“Wild above rule or art”

In A Sicilian Romance (1790) Ann Radcliffe’s representation of Sicily’s wild landscapes draws on eighteenth-century stadial histories and travel writings, particularly Patrick Brydone’s A Tour through Sicily and Malta (1773). Brydone’s description of Mount Etna identifies conflicting forces in Sicily’s volcanic sceneries with the description of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). The figurative analogies that Milton established between the garden and its occupants merged natural and human wildness, influencing eighteenth-century constructions of gender by naturalizing a conflicting image of womanhood in the figure of Eve. This chapter shows how Radcliffe reimagines contemporary accounts of Sicilian wildness and the Miltonic archetype of female nature to critique eighteenth-century models of essentialized gender difference and present wild nature as a space identified with women’s independent development and expression, as well as their objectification and confinement. This analysis is interconnected with a discussion of contemporary responses to gothic fiction during the 1790s against the threat to hierarchical and patriarchal order presented by the French Revolution. Given the subsequent marginalization of Radcliffe’s novels from the Romantic canon, the chapter asks what her critical legacy reveals about who has been permitted to author wild Romanticism in Britain.