Gothic Library - Horace Walpole - Castle of Otranto - 1764

It's finally time! I'm rereading The Castle of Otranto for Christmas and you get the wonderful opportunity to follow along (without also having to read it)!

Why Christmas? The novel was actually first published on Christmas Eve 1764. It's the first "gothic" novel in the literal sense: the word just meant architectural style before Walpole added it to the second edition the following year.

So I called this the prefatory materials, not because I'm writing a preface to the series but because Walpole's prefaces are actually really important . The first one is in character. Walpole claims to be translating this book from the Italian. He even says that it was printed in a fine black letter script.

Which means it looks like this.

Imagine reading an entire novel in that mess. The book itself, of course, is not printed that way. He's cheating to create a physical artifact that didn't really exist. And that's really interesting on its own. Gothic fiction, traditionally, does stuff like this all the time.

Frankenstein is one of the most famous examples. The novel is actually a collection of letters written by a man named Walton to his sister. In these letters, Walton describes Discovering a man out on the ice in the arctic, and that man is Victor Frankenstein. And as Walton sits and talks to Victor, Victor narrates his life story. So the entire story of Frankenstein's inside these letters, it's a frame narrative. Castle of Otranto is not that elaborate and the frame story isn't that interesting. But it's important to know that the very first gothic novel uses this technique.

The second preface is more literary. It admits that Walpole wrote the book. It was popular enough for a second printing, so he's taking the credit where it's due. People probably knew he was already. In fact, throughout this preface, Wolpole talks about Voltaire a few times. One of the moments is when he points out that Voltaire was clearly the author of the introductory essay in a book of his work, even though it was ascribed to the "editor" of the work. The footnote in my edition actually points out that Walpole turned out to be correct; it's since been demonstrated Voltaire definitely was the author of that essay. Walpole is sort of slyly referring back to his own "translation efforts" while engaging in the discourse over what is and isn't good literature.

Walpole was interested in drama. He was interested in theater. And so he conceives of gothic fiction as theatrical. His source is Shakespeare. He talks a lot about "romances ancient and modern" by which he means medieval romances like Arthurian tales, where wizards and knights traveled the countryside fighting dragons. And he says that these aren't "natural" but natural romances of his day sort of aren't that interesting.

He says that nature was getting her revenge for being excluded from romances for so long. So, his goal was to combine the two types, and he wants to do what is usually described in modern terms as putting psychologically realistic people into extraordinary, fantastical circumstances, and exploring the ways in which they react to the events around them.

If you read the book, you'll note that their reactions aren't very realistic either. But they're in line with both theatrical and literary ideas of natural writing from Walpole's time. And more to the point, they dwell on how they feel. They don't briefly mention that they're in a dangerous situation and then just go for it. They shiver in fear, they sweat in dread, they peer about in dark catacombs and shudder as they consider the sounds they're hearing. It is psychological, in the sense of "psychological horror," even if it isn't exactly the way we'd expect someone to write stuff now.

It's also important to notice that Walpole doesn't think he's inventing anything new even when he says that he's invented a new form of the romance. It's still a romance and he still cites Shakespeare and Voltaire. He sees this as a development of what was already there. And the reason that's important is that every bit of speculative fiction is essentially rooted in this novel. Every fantasy novel, every science fiction story, every horror movie, has somewhere in its dna Otranto.

And this novel is rooted in. The interplay of the fantastic and the natural. And if you think about speculative fiction very carefully, you will notice that there's always an interplay between the strange and the ordinary. If a novel or a movie did nothing but show you extraordinary things, like aliens you couldn't understand or kaleidoscopic dimensional transportation, you wouldn't be able to make anything out of it. There wouldn't be any ground to stand on. The best science fiction novels divorce you from your day-to-day existence. They're supposed to confuse you a little. The technical term for it is cognitive estrangement.

It eventually comes back around to helping you figure out what it all means, of course. It guide back. No science fiction novel is about the future. It's always about the present. No fantasy novel is about the past. It's always about the present.

