Behind the Scenes Minis: Gothic All Week

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Frye and I'm Tracy d Wilson. We talked about Anne radcliff Oh all week long. Tracy. I want to ask you right off the bat, because when we began, you giggled a little when we referenced the Castle of a Toronto. Yeah, so the little giggle. Well, first, was there a specific thing you were going to ask me? Or were you just like, what was that about? What was that about? When I was putting together my potential October episode topic ideas for this year, one of them was Horace Walpole, author of Castle of a Toronto. And when you and I talked about sort of what you had on your list, and I was like, I sort of felt like having Anne Rad and Horace Walpole in the same year might feel a little too similar. And I had not really realized until you sent this outline over to me that she specifically cited the Castle of a Toronto is like one of the big influences on her. Yeah, I liked. I just didn't know that. And uh so I was as we were recording, I was thinking about interjecting that, and then I was like, no, this is better for Friday in the Box. So yeah, maybe at some point in the future there will be a Horace Walpole episode. I took a class in college, which at this point was so long ago, that was called Discourses in Terror, and it was a class that was all about the evolution of the Gothic novel. So we read The Castle of a Toronto. We read the Mysteries of Adolpho. I don't think we read it was Northing or Abby that was like Austin's satire, right, I don't think we read that one, but I do think that it was in the volume that included Castle of a Toronto and Mysteries of Udauful. I feel like that was one book that contained all three of those books. And then like from there we read a whole bunch of other very dark and foreboding and eerie and sublime and surreal stuff, ending with a clockwork orange. Oh the way I love that book. The way I love that book. I know, not everyone loves that book. Yeah, it was a really interesting class. It was an elective in the literature department, so yeah, and it was it just was funny to me. That I had not really realized that she had specifically cited this. That could be a thing we talked about in class twenty something years ago that I've forgotten now. But yeah, yeah, I found the one of the hardest parts of prepping this episode was trying to summarize any of her books, because they do have a lot of tend rolls, and like Sir Walter Scott mentions, like, it seems like she forgot about this. There is the trajectory of her work that intrigues me, which is that for a while, you know, she fell so out of favor in people kind of were like, that's cute little housewife writing romancy books, huh. And now you know, it's kind of comeback full circle and people are analyzing them with more depth, which I find very interesting. It's one of those things where I read her work and I will confess I'm not like super into it. I was not either, Like I love the descriptive parts, which is what she is always lauded for, like writing really good, creepy descriptions of places and landscapes. Yeah, but like then it gets her. I'm one of those people that her device of like not telling you what has actually just happened makes me a little itchy where I'm like, do I have to flip through this book to find out what that was? But I do think it's interesting that that she is the person like if you, you know, trace the line just like your college class did, Like there is a line that can be traced from her to modern works and it's not like they wouldn't have existed without her, but she definitely influenced that trajectory to I just always love those those flow charts of like influence are always very interesting to me. There is another thing we didn't really talk about in the episode that is interesting to me, and if anybody listening who maybe hasn't studied this era of English literature in particular this idea of ladies publishing anonymous works, which was not particularly uncommon because you know, women of this time would read a lot because they did have leisure if they were of a certain station, and then it was kind of a natural progression for them to go I could write something. It's kind of like when we did, I'm jumping to a very different type of thing. But when we were reading Billy Burke and it was like there were always like women who were like I could write a play. It's kind of the same thing, like people who had a little bit of time on their hands and could be like, no, I'll try my handwriting. So there is like not a lack of anonymous works to be found from this time that were most likely written by a woman who had read a great deal which informed her. Listen my time in college, the part of my time in college that was spent on my English major, because I was one of those people that kept adding majors. I wouldn't change, I would just add was specifically all into the English romantic literature. And I'm about to trash talk Samuel Taylor Cole originally okay, which normally I don't do. Accept He at one point had criticized her explaining her endings because he felt that that didn't satisfy the reader's desires. And every time I hear that, I think about Kubla Khan, which is essentially him writing a poem where he says, I dreamt about this amazing place and he goes on to describe it, and then he goes but I could I could never describe it, and then the whole thing ends, and I'm like, you just did come on, there's some weird parallel to be drawn there of like, really, you're going to attack people for their expectations when you just kind of were like, oh, I'm done with that, I can't do it. Interesting. I want to talk about Richter Norton. We mentioned