Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto

Introduction

The horror stories of all kinds have been told in all periods. Literary tradition confusingly called the “Gothic” is actually the modern development of the novel, the subject characteristic of strangulation exercised in the past on the present or the encroachment of times "dark" from the oppression of the " light "of modern times. Typical elements of the “gothic” are: trapped and haunted places, such as the old castles, crypts, convents or mansions dark and are ruined when the state of decay, the situations presented in a gothic book are filled with episodes of imprisonment, cruelty and persecution (Kallich, 98-109).

Gothic Fiction and Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto proved crucial to the development of Gothic fiction. As indicated by the book's subtitle, Walpole (1717-97) designed it to provide readers with a romance incorporating a dark moody villain, an endangered heroine, a hero with a mysterious past/identity, mysticism, and adventures set in a forbidding and mysterious structure. In his first edition, Walpole's preface claimed he based the book on an Italian tale. By the next edition, he admitted that the story was his own, and his preface's opening claims that: The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savors of barbarism. The style is the purest Italian (Kallich, pp. 98-109).

During the 13th century, Manfred, Prince of Otranto, has assumed his rule from his grandfather, who poisoned the true prince, Alfonso. Based on prophecy, Manfred believes he must produce a male heir in order to perpetuate his family's false claim to title and property. Others are not so sure that Manfred has correctly interpreted the confusing prophecy that "the Castle and Lordship of Otranto 'shall pass from the present family, whenever the real owner shall be grown too large to inhabit it” (Christopher, pp. 75-92).

Manfred dotes upon his two children, the beautiful Matilda and the sickly Conrad. Anxious to fulfill what he believes to be the point of the prophecy, Manfred rushes Conrad into marriage to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza, at what his mother, Hippolita, believes to be too early an age. As the bride awaits the groom's arrival, screams echo outside the chapel, and cries including "The prince!" and "The helmet!" disturb those waiting within the church. To Manfred's horror, his son has been crushed to death by an enormous helmet covered in black feathers, "a hundred times larger" than any made for a human. Unaccountably, Manfred appears more concerned for Isabella than for his mangled son, whom the peasants carry into the castle. When one bystander comments that the helmet resembles that worn by a black marble statue representing Alfonso the Good, a former prince, in the ...