The Romance of the Forest

The epigraphs or quotations that open each chapter are a common feature of 18th-century literature and introduce the chapter’s theme or message. The epigraph to Chapter 1 quotes from the Shakespearean tragedy Macbeth with a complaint about misfortunes that presage the various plots the author will introduce. La Motte’s danger from the justice system and Adeline’s frequent dangers are character paths that will illustrate, in different ways, the novel’s exploration of the theme of Self-Interest, Self-Preservation, and the Insistence on Virtue.

Radcliffe sources her tale in a documented history to lend authenticity and verisimilitude. The history published by Gayot de Pitaval in 1734 does not contain a reference to La Motte or the Marquis de Montalt, which are Radcliffe’s inventions. Eighteenth-century authors frequently invoked this pretense at historicity due to a common criticism that fiction, because it was a work of fancy or illusion, was potentially dangerous or damaging to readers. Works of nonfiction, like history, contain knowledge and instruction that can serve a moral good. Radcliffe addresses the dangers of fancy within the novel as various characters experience The Power of Imagination and the fears their fancies produce. This lends to the novel’s ongoing discussion about the value and role of emotions in relation to intellect and reason.

This discussion is fruitful since the romance narrative embraces emotion, as does the Romantic sensibility. The Gothic novel is designed, through the use of terror, suspense, deferral, and surprise, to excite a reader’s interest and emotion, while the many scenes of Adeline’s endangerment are designed to provoke pity. Radcliffe often employs “romantic” as an adjective meant to indicate when something stirs powerful emotions or an affective response. In some places, the novel is self-conscious about its genre, commenting on the improbability and fancifulness of the romance. This is evident when La Motte reflects on the strange episode in which he’s trapped in a remote cottage and charged to carry away a beautiful young woman he doesn’t know.

Within the action itself, however, emotion is rarely enjoyed for its own sake but rather for some further end. The characters find consolation in philosophy; in prayer, as Adeline sometimes does; in immersion in books or music; or contemplation of a beautiful landscape. Excitability, terror, distress, and other extremes of emotion always lead to some resolution. In the case of the virtuous characters, they can impose order on their mind and control over their feelings. For characters who do not have the same self-control or moral compass, emotions prove detrimental, even destructive.

Discussions of The Effect of Landscape on Emotion frequently invoke the sublime, which is a reference to Edmund Burke’s 1756 essay, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Burke’s essay is essentially a discussion of aesthetics, in which he analyzes the impacts and effects of beauty. More powerful than beauty, Burke argues, is that which inspires the sublime: an experience that blends awe, terror, and a sense of vastness or grandeur. The Romantics adopted the term to describe interactions with the landscape. While cultivated or quiet scenes could inspire sensations of repose and appreciation, the more impressive response of sublimity is generated by truly dramatic scenery like mountainous landscapes or the ruins of a massive and once-majestic building. The ability to apprehend the sublime is a mark of a character’s taste and refinement. While Madame La Motte and Peter remain insensible to the beauty of the ruined abbey and are uncomfortable or unconscious of the emotions it provokes, La Motte and Adeline are both moved.

In keeping with the Gothic novel’s interest in the supernatural, there are hints that the abbey is haunted, in connection with the rumors about a prisoner who died in the abbey. Horrific hints such as this are favorite techniques of the Gothic, meant to provoke terror and dread. While Radcliffe hints at several supernatural disturbances, thus far, each phenomenon turns out to have natural causes. Voices prove to have human sources, and the movement of nesting birds explains the disconcerting rush of sound the group hears upon entering the abbey. But the skeleton is evidence of violence of some sort, and an unquiet death is a common source of supernatural disturbance. Further, the isolated setting of the wild forest and the grand but ruined abbey supply the brooding, troubled atmosphere upon which the Gothic effect relies.

The real terrors of human experience, as the novel shows, are caused by human actors. Adeline’s journeys from imprisonment to peril are designed to provoke the reader’s sympathy as much as her loveliness and helplessness stir pathos. Radcliffe highlights Adeline’s vulnerability to others by her emotional sensibility, indicated by her many moments of fainting or fear-induced torpor. Notably, Adeline’s beauty is bound up with her sexual innocence, her virtues of character, and her steadiness of mind. While she is susceptible to terror and apprehension, this same sensibility makes it possible for beauty or contemplation of the landscape to soothe her. Her ability to survive her dangers and misfortunes speaks to her resilience, a central aspect of the novel’s interrogation of the marks of a virtuous character.