With its dramatic focus upon the Inquisition and the tortured villainy of Schedoni, The Italian is the only novel in which Ann Radcliffe went appreciably beyond a schematic psychology that divided characters into the simple categories of the innocent and the corrupted. However, this is not to say that the psychology of her other novels is entirely without depth. Rather, one may look for and find considerable psychological complexity in aspects of her work other than the depiction of character. In these other novels – and also in The Italian, in addition to its more subtle characterizations – psychological meaning is dramatized through a vocabulary of repeated situations rather than analyzed through narrative exposition. Moreover, in considering the most prominent among these repeated situations – the appearance of “speaking bodies,” of cryptic figures and sounds, and of heroines lost in labyrinths – one sees how such a dramatization of psychological meaning is significant in itself.

It seems appropriate to begin with the body; for when Gothic fiction has been satirized, from the time of Northanger Abbey to our own day, the role of the female body is always among the major topics of this satire.