Bloody Records: Manuscripts and Politics in The Castle of Otranto
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) famously begins when a giant medieval helmet plummets from the sky and fatally crushes Conrad, the only son and heir of Manfred the Prince of Otranto, on his wedding day. This event is a harbinger of things to come as more supernatural objects from the past descend in various ways on the castle to reveal the true history of Manfred’s ill-gotten rule over Otranto. As Manfred plots to divorce his wife and marry Conrad’s fiancée, Isabella, he stalks Isabella through a castle increasingly characterized by its medieval malevolence: a giant, armored hand appears on a banister; an army arrives bearing a colossal, ancient sword; a figure walks out of an old, musty portrait; a skeletal monk speaks. The novel reaches its climax when, in a case of mistaken identity, Manfred accidentally stabs his own daughter in a fit of rage. In the tumultuous denouement, the spirit of Alfonso the Good, the original Prince of Otranto and ghostly owner of the giant spectral objects that have mysteriously appeared throughout the story, materializes. He breaks the castle into ruins, reveals a seedy history of murder and forgery, and names a local peasant, Theodore, the rightful heir to Otranto before ascending into the sky in a giant fireball alongside St. Nicholas. Otranto’s wild supernatural machinations would become stock features of the Gothic novel, as would its medieval setting. In fact, critics have frequently treated the novel’s historicity as its most important formal feature. By setting Otranto in the murky medieval past, Walpole would seem to remove characters and readers alike from the empiricist ideologies of the Enlightenment and the demands of realist fiction, facilitating the Gothic’s unbelievable plot devices and sentimental effects. Understanding the
Gothic piles and cynical follies revisited: A quizzical tour through country house literature of the long eighteenth century
The eighteenth century witnessed an expansion in domestic tourism that allowed increasingly diversified visitors to access the grand homes of those for whom more lavish types of travel had furnished their seats, in town and country alike. Numerous travel guides and literary texts engage with the ongoing ‘country house’ tradition of praising the home, gardens, and owner of such places. However, the shifting social contexts in which both these buildings and the ideologies they embodied often drew writers to satirise critically the great houses they ostensibly admired. This essay examines how the Gothic aesthetic infused the broader country house tradition with a novel way of assessing the uneasy tension between tradition and innovation catalysed by the changing circumstances of the eighteenth century by examining the links several key writers forged between Gothic architectural structures and literary texts. It examines Horace Walpole’s Gothic projects in both The Castle of Otranto and Strawberry Hill; Mary Leapor’s Crumble Hall ; William Beckford’s Vathek and Fonthill; Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey ; before settling on a detailed discussion of Norman Abbey in Byron’s Don Juan , the literary equivalent of his own seat at Mansfield which, in turn, became a key spot on the tourist trail.
"The Plain Round Tale of Faithful Thady": Castle Rackrent as Slave Narrative
Critics of Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent tend to focus on textual elements—gender issues, the symbolism of the Big House, colonial hegemony— or contextual readings by placing Edgeworth in the Anglo-Irish history and tradition. While such criticism usually in some way examines the main theme of the text, the appropriation of power and authority, little of it accomplishes both the textual and contextual analysis that Castle Rackrent deserves. Exploring Thady’s “plain round tale” as a slave narrative in content and form sheds new light on the work both textually and contextually; in Thady Quirk, Edgeworth has created a typical slave narrator who recounts a history of oppression which is ultimately mediated by an outside editor. As John Cronin writes of Castle Rackrent, “What Maria Edgeworth has given us . . . is a magnificently realised slave, a terrifying vision of the results of colonial misrule. There must have been a moment of clearly deliberate artistic decision in which she realised that what needed to be said must be said through one of the submerged people.”1 The three main textual elements of the narrative indicate its likeness to typical slave narratives: its presentation of a conflicted slave narrator, its use of the framing device of the outside editor, and its narrative structure of episodic anecdotes that utilizes memory, description, and didacticism.