The importance of the family in The Romance of the Forest
Adeline, the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, is a character with few goals for the end of her story. She knows what she does not want, and that is embodied in a life of the convent. She cannot accept a life where she is “Excluded from the cheerful intercourse of society– from the pleasant view of nature– almost from the light of day– condemned to silence– rigid formality– abstinence and penance– condemned to forego the delights of [the] world” (37). These basic needs are more than met by the end of the story when she is rewarded with wealth, love, and title. The common factor between these three is the relationship they all have to family. Family becomes the unnamed goal for Adeline and the focal point of the story: it has the power to accelerate the events of the novel and creates the sense of interconnectedness and fortunate coincidence so important to the ending.
At the beginning of the novel, Adeline is described as essentially an orphan, with few bonds left to connect her to her family. She meets La Motte under mysterious circumstances, put under his charge when he is trapped by bandits in the countryside late one night. When she tells Madame La Motte the story of her life in the third chapter, she says,
"I am the only child [...] of Louis de St. Pierre, a chevalier of reputable family, but of small fortune, who for many years resided at Paris. Of my mother I have a faint remembrance: I lost her when I was only seven years old, and that was my first misfortune. At her death, my father gave up housekeeping, boarded me in a convent, and quitted Paris. Thus was I, at this early period of my life, abandoned to strangers." (36)
A part of her abandonment to strangers is in her present relationship with La Motte, a source of anxiety for her throughout the first half of the book. She tells him, “I have no friend in the world, if I do not find one in you” (7). Thus, at the beginning of the novel, Adeline is without money or a home. Her father leaves her in a convent in Paris, and sees her rarely afterwards. She has literally been orphaned by death in one parent, her mother. In this way, she loses the sympathetic and nurturing maternal figure so important to female characters in fairy tales. She is orphaned figuratively by the disinterest of the other parent, her father. He wants her to take the veil in the convent, and so become no longer a responsibility of his. Adeline does not want this life. Although she is virtuous, she is too interested in the sensual and intellectual pleasures of the outside world to become a nun. She confides in Madame La Motte, “You [...] can form little idea of the wretchedness of my situation, condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and imprisonment of the most dreadful kind, or to the vengeance of a father, from whom I had no appeal” (37). It is Adeline’s family history that renders her so much a tragic heroine: because she has no family, she has nothing. The indifference of her father stripped her of a happy childhood, and his cruelty leaves her in the care of the La Mottes. The criminals she is left with in the countryside say her father “ordered [her] to be confined in [her] chamber” (41) and then tell La Motte to remove her and not return, under fear of death. Because her family has prevented her from ever knowing happiness, Adeline’s story begins with her having everything to gain.
Adeline does begin the novel with the characteristics that enable her to eventually overcome her troubles and become happy. When La Motte first meets Adeline, he is moved by her innocence and beauty. Madame La Motte notes her sweetness when she is ill. But Radcliffe does not give a thorough, physically- and characteristically-specific description of Adeline until the family has taken up residence in the abbey. She says that
"The observations and general behaviour of Adeline already bespoke a good understanding and an amiable heart, but she had yet more– she had genius. She was now in her nineteenth year; her figure of the middling size, and turned to the most exquisite proportion; her hair was dark auburn, her eyes blue, and whether they sparkled with intelligence, or melted with tenderness, they were equally attractive. [...] The captivations of her beauty were heightened by the grace and simplicity of her manners. (29)
Adeline is a perfect heroine. She has had a childhood sheltered in a convent where she confesses everyone was unhappy and oppressed, yet she has developed sweetness, amiability, and charming manners. She is a noblewoman without very strong claims to that title based on her birth, as the reader knows it, and without the appropriate upbringing for it. Her character, like her beauty, is something innate. These qualities do not compensate for the setbacks of her family, in the life of a heroine; instead, the setbacks of her family contribute to her status as heroine, with her good qualities as enhancement for her story. The tragedy she has to overcome lends her dramatic substance, and creates an ability for hope in her. When the family moves to the abbey, Adeline cannot be too upset, because she “had no retrospect of past delight to give emphasis to present calamity”(32). As mentioned before, she is completely open to the possibilities of happiness because she has been deprived in the past, and the qualities she possesses help her to find that happiness.
