Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 Gothic novel The Romance of the Forest is sometimes gloomy, sometimes silly, and sometimes sublime. It cycles through its moods like a piece of music: major key verses, minor key pre-choruses, soaring choruses, unexpected key changes in the bridges. Within each sequence are sudden shocks and disturbances, breaks and irruptions. Almost every development comes as a “surprize” (sic) to protagonist Adeline. She gasps, she faints, she imagines ghosts around every corner. As the plot attains velocity, this rhythm is explodes into forward motion: the comedic middle section, the peaceful journey through the Alps, the retrospective courtroom drama.
But there’s also a slower, almost seasonal, rhythm to the atmosphere of this book, particularly in the first third. One chapter, everyone is happy and their lives at the abbey are content and fulfilling. The next, a cold gloom falls over the abbey, and everyone suspects the worst of everyone else.
It is a difference in the texture of terror and dread: the thunderclap terror, the overcast sky of dread. Anticipation erupts into terror, suspense drags everyone down into dread. Each time someone imagines the abbey to be haunted, it turns out to be just the wind. Every bizarre turn of events has a logical explanation. By the same token, when Mme. de la Motte suspects her husband and Adeline to be carrying on a secret affair, the truth turns out to be far more mundane: La Motte is depressed, taking long walks on his own to ruminate on the dishonor that led him to hide out in a ruined abbey in the middle of a forest as well as the fact that he knows there’s nothing he can do to protect Adeline, whom he loves like a daughter. The roiling dread of the novel rarely boils over, but when it does, it’s in the form of another surprising revelation of human, not supernatural, cruelty.
In Radcliffe’s world, there are no ghosts or spirits walking the earth terrorizing humanity; the real monster is man, or more precisely, men: Adeline is trapped between La Motte, depressive and secretive; the Marquis, embarrassingly passionate and overbearing; and her violent, destructive father (that is, the man suspected to be her father). Then there is Theodore, whom she falls in love with only to be abandoned by until later in the book, and minor characters like the surgeon, whose foolish philosophy almost kills Theodore: “Nature is the most improper guide in the world. I always adopt a method directly contrary to what she would suggest; for what can be the use of Art, if she is only to follow Nature?” (267). At every turn, Adeline has to navigate a world of men who are evil, self-absorbed, or foolish.
Should I slow down and talk about the plot? Wikipedia can give you the plot synopsis. My least favorite part of writing about a book is summarizing the book.
I really enjoyed this one, much more than Vathek. Can you tell? The opening scenes, in which the La Mottes flee Paris by night by carriage under mysterious circumstances, are beautifully, iconically, Gothic and anxiously propulsive. The slower second chapter is heavy with atmosphere, the descriptions of the ruined abbey and the forest evocative and as dense as ancient stone and thick foliage. From there, the novel establishes a rhythm and then takes a number of sharp turns until the narrative reaches its logical, bittersweet conclusion.
As with Vathek, it is the form of the novel that most interested me as a writer. The first character we meet is La Motte, and it would be a long time before I understood that Adeline, and not he, would be the protagonist. After establishing a web of relationships during their time at the abbey, Adeline escapes, and when she meets Theodore again, the narrative briefly summarizes Theodore’s journey back to Adeline. A modern novel would likely give us parallel narratives told through alternating chapters, but the Gothic often feels more improvisational than rigorously structured. We’ll see this twisting, labyrinthine structure taken even further in The Monk and Zofloya.
I haven’t yet mentioned Radcliffe’s characters. One of the hallmarks of the Victorian novel is the way characters often double or mirror one another. This is one of the many motifs the more respectable Victorian realist novel borrowed from the Gothic tradition. La Luc’s happy family contrasts La Motte’s family in turmoil. Adeline never knows quite where she stands with La Motte, but she finds contentment with La Luc. La Motte’s mind is racked by doubt and regret. La Luc, meanwhile, a clear thinker with a clear conscience and a straightforward, common-sense philosophy.
As is often the case in Romantic literature, the external setting mimics the internal state of mind of the characters. La Motte is trapped in a labyrinth of his own mind as he wanders the gloomy, confusing, and frightful forest and its run-down abbey, full of secret passages and rooms. La Luc, meanwhile, lives a simple, happy life in an idyllic Alpine village.
What would I like to steal from Radcliffe as a writer of fantasy? The control of emotion. The emotional rhythm of the book that at turns lulls the reader, shocks the reader, takes the reader by the collar and drags them away. The form of the book and its emotional registers are all of a piece, inextricable from one another.
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