2 - El silencio de las sirenas (1985) and Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794): The Sublime

Summary

El silencio de las sirenas [The Silence of the Sirens] is set in an isolated village in the Alpujarra mountains of southern Spain. The two principal characters, Elsa and the narrator, María, are outsiders to the community and the mountains and are portrayed as relating to their geographical setting with the wonder and appreciation of its beauty and majesty that locals – for whom it is nothing more nor less than normality – do not share. The main storyline contains many elements familiar to readers of Gothic fiction: the doubling of characters – Elsa, the protagonist and Agustín Valdés, the man she loves, re-appear in the former's dreams and hypnotic trances as nineteenth-century figures in Germany called Otilia and Eduardo, linked with characters in Goethe's Elective Affinities – , the use of supernatural elements – hypnotism, Moorish magic, and the evil eye – and the encounter with them by modern characters who wonder (as we do too) whether to dismiss them as ignorant superstition or quaintly picturesque folk-beliefs, on the one hand, or to respect them as expressions of ancient wisdom lost in the hurly-burly of the contemporary world, on the other. There is also a different type of Gothic echo in Silencio, this time a structural, rather than a thematic one: García Morales's narrative repeatedly intercalates stories that seem tangential to the reader's main centres of interest, namely, the relationships between Elsa and María and between Elsa and Agustín. The novel ends with Elsa's rapid decline following Agustín's abrupt termination of all contact. Finally, María discovers her dead and frozen body in the mountain snows beyond the confines of the village, a death that is portrayed lyrically as a chosen fusion with the landscape.

The use of mountain landscapes in Gothic fiction has been noted by many scholars and linked to Edmund Burke's notion of the sublime, expressed in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). E. J. Clery glosses the sublime as ‘an apprehension of danger in nature or art without the immediate risk of destruction’ and Jerrold E. Hogle explains, ‘Sublimity is thus aroused for Burke […] by linguistic or artistic expansions into “Vastness” or “Infinity” […] because they terrifyingly threaten the annihilation of the self.’