The La Mottes become her adopted family and, under their care, she begins to travel the path that will eventually end in her happiness. Soon after they have settled in the abbey, Adeline “began to feel an interest in the concerns of her companions, and for Madame La Motte she felt more; it was the warm emotion of gratitude and affection” (25). This soon changes to “the affection of a daughter” (44). The La Mottes are Adeline’s source of security in a world where she has previously only known misfortune, a lack of love, and danger. However, her relationship with this family soon deteriorates for the purpose of accelerating her story. If Radcliffe had allowed Adeline to find happiness with the La Mottes, living as their daughter in filial harmony, she would not have gained all that the virtuous heroine deserves. Radcliffe must deny the heroine comfort with one family for a greater achievement. When La Motte suddenly begins to leave the abbey for long stretches of time without giving satisfactory reasons for doing so, Madame La Motte is suspicious and decides “that Adeline was the object of her husband’s attachment. Her beauty out of the question, who else, indeed, could it be in a spot thus secluded from the world?” (46) Her manner changes towards Adeline, and the relationship between them declines quickly. When the son of the La Mottes, Louis, comes to the abbey and falls in love with Adeline, “a perception of the growing partiality of Louis co-operated with the canker of suspicion, to destroy in Madame La Motte that affection which pity and esteem had formerly excited for Adeline” (74). The heroine’s relationship with her first adopted family begins to deteriorate beginning with the member she cares for the most. It is ironic that while romantic love is essential for Adeline’s happiness and reward, it is the development and suspicion of it that leads to the destruction of Adeline’s first adopted family.
As Adeline’s relationship with the La Mottes dissolves, her story accelerates into the persecution she will face throughout the story at the hands of the Marquis. This relationship itself is the result of her interaction with the La Mottes. La Motte owes a debt to the Marquis for his secrecy about the robbery reported at the end of the novel, and that debt is repaid by allowing the Marquis open access to Adeline. All three members of the family destroy their relationship with Adeline in some way: La Motte betrays her, Madame La Motte regards her with mixed affection and suspicion, and Louis reveals his love in an unwanted declaration. Romance forces itself on Adeline: the fate that the story demands meets her at every step. Thus far in the novel, she has two suitors, Louis and the Marquis. Adeline does eventually succumb to the inevitable. When she first meets her destined lover, a chevalier named Theodore who is serving under the Marquis, “she indulged, without scruple, the remembrance of that dignified air and manner which so much distinguished the youth she had seen” (76). This is perhaps the first time that Adeline has done anything in the book “without scruple”; her love comes upon her in a way that sweeps away her sense of restraint and virtue, at least in thought, if not in deed. Adeline’s acquaintance and residence with the La Mottes initially exposes her to the three lovers that she will have in the course of the book. Her relationship with the family completely breaks down when the Marquis abducts Adeline. Although Theodore saves her, he is soon arrested for attacking the Marquis and she is sent back to the abbey. The Marquis tells La Motte to kill her, but La Motte instead sends her to the village of Leloncourt, in Savoy, with the servant Peter.
In Savoy, Adeline attaches herself to the family of La Luc, the local clergyman. She falls ill in the house of Peter’s sister and is removed to the house of La Luc for the better conditions and nursing to be obtained there. His family seems similar to the one claimed by Adeline earlier in the book, “an ancient family of France, whose decayed fortunes occasioned them to seek a retreat in Switzerland” (245). La Luc’s family, consisting of “one son and a daughter, who were too young, when their mother died, to lament their loss” (246), is described as virtuous, educated, and intellectual. Although the son was brought up to be a clergyman, he has left for the military in France four years before Adeline arrives in Savoy. Adeline quickly bonds with the rest of the family, however, and soon after her recovery from her illness, she is left in the state of being
"considered as a part of the family, and in the parental kindness of La Luc, the sisterly affection of Clara, and the steady and uniform regard of Madame, she would have been happy as she was thankful, had not unceasing anxiety for the fate of Theodore, of whom in this solitude she was less likely than ever to hear, corroded her heart." (259)
Perhaps Adeline is correct; she is in extreme solitude in the small village and, as far as she knows, unlikely to see her lover outside France. However, La Luc soon becomes very ill and the family goes abroad for his health and recovery. While abroad, they meet Louis La Motte, who is, coincidentally, on his way to Savoy. He tells Adeline that Theodore is in prison and soon to be executed. It is during this confession that she learns that Theodore is actually the absent son of La Luc. The family in which she has already become as a sister is actually the one that her marriage to her lover would make her a sister-in-law in. This is rather strongly foreshadowed earlier in the book, when Adeline waits for Theodore’s recovery from a wound. The physician says to her, “You are a sister of the gentleman’s, I presume, Madam; his sister, perhaps. [...] Perhaps, Madam, you are more nearly related, [...] perhaps you are his wife” (179). She, in fact, seems to become both in separate and individual situations. The adopted family she creates becomes her means for seeing Theodore again and for learning of the fate that he must meet, and for the beginning of circumstances that will eventually lead to the end of Adeline’s sorrows and to her reward.
