Legitimacy in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

Abstract

As we have seen in Chapter 7, Lennox’s heiress Arabella is forced to give up the romance to eliminate the threat of a woman who can fulfil her fantasies of female power. It was Horace Walpole who ‘resuscitated’ the romance genre with his 1764 tale and returned readers to the heiress’s claims obliquely, but using a different aesthetic strategy. As a young man, Walpole was an avid reader of chivalric romances, while in adulthood he had a mansion constructed in the Gothic manner and as a collector of antique artefacts he was immersed in his culture’s obsession with the mediaeval past (the so-called Gothic revival). The story has it that following a nightmare he had one night in his Gothic mansion, Walpole began to write The Castle of Otranto ‘surrounded by old tomes and suits of armour, the light filtering through stained-glass windows’.¹ Arguably, as the product of such a nightmare, The Castle of Otranto feels and works like a dream. Yet it is doubtful which diegetic character’s dream it is. Is it Manfred’s nightmare in which he can confront the terrifying fear of retribution or Theodore’s wish-fulfilment fantasy?