Gothic’s Death Drive

‘Every thing tends directly to the catastrophe.’ Is this not to specify the leitmotiv of the Gothic? Here, in the Preface to the first edition of The Castle of Otranto , Horace Walpole articulates the interest of what is presented as a recovered manuscript of a 16th‐century Italian story. But if this statement appears right at the front of Otranto – that is, the novel which will bear the crucial appellation ‘A Gothic Story’ on the occasion of its second edition – so it seems to stand, at the same time, at the head of Gothic itself as structured in terms of a certain telos of catastrophe. Thus, as we shall see, to get to grips with The Castle of Otranto as well as the generic fictions it helps to inspire is to get to grips with Gothic’s death drive. If this phenomenon manifests itself in terms of a certain ‘compulsion to repeat’, to invoke the most familiar Freudian formulation of the death drive, then there is, to be sure, a great deal of evidence as regards its actual reality. We could adduce in this regard the formulaic – in this sense, repetitive – nature of the Gothic and its generic conventions as a distinguishing characteristic of the Gothic that is widely agreed upon. But for the sake of a perhaps more penetrating analysis, we shall examine other ways in which a repetition compulsion appears at work in The Castle of Otranto (amongst other things, this is a story that begins with a death, featuring several others afterwards). In this article, the logic of this then carries through into an examination of some of the key imitations of Otranto that appeared after the ‘Gothic Story’ of 1765: ‘Sir Bertrand, A Fragment’ by Anna Laetitia and John Aikin (the former, later known as Anna Laetitia Barbauld), and The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve. For literary imitation in itself offers a further perception of what repetition, at the level of a certain sublimation of Gothic’s death drive, looks like here in the Gothic.