Her reward comes when the characters of the novel have solved the mystery of her true family, and bring justice to the Marquis. Adeline travels to Paris to testify against the Marquis, and to possibly save the lives of both Theodore and La Motte, who has been arrested for his earlier attack on and robbery of the Marquis. Du Bosse, one of the criminals who gave Adeline to La Motte at the beginning of the novel, has revealed information that casts a serious doubt on the character of the Marquis. He says that Adeline is the Marquis’s daughter and was entrusted to a man named Jean d’Aunoy, who raised her as his own child. The first moment of justice, then, comes in the acknowledgment that the Marquis almost committed incest with his daughter, and that incest almost came in the form of rape. It is a shock to the characters as well as the reader: “when he [La Motte] knew that Adeline was the daughter of the Marquis, and remembered the crime to which he had once devoted her, his frame thrilled with horror” (334). Radcliffe gives the history of Adeline in the testimony of Du Bosse, and it is as detailed as the history that Adeline relates herself, although one that runs completely contradictory to what she says. It is another coincidence that her father should feel such lust for his own daughter without knowing it, and that the family the child was given to should accidentally conduct her to him. However, this story is soon overturned by the testimony of Jean d’Aunoy, who reveals that the Marquis is not actually Adeline’s father, but her uncle. Instead, the brother of the Marquis, Henry, is the father of Adeline. He was killed by the Marquis in the abbey, leaving behind a manuscript later found and read by Adeline. The Marquis knows that with this evidence, he will be condemned to death, and becomes penitent in the last moments of his life. He poisons himself and leaves a full confession behind.
Adeline’s story is completed in the last pages of the novel. She begins the novel in destitution– the only riches she possesses being those of her beauty and her character– and by the end, she has become incredibly wealthy. Her father, Henry, “received from his ancestors a patrimony very inadequate to support the splendour of his rank; but he had married the heiress of an illustrious family, whose fortune amply supplied the deficiency of his own” (343). She not only receives the fortune of her mother and the good name of her father, but is willed a “considerable legacy” (353) by the Marquis in his final moments. She is acquainted with members of her true family and finally knows what it is to have relations who welcome and love her. Thus her establishment of an extended, temporary family with the La Mottes at the beginning of the story and with the family of La Luc in the middle of the story, leads to security in a real family and a reward befitting her nature. However, Adeline does not simply rely on what she is given. She continues to create an extended family, and “in the society of friends so beloved, [she] lost the impression of that melancholy which the fate of her parent had occasioned” (357). Her experiences have taught her the importance of human relationships, and although now satisfied with a history and all that brings to her, she looks more to the family created by friends. She marries Theodore and they move to the lake of Geneva, near Leloncourt, where they can be near La Luc, who has made a complete recovery from his illness. The passion of Louis for Adeline eventually fades and, as he is a good friend of Theodore, he moves to the lake as well. Finally happy, Adeline is reunited with branches of all of the families that she has come to care for, all three of which have had some contribution to her ultimate reward.
