Discuss this extract from 'The Castle of Otranto' by Horace Walpole in relation to the Gothic genre.

(Answer would typically be a whole essay, but here is an example introduction and paragraph.)

Written in 1764, Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’ is widely accepted as the first defined gothic novel. The extract reflects many key themes of the genre itself, such as the dark setting and the characters, as well as many key themes, such as light and dark, terror and emotion versus rationality.

The setting appears to be an important element of the text itself as it is the title of the novel. In the extract, the reader gets a glimpse of what lies below the castle with a semantic field of the underground, such as ‘cavern’ and ‘subterraneous’. Certainly, towards the end of the extract, these ‘subterraneous regions’ become symbolic of fear and the edge of the subconscious. Upon the earth, reality and truth as prevalent, but below, in the ‘total darkness’, the setting becomes a stage for fear to affect the mind: Isabella is ‘far from tranquil’ and ‘under so much anxiety’ (another example of the semantic field of ‘under’) because underground, in the darkness, is the realm of the Other. Emphasised at the end of the extract with ‘chasm’, connoting an endless pit and inescapable darkness, it shows how the darkness of the mind, the subconscious Other, can never be escaped. Despite seeing the light of the moon, it is described as ‘an imperfect ray of clouded moonshine’, which implies the light of truth is being veiled (‘clouded’) by the darkness. The binary opposites of light and dark, truth and the imagination, are common themes found in other gothic novels, a convention started by Walpole, such as in Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ where the fight between the dark, supernatural Dracula and the scientific truth forms the crux of the novel. Frequently, the setting of a castle is used as a phallic symbol to emphasise the power of a man’s dominion over the people inside. The extract implies Walpole started this gothic tradition with the first sentence ‘the lower part of the castle’ being interpreted symbolically as a sexual reference to the nether regions of man trapping the beautiful, ‘conscious innocence’ of the woman. However, the setting of ‘The Castle of Otranto’ doesn’t just symbolise the predatory masculine character, but also his mental state. The ‘long labyrinth of darkness’ implies Manfred has a twisted mind of dark thoughts, as the ‘labyrinth’ has traditionally been associated with monsters and evil, such as the Minotaur in the original myth. Although the exploration of psychology becomes more present in later gothic novels, such as Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, it is clear Walpole had been exploring the darker territories of the mind, either through the setting as an allusion to Manfred, or as symbolic of the subconscious Other.