SOURCE: "Gothic, Gothicism, and Gothicists," in The Adversary Literature: The English Novel in the Eighteenth Century—A Study in Genre, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.

[In this essay, Karl discusses elements of different genres found in The Castle of Otranto.]

So much of The Castle of Otranto seems nonsensical today that it is hard to believe it was taken seriously and still should be. Walpole, in his way, was a genius of the large and the outlandish, and we can say that with him a subgenre came into being. Although we must be careful not to make him the sole founder of Gothic,³ we can agree with Varma that Walpole brought together the various elements that we now identify as typical: "the Gothic machinery, the atmosphere of gloom and terror, and stock romantic characters." (The Gothic Flame, p. 57)

Even more, Walpole had the supremely romantic tum of mind which demanded that the supematural appear natural. In his preface to the first edition, he speaks of belief as relative to an age; so that "belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages [ca. twelfth century] that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who would omit all mention of them." Walpole asks the reader to excuse "the air of the miraculous" and "allow the possibility of the facts." Thus, Walpole is very careful to turn the unusual into realistic detail. Through it all, he speaks of himself as no more than a translator of a manuscript found in the library of "an ancient Catholic family in the north of England," written at some undetermined time and printed at Naples in 1529. In this way, too, Walpole preserves realistic appearances, placing this bizarre undertaking within the mainstream of the eighteenth-century novel as an edited manuscript, a true history, a journal or series of letters, all authentic. We should stress this point lest Walpole's novel appear too much of an aberration in the eighteenth century. On the contrary, it is closer to the center than we are often led to suppose.

Walpole also associates his work with the drama, and we recall the revival of interest in Elizabethan drama. In his preface to the second edition, Walpole defends his method as a combination of low-comedy scenes and high tragedy based on no less authority than Shakespeare's own practice in Hamlet and Julius Caesar. And Sir Walter Scott, in his introduction to a later edition, speaks of Walpole's structuring as suitable to the modern novel, although we recognize his remarks as appropriate to the drama: "It was," Scott wrote, "his object to unite the marvellous turn of incident, and imposing tone of chivalry, exhibited in the ancient romance, with that accurate exhibition of human character, and contrast of feelings and passions, which is, or ought to be, delineated in the modern novel."

Walpole's Gothic is, really, close to a special type of drama, what developed contemporaneously in Mozartian opera buffa and in later Italian opera. The contrasts of low comedy and high tragedy are the stock-in-trade of the operatic composer; and the machinery of Gothic that Walpole employed allowed necessary modulation from low to high to low. In fact, one of the oldest devices of both the early novel and of opera is the lowbom young man—here Theodore—who turns out to be well-bom, indeed princely. This is part of opera's "fabulous" heritage, and, curiously, one of the stock devices of the realistic novel—consider Tom Jones, Humphry Clinker, et al. Thus, within the protagonist himself, we find this characteristic movement between high and low.

The point warrants further exploration. Although the Gothic novel would appear by its trappings and major interests to be completely outside the realistic social frame of reference, there is, in fact, considerable overlap. And that overlap occurs in its modulation of movements from low to high and back again to low, or a comparable sequence, as embodied in a major character. The device is not, of course, new—it is part of the romance and fairy tale. But when it appears in the eighteenth-century novel, it becomes something else, the representative of an idea not yet ready for acceptance, but nevertheless ready for testing.

The ancient romance does become wedded to the modern novel in certain social assumptions. Theodore, for example, makes his mark is a "virtuous" young man while his social role is low; and though he tums out to be an aristocrat, the testing out of social roles indicates that innate virtue is as significant as birth. This is surely the conclusion of Fielding and Smollett, with Tom and Humphry, respectively, although as novelists they failed to resolve the social idea fully. Walpole is in this tradition, although his novel is not realistic; and it is precisely in this tradition that we find a good deal of Italian opera, as an amalgam of ancient romance and modern social ideas.

It is necessary to see Walpole, then, in the line of the eighteenth-century novel before proceeding to his deviations from it. In both his resemblance to the novel and his departures from it, he was moving toward alternate assumptions about man and his milieu, away from a settled, rational view toward other aspects of the human being which the romantics were to explore.⁴ Likewise, the Methodist movement parallels the literary development of emotionalism, and the belief in redemption through faith finds its counterpart in certain Gothic trappings that Walpole helped to make famous.

