Reader, I cannot tell what strange force impelled me, some weeks since, to revisit that ghastly structure, The Castle of Otranto, the surreal ur-Gothic novella composed in 1764 by Horace Walpole.
Imagine a self-centered, manipulative paterfamilias, governing under a title dubiously obtained. He inhabits a historic and deeply symbolic edifice. He resents the least reminder of an honored predecessor in that role.
He perpetuates his family fortunes by fraud and intimidation. He bullies everyone around him. He treats young women as currency, a wife as disposable goods. His wife and daughter, nevertheless, show extreme loyalty in the face of mistreatment.
He rages when principled individuals object to his plans. Angry over a simple factual statement, he orders an assault. He lies, temporizes and offers a deal to distract a would-be intervenor.
His volatile emotions and ever-increasing paranoia lead to him to threaten, dissemble and restlessly shift his plans. He fears a reckoning that looks more and more inevitable.
His name: Duke Manfred.
*****
Out of the shadows that fringed the Enlightenment...something lumbered that was truly weird.
“I waked one morning....,” Horace Walpole later wrote, “from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle...and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armor. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate. The work grew on my hands...I was so engrossed in my tale, which I completed in less than two months, that one evening I wrote from the time I had drunk my tea, about six o’clock, till half an hour after one in the morning, when my hand and fingers were so weary, that I could not hold the pen to finish the sentence....”
.
.
.
.
.
Context:
.
George III sits on the British throne. The global Seven Years’ War (a.k.a. “French and Indian War”) has just concluded. In Lancashire, weaver James Hargreaves is building the first machine to spin thread. In America, British colonists are starting to resist economic controls imposed by the mother country. In London, death claims artist William Hogarth – creator of portraits and satiric scenes, including the dystopic “Gin Lane.”
.
.
.
Also in London, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 8, is spending a year in residence and composing his first symphony. English actor David Garrick is passing two years in Italy. On the Ganges, troops commanded by the British East India Company face off against four Mughal monarchs and gain a strategic victory. Back at home, the monumental classical-revival style of architecture called Palladian is hot; so is the painstakingly composed “natural” landscaping of Capability Brown.
.
.
.
.
Horace Walpole, suffering hand-cramps over his manuscript, is the 47-year-old younger son of an Earl. He is also a Member of Parliament, and England’s first scholarly historian of art. Walpole has spent almost 20 years elaborating an old house at Twickenham in London, which started out as “little more than a cottage” and now stands forth as a Disneyesque hybrid of castle and wedding-cake. At this point in life, his neo-Gothic obsession bursts out in prose.
The heirs of Otranto will be legion. Among the famous we can count Jane Austen; the Bronte sisters; Edgar Allen Poe, penning nightmares under the claustrophobically canted ceiling of a Baltimore attic; Lousia May Alcott, “falling into a vortex” as she exercised her young talent on magazine pot-boilers; and even Stephanie Meyer, who has said that the kernel of her “Twilight” series first came to her in the form of a dream (CNN interview, Nov. 18, 2009).
In just five fast-moving chapters Walpole forges a brand-new genre, melding dream-logic and fairy tale, Sophocles, Sir Thomas Mallory, and the darker plays of Shakespeare--with perhaps a pinch of Roman New Comedy and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia thrown in.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The opening sets the pace:
“Manfred, prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter; the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen, was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition....Young Conrad’s birth-day was fixed for his espousals. The company was assembled in the chapel of the castle, when Conrad himself was missing. Manfred, impatient of the least delay...dispatched one of his attendants to summon the young prince. The servant...came running back breathless, in a frantic manner, his eyes staring, and foaming at the mouth. He said nothing, but pointed to the court....The princess Hippolita, without knowing what was the matter, but anxious for her son, swooned away. Manfred, less apprehensive than enraged at the procrastination of the nuptials...asked imperiously, what was the matter? The fellow made no answer, but continued pointing towards the court-yard; and at last...cried out, Oh, the helmet! The helmet!...Manfred, who began to be alarmed...went himself to get information of what occasioned this strange confusion....
“...He beheld his child dashed to pieces, and almost buried under an enormous helmet, an hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers.”
