If you happen to be out at a trendy bar one night and a bachelorette party happens to wander in, you can just about always pick out the bride-to-be. She often is wearing a tiara (often emblazoned with the word “PRINCESS” just for good measure), and her friends are plying her with Cosmopolitans, Prosecco, or even shots of Rumplemintz liquor as she is working her way through a night of debauchery, before she enters life as a wife. Even in our own modern era, when women have access to just as much education as their male counterparts and a two-income home is much more the norm than the stay-at-home mother, there is still that element in approaches to marriage in which a woman wants to be a princess in a castle. This is not to denigrate women; rather, it is to emphasize that the fairy tale of the woman being rescued and treasured by a prince is still a powerful part of our own cultural mythology. At the end of the eighteenth century, women faced far fewer choices in life; if they did not want to enter a life of service or penury, they had to find a husband who would take care of them materially throughout their lives. This is the unpleasant choice that faces Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice until, fortunately, Mr. Darcy proves to be just as intelligent and wonderful as he is rich; he just has a bit of social awkwardness that keeps people from seeing it at first (Moers, p. 28). In Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian, Ellena di Rosalba has a similar plight – and a similar outcome.
It is worth wondering, of course, where this sort of mythos would even arise in culture. While we like to style ourselves as having gender equality in the modern era, there are still some sources of inequality (gender pay being among them) that keep the balances from being perfectly square. In the time when Radcliffe was writing, though, there were a number of reasons why women might want to escape from their current surroundings and be carried away by a sort of Prince Charming to a place where they were treated like royalty instead of like the servant class that they were viewed as holding throughout much of the world. An example of this differentiation comes from the curious medical diagnosis of “hysteria.” Male doctors began “noticing” this disorder as early as the second millennium BC, and its symptoms ranged from a lack of desire to have sex to what men termed an excessive desire to have sex, as well as general boredom or even more severe forms of emotional distress. The cure for this was either an herbal treatment recommended by the ancient physician Galen or an increase (or decrease) in sexual activity. In some cultures, women were even treated with a fiery purification to get rid of it. It was not until the late 1800s that the alienist (later known as a psychiatrist) appeared as a medical specialty, realizing that what was, in many cases, simply a difference of opinion with one’s husband had been diagnosed as a severe condition (Tasca, Rapetti Carta and Fadda, p. 111). The protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper is confined to a room by her husband (who is also her physician) so that she can rest her mind (Gilman, web). It becomes fairly clear that the primary difficulty was simply a lack of sufficient mental activity, which makes that confinement a particularly ghastly treatment.
So when Ellena finds herself looking to fulfill her own wishes of a grand life complete with a castle (and maybe even a prince) of her own, she is far from alone in the mores of the late 1700s. Vincentio di Vivaldi is one of the first men in Naples to notice her, after he sees her at church and is driven mad by her beauty. He immediately wants to marry her, but his mother opposes the match (as we can see, some parts of the march to true love never change). She asks for her confessor to help her in preventing the marriage. Even so, Vincentio talks to Ellena’s guardian (her aunt), Signora Bianchi, and gains her approval. However, Signora Binachi suddenly passes away, and then kidnappers swoop up Ellena and cart her off to San Stefano, a distant convent. As one can see, this is the first part of the rescue fantasy that captured the minds and hearts of so many women back then. A sympathetic sister helps her get away, and she flees the convent with Vivaldi. They are on their way to get married, but then the Inquisition shows up to arrest Vivaldi for taking a nun away from her convent. He and his servant Paolo are dragged off to Rome and confined, while Ellena goes to a seashore home owned by a friend of Vincentio’s mother’s confessor – and this friend has been directed to murder Ellena. In a twist that would even make Charles Dickens blush in its sheer convenience, the confessor, Schedoni, realizes that he is Ellena’s father. Now his tune changes, and he tries to tell Vincentio’s mother that Ellena is a good match. He tries to get Vincentio out of prison, but then we find out that Schedoni is really the Count di Marinella, on the run from murdering his brother and marrying his wife in a Hamlet-esque sort of scenario, and then murdering the wife later on. So he is arrested and sentenced to death, and he poisons himself. The Inquisition finally releases Vincentio, and he returns home to find that his mother has passed away, and that Ellena has not only lost her father but discovered that the nun who helped her escape the convent was actually her mother – who had survived Schedoni’s stabbing attempt and had gone into hiding. So now Ellena realizes that she is from a noble family all along, so Vincentio’s father is now happy to approve the marriage (Radcliffe, web).
