SOURCE: "Proto-Gothicism: The Infernal Iconography of Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Orbis Litter grum, 41, 1986, pp. 199-212.

[In the essay that follows, Frank explores the iconography of The Castle of Otranto as a fully developed Gothic inversion of positive value systems.]

The amazing preeminence of the Gothic novel from the death of Smollett in 1771 to the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley in 1814 saw the ascendancy of many varieties of horror and the proliferation of many types of terror. Historians of the Gothic are still debating how many Gothics were written during these four frantic decades and they continue to make deeper inquiries about why the Gothic dominated English literature between Smollett's death and Scott's first successful novel.¹ Whatever the answers to these questions of quantity, intention, and literary influence might be, the fact is undeniable that the scores of Gothic titles which flooded the literary market-place during the period could all claim one common point of origin: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, Gothicism's primal "long labyrinth of darkness."² All critical considerations of what the Gothic communicates and how the genre does so must commence with an acknowledgement of Walpole's ingenious prototype.

Written in defiance of neoclassic forms and norms, Walpole's Castle of Otranto remains a well-defined technical prototype for all later literature of horror and terror. Every necessary piece of supernatural apparatus for sustaining the ambience of irrational horror was installed by Walpole within the first haunted castle. In short, the infernal iconography of Gothic fiction requires no additional development beyond Walpole's prototype. In the estimate of one of his earliest twentieth-century defenders, Edith Birkhead, Walpole "bequeathed to his successors a remarkable collection of useful 'properties."'³ In his monumental history of the Gothic movement, Maurice Levy maintains that it is Walpole's properties which endow all later Gothic fiction with its profounder symbolic qualities. For Levy, it was Walpole who defined the iconographic necessities of the Gothic novel and created a model for his Gothic successors. Furthermore, Walpole's proto-Gothic achievement involved an artistic awareness of the systematic symbolism or iconography of horror, terror, and the malign supernatural. Writes Levy:

On peut dire que le Chateau d'Otrante est le premier conte fantastique anglais, precisement dans le mesure ou il y a irruption du surnatural dans un monde par ailleurs en conformite avec la realite familiere. L'originalite de Walpole fut not pas tant d'escrire une oeuvre qui teindrait, a part egale, du "romance" et du "novel", que de viser a confronter le lecteur avec l'irrationnel du premier par le truchement des elements familiers du second.⁴

Within the context of Levy's approach to Walpole's achievement, the term iconography can be used to refer to the study of those symbols and images signifying the displacement of reason or collapse of value systems in The Castle of Otranto. As a general term, iconography means any set of symbols, images, and spatial motifs which give form to the work and thematic substance to the work's intentions. According to the art historian, Erwin Panofsky, in his essay, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art," the iconologist or student of literary icons makes "a description and classification of images much as ethnography is a description and classification of human races."⁵ Panofsky's general definition has been specifically applied to questions of iconography in the first Gothic novel by Theodore Ziolkowski. Ziolkowski concentrates on the particular icon of the mobile or animate portrait of a former master of the castle whose spirit has reimbued the object of art in order to demand retribution for the crime of usurpation. In "Image as Motif: The Haunted Portrait," Ziolkowski traces the activities of this particular supernatural object and argues that the walking picture is best understood iconographically as a deliberate repudiation of natural law, "an incipient reaction against the Enlightenment."⁶

It can further be demonstrated by a broader iconographic analysis of the contraptions found within the primordial Gothic castle that the proto-Gothicism of the novel furnishes a symbolic glossary for evoking dread, for arousing pleasure in the irrational and for establishing an iconography of an unholy and malignant cosmos governed only by absurd forces. On the psychological level as well, Walpole's infernal iconography reflects the subconscious fears and desires of an age grown too dependent on reason. Walpole himself had announced his intention of challenging the rational complacency of his age when he observed in the Preface to the second edition of the novel that "the great resources of fancy have been damned up by a strict adherence to the common life."⁷ The castle's hardware of horror points to a metamorphic or constantly shifting iconography symbolizing a fallen and unstable universe where traditional religious values and moral imperatives no longer operate. For much of the novel, the malevolent supernatural seems about to take control. Virtue is helpless, religious faith is useless, chivalry is ludicrous, and depravity is relentless while the triumph of moral evil seems an omnipresent possibility.

