The Gothic Archive is a large digital collection of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British gothic chapbooks held in a variety of private and research libraries in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The chapbooks have been digitized by Diane Long Hoeveler, Professor of English at Marquette University, and will eventually be accompanied by summaries and instructional materials. Questions related to the chapbooks should be directed to her at diane.hoeveler@marquette.edu
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History of the Duchess of C****
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The most gothic of interpolated episodes in Madame de Genlis’s novelistic “letters on education,” Adèle et Théodore (1782; trans 1783), The affecting history of the Duchess of C**, in which an Italian noblewoman is imprisoned by her husband for nine years before she is released, a motif that would appear fairly quickly in Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and its imitations (Eliza Parsons’s The Castle of Wolfenbach, 1793). The use of the imprisonment and rescue motif seems to have originated in the private domestic sphere and then moved to the public, political realm in works that feature male aristocrats under siege by hostile, usually “revolutionary” forces. The affecting history of the Duchess of C**, the most notorious episode in the novelized “letters on education,” Adèle et Théodore (1782; trans English 1783), produced by the prolific French author Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746-1830). By excerpting and then focusing on the horror of a wife imprisoned by her husband for nine years, female gothic novelists found the ideal subplot for a longer novel (i.e., Radcliffe’s Sicilian Romance or Eliza Parsons’s Castle of Wolfenbach). This inset tale initially served as the source for the explained supernatural of a long gothic novel, the material cause for all the mysterious lights and noises at night. In fact, the imprisoned wife becomes in the female gothic genre the deus ex machina, the explanatory first cause brought back to life, much like a lost female matriarch restored to power. As the gothic chapbook evolved, it appropriated these intense episodes of suffering as its only content so that the genre, much like gothic drama, was a potent distillation of the immanent and the transcendent, minus the more extended descriptions of scenery, characterizations, and subjectivity that the middle or upper-class reader had come to expect in a novel identified as “gothic.”
