SOURCE: "Time and Family in the Gothic Novel: The Castle of Otranto." Eighteenth Century Life, Vol X, n.s. 3, October, 1986, pp. 159-71.

Long ago Matthew Arnold, confronting what Darwin had recently demonstrated to be our common ancestor—"a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits"—was moved to wonder how "this good fellow" could ever have "carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek."¹ It was even longer ago that an unpromising stripling named Conrad was dashed to pieces by some archaic military hardware in the courtyard of the Castle of Otranto; and even today we still hardly know how it was that this "enormous helmet, a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers"² also carried in its nature an evolutionary necessity for Emily Bronte's Heath-cliff and Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen.

Two aspects of that necessity are the subject of the present enquiry. What gave The Castle of Otranto—at first sight the most sensationally unpretentious novelette that can well be imagined—its power to bring into being a whole new fictional mode that has been characteristic of the last two centuries? What was the essential imaginative matrix which struck off, not only the nine hundred odd works that are listed—however dubiously—in Montague Summers' A Gothic Bibliography (1941), but also many later novels that are often placed in the Gothic tradition? I will suggest that two elements in that matrix, the function of time and the treatment of the family, provide a set of particular characteristics in the very miscellaneous literary phenomena to which the label "Gothic" is currently applied.

The very word "Gothic" suggests that the genre has got something to do with time. It is hardly too much to say that etymologically the term "Gothic Novel" is an oxymoron for "Old New." When Horace Walpole subtitled The Castle of Otranto "A Gothic Story" in the second edition, to him the term "Gothic," as he had already made clear in the original Preface, meant "the darkest ages of Christianity," or, more generally, merely "very old." "Novel," on the other hand, originally meant the "new"; and such were the contemporary subjects of what, in 1764, were beginning to be called novels. Walpole himself was aware that the essential originality of The Castle of Otranto depended on this temporal dichotomy of past and present:

It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success.³

(p. 7)

A closer scrutiny reveals that the relation of ancient and present time in Walpole's narrative is somewhat more specific and complex in nature; obviously all the events take place in Gothic times, but that past itself has considerable depth, and the psychological present in which the characters live is only the immediate surface on which the power of a long anterior past is manifested.

The distant pastness of the whole tale is insisted on in Walpole's title-page and Preface. The original Italian version, he asserts, was printed in black letter—what we now call Gothic type—in 1529; but internal evidence points to a much earlier date of composition; and the actual period of the action, we are told, must go further back still, to some time between 1095 and 1243, the dates of the first and last crusades, "or not long afterwards." This defines what we may call the period both of the narrative present of the story and of its anterior past.

The events of the plot, in what the reader experiences as the narrative present, take only three days. The action begins on Conrad's fifteenth birthday, which is supposed to be the day of his wedding to Isabella—a wedding which will strengthen the position of his father, Manfred, Prince of Otranto; but it is in fact the day of Conrad's death. From the opening of the temporal sequence is a progression whose intervals are related to calendar time by signals in the narrative—sunset, moonshine, dawn, etc.

The plot, in five chapters like the acts of a tragedy, is equally linear, logical, and concentrated. In the first chapter, Conrad is crushed by the gigantic helmet. Then a handsome young peasant announces that this helmet is "exactly like that on the figure in black marble of Alfonso the Good … in the church of St. Nicholas" (p. 18). Almost immediately that particular helmet is reported missing: an ominous coincidence. Meanwhile, Manfred resolves that he must cast aside his wife, Hippolita, and marry Conrad's intended, Isabella. Horrified, Isabella attempts to escape and in her flight through a subterranean passage sees a ghostlike figure who turns out to be the handsome peasant, called Theodore. He tries to help her but in the process is discovered by Manfred, who is on the point of sentencing Theodore to death when the news comes that an armed giant—or at least an awfully big leg and foot—has been seen lying in the long gallery.

