Exposing the irrational in an Age of Reason: Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto

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)