Calliope

This is actually the third of Poe's stories about Auguste Dupin, the first fictional detective, but it's the best one, and the most obviously gothic. The others are "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Do not read the second, it's awful.

Here, Dupin must steal back a stolen letter that can be used to blackmail the queen, as she's carrying on an affair. The minister who steals it, only ever referred to as D--- (a method in 18th and 19th century writing of concealing a person's name), took it right before her eyes, as to protest the theft would be to reveal to her husband, standing nearby, that there's something worth stealing on her desk.

Now, you should read this story. It's extremely good. But if I tell you why it's a great gothic narrative I'll spoil the good bit, so here's the link, let's talk after:

OK, so here's the thing: the story very quietly leaves hints lying around and you can figure out, if you read very carefully, or, and I mean I did this, or if you read the essay in the back of the Norton Poe that argues this -- Dupin and the minister are brothers. "D---" is just "Dupin," the entire thing is a trick.

Dupin says the minister did him a bad turn once, in a tone that brooks no discussion; something bad happened. Dupin also says the minister will know his writing on sight, without needing a signature to figure out who wrote the note he leaves behind.

That means this is a doppelganger story, a common gothic trope since at least Hoffman's "The Sand-Man," though Poe is one of the most important vectors from which Anglophone gothic literature got the trope (apart from this story there's also "William Wilson").

Why it matters that this is a doppelganger story is that it's among the earliest detective fiction, which means that entire genre is about a person becoming a doppelganger of someone else, learning their habits and copying them in order to anticipate their movements and divine their secrets.

That's the good shit, my friends.

This is it, the big ending and all the reveals! I said recently that I intended to do this in two parts, but I think I'm going to try for one. I write this all unknowing, let's see what happens.

The Plot

• Manfred is convinced that Isabella and Theodore are trysting in secret. He goes to Frederic and puts his case to him again. Frederic, previously agreeing to the double marriage, is having second thoughts.
• But look apparently Matilda is mad hot, so he says yes again.
• Enter, as we might write in a script, the domestics. She comes in screaming and yelling. Once they dig through Walpole's idea of what poor people speak like (disconnected ranting basically), what's happened is that a giant hand, to match the previous giant foot, has appeared, and Bianca is leaving.
• Manfred of course poo poos this, but Frederic, believing her behavior to be genuine and not to be second hand, tells Manfred he will never marry Isabella: Manfred's under the curse of heaven.
• However, there's time for one more fucking weird thing before the novel ends: Frederic still really has the hots for Matilda, so he's sort of reconsidering his reconsideration. He seeks Hippolyta, because he wants to assure himself that Manfred's divorce is actually going to happen. He enters her chambers, and from there her private devotional room.
• Now this is the metal shit, just real sicko gothic amazement: Frederic sees a figure knelt in prayer. It rises and removes its hood and it's a fucking skeleton -- and better yet, it's the ghost of the hermit who led Frederic to find Isabella in the first place.

I want this in a block, this is some cool shit. Here's the scene.

That, as they say, is that.

• Pissed off at the world, Manfred does what any self-respecting dude would do: gets kinda toasted. Liquored up, he hits on Isabella at supper, and she shuts her door in his face.
• Now assuming she's rushing off to meet Theodore, he meets the servant who was spying in the church. He affirms Theodore entered, with a lady, but it was not clear who.
• Here, I might take a moment to point out, is the uncertainty rearing its head again.
• Manfred is certain Isabella has run off, and so he rushes to the church, sees Theodore talking to a woman, and stabs the shit out of her. Like, in the chest, this lady is dead now.
• Except it'll be 8 pages or so before she dies, we have to get the rest of the novel in.
• Also I just bet you see what's coming here: it was Matilda. Manfred has killed his daughter, who was coming to the church to pray and met Theodore by chance.
• They rush Matilda back to the castle. Manfred is finally broken, and repents all his actions. Hippolyta sits by her daughter's death bed. Theodore weeps and kisses her and tries to get Jerome to marry them right now, like, right now right now.
• Frederic, being That Guy, takes a moment from grieving the death of Matilda to say Theodore is being a little entitled shit -- not for any reason you would approve of, but because he's a landless bastard.
• And here comes the rest of that story. Theodore blurts out that he's the rightful prince of Otranto. Jerome fills in the rest. When Alfonso went to the crusades, he was stuck in port for several months near Sicily, and married a young peasant woman there. Naturally she was pregnant. Alfonso's intention was to bring her home with him upon the return leg of his journey. But he died. His wife, Victoria, had her child, a daughter. That daughter married Jerome.
• And how did he die? Oh yeah, Manfred's grandfather poisoned him. Ricardo was his name, and the entire will was a forgery. Ricardo, on his way back home is beset by storms, because he's a filthy poisoning usurper. But he swears to build two churches when he gets back, so Heaven says, yeah, cool, sounds good.¹ But, when there's no male heir, the whole kit and caboodle is going back to Alfonso's line.

