The Castle of Otranto was written by Horace Walpole. Walpole (1717-1797) is best-known for The Castle of Otranto, but in his lifetime he did far more than write just the one novel. Walpole was a poet, a correspondent of great volume and interest, an M.P. for twenty-seven years, and a well-respected historian. But he will always be most known for The Castle of Otranto, which in addition to being historically significant is also surprisingly enjoyable.

During the time of the Crusades Manfred is the Prince of Otranto. He plans to marry his fifteen-year-old son, Conrad, to Isabella, the daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza. But on his wedding day Conrad is killed when a huge stone helmet mysteriously falls on him. This panics Manfred, and when a peasant announces that the helmet is similar to the one on the statue of Prince Alfonso the Good which stands in the Church of St. Nicholas, Manfred reacts badly, blaming the peasant, Theodore, for Conrad’s death. Manfred has Theodore imprisoned. That evening Manfred summons Isabella. He tells her that he is going to divorce his wife Hippolita and marry her, since he must have more sons now that Conrad is dead. Isabella flees from Manfred, who pursues her, but she eludes him in the subterranean passages underneath his castle. In the tunnels she meets Theodore, who helps her escape into the Church of St. Nicholas. Manfred captures Theodore in the tunnels and accuses him of helping Isabella escape. Two of Manfred’s servants rush up and tell Manfred that they’ve seen a giant figure sleeping, then moving, in the castle’s main hall, but when Manfred goes to the main hall the giant has disappeared. Father Jerome, of the Church of St. Nicholas, arrives the next morning to tell Manfred that Isabella has taken sanctuary in the altar of the church. Manfred, upset, demands that Father Jerome deliver Isabella to him. Father Jerome refuses, telling Manfred that God will punish him if he tries to harm Jerome or take Isabella by force. Jerome also suggests that Theodore might be in love with Isabella. Manfred is not happy to hear this and confronts Theodore, who admits to having helped Isabella but claims he had never seen her before their encounter in the tunnels. Manfred orders Theodore executed and has Father Jerome summoned to give absolution to Theodore. But Father Jerome discovers that Theodore is his son, born before Jerome entered the priesthood. Manfred offers to let Theodore go free if Jerome will hand over Isabella, an offer which tempts Jerome.

As Jerome is considering Manfred’s offer they hear trumpets sounded from outside the castle. A group of knights have arrived, carrying with them a gigantic sabre. The knights confront Manfred and demand the release of Isabella and the abdication of Manfred, who they call an “usurper.” Manfred dines with the knights, who refuse to respond to his attempts at negotiation. Father Jerome arrives to tell Manfred that Isabella had escaped from the church. After Manfred, Jerome, and the knights leave the castle to help find Isabella, Theodore escapes from the castle. Theodore and Isabella meet up in a cave in the forest near the castle. One of the knights finds them and, thinking Theodore is an enemy, attacks him. Theodore wounds him in the fight, only to discover that the knight is Frederic, Isabella’s father. Theodore, Isabella, and Frederic return to the castle. Frederic says that he brought the giant sword back from the Holy Land, and that on the blade it is written that only Manfred’s blood can atone for the wrongs done to the family of Alfonso, the rightful ruler of Otranto. Manfred negotiates with Frederic for Isabella’s hand, playing on his weakness. Eventually Frederic consents to Manfred’s marriage to Isabella. In exchange Manfred promises Frederic Matilda, Manfred’s daughter. This agreement causes a statue of Alfonso to drip blood from its nose.

The giant appears again. Frederic decides not to marry Matilda after seeing a skeleton wearing a hermit’s cowl. On hearing that Theodore is in the chapel of the church with a woman, Manfred stalks into the chapel and stabs the woman, who turns out to be Matilda. Theodore announces that he is Alfonso’s grandson and the rightful heir to Otranto. The giant appears again and is revealed to be the ghost of Alfonso. Grown to enormous form, the ghost destroys the castle and ascends to heaven. Manfred and Hippolita enter neighboring convents and Theodore marries Isabella and becomes the new prince of Otranto.

Despite being over two hundred and fifty years old The Castle of Otranto remains readable. Although the emotions and dialogue of the characters are permanently at a high pitch, the language of the novel is not. Walpole’s narration is wonderfully free of the turgid and shrill vocabulary, torpid pacing, and extended descriptions of scenery which can make later Gothics such a chore to read. Walpole is relatively terse and is not without humor and even a little wit. The novel’s characters lack any interior life, and Walpole tells Otranto in a declamatory style, but the novel reads quickly and is full of exciting incident. The novel’s only real impediment for modern readers is some of Walpole’s vocabulary, whose meanings have changed. These words are comprehensible in context, but it can be disconcerting to find “desired” used for “demanded,” “wanted” for “lacked,” and “discovered” for “displayed.”

But even if Otranto were as unenjoyable as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Walpole’s work would still be significant, because it is primus inter pares among Gothics. There were novels before The Castle of Otranto which had Gothic elements, but Otranto is the first Gothic novel. Otranto set the template for the Gothic genre and was enormously influential on the Gothic writers to come. The elements first appearing in Otranto read like a checklist for later writers of the Gothic: a European setting; events occurring in the past, especially the Crusades; the events of the novel taking place in a castle, although Otranto’s castle was intact, rather than ruined, which was a later staple of the Gothics; a woman pursued and threatened sexually; the presence of a Hero-Villain; subterranean passages; enclosed spaces designed to evoke claustrophobic entrapment in both the characters and the reader; a virginal heroine; frightening (and symbolically and poetically appropriate) supernatural occurrences; a physical location (the castle) which assumes an almost sentient personality; and crimes of the past coming back to haunt the present, especially in the form of hidden parentage and a cheated patrimony.