The gothic novel is overtly set in the past. That's another thing about the traditional stuff: the gothic meant medieval. If you've ever wondered by ghost stories are so often set in old dusty mansions, it's because they always were, in a literary sense. The gothic in some sense is about grappling with the past, with the stuff we don't like to admit is back there. It's as though the past is a basement, and humanity has all this crap down there they don't like to think about (such as tyranny, torture, "superstition," so on, so forth). It's why the gothic is often read as "literature of anxiety" in literary criticism -- it's where a culture goes to worry about things.

I mentioned earlier that Walpole was particularly interested in theater. The novel is specifically dramatic. The notes to the Broadview edition point out how Walpole uses theatrical conventions, down to describing things as though they're on a stage. One thing to note in particular is the use of the servants. Walpole and his preface defend the use of the rustics. Which some critics had complained about at the time of the novel's first publication. He says that just like Shakespeare's rustics, the servants are "natural." There's a lot of classism happening here because he's effectively saying that poor servants are stupid. But they're natural and therefore they have a place in the novel. And that when they delay the plot because they can't speak well, they're making you anticipate it more which is actually a benefit. Walpole points out that if you're feeling impatient to get to a big reveal, you should realize that it means you're invested in what's happening.

He's playing with dramatic reveals with showing you what's in the wings and making you sit through half a scene of something else happening, even though it's a novel, The idea that a novel was overtly dramatic, was relatively new. Novels and theater weren't the same thing at all.

[^1]: I apologize for the unicode text crime, but I couldn't figure out any other way to get the text to look the way I needed it to for this totally needless joke.

Genre and innovation

OK, so the overall thing I want to say is a callback to this joke I made.

Modern fiction's pacing wasn't invented until the 19th century fuck your rising action graph

A significant number of the things we think fiction "must" do are conventions. Fiction doesn't have to do anything. It's not driving on a public road or building a bridge or applying to law school. There are no rules. There's nothing, and then there's something.

Before genre conventions harden -- and especially before consumer markets harden them -- writers had a kind of freedom it's nearly impossible for us to imagine nowadays.

Have you ever seen a musician say that they don't really have a genre, they don't believe in genre, it's limiting man? And you roll your eyes because they're inevitably doing fucking pop rock or dungeon synth or something really, really identifiable? The reason they're doing that is that genre is, at its core, a set of understood conventions that artists and audience members move within. They're not rules. They're a set of expectations.

Paul Kincaid has written, specifically in SF studies, that genres work through a series of "family resemblances" (he gets it from older philosophy). So not all SF has a rocket ship, but teleportation looks like a rocket ship because they're both impossible (in the 1930s let's say), and so they both sort of fulfill the same need for a technological novum (new thing -- it's a technical term in SF studies) that cognitively estranges the audience from the text.[^1]

The point here regarding Otranto is that it literally invented the genre. It didn't exist yet, so there were no expectations. It's a kind of romance, so there will be some supernatural stuff, some attempts at marriages, and a kind of "wilderness." The gothic castle becomes the wilderness, basically. It's a strange place, full of horrible sights, dark corners, catacombs, poorly-lit rooms shuttered with arras, the works.

But while we can perceive all the things we recognize from Gothic fiction, none of it works in quite the way we expect. This is not because Walpole is a bad writer, but because we have expectations that he didn't have. Remember Twilight, and how the author bragged about how she had never read any vampire fiction before? And remember how, like it or not, it was always just sort of weird in a bad way, like if you pick up something in your kitchen and there's that veneer of grease because the sudsy water was too dirty when you washed it last night? And, like, it's working, and it's basically clean, but you want to put it down? That's the thing. A work that's in a genre but whose author doesn't know the genre expectations nowadays tends to make people uncomfortable. It just doesn't quite work somehow.

It's like insisting your genius is too good for learning how to do basic chords on a guitar. You gotta learn how the basics work first.

