The Romance Of The Forest: A Gothic Romance of Libertinage and Decadence

Before the gentle reader plunges into the chthonic depths of Anne Radcliffe’s mind, a few explanatory words about the genre of Gothic horror may be in order. What is today accepted as “Gothic” has only a slight bit in common with the Gothic literature of the eighteenth century and the Romantic period in general. Today, the word Gothic usually conjures up images of either paperback novels involving mystery, innocent young women married off to rich and powerful old men, haunted mansions, and murder (actually, this description isn’t all that far from the original Gothic recipe, except that the modern Gothic romance is often reputed to have been written by a group of Rhesus monkeys banging away on word processors), or an Anne Rice/White Wolf vision of vampires, gargoyles, haunted castles, black clothing, and white face paint, urban horror and industrial punk, maybe a bit of sadistic fantasy for the truly liberated hard core. Two hundred years ago, vampire fiction (erotic or otherwise) was virtually unheard of. The literary experiments of various Romantic poets notwithstanding, vampires did not become popular figures of exploitation until the Victorian era. The reasons for this cannot be glossed over in a sentence or two – they will have to be covered separately. Suffice it to say that attitudes towards sexuality and sexual identity frequently are a determining factor in the popularity of the vampire as a cultural icon. At any rate, Gothic literature of the Age of Sensibility (a time period that sat squarely on the cusp of the early Romantic era) lacks the image of the vampire. The gargoyles, haunted castles, and sadistic fantasy are however very much present.

The word “Gothic” actually referred, originally, to a style of medieval architecture, which was characterized by flying buttresses, gargoyles, high arches, and peaked windows. The reason Gothic horror takes its name from this relatively innocent art form is that intellectuals of the post-Renaissance period wished to divorce themselves from the middle ages. In fact, the very term “middle ages” is perjorative – it refers to a time that is in between the height of Greco-Roman civilization at one end of a time scale, and the glorious neo-Classical culture at the other end. This is of course a term invented by a neo-Classical seventeenth or eighteenth historian who was unaware that the lust for all things Classical would ebb within a century or two. It implies that the “middle” ages had no culture of their own, but were more of a transition point between one wave of culture and the next; an embarrassment best glossed over. This time period became associated with gross superstition and blind religious faith, despite the fact that many of the world’s most famous theorists (including Copernicus) happened to live in the medieval world. Since the medieval period was largely seen as a time of barbarism and superstition, all things associated with that time period acquired the same taint. Gothic no longer referred to an architectural form or an early Germanic tribe, it referred to art that evoked feelings of awe, wonder, or horror. Supernatural elements were considered key to this art form.

Although some critics associate Gothic fiction with the Romantic movement, I would argue that Gothic literature is a separate movement altogether, an offshoot of the eighteenth century literature of sensibility that mutated on its own, and then somehow (perhaps because of the fascination of later Romantic poets with Gothicism – Byron and Shelley foremost among said poets) dovetailed into the more dominant and widespread Romantic movement. Gothic literature did not suddenly appear fully armed from the heads of the Romantic authors. The so-called “graveyard poets” of the eighteenth century – definitely Gothic in their choice of thematic material – wrote in a strict and neo-Classical elegaic style. Furthermore, two of the greatest Gothic fiction writers of that time period would have been aghast to find themselves lumped in with the excessive Romanticists. Samuel Beckford, an eccentric homosexual who lived a life of decadence and splendour, lived out his Romantic tendencies but penned Vathek in crisp, Voltairesque French. The most prolific Gothic novelist of that time period is a notorious figure, who likewise scoffed at the philosophies and ideals of the continental Romantic movement, preferring the concepts of the Enlightenment. His novels were mostly written in prisons and insane asylums, banned from the public eye; one was written on sheets of what would otherwise have been toilet paper. This “man of letters,” as he preferred to call himself, is of course Donatien-Alphonse-Francoise, Marquis de Sade. He will be mentioned later.

*

In Anne Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, the author’s Gothic fascination appears to be in many ways a response to the dawn of Romanticism. She was well read enough to have partaken of the terribly avant-garde Romantic movement, as it was in 1792. She would have been familiar with Goethe and Schiller, with Rousseau, and with the concepts and ideals espoused by their imitators. Radcliffe’s romances themselves embrace idealism and Romanticism at their excesses, rather than their somewhat more sensible points. Her pages abound with descriptions of dark and stormy nights, hidden castles, pleasure domes, supernatural horrors, and ravished innocence. This excess of strangeness in nature is not only Romanticism amplified to an almost painful magnitude – it is Romanticism’s dark side, the shadow inevitably lurking behind the light of the sun. To give in to nature has an inevitable dark result.