Although Otranto was not unusually successful financially the long-term effect of the novel cannot be overstated. Direct imitation was not immediate, and the true influence of Otranto was strongest felt in the 1790s. But it was in many respects the standard-bearer for the revolt against the rationalist, realistic, and restrictive Neo-Classicists of seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. They and the proponents of Enlightenment thinking stressed order and logic above emotion. Like most Gothics Otranto emphasizes emotion rather than logic. Walpole also helped contribute to a revival of interest in the medieval past, to antiquarianism, and to the movement in fiction to show psychologically credible characterization and human behavior, especially against a chronologically and geographically remote setting, accompanied by pleasant frights and emotional thrills.

One way in which Otranto does deviate from later Gothics is in its lack of Catholic-bashing. Father Jerome is fallible but essentially a good person, quite the opposite of the many agents of the Inquisition who populated later Gothics. Unlike later Gothics, such as The Mysteries of Udolpho, Otranto partakes fully of the supernatural, creating the supernatural strain of Gothic which Ann Radcliffe would later react against. Otranto has Conrad’s supernatural death, a levitating helmet, feathers which move without benefit of the wind, mysterious moaning sounds, a groaning portrait, a specter, a ghostly knight in armor, strange voices, a talking skeleton in a hermit’s cowl, and a castle being destroyed by a giant ghost. Not all of the supernatural elements are frightening–modern readers are far too jaded to be scared by someone being killed by a statue’s helmet–but Frederic’s encounter before the altar with the skeleton in the hermit’s cape still retains the ability to chill. In addition to being the first significant Gothic The Castle of Otranto is also one of the first horror novels. Walpole’s intention was to frighten rather than evoke positive emotions, a departure from the more established literary conventions of writers like Fielding and Richardson. Later horror writers drew much, if often indirectly, from the Gothics, and one of Walpole’s contributions to later horror writers, besides his virtual establishment of the Gothic genre, was the creation, through the castle of Otranto, of the first Bad Place in modern horror fiction.

That said, Otranto is heavily influenced by the nascent form of Romanticism and by Walpole’s own internal turmoil:

Like much Romantic art to follow, the novel is also an intense personal expression of the artist’s buried emotional life, a psychological register of secret and ambivalent sexual tensions. Recent readings of The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother stress Walpole’s need to Gothicize as a means of confronting his secretly obsessive homosexuality and filial inadequacies. The text of the novel has been closely psychoanalyzed (see Betsy Perteit Harfst, Horace Walpole and the Unconscious), while other critics have found it to reveal “a psychobiographic record of parricidal guilts and fears, homosexual longings and drives, castration phobias, and Oedipal desires. Manfred’s sexual frenzy and violent self-assertion are in some significant ways connected to Walpole’s own suppressed or misdirected anger and contempt (Haggerty 342).”¹

That Walpole was gay is a likelihood; but The Castle of Otranto represents not a statement in favor of homosexuality but rather a clear example of what Eve Sedgwick wrote was the very Gothic “dialectic between male homosexuality and homophobia:”²

“The beast and the monk” in Otranto are at odds, and their inability to be reconciled brings death and destruction. Walpole leaves the emotion generated within the work unresolved at its close and allows us to apprehend that emotion itself as a metaphor for the unspeakable. Unresolved passion therefore retains its meaning in its very inability to be resolved. The novel cries out in pain, but there is no way to answer that cry or even to understand it. As a result, the book undermines its own effectiveness as a novel and even seems to work against itself. The contradictory nature of Otranto reflects a conflict inherent in the emergence of a homosexual identity in the kind of antagonistic society I have described. What Walpole instills in Otranto from the realm of private fantasy seems only to mark him as a brooding and unsettled genius, unable to come to peace with himself or even to lash out at his social confines with real effect. He turns his sensationalism on no one but himself.³

Manfred is the first Gothic Hero-Villain, and like many of the best of them he is a tormented tormentor, psychologically torn between doing what he wants to do and doing what he knows to be the right thing:

Manfred was not one of those savage tyrants who wanton in cruelty unprovoked. The circumstances of his fortune had given an asperity to his temper, which was naturally humane; and his virtues were always ready to operate, when his passion did not obscure his reason.⁴

Despite Manfred’s flaws, his temper, his pride (“Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs!”⁵), his treatment of women solely as instruments for the continuance of his line and his ascent to power, his tyrannical treatment of his subjects and his family, his great lust and his inability to resist it, and his cruelty when his passions are aroused, he is not unaware of his internal conflict. He describes himself as “a man of many sorrows,”⁶ and is always conscious of how he should act. His behavior with the knights who come to free Isabella is featly and proper, and he makes a point of honoring Hippolita’s virtues. But shame drives him to “exquisite villainy,"⁷ rather than pity or love.

The Castle of Otranto is urged on any reader interested in the creation of the Gothic or merely in an enjoyably semi-spooky novel.

Print: Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2014.

¹ George Haggerty, “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis,” Studies in the Novel 18 (Winter, 1986): 342, qtd. in Frederick S. Frank, “Horace Walpole (1717-1797),” in Douglas H. Thomson, Jack G. Volker, and Frederick S. Frank, eds., Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographic Guide (Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 2002).

² Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Press, 1985), 92.

³ Haggerty, “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century,” 345.

⁴ Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (London: Cassell, 1901), 26.

⁵ Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 14.

⁶ Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 80.

⁷ Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, 34.