In Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest she uses foreboding words to foreshadow Adeline’s discoveries. The beginning of this excerpt from chapter eight, Adeline retires to her chambers. Upon entering she notices the deterioration of the furniture and the greatness of the space. These objects are fairly ordinary however Adeline’s current mood causes her surroundings to take up a “Melancholy” feel in her imagination. However, Ann Radcliffe manipulates Adeline’s senses to foreshadow the events that follow. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “melancholy” means: “ill tempered, sullenness, brooding and anger.” This is the label she gave her spacious room. At first this seems a missive statement and it simply passes through the listener’s ear. Further on in the text we understand why Adeline was feeling this sense of foreboding. She finds a secret passage way behind a tapestry and follows it into a small labyrinth of different rooms. These rooms call to her memory, a nightmare she recently had about a murder. She fancies she will see a corpse on the floor but all she finds is a rusty knife. We can infer that she thinks the rust on the knife was caused by the wetness of blood and she quickly leaves the premises. The reason Adeline was feeling the “melancholy” of her own room was not because of the character of her chamber. Radcliffe was giving her audience a taste of the mood in the hidden inner chambers before Adeline found them. The atmosphere of a murder scene has an ill tempered and angry atmosphere. A predator before a murder will have a brooding and sullen attitude. Those the perceived actions of murder happened in retrospect but the melancholy mood lingered in the hidden chambers and even began to leak into Adeline’s own room and mind.
-Katie Anthony
Oxford English Dictionary. Melancholy, n. www.OED.com. (Oxford University Press: England) Date Accessed: October 14, 2012.