The Romance of the Forest is a novel of “virtues greatly rewarded” (363) and of deserving natures receiving all that Radcliffe believes them entitled to. However, the “former lives [of Theodore and Adeline] afforded an example of trials well endured” (363), a hint that part of this virtue lies in the ability to overcome evil. It is a book of instruction about the importance of family, including extended ones. To endure well is to withstand the trial and to look farther past it; Adeline is hopeful and forms families when they are not to be found. Coincidence plays an important role in the creation of her happiness, but the consequence of her own action is equally important.
WORKS CITED
Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
At the beginning of the novel, Adeline is described as essentially an orphan, with few bonds left to connect her to her family. She meets La Motte under mysterious circumstances, put under his charge when he is trapped by bandits in the countryside late one night. When she tells Madame La Motte the story of her life in the third chapter, she says,
"I am the only child [...] of Louis de St. Pierre, a chevalier of reputable family, but of small fortune, who for many years resided at Paris. Of my mother I have a faint remembrance: I lost her when I was only seven years old, and that was my first misfortune. At her death, my father gave up housekeeping, boarded me in a convent, and quitted Paris. Thus was I, at this early period of my life, abandoned to strangers." (36)
A part of her abandonment to strangers is in her present relationship with La Motte, a source of anxiety for her throughout the first half of the book. She tells him, “I have no friend in the world, if I do not find one in you” (7). Thus, at the beginning of the novel, Adeline is without money or a home. Her father leaves her in a convent in Paris, and sees her rarely afterwards. She has literally been orphaned by death in one parent, her mother. In this way, she loses the sympathetic and nurturing maternal figure so important to female characters in fairy tales. She is orphaned figuratively by the disinterest of the other parent, her father. He wants her to take the veil in the convent, and so become no longer a responsibility of his. Adeline does not want this life. Although she is virtuous, she is too interested in the sensual and intellectual pleasures of the outside world to become a nun. She confides in Madame La Motte, “You [...] can form little idea of the wretchedness of my situation, condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and imprisonment of the most dreadful kind, or to the vengeance of a father, from whom I had no appeal” (37). It is Adeline’s family history that renders her so much a tragic heroine: because she has no family, she has nothing. The indifference of her father stripped her of a happy childhood, and his cruelty leaves her in the care of the La Mottes. The criminals she is left with in the countryside say her father “ordered [her] to be confined in [her] chamber” (41) and then tell La Motte to remove her and not return, under fear of death. Because her family has prevented her from ever knowing happiness, Adeline’s story begins with her having everything to gain.
Adeline does begin the novel with the characteristics that enable her to eventually overcome her troubles and become happy. When La Motte first meets Adeline, he is moved by her innocence and beauty. Madame La Motte notes her sweetness when she is ill. But Radcliffe does not give a thorough, physically- and characteristically-specific description of Adeline until the family has taken up residence in the abbey. She says that
"The observations and general behaviour of Adeline already bespoke a good understanding and an amiable heart, but she had yet more– she had genius. She was now in her nineteenth year; her figure of the middling size, and turned to the most exquisite proportion; her hair was dark auburn, her eyes blue, and whether they sparkled with intelligence, or melted with tenderness, they were equally attractive. [...] The captivations of her beauty were heightened by the grace and simplicity of her manners. (29)
Adeline is a perfect heroine. She has had a childhood sheltered in a convent where she confesses everyone was unhappy and oppressed, yet she has developed sweetness, amiability, and charming manners. She is a noblewoman without very strong claims to that title based on her birth, as the reader knows it, and without the appropriate upbringing for it. Her character, like her beauty, is something innate. These qualities do not compensate for the setbacks of her family, in the life of a heroine; instead, the setbacks of her family contribute to her status as heroine, with her good qualities as enhancement for her story. The tragedy she has to overcome lends her dramatic substance, and creates an ability for hope in her. When the family moves to the abbey, Adeline cannot be too upset, because she “had no retrospect of past delight to give emphasis to present calamity”(32). As mentioned before, she is completely open to the possibilities of happiness because she has been deprived in the past, and the qualities she possesses help her to find that happiness.