The remaining chapters work out these puzzles. The next day Father Jerome, a priest at the convent near the church of St. Nicholas, announces that Isabella has taken sanctuary there. Theodore is once again on the point of being executed when a birthmark on his neck luckily reveals that he is really Father Jerome's son. Then a great procession arrives, with a gigantic sword that is carried by a hundred knights. (This echo of the "hundred times" larger scale of the helmet illustrates Walpole's rough and ready use of numbers to indicate the supernatural dimension of his narrative.) The leader of the knights, who remains masked, eventually proves to be Isabella's father, the Marquis of Vicenza. He found the sword in the Holy Land; and on its blade is written

Wher'er a casque that suits this sword is found,
With perils is thy daughter compass'd round:
Alfonso's blood alone can save the maid,
And quiet a long-restless prince's shade.
(p. 79)

We surmise that the matching accessory which "suits this sword" must be the huge casque that landed on Conrad. As to "who alone can save the maid" (presumably Isabella), it must surely be Theodore, who must therefore be of Alfonso's noble blood. As for "quieting" the "long-restless prince's shade" we are given many clues as to what person may own the "shade." The first and most obvious comes very early: "ancient prophecy which was said to have pronounced, '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.'" (pp. 15-16). Manfred has shown no sign of abnormal growth; and so he cannot be "the real owner," and eventually proves to be the grandson of Richard, Alfonso's false chamberlain, who long ago poisoned his master and made himself the owner of Otranto by a forged will. We must, then, wait until someone's shade gets big enough to wear the helmet; that shade, of course, proves to be Alfonso's own. He is literally a shade—a ghost—and when he throws the castle down according to the prophecy, Manfred is frightened into abdicating, and Alfonso's grandson, Theodore, is restored to the rule of his rightful principality.

The essence of The Castle of Otranto, then, is the progressive revelation of the secrets of the two family pasts; but its interest for the reader depends not on this in itself—the disclosure of the rather murky genealogies of the descendants of Alfonso and Richard—but on the excitement generated by how the ghostly survivors of the anterior past operate on in the affairs of the fictional present, which wholly preoccupies them. Past and present are, it seems, locked together; the living characters are the captives of the past, while the characters of the past—notably Alfonso—live on as spirits only to be their vigilant captors. The anterior past has all the power. Whenever the present generation attempts to avoid its fate, as when Manfred attempts to marry off his son, its effort is wholly ineffectual. The only imperative causality in the life of the present, apparently, is to complete what was done long ago; only when the helmet, sword, armor, and the giant hands and feet are finally reconstituted can Theodore succeed to Otranto, and the perturbed spirit of his ancestor leave its sublunary caves and rises in apotheosis through the clouds to be received into the arms of his patron St. Nicholas.

The history of the word "gothic" supplies one basic clue to the meaning of the power and the appeal of the past. The Oxford English Dictionary informs us that in the sense of medieval, "gothic" was early used with the pejorative connotation expressed by Dryden: "all that has something of the Ancient gust is called a barbarous or Gothique manner"⁴ (1695). Such reprobation continued well into the eighteenth century, partly because no reasonably precise architectural or chronological meaning was as yet attached to "gothic."⁵

But long before there was any genuine understanding of what we call Gothic architecture, there arose the fashion for imitations of Gothic buildings and ruins. Walpole's own house, Strawberry Hill (begun 1749) was the most celebrated of many early examples; and literature, in Richard Hurd's Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), for example, reflected a parallel counter-movement to the previous prejudice against the barbarism of the gothic. "Gothic," in Walpole's day was exchanging the disgrace of being old-fashioned for the distinction of being antique.

The Augustan nostalgia for its antithesis was itself dependent on the new sense that the present was radically separate from the past. This historical awareness began in the Renaissance, which looked back at the classical world through the darkness of the Gothic period; but both the increasing body of historical knowledge (to which Walpole himself made many contributions), and the conscious Augustan effort to follow Roman models, developed historical consciousness much further. Anachronism in Renaissance painting or drama seems unconscious; in Walpole it is a conscious fashion which also reflects his spiritual and aesthetic needs.

The new need for conscious anachronism brings us to the psychological basis of the tension in Gothic between past and present—the individual's awareness of the quotidian dullness of the present and the consequent longing for something totally different. This contrast was to lead the rich, and later their humbler imitators,⁶ to cover the land with castles and mansions, suburban villas, and country cottages—all in the Gothic manner—and the same contrast was to become a great theme of the Romantic poets. But the spiritual appeal of the Gothic past is already explicit in Walpole. Thus he writes in a letter to George Montagu (5 January 1766):

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 that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams. Old castles, old pictures, old histories, and the babble of old people make one live back into centuries that cannot disappoint one.

