The Castle of Otranto: The Prototype for Gothic Fiction

I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.

-Horace Walpole on writing The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is generally considered the first Gothic novel. It is composed of supernatural phenomena and contains human monsters such as the tyrant Manfred. The story centres around the usurper Manfred who goes to great lengths to keep the power within his lineage – so far as to attempt to rape and force an incestuous relationship onto Isabella, who was about to marry his son, Conrad.

Walpole’s novel contained the following elements which came to be known as the first-wave Gothic conventions:

Virtuous and persecuted heroines who need saving from the noble hero
Male noble hero
Male Gothic villain
Superstitious servants
Gloomy, isolated settings (typically a medieval castle with trap doors and secret passageways)
Ancestral curses, prophecies
Supernatural or seemingly supernatural occurrences
The use of horror and terror. Horror is the clear presentation of something violent, whereas terror is the anticipatory anxiety over an unknown threat. Or, as Ann Radcliffe describes, “terror and horror are so far opposite that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life, and the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them” (Radcliffe 149).
Themes include dangerous curiosity, overreaching, transgression of boundaries, past haunting the present. In Walpole’s novel, Manfred is an over-reacher who goes to great lengths to keep power within his family. His family’s transgression is that they have usurped their power by poisoning the rightful ruler of Otranto. And this past haunts their present as supernatural occurrences take place whenever Manfred immorally attempts to keep his power.

The cover of the first edition states that the text was translated by William Marshal “from the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto.” The preface to the first edition also claims that the text was found “in the library of an ancient Catholic family” (Walpole 5). This statement sets the novel as a mysterious work before the readers even begin to read the narrative. Walpole did not sign his name on the text because he wanted to gauge the audience’s reaction to his experimental text before he took ownership (Riely 3).

The reviewers of The Castle of Otranto were “guarded and reserved in their praise” (Riely 3). The Critical Review in 1765 called the work a “very curious performance” and criticized “the absurdity of its contents” (Riely 3). The reviewer refused to believe the supernatural phenomena in the novel “but admitted that ‘the characters are well marked’” (Riely 4). While another reviewer by the name of John Langhorne for the Monthly Review also viewed Gothic fiction as absurd, he called Walpole’s gothic novel “a work of genius, evincing great dramatic powers, and exhibiting fine views of nature, the Castle of Otranto may still be read with pleasure” (Reily 4). Despite the critical reviews, the novel sold rapidly, leading Walpole to take authorship for his work and changing the subtitle from “A Story” to “A Gothic Story.”

Walpole’s Gothic novel has served “as the primary model for a vast quantity of fiction written up through the first quarter of the nineteenth century and beyond” (Riely 17). His work is an essential work of Gothic literature. It shaped a new language and genre that would soon be mimicked and altered by emerging Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis, Charlotte Dacre, and more.