124 THE FEMALE THERMOMETER A haunted lover can nothing, it seems, but haunt the haunts of the other To love in the novel is to become ghostly oneself When Valancourt, defying Madame Montoni's prohibition against meeting Emily, finds his way back to her, he exclaims, "I then see you once again, and hear again, the sound of that voice! I have haunted this place—these gardens, for many—many nights, with a faint, very faint hope of seeing you" (152) Near the end of the novel, after Emily rejects him for supposed debaucheries, he makes obsessive "mournful wanderings" around her fateful garden: "the vision he had seen [of Emily] haunted his mind; he became more wretched than before, and the only solace of his sorrow was to return in the silence of the night; to follow the paths which he believed her steps had pressed, during the day; and, to watch round the habitation where she reposed" (627) Such porous lovers, to be sure, may sometimes be mistaken for the cruder, traditional kind of spectre But the lover's ghostliness is somehow more febrile and insistent Emotionally speaking, it is not susceptible to exorcism When Emily's gallant suitor Du Pont, the Valancourt-surrogate who appears in the midsection of the novel, traverses the battlements at Udolpho in the hope of seeing her, he is immediately mistaken by the castle guards (who seem to have read Hamlet) for an authentic apparition He obliges by making eerie sounds, and creates enough apprehension to continue his lovesick "hauntings" indefinitely (459) Similarly, at the end of the fiction, when Emily is brooding once again over the absent Valancourt, her servant Annette suddenly bursts in crying, "I have seen his ghost, madam, I have seen his ghost!" Hearing her garbled story about the arrival of a stranger, Emily, in an acute access of yearning, assumes the "ghost" must be Valancourt (629) It is in fact Ludovico, Annette's own lover, who disappeared earlier from a supposedly haunted room at Chateau-le-Blanc and is presumed dead Annette's own joy at seeing him, we note, "could not have been more extravagant, had he arisen from the grave" (630) Whoever he is, wherever he is, the lover is always a revenant Already, given what we might call Radcliffe's persistently spectralized language, one cannot merely say with aplomb that the supernatural is "explained" in The Mysteries of Udolpho To speak only of the rationalization of the Gothic mode is to miss one of Radcliffe's most provocative rhetorical gestures The supernatural is not so much explained in Udolpho as it is displaced It is diverted—rerouted, so to speak, into the realm of the everyday Even as the old-time spirit world is demystified, the supposedly ordinary secular world is metaphorically suffused with a new spiritual aura II Why this pattern of displacement? And why have modern readers so often been impervious to it? The questions are deceptively simple, yet they bear profoundly