First of these is the Gothic castle, whose atmosphere thins the line between supernatural and natural. The castle, if we wish to extend the analogy, provides a kind of religious experience based on awe, fear, and transcedence. Second are the climatic conditions, of storm, wind blasts, moonlight—all of which act as suitable background for the awesome castle. The climate creates sound for the castle's visual effects; we have here, really, the stage sets for Italian opera. Third in this swirl of events and effects is the melancholy young man who seems to carry a weight on his heart and shoulders—the Byronic hero of later years. He is, of course, perfectly suitable for the melancholy castle and weather, and his apotheosis as a figure of morbid gloom is Emily Bronte's Heathcliff. Once again, as in opera, the three elements of castle, weather, and moody, sullen protagonist are completely wedded, virtually indistinguishable, so that character, scene, and sound seem part of one single development. Such an achievement on a meaningful scale was, evidently, beyond Walpole's powers as a novelist, but it was clearly the aim of Gothic, as Scott's comments on the uniting of elements would appear to indicate.

If we view The Castle of Otranto as a vision of certain elements rather than as a novel in any traditional sense, we can gauge Walpole's achievement more effectively. As a novel, it is nonsense; as a vision (dream, nightmare, prophecy), it gains significance. Primarily, it is an observation of a life teeming with emotional crises denied in the contemporary literature of the period. It is a vision of omens, curses, extravagant stage sets (the helmet which crushes, the sword of monstrous size); a lustful, domineering father (Walpole's own was Fielding's model for Jonathan Wild) who goes well beyond the Harlowes; a devout, compliant, priest-ridden wife; a vision of doom, blood, terrified servants, apparitions, vengeance, and sadism. The novel suggests an imaginary, dreamlike state, one of ecstasy, in which the author stands "outside" normality and surveys the terrain of his own fantasies.⁵

There is, in this vision, something of the Sadean view of man. Manfred is the resident tyrant who uses his strong will to dominate men and his sexual power to overwhelm his weakling son, Conrad. (Cf. Heathcliff and his weakling son, whom he drives into an arranged, unconsummated marriage.) As a tyrant, Manfred is a man of violent extremes, a man who assumes that whatever he is, nature is also, a man whose libido is so strong it must manifest itself in every situation. The cruelty of such a man is obvious if anyone attempts to interfere with his plans, needs, or lusts.

It is more than coincidence that Walpole's father figure, Manfred, should so closely resemble Fielding's interpretation of Sir Robert Walpole in his portrait of Jonathan Wild as a man of uncontrollable hands. Or that the son, Conrad, should be portrayed as a weakling, crushed under a helmet, while another, Theodore, eventually usurps the young man's role and marries his intended, Isabella. The vision is a fantasy of family life carried to its extravagant extremes, a medievalism that has little relationship to eighteenth-century reality but considerable connection to a view of family life by one who sits outside normality and can turn his personal vision into opera.

When Clara Reeve, Mrs. Radcliffe, and others rejected, in part at least, the extravagance of Walpole's tale and tried in their own work to be more realistic, they missed an essential factor: Walpole's entire scheme rested on the very aspect they rejected, on a vision or fantasy of his inner life posing as a medieval document. Summers quotes from a letter Walpole wrote to George Montagu: "Visions, you know, have always been my pasture; and so far from growing old enough to quarrel with their emptiness, I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams." (The Gothic Quest, p. 409). We also recall that Walpole claimed that The Castle of Otranto began with a dream. Writing to the Reverend William Cole, on February 28, 1765, he said: "Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning, in the beginning of last June, from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head like mine filled with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening, I sat down, and began to write…"⁶

If we accept Walpole's romance as fantasy, then we are no longer troubled by extravagance and not worried about its purely novelistic qualities. While utilizing typical eighteenth-century devices also found in the realistic novel—the blending of social types, the use of the unknown young man who turns out to be well-born, the testing out of social roles, et al.—Walpole made his mark by his departure from the realistic novel then establishing itself. And he did so by moving from fiction based on a social vision to a fiction founded on a private vision, which is impervious to the usual criticism employed with novels. A fantasy life, and all its accounterments, is always true in its own terms, valid at every stage of its development; precisely as a schizophrenic's version of reality is the version, held on to tenaciously as the truth.

