"No picture": time, trauma, and ineffability in The Mysteries of Udolpho

Statements of ineffability are abundant in Gothic literature, especially during its burgeoning period of the late 18th into early 19th century in Western Europe. Despite their fundamental status as a convention of the language of the genre, the “unspeakable” continues to be glossed or rejected by critics and scholars. This essay takes as its main focus the Gothic ineffable statement and focuses on a specific example in a famous scene of traumatic unveiling in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho . I argue that “excessive,” passionate, ineffable language in literary works like Radcliffe’s are symptomatic of the pressures that epistemological empiricism placed on the phenomenology of human subjectivity, where prominent science and philosophy influenced cultural understandings of emotional life. By looking at the failure of expression in the moment, and the later natural explanation of the phenomenon, Udolpho performs what Cathy Caruth and others in trauma studies identify as trauma and its subsequent “belatedness.” Ineffability functions most meaningfully in identifying a very particular experiential response , especially to trauma, and is very much less useful as a description of any such experience. This seems most logically evident in the fact that even if we explain away all of the metaphysical happenings of our reality, it does not reject the emotional landscape of that reality.By treating the ineffable statement with legitimacy, we see linguistic events wherein language falls short in relaying the emotive reality of the present – in communicating human interiority in the midst of the traumatic.