Summary
Manfred, Prince of Otranto, has two children: Matilda and Conrad. Conrad is sickly and engaged to Isabella, a marriage planned by his parents and her guardians. Manfred is strangely anxious for the ceremony, and Hippolita, his wife, is a little concerned about how young their son is. Most people assume that Manfred’s haste comes from a rumored prophecy that says the castle and lordship will pass from the present family when the real owner has grown too large for it.
Conrad’s birthday is chosen for the day of the marriage. That day, though, a frightened servant runs to the gathered family and servants and can barely get any words out besides 'helmet'. Manfred is alarmed, as are Matilda and Isabella.
Manfred sees his son buried under a huge helmet covered with sable feathers, dead and dashed to pieces. This horrible spectacle is utterly shocking, but Manfred seems more lost in thought than saddened. He tells the domestics to take care of Isabella, which seems like a strange request.
Isabella is glad she is not marrying Conrad; she comforts Matilda, who is almost like a sister to her. The two young women help the stunned Hippolita. While they do this, Manfred tries to gather information about what happened from the crowd, but no one knows anything. One young man, a peasant from a neighboring village, ventures that the helmet looks like the one on the figure of Alfonso the Good, a former prince, situated at the church of St. Nicholas.
Manfred is in a “tempest of rage” (20), incensed at the peasant for referencing the founder of Otranto. The young man is surprised but unruffled, which further enrages Manfred. He orders his attendants to seize him.
A few other spectators yell that the helmet on the statue is missing. Manfred wildly accuses the young peasant of murdering his son. The mob gloms onto this as well, no one stopping to think that it would be impossible for the peasant to lift and move the heavy helmet.
Hearing these wild expostulations from the crowd, Manfred gathers his wits but is still annoyed; he proclaims the young peasant is a necromancer. He will be kept prisoner under the helmet until the church intervenes. Most people approve of this, but some of Manfred’s friends are wary, especially as the youth is denied food.
The young ladies revive Hippolita in the meantime. Isabella stays with her while Matilda goes to see her father. She is apprehensive, as he clearly loved her brother more than her, but imagines he must be filled with sorrow. When she arrives at his door she hears his pacing. He angrily asks who is there, and shouts at Matilda that he does not want a daughter.
Shocked and hurt, Matilda withdraws. She tells her mother that her father is fine, though, and the two young women endeavor to keep her calm. A servant enters and says that Manfred demands to see Isabella. Hippolita is impressed, and says that her husband must know Isabella is the most emotionally stable of all of them right now.
Isabella is taken to Manfred in the gallery. He tells her to dry her tears, and says that Conrad was never worthy of her beauty. As he talks, Isabella grows more and more astonished. She thinks that grief confused him, or that he is trying to ensnare her regarding her indifference for his son. Soon, though, he tells her he wants to divorce Hippolita and marry her himself so that he will have an heir. He seizes her hand; she shrieks and flees. At that moment Manfred sees the plumes of helmet at the height of the window, waving back and forth and rustling. He also sees the portrait of his grandfather sigh, heave his breast, and then move out of his panel. Manfred is discombobulated, and demands that the specter speak and lead him.
The specter marches ahead placidly, and Manfred claims he will follow it to perdition. It takes him to the end of the gallery. Manfred is terrified but follows. He tries to open the appointed door but it is supernaturally fast.
While this is occurring, Isabella flees down the stairs. She doesn't know how to escape a guarded castle, and she knows she cannot go to Hippolita because Manfred will expect it. She remembers a subterranean passage leading from the vaults of the castle to the church of St. Nicholas.
Even though her route to the passage is frightening, Isabella makes it into the silent and drafty nether regions of the castle. Her blood curdles, especially when she hears a sigh. She assumes it is Manfred but realizes he couldn't be that close yet; she guesses that it might instead be a domestic wanting to help her. As she moves to an open door, a gust of wind extinguishes her light.
The darkness is utterly petrifying. Isabella feels hopeless and fears Manfred will come at any moment. She is about to faint and implores the saints for help. Finally she finds a door into a vault. A dim ray of moonlight illuminates the room and she sees a figure in the shadows. She shrieks, thinking it is the ghost of Conrad, but the figure implores her to calm down. He promises to help her and to die in her defense if need be. She calms down and tells him there is a trapdoor nearby that they must find.
As they search for the smooth piece of brass in a stone, Isabella worries that Manfred will implicate the mysterious young man. The mystery man says he cares not for his life and will help her no matter what. She is surprised, but she has no time to question him further because she touches the lock and springs it open. She begs him to follow her down; if he has no need to leave the castle, she says, then he must at least tell her who he is. Before he can answer, they hear Manfred’s voice.
Isabella descends into the trapdoor, but the young man does not know how to do this and is stuck. Manfred bursts in and sees the very same young man he trapped under the helmet. He yells that he is a traitor, but the youth boldly replies that he is not. He had escaped because part of the helmet cut into the ground and he fell into the vault.
Manfred asks what the noise was that he heard when he came in. The peasant says it was a door clapping, but he does not know this castle so he has no guess as to what it might have been. He claims that providence told him about the lock and door, but he did not have time to escape. Manfred continues to interrogate him, but learns nothing. He even becomes a little impressed by the young man, and knows the man most likely did nothing wrong.
Suddenly confused voices echo through the chamber, and Jaquez and Diego, two servants, enter. They claim to be frightened immensely and indeed can barely speak.
