The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe

I recently finished The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe – the third novel of hers I’ve read. Apparently, this was the first book of hers which gained wide notice, and it has many interesting aspects, though in no way comes close to The Mysteries of Udolpho.

As expected, the heroine Adeline ended up in a gothic setting (in this instance, an old abbey in a forest) which is a site shrouded in mystery and intrigue. She “falls insensible” more times than a reader could count. But of course, she overcomes her trials and tribulations (through no effort of her own, but merely with the assistance of others), marries the guy she loves, comes into a fortune, and generally winds up hunky dory through a series of coincidences.

Two main things interested me about the text, and about Ann Radcliffe’s works in general. The first is the heroine herself. I once read a piece of commentary which argued that in gothic romances the fortunes of the characters are tied to virtue and morality – the heroine will inevitably triumph because of her greater moral fiber, while the villains are destined to fail. This, in and of itself, does not surprise me. The aspect that bothers me is that Adeline’s goodness and the generosity of other characters are the sole reasons she triumphs. Through the narrative, she seems consistently incapable of doing anything to help her own situation. From the beginning, she frequently laments that she is friendless with nobody to help her. These feelings are fair, but reveal Adeline’s expectation that somebody else should take care of her. She never once contemplates trying to find work or trying to fend for herself, and takes it as her due when kind people who pity her welcome her into their households. Radcliffe’s heroines in some ways are no more than rag dolls who are tossed about by other characters and who exert no influence on their own.

The second rather disturbing aspect is the treatment of servants. Radcliffe frequently takes care to demonstrate how “good” characters act with benevolence towards those in a lower class, but the understanding that there are two classes of people—those who serve and those who are served—still pervades the text. The character Peter is the most visible servant in the text, and his master almost expects superhuman performance from him. In any time of trouble, Peter is the one who has to exert himself to provide for the family. Even after a tireless day, the master expects Peter to stand guard all night . . . do they really think he doesn’t need to sleep? And yet Peter is made comical in his simplicity and devotion to his “superiors.” While I’m sure Radcliffe would have frowned on abusing or mistreating servants, this text seems to demonstrate that her notions of class difference and social standing were probably no different from the general thinking of the time.



A note on the text: I read the Barnes and Noble classics version, which was just terrible. The text was riddled with errors – on one page, the name “Louis” was spelled “Lewis” several times (so both spellings were used on the same page). Additionally, there are many poems and little quotes separated out of the text and put in italics, but for one Sonnet, only 8 lines were separated out and somehow the rest were left in paragraph form – an obvious mistake considering the title of the piece was simply “Sonnet” and any reader could tell that there were not 14 italicized lines. These obvious errors were the worst, though typos and missing quotation marks were frequent. Shame on you Barnes and Noble for publishing such a flawed text. If anybody wants to read this book, secure a different version.