It's that time once again. In this installment, mostly people talk, but there is an attempt to wrongfully execute a guy.

CW for y'all: no actual incest happens, but the word comes up because the confused family relations, literal and figurative, make this the spectral sin Manfred is trying to commit, even though technically it's not actually incest.

Plot Summary

• Matilda, who you may remember as Manfred's daughter, is shut up in her room for the night with her servant Bianca. They're missing Isabella, who hasn't come back yet. They talk about the ghosts in the castle, Isabella, and whether Matilda should become a nun or get married. We are to understand this is a long-running debate.
• Bianca points out that Matilda would love whoever showed up at the castle if only they were pale with curly black hair. This is a joke: Matilda, it turns out, is obsessed with the portrait of Alfonso in the gallery. This will be important later.
• Peasant, whose name is Theodore, I was right, breaks into their conversation accidentally. He's basically at the window of the room he's been shut up in lamenting. They talk briefly, but when he asks about Isabella -- hoping to hear that she's safely escaped -- Matilda assumes he's just some skeevy dude up in Isabella's DMs and shuts the window.
• This is one of the most important moments in the plot, because there's a good amount of crosstalk that keeps fucking the characters over. If they'd had a slightly longer conversation, they would have known each other in the events to come. If this sounds like the way shit keeps getting worse in a Shakespeare play, you are correct.
• Meanwhile, Manfred is convinced that Theodore is Isabella's lover, and that they were a-trystin'. Father Jerome shows up while Manfred is Manfredding all over the place about this problem.
• Father Jerome runs the nearby abbey that Isabella has escaped to. He's come because he knows what happened and he wants to talk Manfred down. Jerome is a frequent visitor, because he works closely with Hippolyta on church matters and praying and such like.
• If you are noticing that this is mostly people talking and the summary isn't that funny, you are correct. All the action, so to speak, is at the end, and while all of this is important it's not all that interesting.
• So, with Jerome there, the church's representative in the area, Manfred takes the opportunity to get him alone and convince him to give Manfred a divorce.
• Jerome actually confronts him about Isabella first, and starts to have this conversation in front of Hippolyta. Manfred calms down because this would be Very Bad, and Hippolyta, seeing he's distressed, leaves of her own volition.
• This conversation is a big deal. It establishes that Manfred is not a pulp villain who does evil because he's evil. He doesn't love his wife but he respects her, and calls her a saint. This is another genre marker being made ab initio: the traditional gothic villain is never just a huge douchebag. They have feelings and can be touched by pity, love, and fear. They are driven by a hidden spring that forces them past these feelings. Think of Heathcliff.
• Jerome does calm Manfred down, mostly by stalling. Manfred's excuse is that he discovered that he and Hippolyta are related. That means he has been unknowingly engaging in incest. This is a lie. And in fact it's an irony, since everyone considers his relationship with Isabella to be that of a father. As father-in-law, he's basically her second dad. And so his apparent desire to get her pregnant is effectively incestual.
• Jerome says he'll think about this and write to Rome. This is bullshit. But it works, Manfred calms down and considers that this keeps Isabella nearby at the least. Jerome, though, starts to get high on his own supply (of bullshit, is the joke here), and so when Manfred asks if Isabella and Theodore were lovers, Jerome says there was some interest at least.
• This is also a lie. He thinks the jealousy will make Manfred desire Isabella less. Jerome doesn't know two things. One: Manfred doesn't desire Isabella so much as he needs her because, for Reasons, he's obsessed with continuing his bloodline, and so he needs male heirs. Two: Manfred asked Theodore if he was Isabella's lover and Theodore obviously said no.
• Oh, and the third thing Jerome doesn't know is that Theodore is imprisoned in the castle. So Manfred drags him down to the court yard to execute him.
• Before we can get to the big set piece, Matilda walks by with Bianca. She gets interested because Theodore looks exactly like the portrait of Alfonso and as much as she passed it off as a joke, she is in fact kind of obsessed with that portrait. Just like Bianca said, she sort of immediately gets the hots for Theodore.
• Then, of course, she hears that Manfred's about to kill the guy, and promptly faints. This briefy distracts Manfred who checks on her, and of course he rolls his eyes when he finds out she's just fainted. But since Bianca is hollering that her mistress is dead, and since Theodore only knew about one noblewoman in this castle, he concludes Manfred his Isabella back in his clutches. His concern re-convinces Manfred that they were lovers and to the courtyard they go.
• This is where the action happens. There's a lot of big talk, Theodore saying he is content to die because he has not sinned enough to go to hell, and Jerome is there to offer him his dying rites. Jerome does so, and keeps trying to convince Manfred to spare him. He feels -- somewhat correctly, lol -- that this is his fault.
• Plot twist time: Jerome finds a birthmark on Theodore's shoulder demonstrating that A: Theodore is Jerome's child and B: is therefore a noble. There's no explanation yet but Jerome assures Manfred that he was not a bastard (conceived, presumably, before Jerome received holy orders) and is the rightful count of Falconara.
• They start to get into what this means when trumpets blare on the walls and the helmet's sable plumes wave ominously in the air.

