SOURCE: “Literal and Literary Representations of the Family in The Mysteries of Udolpho,” in Eighteenth Century Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 4, July, 1996, pp. 485-501.

In the following essay, Whiting investigates the theme of family by analyzing the different types of families that Emily experiences in Udolpho.

From its publication, critical response to The Mysteries of Udolpho has been lively and mixed, particularly to the novel's explicable and explained supernatural, its long scenic descriptions, its anachronisms, and its mediocre poetry.¹ In our own century, beginning most forcefully with Wylie Sypher's discussion of its relentless and almost defining ambiguity,² critics have often been uneasy with the novel's seeming generic, political, and philosophical contradictions. The present essay attempts to explain a seemingly arbitrary episode in the novel, the adventure that befalls Count De Villefort, his daughter Blanche, and her fiancé St Foix during their return to Chateau-le-Blanc. This episode, involving one of the...