So for instance when Philip Roth said he was pleased that he'd invented a whole new genre for people to write, everyone was pissed off. Because what he'd written was a piece of alternate history fiction, and Philip K. Dick invented that with Man in the High Castle. But Roth doesn't know that, because he thinks he's too good to read science fiction, but he'll sure write it when he needs some money.

Unlike that, Walpole was setting up the expectations, but some of them lasted longer than others. So reading this novel can be a little topsy-turvy, a little weird, but in a much more pleasant way.

Short notes

This is long, I'm wrapping it up lol. When the Peasant and Isabella meet, they both freak out because they are in the dark, and neither of them are supposed to be there. An ever-present sense of terror is quintessential in the Gothic -- both are trespassing, both are under threat, both are in need of assistance, and both are nearly powerless without it. I'll talk about the differences between terror, horror, and dread some other time, but for now it's just important to know all three are different and all three are important to books like this one.

[^1]: Which could be a film or an album or a game. "Text" is just a generic term for "thing I'm studying" since the language is from when that was mostly stuff made of text.

It's that time once again. In this installment, mostly people talk, but there is an attempt to wrongfully execute a guy.

CW for y'all: no actual incest happens, but the word comes up because the confused family relations, literal and figurative, make this the spectral sin Manfred is trying to commit, even though technically it's not actually incest.

Evil Gothic

18th Century gothic is interesting because its evils are very human. The supernatural often appears in a secondary role. 19th century gothic, like Frankenstein, Dracula, and so on, feature the supernatural more centrally, though I've also used those two examples on purpose: at the beginning of the century we get the Creature, who is not innately evil and in fact performs evil acts as a form of revenge against the evil perpetuated on him by Victor, an unassuming nerd who nopes out of child support payments (so, a huge dick, but not a supervillain). However, at century's end we get the titular Dracula, a malevolent, supernatural force marauding through history.

This speaks to more than a genre development, but it is enmeshed with it. My point is basically that evil was imagined differently in the mid 1700s as it was in the late 1800s. Very (very very very) broadly speaking, we can say that the gothic fiction of the 18th century shows us a fascination with people in power ultimately becoming evil as a result of desire and the past's power over us. Manfred is obsessed with preserving his line because, as we'll see later in the novel, his family usurped the castle and the noble line from the "rightful" heirs. He knows this, and he knows that if he should ever fail to continue his line the entire place will fall down around his ears (figuratively, though, I mean, turns out also literally). He desires that continuation. He's also trapped into a situation: his child wasn't killed by a random accident but by Providence, by a supernatural force bending back towards justice. If it weren't Manfred it would be his dad or his son, this was going to happen.

By contrast, we get gothic villains in the 19th century who are simply evil because of Herbert Spencer. I'm not going to bore you to death by summarzing chapter one of my dissertation, but the very truncated tl;dr is that Darwin's theories of evolution sparked deep and intense existential angst in the Victorian mind, but Darwin didn't really write about humans much, and when he did he didn't say much about societies. It was Herbert Spencer who took Darwin's theories -- really, a bad misunderstanding of them -- and applied them to human societies.

When I say Herbert Spencer invented racism I do not mean people weren't racist before Spencer, they certainly were; he kind of shaped the final form of racism as we know it today, in all its pseudoscientific glory.

So the Victorians were freaking out basically because it turns out everything they hated was natural (not really). Violence, hatred, lust, these weren't -- or weren't only -- religious relics, but powerful "natural instincts" that evolved humans could overcome but "degenerates" were victims of.

Writers such as Lombroso wrote whole books about how criminals were born, and that they had to be removed from the gene pool (mmmm eugenics 🤮 ). Useful or not, Victorian penal theory actually aimed at reforming criminals by teaching them useful trades (that, somehow, totally coincidentally, were the trades that weren't very well compensated). Lombroso is one of the people responsible for the contemporary penal theory that prison is just for keeping people away from the general population, because obviously they will continue to Crime if allowed to (the eugenics got buried but it's obviously still present in the dna).

