Angela F.

Jacobs University of Dayton

PCA/ACA 2010 Contact Info: (407) 528-2871; jacobsaf@notes.udayton.edu

The Shifting Gothic Psyche: The Depiction of Individual Conscience versus Received Authority in Ann Radcliffes The Italian As with the centuries prior, Eighteenth-century Protestant England dawned with much the same stringent treatment of its Catholic population. Whereas the Protestant majority owed their allegiance to the Crown, the minority Catholic population owed its allegiance to the Pope. According to Angela Keane, due to the changing political and religious climate occurring in the later half of the eighteenth century, Ann Radcliffe must have been keenly aware of appealing to English Protestant readers sense of rationality, as well as the conquest of natural religion over superstition and dogma. The overriding distinction the English made between the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church was that the Protestants stressed individual conscience versus the Catholic Church, which stressed received authority. Radcliffe illustrates this divergence within the characters of her last Gothic novel, The Italian, marking an important shift in the English psyche. As Deidre Shauna Lynch has pointed out, Gothic novels served a variety of purposes, one of those being a medium for political analysis. With the characters of Vivaldi and Ellena, the young lovers, Radcliffe explores the idea of individual conscience as both characters refuse to accept the orders of the clergy whose authority, as Catholics, they are supposed to uphold. Their actions are in direct contrast to the Marchessa and Father Schedoni, who both adhere to received authority, which can also be seen as a desire to uphold the status quo. As the political and religious landscape is changing throughout Britain in the eighteenth century, Radcliffe embeds Protestant ideology into her novel with its direct Catholic contrast close at hand. As Vivaldi and Ellena triumph over the Marchessa and Father Schedoni, so does individual conscience seem to triumph over received authority.