Evil Gothic

18th Century gothic is interesting because its evils are very human. The supernatural often appears in a secondary role. 19th century gothic, like Frankenstein, Dracula, and so on, feature the supernatural more centrally, though I've also used those two examples on purpose: at the beginning of the century we get the Creature, who is not innately evil and in fact performs evil acts as a form of revenge against the evil perpetuated on him by Victor, an unassuming nerd who nopes out of child support payments (so, a huge dick, but not a supervillain). However, at century's end we get the titular Dracula, a malevolent, supernatural force marauding through history.

This speaks to more than a genre development, but it is enmeshed with it. My point is basically that evil was imagined differently in the mid 1700s as it was in the late 1800s. Very (very very very) broadly speaking, we can say that the gothic fiction of the 18th century shows us a fascination with people in power ultimately becoming evil as a result of desire and the past's power over us. Manfred is obsessed with preserving his line because, as we'll see later in the novel, his family usurped the castle and the noble line from the "rightful" heirs. He knows this, and he knows that if he should ever fail to continue his line the entire place will fall down around his ears (figuratively, though, I mean, turns out also literally). He desires that continuation. He's also trapped into a situation: his child wasn't killed by a random accident but by Providence, by a supernatural force bending back towards justice. If it weren't Manfred it would be his dad or his son, this was going to happen.

By contrast, we get gothic villains in the 19th century who are simply evil because of Herbert Spencer. I'm not going to bore you to death by summarzing chapter one of my dissertation, but the very truncated tl;dr is that Darwin's theories of evolution sparked deep and intense existential angst in the Victorian mind, but Darwin didn't really write about humans much, and when he did he didn't say much about societies. It was Herbert Spencer who took Darwin's theories -- really, a bad misunderstanding of them -- and applied them to human societies.

When I say Herbert Spencer invented racism I do not mean people weren't racist before Spencer, they certainly were; he kind of shaped the final form of racism as we know it today, in all its pseudoscientific glory.

So the Victorians were freaking out basically because it turns out everything they hated was natural (not really). Violence, hatred, lust, these weren't -- or weren't only -- religious relics, but powerful "natural instincts" that evolved humans could overcome but "degenerates" were victims of.

Writers such as Lombroso wrote whole books about how criminals were born, and that they had to be removed from the gene pool (mmmm eugenics 🤮 ). Useful or not, Victorian penal theory actually aimed at reforming criminals by teaching them useful trades (that, somehow, totally coincidentally, were the trades that weren't very well compensated). Lombroso is one of the people responsible for the contemporary penal theory that prison is just for keeping people away from the general population, because obviously they will continue to Crime if allowed to (the eugenics got buried but it's obviously still present in the dna).

What does all this have to do with Castle of Otranto? Well, as most of the theorists on the gothic will tell you, gothic fiction tends to reflect the anxiety of its times. And since gothic fiction is a genre, bound up in its conventions, there are conventional means of expressing that anxiety.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: people get anxious about overpopulation, consumerism, and conformity and zombies get popular.

How about this one: people start to notice that bloodless aristocrats control their lives and prey on them and vampires get popular. Look closely at War of the Worlds. It's a vampire novel.

So the thing is, Otranto set these conventions. And the thing about traditional gothic is that it's always about the past in some way. It's often set in the past -- Walpole, in the 1700s, was at least four centuries removed from the setting of his novel. The past is important to gothic because that's where the bad things come from. Be it the supernatural comeuppance of family misdeeds or the curse of vampirism that creates a monster, the past is fucking frightening.

This marks the gothic as overtly European and post-enlightenment, mind you. And it's why good works that complicate that assumption slap so hard in today's gothic fiction.

But, basically, an important element of the genre of gothic fiction was set early, by Walpole, because "weird" fiction tends to come out of the cracks and show people stuff they don't really want to think about or look at.

Keep that in mind when we talk about the grotesque at some point in the future.

To bring this back around to Manfred, though: Manfred decides to do evil things. And to some degree, he knows they're evil things. He does them anyway, because, to borrow the cliche, he believes the ends justify the means.

Good old cliches

Walpole didn't invent the rest of these cliches, of course, but he inserted them directly into gothic fiction's veins. Long lost heirs, family curses, these were all part and parcel of the romance genre that Walpole is developing from.

Doubt

This was far more pronounced in chapter one, but it continues now: no one knows anything. This should come up again when we get to more focused talk on terror and so on, but it's important to notice that no one has any fucking clue of what's happening at any given moment. All of gothic fiction is in the dark, so to speak.