Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto Flashcards
1
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Contexts
A
- Developed out of a dream fragment
“I had thought myself in an ancient castle … and that on the uppermost banister of agreat staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour” - The Otranto castle modeled after Walpole’s re-designed & ‘Gothicized’ Strawberry Hill
Introduced 1st as a ‘found manuscript’ written in Italian by “an artful priest” (c.1095-1243) & then translated by the “William Marshal”
2
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
The Gothic
A
- Prominent features of the Gothic:
Designed to elicit an affective response (fear)
Tied to the emergence of a “literature of sensation” in the wake of Pope’s death (the cult of sensibility)
Departs from the realist expectations of the earlier novel
Old gothic manors & castles
“Long, long ago, in a place far, far away”
Locations are usually ancient, foreign, exotic
Secret, subterranean passageways
A sense of foreboding, of claustrophobia
Prominent features of the Gothic:
Designed to elicit an affective response (fear)
Tied to the emergence of a “literature of sensation” in the wake of Pope’s death (the cult of sensibility)
Departs from the realist expectations of the earlier novel
Old gothic manors & castles
“Long, long ago, in a place far, far away”
Locations are usually ancient, foreign, exotic
Secret, subterranean passageways
A sense of foreboding, of claustrophobia
3
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Analysis - Part One
A
- Prominent (& competing) features of Augustan literature:
An aesthetic informed by Lockean empiricism (‘formal realism’) - New mandate to “depict life with fidelity”
- Realized esp. in the new prose form of the period, the novel—realism, verisimilitude, formal realism
- Details, details: the comprehensive accumulation of sensory data (rather than a selective or representative approach)
- Non-realist issues suitable in literature primarily as vehicles of satire (the supernatural agency in Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” the wild characters & places of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels)
4
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Analysis - Part Two
A
- Prominent (& competing) features of Augustan literature:
An overriding concern with order/disorder - The lasting effects of the national traumas of the seventeenth centuries: civil war, regicide, the ‘Interregnum,’ regal deposition, the ‘Glorious Revolution’
- Inspired an aesthetic fueled by notions of politeness, correctness, & rationality
- Explains emerging attention to classical literary ‘rules’ (Dryden’s prefaces, Pope’s “Essay on Criticism,” neoclassicism generally)
- Popean conception of poetry as a stabilizing agent for the existing social order, a public poetry that affirmed the various hierarchies of its culture
5
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Analysis - Part Three
A
- Prominent (& competing) features of Augustan literature:
Scriblerian binaries - The public over the self / interiority
- The collectively known over individual perception / experience
- Public over private truths
- The whole over the parts
- The broad view over minutae, the general over the particular
- Innate sense over acquired / purchased taste
- Birth / inheritance over merit / contract
- The ancients over the moderns
6
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Analysis - Part Four
A
Walpole’s departures:
- A decidedly disorderly world where the irrational reigns supreme (for a time)
- A rejection of a Lockean framework
- An attempt to disregard for inherited ‘rules’ of genre, taste, art
- Private over public truths, perception over fact
7
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Women
A
- Treated primarily as units of exchange, as ciphers that enable the transfer of property
- Hippolita as obstacle to Manfred’s hope for the continuation of the (male) family legacy (p.80)
- Isabella as object that fulfills Manfred’s desire for family legacy (p.80)
- Matilda as offering to Frederic to further facilitate Manfred’s desire for family legacy (p. 140)
- Occupy a culture that expects them to be passive, obedient, desire-less, selfless
… But frequently struggle with & chaff against such expectations - Otranto is critical of the untenable gender identities imposed on women in medieval culture
- By extension, also critical of those of Walpole’s own time, where many of the same expectations still remained the same
- At the same time… Walpole is a Tory MP & a conservative, & his gender politics are more complicated than we might think
- Otranto might be expressing points of view that might be bubbling beneath the surface of Walpole’s ‘rational self
8
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Class
A
- Like its (potentially unconscious) critiques of restrictive gender norms, Otranto suggests critiques of medieval class structures
- Those critiques often extend into the present moment of Walpole’s audience, too
- The unmasking of claims to ‘disinterestedness,’ ‘noblesse oblige’
Echoes of Pope’s critics - The lower classes made feeble & manipulated through superstition
The behaviour of the peasants & the servants generally
Echoes of Enlightenment philosophers - BUT, also ultimately seems to end up affirming various notions that fuel the hierarchical order Pope defends & which is under stress
Theodore as secret, legitimate son of Alfonso; restoration of property via bloodlines
Manfred’s ancestor, Ricardo, as ambitious, murderous, usurping (lower class) chamberlain seeking to ‘move upwards’
Divine will works to restore order along bloodlines—Theodore’s merit (& Manfred’s lack thereof) are factors, but secondary
9
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Generational Relations
A
- The past as a huge, persistent, determining agent that shapes the present in all kinds of meaningful ways
- Novel dramatizes this conflict between past & present
- The past takes on supernatural power
- All manifestations of the supernatural are acting on behalf of the past, executing its will, making things happen & influencing people to act in certain ways
Alfonso’s murderous helmet, p.74
Ricardo’s ghost’s sigh & vision, p.81
The bleeding statue, p.147
The skeletal hermit’s warning, p.157
Aflonso’s ascension & declaration, p.162 - In spite of its ultimate affirmation of existing class order, Otranto seems critical of a socio-political arrangement that accords the past such power to determine the present/future
- Inheritance is ruling mechanism for the transfer of value in Walpole’s society (property, identity), but it also enables the sorts of relationships the the novel (also) takes to task
- Possibly another byproduct of the unconscious self that the Gothic simultaneously reveals even as it tries to conceal
10
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Historicism
A
- The representation of the past ‘on its own terms’
- L. P. Hartley (1956): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
- Context-specific & relativist (‘Romantic’ sensibility), rather than universalist & rationalist (‘Augustan’ sensibility)
- A uniquely post-Enlightenment development that is beginning to take place in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century
- Walter Scott among the earliest of commentators to accentuate the historicism of Otranto
- Otranto takes part in a broader movement in mid-century Britain towards an historicist understanding of the past
- A development in the period influencing literature across genres
11
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Summary - Part One
A
- In some ways, Otranto seems to register & nervously respond to the emerging fractures in eighteenth-century culture that we saw Pope et al. explore:
Women’s roles as ciphers for property both asserted & problematized
The possibility of social mobility & an evacuation of the birth/worth matrix temporarily indulged, only to be shut down again
12
Q
Horace Walpole - The Castle of Otranto
Summary - Part Two
A
- In other ways, Otranto seems to be taking part in other developments that are taking eighteenth-century culture in different directions than Pope et al.:
- The literature of affect (sensibility, gothic, etc.)
- The rising tide of historicism
- And above all, the search after new modes of expression, ones that increasingly suggest 1) that the ‘public’ approach of Pope is out of reach and 2) that the Lockean emphasis on the everyday or the merely factual is no longer enough (pp.65-66)