Manfred is not only shocked, but deeply disturbed because of a prophecy: “That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it.”
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” –William Faulkner (inheritor of the Gothic tradition), in his novel, Requiem For a Nun, 1950. (Often slightly misquoted.)
.
SPOILERS
.
In the five chapters (equivalent to five acts of a play), Prince Manfred perpetrates quite a series of wickednesses:
--We first see him about to marry off his sickly, underage son to the lovely princess Isabella for “reasons of state.”
--On the son’s untimely death, Manfred immediately tries to persuade or coerce Isabella to accept himself instead.
–-Being already married, Manfred schemes to persuade his faultless wife into accepting a divorce and the priest of their church into going along with it.
--He orders the execution of the young peasant, Theodore, whose attitude is getting on his nerves.
–-When Isabella's father eventually shows up to rescue her, Manfred offers his own daughter in exchange for Isabella.
--Finally, Manfred stabs to death his own daughter, under the impression that he’s caught Isabella dallying with Theodore.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Meanwhile a series of prodigies haunt the dramatic personae.
Isabella’s father is warned of her danger by a mysterious, dying hermit, whose instructions lead him to a a gigantic, buried sword.
The same hermit later turns up in the Otranto church as a decomposing, talking corpse.
A portrait of former Duke Alfonso walks. His effigy in the church sheds tears.
The giant helmet remains blocking up the forecourt, its plumes waving significantly at key moments.
Other parts of a Brobdignagian figure turn up: a giant armored foot is reported by a terrified male servant, a giant hand by a terrified female servant.
Isabella's father turns up at the castle with the giagantic sword.
And finally...we'll get to that.
.
.
Otranto created a sensation. A second edition came out in under four months. A third appeared in 1766, a French translation in 1767. Meanwhile, a literary magazine offered an abridgement. Ireland saw two pirated versions. The “graveyard poet" Thomas Gray (a friend of Walpole) wrote to the author, “it made some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’nights.” Other early fans included poet Ann Yearsley, who produced a lengthy appreciation of Otranto in verse.
Reportedly Otranto has never gone out of print since first publication. Theatrical, even operatic, in form to begin with, it was successfully adapted for the stage in 1781 and again in 2009 (at the First Folio Theater in Chicago).
Readers today are apt to wonder what the excitement was about.
Loquatious “comic” servants, mistaken identity, repeated swooning, helpful birthmarks, theatrical oratory, long-lost heirs, cyclopean paragraphs and perpetual parentheticals have lost their allure. Even at the time, serious reviewers had decidedly mixed opinions.
Still, the novel resonated with readers in a powerful way, and some of its tropes remain perennial: framing a supernatural tale with “documentary” background (as in Dracula and The Turn of the Screw); Roman Catholic atmospherics (as in The Exorcist); dungeons and secret tunnels (as in the Harry Potter series).
.
Other 18th-century narrative milestones:
1726. Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts, By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships, Jonathan Swift. Fantastical satire based on travel genre.
1740. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (two vols.), Samuel Richardson. At the request of publishers, Richardson undertook a “conduct book,” or manual of proper behavior, in letter form, which morphed into an epistolary novel of sexual peril. Immense best-seller, much satirized from the get-go.
1759. Candide, or All for the Best, Voltaire. Fast-moving philosophico-satirical picaresque, 30 chapters.
1759-66. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (nine vols. published sequentially), Laurence Sterne. Outsize shaggy-dog story with farcical cast, based on autobiographical genre.
.
.
.
.
The first edition of Otranto appeared without Walpole’s name, presented as a translation from an old manuscript. In a new preface to the second edition, however, he revealed himself and stated that he aimed to create a new type of romance by letting in miracles, yet having characters “think, speak, and act, as it might be supposed mere men and women would do, in extraordinary positions.”
Really? What mere woman, on suspicion of a budding love interest, might be supposed to talk like this:
Oh! I see all my guilt! said Matilda. No...I should not deserve this incomparable parent, if the inmost recesses of my soul harbored a thought without her permission...I have suffered a passion to enter my heart without her avowal – But here I disclaim it...I ahbor myself if I cost my mother a pang. She is the dearest thing I have on earth. – Oh! I will never, never behold him more!
