CHAPTER THE SPECIALIZATION OF THE OTHER IN THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO Friends came to be possessed like objects, while inanimate objects were desired like living beings Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (606) ^ hen it is not treated as a joke, Ann RadclifFe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is primarily remembered today for its most striking formal device—the much-maligned "explained supernatural." Scott, we may recall, was one of the first to blame RadclifFe for supplying anticlimatic "rational" explanations for the various eerie and uncanny events in her novels, and in Lives of Eminent Novelists (1824) chastized her for not "boldly avowing the use of supernatural machinery" in her greatest fiction.2 Jane Austen's satiric depredations in Northanger Abbey are even better known.3 But modern critics have been similarly put out—that is, when they have bothered to write about Radcliffe at all "A stupid convention," says Montague Summers of her admittedly intrusive rationalizations "The vice of her method," writes another A few hapless defenders merely compound the damage: "the poor lady's romances," wrote Andrew Lang, "would have been excluded from families, if she had not provided normal explanations of her groans, moans, voices, lights, and wandering figures."4 Requiescat in pace It has always been easy, of course, to patronize Ann Radcliffe No English writer of such historic importance and diverse influence has been so often trivialized by her critics Granted, we have the occasional arch excurses on selected W 120