A Sicilian Romance

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide and abuse.

Through her use of figurative language to describe landscapes, Radcliffe praises nature’s beauty and power. The motif of landscapes develops characterization, mood, and the theme of Romanticization of the Natural World. When Julia reaches the monastery and temporarily finds herself at peace, the landscape reflects feelings of beauty and security: “glories of the vintage [...]: the purple grapes flushed through the dark green of the surrounding foliage, and the prospect glowed with luxuriance” (96). In this landscape, she has new opportunities and a moment to take stock of her own growth. When Chapter 5 begins, “[t]he night grew stormy. The hollow winds swept over the mountains, and blew bleak and cold around” (78). This reflects the sense of defeat and dejection that the duke is feeling in his failed pursuit of Julia.

Radcliffe also uses the landscape to develop the novel’s plot: It provides caves where the characters may hide, moonlight that reveals them to pursuers, and weather that forces them to seek shelter or take a different route; it controls all the characters do and everywhere they may go.