"Since I Cannot Give You My Son, I Offer You Myself..." | The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (Oxford...

Walpole's Castle: More Historical Then Entertaining | The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (Oxford World's Classics) | Horace Walpole

books:


	• The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (Oxford World's Classics) Horace Walpole Oxford University Press, USA, 2009 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

Powerful whimsy

This review refers to the Oxford World's Classics edition, edited by WS Lewis, with a 26-page introduction and eight pages of endnotes by EJ Clery. There is a select bibliography and a chronology of the author, Horace Walpole. Importantly, the book includes both the first and second editions' title-pages and prefaces.

The first edition, "The Castle of Otranto: A Story, translated by William Marshal", was published in December 1764 (but marked 1765 on the title-page). It's preface tried - and succeeded for awhile - to give the impression that the tale had been "found in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England" and had been "printed at Naples ... in the year 1529. ... The style is the purest Italian."

The style was instead the purest Walpole and he quickly confessed; so that in the rapidly-issued second edition of 1765 (the book was an immediate hit), the revised preface became, as EJ Clery makes clear, "a manifesto for a new type of writing", and the title-page was amended to "The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story".

The inclusion of the adjective into the story's title is fundamental to the book's reputation as being the well-spring of much (all?) that followed in subsequent western literature that effected to underscore its credentials with a Gothic - or Gothick - motif. One could argue that that includes 90% of western literature (as much Thomas Pynchon as Stephen King), but this is going too far; for as Walpole himself makes plain in his second preface, his work was an attempt to marry imagination with nature, fantasy with reality, and that he had progenitors in the essay: "That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied."

The story itself - a tale of lordly tyranny, supernatural horror, and family feuding that would have interested Shakespeare himself in its dramatic possibilities - is told over five chapters, barely one hundred pages in total, and so can be read in a few hours. As the excellent introduction relates, Walpole himself thought the story a piece of whimsy, and did not attempt to savagely repudiate the criticisms raised about both the style of writing and about the narrative itself. He was aware of the novella's power, however, in creating a new species of romance.

The work today is as much read for its historic relevance than for its terror and sublime effects, but both of these aspects recommend it.

for more information click here

"Since I Cannot Give You My Son, I Offer You Myself..."

First published in 1764, Horace Walpole's dark and melodramatic novel is widely considered the very first Gothic novel, containing within its pages all the familiar (and by today's standards, clichéd) elements of the genre. Expect a spooky old castle, an ancient prophecy, dark portends, women that faint often and with little cause, a dysfunctional family whose members can't decide whether to love or hate each other, haunted portraits, secret tunnels and trapdoors, manic tyrants, endangered virgins, ghostly visages, and young heroes that put honor before reason, and whose obsession with virtue prevents them from doing anything particularly helpful. It's vintage Gothic: intense emotions running wild, thrill-seeking in the reader's pursuit of the supernatural horror, and a heavy, foreboding atmosphere.

The story was first purported to be a translation of an Italian document dated 1529 which in turn was a transcription of an older story that took place some time during the crusades. Walpole later amended this in a later preface, admitting that he wrote the story himself (in fact, his inspiration came from a dream in which he glimpsed a gigantic armored hand on a stairwell) and that his intentions were in blending the ancient and modern forms of Romance: "in the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be copied. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been damned up, by strict adherence to common life. But if in the latter species Nature has cramped imagination, she did but take her revenge, having been totally excluded from old romances. The author of the following pages thought it possible to reconcile the two kinds."

Whether Wadpole was successful in this endeavor is incidental. The importance of "The Castle of Otranto" is that in this mingling of old and new, the Gothic genre was born.

Prince Manfred of Otranto has a faithful wife, a beautiful daughter, and a sickly son, yet as is often the way with tyrants, he is dissatisfied. His son is about to marry Princess Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vincenza, but on the day of the wedding Conrad is killed in mysterious circumstances. Actually, make that "bizarre" circumstances: he's been crushed under a giant helmet that seems to have fallen out of nowhere.

Cutting his losses, Manfred arrests a young man for the murder of his son, and decides to divorce his wife Hippolita and marry Isabella himself, a proposition that horrifies the girl who was to become his daughter-in-law. Isabella makes her escape into the shadowed catacombs of the palace, Hippolita and Matilda fret about their future, and the servants live in terror of the apparitions appearing throughout the castle: the oversized arms and legs of an armored giant (who is somehow finding a way to hide whenever anyone's back is turned).

It's difficult to really assess this book. It many ways it is totally outdated in terms of story and character, and is really only valuable for its historical significance. Although I could not say I "enjoyed" reading it, I nevertheless found it "entertaining," as odd as that distinction may seem. When it comes to the characters' emotions, there's a lot of telling rather than showing, and many of the main cast is thoroughly insipid, frustrating and unsympathetic (even those who are meant to be the heroes).