The iconography developed by Walpole reenforces the themes of cosmic skepticism and a darkly ambiguous universe. We are conveyed to a seemingly strong but actually weak piece of architecture saturated with the phantasmic segments of a huge and apparently growing body of the castle's wronged former master. Both a prop and a proposition, the gigantic frame of Alfonso the Good is the Gothic novel's first ghost of the past, a genealogical icon scheduled to make many reappearances in the pages of the Gothic novel. Each of Walpole's Gothic props should be interpreted symbolically as an icon of dread, uncanny power, awe, and terminal unreason capable of destroying faith in a stable and controllable universe. Darkness devours light, passions threaten to displace reason, and the various Gothic symbols of ancient power strategically located throughout the castle inspire demonic fear rather than pious wonder or consolation in the characters who confront them. Enclosed by this Gothic world, all of the characters, good and bad, are victims of an unremitting ontological malaise. Commencing with the heroine, Isabella's, flight through "vaults totally dark,"⁸ the pattern of action entails a "radical confrontation, a process of emerging cognition forced upon those whose values have not prepared them for what has just come to meet them."⁹ Plagued by universal instability, the characters seek desperately and usually without any success for a way out of the castle. Iconographically, they hope for some form of salvation by reason or delivery from their own savage passions. Once the sanctified emblem of the grail quest as well as a place of refuge and a security, the castle now becomes a place of danger. Many modern critics of the Gothic interpret the haunted castle as a type of hell where "Nobody is entirely safe; nothing is secure."¹⁰ Symbols of reason, security, and faith have undergone a "process of secularization"¹¹ whereby an iconography deriving originally from conventional systems of belief is divested of its salvational and redemptive significance and becomes instead a perverse opposite or even a hollow parody of itself. A Gothified icon such as the mighty castle retains its initial potency but foregoes the enchantment of religious assurance and assumes a disenchanted or nihilistic status.

In the figurative sense, the act of entering the haunted castle is an irrational crossover symbolizing loss of reason and separation from faith. To be entrapped within the castle is to be returned to the interior of the Platonic cave wherein the shadows cast on the mind's wall supplant the higher realities of a defunct religious ideal. The interior icons transmute God into Satan, heroic quest into perverse pilgrimage, hero into mad villain, votary into victim. The free space of pastoral landscape gives way to the hysterical restrictions of Gothic containment. The castle appears solid and indestructible but is actually doomed to annihilation by internal forces; the castle as a traditional icon of spiritual order and moral safety now represents disorder and the disintegration of hope in an environment which has a will and a spirit of its own and behaves independently of any human control. While not a deserted ruin at the outset of the story, the very ownership of the Castle of Otranto—and by extension, its structural worthiness—is in doubt from the beginning. It functions as an arena of struggle between natural and supernatural wills. All things that should be stationary move mysteriously. All natural causation is neutralized by the supernatural, occult forces imbuing the turrets, walls, and most especially the subterranean segments of the castle with an alien vitality. These icons project the moral darkness, philosophic confusion, and spiritual void felt by maiden and villain alike.

On a still profounder level, the icons found throughout Walpole's dreamworld suggest an impending apocalypse. Such animated icons as the sanguinary statue of Alfonso the Good, former master of the castle, or the peripatetic portrait of Ricardo, usurper of power and progenitor of the absurd curse which hangs over Manfred, may be viewed as symbolic expressions of the displacement of reason. Such icons can titillate as well as terrify by their magical animation but, as will be the case in much later Gothic fiction, diversion of the reader is never their sole aim or end. The volatile icons of The Castle of Otranto engage the imagination by revealing a paradoxically ambiguous world in which evil may be stronger than good and disorder far more likely than order. Manfred's ancestral home, like other places of former security and family unity such as the mansion, abbey, or manor house, is forbidding, unsafe, and about to be transformed into a ruin by mysterious forces acting from inside. In this sense, Walpole's novel offers the plan for the violent plotting of many Gothics to follow in which social institutions and authority-figures are twisted, barbaric, and dehumanized. Once-revered figures of respectability such as parents and clergymen suddenly become despotic, violent, or in the case of Otranto's saintly but bungling priest, Father Jerome, simply inept. Reaching a climax in the imploding walls of the castle—a scene which should be read as symbolizing the shattering of the decayed remnants of an empty ideology—the iconography of The Castle of Otranto clearly presents an irrational picture of both self and society.