A fascination with horror (often confused with the frisson of sexual titillation) can however be used to drive in a theme that might otherwise not have been noticed – let alone taken seriously. Examine the very beginning of The Romance of the Forest. The heroine, Adeline, is described as being a force of “apparent innocence (and) artless energy.” Although the description of her dishevelled appearance and her “features…delicately beautiful” are described in loving and voyeuristic detail as having “gained from distress an expression of captivating sweetness,” this does a good deal more than put the reader into the role of voyeuristic observer. Radcliffe’s conscious intention is not, after all, to put forth approximately three hundred fifty pages of erotica. Her descriptions serve to illustrate the beauty and strength of Adeline’s innocence. Even in distress (of which Adeline seems to find an inexhaustible supply) her innocence seems to lend her a lasting strength. Perhaps, too, the pleasurable shudder of arousal coupled with dread reflects Radcliffe’s own ambivalence about the Romantic/Idealist aesthetic: the ideas expressed by the new poets, artists, and philosophers at the end of her era. Radcliffe, a true woman of the eighteenth century, was as fond of Fielding as she was of Rousseau. Her literary tastes all seem to be concerned with that beloved eighteenth century concept, “sensibility” – she delights in contemplating throughout her novels the various forms that extreme sensitivity can take, be it a sensitivity to suffering, to art, to beauty, to good taste and fine manners, or simply to human empathy. This is the sensibility cultivated by the sentimentalists of the late rococo/Classical period, so passionately embraced by the romanticists who otherwise stood in opposition to the morals and aesthetic values of previous generations. This is the sensibility which was the untimely end of young Werther (and some numbers of real life imitators) and Radcliffe seems to be highly aware of the dangers of cultivating a passively “sensible” temperament. Her seductive heroines are consistently imperilled by their own sensitivity. Damsels in distress generally wise up after a misadventure or two, acquire some defenses or avoidance skills, and cease to be damsels in distress.

The idea that nature is all-powerful, that the individual may have rights of his/her own in opposition to society as a whole, and that pleasure and beauty are their own truths are Romantic tenets, and these do crop up in The Romance of the Forest as well. These ideas are as dangerous as any other potentially corrupting force. The forces that would later drive Keats to write of “wild ecstasy” in his ambivalent “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are the forces that threaten to destroy Adeline. They also threaten to destroy the seemingly stronger (but much more easily tempted!) LaMottes. This is the significance of the Gothic excess, the terror of Nature. Radcliffe the writer understands fully the revolutionary nature of such sentiment.

Gothic excesses are an inevitable mirror of the corruptions of society. This can be quite a subversive technique, especially since earlier Gothic works had no overt political agenda. However, the strange world of the Gothic novel can illustrate best the horrors of a corrupt establishment, and Radcliffe pursues an obvious agenda in this story – it is a nobleman who opresses the weak and pure of heart in his northern chateau, and it is (interestingly enough) Catholicism that bears the brunt of the author’s indignation against moralistic hypocrisy:

It was (the Lady Abbess’) method, when she wanted to make converts to her order, to
denounce and terrify rather than persuade and allure…But in the life to which she
would have devoted me, I saw too many forms of real terror, to be overcome by the
influence of her ideal host, and was resolute in rejecting the veil. Here I passed several
years of miserable resistance against cruelty and superstition…” (p 36)

Perhaps this anti-Catholic sentiment is a carryover from earlier Gothic romances, an accepted part of Gothic writing of the time (witness the corruptions described in Matthew Lewis’ The Monk) ; or, perhaps, a sign of prejudice against French character in general (a later description in The Romance of the Forest of the French national character would support this theory) but it also seems to speak on a deeper level – that of social change. This, while the establishment nevertheless seems to be overtly supported: the character of the Marquis (who later uses his role as a leader of society to undermine society) is nevertheless obviously condemned.

