[In the following excerpt from her Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence (1980), Wilt examines the religious import of Walpole's Gothic tale.]

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) is a rather gormless tale for which Walpole claimed little, and even the claim he did make—"Terror, the author's principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing"¹—is not entirely true. Its merits are not in character, plot, or prose, nor as he had thought, in the dramatic structure, but in half a dozen memorable tableaux,² frozen moments of action, which are almost certainly lifted from Walpole's dreams, and maybe yours and mine too.

The narrative proper begins, like a primer in Gothic plot, with the father: "Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son and one daughter." A page later, on young Conrad's wedding day, the cry "Oh! the helmet! the helmet!" brings the family to the courtyard, where "—but what a sight for a father's eyes!—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's stupefied gazing at this portent establishes the first tableau; and the second comes pat a few pages later as, trying to become his own son, Manfred offers himself to the bereft bride, Isabella: "Heaven nor hell shall impede my designs, said Manfred, advancing again to seize the princess. At that instant the portrait of his grandfather … quit its panel and [descended] on the floor with a grave and melancholy air" (p. 24). The third tableau, Isabella escaping through the lower vaults of the castle, became the subject of numerous sketches and paintings in the late eighteenth century, for as Walpole says only too truly of his own prose: "Words cannot paint the horror of the princess' situation" (p. 27).

Wanting no daughter, "raving" for more sons, and intending to put away his infertile wife and beget more sons upon Isabella, Manfred meets his match, another father, in the priest Jerome. "I am sovereign here, and will allow no meddling priest to interfere," he says (p. 47), but Jerome refuses to hand over the bride: "she is where orphans and virgins are safest from the wiles and snares of this world, and nothing but a parent's authority shall take her thence." "I am her parent, and demand her," returns Manfred, leaving himself open to Jerome's unanswerable riposte: "By me are thou warned not to pursue the incestuous design on thy contracted daughter" (pp. 49-50). The property of Otranto at stake, Manfred and the real father of Isabella compromise, each to his own best advantage: each will marry the other's daughter, each hopes that his own daughter will bear no sons to his enemy and thus secure the property to him. "Thou art no lawful prince," thunders the substitute father Jerome. "It is done," responds the separated Manfred, and "as he spoke these words three drops of blood fell from the nose of Alfonso's statue" (p. 98).

This serio-comic tableau marks the third ponderous intervention of Alfonso the Good, the true prince, foully done to death by Manfred's grandfather for the lordship of Otranto, but not before he had secretly married and begotten a daughter, who married the Count of Falconara, who fathered the true heir Theodore and then became Father Jerome after Theodore's disappearance. This young "lost heir" appears at Otranto in time to be fallen in love with by both of the girlchildren, Matilda and Isabella, who are coveted as property by the middle-aged fathers. Thus in this first of the classic Gothic tales the male ingenue has almost no active role, not even as an object of persecution. He is simply the convenient receptacle of the least interesting, most conventional sentiments; he loses his own beloved, marries her friend as an afterthought, and after an odyssey as sentimentally banal as Charles II's, he is only a spectator at his own restoration, which provides the last spectacular tableau of the tale:

The moment Theodore appeared, the walls of the castle behind Manfred were thrown down by a mighty force, and the form of Alfonso, dilated to an immense magnitude, appeared in the centre of the ruins. "Behold in Theodore the true heir of Alfonso!" said the vision; and having pronounced those words, accompanied by a clap of thunder, it ascended solemnly towards heaven, where the clouds parting asunder, the face of St. Nicholas was seen; and receiving Alfonso's shade, they were soon swept from mortal eyes in a blaze of glory. (p. 113)

One feels impelled to start a round of applause, though Walpole's priest-narrator informs us instead that the beholders fell on their faces, "acknowledging the divine will."

This narrator, it is important to note, is the first of the holy fathers in the tale, and he may indeed have devious clerkly motives in telling the story. In a reflex absolutely central to English Gothic, Walpole affects to find the manuscript of this story "in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England"—that is, to the comfortable home-counties' Anglican mind, at the edge of the civilized world, where the minions of the great old religion might still dwell. Now, to the enlightened eighteenth-century mind of course, says Walpole in his "translators preface," marvelous visitations, dreams and portents, priestly tyranny, have been "exploded … even from romances." Two hundred and fifty years ago it was different, and "an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times" to omit them (p. 4).

On the other hand, Walpole offers a singular explanation for the telling of the story. Carefully deducing from stylistic evidence that the manuscript he has found dates from early sixteenth-century Italy, he theorizes:

Letters were then in their flourishing state … and contributed to dispel the empire of superstition, at that time so forcibly attacked by the reformers. It is not unlikely that an artful priest might endeavor to turn their own arms on the innovators; and might avail himself of his abilities as an author to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions.

"Such a work as the following," Walpole adds solemnly, "would enslave a hundred vulgar minds beyond half the books of controversy that have been written from the days of Luther to the present hour" (pp. 3-4).

Thus in Walpole's crucial narrative conceit, the Gothic arises in "the days of Luther" as a tool of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the priests of the old dispensation striking from beyond the grave at the new. In the 1760s, as an embattled Catholic Church suppresses the Jesuit Order under pressure from the "rational" despots of the continent, Walpole's "modern" romance restores the Jesuits to the English reader's mind.