What does all this have to do with Castle of Otranto? Well, as most of the theorists on the gothic will tell you, gothic fiction tends to reflect the anxiety of its times. And since gothic fiction is a genre, bound up in its conventions, there are conventional means of expressing that anxiety.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: people get anxious about overpopulation, consumerism, and conformity and zombies get popular.

How about this one: people start to notice that bloodless aristocrats control their lives and prey on them and vampires get popular. Look closely at War of the Worlds. It's a vampire novel.

So the thing is, Otranto set these conventions. And the thing about traditional gothic is that it's always about the past in some way. It's often set in the past -- Walpole, in the 1700s, was at least four centuries removed from the setting of his novel. The past is important to gothic because that's where the bad things come from. Be it the supernatural comeuppance of family misdeeds or the curse of vampirism that creates a monster, the past is fucking frightening.

This marks the gothic as overtly European and post-enlightenment, mind you. And it's why good works that complicate that assumption slap so hard in today's gothic fiction.

But, basically, an important element of the genre of gothic fiction was set early, by Walpole, because "weird" fiction tends to come out of the cracks and show people stuff they don't really want to think about or look at.

Keep that in mind when we talk about the grotesque at some point in the future.

To bring this back around to Manfred, though: Manfred decides to do evil things. And to some degree, he knows they're evil things. He does them anyway, because, to borrow the cliche, he believes the ends justify the means.

Good old cliches

Walpole didn't invent the rest of these cliches, of course, but he inserted them directly into gothic fiction's veins. Long lost heirs, family curses, these were all part and parcel of the romance genre that Walpole is developing from.

Doubt

This was far more pronounced in chapter one, but it continues now: no one knows anything. This should come up again when we get to more focused talk on terror and so on, but it's important to notice that no one has any fucking clue of what's happening at any given moment. All of gothic fiction is in the dark, so to speak.

Quite a lot happens in this chapter as well. I wonder if we'll find, as we continue, that the chapters alternate like that? Maybe not! I dunno!

First, note that Theodore's thinking is described. This was actually somewhat rare for a lot of history, at least in western literature.

In fact, the case has been made that Hamlet is the first time that a work in the English language provided an interiority to the characters that was not immediately expressed. The soliliquy exists basically to make us aware of what characters are thinking, right? But Hamlet is engaged in a game of cat and mouse, his friends even working for the king to catch him out. The entire plot hinges on Hamlet hiding how he feels from others. There's one line that is very often cited in this topic:

But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
(Hamlet I.ii.88-9)

The very idea that a character, particularly on a stage, might feel one thing and say another, without telling the audience what they were actually thinking, was revolutionary. Think of Iago, who carefully describes the way he lies to Othello. He doesn't tell Othello he's lying, of course, but he tells us. If you've ever studied Hamlet in a classroom you've probably been asked if you think Hamlet is crazy or not. We don't know. There's no way to definitively say yes or no.

All that is relevant because Walpole loved Shakespeare, and used his plays as the perfect model of literature. And here, in Otranto, we see characters described as thinking in a complex way. We're told, it's not left as a mystery, but the depth of a character's possible feelings has been enlarged. Theodore convinces himself it's filial piety that makes him stick around -- and not, as the narrator doesn't state in that paragraph, that he wants to see Matilda again.

Then, in the scene with Theodore and Isabella, it's somewhat comedic, but it really shows off the sort of fear and hesitation that marks out the Gothic. No one is sure of anything, so they hesitate. And hesitations fuck things up -- but there's no other way to go about things, right? You have to stop and think about things before you act -- or you end up killing some innocent guy who just wants to find his daughter.

This hesitant reaction to things -- so out of the ordinary that they stun the character, basically -- survives into contemporary gothic. If you've ever been annoyed that a character in a haunted house movie hesitates and doesn't immediately flee when the ghost appears, this is why. I distinctly remember sitting in an armchair rewatching Night of the Living Dead back in grad school and feeling as though an idea really did click, like I could hear it click, because the main character is so "useless" in that movie because she's Isabella, she's the classic gothic protagonist. This is how genre can help define the way characters behave. And remember, Walpole was pressing back against the way characters in chivalric romances behaved. He wanted to intervene in the genre, make the characters more realistic, but still have what he saw as the good stuff, ghosts and knights and duels and shit.

