Embodied Ideology Walpole's Expression Through Characters in Castle of Otranto

Embodied Ideology: Walpole's Expression Through Characters

The description of the eighteenth century gothic as ?a confused and contradictory form, ambivalent or unsure about its own aims and implications? (Kilgour 5) is an entirely fitting one for Otranto - especially with regard to domestic and gender ideology. Valdine Clemens tells us that at the time of Otranto?s publication, ?cultural conditions [?] were highly repressive for women? (31). Women were vulnerable and defenseless, unable to exercise control in most areas of their lives. Men were allowed to control where their children went to school, where they worked, and to whom they got married ? all without any input from their mother. As well, it was much easier for a man to divorce his wife than for a woman to divorce her husband. Clemens cites Lawrence Stone to give us just such an example of the inequalities women had to suffer:

[?] a Lady with numerous aristocratic connections sued for divorce from her husband, who ?had been unfaithful to her on their wedding night, had debauched all the maidservants in the house, had given his wife venereal disease, and was constantly drunk.? Her application was defeated after considerable parliamentary debate on the grounds that ?divorce by act of Parliament had traditionally been restricted to husbands, except when there were peculiarly aggravating circumstances like incest.? (34)

Walpole?s novel can be seen as having a feminine bias and being subversive of these social norms. There is, however, evidence that supports a conservative ideology as well. This makes it particularly difficult to give a definitive answer to the long-debated question of whether or not Walpole was trying to be conservative or subversive of societal nor...

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...ranto and subsequent revelation of authorship points to a conflicting desire to circulate and to not circulate his work at the same time. It is not improbable that Walpole was also unsure about what he wanted the implications of his novel to be. Like the incongruous and ambiguous nature of the gothic (discussed in IncongruousCorpus), Walpole himself was ?unsure about [his] own aims?, whatever his views on society were.

Works Cited

Clemens, Valdine. The Return of the Repressed: Gothic Horror from The Castle of Otranto to Alien. New York: SUNY P, 1999.

Ellis, Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Kilgour, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. London: Routledge, 1995.

Marcie Frank. ?Horace Walpole?s Family Romances.? Modern Philology 100 (2003): 417-35.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.