Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mysteries of Udolpho, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Marriage, Love, and Inheritance
The Wonders of Nature
Mystery and Superstition
Mortality
The Value of Education and Art
Summary
Analysis
A few days later, Agnes/Signora Laurentini dies. She leaves a third of her property to the closest surviving relative of the Marchioness De Villeroi, and it turns out that this is Emily. It also turns out that the abbess had known that Emily was related to the Marchioness for a while but didn’t want to say anything out of respect for St. Aubert.
Although Emily doesn’t actively seek out material rewards, she continues to accumulate more money over the course of the novel, almost by accident. The novel thus suggests that at least in its fictional world, God provides for people who dedicate themselves to acting morally.
Themes
Pausing the narrative to tell Signora Laurentini’s backstory, she loses both her parents in the same year. She is young and beautiful, with many admirers, particularly the Marquis de Villeroi. They initially plan to marry, but the Marquis eventually decides he’d rather have her as a mistress than a wife.
Like many of the tragic events in the novel, the death of the Marchioness de Villeroi starts with a bad, selfish marriage decision.
Themes
Months pass, and Signora Laurentini hears nothing about the Marquis De Villeroi, until one day she learns that he has gotten married, filling Laurentini with jealousy. The Marquis finds his wife, the Marchioness De Villeroi, beautiful, but he remains partly under Laurentini’s spell. Laurentini shows the Marquis proof that his wife is cheating on him. She convinces the Marquis to poison the Marchioness. But while the Marquis wants revenge, he loses his desire for it immediately after they kill the Marchioness.
Marquis De Villeroi and Signora Laurentini each bring out the worst qualities in each other. While the Marquis is the one who carries out the murder of his wife, Signora Laurentini is the one who orchestrates it, revealing to him that the Marchioness is cheating on him, something that Laurentini (as Agnes) also told Emily but which the novel has not yet confirmed. Greed continues to motivate the characters to act selfishly without caring who gets hurt.
Themes
The Marquis De Villeroi curses Signora Laurentini for motivating him to commit the crime, and he says he’ll turn her over to the authorities with himself unless she agrees to live a life of prayer in a convent. Laurentini agrees to go to the convent. The letters that Emily watched St. Aubert read and weep to were his final ones from the Marchioness De Villeroi.
The Marquis De Villeroi may be an evil character and even a murderer, but that doesn’t mean that he isn’t capable of feeling regret. Unlike Montoni, who gets a very concrete punishment for his actions, the Marquis’s punishment is having to live with his actions for the rest of his life and dying alone.
Themes
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But as St. Aubert’s confessor recalls, St. Aubert was not the lover of the Marchioness De Villeroi, but her brother. Signora Laurentini took on a new identity of Agnes in France at the convent, telling Frances a false story to hide her true identity. While at the convent, Laurentini made a will giving part of her property to the convent, part of it to Bonnac’s wife (a relative of hers), and part of it to the nearest surviving relative of the Marchioness De Villeroi. Laurentini/Agnes saw Emily’s resemblance to the Marchioness right away, but it was only near her death that she realized the resemblance was more than coincidental.
If St. Aubert’s confessor is Catholic, he probably shouldn’t be telling everyone what St. Aubert said in confession, but this offers a convenient plot device for St. Aubert to “speak” even after this death. As one of the most trustworthy characters in the novel, St. Aubert’s confession provides a definitive version of events. This means that Agnes lied on her deathbed, holding on until the end to the lie that the Marchioness was unfaithful to the Marquis. And this also means that Emily resembles the Marchioness because the Marchioness was her aunt, not her mother as Agnes claimed.
Themes
Emily finally reveals what was under the black veil that filled her with horror. It turns out it wasn’t a picture at all but a pale human figure, dressed in burial clothes and with worms coming out of it. If she’d gotten a better look at it, she would’ve realized that it was not real but made of wax. The original purpose of the sculpture was to remind the Marquis of Udolpho of his own mortality. His descendants didn’t like to look at the statue, however, so they covered it with a veil.
Facing this truth about her past and her relationship with the Marchioness seems to lead Emily to face another truth: what she saw under the black veil. Though the wax figure Emily saw was frightening, it is perhaps also a slightly anticlimactic reveal, suggesting that Emily allowed herself to be overcome by a disproportionate amount of fear. This symbol suggests that for a devout Christian like Emily, mortality might be something to welcome. By contrast, Montoni and his predecessors make futile attempts to avoid thinking about mortality by covering up the wax figure.
Themes
Emily is disturbed by many of the things she’s recently learned, but she’s glad to find out that St. Aubert’s conduct was all honorable.
Though Emily has learned that her father had flaws (such as his faith in Madame Cheron’s character), she ultimately learns that she was right to take his lessons to heart.
Themes
