Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

The Castle of Otranto is significant for being known as the first ever Gothic novel. I am someone who stays away from horror movies and scary stories of all kinds. I do not like bumps in the night.

But I didn’t have anything to fear from this novel at all. The spectural elements are mainly portents and messages rather than the walking dead chasing people all Doctor Who style down countless hallways.

The novel is essentially a story of heirs, lineages, and entailments. Although set in medieval times, the audience for the original printing of this book (1764) would have been greatly sensitive to the horrifying situation presented within.

Manfred is the prince of Otranto. Throughout the book, his claim to the title and the land are challenged through a number of ways. I won’t give anything away here, but I don’t think any of the twists will be a surprise to the modern reader.

The presentation is probably too melodramatic and overly Romanticized for today’s audience, but I appreciated how fast the action moved. The characters are cliche to us, but because I know the archetypes—the suffering wife, the dutiful daughter, the virtuous young stranger—I didn’t miss all the passages that are usually there to explain it all.

I just read through as quickly as the text demands.

It is interesting to read something without modern text conventions. Dialogue doesn’t break into paragraphs with every switch of the speaker. Instead, conversations just continue on in running text without even a [character] said, “…”

This, among other reasons, helped paragraphs run pages in length at a time.

While the text may be unfamiliar, the story elements really are. It’s strange to read this and think about when these elements, characters, and ideas were fresh and brand new. The history nerd part of me really enjoyed that.

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