Here's another point where I want to put the text in front of you. This is it, the big climax. When everyone goes out into the courtyard, hearing shit falling down around their ears, Manfred cries out that Matilda is dead and a big old giant pops out of the castle, ruining it in the process. He grabs his sword and helmet and flies into Heaven.

Yes. Hell yeah.

• There's a bit left. Actually the explanations above happen after the giant appears, But I saved him until nearly last. Manfred, after explaining his grandfather's crime, laments, agrees to give up any claim he has to the demesne.
• Manfred and Hippolyta cloister themselves away in their respective churches.
• Frederic offers Isabella to Theodore, who's too depressed to say yes. But she stays on, and they become friends over how sad they are, and then they get married.
• Seriously. This is the final sentence of the novel:

But Theodore’s grief was too fresh to admit the thought of another love; and it was not until after frequent discourses with Isabella of his dear Matilda, that he was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.

Loose Ends

Does that ending feel satisfying? I can't remember which book I read it in, but at one point in grad school I read that some critics have pointed out that the unsatisfying ending of Otranto may be to leave the reader unsettled. It both gives you the moralizing ending that it's "supposed to," where the sort-of incestuous villain gets his just desserts, and at the same time it refuses to let you get satisfaction from it because God did it, everyone kinda sucks, and really wasn't the fun part watching Manfred be an evil shit?

I think this is a good reading, but it bears complication: Walpole thought of this as a kind of play, not really a novel; anyway, the strictures of the novel were not as binding then as now. And plays, if you've seen or read anything from Shakespeare to Racine, do not have to give a single fuck about whether you're happy at the end. Things just fucking happen up on that stage, and the immediacy of the performance will make things work that might not appear to on paper.

With that said, it's also worth noting that the five chapters of the novel probably correspond to the typical five act play structure.

Big Reveals

I've teased on several occasions that I would talk about the grotesque and the kinds of gothic fear. But to my surprise, this novel doesn't really provide any good ways into those topics. Things happen to quickly for dread. The dead and dying are beauteous with their hopes for Heaven, and don't disgust onlookers even as they remind them of death. No nuns are getting trampled to death here. ²

Understand right now that I'm not promising anything in a hurry, but I already bought a better edition of the second gothic novel, Vathek. So I'll probably be back here at some point in the future, doing this again. So please look forward to those topics in the future.

If anyone wants me to read Radcliffe in the future, give me money. Like, seriously, I may start some kind of campaign on Ko-Fi and Patreon.

At any rate, I titled this section Big Reveals.

Here's a comment from one of the footnotes:

It might be said that the Gothic novel is a primitive detective story in which God or fate is the detective. (Bleiler, qtd in Otranto, Frank, ed. p. 162.)

This is both a good point and a bad one. It's a good point because it makes us think about detective fiction. It's bad because all detective fiction is gothic fiction.

Again, referring to that kind of "genetic code of genre" metaphor we used a while back, detective fiction is a descendant of the gothic.

The first detective story, in the western world at least, is The Memoirs of Vidocq. Non-fiction, at least at first, they were actual memoirs, of an actual thief that the French authorities released from jail once he helped them catch an even more skilled thief. He became a kind of consultant for the police.

This presumably sounds familiar to you.

The series was quite long, and eventually became fiction, but still with that veneer of non-fiction on it.

The first overtly fictional detective story, though, is by Edgar Allan Poe. He invented the genre, basically, with "Murders in the Rue Morgue." And if you haven't read that, here's the thing: the narrator is friends with the detective, Dupin, and they both live alone and take long walks at night, while sleeping in the day, in their rooms where they've covered over all the windows so they can live in perpetual gloom. Skulls and other macabre decorations litter the rooms. These fuckers are goth in two senses of the word (gothic fictional and also club kids; they are not, in fact, Visigoths).

The gothic is always about a mystery, right? There's a thing in the darkness, and you don't want to see it, but you have to see it. People creep around in graveyards and in catacombs, finding clues that add up to horrifying discoveries.

It's just that the detective uses the power of rationality -- ratiocination in Poe's words -- to reorder the world, to make it make sense again.

Thanks for coming!

I'm leaving it there because we've already run long enough and you probably have something else to do.

An artist did an illustrated edition of Otranto and honestly the images kind of kick ass.

1. That's more common than you might think. It shows up in some Norse sagas as well, and more appropriately, there are a ton of churches in certain parts of France because William the Bastard kept buying the church's approval for his wars of aggression by promising the fund churches and keeping his word afterwards.

2. Yes. In The Monk.