(Corr., 10:192)

In earlier ages there had been nothing picturesque about wearing swords or going into gloomy dungeons;⁷ their appeal to the imagination depended on a social order based on life insurance rather than carrying swords; on habeas corpus, the rule of law and the beginnings of an organized police force. As Thomas Blackwell put it in his contrast between Homeric times and his own: "The marvellous and wonderful is the nerve of the epic strain: but what marvellous things happen in a well-ordered state? We can hardly be surprised."⁸ Or Walpole, speaking of the modern novel: "the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life" (p. 7).

Escaping the milieu of the common life, Walpole's title proclaimed as the chief protagonist in his novel what was to become the most characteristic symbolic element in Gothic fiction generally, the castle. The "dramatised decay" of the ruin, as Kenneth Clark terms it (p. 30) inspired fascination and awe, and the later part of the century saw ruins become a major preoccupation of art, architecture, and landscape. And in the Gothic novel, the castle becomes connected with the family because it is essentially the material survivor of a powerful lineage, a symbol of the continuing life of its founder. Only, therefore, when Otranto's living heir, Theodore, is safely in the courtyard can "the walls of the castle" be "thrown down by a mighty force," and the form of its founder, Alfonso, "dilated to an immense magnitude," appear "in the centre of the ruins" (p. 108). Within the walls the most common material objects are likenesses—either portraits or sculptures—which, like ancient documents attest the continuing presence of the dead. The portrait of Alfonso, his statue, even the helmet, armor, and sword—all assert his paternal power. So do the ancient prophecy and the riddling quatrain.

From likenesses of the dead to the world of the supernatural is no great leap for Walpole's liberated "resources of the fancy"—as Alfonso presumably discovers when he steps down out of his picture frame. Walpole was at some pains to excuse the element of superstition in his story on the grounds that it was typical of the times depicted, and that he had in any case much restricted its operation, as compared to earlier writers of romance, where "the actors seem to lose their senses the moment the laws of nature lose their tone." So in general his motive for seeking the greater imaginative freedom of the supernatural must be seen as yet another aspect of how Gothic was a reaction to the intellectual temper of the century. Walpole liked The Castle of Otranto most among his works, he wrote to Madame du Deffand, because there alone he had given "reign to … imagination… I am even persuaded that in the Future, when taste will be restored to the place now occupied by philosophy, my poor Castle will find admirers."⁹ His own time, alas, wanted "only cold reason," which had established a rigid distinction between the natural and the supernatural after Newton had cast light on nature's laws, and definitively depersonalized and demythologized the physical world.

The systematizing of this division between the natural and the supernatural orders inevitably affected general attitudes to the past and to the unseen world. By the time of Pope the supernatural had become to the enlightened a dubious and rather fanciful rival order, like the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock; and by the middle of the century such beliefs were becoming a sign of religious archaism, as in John Wesley and Parson Adams. To give the occult power of the past a real existence in fiction it was now necessary to set the narrative back in time into the Gothic past, to the times before the Reformation when Roman Catholic superstition held sway, and to the countries—most notably Italy—where it was still rampant.

To an Enlightenment sceptic like Walpole, of course, religious superstition was equally repulsive to political liberty and scientific reason; but it remained congenial to the aesthetic imagination. Hence Walpole compromised with his times both by setting the events back in times and places where credulity was universal, and by presenting his supernatural interventions in a selective way.

Walpole's supernature is entirely populated with beings who, for all their monstrous size and power, are essentially historical beings with rational human aims. This is typical of the Gothic novel in general; supernature is both secularized and individualized. Alfonso the Good, or whichever of his unseen adjutants is currently on duty to ruffle the helmet's plumes at the appropriate time, seems to be wholly concerned with bringing about a more satisfactory state of affairs in the secular world of his genealogical descendants; and when this rectifying mission has been accomplished, he can be trusted to hand Otranto back to the custody of Newtonian physics.

There are other orders of experience besides the supernatural which exist outside time as it is viewed by natural science: there is the sacred time of myth and ritual and the mystics; and—much more important for the Gothic tradition—there are the special kinds of time in which dreams and the unconscious have their being; and both are peculiarly open to the irruptions of the forces of the past.—

In dreams, time is intensely real in the sense that we are immersed in a series of scenes which follow each other with hallucinatory vividness: it is very much a question of now, and now, and now. The connection of these scenes is not causal; the fragments are real, but they have their own kind of temporal order which is unconscious or imaginative, rather than consecutive in any logical way. The specific time-setting of the dream is typically unlocalized or shifting; but when we recall the dream later we often realize that we have revisited various scenes of our long-past life, though not in their chronological order. What initially provokes the dream, though, is normally some present occasion; and this provides a basic structural analogy to the symbiosis of past and present in Gothic.

