gothic genre/mode (part one)
On Christmas Eve in 1764 Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto which, by most accounts, was the first Gothic novel. Otranto is the story of how Manfred, an Italian nobleman, decides to attempt to divorce his wife and marry his almost-daughter-in-law because his son died on his own wedding day (before the ceremony) and that was…the best course of action in Manfred’s mind? It’s actually a much more complicated narrative that involves supernatural omens, a curse on a family, a rightful heir, a giant helmet, and a chase scene through a ruined castle, but it is also about Manfred trying to marry his son’s fiancée. The Castle of Otranto certainly established Gothic conventions and tropes— “sexualized power dynamics, supernatural elements, and terrorized and vulnerable women” (Westengard 1–2)—that can be found in contemporary media (especially within the horror genre). But aside from being a specific historical literary genre, what does Gothic mean? And what is the difference between Gothic and gothic?
Gothic culture(s)
Gothic has meant many different things over the past seventeen hundred years (give or take). To uncover the history of the term, I turned to Nick Groom’s The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Gothic first referred to “barbarian tribes” from Germania, the region north of the Roman Empire, who were called the Visigoths (Western Goths) and the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths). The Visigoths were pushed out of Eastern European territory by the Huns and, in 376 CE, were allowed to cross the Danube and enter Roman territory (The Gothic 4). The Romans were super chill about the whole thing, and everyone lived happily ever after.
Wait, that isn’t right.
The Romans and the Goths fought in bloody wars. In 410 CE Rome was sacked and in 475 CE, the Visigoths declared their independence from Rome—which collapsed the year later (The Gothic 6). The Ostrogoths, meanwhile, were split into two main groups: those under Hunnic control and those under Roman-Byzantine control.
Following the fall of Rome, Gothic culture developed an origin story that justified both the Goths’ status as the successors to Rome and a unification of Gothic cultures. Basically, the Goths were Catholic now, baby! Groom argues that “the Goths had not only sacked Rome and overrun the old Empire, they had effectively sounded the death-knell of the classical pagan world” (The Gothic 12). This association between Gothic and Catholic would last until the Renaissance, when Gothic started to refer to medieval architecture and culture (which was not meant as a compliment). Renaissance Europeans were Big Fans™ of Greek and Roman culture, which they believed were destroyed by the Goths who introduced “bad art and architecture” that was decadent—full of decorations like gargoyles and buttresses.
But let’s be honest, Gothic architecture fucks. It is generally split into four major periods: Norman Gothic (which spanned from 1066–1180 ish CE), Early English Gothic (which lasted from about 1180–1275 CE), Decorated Gothic (which is dated from 1275–1375 ish CE), and Perpendicular Gothic (which lasted from about 1375–1525 ish CE). Many Gothic buildings were churches, especially those in England, which used their impressive construction as a rhetorical connection to the divine and the infinite. “If this is a house of God,” they seemed to say, “it might as well look the part!” But these religious buildings weren’t all bright and cheery; Groom argues that there was “a culture of death that was centered on churches” (The Gothic 23). The Gothic cathedral was a massive memento mori—a reminder of death’s inevitability.
Europe had a little bit of a moment with the Catholic Church: The Reformation. Protestants were now a thing and they hated Catholics and Catholics hated them right back. They loathed each other so much that they were willing to go to war for decades with each other over ideological differences. The Protestants didn’t like that the Catholic Church was corrupt, and the Catholics didn’t like that being pointed out. And the Catholics did have their own Counter-Reformation where they tried to fix some of the shit that they got called out on. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
England had a complicated take on the Catholic Church. They were proud to be Catholic and not Protestant, but then Henry VIII wanted a few too many divorces and the pope was hesitant to annul another marriage. So, like a mature world leader, Henry VIII threw a tantrum and made his own Catholic Church knock-off: the Anglican Church. So, England was Protestant. And English people are known for being calm and level-headed.
Wait, I read that wrong.
The English went fucking ballistic, killing each other and razing their own land in the one-two punch of the English Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Henry VIII and his son weren’t Catholic and then Queen Mary was, but she was executed and then the English were Anglican again. Groom says that after the violence of the English Reformation(s), “English identity was rooted in a violence on a terrifying scale” (The Gothic 24). Which isn’t true because the English had been and would continue to be kind of oppressive dickheads who committed genocides against pretty much everyone they could. But it is true that in the wake of the mass destruction and violence, the English landscape was littered with half-alive ruins of religious buildings (made primarily in the Gothic styles) that served as a painful reminder of that time they turned their brand of violence inward.
English culture didn’t really know how to grapple with the collective trauma of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation (which should not be confused with the other Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which happened in a magical place called “not in England”). Kind of like the United States of America in the wake of the September 11thattacks, English cultural production fixated on the trauma of the iconoclasm primarily through things like ballads and the Revenge Tragedy. Both modes of cultural production seemed to highlight violence—often sexual in nature—and the supernatural; both were dark in tone and obsessed with death and ruin. English art and culture could not stop thinking about how bad shit got. These themes would percolate for a little while and eventually make their way into Gothic literature, but before the genre could enter the picture, there was a little bit of political groundwork that needed to be done.
