In my examination of the relationship between looking and power, I shall also discuss the strategies of authority inherent in Radcliffe’s appropriation of the image of the veil (which appears almost obsessively throughout the text), consider the master-servant relationship between Vivaldi and Paolo, and, ultimately, Radcliffe’s use of the carnivalesque in the concluding scene of her novel.ĢIn the process of interpretation I hope to apply some aspects of the theories of the gaze and of the discursive depiction of the colonial Other. Depiction of place will not be the only focus of my attention.
The novel's replaying of the Grand Tour complicates the power structures implicit in its applications of the visual because of its framing narrative explicitly dealing with tourists from England. The main starting point will be Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian with its narrative device of travelling and the accompanying ways of representing place, the power of the gaze which is directed at the exotic landscape, and the figure of the native 'Other'.
In my paper I want to discuss the ways that Gothic literature uses the visual and the meanings its practical applications bring about: Looking as a source of power and manipulation. The Gothic aesthetic set out to embody these values in vivid picturesque descriptions of exotic locale, natural landscapes, haunting Gothic mansions, and heroes and heroines of striking physical appearance. Sight was thought to be the noblest and most comprehensive of our senses, and visual pleasure was the first avenue of intellectual and therefore spiritual progress.
1Eighteenth-century aesthetics placed a high value on the visual.
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