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GOTHIC NOVEL
[SENSATION NOVEL]
The history of the Gothic novel, or Gothic romance as it was sometimes called, conventionally begins with the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, subtitled A Gothick Story, in 1764. Walpole, who was a Whig member of parliament, concealed himself behind two personae, framing the story as a 15th-century manuscript by one “Onuphrio Muralto,” translated by “William Marshall, Gent.” The first reviewers sensed something fake, but they were unsure about the status of this “manuscript.” The public, however, was enthusiastic, and after the first edition sold out in a matter of months, Walpole was prevailed upon to identify himself. Born appropriately illegitimate, the Gothic novel belatedly acquired its father and became a genre whose conventional end point in literary history is usually marked at around 1820 with the publication of Charles Maturin's tremendous anti-Catholic epic, Melmoth the Wanderer (although, of course, novels following in the Gothic tradition continue to be written and published today).
The Castle of Otranto anticipates many of the formal and thematic obsessions that would characterize the Gothic novel. It looks back to a feudal world in which the Lord of the Manor, Manfred, the first in a long line of Gothic villain-heroes, exercises seigneurial rights over the minds and bodies of his subjects. His castle, however, according to an ancient prophecy, is haunted by a gigantic ancient suit of armour, which falls on his sickly son, Conrad, and kills him. Manfred's obsession with primogeniture and the inability of his wife, Hippolita, to provide him with a son and heir lead Manfred to offer himself in a vaguely incestuous fashion to his one-time prospective daughter-in-law, Isabella. Isabella refuses him indignantly, and, pursued by the would-be rapist, flees into the subterranean vaults of the castle, taking refuge in the monastery church, sheltered there by a good priest. In the end, Manfred is revealed as the son of a usurper of the true line of Otranto, which is represented by a mysteriously articulate young peasant, Theodore, who saves and marries the harrassed Isabella and takes over his rightful estate.
The Castle of Otranto is permeated with many of the conventions of the Gothic romance that would flourish between 1764 and 1820: the antiquarian pretense that...