Secularized and disenchanted by Walpole's art, the icons of faith, justice, reason, and hope undergo malign inversions. The process of "disenchantment" whereby a symbol traditionally associated with sacred values is rendered in sinister fashion is an indication of Walpole's recognition of a universe entirely contradictory to the confident postulates of the deists: "Morally the Gothic romance marked a shift from faith in a simple dualism to a fascination with the more complex interrelatedness of good and evil. Politically it embodied the new sense of freedom that characterized the revolutionary age. Psychologically it signalled a turn from the portrayal of manners in an integrated society to the analysis of lonely, guilt-ridden outsiders."¹²

If Walpole's Gothic vision presents a dissolution of all norms—ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic—his characters, too, reflect the new metaphysical anxiety, for their primary function is to lose their way, with their disorientation or "disenchantment" constantly imaged by their entrapment within the subterranean maze. Iconographically, the ordeal of underground confinement together with the gropings of the hero-villain and heroine deep within the "hell" of the castle suggest metaphysical consternation and spiritual claustrophobia for both of these "lonely, guilt-ridden outsiders." The primal maze of dark corridors underlying the Castle of Otranto refers us iconographically to the "amazement" of the characters, their flight and pursuit reflecting a disruption of belief in traditional systems of order. Directly beneath the heavenly and earthly portions of the castle complex lies the new iconographic hell, shortly to become the Gothic's novel's most recurrent symbolic fixture:

The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavem. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.¹³

Here we have the fundamental imagery of Gothic crisis, a hysterical subterranean wayfarer depicted in the act of anxious flight through a gloomy atmosphere that Milton might have described as "darkness visible."¹⁴ Now furnished with its own iconic version of hell, the Gothic novel could then begin to extend its motif of the descent or vertical quest. Walpole's proto-Gothicism made available through the castle and its horrific contents a symbolic vocabulary whose awesome mystery could effectively dissolve traditional moral categories while at the same time elevate the imagination to a peak of pleasure arising out of its contact with the ineffably gruesome. Walpole sought to astonish, amaze, and eventually to obliterate the security of the reader by involving him beyond recall in a series of supernatural events that might almost constitute a quasi-religious experience. Gothic iconography might be made the means of conveying the power of a Gothic aesthetic to produce pleasure in spectacles of chaos, pain, absurdity, death, spectral encroachment, and other varieties of horror. From its birth, Gothic symbolism concentrated on the depiction of an intense series of phantasmagoric confrontations with a perverse otherness which allowed no chance for rational reflection or recovery of common sense. Beginning with the arrival of the huge airborne helmet on the opening page of the novel, the outrageous supernatural occurrences thrust themselves into the foreground and demand an immediate response from the characters. The moments of high Gothic experience as Walpole conceived of them were iconographic applications of a psychological law of fear first stated by Edmund Burke, a type of Gothic pleasure principle uniting the horrible with the sublime and beautiful. Burke's law of Gothic emotion, a law set in operation throughout the novel, states that "the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. "¹⁵

Some of the exact objects and the artistic objectives of the new Gothic terror were considered in detail in the two informative prefaces which Walpole prepared for the first and second editions of The Castle of Otranto. Each of these statements on the art of Gothic fiction proposes important criteria for the construction of catastrophic narrative. In an expertly chosen metaphor, Walpole labels terror as "the author's principal engine [which] prevents the story from ever languishing."¹⁶ His notion of Gothic terror was heavily formulaic and mechanical; like the symmetrical constructs of the deists, the engine of the Gothicists was to be a grand and complex machine operating by its own fixed and inexorable laws. Once activated by the forces of the unconscious, the engine's dark flow of Gothic energy would generate the emotional voltage required to electrify both characters and readers.