IMO, in Otranto Walpole created something so new that he himself had trouble wrapping his head around it:
The novelty of Otranto was literary surrealism.
And in its essentially dreamlike narrative, multiple significances lay embedded.
On one level, of course, it is pure melodrama.
But consider also a psychological interpretation:
Besides killing Conrad, the falling helm cracks the pavement of the courtyard and breaks an opening into the underground portion of the castle. Through this opening Theodore escapes into the dungeons. He meets Isabella underground and helps her escape as well. Symbolically, this may evoke a breakthough between the well-defended selfish consciousness of Manfred and the subconscious mind – with some of those subconscious contents escaping.
Indeed, it may be possible to interpret the castle and even the whole cast of characters as symbolically representing Manfred himself. Manfred deliberately devalues and disclaims the nobler potentials of the self: humanity, humility, caring for others, self-forgetfulness, duty, religious feeling, pliancy, honor, which are enacted around him by dependents and outsiders.
Conscience looms in the form of Duke Alfonso, representing the type of noble personality that Manfred might otherwise have chosen to be. Eventually the Duke’s gigantic form shatters the bastion (both psychological and physical) that Manfred has so long struggled to maintain.
The narrative might also be viewed as study in the dynamics of a dysfunctional family.
In fact, I'd suggest that Otranto embodies among other things a tacit protest against a patriarchial system that enabled abusive behavior and made complicity a duty. At the time, such an idea could scarcely even be consciously entertained. But Otranto evaded the censorship of the conscious mind through dream-form, dream-logic.
Of course, the plot of Otranto takes patriarchal norms for granted, apparently protesting only against their violation. Yet notice:
Otranto presents a shocking array of missing, abusive or impotent father figures:
It turns out that Duke Manfred’s grandfather actually poisoned the former Duke Alfonso, then lied his way into control of the dukedom. [The intermediate duke, Manfred’s father, is barely mentioned.]
Duke Manfred commits all his wrongs specifically out of anxiety to ensure male-to-male succession. After the death of Conrad, Manfred refuses to see both wife and daughter: “Manfred, stepping back hastily, cried, Begone, I do not want a daughter; and flinging back abruptly, clapped the door against the terrified Matilda.”
Even worse than we thought: he obtained custody of Isabella by subterfuge from a credulous guardian.
.
The father of Isabella--Frederic, marquis of Vincenza--has been long absent in the Holy Land. He arrives mid-plot with impressive pomp, but proves both physically and morally weak. He has to be reminded of his duty, twice, by another “father” in the form of the dying–later dead–hermit. Frederic, moreover, has all along possessed a better claim to rule Otranto than Manfred--which neither Frederic nor his predecessors ever bothered to exert.
The confessor of Manfred’s wife Hippolita, Father Jerome, turns out to have — years before — lost track of an actual son of his own. This priest also allows family secrets and abuses in Otranto to persist inexplicably before taking a stand at the end.
Even the good Duke Alfonso died without producing a male heir. His spirit sits virtually inert for a couple of generations before acting–only to bring worse disasters on the innocent than the guilty.
Meanwhile, the three women–Hippolita, daughter Matilda and Isabella–positively compete for a prize in self-denying consideration towards one another. Even when the girls become love-rivals for Theodore, they cannot remain enemies.
Yet even this female solidarity is limited by patriarchal norms.
The wife and daughter of Manfred are depicted as faultless, if “faultless” means to speak and act as classic enablers. Hippolita (the name of the wronged wife in The Winter’s Tale can hardly be coincidental) weeps profusely whenever her husband is cruel to herself or her daughter. Nevertheless, Hippolita elevates loyalty to Manfred over every other value: "He is dearer to me even than my children."
At one point Hippolita is even prepared to acquiesce in a divorce, so that her husband can marry the young and presumably fertile Isabella, and so perpetuate the male line. She is equally prepared to acquiesce in horse-trading away Matilda to a man old enough to be her father.
“My lovely children…," says Hippolita, "your tenderness overpowers me–but I must not give way to it. It is not ours to make election for ourselves; heaven, our fathers and our husbands must decide for us.”
