Perhaps because I had Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees in my head (or maybe I’m just dreaming of faraway places), I began to notice the various place names in Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. There seem to be three sorts of places in the novel: real ones (i.e. locatable on a map), fictional ones, and purposely obscured ones.
What’s remarkable about the fictional ones is that they seem to center around the Abbey and Adeline’s clandestine escape. For instance, neither the city of Auboine, nor the forest of Fontainville (sometimes Fontaingville) are locatable on the map. This may either be 1) because Radcliffe simply invented them to prevent travelers arriving at the location and realizing there is, indeed, no ancient Abbey there; or, 2) because she was reading faulty travel literature that included Auboine and Fontainville as such, and merely reproduced the error.
There is another place name, however, that is even more ambiguous, and doesn’t (at least upon a preliminary search) appear in any contemporary travel literature: Caux. Our first introduction to the city comes from the manuscript Adeline discovers in the dark chamber of the Abbey (later realized to be from her father). He writes that he was arrested on the road to Caux, where there is erected a monument to the “immortal Henry” (128). Certainly this would remain unremarkable, if the city had not reappeared upon Adeline’s escape.
The next time Caux is mentioned is while the Marquis remains injured in an inn after his skirmish with Theodore. This inn is in Caux (212), which means that Adeline and Theodore arrived here, were retained here, and, most importantly, travelled the road to Caux, retracing the steps of her father. Unfortunately, however, Caux does not exist as such on a map of France. There are many roads to Caux (Rue de Caux), and a few cities with “Caux” in their names; nothing, however, exists as simply “Caux” to which a road called “Rue de Caux” leads. This, of course, preserves Radcliffe’s geographical obscuring of the first-half of the novel, but oddly establishes Caux as a point of connection between father and daughter—between the scene of one arrest, and the scene of another.
What’s also perplexing about place names is that aside from using real ones, and making up fictional ones, Radcliffe also had a third option: using only the first letter. This is mostly used during Louis’s description of his father’s journey to the Abbey. “D—,” is close to Paris; “V—“ is south of “D—;” “M—“ is south yet of that, where Adeline stayed sick; at “L—“ Louis seemed to be lost, but he saw La Motte’s scribbling on the glass and people of inn recollected him. From there, he arrived at “Auboine.”
Obviously La Motte wouldn’t want his persecutors to know the way to the Abbey, and thus the obscured place names would make sense if they were written in a letter. However, he is speaking his retracing of his father’s journey, presumably not actually saying “D, dash,” and thus the dashes are Radcliffe (or the narrator) purposely obscuring these particular place names from the reader.
What this indicates, then, is that though the story is based in contemporary France and the action touches several real-life places, the Abbey, and the events surrounding it were geographically unreal for Radcliffe—unreachable. The reader can never actually go back and find it. After the La Mottes left Paris, and before the action reappears on the map in Savoy, they had literally arrived in a realm of fantasy.
This small analysis of place names in The Romance of the Forest is fairly fragmented and warrants further in-depth research. Quite a bit of comparison has been made between popular travel literatures of Radcliffe’s day and this novel; however, I’d like to look a bit deeper into printed maps of France, and (Mortetti-style) do a bit of mapping to see if I can make sense of the (partial) travel routes. Further, since The Romance of the Forest inscribes locations both real and fantastical, I’d also like to consider Adeline’s methods and conditions of transportation between the two worlds: both seeming to hinge upon the charity/character of La Motte, and a helpful Peter.