several times. He is a historian that I think a lot of our listeners might be into some of his work. He really specializes in lgbtq I a history and has written a lot of really good books about it, particularly in England and I think some in other areas of Europe. Writes some very cool things. His analysis is really interesting. I find I like the way he writes, so if you are in search of such, that's a great place to start. He wrote a lot of analysis in his biography of her about her anti Catholicism and the Unitarianism thread that kind of goes through her her thing, including William's periodicals that he edited and owned, one of being kind of considered radical Unitarian gazettes essentially, And so if you are into that, that's a very interesting part of her story that didn't quite fit in her life story, but is interesting in how you may read her literature. He makes an interesting point about the fact that she was self taught a lot of things, like her knowledge of things like history were things she had read in books, but she would mess it up and she would kind of get away with that, whereas when it came to people of lower class, she would make fun of them for being uneducated, sometimes in stupid and it's like, ma'am, that's not cool. You are very sensitive, clearly, and yet you are not sensitive to other people's feelings or needs if you don't think they're as good as you. Super interesting. She wrote a line that I plucked out of one of her travelogs, and I don't know why it really stuck with me, because I keep finding myself trying to pluck it apart to really get to the meaning of it, and I continue to rethink what I think it means. It's a very simple line, which is I prefer rich beauty to wild beauty, unless accompanied by such shapes of grandeur as verge upon the sublime. And I'm like, are you saying that you like man made beautiful things, like things that are crafted by a human versus like the natural, Like looking at architecture versus just a landscape, unless there is something in that landscape that wows you or are you saying something else? And I can't keep like circling this, like what does she really mean by rich beauty versus wild beauty? And what does she mean by shapes of grandeur exactly? And we don't know. I remember having a very long it might have been like the whole a whole session of class in this Gothic novel class that I took, just a lengthy, lengthy exploration of like what exactly sublime hum meant in like the context of this literary world? Yes, yes, well, And that passage that I think you read in the course of the episode where we're talking about the character of Emily pulling back the veil and her talking about how being afraid like terror is actually this sublime thing and sort of feels good. And I'm like, perhaps I'm not cut from the same clauses missus rad I'm certainly much less uptight than it seems she might have been. But I also don't find being afraid to be terribly fun. I like horror films, but it's because I'm not afraid of them, do you know what I mean? Yeah, listen, I'll watch the Bobba Dukes seven times a day. I love it. But yeah, I I like thinking about the significant differences between her time and ours, and also trying to translate what that means, like things that she said and whether or not they apply to our current world, because it was a very different world obviously, like we mentioned in the show, like the things that were considered you know, provocative or or terrifying in her time are really extraordinarily mild for most modern readers, which is part of it. Like I know, I remember talking to a friend who had read one of her books, and I even had this experience. I think as a teenager. I don't remember if I had read Udolpho or The Italian. It's been a long time. And being like I thought this was supposed to be scary, like there was no real sense of it being actually terribly frightening. Like my takeaway was that Emily was just soft sure, not that she had seen anything very scary. I was like, well, she just fainted. I don't know, I'm not decrying anyone who faints or is soft for that matter, but that was my takeaway as like a seventeen year old, it is like, gosh, she probably faints at everything. Which is, you know, the least kind read I could have possibly had anyway, Anne Radcliffe, you you intrigued me. I feel like we would not have liked each other had we found ourselves in the same timeline. But I'm still very intrigued by her. I do love the idea that she was like, let's just let's just live our life. Let's just go go hang out. I want to hang out for the next thirty years. That sounds good. You want to do that? Sure? Yeah, when you were talking about they still went out in the carriage and they went around London and the surrounding area and stopped wherever their heart desired. I was like, that sounds great. Yeah, their travels together. It seems like she and William just loved hanging out together and traveling together. And that's kind of the dream. You can't ask for more than that, right. She lived a great life from the time she retired from writing for like the next twenty four years. Sounds great, sounds great. May we all have such delight? May you have such delight. If this is your weekend, maybe go drive your carriage around and stuff wherever you want. If you have obligations or work or something of that nature this weekend. I hope they still afford you time to find delight and ride your carriage around wherever you want. But we will be right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday there will be another brand new episode. And we are into Halloween times, so spooky and creepy things afoot. Yeah, stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.