The La Mottes become her adopted family and, under their care, she begins to travel the path that will eventually end in her happiness. Soon after they have settled in the abbey, Adeline “began to feel an interest in the concerns of her companions, and for Madame La Motte she felt more; it was the warm emotion of gratitude and affection” (25). This soon changes to “the affection of a daughter” (44). The La Mottes are Adeline’s source of security in a world where she has previously only known misfortune, a lack of love, and danger. However, her relationship with this family soon deteriorates for the purpose of accelerating her story. If Radcliffe had allowed Adeline to find happiness with the La Mottes, living as their daughter in filial harmony, she would not have gained all that the virtuous heroine deserves. Radcliffe must deny the heroine comfort with one family for a greater achievement. When La Motte suddenly begins to leave the abbey for long stretches of time without giving satisfactory reasons for doing so, Madame La Motte is suspicious and decides “that Adeline was the object of her husband’s attachment. Her beauty out of the question, who else, indeed, could it be in a spot thus secluded from the world?” (46) Her manner changes towards Adeline, and the relationship between them declines quickly. When the son of the La Mottes, Louis, comes to the abbey and falls in love with Adeline, “a perception of the growing partiality of Louis co-operated with the canker of suspicion, to destroy in Madame La Motte that affection which pity and esteem had formerly excited for Adeline” (74). The heroine’s relationship with her first adopted family begins to deteriorate beginning with the member she cares for the most. It is ironic that while romantic love is essential for Adeline’s happiness and reward, it is the development and suspicion of it that leads to the destruction of Adeline’s first adopted family.
As Adeline’s relationship with the La Mottes dissolves, her story accelerates into the persecution she will face throughout the story at the hands of the Marquis. This relationship itself is the result of her interaction with the La Mottes. La Motte owes a debt to the Marquis for his secrecy about the robbery reported at the end of the novel, and that debt is repaid by allowing the Marquis open access to Adeline. All three members of the family destroy their relationship with Adeline in some way: La Motte betrays her, Madame La Motte regards her with mixed affection and suspicion, and Louis reveals his love in an unwanted declaration. Romance forces itself on Adeline: the fate that the story demands meets her at every step. Thus far in the novel, she has two suitors, Louis and the Marquis. Adeline does eventually succumb to the inevitable. When she first meets her destined lover, a chevalier named Theodore who is serving under the Marquis, “she indulged, without scruple, the remembrance of that dignified air and manner which so much distinguished the youth she had seen” (76). This is perhaps the first time that Adeline has done anything in the book “without scruple”; her love comes upon her in a way that sweeps away her sense of restraint and virtue, at least in thought, if not in deed. Adeline’s acquaintance and residence with the La Mottes initially exposes her to the three lovers that she will have in the course of the book. Her relationship with the family completely breaks down when the Marquis abducts Adeline. Although Theodore saves her, he is soon arrested for attacking the Marquis and she is sent back to the abbey. The Marquis tells La Motte to kill her, but La Motte instead sends her to the village of Leloncourt, in Savoy, with the servant Peter.
In Savoy, Adeline attaches herself to the family of La Luc, the local clergyman. She falls ill in the house of Peter’s sister and is removed to the house of La Luc for the better conditions and nursing to be obtained there. His family seems similar to the one claimed by Adeline earlier in the book, “an ancient family of France, whose decayed fortunes occasioned them to seek a retreat in Switzerland” (245). La Luc’s family, consisting of “one son and a daughter, who were too young, when their mother died, to lament their loss” (246), is described as virtuous, educated, and intellectual. Although the son was brought up to be a clergyman, he has left for the military in France four years before Adeline arrives in Savoy. Adeline quickly bonds with the rest of the family, however, and soon after her recovery from her illness, she is left in the state of being
"considered as a part of the family, and in the parental kindness of La Luc, the sisterly affection of Clara, and the steady and uniform regard of Madame, she would have been happy as she was thankful, had not unceasing anxiety for the fate of Theodore, of whom in this solitude she was less likely than ever to hear, corroded her heart." (259)
Perhaps Adeline is correct; she is in extreme solitude in the small village and, as far as she knows, unlikely to see her lover outside France. However, La Luc soon becomes very ill and the family goes abroad for his health and recovery. While abroad, they meet Louis La Motte, who is, coincidentally, on his way to Savoy. He tells Adeline that Theodore is in prison and soon to be executed. It is during this confession that she learns that Theodore is actually the absent son of La Luc. The family in which she has already become as a sister is actually the one that her marriage to her lover would make her a sister-in-law in. This is rather strongly foreshadowed earlier in the book, when Adeline waits for Theodore’s recovery from a wound. The physician says to her, “You are a sister of the gentleman’s, I presume, Madam; his sister, perhaps. [...] Perhaps, Madam, you are more nearly related, [...] perhaps you are his wife” (179). She, in fact, seems to become both in separate and individual situations. The adopted family she creates becomes her means for seeing Theodore again and for learning of the fate that he must meet, and for the beginning of circumstances that will eventually lead to the end of Adeline’s sorrows and to her reward.
