Gothic Features in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto Felix Morrison 11th Grade

Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was the first gothic novel, and thus was the originator of many of the distinctive features that have pertained throughout the history of the genre. Early gothic was characterized by the rejection of enlightenment thinking in favor of the intense emotion and the supernatural, expressed in this extract particularly through the drama of a chase sequence.

While the passage mainly uses third person narration, Walpole utilizes free indirect discourse to provide an insight into the princess’s consciousness. This is shown through the multiple rhetorical questions such as “Yet where conceal herself?”. Providing a voice for the consciousness of the princess helps to articulate a sense of intense anxiety, fitting the character neatly into the gothic trope of the damsel in distress. Indeed, the thoughts that passed “rapidly through her mind”, reflect the urgency of the ‘chase’ sequence, a characteristic of the gothic – reflected even today in modern slasher movies - where the persecuted female flees the persecutor. Indeed, these roles also reflect the established social order, as the aristocratic “princess” is the heroine, whereas Manfred and his “domestics” – likened almost to property – are demonized....