Walpole further maintained that the inmates of the haunted castle could be expected to occupy various "extraordinary positions [like] personages under the dispensation of miracles, and witnesses to the most stupendous phenomena."¹⁷ Shrewdly, Walpole did not specify his phrase "extraordinary positions" just as he did not qualify exactly what he meant by "interesting passions" but the narrative makes it clear that a typical "extraordinary position" for a Gothic victim or victimizer might be either physical or psychological, a lethal predicament of body or mind or a combination of both. When Alfonso's immense helmet descends like a lunar module to crush the sickly Conrad on the novel's opening page, this initial spectacular event precipitates an "extraordinary position" of body for the unfortunate Conrad and an equally "extraordinary position" of mind for the astounded Manfred. The falling helmet is a first Gothic icon for the artist's imaginative perception of a cosmic disharmony which could not be redressed. In the absence of a righteous and reasonable God, the prime mover of the Gothic universe is an enormous but empty headpiece. From the outset, the iconography becomes a perverse negation of Newtonian law and Shaftesburyian benevolence. Manfred's reaction to the absurd death of his son illustrates the "process of secularization" whereby a deific icon—the god's head—is transformed into an anti-deific icon—a headless void in armor—while maintaining and even increasing all of its former deific force. The fall of the gigantic helmet is not the rightous vengeance of God but the absurd revenge of the void, a perfect infernal icon of a once mighty but now absent divine head. Manfred takes "the miracle of the helmet"¹⁸ to be a portent of savage and meaningless power. But rather than contemplating the religious meaning behind the event, Manfred is immediately obsessed with the object itself. Like other icons of void and nothingness which follow the falling helmet, the object itself is secularized into subject and becomes a godlike, godless assertion of colossal emptiness. Instead of being awed by the arrival of the Brobdingnagian helmet. Manfred can only contemplate the object itself. Subjectively filling his mind's eye, the object becomes a numinous manifestation of the metaphysical absurdity of the universe.

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. The horror of the spectacle, the ignorance of all around how this misfortune happened, and above all, the tremendous phaenomenon before him, took away the prince's speech. Yet his silence lasted longer than even grief could occasion. He fixed his eyes on what he wished in vain to believe a vision; and seemed less attentive to his loss, than buried in meditation on the stup-endous object that had occasioned it. He touched, he examined the fatal casque; nor could even the bleeding mangled remains of the young prince divert the eyes of Manfred from the portent before him.¹⁹

The other supernatural events and situations of the novel inspire a similar astonishment in the characters. The architectural dilemmas, cadaverous surprises, converging gigantism, and the eventual crash of the castle walls are all suggestive of the breakdown of rational order. Under these conditions, the anxieties of the characters express their metaphysical exasperation. All previous assumptions about a rationally directive universe must be false since the universe is under the jurisdiction of dark and demonic forces present everywhere throughout the castle. The iconography of early Gothicism, then, raises desperate questions about the supposed rational symmetry of the universe. The inhabitants of the castle seem doomed and imprisoned by their own obsolete ideals, walled in by their fates as well as by the fiendish building itself. As belief gives way to doubt the castle gives way to collapse since it contains, like the social and religious systems it represents, the seeds of its own destruction. Manfred and Isabella, the two prisoners of the contracting and unstable Gothic world, find themselves in the "extraordinary position" of being caught between two alien value systems; the empirically beautiful outlook of the deists now transformed into a hellish engine of terror; and the once-unquestioned and fixed body of traditional religious truth now symbolized by the mock medievalism, perverted chivalry, and organic misbehavior of the castle's totally mobile icons.

