Without
a doubt, the Enlightenment played host to a number of philosophical developments
over the course of the eighteenth century. Chief amongst which, were arguably debates
regarding the nature of reason and rationality. So significant were these in
fact that the era was even termed, problematically, the ‘Age of Reason’. But although
this phrase conjures a somewhat cinematic image of religious abandonment, it more
accurately stood for revision; a remapping of the ways philosophy perceived and
understood the real. What is staggering however, is how the literature of this era departs from its
reason-driven context. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) is replete
with supernatural happenings and absent rationalism. As such, we might say the
text is born in to, but not out of its era. On the one hand, it is right that
the kinds of imagery and devices that Walpole makes use of at once inspired and
horrified early audiences. But on the other, it is startling how far the text
acts as a literary arm of the day’s philosophy. Along with its departure from
contemporary thought, the text is also something of an arena in which the rational
and irrational continue to debate.
Indeed,
Otranto opens with a question of rationality. Take Conrad. A ‘homely
youth’, ‘sickly’, and of ‘no promising disposition’, he is to all intents and
purposes, unfit for marriage. And, to make the point, he is also ‘three years
younger’ than his virginal eighteen year old sister Matilda. The contractual
and formal marriage of what appears to be above all else a sick and underage
boy, is of course absurd and irrational – but so too are the reasons for it. If
we suspend Manfred’s likely desire to marry his son in order to secure an heir,
then the ‘dread of seeing accomplished an ancient prophecy’ appears to be the
sole reason as to the necessity of Conrad’s marriage to Isabella. Even with Hippolita’s
attempts to encourage her husband to see the potential ‘danger’ in his plans, Manfred
chooses to instead undermine her by reminding her of her own sterility. What
should be emphasised here is the salvation Hippolita is illustrative of. Though
she offers the opportunity for Manfred to consider reasonably what the
consequences of his actions may be, she is rejected along with the rationalism she
represents. This in one way, is an example of how characters within Gothic
texts like Otranto permit fear and
irrationality to replace their rational judgment.
Before
continuing, it is worth reflecting a little more on the intellectual tradition
to which Walpole’s text belongs. Although Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
was not published some seventeen years after Otranto in 1781, much of
the epistemology it went on to posit was in counterargument to the sort of
rationalism attributed to Descartes and his Discourse on Method (1634).
The style of reason Descartes used to express a rational approach rested on a
method derived from mathematical geometry – although perhaps ironically, it led
him to authenticating the existence of God. But as Andrew Cooper Fix notes:
The intellectual origins of the secular and rationalistic worldview of the European Enlightenment lay in a world that was…deeply penetrated with religious assumptions.
But
realistically, what does this have to do with The Castle of Otranto?
Well, prior to Kant’s assertion in his Critique that what we know to be
real and rational is the result of both sensory experience and understanding,
then Walpole’s text is clearly a hybrid of Enlightenment perspectives. The
supernatural experiences that manifest themselves in the text can be seen as an
agent of the irrational, like for instance the inexplicable helmet that falls
and mangles Conrad. It is also exemplified through the natural world in the
appearance and disappearance of moonlight, alluding to a force of nature beyond
the control and comprehension of man.
On
the contrary though, the rational and man’s reasoning capabilities surface
through the text’s seemingly omnipotent narrator. As Isabella runs to escape
the sinister urges of Manfred, she is ‘fortified’ by her conscience, and
critically, by ‘what she could observe’. I say critically because of Walpole’s
conspicuous allusion to empiricism. It could also be said that not only in the
Gothic, but also within the travel writing of the period, an emphasis on the
acquisition of knowledge by empirical data – that is, what one can observe
through their senses and thus know to be true – was burgeoning in popularity,
too. Since the founding of the Royal Society roughly a hundred years prior to Otranto’s
publication, the empiricist method of obtaining knowledge was high on its
agenda, and would likely have made its way into the minds of writers like
Walpole by the 1760s.
Further
to the natural world exposing the irrational in Otranto, so too do the domestic
surroundings. The castle, like many in Gothic literature, assume active rather
than passive roles in instigating the decay of rationality:
The lower part of the castle was hollowed into several intricate cloisters, and it was not easy for one under so much anxiety to find the door that opened into the cavern. An awful silence reigned throughout those subterraneous regions, except now and then some blasts of wind that shook the doors she had passed, and which grating on the rusty hinges were re-echoed through that long labyrinth of darkness.
Isabella’s
capacity to navigate and make sense of the complex world beneath the castle is
conditional on her emotional resignation. If ‘anxiety’ overcomes her there is a
suggestion that her attempt to escape Manfred will be futile. Furthermore, with
the threat of capture imminent, the dramatic thrust of proliferates in the
midst of a pursuit heightens the dramatic thrust of Walpole’s narrative. The
‘blasts of wind’ that only occur ‘now and again’ connote an air (no pun
intended) of the unpredictable, again placing another aspect of Isabella’s
surroundings beyond her control and reason. These descriptions, found within
the ‘labyrinth of darkness’, in some way seem designed to assault Isabella’s
senses, rather than permit her the empirical reason to think rationally. The
darkness impairs her vision, whilst the rusty creaks perforating the ‘awful
silence’ haunt her hearing. It could be said that in its subversion of
empiricism, The Castle of Otranto can again be seen to expose the
irrational potential in a supposedly rational method of reasoning. Above all
though, the nauseating and vertiginous delirium Isabella’s senses force her to
endure instead enables Walpole’s text to hybridise Enlightenment perspectives
on reason, method and irrationality.
Bibliography
Fix, Andrew Cooper, Prophecy and Reason: The Dutch Collegiants in the Early Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991)
Walpole,
Horace, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2014)
Wilson,
Ellen Judy and Reill, Peter Hanns ed. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (New York: Facts on File,
2004)
