The Castle of Otranto, or What's Going on with the Helmet, Exactly?

So, as promised, today I'll be discussing The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. As the first true Gothic novel, I was a little surprised at a few of the different elements that make up the work. First, the quality of the writing is simply lacking. This book is clearly more of an important piece of literature than it is a great one. The varying, almost bipolar, method of conveying the plot--where for a few pages there is no dialogue and the narrator explains everything, and then there are large chunks of dialogue without any real context--is perfectly understandable in a novel from this time period. However, it is the contents of the novel which are valuable to this discussion. One of the things I noticed immediately is that Walpole coaches the novel as a translation (a very old one at that) from Italian. Obviously, this is part of the contemporary style of novel writing; that said, given the nature of the work as a Gothic text, the self-effacing nature of the preface can be viewed as an element of self-parody that tends to turn up in similar works.


Furthermore, the setting of the novel centuries before its publishing marks another aspect of the traditional Gothic--this aspect would soon fall out of favor, leading to novels set in contemporary times. What the setting does, however, is strengthen the suspension of disbelief. It is simply easier to imagine the supernatural elements of the novel when they are placed long ago and far away. As far as the supernatural is concerned, it is also interesting that over-laying essentially every action is a light dusting of Catholicism. This element of Gothicism would continue on in various ways from this moment forward--I'm thinking here of exorcism films in which all Christianity is Catholic. The foreign-ness of Catholicism to the Anglican Britain also plays into the weirdness factor.


Finally, in this novel we see the beginnings of the Gothic archetypes, most obviously the Virgin Maiden and the Corrupt Man. Both Isabella and Matilda are obviously Virgin Maidens--the narration seems to fall all over itself praising their piety and grace--especially that of Matilda who originally wanted to be a nun. Likewise, Manfred plays the role of the Corrupt Man, willing to do anything, even the most grievous of sins, in order to further his aims. His pursuit of Isabella near the beginning of the book is, most likely, what was appropriate in an attempted rape scene at the time. It will be interesting to see how these Gothic elements play out in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) next week.