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Proto‐Gothicism: The Infernal Iconography of Walpole's Castle of Otranto
Author(s) -
Frank Frederick S.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1985.tb01083.x
Subject(s) - iconography , iconology , symbol (formal) , art , literature , art history , philosophy , linguistics
Summary An analysis of the major supernatural icons or horror symbols of the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), suggests that the work's infernal iconography expresses in a fully developed way the central themes of the emergent Gothic tradition: a malign and disorderly cosmos; the impotency of rationalism; supernatural terror and horror as the prevailing conditions of the Gothic universe. The iconography of Gothicism derives from older positive value Systems, codes of religious belief or symbols of social stability, but converts these traditional positive representations of order and security into an iconography of fear, doubt, loss, disintegration of self and disruption of natural law. The primary example of this process of iconographic inversion whereby the negative or darker side of the symbol becomes the dominant object of terror in the Gothic world is the sentient architecture of the haunted Castle of Otranto itself, a former refuge now become a site of terror. Concentrating on the mobile icons of the castle's interior and applying a theory of iconology developed by Theodore Ziolkowski in his Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology , the essay explores Walpole's proto‐Gothic achievement in preparing the way for the vast eruption of Gothic fiction that would follow in the last decades of the Eighteenth Century.