Avenged: Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest

Abstract

The Romance of the Forest shows a girl in the grip of the stern world of the Symbolic order. Although she accepts the Symbolic order itself, she rejects her place in it. Adeline does not understand this world because it does not satisfy her inmost needs as a human being. Therefore, her Family Romance aims at changing her place and thus her destiny in the social order. She experiences her story as an utter loss of plenitude following the death of the woman she believes to be her mother when she is aged seven. However, she is not aware of a prior experience of plenitude and its loss with regard to her biological mother, whose death precipitates all the disastrous developments in her family. Wealthy and high-ranking, her biological family was indeed a site of originary plenitude. Adeline’s first, irrecoverable loss of plenitude, her originary trauma, is the death of her mother and the subsequent murder of her father. These events also cause her dislocation from the happy family and from her high station in life — loss of plenitude coded as loss of place.