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‘Beyond the Awful Veil’

Radcliffe’s Anglican orthodoxy is established in Chapter 4, along with her attempt through her fiction to offer a theology of mediation and participation. She works with Shaftesbury’s Platonic moral realism in contrast to Mrs Barbauld’s associationist view of taste and develops a mode of mystical ascent through the interplay of vertical and horizontal experiences. The sublime allows ascent through an awareness of one’s created nature, which is linked to Shaftesbury’s taxonomy of forms. It is an inherently social and virtuous experience, as in James Thomson’s Seasons, and centred on melancholy—an awareness of fallenness, which again allows for a mediation through this distantiation. Twilight’s veiling inbetweenness restores a sense of the lost Eden, while music and liturgy offer humanity’s articulate praise as an example of a Shaftesburian ‘form that forms’. Radcliffe’s explained supernatural is revisioned as a false idolatrous sublime that mistakes an effect for a cause and refuses the mystical ascent.