For example, Theodore is our male lead, who makes catastrophic mistakes throughout the story (usually due to an inability to keep his mouth shut) and who eventually makes the decision to be miserable for the rest of his life, desiring only to "forever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul." If a character is depressed, it's probably because they're in love; which is how Theodore experiences his ardor toward Matilda (even though I'm not entirely sure how he tells her apart from Isabella). All the women are submissive, delicate martyrs, who consider it an honor to be walked all over by their male counterparts, and sigh with angelic resignation in the face of mistreatment. Comic relief comes in the form of the shrewd and wily servants, who seem to be well-aware of how ridiculous their masters and mistresses are.

And some of the dialogue is downright hysterical, such as: "My dearest, gracious lord, what is it you see? Why do you fix your eyeballs thus?" Obviously, it's very easy to make fun of the Gothic genre (Jane Austen herself did it in Northanger Abbey) simply because it relies so much on melodrama. Despite the negative connotations, melodrama *can* be done well, and despite my heckling, Walpole pulls it off...for the most part. But don't just think it's 21st century cynicism casting its shadow over the literary past, even many of Walpole's contemporary critics dismissed "The Castle of Otranto" as an absurdity.

An absurdity it may well be, but keeping in mind the author's intentions and its place within the Gothic canon, Walpole's efforts are worthy of attention. This is not the heights of Gothic literature, but it is the forefather of the genre, and for that reason alone it has value.

for more information click here

Walpole's Castle: More Historical Then Entertaining

When Horace Walpole published THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO in 1794, his reading public was unprepared for what was to them a floodtide of unrestrained emotion. It had only been recently that the concept of "sensibility" in writing had been in vogue. In novels of this type (later popularized by Austen) the protagonist, usually a well-born female, would be subject to a non-stop series of emotional excesses like fainting, weeping, and otherwise losing all restraint. And lying behind this relatively recent vogue of sensibility lay a much longer tradition of its polar opposite: the damming of all feeling in favor of a carefully controlled harmony between man and nature. With THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO, this harmony cracked into innumerable pieces that manifested themselves into what was soon to become staples of the genre: unexplained supernatural phenomenon, dark and dank castles that hinted at the equally dark and dank recesses of the human psyche, and a series of images that exploded into a cacophony of sound and sight.

The story is slight both in plot and theme. The evil Manfred, the usurping ruler of Otranto, plans to marry his weakened son solely to ward off a prophecy that suggests that unless he has male heirs, he will be deposed. Just before the nuptuals between his son and Manfred's choice for him, Isabella, a colossal helmet comes crashing down, crusahing his son to pieces. This tragedy does not deter Manfred as he then plans to marry the lovely Isabella himself. Isabella, aided by the peasant Theodore, helps Isabella escape. Theodore is captured, but the ghost of the previous owner of Otranto, Alonso appears and incredibly blasts his own castle to pieces, leaving Isabella to marry Theodore. Even for a nonsense story, the plot does not hold water. Further, the writing style is inexplicably formal, with all events, both mundane and preternatural, narrated in a pseudo-classic manner that fits in well enough in the Augustan mode but seems ill-suited to this new genre of emotional excess. Still, THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO is significant in that for those who care to learn the where and the how of the horror genre, then Walpole's innovative surge of novelistic emotion is a good place to begin.

for more information click here

Oxford World Classics edition

I have to agree with the consensus of reviewers here: If you are looking for an excellent Gothic novel to read, this one is not it. If you are studying the history of Gothic literature and aesthetics, this novel is fundamental.

I want to recommend highly the introduction by E.J. Clery to the Oxford World Classics edition. Clery provides a survey of the various ways of interpreting the novel, and amply explains the novel's strengths and weaknesses in the context of the different interpretations. With this approach, the reader finds ways of making sense of the peculiar novel within the context of its time and its author's possible intentions.

for more information click here

Probably better in its day

This book, like Pamela for feminist literary history, is important due to the fact that it was the first gothic novel ever written. The voice is a good one for the story, deep, reverant, dramatic; the writing is of excellent breed as well. With that said, however, so much has been ripped-off from this novel, and into novels that we've already read, that the story itself comes off as a bit cliche, not to mention ridiculous. Although the hyperbole of the novel is based off sybolic intentions, the best that one can say about this piece is that it lit a torch for future great novels--not that it's so much a great novel on its own two feet. Worty of reading if you care about the history of novels in general, but if you're looking for a great gothic novel this shouldn't be a first choice.

for more information click here

First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7