A Matter of Comfort

The character of Adeline in Romance of the Forest is one of the first to give a long winded speech about her past, but she starts off in the beginning of the novel giving sort of indifferent and "artless" answers to everyone's questions. She also tends to be quite dramatic with no background information as to why, constantly bursting into tears and falling prey to hysteria at the slightest intimidation. As we said in class, the first chunk of the text is mostly indirect dialogue with the narrator dictating what is happening at a pretty fast pace. Within the first ten pages or so, La Motte has already escaped his home to flee debtors, gone to a strange house and been captured and then been forced out with a young girl and told he would be killed if he decided to return within the hour. This leaves the reader in a sort of bewildered state in the sense that we know generally what the characters are doing and what it happening, but we have no insight into what they are thinking or how they interact with each other. So much is compacted into a short number of pages that the pace of the story seems to quicken. This is due to the lack of direct dialogue. As the story progresses, we see the characters, especially Adeline, opening up to each other and giving a history of how they came to be in their current predicament. I think this has to do with character development and how they must build a sense of trust among them before they interact verbally. This in turn makes the characters seem a little more real and relatable. They start to form disfunctional family of outcasts and once they have established bonds, they tend to speak more openly. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure if any one of us were forced into this strange grouping scenario, we'd a ll be a little skeptical at first, too.