The Specialization of the Other 121 Radcliffean topoi—the Villain, the Fainting Heroine (with her much-vaunted Sensibility), the Scenery But the point of such commentary is usually to demonstrate the superiority of the critic to this notoriously "silly" writer and to have done with Radcliffe as quickly as possible Even among admirers of Gothic fiction, the clumsy device of the "explained supernatural" is often taken as the final proof of Radcliffe's irredeemable ineptitude and bathos By way of a formula, the author herself is explained away Which is not to say that the formula is entirely misleading Blatantly supernatural-seeming events are "explained" in Udolpho, and sometimes most awkwardly Mysterious musical sounds, groans emanating from walls, the sudden movement of a supposedly dead body: however incredibly, rational explanations for such phenomena are inevitably forthcoming At numerous points in the fiction, moreover, Radcliffe self-consciously condemns what she calls "superstition." Not for her those primitive ancestral spirits described by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals, who come back to earth to terrify, cajole, or exact various pious sacrifices from the living Nor, despite occasional hesitations, has she any residual faith in the more benign ghosts of popular Christianity St Aubert, the father of the heroine in Udolpho, admits at one point to a hope that "disembodied spirits watch over the friends they have loved" (67), but later in the novel, when the enlightened Count de Villefort argues against the reality of specters, Radcliffe resolutely endorses his position, noting that "the Count had much the superiority of the Baron in point of argument" (549).5 In this denial of the traditional spirit-world, The Mysteries of Udolpho, like the Gothic in general, anticipates the thoroughly God-abandoned forms of modern literature Yet already we oversimplify perhaps, for the very concept of the "explained supernatural" depends upon a highly selective—indeed schematic—vision of the novel We "read," it seems, only part of The Mysteries of Udolpho: the famous part As any survey of Udolpho scholarship will show, modern critics devote themselves almost without exception solely to those episodes in the novel involving the villainous Montoni and the castle of Udolpho—even though these make up barely a third of the narrative Of the dreamlike wanderings of Emily St Aubert and her father through the Pyrenees (which alone take up nearly one hundred pages at the outset of the work), of St Aubert's drawn-out death scene and Emily's sojourn in a convent, of Emily's bizarre relationship with her lover Valancourt, of the episodes with Madame Cheron at Tholouse and Venice, of the lengthy post-Udolpho sections involving Du Pont, Blanche, the Marchioness de Villeroi, and the Count de Villefort, we have heard little or nothing The crude focus on the so-called Gothic core of The Mysteries of Udolpho has been achieved by repressing, so to speak, the bulk of Radcliffe's narrative Many modern critics implicitly treat the fictional world as though it were composed of two ontologically distinct realms—one extra-ordinary, irrational, irruptive, and charismatic (that of Montoni and Udolpho), the other ordinary, domestic, and