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Unit 12: The Age of Johnson-The Decline of Neoclassicism (Gothic Novel)

own work. The events narrated are supposed to belong to Italy of the twelfth or thirteenth century. Notes
The scene of action is the castle situated at Otranto. Manfred, the villain-hero, is the grandson of the
usurper of the kingdom. He intends marrying his son to the beautiful Isabella; but on the day of
the marriage his son is mysteriously killed, and he himself decides to marry Isabella after divorcing
his wife. But Isabella escapes with Theodore, a young peasant. Manfred decides to kill Isabella, but
mistakenly kills his own daughter who loves Theodore and is at that instant accompanying him.
The castle is thrown down by the spirit of the true ruler who had been killed by Manfred’s
grandfather. Theodore is revealed to be the son of that ruler. He marries Isabella and establishes
himself as the ruler of the realm in place of Manfred.
The story is puerile in the extreme. Its Gothicism and supernaturalism are also crude and
unconvincing. Even the most naive reader will fail to believe such events as the walking of a
picture, coming out of three drops of blood from the nose of a statue, and the descent of a huge
helmet apparenly from nowhere—not to speak of the account of ghosts and the mysterious
fulfilment of a prohecy. Walpole’s supernaturalism is not at all psychologically convincing like
Coleridge’s for example, or Shakespeare’s. It is strange to find Walpole comparing himself to
Shakespeare in his use of the supernatural. He wrote: “That great master of nature, Shakespeare,
was the model I copied.” Ifor Evans observes about this claim: “It is as if all the poetry and
character had been removed from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, only to leave the raw mechanism of
melodrama and the supernatural.” What in reality Walpole sincerely tried to copy from Shakespeare
was the mixing of the tragic and comic elements by punctuating the very sombre narrative with
instances of the naivete of domestic servants. But Walpole does not succeed here either.

Notes As George Sherburn points out, Walpole draws the domestic servants “so feebly that
they fail almost totally in comic power.”
Walpole’s medievalism is also sham.He never shows any real knowledge of the times and places
which he handles in the story. As a historical novel The Castle of Otranto is, thus, worthless. His
“medieval escape,” as George Sherburn puts it, “simply provided a no man’s land where startling,
thrilling, sensational happenings might be frequent.” Everything, however incredible, passes
muster in a Gothic setting. No explanation of the supernatural incidents is considered desirable by
Walpole at all, and none is offered.
The Castle of Otranto became, in spite of all its absurdities, quite popular, and was imitated by a
large number of writers including Clara Reeve and Ann Radcliffe. Walpole with his own example
set the tradition of Gothic romance which was obliged to him for numerous “conventions.”
According to Moody and Lovett, these conventional elements are:
“a hero sullied by unmentionable crimes”;
“several persecuted heroines”;
“a castle with secret passages and haunted rooms”;
“a plentiful sprinkling of supernatural terrors.”

Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823)
Though Mrs. Radcliffe was an imitator of Walpole yet her attempts at the Gothic romance were
much more successful and artistic than Walpole’s. She was in fact the ablest and the best of all the
practitioners of this kind of writing. She was the loving wife of a journalist, and wrote five
romances just to while away her leisurer-The most famous among them are The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1764) and The Italian (1797). The scene in both of them is the mysterious land of Italy: in
the former Italy of the sixteenth century, and in the latter that of the eighteenth. Mrs. Radcliffe
almost always wrote to a formula. A beautiful young woman is kept imprisoned by a hardened,
sadistic villain, in a lonely castle, and is ultimately rescued by a somewhat colourless hero. These
heroes and heroines are all modelled after the same pattern. The only variety the heroines admit of
is of their complexion. Otherwise, all are sentimental, and, in Compton-Rickett’s words, “are true
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