A Psychological Reading of The Romance of the Forest

The book opens with a flight, not a haunting. La Motte steps into a carriage at midnight, leaving Paris, “his creditors and the persecution of the laws.” His lawyer sends him off with a warning: “When once sordid interest seizes on the heart, it freezes up the source of every warm and liberal feeling.” The wound that drives the story is shame about money, with a fear of prison riding on it.

That fear chooses the abbey for him. Looking over the ruin, he decides that “a forest with liberty was not a bad home for one who had too much reason to expect a prison.” He does not choose the place because it is safe. He chooses it because it is hidden, and a man who needs to be hidden will accept a lot he would otherwise question. The house on the heath, the ruin and the fugitive family all share one condition: nobody is meant to look closely.

La Motte is not a villain at the start. He is a man who has been cornered and who keeps the cornering to himself. He finds the trap-door in a closet and says nothing. He suspects what the furnished tower rooms mean and tells nobody. When he reasons that the cells can hide his family, the narrator is dry about it: “selfish prudence was more conspicuous than tender anxiety for his wife.” Each secret is small. Together they make a man who has stopped consulting anyone.

Dissonance theory describes what happens next. A person who sees himself as decent and acts otherwise has to change one of the two beliefs, and the cheaper one goes. When the Marquis presses him, La Motte does not ask how to save Adeline. He “endeavoured only to lull the pangs of conscience, and to persuade himself into a belief that he must proceed in the course he had begun.” Radcliffe knows the slope: he has been “led on by slow gradations from folly to vice.” The sentence that sums him up is an accounting entry. “The honour of Adeline, and the quiet of his own conscience, he consented to barter for a few years of existence.”

Adeline arrives as the passenger nobody asked for. She was handed over at pistol point, with no family to claim her and no paper to say who she is. The Marquis's servant later calls her “nothing but a poor foundling.” After a fever at Monville, her first words to Madame La Motte are about attachment: “I can remember no connexion to make me regret life so much, as that I hoped to form with you.”

Attachment theory describes a child who looks for a secure base, a person to turn to when frightened. Adeline builds hers from strangers, and the book keeps testing it. Madame La Motte is kind, then jealous, then silent. La Motte is protector, jailer and, at last, rescuer. Adeline's virtue is not softness. She will not buy a roof with her conscience, and she keeps asking the people around her to be better than their fear. That demand costs her the safe place more than once, and it is what the book rewards.

The strangest passage in the book is a night of dreams. Adeline sees a dying man in a barricaded chamber, “an expression of mildness and dignity” on his face. Later dreams lead her through winding passages to a coffin. When she wakes, “the features of the deceased person, and the chamber where he lay, were strongly impressed upon her memory,” and the connection frightens her: “yet why they should be supernatural, she could not tell.” Entering the hidden rooms for the first time, she “almost expected to see the phantom of her dream.”

Freud described the uncanny as something familiar that returns in a strange form. This is the book's version. The dying man of her dreams turns out to be the writer of the manuscript, her father, and she meets his face before she knows she has one. The family romance, the old fantasy of being a nobler person's child, comes true here, and Radcliffe makes the price plain. The inheritance arrives as a murder file. When she learns the truth, “there were times when she wished the secret of her birth had never been revealed,” because she cannot easily see herself as “the instrument of dispensing that justice.” The gift of an identity is also the duty of prosecuting her uncle.

The form carries the dread. The manuscript Adeline finds is a dying man's diary: “I write by stealth.” He promises a signal: “when the journal ceases, the reader will know I am no more.” He breaks off on a prayer for courage, “nerve my heart to----,” and the page stops there for Adeline because her “light was now expiring in the socket.” To fetch another she would have to explain why she is awake. Reading the diary has to be done in the dark and in secret, as writing it was.

What the page withholds is as important as what it shows. In the pages she reads, the writer never names who sent the men, and Adeline cannot ask anyone to help her read. That sets up a pattern the whole book uses: the reader fears what she cannot see, and the worst figures stay out of view until they are standing in the room. Dread works here as a kind of waiting. The ruin teaches the reader to flinch at sounds, so the real threat can walk in unannounced.

Almost every household in the book prefers a comfortable explanation. Peter, after a fright, announces that the devils were “only owls, and such like, after all.” La Motte mocks his wife's alarm because he is ashamed of his own, and when Adeline smilingly asks whether he believes in spirits, “he felt a superstitious dread stealing upon him.” When she reports her dreams, he says the manuscript is “a strange romantic story” and that “you fancied you saw spectres and heard wondrous noises.”

