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The Gothic Novel, 1764 -1824
THE first Gothic novelist celebrated his literary inspiration with all the fanfare of a bored aristocrat telling his dreams over breakfast. 'I waked one morning… from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle… and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour.' Because this particular bored aristocrat was Horace Walpole, and because his literary ambitions were a match for his midnight reveries, the Gothic novel was born.
Walpole told his readers in the preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1764) that he had attempted 'to blend the two kinds of romance' in the novel. What Walpole called 'the two kinds of romance' are what literary critics now call the «romance» and the 'novel.' Walpole claims that the romance favors 'imagination and improbability' while the novel gives preference to copying 'nature,' with the result that 'the great resources of fancy have been dammed up by a strict adherence to common life.' Otranto uses 'the great resources of fancy' as the occasion for an outrageously improbable «political» tale-what I would call the paradigmatic Gothic plot-one of nefarious usurpation and ultimate revenge, set against a vaguely historical (hence 'Gothic') backdrop, enlivened by scenes of supernatural agency, brutal sexual aggression, undisguised incestuous longings, sadomasochistic fantasy, and an astonishingly lurid and versatile architectural motif. Although it was almost thirty years before the Gothic novel achieved its greatest popularity, Walpole anticipated its full range of concerns and techniques for handling those concerns in his tour de force. -220- Of course, as Walpole himself may have understood, there is always more than authorial agency at work in the creation of literary genres. Various literary historians have attempted to pinpoint the origins of the Gothic novel. Antiquarian interest in Gothic architecture, changing popular tastes, frustration with 'reason,' new concepts of subjectivity and emotional response, including theories of 'pleasurable terror' or the 'sublime,' the politics of individualism, the French Revolution-all these things have been posited, more or less successfully, as explanations for the emergence of the Gothic novel in the later eighteenth century. Walpole's paradigmatic text, however, provides a less circumstantial explanatory resource. The Castle of Otranto itself reveals the degree to which Gothic fiction provides the terms for its own analysis.
Otranto tells a story of sex and power linked at so many points and in so many ways that the two can only be understood in terms of one another. Walpole was not alone in imagining the intersections of sexuality and power in the middle of the eighteenth century; the French cultural historian Michel Foucault, for example, has studied the ways in which «sexuality» emerged as a function of ideological control during this period. He argues, for instance, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, that specific relations in modern society-such as those of the family, the school, and the medical profession-institutionalized a relation between sexuality and power. Walpole's novel crystallized a particular vocabulary for documenting this relation and for dramatizing the virulence with which various repressions-'damming-ups,' in Walpole's terms-exercise the control inherent to 'bourgeois culture.'
The Gothic novel, emerging as it does at the moment when the battle lines of cultural reorganization are being formed in the later eighteenth century, shimmers with subversive potential. If the emergence of the novel itself celebrates the codification of middle-class values, as several critics have argued, the Gothic novel records the terror implicit in the increasingly dictatorial reign of those values. Gothic fiction seems particularly, if not aggressively, open to interpretation from various social, political, and sexual points of view. The Gothic novel achieves this potential precisely because it reflects, in perhaps predictable but nonetheless powerful ways, the anxiety that culture itself generates in its members. Gothic fiction thereby challenges the cultural system that both commodities desire and renders it lurid and pathological.
Manfred, the usurper and sexual aggressor of The Castle of Otranto, who turns every relation into a perversion and who finds ways to turn -221- the very passages of the castle into a sexual nightmare for the vulnerable heroine, is the perfect figure to memorialize the anxieties that Walpole is chronicling. Manfred acts out of a personal ambition that gives political ramifications to a desire that is at once ruthless and self-serving. The first victim of this megalomania is his 'sickly puny' son Conrad, who early in the novel is 'dashed to pieces' by an 'enormous helmet' that crashes into the court of the castle on Conrad's wedding day. The story of the indirect murder of a sickly child by a politically important and abusive father who mistreats his wife and indulges his own urges finds an analogy in Walpole's own personal situation. The author was the effeminate son of the «great» Sir Robert Walpole, a statesman of unparalleled power during the first half of the eighteenth century; and he adored his mother as much as he detested his father's mistreatment of her. Because this novel establishes the 'dysfunctional family' as a Gothic trope or central metaphorical device, it is tempting to suggest that Walpole's Gothic is a reflection of his own family life. Freud's concept of the Oedipus complex could easily be applied to a case such as Walpole's. Whatever the sources of the Gothic in Walpole's own psyche, however, there are Oedipal tensions enough in culture itself. Jacques Lacan, an influential post-Freudian theorist, sees the 'Oedipus complex' as a precondition of cultural awareness, what he calls 'cultural subordination': in order to become a member of a culture, what Lacan calls 'the Symbolic order,' it is necessary to suppress private desire in the ways that Freud's analysis outlines. You cannot kill your father or marry your mother, so you make little compromises that trap you into working against your own «best» interests. Gothic novelists refuse to settle for these compromises. In this sense, what Walpole begins to articulate in The Castle of Otranto becomes a complex gesture of cultural defiance. The impulse to connect prince, unauthorized sexuality, and Gothic convention in a single narrative of unmistakable force anticipates the technique of psychoanalysis, but Walpole's is a psychoanalysis that draws out «madnesses» rather than trying to contain them. He provides, in other words, a counterpoint to the narratives of cultural subordination that abounded in the «realistic» fiction he was resisting.
After his son dies, Manfred, in what would have been understood by contemporary readers as an incestuous gesture, courts the dead boy's fiancée, Isabella, throwing over his indulgent wife and insulting his daughter Matilda in the process. When Isabella resists him, she -222- becomes the victim of sexual aggression so violent that it turns the castle itself into a Gothic nightmare. Her flight through the castle is depicted in vivid detail:
The lower part of the castle was hollowed in to several intricate cloisters; and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened in to the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.
Here Walpole introduces what becomes the hallmark of Gothic fiction: in a single image he combines the sexual anxiety of a victimized female, the incestuous desire of a libidinous male, the use of the physical features of the castle itself to represent political and sexual entrapment, and an atmosphere deftly rendered to produce terror and gloom. This scene is retold hundreds of times in Gothic fiction; it is absolutely basic to the form. Because he understands that Gothic fiction can represent abject terror and frenzied aggression in ways that other fiction only approximates, Walpole's depiction of this moment, and others like it, takes on a kind of talismanic importance in the