The closeness of the two kinds of mental representation—dreams and Gothic fiction—is reflected in two well-known facts. First, dreams, particularly nightmares, are common in Gothic novels; many of the best are like nightmares—Frankenstein or "The Fall of the House of Usher." Second, many Gothic novels apparently began as actual dreams. In her Preface, Mary Shelley, for instance, says Frankenstein did, and so does Walpole in a letter to William Cole (9 March 1765):

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 filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. 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, and I grew fond of it—add that I was very glad to think of anything rather than politics …

(Corr., 1: 88)

We can be fairly confident, I think, that Walpole's dream was a transposition of sights familiar to him partly from Strawberry Hill and particularly, as he wrote, from the great court of Trinity College, Cambridge.¹⁰ We can also see how the symbolic meanings of these images reflect the unconscious life.

The unconscious shares with Gothic the characteristic that anything (we are credibly informed) can happen there, and that its psychological spectrum reflects the extremes of what we seek and what we fear much more dramatically than is common either in the novel or in real life. There is a further parallel: both dreams and the unconscious share with Gothic fiction the tendency to deal with present problems through a special reliving of the past. As Auden puts it in his elegy for Sigmund Freud, "He wasn't clever at all: he merely told/the unhappy Present to recite the Past."

This particular aspect of Gothic—the unhappy present reciting the past—is clearest, I suppose, in the later Gothic tradition, in Dickens, with Miss Havisham immobilised in the posture of frustration, or in Ibsen's Ghosts and John Gabriel Borkman, where the past has irrevocably foreclosed the possibilities of the present. In all these, once again we have a double past; for the crucial events of the past, whether betrayal, theft, murder, rape, or incest, were themselves the residue of an infinitely earlier past, which lived on in the archaic violence of the unconscious.

The unconscious, as we have all learned, is very like a Gothic castle: not the clean, well-lighted and cellarless place of the modern single-family residence, but a many-tiered vertical maze—and a dark and dirty one at that. Its many levels connect only through narrow, turning staircases and concealed trapdoors; and its towers, vaults, caverns, and dungeons are both the natural scene of death and terror and rape, and established symbols for our unconscious drives. Their sexual symbolism is now an open book to a normally contaminated mind; but it may be worth suggesting how the facts that, as Freud put it, "We are not masters in our own house," and that there are rooms in it that we may never really see, both supply an enduring psychological basis for the appeal of the Gothic genre, and help explain its frequent concentration on family relationships.

Melodrama and Gothic are not always clearly distinct genres, but the reader's responses to their characters usually differ. In melodrama, we hiss at the villain. In Gothic our attitude is more complex; the villain nearly always excites some degree of identification, whether he is predominately evil, like Mrs. Radcliffe's Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho, or predominately sympathetic, like Ambrosio in The Monk,¹¹ Melmoth, or Heathcliff. Most typically the reader has a divided sympathy, and this ambivalence seems to follow the division between the id and the superego.

Here, too, Walpole is a precursor. His hero, Manfred, is on one hand a cruel and tyrannical usurper whose mind often turns, in Walpole's phrase, "to exquisite villainy"; yet on the other hand, something in us finds much to admire and to envy in his cunning and self-confident resolution to pursue his aims; Walpole's own unconscious sympathy is made clear very early when he gives Manfred so firm a command of irony at the expense of superstition and sentimental pretence. Like Walpole, we know we ought to condemn Manfred, but we find we cannot; he appeals to a division in us between the conscious and the unconscious, between the public and the private, between the day and night side of the personality. These tensions provide a complexity which does something to atone for the thin psychological characterization of The Castle of Otranto, and is also typical of Gothic fiction. When there is character development in the Gothic, as in The Monk, it is a morally emblematic series of accelerating villainies rather than a psychologically cumulative process; more typically, the Gothic character is sustained by a labile balance between the past and the present, between the unrestrained impulses of the id and the controls of reason and normality.

