"what the fuck" you might say. What the fuck indeed.
I'm nearing the end of the volume of Walpole from which my Otranto series came. It also includes The Mysterious Mother, Walpole's closet drama about an incestuous mother's lifelong ardent penitence and the eventual tragedy that results from an evil monk manipulating events. That's all I'm going to say about the incest, except to point out that the play's sources are clearly works such as Oedipus Rex, Phedre, and so on.
Walpole knew the people of his time and country wouldn't accept a production, and so he tamped down his desire to see it on stage and printed a few copies for friends. Naturally, some of those copies escaped into the wild. To prevent pirate editions, Walpole gave in and permitted an official printing. He was basically right about the reaction, though there were far more favorable reviews than he had expected.
Recorded in the diary of Fanny Burney is a strong negative reaction. She was a novelist and a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, and borrowed the queen's copy. Burney knew Walpole personally, I should point out; they were friends, and he had taken her on a tour of his "gothic villa," Strawberry Hill.
Here's a selection from her reaction:
Dreadful was the whole! truly dreadful! a story of so much horror, from atrocious and voluntary guilt, never did I hear!.... For myself, I felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast and warm in my mind, against the wilful author of a story so horrible: all of the entertainment and pleasure I had received from Mr. Walpole seemed extinguished by this lecture, which almost made me regard him as the patron of the vices he had been pleased to record."1
It's worth reading this response carefully: from previously recorded delight at the writing, and from her past experience of happiness and friendship with Walpole, Burney pivots to a kind of moral outrage. The play doesn't depict the "vices," to be clear; it also clearly repudiates them, though the engine of the play, to borrow his phrasing from the preface to Otranto, is to simultaneously build up the past sin of the Countess while engendering feelings of pity for her in the audience. This pity in no way obviates the "crime" she has committed.
From that pivot Burney goes on to say that she felt as though Walpole -- with absolutely no concrete reason whatsoever -- was "the patron of the vices he had been pleased to record." She felt as though he approved of the crime. The mere fact that he had been "pleased to record" it -- even in passing, and not directly depicted on stage -- meant that he must in some way find them acceptable.
You may find this familiar if you're engaged in any fandom discourse, as it's a perennial problem nowadays. It's very common for fanfic authors -- and increasingly, even "traditional" authors -- to be pilloried online for being bad people just for writing about bad things. And mind you, this has nothing to do with something like content warnings or revenge porn or something like that. It's about the ability of art to take on any topic, and for good art to help readers think about it.
If I have a thesis here, it's really this: this problem is older than you think. Indeed, the gothic is an excellent analogue for fandom within genre and fandom studies. Both were considered transgressive, weird, feminine, maudlin, schlocky, and lesser than other forms of art. They have reputations for being full of tropes, of using mechanical plots to pilot meager characters towards bombastic climaxes... the comparisons can go on.
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Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother. Frederick S. Frank, ed. Broadview Press. p. 303. Print.