The gothic is basically about taking one's worldview and destabilizing it. The characters become increasingly uncertain about everything, because everything they had taken to be true is not -- there are ghosts, Jerome's son is alive.

This chapter is mostly talking, and so with a very small sample size of four chapters, my speculation from last time seems to be holding up, and we're alternating between action and dialogue chapters.

As in chaphter 2, a lot of the heavy lifting was done here, setting up the various relationships, furthering them along, and creating the necessary hooks for further reveals and twists.

Since it's mostly talk, I struggle a bit to conceive of what to talk about. The topics I know I want to get to eventually are the grotesque, and the varieties of fear. One that suggests itself is the role of the religious personage in the gothic, but I have idle dreams of continuing this series, and it would make much more sense to talk about that when I re-read The Monk.

But what is appropriate for this chapter I think is the idea of foreignness.

The gothic was, effectively, an English genre. That's important because these novels were, for a long time, never set in England. They're often, in fact, set in Italy.

Otranto is set in Italy. So is Udolpho, and I don't think The Italian is just about one Italian guy, but I might be wrong, it's been a long time.

The Monk is set in Spain. Vathek is set in the caliphate. The thing to note here is that the gothic was originally a genre where, explicitly, bad things happened in other countries.

England was soundly Protestant, so all the gothic stories are about Catholics. England was reforming and moving into the future, so all these stories were set in the past. This is not as simple as saying that English authors conformed to, or utilized, their society's xenophobia, but that is part of what's happening.

But remember that the gothic destabilizes things. It undermines our sense of the normal, of the everyday. It's why the gothic became a place one finds queer fiction, and where we still often see it: the gothic is about confusing and blurring lines that everyday people think are clearly demarcated, and often about showing that the lines don't exist at all.

Here's an early elevator pitch for a way to read Otranto: a prince can do bad shit in his demesne and short of God intervening there is fuck all you can do about it. We want to think justice will save us, because we tend to think justice is a thing, a person.

Now, look, I'm an animist, so I do think there is a thing that's like that, but it's not the same as the human justice, the thing where you have to pay back your loans and you tacitly agree not to murder people.

The reason I bring that up in the same chapter that I bring up the gothic's use of the foreign is that everything that the gothic gives you that's revolting is also what we're drawn to.

Think of the ilne above, where Walpole archly says the two maidens have a "content of amity," and then think of how cool Manfred is, sweeping around everywhere, shouting at priests.

Byron wrote an excellent poem titled "Manfred." He didn't write any titled "Theodore." The gothic is where we get the best villains, right? Dracula, Mister Hyde, so on, so forth. Even as we know they're bad, and we deplore their actions, we are drawn to them by the force of the narrative and its transgressive nature.

Gothic fiction was not safe. Women were warned not to read it. Poets wrote about the cold sweats they got when they read it. And the "foreign" aspect of the narratives add to it. They are no longer only the countries that England believes itself to be better than -- they're also the exotic, startling places where cool shit happens.

And fiction is place, isn't it? We "go" there.

This is it, the big ending and all the reveals! I said recently that I intended to do this in two parts, but I think I'm going to try for one. I write this all unknowing, let's see what happens.

The Plot

• Manfred is convinced that Isabella and Theodore are trysting in secret. He goes to Frederic and puts his case to him again. Frederic, previously agreeing to the double marriage, is having second thoughts.
• But look apparently Matilda is mad hot, so he says yes again.
• Enter, as we might write in a script, the domestics. She comes in screaming and yelling. Once they dig through Walpole's idea of what poor people speak like (disconnected ranting basically), what's happened is that a giant hand, to match the previous giant foot, has appeared, and Bianca is leaving.
• Manfred of course poo poos this, but Frederic, believing her behavior to be genuine and not to be second hand, tells Manfred he will never marry Isabella: Manfred's under the curse of heaven.
• However, there's time for one more fucking weird thing before the novel ends: Frederic still really has the hots for Matilda, so he's sort of reconsidering his reconsideration. He seeks Hippolyta, because he wants to assure himself that Manfred's divorce is actually going to happen. He enters her chambers, and from there her private devotional room.
• Now this is the metal shit, just real sicko gothic amazement: Frederic sees a figure knelt in prayer. It rises and removes its hood and it's a fucking skeleton -- and better yet, it's the ghost of the hermit who led Frederic to find Isabella in the first place.

