Calliope

This chapter is mostly talking, and so with a very small sample size of four chapters, my speculation from last time seems to be holding up, and we're alternating between action and dialogue chapters.

• Frederic arrives safely at Otranto, and the surgeons care for him and declare him out of danger.
• Isabella and Theodore came too, despite how neither of them should really be anywhere near Manfred at this point.
• If you were wondering how there could be more novel when Isabella escaped Manfred's clutches in chapter one, this is why.
• There is just an amazingly awkward conversation set piece around Frederic's prone form, in his sick bed. Everyone's gathered around.
• Frederic tells his story. He was imprisoned, and while held had a dream, in which he was told to go to a certain wood and there he would learn something necessary to help his daughter. When he's ransomed, he rushes there.
• After a few days, he and his retainers come across a hermit on the verge of death. They aid him, and while he is dying and at peace with the fact, he thanks them for their care. He also says when he first entered these woods, decades before, he was vouchsafed a sign and a message that he should only divulge on his deathbed. Frederic's arrival signals that the message is for him.
• The hermit tells him to dig underneath a certain tree outside the cave. After the hermit dies and Frederic lays him to rest, he and his companions dig, unearthing the giant sword from last chapter. There's a message engraved on it:

Where'er a casque that suits this sword is found,
With perils is thy daughter compass'd round:
Alfonso's blood alone can save the maid,
And quiet a long restless prince's shade.

• Theodore has no idea what this means, depsite being the one in chapter one to recite the local prophecy.
• Isabella yells at him for being rude to her father.
• Manfred turns to look at Theodore and freaks out. Theodore, now armed and in armor, looks exactly like the portrait of Alfonso. He has a strong reaction, and barely calms down when his wife reminds him of Theodore's existence.

First, a quick note on that reaction of Manfred's to Theodore. Manfred thinks he's seeing Alfonso's ghost, and freaks out. This is very clearly inspired by Macbeth's gruesome vision of Banquo, but oddly, the Broadview edition doesn't footnote that -- and it's odd because it footnotes every other instance that even looks like it could be a reference to Shakespeare. Apart from noting it for interest, and as yet further proof of Shakespeare's influence on the book, there's not much to say, but it was worth talking about.

• Riled up again, Manfred beefs with Theodore and Jerome again. But story time isn't over. Theodore tells his tale now.
• When he was five he and his mother were kidnapped by corsairs.
• Yeah, there are pirates in this book. In flashback at least. They don't do much.
• Enslaved, Theodore's mother dies in less than a year, but secrets away a document proving Theodore is the child of the line of Falconara. When the corsairs are taken by Christian sailors, years later, Theodore is set free and dropped off in Sicily, near his father's land. But the raiders had destroyed the mansion when they took Theodore and his mother, so Jerome had sold the land and entered the clergy in the interim.
• Theodore had traveled into this province seeking Jerome's monastery.
• Theodore is allowed by Manfred to stay with his father for the night, but is enjoined on his honor to return the next day. He agrees.
• Matilda and Isabella can't sleep; each has figured out that the other is in love with Theodore, and each believes Theodore to be in love with the other -- maybe. That hesitation comes into play again.
• They talk, which is at first sort of hilariously catty, but they're too nice and so they have what is called "a contest of amity" and each vows to give up their interest.
• In the midst of that, Hippolyta comes in and says she's suggested to Manfred that Frederic and Matilda be wed, thus healing the breach between the two families. This is of course Bad News for Matilda, who is in love with Theodore.
• Isabella finally admits that Manfred said he wanted a divorce and that he wanted to forcibly marry her.
• Hippolyta says she will consent to the divorce, admonishes Matilda for loving someone as poor as Theodore, and goes to see Jerome.
• Jerome is horrified to learn Theodore is in love with Matilda, and makes him come to Alfonso's tomb the folllowing morning (while Matilda and Isabella are talking), to explain why. Theodore naturally doesn't care, and whiles away the night with dreams of Matilda.
• Jerome begins to unfold something big, and in fact begins to overtly quote and mimic the language of Hamlet and the ghost of Hamlet. But he's got a head of steam and just sort of vaguely talks about how God is going to punish Manfred's family.
• It is extremely obvious there's another reveal coming, but Hippolyta comes in at that moment. She asks to speak to Jerome alone, and Theodore, not noticing the intense vibe his father was creating, takes the opportunity to nope out.
• Hippolyta tells Jerome what's been going on, and how she's even willing to go through with the divorce. Jerome hates all these ideas, but all he can really say, in his position, is that the divorce is immoral and the church will never approve and so on, so forth.
• Double meanwhile, Manfred pitches the double marriage plan to Frederic: Frederic marries Matilda and Manfred marries Isabella.
• Frederic says yes. He has two reasons. One, Matilda is pretty. Two, he's all fucked up now and could not win a duel against Manfred. He also comforts himself with the idea that Manfred and Isabella will never have a male heir, and thus his own bloodline will be restored to the principality.
• Manfred goes to the monastery to find Hippolyta, finds her talking to Jerome, and gets hollered at by the friar for his trouble.
• Once again, we're reminded that Manfred has impulses other than evil: he must take a moment to recover from the awe that is inspired in him when Jerome repudiates his plans and threatens him with excommunication. But he still rallies and tells the friar off in turn. He also announces Frederic has accepted his plan, takes Hippolyta away, and orders a servant to wait around in the church to see if anyone else from the castle enters.
• Oh also though, when Manfred said he and Isabella would be wed, the statue of Alphonso, over the tomb, bleeds from its nose. I find it very funny that it doesn't weep, it gets a nosebleed to indicate divine disapprobation.