Pursuing his scheme for material power, Isabella's father approaches a figure that, "turning slowly round, discovered to him the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit's cowl" (p. 107). In a "conflict of penitence and passion" he is recalled to his errand, which is to work the dead Jesuit's will upon the house of Manfred according to the story's governing moral. "Yet I could wish," says the "translator" airily of that other living/dead priest, the writer of the manuscript, that "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. I doubt whether in his time, any more than at present, ambition curbed its appetite of dominion from the dread of so remote a punishment" (p. 5). The secret sin that works itself poisonously out into the open, destroying at a distance of years or even generations, is a staple of Gothic plot; it is prime evidence for a theological universe, one in which any human act, occasionally a selfless one like Christ's sacrifice but more often a selfish one, may call to itself a power that will magnify the act far beyond the human scale. Time and distance supply some of the magnification; the Gothic portrays exactly that special dread which arises from the anticipation of remote, therefore magnified, punishment.

In terms of narrative, however, immediate punishment is what the Gothic delivers; from the death that opens The Castle of Otranto to the death that opens the novel Jaws, punishment comes first—not, certainly, before the sin, but before the revelation of the sin. In the Gothic, then, a world that first seems rational and calm is shattered by an irrational or random punishment, which is then rerationalized by the revelation of the generating, the original sin. And punishment in the Gothic, we will note, is most often for the young, while sin, the ambition for dominion, is the province of the old. This is one hidden reason why Manfred is "mad for sons"—not only will a son secure the domain but a son will receive the promised doom. The son must die so that the old man may live.

Or, in the last resort, the daughter must die. Manfred and Matilda are a curious pair. As Walpole rather casually creates her, Manfred's daughter is as mysterious an object of hatred to Manfred as Isabella is an object of lust. In the "conduct of the passions … according to probability" that Walpole feels is the central interest of his "new" kind of romance, these two passions are clearly linked. "I do not want a daughter" rages Manfred to his daughter; "I will be her parent" he insists of Isabella, his son's contracted wife. In the last pages of the book the two women and the two passions link together in a kind of murder/rape: hated by Isabella and haplessly loved by Matilda, Manfred in a fury plunges his dagger into the object of his lust and finds that he has killed the object of his hatred, his daughter. Attempting to shed "Alfonso's blood," he had "shed his own." Alfonso's revenge is complete, and his monk-substitutes are triumphant. Matilda forgives Manfred and thus locks him forever into guilt; he takes the cowl and goes into eternal penitence; woman and priest meet victorious beyond the grave, clouds parting asunder. Isabella and Theodore survive, like Shakespeare's Edgar, never to see so much nor live so intensely again.³ Manfred and Frederick, two mighty old ones, are defeated by the still older ones, priests of the old empire of superstition. Like Marlowe's Faustus, Manfred believed hell was a fable and learns his mistake: hell is a truth, and it is wherever the sinner is. The artful priest, whom Walpole's "translator" suggests cynically contrived the whole story, has had his sadistic will with the Gothic antihero, the separated one, the "man of sorrows" as Manfred calls himself in echo of that ambiguous model Separated Son.

Manfred is also the skeptic, who "doubts whether Heaven notifies its will through friars" (p. 65). Here we locate the real and empathetic terror of the Gothic antihero: in the midst of his power he doubts. Heretic and would-be atheist, he yet wonders whether in fact there is not, somewhere, if not in friars, the face, the portent, the pattern of events in which he should be reading the writing of heaven. No simple savage, Manfred is usually, in the easy eighteenth-century formula Walpole uses, humane and virtuous "when his passions did not obscure his reason" (p. 31). He bears the guilty burden of the tale and shares in the secret sin, but in the midst of his obsession that his house not fall, his mortality not end, he is at least partly drawn to propagate sons on Isabella because she is distantly of Alfonso's blood. So a son of theirs might both preserve his house and restore Alfonso's: a reasonable compromise, it would seem, in any universe but the Gothic, where the powers of evil and good, "dilated to an immense magnitude," pursue their own passionate symmetries, powers made even more dreadful in their abstract emptiness by an eerie familiarity. "This can be no evil spirit," says Matilda in the most Gothic moment of all, "it is undoubtedly one of the family" (p. 41).

Notes

¹ Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, reprinted with The Mysteries of Udolpho and Northanger Abbey (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963), p. 4. Walpole published this preface in his own personna in the second edition; the first edition, published several months earlier, contained only the "translator's preface" in his assumed personna. Subsequent references are to this edition and will be cited by page number in the text.

² Gothic melodrama really does derive from The Castle of Otranto in this respect; most of the important Gothic romances were immediately dramatized in their entirety or contributed familiar "bits" to the wildly successful plays of this genre. A wounderfully entertaining picture of the process is Montague Summers' account of Matthew Gregory Lewis's career as a playwright; he quotes Lewis's candid admission of what "business" was borrowed from Otranto and what from The Mysteries of Udolpho or other novels for his most successful play, The Castle Spectre.

³ It is interesting to note that the century that produced Tate's "happily-ever-after" Lear and Johnson's strictures on the lamentably "mixed" and "painful" Shakespeare also responded powerfully to the dark and formally rough Shakespeare as administered through the Gothic novel. Quotations from Macbeth, Lear, Titus Andronicus, and Richard III abound as headnotes in Mrs. Radcliffe's and Monk Lewis's works, for instance, and in his second preface to The Castle of Otranto Walpole claimed Shakespeare for his model above all in that mixture of "buffoonery and solemnity" (p. 11) which is a peculiar hallmark of the Gothic imagination and which Barm Stoker's Dracula, in a passage I want to advert to later, formalizes as a kind of dance between King Death and King Laugh.