If we take the sentient castle itself to be the major icon of dark mutability and profound disenchantment, it is quite simple to draw an isomorphic analogy between haunted castle and haunted self. The individual icons of a once stable world contained within the castle all seem to be motivated by a perplex of forces operating outside the confines of reason. The rational abilities of the characters to deal with the bizarre conditions of the castle interior are repeatedly frustrated and finally rendered impotent by a series of supernaturally shocking and inexplicable events presented as iconographic manifestations of tormenting uncertainty. After the great helmet buries Conrad, all rational defense deserts Manfred, who, as Walpole was careful to inform the reader, is a figure somewhat like the protagonist of tragedy, a man of potential nobility and whose temperament "was naturally humane.… his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passion did not obscure his reason."²⁰ Confronted by the huge helmet, the bleeding statue, the walking portrait, the protuberance of a mighty foot from the castle walls, the grasping of a mighty hand in armor after an equally titanic sword and the other malign movements of the castle's icons, Manfred is driven to dreadful deeds in the all-consuming darkness. His light of reason is extinguished, its place taken by the basest of passions which drive him to the cryptic murder of his own daughter, Matilda, following the abrupt "transition of his soul … to exquisite villainy."²¹ If not quite tragic, the fall of the Gothic hero is nevertheless the consequence of his loss of faith in the efficacy of reason. His solipsistic struggle isolates him for he cannot overcome irrational forces residing in the cosmos and in the mind. The sinister and shifting icons define his equivocal relationship with God, self, and universe, a condition of almost existential dread for the Gothic hero. Torn by metaphysical anxiety over the cause, nature, and end of existence, Manfred is the first in a long line of Gothic heroes to attempt to alleviate this unbearable state of consciousness by committing himself to evil. Faced with the realization of an absurd cosmos, he becomes the agent of terror, madness, death, and disorder in a desperate attempt to confer some identity upon himself. In a recent essay on the nature of Gothic heroism, Syndy McMillen Conger argues that what is seen in the curious career of Manfred and his Gothic descendants is a type of tragic anguish manifesting itself in the actions of the Gothic hero not as suffering but as hatred and defiant evil. "Uncertainty has transformed itself into the heretical fear that unknown, irrational, even malevolent forces may control the world, a terror which becomes, when it takes the shape of belief, primitive superstition. Manfred's 'Do I dream … or are the devils themselves in league against me?'—this is a Manichean cry of doubt echoed by Gothic villains and victims from Ambrosio and Raymond in Lewis's The Monk and the younger Melmoth in Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer to the characters of Mary Shelley, Hoffmann, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, and Henry James."²² An iconography of religious doubt and supernatural dread is fundamental to a context of terror and horror which deprives the soul of its heavenly aspirations and denies to the mind its deistic assumptions about the universality of reason and natural law. By substituting a Gothic nightmare for a rationalist's dream of bliss, Walpole evolved a terrifying new hypothesis in The Castle of Otranto: what if all traditional norms of reality, psychic, social, and spiritual, turned out to be illusory and self-deceiving? Such a tormented scepticism is the philosophic basis for terror and horror in all later Gothic fiction.

The shocked awareness of a disharmonious universe is one of the key themes of dark or negative romanticism.²³ Walpole's iconographic management of the theme is witnessed most vividly in what might be called a reverse conversion episode during which an insider or believer is compelled to abandon his faith in religious mystery and reason to accept its opposite, Gothic mystery and unreason. The character's conversion to doubt and madness is effected through the icon of the grinning skull. In a scene in Chapter Five, the novel's most chivalrous personage and the defender of morality and justice, Frederic, the Marquis of Vicenza, encounters a hooded monk kneeling before the altar in Hippolita's private chapel. Iconographically, the scene illustrates the instantaneous destruction of Frederic's rational values as holy father is suddenly transmogrified into skeletal phantom. Frederic's encounter later becomes a familiar moment of supernatural sensation in Gothic novels,—the ghastly rotation or terrible turn. "The marquis, expecting the holy person to come forth, and meaning to excuse his uncivil interruption, said, 'Reverend father, I sought the lady Hippolita.—Hippolita! replied a hollow voice: camest thou to this castle to seek Hippolita?'—And then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl."²⁴ A hollow helmet and a death's head in monastic garb,—are these revelations not to be taken as complementary icons of the ideals of chivalry and religion now secularized and transformed into images of cosmic dread and doubt? As was the case with Manfred's startled encounter with the fallen helmet, Frederic's confrontation is also with an icon of appalling nothingness whose most horrifying aspect is its hollowness which gruesomely mocks the anticipated religious ideal.