Thus, that strong, overwhelming father figure, Manfred, arranging everyone's destiny and then being brought down, indeed being unmanned by his signing his abdication from the principality, has significant psychological overtones. For when Manfred is forced from power, is made to take on "the habit of religion," the new prince is Theodore, a young man who has overthrown the father and gained power. The play of events suggests Freud's short essay "Family Romances" (1909), in which the child fantasizes about his background, sees himself as secretly allied to the aristocracy (born to a prince, etc.), and, through his dreams, hopes to replace his actual parents with others of different quality. Such a replacement, or an Oedipal variation thereon, occurs in Walpole's tale, all under the guise of a medieval document discovered by the teller. Even here, in the documentation, as in the substance of the tale itself, we have the elements of a fantasy life attempting to manipulate reality in order to further its own needs, in order to reinforce and implement its own vision: of a strong father brought down, despite a weakling son himself incapable of doing the deed.

Notes

³ Montague Summers reminds us that the "tendencies of taste which culminated in the Gothic novel had origins wider and deeper than any one book, even The Castle of Otranto, could develop. The dominant elements in the terror novel of the 1790's, of which the most famous exemplar is The Monk, came from Germany; the historical romance, which we have just examined, accounts for much; the French influence of Baculard d'Arnaud and his 'drames monacles' [monastic] are of the first importance." (The Gothic Quest, p. 180) See also my comments on the "atmospherics" of Gothic, pp. 236-7.

⁴ It was this development that Clara Reeve had in mind in her preface to The Old English Baron (1780; originally published in 1777 as The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Tale and dedicated to Richardson's daughter). A disciple of Richardson's novel of sensibility, she was worried about the excess of feeling in Walpole's novel: "… the machinery is so violent that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability the effect had been preserved, without losing the least circumstance that excites or detains the attention." She then speaks of the "limits of credibility," citing, for example, the sword and helmet as destroying the imagination because of their monstrosity. "I was both surprised and vexed to find the enchantment dissolved, which I wished might continue to the end of the book …" She gives her own plan, which is to combine Richardsonian sensibility with Gothic trappings which will never become excessive:

"In the course of my observations upon this singular book, it seemed to me that it was possible to compose a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects might be avoided; and the keeping [harmony among parts], as in painting, might be preserved."

In this way, she hoped to achieve her end of exciting the attention and directing it to some useful end; that is, to entertain and to instruct. However, as a counter to her realism, Varma observes, Miss Reeve makes extensive use of dream material. Dreams, as we shall see, became common in Gothic novels and often served to provide the fantasy side to novels that purported to be realistic. Further, the utilization of dream material helped the novelist explore the unknown, dark, fearful, subterranean, or "psychological" side of human behavior, all of which characterized the Gothic aspect of Gothicism.

⁵ William Beckford's Vathek (written in 1782 in French, published, in English, 1786) fits loosely into this literature of vision and fantasy. Although Vathek in a few of its aspects recalls Johnson's Rasselas, it is, actually, a very different sort of thing—operatic in its way, certainly theatrical, a musical extravaganza directed by Busby Berkeley or Tom O'Horgan.

Beckford's Vathek is, to some extent, a thousand-and-one-nights version of Walpole's Manfred. Although Beckford appears to be satirizing Vathek's lust for power and his sensuality, the reader senses, behind the satire, a distinct feel for the exaggerated event, a sympathetic indulgence in sadistic acts and savage murder—the feeding of fifty innocent young men to the Giaour, for example. While such acts are purportedly part of the satirical exaggeration, they are described lovingly as elements of the author's own sexual fantasies.

Ostensibly, the tale is a moral one, pointing up the abuses of power; but the filigree work of the narrative focuses, instead, on the pleasures derived from such abuses. Never distant from sight or mind are the capricious tastes, the sexual content of the rich descriptions, the indifference to human life.

If we pull together the pieces, Vathek is a homoerotic fantasy, comparable in this respect to many aspects of The Castle of Otranto. Its chief victims are young men, its man of power (Vathek) is mother-ridden, its splendors are extravaganzas of design and indulgence.

⁶ Quoted by Summers in his introduction to The Castle of Otranto, 1924, pp. xxvi-vii.

Bibliography

Summers, Montague, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel, 1938, 1964.

Varma, Devendra, The Gothic Flame, 1957, 1966.