For it is obvious that Radcliffe has another agenda, a purpose far more specific than the mere promulgation of Gothic themes and devices or even the criticism of the excesses of the nobility or the Catholic church (which, it should be noted, had very little foothold in England by the time Anne Radcliffe wrote The Romance of the Forest. England was by this time quite solidly Anglican. Radcliffe’s social criticism is perhaps directed not towards her own country at all, but to the rival country across the Channel). The Romance of the Forest, with its theme of innocence threatened by corruption and cruelty, bears similarity to a much more sinister book, published in 1791: Justine, by Donatien-Alphonse-Francois Sade. While it would be absurd to suppose that a well-bred and refined woman of her times like Anne Radcliffe would have actually read Justine at the same time as she wrote The Romance of the Forest – to do so she would have had to have been close friends with Sade and edited the book for him or otherwise had access to it prior to its publication, a ridiculous presumption; besides, a cultured lady, even a woman of letters, of the eighteenth century simply would not have considered reading Sade – it is altogether likely that Radcliffe was familiar in a second-hand sort of way with the philosophy of libertinism. This philosophy had been on the Continent for quite some time already, long enough certainly to shock some people’s sensibilities and seduce others’. The Romance of the Forest is therefore a response to the libertine philosophy of Sade, who while not the only libertine philosopher in existence at the time was easily the most well-known due to his notoriety.

Radcliffe, like Sade, deals with the theme of indulgence to excess of passion. To read Radcliffe is to enter a world very separate from the more moderate pleasures of, say, Jane Austen. It is a world of hyperbole – Adeline in danger contemplates her lover not struggling to marry her against ordinary odds, but suffering and dying at the hands of the Marquis; the Marquis who holds her in durance vile: “From the Abbey she saw no possibility of escaping. She was a prisoner in a chamber enclosed at every avenue: she had no opportunity of conversing…and she saw herself condemned to await in passive silence the impending destiny…more dreadful to her imagination than death itself.” (p 228) Like Sade, Radcliffe has worked in the plot devices of a threatened innocent, a corrupt abbey, and cruelty. All this coexists beside a certain voluptuous hedonism – the delights of the chateau held by another Marquis, the fictional Marquis de Montalt in The Mysteries of Udolpho, are as seductive as any delights Kubla Khan could order in his stately pleasure dome. Radcliffe’s villains do not merely thrill, they seduce – and they bear an uncanny resemblance to the real Marquis de Sade in their displayed evil and debauchery.

Also like Justine, Sade’s hapless anti-protagonist, Adeline in The Romance of the Forest faces the threats of incest and murder. These threats are not thrown in for gratuitous titillation. As in Justine, they are representations of terrible crimes against God and Nature – crimes, in short, against sensibility, although Radcliffe denounces such crimes where Sade supports them as acts of rebellion. Or are they, perhaps, expressions of Nature’s dark side all over again? While Radcliffe does not overtly declare that “by Nature created…with very strong passions; placed on this earth for the sole purpose of yielding to them and satisfying them, and these effects of my creation being naught but necessities directly relating to Nature’s fundamental designs…I repent not having acknowledged her omnipotence as fully as I might have done” (Sade, “Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man”) it is nevertheless true that the beauty of nature contained in The Romance of the Forest does not merely serve to keep the reader in suspense while waiting for the next plot twist – it also serves, insidiously, to seduce the senses, creating a subtle ambivalence that is considerably more powerful than any of Sade’s bombastic tirades. One thinks of the beauty and terror as depicted in Coleridge or Wordsworth, and one wonders.

It is important to note here that the crimes against God and Nature that Sade advocates and Radcliffe’s minor characters are seduced into were more dangerous to social sensibility in the eighteenth century than they are today. Nowadays, a quote such as that found in the Encyclopaedia of 1751 by Diderot would sound not merely quaint, but absurdly repressive – “Even the more tolerant of men will not deny that the judge has the right to repress those who profess atheism, and even to condemn them to death…” Sodomy (the sexual practice that Sade advocated more vociferously than any other) was in most places punishable by death, or at least life imprisonment, largely because it was regarded as against the natural order as well as being contrary to God’s plan. Atheism, pantheism, even deism were not merely countercultural alternatives to Christianity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; they were literally revolutionary, for only a revolutionary would embrace such philosophies.

Gothic romances, while outwardly conservative and arguing the point of view of the social order, explored such concepts freely. A villain could embrace any number of “unnatural” practices and ideas – indeed, the more outrageous the villain was, the better for the plot as a whole. The Gothic romance could thus be a powerful tool for subversion.
Ironically, while Sade contrived to get himself imprisoned for moral insanity by expounding his philosophy in such books as Justine and Juliette, a more or less conventional female author such as Radcliffe could get away with writing outrageous things, provided she condemned them elsewhere in the text.