The Romans weren’t really all that cool to the English anymore. I mean, right off the bat, Rome was where the Catholic Church started, and Catholicism was No Longer Cool. And their whole absolutist monarchy system wasn’t vibing with the republican sentiments of a pro-parliament Britain. Enter the Whigs.
The Whigs were a British political party whose official stance was “fuck the monarchy” …kind of? They opposed the Tories, who ended up becoming the modern-day Conservative Party in the UK, but everyone still calls the Conservative Party the Tories. The Whigs were in favor of a constitutional monarchy. Oh, and the first Prime Minister of the UK was a Whig politician named Robert Walpole. Horace Walpole’s father. We’ll come back to that. The Whigs started associating themselves with Gothic culture, which was seen as valuing personal freedom in opposition to absolutism and tyrannical leaders. Gothic sentimentality was politically progressive; no longer was England under the control of the imperial Roman authority or the absolute power of the monarchy. The Whigs had established the office of Prime Minister and opposed the domination of the Catholic Church. Gothic was synonymous with political progress.
Enter Horace Walpole.
Gothic literature
The Castle of Otranto was a vessel for Whiggish sentiment: its plot is “based on fraud and inheritance, expressing perhaps a fear of the legitimacy of English Teutonism and the Gothic heritage” (The Gothic 71). It was the establishment of a new genre of art, a new mode of cultural production that featured decadence, ornamentalism, supernaturalism, and an aesthetic of death and decay. It was a “metaphor for the less tangible anxieties and traumas of the human condition” (The Gothic 72). In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Castle of Otranto, Nick Groom suggests that Walpole was not so much establishing a new genre, but rather that Otranto represented “the climax of eighteenth-century discussion and debate about the Goths and ‘Gothick’” (“Introduction” ix). I see where Groom is coming from, but I also want to highlight that Walpole was explicitly outlining a new mode of artistic expression. Yes, it built upon the eighteenth-century discourse, but it also developed a whole set of practices that have fundamentally changed how we write today. Gothic techniques have spread to influence many genres of writing, ranging from literary fiction to philosophy.
a summary of The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto is about a lot of things, but it’s also short as novels go—both of my copies are just over one hundred pages in length. If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so; the whole text is available online for free[1] and the text itself isn’t too dense. There are content warnings, which I’ll provide here.[2] But if you haven’t read it, I’ll quickly summarize what happens. As a note, all page numbers I use for my citations are from the Penguin Classics edition of The Castle of Otranto unless otherwise noted (as I have with excerpts from Nick Groom’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition).
Before the narrative starts, the preface to the first edition of the novel gives some context for what the fuck The Castle of Otranto is. The “translator,” William Marshall, says that he found this history in “the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England” (Walpole 5). Marshall also notes that the manuscript was printed “in the black letter,” which means a Gothic-style font (Walpole 5). He implies that the work is likely an embellishment of an actual history, noting that the names used are fictitious and that the original author’s writing “can only be laid out before the public at present as a matter of entertainment,” but goes on to state that he “cannot but believe that the ground-work of the story is founded on the truth” (Walpole 6, 7). And then the story started. But after the success of the first edition of this novel, Walpole revealed himself as the author and the work as pure fiction. When a second edition was printed, Walpole included a second preface that explained a little bit more about his motivations: he wanted to “blend the two types of romance, the ancient and the modern” (Otranto 9).
Manfred is the prince of Otranto, and he has two children, his daughter, the “most beautiful virgin,” Matilda—whom he dislikes—and his son, the “sickly” Conrad—whom he adores (Walpole 17). It is Conrad’s wedding day and Isabella, his bride and the daughter of a marquis, has been at Otranto for a while, waiting for Conrad to be healthy enough to make it through the ceremony.
Oh, also there is a weird prophecy that implies that Manfred is not the rightful lord of Otranto.
Anyways, Conrad is late to his wedding ceremony and Manfred is impatient. He sends someone to look for the boy and they come back terrified and raving about a helmet, which makes no sense to anyone until most of the wedding party go out of the chapel and find Conrad’s body crushed underneath a massive helmet. Manfred is super normal about seeing his beloved son’s mangled corpse and has no emotional reaction, instead giving orders for Isabella to be taken care of. This is kind of silly because Isabella was not a big fan of Conrad or Manfred, so she’s kind of feeling relieved to not have to go through with this marriage. Later in the evening, Manfred goes to visit Isabella and basically tells her that Conrad was a loser, she deserves a real man…perhaps one named Manfred. Which is gross and borderline incestuous? Manfred isn’t technically her father-in-law because Conrad died before the marriage, but she was still viewing Manfred as her parent (in a loose sense). When Isabella points out that Manfred is married to Hippolita, he declares that he is divorced from her because she couldn’t give him an heir. Manfred grabs at Isabella but she runs like hell, managing to escape into the castle’s subterranean passages.
