or grubs to feed it. I found a few bugs and managed to get a couple into the little thing. He started acting really happy then, and actually started chirping. Then he started that "call" chirp that just broke my heart. He was calling for his mama. So, later when my husband got home, we drove the little birdie back to where he found him. Sure enough, his mama was sitting on some phone wires calling for him, so we returned the baby to his mama.

The next adventure was much more "exciting," even dangerous. I have, for the past several weeks, been letting my Marans chickens out of their poultry yard in the afternoon to range among the grass and bushes in my back yard. Well, this particular afternoon, I had no more than opened the gate for them and gotten back to the house (about 30 feet away) when I heard my chickens just squawking up a storm. I looked back and a red coyote had bounded out of the woods and had paused, one forefoot in the air, speculating which tasty chicken on this unexpected buffet he would sample first. Well, I started yelling at him to scare him off. He did not seem shy or scared of me in the least. In fact, he didn't even notice for a short while that I was there, whether from indifference or from focusing on the chickens in front of him. My chickens, of course, scattered, and then the coyote looked up, noticed me yelling, and ran back into the woods. I was worried about my chickens, and wanted to get them back into the relative safety of their fenced enclosure, but they had run into the woods to hide. Some of them hadn't gotten out of the poultry yard yet, so I went up there and shooed them back in and kept them there. In order to allow my chickens a chance to feel safe enough to come back, I kept walking up there, walking stick in hand, every so often and making noise to keep the coyote away. Finally, most of the chickens wandered back, and I got them into the poultry yard. However, one good hen never did come back, and I'm afraid I've lost her for good. I did not get a picture of the coyote, because I was more concerned about chasing him away than running into the house and grabbing my camera. I was quite disconcerted about this event, and downright scared to wander outside without some sort of protection for a couple of days after this. Now my husband accompanies me when I go up into the woods to take care of my chickens.

The last animal event happened the evening after the coyote event. While I was locking up my chickens for the night and checking their nests for eggs, I discovered a young rat snake in one of the nests in the process of swallowing an egg. I disturbed him when I opened the hinged door to the nest, so he regurgitated the newly swallowed egg. Then my husband caught him with our snake hook, which does not harm the snake at all, and put him in a covered box. We then took him down to the river and let him loose.

I think I've had enough animal adventures for a while.

Read and Chat

Oh, my goodness! There's this new website that enables one to read a book online and chat about it with other readers at the same time! My husband brought this to my attention just this morning. He had heard about it on an NPR radio broadcast. Since I've just now heard about it, and I still have morning errands and such to do, I haven't had a chance to browse the site, but I am so excited about it! I hope to explore this later today. Meanwhile, I wish everyone a happy Independence Day here in the U.S.