The
passage by Walpole at the beginning of Chapter 2 serves as a beautiful example
of establishing a mood or tone before even including the plot. This passage
serves a similar purpose to an overture in a musical. In a musical, the
overture introduces the audience to the general range of melodies that will be
heard throughout the work. This passage serves to direct the emotional
responses of the audience. The first line, which talks about “antique towers
and vacant courts,” parallels and in fact seems to describe the “Gothic remains
of an abbey” in the first sentence of the chapter. From this small initial
similarity, a larger chain is established. The chapter then becomes the
aesthetic stimulus to spark the emotions explained in that opening passage. The
two pieces ultimately share a symbiotic relationship. The poem offers the
statement or argument which the chapter then serves to enforce. Equally, the
chapter presents the sensory details, with the poem providing the perspective.
*Quote courtesy of brainyquote.com
I never thought of the novel like that but now I can see your idea. Thinking of mood and tone in the same way as a musical helps me to reevaluate my ideas of this novel, because originally I found it boring, but now I'm going to try to think of it in those terms.
ReplyDeleteI think comparing the quote to an overture is a great connection to make. The passage from Walpole really does set the scene. I wonder what the effect of these particular lines would have had on the audience when Romance of the Forest was first published. I've never read The Mysterious Mother (the drama the quote comes from) but the explanatory notes say that it's about incest. Assuming that readers would have been familiar with the Mysterious Mother, perhaps they may have read the quote as suggesting incest as well. So why make allusion to incest? I think that connecting the abbey to the Mysterious Mother castle would suggest that unnatural things will happen at this abbey that they seek refuge in. As if the abbey is not creepy enough, there is the added suggestion of perversion.
ReplyDeleteI love the comparison of using the beginning description of the setting as the overture music for a musical. I always thought of setting the tone in the stories happened throughout the main events with descriptive words especially picked out and tossed in the bodies of the chapters. The correlation you used with the beginning music to set the mood of the scene with the setting of a paragraph though really brought the true art of creating an environment for the reader, an important point that an author must achieve especially with the gothic works.
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