Matilda adheres more than faithfully to her mother’s pattern:
“[A] child ought to have no eyes or ears but as a parent directs. “
Less enmeshed in Otranto’s dysfunctional family system, Isabella shows some initiative: “Alas...the purity of your own heart prevents your seeing the depravity of others,” Isabella tells the dutiful wife. “No madam, no; force should not drag me to Manfred’s hated bed.”
Yet Isabella also defers to patriarchal rules. She refuses to marry Manfred — but only conditionally. She would comply if her own father orders her to do marry him, which she cannot believe possible (though later on her father nearly agrees to exactly this.
Matilda, in contrast, holds so consistently to filial piety that, stabbed fatally by her own father, she refuses to speak a word to Theodore, who loves and has tried to protect her. Instead, Matilda blames herself for having fallen in love without parental permission and focuses on her parents alone.
“[E]very thought was lost in tenderness for her mother...[S]he asked for her father. He approached, unable to speak. Matilda, seizing his hand and her mother’s, locked them in her own, and then clasped them to her heart.”
On Matilda’s death, the catastrophe culminates:
“[T]he moon was now at its height....A clap of thunder at that instant shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and a clank of more than mortal armor was heard behind.…
The walls of the castle...were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the center of the ruins....Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso! said the vision;
and...accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven...soon wrapt from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory.”
.
Faced with this evidence of divine will (further ratified by the appearance of local patron saint Nicholas alongside the figure of Duke Alfonso), Manfred repents and abdicates. He and Hippolita betake themselves to the religious life in separate institutions.
Theodore, at first inconsolable at having lost Matilda, eventually marries Isabella, uniting the lineages and claims of Duke Alfonso and the marquis Frederic.
(The story of why Theodore is the heir is lengthy. Ironically, Theodore’s supernaturally-recognized claim turns out to be through the female line.)
A happy ending? Not quite.
“...[I]t was not until after many discourses with Isabella...that [Theodore] was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy which had taken possession of his soul.”
.
An ending that inevitably evokes a famous echo:
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted----nevermore!
.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
And in the last analysis, what are we to make of all this?
The villain, Manfred, ends his life in a chastened state, with some degree of redemption: an Oedipus without the innocent intent that made him such a tragic figure.
The long-suffering, virtuous Hippolita is repaid by the deaths of both her children and ends her life in the isolation of a convent.
The weak marquis, Ferdinand, who failed to save the distressed damsels, comes out of it fairly well. His grandchildren will inherit the duchy of Otranto.
Out of the younger generation, the super-dutiful Matilda ends up dead.
Theodore -- the young character who shows the strongest sense of autonomy — succeeds to his “due” position, at the cost of his true love’s life.
Isabella, who showed some independence, gets to marry the man she loves, but only as his consolation prize.
In his original (faked) introduction to the first edition, Walpole, pretending to be only the translator, wrote:
“Yet I am not blind to my author’s defects. I could wish he had grounded his plan on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.”
If this is taken in the sense of divine retribution, it is certainly makes an unsatisfactory moral in our eyes.
On the other hand, if the “moral” refers to the natural, tragic outcome of abuses enabled by a patriarchal system, it would seem accurate indeed. Perhaps it could be restated in modern terms: “the abuses of the fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.”
.
Viewed as a dysfunctional-family story, presented in surrealist form, Otranto may be seen to prefigure not only Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with their collapsing-edifice catastrophes.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Among its descendants or collateral relations might be counted Dostoyevski’s Brothers Karamazov, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”; Alfred Jarry’s play "Ubu Roi"; Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan; Stephen King’s The Shining, and even the disturbing domestic tableaux of an Edward Gorey.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
.
Some have sought the origins of the Otranto plot in politics. Walpole was certainly politically connected, but for myself, I find alleged parallels to political events of the day unconvincing.
And, while there is a real Otranto on the boot heel of Italy, and Walpole borrowed some names connected with it, the plot of his story bears only tangential connection to actual history.
.
.
At the same time, Horace Walpole was the son of a monumental historical character, and one whose whose family life was not exactly a model of virtue.
Robert Walpole (1646-1745) served in essence as Britain’s first Prime Minister for 20 years — still a record — under the first two Georges.
