Moving on from Austen's visual treatment of self- projection and introspection, this chapter illuminates how Ann Radcliffe uses visuality in her fiction to explore sexual, religious and social forms of female subjection. Her work, unlike Austen's, is not concerned with the formation of companionate couples. Instead, the Gothic novel's preoccupation with terror and the undefined allows her to dramatize real power structures in ways that torment the eyes and minds of her heroines. By removing her plots to extreme situations that are foreign in time and place, the novelist is at liberty to subvert existing presentations of women's perceptions and experiences. Radcliffe borrows from the work of male artists and philosophers to interrelate the natural and the supernatural, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Her narrators move freely between the eye of the body and the eye of the mind, destroying conventional boundaries between interiority and exteriority, private and public.

After positioning Radcliffe's treatment of Gothic sublimity in relation to recent scholarship, the chapter investigates the five concentric visual realms that she uses to depict the inescapability of female persecution. The analysis focuses on A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) in order to underscore Radcliffe's reliance on visuality as an effective yet liminal means of negotiating the psychological conditions imposed on the female sex. The chapter uses an edition of A Sicilian Romance that is based on the 1821 version of the text – the last to appear in her lifetime – to confirm that her deployment of visuality does not significantly alter over time. The study orders the novels’ visual frames according to scale, moving from manmade and natural thresholds to that which is supernatural.

The first section considers Radcliffe's treatment of portraiture – textual, ekphrastic and spectral. It exposes the ways in which women who are trapped in two dimensions convey ekphrastic messages of terror to female spectators within the plot. Radcliffe's portraits are as much signifiers of live burial and double imprisonment as they are representations of natures mortes. The portrait as an analogue for double imprisonment advances the discussion to architecture, the second man- made frame of patriarchal power.