I want this in a block, this is some cool shit. Here's the scene.

That, as they say, is that.

Here's another point where I want to put the text in front of you. This is it, the big climax. When everyone goes out into the courtyard, hearing shit falling down around their ears, Manfred cries out that Matilda is dead and a big old giant pops out of the castle, ruining it in the process. He grabs his sword and helmet and flies into Heaven.

Yes. Hell yeah.

• There's a bit left. Actually the explanations above happen after the giant appears, But I saved him until nearly last. Manfred, after explaining his grandfather's crime, laments, agrees to give up any claim he has to the demesne.
• Manfred and Hippolyta cloister themselves away in their respective churches.
• Frederic offers Isabella to Theodore, who's too depressed to say yes. But she stays on, and they become friends over how sad they are, and then they get married.
• Seriously. This is the final sentence of the novel:

But Theodore’s grief was too fresh to admit the thought of another love; and it was not until after frequent discourses with Isabella of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.

Loose Ends

Does that ending feel satisfying? I can't remember which book I read it in, but at one point in grad school I read that some critics have pointed out that the unsatisfying ending of Otranto may be to leave the reader unsettled. It both gives you the moralizing ending that it's "supposed to," where the sort-of incestuous villain gets his just desserts, and at the same time it refuses to let you get satisfaction from it because God did it, everyone kinda sucks, and really wasn't the fun part watching Manfred be an evil shit?

I think this is a good reading, but it bears complication: Walpole thought of this as a kind of play, not really a novel; anyway, the strictures of the novel were not as binding then as now. And plays, if you've seen or read anything from Shakespeare to Racine, do not have to give a single fuck about whether you're happy at the end. Things just fucking happen up on that stage, and the immediacy of the performance will make things work that might not appear to on paper.

With that said, it's also worth noting that the five chapters of the novel probably correspond to the typical five act play structure.

Big Reveals

I've teased on several occasions that I would talk about the grotesque and the kinds of gothic fear. But to my surprise, this novel doesn't really provide any good ways into those topics. Things happen to quickly for dread. The dead and dying are beauteous with their hopes for Heaven, and don't disgust onlookers even as they remind them of death. No nuns are getting trampled to death here. [^2]

Understand right now that I'm not promising anything in a hurry, but I already bought a better edition of the second gothic novel, Vathek. So I'll probably be back here at some point in the future, doing this again. So please look forward to those topics in the future.

If anyone wants me to read Radcliffe in the future, give me money. Like, seriously, I may start some kind of campaign on Ko-Fi and Patreon.

At any rate, I titled this section Big Reveals.

Here's a comment from one of the footnotes:

It might be said that the Gothic novel is a primitive detective story in which God or fate is the detective. (Bleiler, qtd in Otranto, Frank, ed. p. 162.)

This is both a good point and a bad one. It's a good point because it makes us think about detective fiction. It's bad because all detective fiction is gothic fiction.

Again, referring to that kind of "genetic code of genre" metaphor we used a while back, detective fiction is a descendant of the gothic.

The first detective story, in the western world at least, is The Memoirs of Vidocq. Non-fiction, at least at first, they were actual memoirs, of an actual thief that the French authorities released from jail once he helped them catch an even more skilled thief. He became a kind of consultant for the police.

This presumably sounds familiar to you.

The series was quite long, and eventually became fiction, but still with that veneer of non-fiction on it.

