The Hierarchy of the Beautiful: Burkean Sublimity in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Work
Lisa M. Grosvenor
Mentor: Jayne Lewis
The terror of the unknown pervades Ann Radcliffe’s five Gothic novels and intimately connects
them with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime
and Beautiful [1757]. This connection is evident in a close examination of his treatise alongside
Radcliffe’s Gothic works, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne [1789], A Sicilian Romance
[1790], The Romance of the Forest [1791], The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794], and The Italian
[1797]. Burke’s Inquiry builds a hierarchy of the sublime wherein the sublime, at the peak of the
hierarchy, is that which creates transcendent terror through its supremacy over its observer, and
the beautiful, at its base, is that which creates fleeting pleasure. Radcliffe’s use of disproportion
and the unknown in her fiction create the illusion of agreement with this paradigm, while she
undermines Burke’s hierarchy, placing beauty in the position of power. Radcliffe destabilizes the
hierarchy by appropriating the authority and fear associated with Burkean sublimity for the
beautiful and by explaining away the sublime as superstition, while using its power to protect
and to elevate the beautiful within her texts. Terror, perception, and the unknown cloud
Radcliffe’s Gothicism in disproportion, concealing the beauty of familial mysteries and
interconnections that lie beneath the surface and the power that beauty holds. For Radcliffe, there
is no hierarchy of the sublime, but rather a hierarchy of the beautiful in which the sublime
functions to support and to exalt the beautiful; beauty itself is Ann Radcliffe’s ultimate aim.