Robert Walpole had six children with his first wife, of whom Horace was the last. The couple, however, became estranged after a some years and lived separate lives. In fact, rumor had it that last-born Horace was in fact the son of Lord Hervey, a courtier with a scandalous reputation.
Robert, for his part, kept a series of mistresses. He lived openly with the last of his mistresses for some years. They had a daughter together and married after the death of Horace’s mother.
Meanwhile, Robert in 1724 married off his eldest son to a 15-year-old heiress. That couple had one child before separating; their son never married and died insane.
The Prime Minister, ironically, ended up with no direct, legitimate male heirs after one generation, although he was made a baronet, the 1st Earl of Orford.
(Horace eventually became the 4th Earl of Orford; as he himself never married or had children, after his death the barony went to a cousin. It has been generally assumed that Horace Walpole was most probably gay, though conclusive proof is lacking.)
Horace Walpole never made any public criticism of his father, and in fact, defended his father in writing against imputations of corruption.
Nevertheless, in Otranto, did Horace Walpole subconsciously draw on his experience of difficulties facing the offspring of a high-handed, dynastically ambitious father?
Among other possible sources for the plot: Haunted houses could have been on Walpole’s mind after friends acquired a country house that had been the scene of a notorious murder. A young woman had been convicted and executed in 1752 for poisoning her father there. Walpole joked in a letter about whether anyone in the family had seen this woman’s ghost.
(The house belonged to Henry Seymour Conway, a friend of Walpole since school days. His daughter, Anne, also a friend of Horace, was just 16 at the time of Otranto. She who went on to become a novelist and a distinguished sculptor under the name of Anne Seymour Damer, despite social hostility towards a woman in such a career.)
Otranto’s second edition included a verse dedication to another friend of Walpole, Lady Mary Coke. Her history might have made up a novel on its own:
She married on 1 April 1747, Edward Coke, Viscount Coke...Their courtship had been strained, and in retaliation Edward left her alone on their wedding night and from then on virtually imprisoned her at his family estate at Holkham Hall, Norfolk. She reacted by refusing him his marital rights.... (Wikipedia)
A legal settlement between the families kept the Cokes married, though living apart, until the Vicount’s death. Afterwards, Lady Mary fell into paranoia and died abandoned by most of her former friends.
It is worth mentioning, in fairness, that self-willed, socially unconventional and even scandalous behavior was hardly limited to the men in the Walpole family or in Horace's Walpole's circle of political and artistic friendships. It is unclear if Walpole was ever acquainted with a real-life Matilda or Hippolita, but friendships with women were important to him throughout his life.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
That Jane Austen (plausibly characterized by our own DrLori as the very first realistic novelist) was inspired by Walpole among others cannot be doubted. And not only in Austen’s parodistic Northanger Abbey can the ear can detect what sounds like actual homage to Otranto.
Take, for example, the penultimate paragraph of Walpole’s work, in which family confessor at last confirms the history of the dukedom's true heir:
“I shall not dwell on what is needless. The daughter of which Victoria was delivered, was at her maturity bestowed in marriage on me. Victoria died; and the secret remained locked in my breast. Theodore's narrative has told the rest.”
Compare with this:
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
….which some will recognize as coming from the last chapter of Austen’s Mansfield Park. In that novel, moreover, Fanny Price -- a protagonist not unlike Isabella in her combination of extreme filial correctness and personal firmness -- also gains her true love as his consolation prize.
Where Walpole (and successors) presented family drama as fever-dream, Austen would go on to give such tales full circumstantial as well as emotional reality.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
More:
Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Gamer. Penguin Classics, 2001. Full text of the novel is otherwise available online here: archive.org/...
Gross, Johnathan David. The Life of the Artist Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist. Portion retrieved via Google Books. Lexington Books, 2014. An interesting summary can be found here: alumni.columbia.edu/… "The emotional ménage a trois of Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Horace Walpole forms the heart of this new biography,” the reviewer states. Amazon page here: www.amazon.com/...
By Walpole’s friend Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written In a country Churchyard,” as diaried by our own Angmar.
My source for further information on Walpole, his friends and extended family: Wikipedia.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.