Perhaps it is this unconscious irresolution that explains one puzzle about so many Gothic novels. At times Manfred and Montoni seem so potently and enviably demonic that we see no reason whatever that their victims, or their whole social order, should survive at all. Yet we also find these Gothic supermen having occasional spasms of normality—moral qualms, moments of kindness, ordinary muddled human sympathy. Their destructive power is apparently not limitless, and oddly defeats our expectation. This contradiction becomes more apparent in the nineteenth century, when the Gothic theme becomes psychologically internalized in such characters as Ahab and Heathcliff: they seem much more terrifying persons than their actions turn out to be.

It may be that the essential explanation of why Gothic villains never realized their full destructive potential is in the Freudian view of the relation between parents and children. Perhaps Manfred, for instance, alternates between the demonic and the normal because Walpole was torn between deep admiration for his father, and an equally deep fear of his father's power. Of course Horace Walpole knew that he was no more likely to continue the family's greatness than was Conrad; and so the dread giant hand on the bannister belonged to the paternal authority that was both desired and hated. But it also had its limits—Sir Robert was now dead.¹²

In any case it is surely within the nucleus of the family that the basic conflicts of the Gothic take place; and for at least three reasons. First, that the most universal of man's social and moral regulations all concern the interplay of power, property, marriage, and sex within the family; second, that these regulations, and the forces which oppose them, are internalised in the unconscious; and last, that these conflicts directly and continuously affect the relationships of the past and the present in the individual's experience. Here again Walpole anticipated later developments; the moral of his work, he wrote in the Preface to the first edition, was "that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation" (p. 5).

The psychological contradictions concerning character and the family, it should perhaps be added, work both ways: Freudian theory can itself be seen as a Gothic myth. It presents the individual, much as Gothic does, as essentially imprisoned by the tyranny of an omnipotent but unseen past. The oedipal situation, or more generally, the terrible authority of the parents in the unconscious, is the Freudian equivalent of the supernatural or demonic power of the Gothic protagonist. The parallel is strengthened by the prevalence of paternal incest in Gothic fiction (of which Manfred's passion for Isabella, the girl who was to have been his daughter-in-law, is an example).¹³ There is a further parallel in that tradition of Gothic which goes from The Castle of Otranto to "The Fall of the House of Usher" and The House of the Seven Gables, where the supreme power is the patriarchal authority of the long-dead lineal ancestor, who is still the real, though invisible, master of the house and its occupants.

More generally, we can conclude that although a sense of the mysterious and immobilising power of the past is one of the characteristic features both of psychoanalysis and Gothic fiction, that power is normally humanised as far as our quotidian experience is concerned. In this respect it seems that characterization in the Gothic novel has a somewhat similar function to that allotted the individual ego in psychoanalytic theory: to mediate between the conflicting demands of two sides of the unconscious, the superego and the id.¹⁴

So much for the psychology of the Gothic. I have obviously not been attempting a complete account either of The Castle of Otranto or of its genre. Such an account would have to concede that it is often forced, sometimes dull, and stylistically Walpole's worst piece of prose writing—with hardly a suggestion of the brilliance and understanding of the letters or the memoirs, for instance. The Castle of Otranto, in fact, very largely lacks the courage of its Gothic convictions; and yet its basic structure contains enough of the essential features of the later Gothic tradition both to explain its historical importance in establishing the new form, and to help us understand some of its characteristic elements.

Walpole himself shared much of the optimism of the Enlightenment; in his Gothic tale, therefore, the past is fairly benign: Manfred repents, and Theodore is returned to his rightful place. For the most part Mrs. Radcliffe followed this comfortable ideological perspective. After the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Gothic tradition took a darker turn. Gothic was still the world of the ancient romance, in the sense that it was a kind of fiction in which all the most violent and destructive extremes of human possibility could be realised, as opposed to the novel, which habitually confines its characters and events within the more normal quotidian spectrum of action and motive. But whereas Walpole had allowed the more affirmative forces of justice and virtue to vanquish evil, Monk Lewis and Charles Maturin and later Gothic writers operated more and more within the darker shades of the moral spectrum; the past is evil and tends to triumph; the fate of both the Monk and of Melmoth is eternal damnation.

Whether the balance of power in the world of the Gothic novel is held by good or evil, however, it is typically—though not always—a world where, in a variety of forms, the redoubtable past haunts the impotent present; it is the past which holds the key.