Her reward comes when the characters of the novel have solved the mystery of her true family, and bring justice to the Marquis. Adeline travels to Paris to testify against the Marquis, and to possibly save the lives of both Theodore and La Motte, who has been arrested for his earlier attack on and robbery of the Marquis. Du Bosse, one of the criminals who gave Adeline to La Motte at the beginning of the novel, has revealed information that casts a serious doubt on the character of the Marquis. He says that Adeline is the Marquis’s daughter and was entrusted to a man named Jean d’Aunoy, who raised her as his own child. The first moment of justice, then, comes in the acknowledgment that the Marquis almost committed incest with his daughter, and that incest almost came in the form of rape. It is a shock to the characters as well as the reader: “when he [La Motte] knew that Adeline was the daughter of the Marquis, and remembered the crime to which he had once devoted her, his frame thrilled with horror” (334). Radcliffe gives the history of Adeline in the testimony of Du Bosse, and it is as detailed as the history that Adeline relates herself, although one that runs completely contradictory to what she says. It is another coincidence that her father should feel such lust for his own daughter without knowing it, and that the family the child was given to should accidentally conduct her to him. However, this story is soon overturned by the testimony of Jean d’Aunoy, who reveals that the Marquis is not actually Adeline’s father, but her uncle. Instead, the brother of the Marquis, Henry, is the father of Adeline. He was killed by the Marquis in the abbey, leaving behind a manuscript later found and read by Adeline. The Marquis knows that with this evidence, he will be condemned to death, and becomes penitent in the last moments of his life. He poisons himself and leaves a full confession behind.
Adeline’s story is completed in the last pages of the novel. She begins the novel in destitution– the only riches she possesses being those of her beauty and her character– and by the end, she has become incredibly wealthy. Her father, Henry, “received from his ancestors a patrimony very inadequate to support the splendour of his rank; but he had married the heiress of an illustrious family, whose fortune amply supplied the deficiency of his own” (343). She not only receives the fortune of her mother and the good name of her father, but is willed a “considerable legacy” (353) by the Marquis in his final moments. She is acquainted with members of her true family and finally knows what it is to have relations who welcome and love her. Thus her establishment of an extended, temporary family with the La Mottes at the beginning of the story and with the family of La Luc in the middle of the story, leads to security in a real family and a reward befitting her nature. However, Adeline does not simply rely on what she is given. She continues to create an extended family, and “in the society of friends so beloved, [she] lost the impression of that melancholy which the fate of her parent had occasioned” (357). Her experiences have taught her the importance of human relationships, and although now satisfied with a history and all that brings to her, she looks more to the family created by friends. She marries Theodore and they move to the lake of Geneva, near Leloncourt, where they can be near La Luc, who has made a complete recovery from his illness. The passion of Louis for Adeline eventually fades and, as he is a good friend of Theodore, he moves to the lake as well. Finally happy, Adeline is reunited with branches of all of the families that she has come to care for, all three of which have had some contribution to her ultimate reward.
The Romance of the Forest is a novel of “virtues greatly rewarded” (363) and of deserving natures receiving all that Radcliffe believes them entitled to. However, the “former lives [of Theodore and Adeline] afforded an example of trials well endured” (363), a hint that part of this virtue lies in the ability to overcome evil. It is a book of instruction about the importance of family, including extended ones. To endure well is to withstand the trial and to look farther past it; Adeline is hopeful and forms families when they are not to be found. Coincidence plays an important role in the creation of her happiness, but the consequence of her own action is equally important.
WORKS CITED
Radcliffe, Ann. The Romance of the Forest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
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