When Frederic looks directly into the hollow sockets of the death's head, he is forced to accept the cynical substantiality of the agent of God now become Gothic literature's first of many animated skeletons.²⁵ Frederic's communion with dread has begun just as Manfred's perverse conversion to the absurd hollowness of existence is consummated by the fall of the house of Otranto. Iconographically, the climax can be seen not as a restoration of order but as a victory for the irrational, perhaps the most effective type of Gothic ending because it leaves unreasonable and disintegrative forces in control of the world.

A clap of thunder, at that instant, shook the castle to its foundations; the earth rocked, and the clank of more than mortal armour was heard behind … The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down with a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins.²⁶

The monstrous figure exploding from the ruins of Otranto may indeed be the great form of Alfonso reclaiming its lost legacy of power, but on a deeper iconographic level what we are also witnessing in the anti-rational denouement is Walpole's iconic inversion of the conventional deux ex machina of classic drama. The giant that bursts through the walls of the castle is a diabolus ex machina, or an all-destroying icon of infernal power born of the skeptical Gothic imagination. In its insistence upon unmitigated chaos, The Castle of Otranto would establish itself as the iconographic prototype for a new and subversive literary genre which would in time lay the foundations for the anti-visions of the dark Romantics. One of these Romantics, Sir Walter Scott, saluted Walpole's foresight in his own preface to The Castle of Otranto (1811) by remarking of Walpole and his Gothic prototype that "He brings with him the torch of genius, to illuminate the ruins through which he loves to wander."²⁷

Notes

¹ Until quite recently, literary criticism has remained indifferent or even hostile to the history of the Gothic genre. Since the 1950's, however, the situation in Gothic criticism has reversed. For full-length histories of the Gothic novel which place The Castle of Otranto at the head of the tradition, see: Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle: A Study of the Elements of English Romanticism. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1927; Rpt. New York: Humanities Press, 1964); Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel. (London: Fortune Press, 1938; Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964); Devendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England. (London: A. Barker, 1957; Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1966); Coral Ann Howells, Love, Mystery, and Misery: Feeling in Gothic Fiction. (London: Athlone Press, 1979; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979); Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. (New York; Columbia University Press, 1979); David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to the Present Day. (London and New York: Longman, 1980); Brendan Hennessy, "The Gothic Novel," in British Writers, ed. Ian Scott-Kilvert. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1980), III, pp. 324-346; Frederick S. Frank, "The Gothic Romance, 1762-1820," in Horror Literature: A Core Collection and Reference Guide, ed. Marshall B. Tymn. (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1981), pp. 3-175; Patrick Day, In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study in Gothic Fantasy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

² Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler. (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 36. Hereafter cited as Walpole, Otranto. In the Twentieth Century, hundreds of critics have attempted to wend their way through "the long labyrinth of darkness" to discover the sources of Gothic energy and iconography in Walpole's first Gothic novel. For a bibliographical overview, together with a thorough coverage of published scholarship on The Castle of Otranto, see: Dan J. McNutt, The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Selected Text. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1975); Frederick S. Frank, "The Gothic Novel: A Checklist of Modern Criticism," Bulletin of Bibliography, 30 (1973): 45-54; Frederick S. Frank, "The Gothic Novel: A Second Bibliography of Criticism," Bulletin of Bibliography, 35 (1978): 1-14, 52; Frederick S. Frank, Guide to the Gothic: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1984).

³ Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance. (London: Constable, 1921; Rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), p. 22. For a counter argument that Gothic properties are subordinate in importance to Gothic atmosphere, see: James M. Keech, "The Survival of the Gothic Response," Studies in the Novel, 6 (1974): 130-144.

⁴ Maurice Levy, "Le Reve gothique d'Horace Walpole," in Le Roman "gothique" anglais (Toulouse, France: Association des Publications de la Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Toulouse, 1968), p. 112.

⁵ Erwin Panofsky, "Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art," in Meaning in the Visual Arts. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday-Anchor, 1955), p. 31.

