EXAM Gothic

Question 1

Angles

Answer 1

• Supernatural vs. social
• Religion and morality
• Effect on reader
• History

Question 2

Supernatural vs. social in The Castle of Otranto

Answer 2

• The novel begins and ends with supernatural events. However, these events are only mimicking social facts.
• The prophecy of Otranto’s destruction comes to pass through Manfred’s actions: catching Theodore and killing Matilda.
• Many of the individual supernatural events throughout the novel are a direct response to Manfred’s actions:
  1. his grandfather’s portrait becomes animated when Manfred declares ‘Heaven nor Hell shall impede my designs’ and goes to seize Isabella
  2. the statue of Alfonso bleeds when Manfred declares he will make Matilda marry Frederic to keep Otranto
  3. Alfonso emerges from the ruins of the castle as Manfred learns of Matilda’s death by his hand.

Question 3

Supernatural vs. social in The Old English Baron

Answer 3

• Many eerie incidents are explainable and minor: the difficulty (and then sudden ease) of opening the door to the closet, or all the doors of the castle opening when Edmund returns to claim it
• But when Edmund, Joseph and Father Oswald find the body, ‘the groan was thrice heard’
• The supernatural imparts knowledge, not intervention. Both Sir Philip and Edmund have dreams that reveal information necessary to advance the plot, but justice is achieved through social action: Sir Philip duels Walter Lovel and a jury is set up to investigate Edmund’s claims
• The supernatural comes in the form of visions from God? Accepted as believable by Reeve

Question 4

Religion and Morality in The Castle of Otranto

Answer 4

• Walpole wishes there were a more satisfactory moral to the story than ‘the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generation.’ (Walpole, The Castle of Otranto first edition preface)
• Is this the moral? See Manfred’s supernatural punishments

Question 5

Religion and morality in The Old English Baron

Answer 5

• Reeve ends the novel by stating that the events ‘furnish a striking lesson to posterity, of the over-ruling hand of Providence, and the certainty of Retribution’
• The virtuous characters are not affected by the supernatural, as it comes from God. Wenlock and Markham, when staying in the same apartment as Edmund, are terrified by a phantom.
• ‘those who do not live good Christian lives are subject to the terror of the supernatural’ (Dent, Sinister Histories)
• ‘The hero’s virtues, for instance, are not solely related to his high birth, since he was raised by a peasant family.’ (Botting, Gothic)

Question 6

Effect on reader in The Castle of Otranto (Walpole’s intentions)

Answer 6

• ‘It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern.’ [ancient = improbability, modern = realism] (Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, second edition preface)
• ‘Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation […] Everything tends directly to the catastrophe.’ (Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, first edition preface)
• ‘Terror, the author’s principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions.’ (Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, first edition preface)

Question 7

Effect on reader in The Castle of Otranto (criticism)

Answer 7

• The supernatural ‘fulfils a positive function […] it bears out the sense of an impending catastrophe all through the narrative.’ (Farnell, ‘Gothic’s Death Drive’)
• ‘the aim of the author was to amuse, and he certainly cannot be reproached with having missed his aim.’ (Grimm, Memoirs)
• the supernatural events ‘rarely precipitate tension or fear in the reader: indeed the dominant effect they create is low comedy.’ (Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction)
• ‘The machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite. Had the story been kept within the utmost verge of probability, the effect had been preserved.’ (Reeve, The Old English Baron preface)

Question 8

Effect on reader in The Old English Baron (Reeve’s intentions)

Answer 8

• ‘This story is the literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan, with a design to unite the most attractive and interesting circumstances of the ancient Romance and modern Novel’ (Reeve, The Old English Baron preface)
• ‘The business of Romance is, first, to excite the attention; and secondly, to direct it to some useful, or at least innocent, end’ (ibid.)

Question 9

The Gothic genre

Answer 9

• ‘Passion and fancy co-operating elevate the soul to its highest pitch; and the pain of terror is lost in amazement.’ (Barbauld, ‘On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror)
• ‘Gothic literature ‘displays transgression and brings norms and limits more sharply into focus […] but if borders and norms are not clear or too weak, the intensity is also diminished.’ (Botting, Gothic)
• The fantastic is a hesitation between the marvellous and the strange; it requires uncertainty to exist (Todorov, The Fantastic)
• In Hoffmann’s The Sandman, the uncanny is generated through not being certain of the rules of the world we are in (Freud, ‘The Uncanny’)

Question 10

History

Answer 10

• ‘when the Enlightenment was establishing itself as the dominant way of ordering the world, gothic tales were set in the Middle, or “Dark”, Ages.’ (Botting, Gothic)
• ‘dark stories and sinister pasts return to haunt the present […] the Gothic is obsessed with the nature of the past and our relationship with it’ (Dent, Sinister Histories)
• ‘Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them.’ (Walpole, The Castle of Otranto,first edition preface)
• ‘that indulgence we afforded to the foibles of a supposed antiquity, we can by no means extend to the singularity of a false taste in a cultivated period of learning’ (Langhorne, contemporary review)