The Gothic tradition in its specialised historical sense is usually agreed to end with Melmoth the Wanderer in 1820: more precisely, perhaps, we might say that one branch of it continues in an increasingly sub-literary and specialised tradition about vampires and werewolves, while the other branch continues to deepen the main moral perspectives of Gothic in works which in other respects come closer to the main tradition of the novel.

The immediate setting in an historical past, and the use of the supernatural, became rarer in this later and looser version of the Gothic; and at the same time it incorporates many of the interests and techniques of the main fictional tradition. With the Brontes,¹⁵ for instance, it assimilates the fuller psychological characterization and the denser presentation of the environment of the Victorian novel in general.

On this issue the roles of time and the family offer an interesting contrast in two acknowledged classics of the Gothic in its wider sense. In Wuthering Heights, for instance, the most memorable part of the narrative—from chapters 3 to 17—deals with events of a generation ago (between 1771, the arrival of Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights, to the deaths of Catherine and Hindley Eamshaw in 1784); Lockwood learns them after his calls at Wuthering Heights in 1801. To that extent the story enacts a double plunge backwards into time: to the days of Cathy's marriage, and then further back to her childhood with Heathcliff; and this backward movement itself takes us even further back symbolically to an unconscious world of eternal primitive possession. On the other hand the optimistic conclusion of the novel—Heathcliff s death and the marriage of Catherine and Hareton—occurs in the present tense of the novel, in 1802 and 1803. This contrast suggests an inherent contradiction in the book. One way of looking at it would be as a working out of the dual role of the Gothic hero: the dark powers of the id have their way for a time, but they succumb to the attrition of moral and social norms in the end. As Thomas Moser has argued,¹⁶ the later parts of the book really amount to a final denial of Emily Bronte's initial psychological premises: the bad, exciting past is not omnipotent; the demonic Heathcliff, of all people, goes soft; Cathy and Wuthering Heights cease to be haunted by him; and the Gothic world fades into the dull domestic Victorian one almost without a protest.

On the other hand Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, (1851), is much closer to the Otranto pattern. There is—first of all-—the Gothic present embodied in the colonial house itself which has survived into the eighteen-fifties. The movement back in time reveals the secrets of two anterior pasts: that of one generation back, when Clifford Pyncheon was sentenced to prison, thirty years before, for the alleged murder of his uncle, Jaffrey Pyncheon; and that of about two centuries before, when Colonel Pyncheon had originally seized the land from Matthew Maule, and has him executed as a wizard. In the narrative present, Judge Pyncheon, sitting beneath the portrait of the founder of his lineage, Colonel Pyncheon, dies choked with blood according to Maule's curse, the same fate that had befallen the original Colonel Pyncheon and his descendant, Jaffrey Pyncheon. The past is beginning to be expiated, and the present must now be reconstituted. The old deed to the Indian lands is discovered by the lodger, Mr. Holgrave, who turns out to be a descendant of Matthew Maule, and of his son, Thomas, who had built the house; and time can start going forward once again, instead of back, when Holgrave, now called Maule, gives his family name to Phoebe, the only representative of the Pyncheon lineage who has a. future.

In the twentieth century, certainly, there has been no inclination to underestimate the extent to which we are haunted by the past and the family; and so the Gothic theme has surfaced in many new, concealed, or unexpected forms. In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, the central pattern is very clear; the two generations which haunt Sutpen's Hundred are traced back to the intractable brutalities and the mysterious inheritance of Thomas Sutpen: the densely layered family history of the Sutpens, cannot, any more than the past of the South, be altered; Quentin Compson, and other defeated survivors of history, can only attempt to understand its multifarious power. One could also argue that the tradition continues in the literature of the mindless molecular now, and even that, the present times being what they are, contemporary fiction in general is rapidly becoming more and more indistinguishable from the Gothic novel—in Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates, or Kurt Vonnegut, for example.

In general, we can be reasonably certain that, unlike the Gothic language, the Gothic novel is unlikely to disappear. As long as we are ambivalent about our incomparable modernity; as long as our political sky gets blacker daily with chickens coming home to roost; as long as children have parents, and so do parents; as long as we continue to experience boredom, night, sleep, and fear; as long as we fail to experience freedom and happiness; the past, alas! will continue to haunt us, and see to it that we spend much of our lives on Gothic time.

