Ambiguities in the Textual Body of The Castle of Otranto Essay

Incongruous Corpus: Ambiguities in the Textual Body of The Castle of Otranto While the relationship of the Gothic to the Romantic is debatable, the persistent desire of some critics to see it as pre-Romantic should not disguise the possibility that the genre is â€Å"actually sending out very contradictory impulses about its own intentions, [and] adopting certain strategies that thwart the very perceptions it seems to be on the brink of achieving† (Napier, 4). This uncertainty in form and intent has produced imprecision and imbalances in Gothic novels that are partly the result of instability within the Gothic form. Although the Gothic achieves stability by repeating a certain pattern of accepted conventions, leading to remarkable coherence in the â€Å"routine likeness of one romance to another† (Napier, 4), one must be mindful that the Gothic is â€Å"formally and stylistically marked by disequilibrium† (Napier, 4). The imbalance, dissolution, and formal unevenness of the Gothic genre, which some scholars claim are recurrent issues with in the genre, are found as early as the first Gothic novel in The Castle of Otranto. Their existence in Otranto suggests the profound uncertainty Walpole had about the intent of the genre as he perceived it and hints at the immense task the author faced in establishing a new genre that required the â€Å"difficult and uneven breaking away from the more carefully structured and considered narratives of the preceding period† (Napier, 5). Walpole’s inability to provide a thorough theoretical explanation of the intent of the genre and breakaway cleanly from pre-existing narrative norms accounts, in part, for the presence of tonal and modal incongruities within the textual body of Otranto. An examination of the theo... .... Meaning is deflected to surfaces and nothing about a character is truly known beyond what is necessary to further the plot. Nonetheless, despite all the structural incongruities within the body of Otranto, Walpole was successful in establishing a genre that later practitioners perfected. Works Cited Clery, E. J. Introduction. The Castle of Otranto. By Horace Walpole. New York: OUP, 1998. vii-xxxiii. Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1972. Mowl, Tim. Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 1996. Napier, Elizabeth R. The Failure of Gothic: Problems of Disjunction in an Eighteenth-Century Literary Form. New York: OUP, 1987. Sedgwick, Eve K. Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York and London: Methuen, 1986. Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York: OUP, 1998.