LitCrit: uncanny radcliffe

The ingredients for an uncanny reading are here, and are announced at the end with the recurrence of a note gradually giving way to a requiem, which prompts the reversal of the Marchesa's passions. Directly after that follows the assertion of the intellectual powers through the Confessor's disdain that this woman should allow music to vitiate her greed for prestige: she wishes now to be free of the plot to kill her intransigent future daughter in law. What is most uncanny is the ghost of sophistry, however: Schedoni's hawk-eyed, cunning knowledge of his interloper's secret fears and desires yet also the softening persuasion of a man of his order, a Confessor.

One must trust his wit and allow the beguiling to be out in the open; such is the Marchesa's predicament. The uncanny character here has glided in and out of the narrative, possibly as the monkishly cloaked "unknown adviser" to Vivaldi's inquisitions into the ruins, where he might chance upon Ellena, as well as the consiglieri who plots with his mother against his beloved.

Considering that the true danger seems at this point to be Schedoni's intellect, I am deferred from a more definitive answer concerning what is uncanny in The Italian. Instead as I read I am followed by Byron's epic "Don Juan," which was inspired, we are told in the introduction, by Radcliffe's romance. There are more than a few similarities, chiefly the curious role of intellect versus the passions (as both lovers philosophize or at least allude in their musings, ambivalent to the oncoming affair, to Plato and the implications of the stars).

Byron's characters, at least in the first canto, also engage in the old struggle between sophistry and poetry, gossip and legitimate commentary (witness Donna's book of the Don's flaws and failures which she cites to friends and family)--items which are not uncanny per se but inflect my reading quite so. The ghost of influences past, perhaps: I might allude to the fact that in The Italian, this very issue of philosophy and poetry is presently buried in voluminous prose. For now I see it arising in the form of musical motifs, serenades by Vivaldi in the ruins near Ellena's modest dwelling, where she too sings, distractedly, about the dashing young man whose love is socially above her and therefore ungraspable.

(But here again I run into another problem: the composer Vivaldi died in 1741 and Radcliffe's Vincentio di Vivaldi goes about his denouement in 1758, while the characters, dropped after the first chapter, who are reading this second-layer narrative pick it up in 1764. No one living in Radcliffe's Italy would not have heard of the Vivaldi of Four Seasons fame, nor is her Vivaldi free from the professional musical world, as his mother administrates an orchestra which performs, early in the narrative, the work of a nameless though famous composer. Another ghost uncovered; this is as uncanny as this seminal Gothic romance has been thus far for me.).....