La Montagne et la Manière Noire

• Main Author: Maurice Levy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Midi 2008-05-01
• Series: Caliban: French Journal of English Studies
• Subjects: montagnes; manière noire; mezzotint; roman noir; Radcliffe; Lewis
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/1219

Graphic arts are not the only arts based on images: fiction (Gothic novels in particular) uses images which arouse comparable emotions. The object of this paper is to liken a number of set subjects typical of Gothic fiction to Turner’s use of the mezzotint technique in his Liber Studiorum. His engraved plates representing the St Gothard pass or Mont Cenis look as though they were illustrations of a number of passages of The Mysteries of Udolpho in which Ann Radcliffe describes mountains. The Via Mala and the "Devil’s Bridge" could be seen as graphic interpretations of certain scenes in The Italian or in Lewis’s Monk. The mezzotint technique, based on the progressive introduction of light on a copper plate which has been uniformly blackened, can be seen as a powerful metaphor of Gothic writing, because of its insistence on the dark side of people and nature, on "mountain gloom" and "mountain glory"