The servants talk over each other, frustrating Manfred. He asks if they saw a ghost, and Diego says he’d rather have seen a ghost. Manfred gives up and says he will go look for Isabella. Jaquez tells him not to go into the gallery, which gives Manfred pause when he remembers the portrait.
Finally the servants describe how they saw a huge giant covered in armor rising from the floor. They rushed out quickly, and do not know where it is now.
The young peasant volunteers to explore the gallery; Manfred is again impressed but says he will go as well because he only trusts his own eyes.
The women join them and ask where Isabella is. Manfred imperiously says he only wants Isabella, but he does not know where she is. He callously says Hippolita must be jealous of Isabella; both Hippolita and Matilda are confused. Hippolita says she went into the gallery and seen nothing—the servant must be confused. Manfred privately agrees, and feels badly about how he treated his wife. Love rushes back, but he tries to forestall this and the accompanying remorse. In fact, he steels himself and turns to villainy. He even convinces himself Hippolita might consent to a divorce, and even encourage Isabella to marry him. He must find Isabella first though, and orders guards at all exits and entrances to the castle. He locks up the youth and retires to his chamber.
Analysis
Walpole is barely two pages into The Castle of Otranto before he kills off Conrad and initiates a series of gruesome, fantastical, and occasionally comical events. Right away the fusion of the ancient and modern romantic literary tropes is clear: as strange things happen, the story remains rooted in the characters’ desires and machinations. The supernatural elements are met with by the characters’ “natural” reactions; they propel the plot without subsuming it. The major elements of the Gothic are here already: a castle, an ominous prophecy, a ghastly death by supernatural means, specters, strange beings, dark passages, and tempests of emotion and sentiment. The characters are constantly reacting in paroxysms of horror, rage, elation, and fear, which exacerbates the sense of mounting, indefatigable terror and anxiety. The novel also contains elements of the sublime, a theory articulated by Edmund Burke in 1757 as “the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling,” characterized by awe and “astonishment.” For Walpole, the sublime is not found as much in nature (vast waterfalls, craggy peaks, endless seascapes) as it is found in the overwhelming and obscure encounters within the claustrophobic walls of the castle. His characters endure privation, pain, difficulty, and intense mental perturbation—all elements of the sublime.
Critic David B. Morris analyzes the novel in light of its relation to the sublime, but suggests that a better analytic framework is actually Sigmund Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (1919). Burke’s theory that terror is the core principle of the sublime is limited in terms of its application to the Gothic novel because he stresses terror as related only to the fear of bodily harm or death. This is, Morris argues, insufficient and too simplistic: in Otranto, terror is also rooted in the comedic and in stylistic elements such as repetition and exaggeration. Repetition, as seen in Manfred’s frequent imprisonment of Theodore and the interactions of Theodore with Isabella and Matilda, “creates the eerie rule that anything which can happen once…is likely to happen again” and the creation of facsimiles raises questions about “both their own status and about the world in which such unlikely duplications occur.” Another related aspect of the novel is its frequent usage of mistaken identity, disguise, and disappearance; this “challenges the concept of a world where everything and everyone is unique, marked by intrinsic differences, possessing a singleness which makes them exactly and only what they appear.” Isabella and Matilda are doubles or mirror images because they look and act similar, Theodore resembles Alfonso, Frederic is mistaken for an enemy, etc. Repetition and similarity create the “latent source of terror” in the novel.
One of the main themes of this Gothic novel—the incestuous feelings of Manfred for Isabella—is not related to bodily terror or fear of death, but it is just as palpable. Incest, Morris writes, “in its unremitting repetitions and hidden agenda continuously threatens characters with a crime they cannot—by mere precautions—avoid.” Incest would violate Isabella’s virtue, and it would also threaten to upset the social order. Isabella’s reaction to Manfred’s first overture is not disgust but rather utter terror, because she seems to grasp what a rupture this would create. The sublime in Otranto is not one of transcendence, then, but rather one of a plunging terror incorporating irrationality, suppression, violations, and liberation. Freud’s theory of the uncanny, which says that terror actually derives from the familiarity of something rather than its utter alienness or external, is useful here. He notes how the uncanny is strange and disquieting because it confronts us with something in ourselves that we have denied and disowned but can never fully expunge. We encounter disguised and distorted images of our own repressed desires and feel a sense of revulsion, a sense of alarm that something so deeply buried can be tapped into.
One of the more salient aspects of the novel is that the characters are not particularly nuanced or compelling. Manfred is all bluster and rage and lust, Isabella and Matilda are beautiful damsels in distress, Hippolita is the long-suffering wife, and Theodore is the dashing young hero. The reasons for this are manifold. First, the plot and its stylistic accouterments matter more than the characters. Second, referring back to the sublime and uncanny use of repetition and doubles, having the characters be interchangeable or reminiscent of one another is disconcerting. And third, Walpole named many of them after Shakespearean characters and harnessed the associations of those characters: Isabella is a virginal and chaste young woman in Measure for Measure, and Conrad is a nonentity “Conrade” in Much Ado About Nothing.
Walpole’s literary influences are quite evident in this first chapter. His labyrinth below the castle is reminiscent of Samuel Johnson’s in Rasselas; Manfred’s following the ghost of his grandfather to “perdition” if need be alludes to Hamlet and his father’s ghost; and there are numerous other references to Hamlet, The Tempest, Othello, and more. The St. Nicholas in the novel is probably St. Nicholas of Myra, a patron saint of children, marketplaces, and commerce. He could also be a reference to St. Nicholas the Great, a 9th-century pope who championed Christian morality in a morally depraved world of secular rulers.