Notes

¹ "Literature and Science," Philistinism in England and America, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1974), p. 64. The Darwin citation is from The Descent of Man, Part III, ch. 21, p. 7.

² Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W. S. Lewis (London: Oxford Univ., 1964), p. 17. Later quotations are from this edn.

³ Walpole said much the same thing in a 16 March 1765 letter to Joseph Warton, where he wrote that he wished to "blend the marvellous of old story with the natural of modern novels" (W. S. Lewis, ed., The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence (New Haven: Yale Univ., 1937-83), 40:377. Subsequently cited as Corr.

⁴ s.v. Gothic, 4.

⁵ Renaissance usage, as in Giorgio Vasari (1551), merely connected the term with the maniera tedesca of the Goths who had sacked Rome and destroyed the classical orders of architecture. Our less derogatory and more historical classification awaited Francois Blondel the Younger, who in 1771 established the distinction between architecture gothique ancienne—the 6th to the 11th c. (the word "romanesque" wasn't to appear until 1819)—and the architecture gothique moderne, from the 12th c. to 1515, the accession of Francois Premier. In 18th-c. England, although many of his contemporaries made a vague equation between "Gothic" buildings and the Saxon period, Walpole in general equated "Gothic" with the pointed arch and perpendicular ornamentation (Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival [N.Y.: Holt, 1962], pp. 46-65), although the issue is not raised in The Castle of Otranto.

⁶ As Ernest Fischer puts it, "The bourgeois wanted to disguise his capital in fancy dress" (The Necessity of Art [Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971], p. 208).

⁷ Walpole was delighted with a dungeon at Hurstmonceaux, an elaborate 15th-c. castellated mansion, because it "gives one a delightful idea of living in the days of soccage and under such goodly tenures" (Corr., 35:138, to Bentley, 5 Aug. 1752).

⁸Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), p. 26.

⁹ Letter dated 13 March 1767 (Corr., 3:260), trans, from the French by the author.

¹⁰ As Warren H. Smith showed in a letter to the ed., Times Literary Supplement (23 May 1936), p. 440.

¹¹ In The Monk the literal haunting of the narrative present by an anterior past mainly occurs in the subplots (the legend of the bleeding nun, e.g.). As far as the protagonist is concerned, it is his own atavistic passions that are gradually revealed, to the astonishment of his admirers (including himself), and that lead to rape, murder, and his own damnation.

¹² The relationship of the Gothic novel to the archetypal and primordial structures of psychological development have been illuminatingly explored, in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the Americal Novel (Cleveland: Meridian, 1962), for instance, and Frederick Crews' The Sins of the Fathers (N.Y.: Oxford Univ., 1966); while more recently, Maurice Levy, in his Le Roman Gothique Anglais 1764-1824 (Toulouse: Faculte des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1968), has investigated those aspects of the Gothic novel which appealed to the French surrealists, notably to Andre Breton and Paul Eluard. See also The Female Gothic, ed. Juliann E. Fleenor (Montreal: Eden, 1983).

¹³ Walpole's play, The Mysterious Mother, contains a double incest: the mother sleeps with her son, and later kills herself when he marries their joint offspring. The Freudian aspect of The Castle of Otranto is treated in Martin Kallich's Horace Walpole (N.Y.: Twayne, 1971), pp. 101-4.

¹⁴ The implications of this for characterization have been well demonstrated in Francis Russel Hart's essay "The Experience of Character in the English Gothic Novel." Hart argues that we must not make the common assumption that the Gothic protagonists are merely flat emblematic portrayals of the demonic in the non-representational world of the romance; they are that, and they are also human beings; and so the central mystery in Gothic novels is one where "autonomous natural existences—characters—come to assume demonic roles" and this is the "terrifying truth in an enlightenment context … that the demonic is no myth, no superstition, but a reality in human character or relationship, a novelistic reality" (Experience in the Novel: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce [N.Y.: Columbia Univ., 1968] p. 99).

¹⁵ See especially Robert B. Heilman, "Charlotte Bronte's 'New Gothic"', in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad, ed. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1958), pp. 118-32.

¹⁶ "'What is the Matter with Emily Jane?' Conflicting Impulses in Wuthering Heights," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (1962): 1-19.