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‘Fancy Paints with Hues Unreal’ : Pictorial Fantasy and Literary Creation in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel / Alice Labourg

‘Fancy Paints with Hues Unreal’ : Pictorial Fantasy and Literary Creation in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic Novel / Alice Labourg, in colloque international organisé, sous la responsabilité scientifique de Muriel Adrien, Melissa Percival et Axel Hémery, par l’Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès et l’Université d’Exeter. Toulouse, Musée Paul-Dupuy, 3-4 décembre 2015.

Before Coleridge praised imagination over fancy, Ann Radcliffe, following the empiricist conceptions of her times, celebrated the versatile powers of fancy in her Gothic novels. Fancy is indeed presented as a positive and liberating force of creation as opposed to the erring delusions of imagination that maintain the heroine in a state of superstitious dread. Phenomenologically conceived as a painter who literally paints pictures in the mind, fancy sustains Radcliffe’s pictorial writing in her creation of picturesque tableaux the reader is asked to see as true “pictures” in words. Drawing from extradiegetical visual models and merging the beautiful with the picturesque and the sublime, a form of pictorial fantasy conjures up the emblematic Gothic décor, in which Piranesian-like architectural capricci fuse with Claudian twilight effects and Salvatoresque mountainous compositions, while characters tend to be frozen in dramatic picture-like poses. Fancy is likewise the power that the heroine appeals to in her own creation of intradiegetical works of art, landscape drawings and poems that provide metatextual images of the writing process itself. The workings of fancy are actually the central driving forces in the creation of the Radcliffean Gothic, a form of “pictorial fantastic”, as Maurice Lévy first suggested, based on the “animation of painted pictures”. The technique of the explained supernatural, which became one of Radcliffe’s trademarks, can thus be regarded not so much as the triumph of reason as the triumph of fancy over imagination.