⁶ Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 84. On the specific matter of infernal iconography in early Gothic fiction, G. R. Thompson comments: "One may argue that the Gothic castle, in addition to its other metaphoric values, constitutes, with its narrow passageways and interior chambers, ornamented with burning swords in the vestibules, an iconography of the female body threatened with assault." See: G. R. Thompson, "Gothic Fiction of the Romantic Age," in Romantic Gothic Tales, 1790-1840. (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 5.

⁷ Walpole, Preface to the Second Edition of Otranto, p. 21.

⁸ Walpole, Otranto, p. 38.

⁹ Frederick Garber, "Meaning and Mode in Gothic Fiction," in Racism in the Eighteenth Century. (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), pp. 155-169. Among many recent books, essays, and monographs on Gothic fiction, several studies concentrate on the anti-religious quality of Gothic symbolism and its iconography of cosmic doubt. See: Joel Porte, "In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction," in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson. (Pullman, Washington: Washington State University Press, 1974), pp. 42-64; Leigh Ann Ehlers, "From Polarity to Perspective: The Development of Structure and Character in Gothic Fiction," Dissertation Abstracts International, 39 (1978): 294-A; Leigh A. Ehlers, "The Gothic World as Stage: Providence and Character in The Castle of Otranto." Wascana Review, 14, ii (1980): 17-30.

¹⁰ Ann B. Tracy, Introduction to The Gothic Novel 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. (Lexington, Kentucky: Kentucky UP), pp. 1-11. Tracy notes "the oddly hopeless tone one perceives in the Gothic world; man has a soul to lose, but no expectation of mercy or possible atonement. The search for one's origins, identity, and family connections in Gothic fiction may be seen as an attempt to impose order upon a chaotic environment." (p. 10).

¹¹ Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images, p. 15.

¹² Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images, p. 84.

³ Walpole, Otranto, pp. 35-36.

⁴ John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book One, line 63.

¹⁵ Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, eds. Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop, and Louis Whitney. (New York: Ronald Press, 1956), p. 565.

¹⁶ Walpole, Preface to the First Edition of Otranto, p. 18.

¹⁷ Walpole, Preface to the Second Edition of Otranto, p. 21.

¹⁸ Walpole, Otranto, p. 29.

¹⁹ Walpole, Otranto, pp. 28-29.

²⁰ Walpole, Otranto, p. 40.

²¹ Walpole, Otranto, p. 44.

²² Syndy McMillen Conger, "Faith and Doubt in The Castle of Otranto," Gothic: The Review of Supernatural Horror Fiction, 1 (1979): 51-59.

²³ The term, "negative romanticism," was originally applied by Morse Peckham to denote the breakdown or fragmentation of vision in Enlightenment beliefs as the Eighteenth Century drew to a close. Any harmonious relationship between the order of the mind and the order of nature was becoming almost impossible to maintain. See: Morse Peckham, "Toward a Theory of Romanticism," Studies in Romanticism, 1 (1961): 1-8. "Dark romanticism" is one extreme form of fragmented vision and particularly relevant to the Gothic phenomenon. Positive romanticism "usually evokes an ideal world, infused with internal energy and dynamically evolving toward a yet higher state, in which the single, separate self seeks unity with nature, itself symbolic of the aesthetic harmony of the cosmos." But "negative" or Gothic romanticism negates such transcendence and unity and deals instead "with the tormented condition of a creature suspended between the extremes of faith and skepticism, beatitude and horror, being and nothingness, love and hate—and anguished by an indefinable guilt for some crime it cannot remember having committed." For further discussions of the Gothic as a manifestation of "negative romanticism," see: G. R. Thompson, ed. The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1974).

²⁴ Walpole, Otranto, p. 99.

²⁵ In later Gothic fiction, the meeting of the hero or villain with an animated skeleton is a horrific commonplace. See, for example, the anonymous Gothic, The Animated Skeleton. (London: Minerva-Press for William Lane, 1798) and Isabella Kelly's monastic shocker, The Abbey of St. Asaph. (London: Minerva-Press for William Lane, 1795).

²⁶ Walpole, Otranto, p. 104.

²⁷ Sir Walter Scott, Introduction to the 1811 Edinburgh Edition of Otranto in Three Gothic Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler, p. 6.