The Romance of the Forest

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness and death. 

“When once sordid interest seizes on the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling; it is an enemy alike to virtue and to taste—this it perverts, and that it annihilates.”

This opening sentence of the novel establishes a prevailing conflict between passions, which are self-interested, and qualities like generosity and attentiveness to others, which are considered higher virtues. The consequences of acting on baser passions rather than nobler sentiments are the book’s chief subject, theme, and moral argument. Radcliffe employs metaphor to liken sordid interests to “an enemy” capable of freezing “every warm and liberal feeling” the heart contains. Further, she uses personification, attributing human-like qualities of perverting and annihilating to abstract concepts like virtue and interest. This quote develops the theme of Self-Interest, Self-Preservation, and the Insistence on Virtue.

“La Motte paused a moment, for he felt a sensation of sublimity rising into terror—a suspension of mingled astonishment and awe! He surveyed the vastness of the place, and as he contemplated its ruins, fancy bore him back to past ages.”

La Motte’s first sight of the ruined abbey stirs in him the emotions embraced and celebrated by Romanticism, demonstrating The Effect of Landscape on Emotion. His ability to feel his imagination stirred by the sight of this grand ruin is evidence of his sensibility, a virtue to many 18th-century thinkers. Radcliffe frequently introduces sublime landscapes, using the term as defined by Burke and demonstrating how these emotions can provide grounds for philosophical contemplation or aesthetic debate.