The first overtly fictional detective story, though, is by Edgar Allan Poe. He invented the genre, basically, with "Murders in the Rue Morgue." And if you haven't read that, here's the thing: the narrator is friends with the detective, Dupin, and they both live alone and take long walks at night, while sleeping in the day, in their rooms where they've covered over all the windows so they can live in perpetual gloom. Skulls and other macabre decorations litter the rooms. These fuckers are goth in two senses of the word (gothic fictional and also club kids; they are not, in fact, Visigoths).

The gothic is always about a mystery, right? There's a thing in the darkness, and you don't want to see it, but you have to see it. People creep around in graveyards and in catacombs, finding clues that add up to horrifying discoveries.

It's just that the detective uses the power of rationality -- ratiocination in Poe's words -- to reorder the world, to make it make sense again.

Thanks for coming!

I'm leaving it there because we've already run long enough and you probably have something else to do.

An artist did an illustrated edition of Otranto and honestly the images kind of kick ass.

[^1]: That's more common than you might think. It shows up in some Norse sagas as well, and more appropriately, there are a ton of churches in certain parts of France because William the Bastard kept buying the church's approval for his wars of aggression by promising the fund churches and keeping his word afterwards.

[^2]: Yes. In The Monk.

Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, and Fandom

"What the fuck" you might say. What the fuck indeed.

I'm nearing the end of the volume of Walpole from which my Otranto series came. It also includes The Mysterious Mother, Walpole's closet drama about an incestuous mother's lifelong ardent penitence and the eventual tragedy that results from an evil monk manipulating events. That's all I'm going to say about the incest, except to point out that the play's sources are clearly works such as Oedipus Rex, Phedre, and so on.

Walpole knew the people of his time and country wouldn't accept a production, and so he tamped down his desire to see it on stage and printed a few copies for friends. Naturally, some of those copies escaped into the wild. To prevent pirate editions, Walpole gave in and permitted an official printing. He was basically right about the reaction, though there were far more favorable reviews than he had expected.

Recorded in the diary of Fanny Burney is a strong negative reaction. She was a novelist and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, and borrowed the queen's copy. Burney knew Walpole personally, I should point out; they were friends, and he had taken her on a tour of his "gothic villa," Strawberry Hill.

Here's a selection from her reaction:

Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! a story of so much horror, from atrocious and voluntary guilt, never did I hear!.... For myself, I felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast and warm in my mind, against the wilful author of a story so horrible: all of the entertainment and pleasure I had received from Mr. Walpole seemed extinguished by this lecture, which almost made me regard him as the patron of the vices he had been pleased to record."[^1]

It's worth reading this response carefully: from previously recorded delight at the writing, and from her past experience of happiness and friendship with Walpole, Burney pivots to a kind of moral outrage. The play doesn't depict the "vices," to be clear; it also clearly repudiates them, though the engine of the play, to borrow his phrasing from the preface to Otranto, is to simultaneously build up the past sin of the Countess while engendering feelings of pity for her in the audience. This pity in no way obviates the "crime" she has committed.

From that pivot Burney goes on to say that she felt as though Walpole -- with absolutely no concrete reason whatsoever -- was "the patron of the vices he had been pleased to record." She felt as though he approved of the crime. The mere fact that he had been "pleased to record" it -- even in passing, and not directly depicted on stage -- meant that he must in some way find them acceptable.

You may find this familiar if you're engaged in any fandom discourse, as it's a perennial problem nowadays. It's very common for fanfic authors -- and increasingly, even "traditional" authors -- to be pilloried online for being bad people just for writing about bad things. And mind you, this has nothing to do with something like content warnings or revenge porn or something like that. It's about the ability of art to take on any topic, and for good art to help readers think about it.

If I have a thesis here, it's really this: this problem is older than you think. Indeed, the gothic is an excellent analogue for fandom within genre and fandom studies. Both were considered transgressive, weird, feminine, maudlin, schlocky, and lesser than other forms of art. They have reputations for being full of tropes, of using mechanical plots to pilot meager characters towards bombastic climaxes... the comparisons can go on.

[^1]: Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother. Frederick S. Frank, ed. Broadview Press. p. 303. Print.