5.25.2005

" 'Last night! last night! O scene of horror!'
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ASTERISKS : IN

THE : ORIGINAL
"Adeline shuddered. She feared to read the coming sentence, yet curiosity prompted her to proceed." Maybe Alli's readers have known the same feeling, what with all we've been through since the bothered nights of early March. Still you've got to admit there's something delightfully symptomatic in these protracted scenes of Adeline's reading--prophetic even, in that they dramatize the craze for nocturnal consumption of texts of terror whose becoming an international mass phenomenon was in no small part due to the novels of Ann Radcliffe, beginnning with our selfsame ROTF (1791).

" 'Some horrid deed has been done here,' said she; 'the reports of the peasants are true. Murder has been committed.' The idea thrilled her with horror. She recollected the dagger which had impeded her steps in the secret chamber, and this circumstance served to confirm her most terrible conjectures." And now Adeline's identification with the protagonist of her text reaches its height: "'Wretched, wretched victim!' she exclaimed, 'could no friend rescue thee from destruction! O that I had been near! yet what could I have done to save thee? Alas! nothing. I forget that even now, perhaps, I am like thee abandoned to dangers, from which I have no friend to succour me. Too surely I guess the author of my miseries!' "

And here a note, because this is really the central mystery of the novel. Can the Marquis de Montalt be the unnamed author of the design which took the life of the manuscript's equally unnamed author? Adeline at one time
surmised as much, and yet not once throughout her reading has it been observed that her miseries and the miseries she reads about may have one and the same author. I'm telling you, Joaquin Phoenix! Gotta run--

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