That's chapter 4! As in chaphter 2, a lot of the heavy lifting was done here, setting up the various relationships, furthering them along, and creating the necessary hooks for further reveals and twists.

Since it's mostly talk, I struggle a bit to conceive of wha to talk about. The topics I know I want to get to eventually are the grotesque, and the varieties of fear. One that suggests itself is the role of the religious personage in the gothic, but I have idle dreams of continuing this series, and it would make much more sense to talk about that when I re-read The Monk.

But what is appropriate for this chapter I think is the idea of foreignness.

The gothic was, effectively, an English genre. That's important because these novels were, for a long time, never set in England. They're often, in fact, set in Italy.

Otranto is set in Italy. So is Udolpho, and I don't think The Italian is just about one Italian guy, but I might be wrong, it's been a long time.

The Monk is set in Spain. Vathek is set in the caliphate. The thing to note here is that the gothic was originally a genre where, explicitly, bad things happened in other countries.

England was soundly Protestant, so all the gothic stories are about Catholics. England was reforming and moving into the future, so all these stories were set in the past. This is not as simple as saying that English authors conformed to, or utilized, their society's xenophobia, but that is part of what's happening.

But remember that the gothic destabilizes things. It undermines our sense of the normal, of the everyday. It's why the gothic became a place one finds queer fiction, and where we still often see it: the gothic is about confusing and blurring lines that everyday people think are clearly demarcated, and often about showing that the lines don't exist at all.

Here's an early elevator pitch for a way to read Otranto: a prince can do bad shit in his demesne and short of God intervening there is fuck all you can do about it. We want to think justice will save us, because we tend to think justice is a thing, a person.

Now, look, I'm an animist, so I do think there is a thing that's like that, but it's not the same as the human justice, the thing where you have to pay back your loans and you tacitly agree not to murder people.

The reason I bring that up in the same chapter that I bring up the gothic's use of the foreign is that everything that the gothic gives you that's revolting is also what we're drawn to.

Think of the ilne above, where Walpole archly says the two maidens have a "content of amity," and then think of how cool Manfred is, sweeping around everywhere, shouting at priests.

Byron wrote an excellent poem titled "Manfred." He didn't write any titled "Theodore." The gothic is where we get the best villains, right? Dracula, Mister Hyde, so on, so forth. Even as we know they're bad, and we deplore their actions, we are drawn to them by the force of the narrative and its transgressive nature.

Gothic fiction was not safe. Women were warned not to read it. Poets wrote about the cold sweats they got when they read it. And the "foreign" aspect of the narratives add to it. They are no longer only the countries that England believes itself to be better than -- they're also the exotic, startling places where cool shit happens.

And fiction is place, isn't it? We "go" there.