While she is stumbling through the dark labyrinth Isabella bumps into Theodore, a peasant who identified the deadly helmet as one from the statue of a former prince of Otranto: Alfonso. When Theodore pointed this out to Manfred, the prince lost his temper, called Theodore a necromancer, and had him trapped inside the massive helm. But Manfred’s plan didn’t go smoothly; the helmet was so heavy that it punched a hole in the street that dropped Theodore in the passageway. Theodore helps Isabella escape the castle’s grounds and she runs to St. Nicholas’ church nearby. Father Jerome, the holy man in charge of St. Nicholas’, makes his way to Manfred’s castle and asks for an audience with him. Jerome says that Isabella is going to stay under his watch until her father comes to collect her, which displeases Manfred. “I am her parent […] and demand her,” he cries (Walpole 44–45). Manfred is acknowledging that he is, in all but the legal sense, acting as Isabella’s father right now. But he wants to marry her and argued that he would “value her beauties” and “may expect a numerous offspring” (Walpole 23–24). His claim as Isabella’s father and his proposal of marriage to her are discordant and emblematic of the sexualized power dynamics that Gothic literature would come to center.
Manfred recaptures Theodore and is ready to kill him when Jerome recognizes Theodore as his bastard son; Manfred stays his hand. It is revealed that Jerome and Theodore are descended from the noble house of Falconara, which makes Theodore a threat to Manfred’s claim to the throne, per the weird prophecy. Theodore is of noble blood. Father Jerome asks Manfred, “what is blood! what is nobility!” The priest goes on to assert, “We are all reptiles, miserable, sinful creatures. It is piety alone that can distinguish us from the dust whence we sprung, and whither we must return” (Walpole 52). While he is technically spared, Theodore is locked away in a tower.
Later, some knights of the lord Frederic, the marquis of Vicenza (who has a claim to the throne and is also Isabella’s father), arrives at Otranto. Frederic was out fighting in the Holy Land (read: committing genocide in the Crusade) when Manfred “bribed the guardians of the lady Isabella to deliver her up to him as a bride for his son Conrad; by which alliance he had purposed to unite the claims of the two houses” (Walpole 56). In other words, the whole engagement was something Manfred orchestrated without the consent of anyone involved. While Manfred is talking to Frederic and his men, Matilda (Manfred’s daughter) helps spring Theodore out of his tower prison. Back with Manfred and Frederic, things are getting wild; everyone is scrambling to find Isabella before the others can. Down in the passageways, a knight bumps into an armor-clad Theodore who stabs the shit out of him in defense of Isabella before he realizes that, oops, it was Frederic.
Everyone makes it back to the surface and, for some fucking reason, Frederic falls in love with Matilda and is like, “Hey, Manfred. I know we’re having a horrible time trying to find my daughter and marry her off to secure our claim to the throne but how about this: you marry my daughter and I marry yours? It sounds like a fair trade.” I guess Manfred finds this amenable but he thinks that Theodore and Isabella are hooking up in the chapel so he grabs a knife and runs down there to stop it.
Now, here’s the thing about Manfred: he’s a stab first, ask questions later kind of guy. He barges into the chapel, sees Theodore and some girl, and plunges the dagger into this poor girl’s bosom. Matilda cries out, “Ah me, I am slain!” and collapses (Walpole 95). Manfred realizes that he’s killed his daughter and lost his son; his line is effectively ended. Well, Matilda isn’t quite dead yet but she’s not going to survive. As everyone is making their way to say goodbye to Matilda, who is taken to her chambers, there’s a big clap of thunder and a ghost wearing massive armor—specifically the ghost of Alfonso, the former prince of Otranto who’s statue’s helmet crushed Conrad—proclaims that Theodore is the new and rightful prince of Otranto. Also this massive ghost destroys the walls of the castle before ascending into the clouds and vanishing. The next day, Manfred abdicates his claim to the throne of the principality before he and his wife take “the habit of religion in the neighboring convents” (Walpole 100). Theodore ends up marrying Isabella even though he’s all broken up about his dead almost girlfriend because “he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul” (Walpole 101).
So that’s the story ofThe Castle of Otranto. Manfred tries to marry his daughter in law and ends up securing the end of his bloodline. It’s largely a story about questioning the legitimacy of the claims of nobility, highlighting the violence needed to maintain one’s family legacy, and building a cultural mode of expression out of the aesthetic of ruin that helped shape a post-iconoclasm English identity.
bibliography
Groom, Nick. The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Reeve, Clara, and James Trainer. Old English Baron. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Walpole, Horace, and Michael Gamer. “Introduction.” The Castle of Otranto. Penguin Books, 2001.
Walpole, Horace, and Michael Gamer. The Castle of Otranto. Penguin Books, 2001.
Walpole, Horace, and Nick Groom. “Introduction.” The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.
Walpole, Horace, and Nick Groom. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Westengard, Laura.Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma. University of Nebraska Press, 2019.
[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/696/pg696-images.html
[2] misogyny, sexism, sexual harassment, death, child death, sexual assault, adult/minor relationship, infertility, incest