Concealment and Darkness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

Global Tides Volume 18 Article 1 April 2024 Concealment and Darkness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto Alexandra G. Speck Pepperdine University, Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Speck, Alexandra G. (2024) "Concealment and Darkness in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto," Global Tides: Vol. 18, Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/globaltides/vol18/iss1/1 This Humanities is brought to you for free and open access by the Seaver College at Pepperdine Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Global Tides by an authorized editor of Pepperdine Digital Commons. For more information, please contact . Speck: Concealment and Darkness in The Castle of Otranto In 1764, Thomas Gray wrote to thank his friend Horace Walpole for the gift of Walpole’s new novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). In his letter, Gray admitted, “[It] engages our attention here, makes some of us cry a little, and all in general afraid to go to bed o’ nights” (137). As Gray’s comment makes clear, Walpole’s literary creation has inspired terror in its readers since its publication. Through its distinctively dark setting, subterranean passages, and supernatural dangers like the infamous giant helmet, Walpole initiated a new literary genre — the Gothic novel — in which he brought together “the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern,” or, the romance and the novel, in order to create a literary form that was both realistic and highly imaginative (Walpole 9). Despite the terror that the supernatural elements of the novel imbue in the storyline, as E.J. Clery and other scholars have shown, the supernatural elements in Otranto and its Gothic descendants are not the primary source of terror. Clery suggests that the human villains in Gothic novels emerge as more terrifying than any ghosts due to their sinister intentions for the young heroines of these stories. Otranto opens with the notorious scene of the giant helmet that crushes Conrad to death, but the fear in the story is not from other giant falling objects but rather the looming threat Conrad’s father, Manfred, poses to the women around him. Since Manfred interprets his son’s death as an omen forecasting the ending of his family’s reign, he seeks to reestablish his bloodline and confirm his authority by forcing Conrad’s betrothed Isabella to marry him instead. Isabella, however, declines his proposal and flees, resulting in a chaotic and fearful chase as Manfred pursues her through the castle’s dark underground halls. While previous scholars attribute the Gothic’s terror solely to the nefarious intentions of its villains, they fail to recognize the extent to which the dark setting magnifies the terror by eliminating the heroines’ sight. Darkness envelops Otranto, with Isabella’s escape taking place at night through the castle’s subterranean passages. For Isabella, darkness itself poses a danger because, without light, she loses visual sensory perception and the ability to create knowledge of her surroundings. Walpole’s novel speaks to almost a century of philosophical debates about the connection between the imagination, sensory perception, and the formation of knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke argued that the ability to think arises through empirical observation of the world. In his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke notes that “external and internal sensation, are the only passages I can find, of Knowledge, to the Understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which Light is let into this dark Room” (123). Locke suggests humans generate knowledge through sensory observation — including vision — of the world, metaphorically comparing knowledge acquired through sensation to “Light” illuminating the otherwise “dark” mind. Rather than use darkness as a passive aesthetic feature of his ancient Gothic setting, Walpole weaves darkness into Otranto to manipulate Isabella’s visual sensory perception and, accordingly, her ability to knowledgeably think. Darkness, therefore, invokes terror in Isabella not only by concealing danger but also by preventing her from taking in visual data that she can use to generate knowledge and devise her plan to escape, instilling fear of not only the unknown but also the unseeable. Manfred reveals to Isabella that darkness does not impede his physical movements, contributing to her fear of his pursuit through the underground passages. After Manfred demands a servant bring Isabella to him, he orders the servant, “Take away that light, and begone. Then shutting the door impetuously, he flung himself upon a bench against the wall, and bade Isabella sit by him” (Walpole 23). Through Manfred’s removal of a light source from the room, Walpole emphasizes Manfred’s propensity to enact evil in darkness. Manfred demonstrates an embodied power in the darkness through his impetuous behavior, confidently flinging himself upon the Published by Pepperdine Digital Commons, 2024 1 Global Tides, Vol. 18 [2024], Art. 1 bench despite the lack of a light source to guide his movements. Where Isabella’s terror aligns with her impaired visual faculties, Manfred remains unnervingly unimpeded by the dark setting. Manfred contradicts Locke’s argument that knowledge and, therefore, the ability to reason, require sensory input. Joseph Crawford lends insight into how Enlightenment notions of empiricism and reason reveal Gothic characterizations of villainy, writing that Enlightenment-era authors believed “failures of reason, education, empathy, or self-control” gave rise to evil (6). Manfred perverts Enlightenment values of sensory observation through his preference for darkness over light. His easy functioning in the dark resembles Crawford’s depiction of Enlightenment “evil,” contributing to his fearsomeness. Moreover, Walpole figuratively emphasizes this correlation between Manfred’s preference for darkness and his villainy. As Manfred develops his scheme to entrap Isabella, Walpole notes, “[I]t was now twilight, concurring with the disorder of his mind” (22). In correlating twilight with Manfred’s disorder, Walpole likens Manfred’s impending evil to the setting’s upcoming night. The setting’s literal darkness thus materializes as an indicator of Manfred’s figurative darkness, or wickedness of character. Nick Groom aptly recognizes twilight as a symbol of concealment, defining “the action takes place in obscurity, from twilight to impenetrable darkness” (121). Twilight, the shadowy precursor to night, suspensefully foreshadows Manfred’s yet-unrevealed plan to trap Isabella as his wife through his figuratively dark intentions and shrouded movements. Walpole reveals the castle’s supernatural dangers with lighting to emphasize the chief terror of Manfred’s concealment in darkness. After Isabella realizes (...truncated)