Introduction

“Ever since its origins in the late eighteenth century, the Gothic has provided Anglo-American culture with a space of monstrous ‘otherness’” (Williams 490). Acknowledged as the world’s first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole has opened the floodgates to this monstrous otherness, allowing the darker sides of human nature to pour out. As with all monstrous things, The Castle of Otranto is worth further exploration for its literary value as the first Gothic novel and the time period it represents...or is it simply because it is so frightening? In this blog, we explore, from a scholarly viewpoint, the complexity of the monstrosity playing into the horrors and haunts of Otranto. According to some, these horrors are merely "fashioned as a 'frivolous' production that might appeal to those with the leisure and learning to appreciate the clever novelties of the text" (Gentile 17). We, however, will show how the floodgate opens and lets of the horror of the dark side of human nature.

One of the major terrors lurking within the castle is the threat of incest or sexual abuse. Isabella was engaged to marry Prince Manfred’s son Conrad, but when Conrad is killed by the falling helmet, Manfred decides that he will divorce his wife Hipploita and marry Isabella. His motivation is primary for his personal and political security. He blankly states to Isabella: “my fate depends on having sons” (Walpole 25). Mair Rigby states that "the institutions of family and marriage are shaken" in gothic fiction (Rigby 47). This motive for Manfred to impose such oppression on Isabella--to force her to marry him against her will and her religious beliefs--is typical of Gothic fiction and reflects sexual interests that arise with psychological interpretation, according to Michelle Masse. Gothic fiction in general, according to Masse, revolves around the fears of a female protagonist. “The originating trauma is the prohibition of female autonomy in the Gothic, in the families that people it, and in the society that reads it (Masse 681). Masse goes on to relate Gothic to a study made by Freud.

In listening to the story of an eighteen-year-old who has been pursued by the husband of her father’s mistress [Herr K.] since she was fourteen, Freud aligns himself with the world of male homosocial exchange that reduces Dora [the patient] to a bargaining chip[....]Freud’s proposed closure of this plot is that Dora marry Herr K. --a shocking suggestion unless we realize that the reality Freud and Gothic endings prefer repeats a social construction of gender that they have a stake in preserving (686).

Is this surprising for his time period? Not at all. The eighteenth century was a period of extreme sexual activity in all directions, always lurking beneath the surface. Anne Williams writes that

opera seria performed the notion that gender itself is performance. Eighteenth-century performance practices had the effect of dissolving the basic and powerful cultural binary of male versus female. Impresarios cast operas by simply finding the best voices they could for particular parts, ignoring the sex of the singer. [A part] might be sung by a soprano, a tenor, or a castrato, the paradoxical male soprano, depending upon who was available (Williams 114). In the novel itself, several characters, notably Father Jerome and Theodore, have hidden identities as noblemen. Ultimately, Theodore is proclaimed to be the true heir of Otranto (Walpole 112). While expressing the terror of male sexuality to the female mind through the frightened Isabella, perhaps Walpole was using the mistaken--and later validated--identity of Theodore to secretly assert his sexual orientation, if indeed all outward identity to him was performance. It is noteworthy, however, to frame this against the counterpoint, as raised by that the gothic novel is simply "an ideology of female power through pretended and staged weakness" or in other words, that Isabella is a poor example of the male/female didactic, grossly misrepresenting females as a whole (Davison 33).


ough pretended and staged weakness"Much more interesting to explore, the Castle of Otranto can be read as an outlet for human emotion in fiction. Anne Williams explores Otranto’s connection to the opera.“Gothic fiction[...]has much in common with the aesthetic principles of opera seria. That is, the plot aims primarily to get the characters into situations where they may experience particular emotions, such as horror, terror, or the sublime. Mood (Affekt) is everything.” (Williams 115). One of Walpole’s important innovations in writing The Castle of Otranto is focusing on emotion over rational experience. This attention is part of a larger intellectual and artistic movement in the late eighteenth century with the shift from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period.

An important element of the emerging emotional aesthetic is the ability to experience the sublime. Marcy Frank comments that historical objects are viewed by Walpole as a source of sublime feeling. This relates very much to the veneration of relics during the middle ages, a concept that Walpole would have been familiar with as a collector of antiquities. “Manfred, then, has two kinds of experience of the helmet that are in Burke's terms redundant: he experiences it as the stupor of the sublime and he ‘examines’ it through touch, as though reinforcing the empirical source of the feeling” (Frank 376). The giant helmet and the giant sabre are objects of power and awe, and even before the reader knows the full significance of these items to the plot, their terrifying mystery is conveyed through the terror and awe of the characters.

The ability for a person to feel the imagined emotions of another is a concept that Robert Hamm suggests Walpole likely borrowed from the stage, with actors being able to communicate emotions through their actions.. In the eighteenth century, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was the iconic terror play. Hamm notes that several scenes and characters in Otranto correspond to the theatrical classic. Hamm believes that Walpole’s aim is “providing the reader a private and more intensely terrifying experience. Much like the skilled actor’s control over the spectator, the novel takes possession of the reader and makes him or her experience the passions it describes. Thus, the novel achieves a new status for its ability to represent terror (674). While the almost mindless behavior of characters in Otranto is liable to drive modern readers crazy, Walpole made the behavior of characters erratic because he wanted to convey their emotions, above all else, to his readers.


On the other hand, Walpole’s novel represents the excess of order and elaboration characteristic of the Enlightenment, but with its own twists of his individual taste and expression.“For Walpole, Gothic is always just that, performance, its structures always full of imitation, disguise, and travesti (the technical term for operatic cross-dressing and the root of our term `travesty', both derived from the Latin transvestire, to change clothes.) His fiction and his house also celebrate ornamentation for its own sake” (Williams 115). Indeed, Jerrod Hogle asserts that Otranto is a "blending of two romances, which both asserted and disrupted generic identity" allowing this ornamentation to take place regardless of current trends dictating otherwise (Hogle 3). If you, the reader, have ever seen a so called 'goth' and their dress, you will understand how this dark gaudiness is emphasised, even though it swims against the current of social acceptability.

We invite you to explore this novel, venture forth to discover the genesis of the gothic novel. Come to the Castle of Otranto, and experience the darker side of human nature!