(Did you follow all of that? That definitely makes Oliver Twist coming into all that money seem much more realistic, didn’t it?)
When Ellena first catches Vincentio’s eye, it is because she has captured his ear first, actually. “The sweetness and fine expression of her voice [attract] his attention to her figure, which ha[ve] a distinguished air of delicacy and grace; but her face [is] concealed in her veil” (Radcliffe, web). The purpose of the veil in this case was to promote modesty, or in other words to make things more difficult for young women looking to find a suitable situation. The idea was to build the anticipation in the suitors so that they would come across with a lucrative bid for the family as quickly as possible. In this case, though, wind comes to Vincentio’s aid, moving the veil so that he can see “a countenance more touchingly beautiful than he had dared to imagine. Her features were of the Grecian outline, and, though they expressed the tranquility of an elegant mind, her dark blue eyes sparkled with intelligence” (Radcliffe, web). So her face is beautiful to him, but at least in part because they show a tranquil mind that nonetheless sparkles with intelligence. She is the prototypical Gothic heroine: she is young; she has lost her parents; she finds herself kidnapped and almost slain by an evil villain.
Now before you object that she sounds more like Nell, the daughter of the commander of the Mounties and the object of Dudley Do-right’s affection (although she prefers Dudley’s horse), it is important to point out that Ellena had many of the virtues of a rounded woman in the eighteenth century. Despite never receiving a formal education, she reads poetry and books, she can play the lute and sing, and she can embroider. She cannot write her own poetry, but at least she can read the poetry of others aloud in a pleasing voice. So in a way we have the perfect package for the Gothic era: a beautiful young woman with a pleasing figure and a good enough mind to be entertaining but that is tranquil enough to keep her from coming up with pesky notions that things in general ought to be different than they are. This is the typical heroine in the “castle” story. If you read Radcliffe’s description of her, you can see that she has all of the key qualities that you would hope for in a Match.com profile from that time period: “sense of dignity,” “moderated affection” and “circumspection” (Radcliffe, web). So she knows what is proper (and what is not), she knows when to turn on the affection (and when to set it aside) and considers what is going on around her before making any imprudent steps. You can see that she would do quite well in Stepford, long before those odious men even came up with the technology.
In a more modern story, if a woman were kidnapped and about to be killed by her captor, we might expect someone like Ashley Judd to play the role, starting to boil with anger and figure out a way to turn the lone piece of furniture into a bludgeon and fight her way out of the room. However, Ellena definitely lacks a dragon tattoo; instead of hacking her way into computer systems and tattooing warnings into the genital area of a guardian who violated her (like Stieg Larsson’s heroine does), Ellena remains calm and rational, perhaps quietly hopeful that things will resolve themselves. Even so, she is not a shrinking violet; she is willing to spring into action, as when Vincentio delivers her a note with the particulars of the escape plan, but it falls to the ground. A nun is about to pick it up and read it, but Ellena springs into action and plucks the note up just in time. She does defy authority, in her own way, and ends up winning her liberty. Eventually, she ends up in her castle.
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-paper. N.d. Web. 20 March 2016.
Moers, Ellen. Literary Women: The Great Writers. London: Women’s Press,
1978.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Italian. N.d. Web. 20 March 2016.
Tasca, Cecilia; Rapetti, Marinagela; Carta, Mauro Giovannia; and Fadda, Bianca.
“Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health.” Clinical Practice & Epidemiology in Mental Health 8: 110-119.
