The Terror?

I have to admit, before I began reading Radcliffe’s “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” I did the cursory Wikipedia check. These days I use Wikipedia before I absorb anything, really. If my girlfriend tells me about a movie she wants to see, I wiki it. If there a cultural reference on The Simpsons or the Daily Show that I don’t understand, I wiki it. If there’s a new record by a band I’m interested in I wiki it just for the release date. In short, I wiki everything. Here is an excerpt from the plot introduction portion of the Wikipedia summery. “The Mysteries of Udolpho is a quintessential Gothic romance, replete with incidents of physical and psychological terror.” Now, to me, terror is a powerful word. I’ve never been that much into the Gothic in literature or even in popular culture (I must plead ignorance when it comes to that clip showed in class this week, while I’m familiar with what both Twilight and Buffy are, I’ve never seen a moment of either), but I have some ideas of what is meant by the Gothic, and I don’t throw around terms like terror.
What I found in “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” was not exactly what I had expected. Rather than descriptions of the supernatural there are far more descriptions of how the characters feel internally, no matter how mundane or minute. When two characters so much as glance at one another, Radcliffe produces a paragraph or more of unspoken internal impressions. In addition to this, Radcliffe also goes on about the landscape quite a bit, and the descriptions seem anything but Gothic to me. We talked a bit in class about the conventions of the Gothic, and how everything in “The Mysteries of Udolpho” is explained by things other than the supernatural, but I can’t help feeling that there’s something else going on in this novel other than the Gothic. If anything it seems more like a romantic adventure novel to me. Where is the terror?

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