This is reassurance used to avoid a fact. La Motte knows the rooms are furnished, knows the trap-door is there, and knows the Marquis has been in his parlour. A ghost is the safer thing to fear, because a ghost asks nothing of him. Mocking Adeline's fears lets him keep from asking what his own are for. The comedy of the owls is also a small lesson about people: the nearest explanation that lets us stay where we are is the one we reach for.

Defences break at night, at Adeline's bedside. The Marquis has handed La Motte a weapon: “take this poniard! use it as occasion offers, but be resolute.” La Motte climbs the stair, hands shaking so that he must set down the lamp to turn the key. He hears her sleeping, sighing, and singing “a melancholy little air” she once sang to him. He draws the curtain. The light falls on her eyes, and she wakes and begs him, “save me from the Marquis.”

The text does not say what he would have done. It shows what the face does. A man who has spent chapters turning Adeline into a problem sees a person with wet cheeks. Dissonance resolves in an act: he tells her to dress, leads her to the forest door and says, “I am not quite so bad as I have been tempted to be.” The sentence is a plea for a better self-image, and he earns it at once by a deed that puts his own safety at risk. The book's moral psychology rests on this: a decent man's conscience is not repaired by an argument but by being looked at.

Philippe de Montalt shows the other side. He too has a haunting: the abbey frightens him once, and he leaves in the night, though the narrator notes that “the spectres of conscience vanished with the darkness” and that “he never attempted to pass another night there.” Fear is not conscience. “neither pity nor repentance succeeded,” and when he learns who Adeline is, he is ready to kill again. His end is orderly. He takes poison and sends for a confessor and two notaries, to “establish Adeline beyond dispute in the rights of her birth.” Even his atonement is paperwork.

Does the ending resolve the tension or suppress it? It resolves the plot. The guilty are hanged, dead or banished, and the survivors end in a dance on the green, where La Luc sets the tone: “there is devotion in making others happy, and gratitude ought to make us devout.” The last paragraph turns the heroine into a lesson: “an example of trials well endured” and “virtues greatly rewarded.” What it suppresses is the horror Adeline felt at being the instrument of her uncle's death. Providence spares her: the Marquis takes his own life before the trial can begin.

The book speaks to anyone who has agreed to a small thing and then another. La Motte's slope runs through every modern account of a workplace scandal, a fraud that began with one favour, or a household that learned not to ask where the money came from. Readers recognise the sentence in which a man asks only to keep his security a little longer. They also recognise the pull of the comfortable explanation, whether it is owls or a rumour that the noise is nothing.

A second resonance is the uncanny of family. A parentage discovered late, a name on a certificate, a relative who turns out to be someone else: these are now ordinary events, and they still carry the shiver Radcliffe sells. Adeline's dilemma, an identity she can only claim by taking on someone else's crime, is a recognisable modern situation.

The frameworks here are modern. Cognitive dissonance dates from the 1950s, the uncanny from 1919, and attachment theory from the mid twentieth century. None was available to Radcliffe, and fictional characters are not patients. Her people are drawn as types of virtue and failing, and the narrator often tells us what to think of them, so a reading that looks for hidden depths in La Motte or Madame La Motte may be finding more than the book offers.

Other readings are strong. The novel can be read as a legal story about property, since an inheritance is at stake and a court settles it. It can be read as Gothic landscape writing, as an early example of what critics call female Gothic, or, as some critics argue, as a product of British Protestant suspicion of Catholic convents and ruined abbeys. The book even opens by saying that readers of Gayot de Pitaval's collection of cases may remember the story of La Motte and the Marquess Philippe de Montalt. That claim says something about how the novel wants to be read, and it is not the same as proof. Adeline's dreams and one apparition she believes she saw are never explained.

A Sicilian Romance, Radcliffe's earlier novel, uses the same trick from the other side: a respectable house hides a living wife behind a ghost story, so that nobody has to look. The Romance of the Forest keeps the haunted ruin and puts a murdered man in it. Northanger Abbey is Jane Austen's affectionate answer to this kind of book. Catherine Morland reads Gothic novels and expects a wicked general to have hidden away his wife, and the fault that turns out to be real is more ordinary: he is rude and mercenary. All three novels ask the same question: when we feel dread, are we afraid of the right thing?