ABSTRACT
Vivaldi seems an oddly Godwinian hero, a revolutionary who has achieved a revolution of sentiment through the achievement of enlightened objectivity and detachment. Feeling is itself purified of its contaminated root in self-interest, to become pure disinterested sympathy for others, conferring upon Vivaldi a degree of nobility that the more selfish Valancourt lacks. The revolution Vivaldi plans gets outside of his control, although without the devastating consequences of Lorenzo’s plot, because it comes into the power of the continuing authority of the Inquisition which is itself untouched by the revolution. The fact that Paulo’s speech in particular must be controlled is significant. An important function of servants in gothic novels is to tell stories, often in order to convey information to which other characters, because of aristocratic codes of discretion and indirection, have no access. While Lewis’s text is a realisation of the dangers implicit in Radcliffe’s work, a making public of horrors she keeps secret and private.
