By Kyle Plimpton
ENG 347B
Companion to Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto

It was English writer and politician, Horace Walpole, who singlehandedly crafted the gothic genre through his novel, The Castle of Otranto . This 18 th century novel is deemed the first gothic novel and set the stage for such authors as Clara Reeve, Mary
Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Edgar Allan Poe, and Stephen King. These extreme ideas of horror and the supernatural are often inspired from radical shifts or changes in society, such as the French Revolution. During this time, the idea of class structure was uprooted after the overthrow of the French Constitutional Monarch. Through The Castle of
Otranto
, Walpole illustrates many these shifting social divisions through Marx’s theories of social stratification, commodity fetishism, and the idea that an economic base does not predetermine how culture and society work.
Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto was a product of the radical changes attributed to the Age of Enlightenment, where emphasis on reason and individualism led to a shift in the 18 th
century’s perspective of social division. Many of the Enlightment ideals emphasized the value of the individual. Writers and philosophers began critiquing the traditional roles and institutions, and advocating a freedom in one’s beliefs and the right to one’s own happiness. French philosopher and writer, Voltaire, reaffirmed the legitimacy of self-interest by stating, “God gave us the gift of life; it’s up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.” This newfound sense of individualism therefore sparked the French lower class’s resentment toward France’s royal absolutism. The years surrounding
The Castle of Otranto’s
publication in 1764, the lower-class landowners began rising with the intent to overthrow the aristocracy, whose negligence and excessive debt had lead to the sever insolvency and hardship for the French people (Lucas 90).
Much like Marx’s
Theory of Commodity Fetishism
, in which the “fixation on the
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accumulation and the distribution of money and wealth prevent people from seeing the truth about society,” the aristocracy’s lavish expenditures prevented them from acknowledging and addressing their exploitation of the lower class (Ripstein 734). In order to escape the oppression caused by the wealthy elite, the French people stormed the
Bastille and overthrew the monarchy.
Walpole illustrates the English monarchy’s paranoia of the radically changing social division within France through Manfred, Prince of Otranto. The French
Revolution’s redistribution of power resulted from the uprising of the lower class, due to unfairly taxation on their land, had provoked fear among supporters of King George III
(Bird 189, Lucas 90). “By the middle of the decade the fears of the ruling class were so intense that the mere act of ‘imagining’ the death of the king was treated with the same severity as more concrete and genuinely threatening acts of treason” (Bird 189). This discomfort and fear of usurpation mirrors Manfred’s fear of the ancient prophecy “that the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it,” which becomes all too real after death of his only heir, Conrad (Walpole 17). The fear of losing his estate and title drives him to seek after his late son’s bride, who he raised from a young age and had, until then, thought of as a daughter. Walpole elevates this idea of a monarchy’s paranoia to the point where incest seems a viable solution. Much like the wealthy French elite, Manfred and
George III are allowing themselves to become blinded by wealth and power, and preventing themselves from seeing how irrational their judgments and actions are. Due to these irrational thoughts Walpole illustrates Manfred, or more broadly the monarchy system, as unreliable and unstable due to Commodity Fetishism.
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From Otranto’s impending prophecy, the reader is presented with the dark truth that Manfred is someone other than the ‘real owner’ of his title and estate. Instead he is someone “who is understood to be illegitimate, but who is tolerated by his docile subjects and clings shamelessly to power” (Bird 190). Through questioning Manfred’s legitimacy,
Walpole is challenging the fundamental principles of a monarchy and whether a man has the right to the power he inherits.
Through questioning what constitutes legitimacy, Walpole uses the looming threat of the ‘real owner’ as an allegory for England’s desire for power to return to the public.
Marx illustrates this same desire to redistribute power in his theory of Social
Stratification . In this theory, Marx predicted that as the rich continued to “exploit workers in order to increase their incoming wealth, the workers would develop a true class consciousness through a sense of shared repression” (Brenkert 129). The workers would then unite and revolt against those in power, eventually becoming their own means of production (Brenkert 132). The idea of production is centered “on the creation of new wealth” (Wallech 411). The idea of production and the creation of new wealth would prevent the monarchy from restricting a population into a strict social structure in which to inflate taxes and allow for social mobility to challenge the monarchy’s control.
When Theodore is originally introduced, he is presented as a measly peasant who is wrongly accused of using sorcery to kill Conrad (Walpole 21). However, after escaping imprisonment and nobly aiding Isabella’s escape from Manfred, it is discovered that
Theodore is the lost son of Friar Jerome and the true heir to Otranto. Regardless of his noble blood, Theodore was raised a commoner, and therefore symbolizes the common or everyday man in society. By having the “rightful heir issue from peasantry,” Walpole is
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illustrating the rise of the common man, or in Marx’s view the ‘worker,’ and “imply[ing] that the ‘real owners’ of government are the people” not the monarchy (Bird 192). The prophecy also predicts that ‘real owner’ will claim Otranto “whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it” (Walpole 17). Based on the former assumption of
Theodore symbolizing the common man, the prophecy also “implies that the lower orders…have outgrown the caste and the illegitimate monarchy it houses” (Bird 192).
Therefore, the lower orders have united and revolted against those in power, and become their own means of production.
Though Marx’s theories were developed almost a century after the publication of
The Castle of Otranto , many of the social shifts Walpole alludes through his characters,
Manfred and Theodore, are what shaped the 19 th
century. Through Marx’s theories of social stratification, commodity fetishism, and the idea that an economic base does not predetermine how culture and society work, Walpole is able to create a genre that illustrates the radical and revolutionary era of the Enlightenment.
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Works Cited
Brenkert, George G. "Freedom and Private Property in Marx." Philosophies & Public
Affairs Winter 8.2 (1979): 122-47. JSTOR . Web.
Bird, Benjamin. "Treason and Imagination: The Anxiety of Legitimacy in the Subject of the 1760s." Romanticism 12.3 (2006): 189-99. Print.
Lucas, Colin. "Nobles, Bourgeois And The Origins Of The French Revolution." Past and
Present 60.1 (1973): 84-126. Print.
Ripstein, Arthur. "Commodity Fetishism." Canadian Journal of Philosophy Nov 17.4
(1974): 733-48. Web.
Wallech, Steven. “”Class Versus Rank”: The Transformation of Eighteenth-Century
English Social Terms and Theories of Production.” Journal of the History of
Ideas 47.3 (1986): 409-31. Print.
Walpole, Horace, and W. S. Lewis. The Castle of Otranto; a Gothic Story . London:
Oxford UP, 1964. Print.
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