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Horace Walpole
THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO (1764) Reviewed by Patrick Killough (1) epinions.com title of this review: OTRANTO launched 60 years of Gothic in Literature Pros: The first ever Gothic novel. Influenced Walter Scott, Goethe, Jane Austen, Kafka. Moves very fast. Cons: You have to swallow absurdities. Melodramatic to the nth degree. Sometimes prissy, even pedantic phrasing. The Bottom Line: We all have to come to terms with the gothic strain in much literature since 1764. Where better to begin than THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, which launched the gothic genre? aohcapablanca's Full Review: Horace Walpole - The Castle Of Otranto DISCLAIMER:
I have not read any of the several editions currently carried by
epinions.com, including the large print edition of acclaimed editor
Wilmarth S. Lewis. What I own and have read is the Dover Thrift
pocketbook edition of 2004, a republication by Dover of the 1996
reprint of the famed second edition in which Walpole acknowledged his
authorship, after his first semi-anonymous edition had received
unanticipated acclaim.
Dover's is an important edition for its lucid introduction by E. F. Bleiler, its inclusion of both prefaces by Walpole the author (the first when he pretended to have merely translated THE CASTLE OF ORANTO from the Italian!) and a famous "Introduction" by Sir Walter Scott. END DISCLAIMER. Setting my disclaimer aside, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, first presented to the public on Christmas Eve 1764, is a must read for historically-minded students of the English novel. Indeed, OTRANTO is sometimes listed among six or so most important English novels. Not because it is brilliantly constructed (though it does gallop right along). Not because every other sentence is immortally phrased (woodenness is not rare). But mainly because THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO: A GOTHIC STORY was the first ever "gothic" romance. Its success was almost immediate and its imitations came fast and furious after Clara Reeve's 1777 THE CHAMPION OF VIRTUE, later retitled THE OLD ENGLISH BARON. You next find Walpole's little Gothic masterpiece (only 80 pages in Dover Thrift pocketbook) imitated by Matthew Gregory Lewis (THE MONK) by Goethe, by Sir Walter Scott and others. The era of "pure" Gothic, according to E. F. Bleiler, famously ended in 1820 with the Irish writer Charles Maturin's MELMOTH THE WANDERER). What a grand run the Gothic had! One reaction to gothic was satire, as in Jane Austen's NORTHANGER ABBEY. And yet gothic's echoes are with us even today. Typically, a gothic novel is set in the past, often the Middle Ages. At some time before novel's beginning there had been a crime. And that crime is not yet avenged. Some one had usurped someone else's property and/or title of nobility and a hero or heroine in disguise is revealed as destined to recover property or title and avenge the crime, which had often included murder. The locale of a gothic novel is more often than not a castle. There are dungeons, priests and/or nuns, both good and evil. Most of the authors are Protestant and in the telling of a gothic tale Catholics are often associated with ignorance, superstition and the dark arts. Events narrated in the tale are intended to create horror and terror in the reader. After my first reading of a few pages of THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, I said, "This is Franz Kafka!" Admittedly, no humans are turned into beetles. But Leibnitz's philosophical "principle of sufficent reason" was largely suspended for both Walpole and Kafka. The novel begins conventionally enough: "Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son
and one daughter: the latter, a most beautiful virgin, aged eighteen,
was called Matilda. Conrad, the son, was three years younger, a homely
youth, sickly, and of no promising disposition; yet he was the darling
of his father, who never showed any symptoms of affection to
Matida. Manfred had contracted a marriage for his son with the Marquis
of Vicenza's daughter, Isabella; and she had already been delivered by
her guardians into the hands of Manfred, that he might celebrate the
wedding as soon as Conrad's infirm state of health would permit."
Prince Manfred loathed his virtuous wife Hippolita because she had given him only one puny son. Castle dependents saw at work in their Prince's imagination an ancient prophecy: "the Castle and Lordship of Otranto should
pass from the present family whenever the real owner should be grown
too large to inhabit it."
On young Conrad's wedding day, servants found him in the castle courtyard smashed to pieces by a plumed helmet, 100 times larger than its original on the head of a stone statue of Alonso the Good, ruler of the last dynasty before Manfred's grandfather began the current one. Among those gathered to see the huge plumed helmet was a young peasant. He will turn out to be the son of a lord who had abandoned the world for religion, the monk, Father Jerome. The handsome young stranger remarks that the helmet greatly resembles that from the statue of Alonso the Good, a former ruler of Otranto. This comment inexplicably earns the immediate hatred of Prince Manfred. The key players of the gothic plot have now been introduced. The current prince of Otranto will be shown to be a usurper. The peasant stranger has claims to the title. To keep his princedom and avert the prophecy of doom, Prince Manfred is now determined to divorce his "barren" wife Hippolita and marry his dead son's young fiancee. Further complications ensue, including flights, secret passages, prisons, revealed identities, vengeance, murder by mistake of a daughter and giant stone limbs from the statue of Alonso the Good growing ever larger with the castle. Enough of the plot! You now know, I think, enough about THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO to make up your mind whether to read it or not -- a matter of a couple of hours at most. This genre-launching novel is without question impressive for its ably crafted twists, innuendos, false scents amid good clues, misunderstandings and efforts to create pity and terror. It is hard for me, however, to imagine readers today picking this tale up more than once or twice in a lifetime. Its importance is two-fold: in launching the nearly six-decade long gothic novel movement and in making us ask what about the gothic so intrigued far greater writers than Walpole. Think Sir Walter Scott, think Goethe, think Jane Austen; why did they pay serious if sometimes bemused attention to the Gothic in literature? There must be something deep in the human psyche that is perennially attracted to the absurd, the impossible, the mysterious as well as to terror, evil, and the inexorable righting of old injustices. -OOO- Recommended: YES http://www.epinions.com/review/The_Castle_of_Otranto_by_Horace_Walpole_and _by_Michael_Gamer_and_edited_by_W_S_Lewis_and_by_W_S_Lewis/content_464146632324 |