56 pages • 1 hour read
Ann RadcliffeA Sicilian Romance
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1790A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Julia enjoys the peaceful environment of the abbey and often takes walks in nature. One evening when returning overly late from a walk, she and Madame de Menon realize that they are being observed by a group of men, her father's spies. Madame decides that the Abate, who has not until now been told the story of Julia's escape, must know. The Abate agrees to continue to shelter Julia unless the marquis comes looking for her, but he says that Julia should be grateful for his indulgence, because concealing Julia from a parent is tantamount to encouraging her in disobedience.
Days later, emissaries from the marquis arrive with a letter demanding that the Abate send Julia to her father. However, the demands are so rude and insulting that the Abate is determined to defy his request out of spite. The Abate then lectures Julia for her disobedience to her father and accuses her of insulting the monastery by lying about her true intentions for being there. Julia contends that her heart is pure, and the Abate grudgingly consents to keep her under his protection.
Chapter 11 Summary
Julia is awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of the monastery bell ringing and learns that a dying nun is being given extreme unction (a sacramental blessing given to the dying). It is Cornelia, who has succumbed to her grief. Cornelia's death brings back all of Julia's grief for Hippolitus. Madame discovers that one of the friars at the convent was the person who heard the dying confession of Vincent, the marquis's servant.
The marquis and the duke ride to the monastery with a troop of armed men and demand that the Abate release Julia. The Abate, outraged by their threats of violence, declares that if they dare to follow their threats, he will reveal a secret “which will make your heart's blood run cold” (120). The marquis departs with promises to appeal to a higher power, and Madame reflects that the secret the Abate knows must have been revealed to him by Vincent's confessor.
The Abate then tells Julia that he can only protect her if she consents to take vows and become a nun. If she fails to do this, her father can appeal to those higher in the church to have Julia returned to him and married to the duke. He gives her three days to make her choice. Julia agrees that life spent in the convent would be a better fate than marriage to the duke (though only slightly better) and consents, but she immediately regrets her decision.
The day before her consecration, Ferdinand appears in the monastery and offers to help her escape so that she might live a life of her choosing. He also brings the news that Hippolitus is alive and has been recovering from the wound inflicted by the marquis's sword in a small town on the Italian coast. Emboldened by the news, Julia makes a plan with Ferdinand to escape.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
These chapters continue to probe The Oppression of Women in Patriarchal Society, as Julia is once again trapped between two male institutional powers represented by the Abate and the marquis. The Abate, at first trusted by Madame to be reasonable and fair, shows himself to have a disposition that is closer to the marquis and the duke, as he allows passion and his own patriarchal power to guide his decision-making. In his contrarian response to the marquis’s letter and his paternally condescending approach to Julia’s dilemma, the Abate’s passions trap him between two conflicting vices, “for to gratify his malignity [against the marquis], he now discovered it would be necessary to sacrifice his pride” by acceding to the wishes of women (116). The Abate’s solution to this mental “torture,” that Julia must either take vows to become a nun or return to her father and marry the duke, in turn traps her between two undesirable options.
Secrets and Legacies create consequences for two dissimilar characters, as Cornelia and the marquis both find themselves unable to escape their pasts. Cornelia’s death represents the oppressive weight of patriarchal power and secret love, and this is reflected in Angelo, “the unhappy lover of Cornelia, on whose features [i]s depictured the anguish of his heart” (118). Cornelia’s death for Julia symbolizes a permanent severing of any connection to Hippolitus, another legacy of lost love. However, Angelo’s demonstrable grief and Hippolitus’s sudden resurrection convey the idea that the past cannot be buried and will continue to influence the present. Similarly, the marquis’s own secret past places him within the Abate’s power; faced with revealing the dishonor of his own legacy or temporary defeat, he chooses defeat.
These shifts, epiphanies, and ultimatums provide a growing sense of tension, and Ferdinand’s arrival to help with Julia’s escape from patriarchal authority, “which had lately appeared so formidable” (125), suggests that the plot is moving toward its climax.
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By Ann Radcliffe
