The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story | Horace Walpole

The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story | Horace Walpole | Probably better in its day

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The Castle of Otra...

	The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story Horace Walpole Oxford University Press, USA, 1998 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 31 reviews view larger image
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First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.

Lovely, trashy early novel

The Castle of Otranto isn't the best novel you'll ever read, since its characters are more like "types" than living human beings. That said, it's a breezy example of an early novel, before the Victorians got hold of the form and made the books longer and more "respectable." This is one of the books that Jane Austen's gothic-novel-obsessed character Catherine Morland (in Northanger Abbey) would have read to scare herself out of her wits. For that reason alone it's worth reading--to understand what types of books Jane Austen herself was reacting to when she wrote her books.

Also, it's worth reading simply because the story begins with a character being killed by a giant helmet. What a great, fun, gloriously trashy way to begin a book!

Horace Walpole, incidentally, was the son of the prominent 18th century politician Robert Walpole, who is satirized in John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" and in a number of works written by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. Perhaps fortunately, however, the father had passed away before his son wrote this book.

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Probably better in its day

This book, like Pamela for feminist literary history, is important due to the fact that it was the first gothic novel ever written. The voice is a good one for the story, deep, reverant, dramatic; the writing is of excellent breed as well. With that said, however, so much has been ripped-off from this novel, and into novels that we've already read, that the story itself comes off as a bit cliche, not to mention ridiculous. Although the hyperbole of the novel is based off sybolic intentions, the best that one can say about this piece is that it lit a torch for future great novels--not that it's so much a great novel on its own two feet. Worty of reading if you care about the history of novels in general, but if you're looking for a great gothic novel this shouldn't be a first choice.

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Powerful whimsy

This review refers to the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by WS Lewis, with a 26-page introduction and eight pages of endnotes by EJ Clery. There is a select bibliography and a chronology of the author, Horace Walpole. Importantly, the book includes both the first and second editions' title-pages and prefaces.

The first edition, "The Castle of Otranto: A Story, translated by William Marshal", was published in December 1764 (but marked 1765 on the title-page). It's preface tried - and succeeded for awhile - to give the impression that the tale had been "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and had been "printed at Naples ... in the year 1529. ... The style is the purest Italian."

The style was instead the purest Walpole and he quickly confessed; so that in the rapidly-issued second edition of 1765 (the book was an immediate hit), the revised preface became, as EJ Clery makes clear, "a manifesto for a new type of writing", and the title-page was amended to "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story".

The inclusion of the adjective into the story's title is fundamental to the book's reputation as being the well-spring of much (all?) that followed in subsequent western literature that effected to underscore its credentials with a Gothic - or Gothick - motif. One could argue that that includes 90% of western literature (as much Thomas Pynchon as Stephen King), but this is going too far; for as Walpole himself makes plain in his second preface, his work was an attempt to marry imagination with nature, fantasy with reality, and that he had progenitors in the essay: "That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied."

The story itself - a tale of lordly tyranny, supernatural horror, and family feuding that would have interested Shakespeare himself in its dramatic possibilities - is told over five chapters, barely one hundred pages in total, and so can be read in a few hours. As the excellent introduction relates, Walpole himself thought the story a piece of whimsy, and did not attempt to savagely repudiate the criticisms raised about both the style of writing and about the narrative itself. He was aware of the novella's power, however, in creating a new species of romance.

The work today is as much read for its historic relevance than for its terror and sublime effects, but both of these aspects recommend it.

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Walpole's Castle: More Historical Then Entertaining

When Horace Walpole published THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO in 1794, his reading public was unprepared for what was to them a floodtide of unrestrained emotion. It had only been recently that the concept of "sensibility" in writing had been in vogue. In novels of this type (later popularized by Austen) the protagonist, usually a well-born female, would be subject to a non-stop series of emotional excesses like fainting, weeping, and otherwise losing all restraint. And lying behind this relatively recent vogue of sensibility lay a much longer tradition of its polar opposite: the damming of all feeling in favor of a carefully controlled harmony between man and nature. With THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, this harmony cracked into innumerable pieces that manifested themselves into what was soon to become staples of the genre: unexplained supernatural phenomenon, dark and dank castles that hinted at the equally dark and dank recesses of the human psyche, and a series of images that exploded into a cacophony of sound and sight.

The story is slight both in plot and theme. The evil Manfred, the usurping ruler of Otranto, plans to marry his weakened son solely to ward off a prophecy that suggests that unless he has male heirs, he will be deposed. Just before the nuptuals between his son and Manfred's choice for him, Isabella, a colossal helmet comes crashing down, crusahing his son to pieces. This tragedy does not deter Manfred as he then plans to marry the lovely Isabella himself. Isabella, aided by the peasant Theodore, helps Isabella escape. Theodore is captured, but the ghost of the previous owner of Otranto, Alonso appears and incredibly blasts his own castle to pieces, leaving Isabella to marry Theodore. Even for a nonsense story, the plot does not hold water. Further, the writing style is inexplicably formal, with all events, both mundane and preternatural, narrated in a pseudo-classic manner that fits in well enough in the Augustan mode but seems ill-suited to this new genre of emotional excess. Still, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO is significant in that for those who care to learn the where and the how of the horror genre, then Walpole's innovative surge of novelistic emotion is a good place to begin.

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Oxford World Classics edition

I have to agree with the consensus of reviewers here: If you are looking for an excellent Gothic novel to read, this one is not it. If you are studying the history of Gothic literature and aesthetics, this novel is fundamental.

I want to recommend highly the introduction by E.J. Clery to the Oxford World Classics edition. Clery provides a survey of the various ways of interpreting the novel, and amply explains the novel's strengths and weaknesses in the context of the different interpretations. With this approach, the reader finds ways of making sense of the peculiar novel within the context of its time and its author's possible intentions.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

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