Ann Radcliffe in the Representational History of Venice

Taking for granted the important place held by Venice in the European collective imagination as a magic city, both seducing and unattainable, this chapter focuses on a fundamental stage in the representational history of the city with the aim to contest the current conventional notion that the image that was to influence 18th and 19th cent. literature and arts originated in Byron’s works. This essay argues instead that the literary picture of Venice as a female creature, sex appealing and elusive, was born in an earlier text: the very popular and much praised “Venetian scenes” in Mrs Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Radcliffe’s chapters on Venice are analyzed and evidences of their enormous popularity throughout the 19th century are provided together with explicit charges to Byron of having “imitated her [Radcliffe’s] account of the first view of Venice” [Chambers, 1844] . Far from being the product of chance or intuition, Radcliffe’s Venice appears both as a ‘summa’ and a recreation or sublimation of the “cultural image” of the fabulous city as it was produced by travel literature, paintings, prints, letters and tales related by those lucky people who could reach the mythical watery city. The final section discusses Radcliffe’s Venice as embodying the principles of the picturesque which will be so prominent in Henry James’, Rilke’s and Sartre’s views.