I've been thinking about where to go with blogging next and, by coincidence, reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which is pretty much the perfect thing to read if you are trying to put off thinking about more serious issues.
The Castle came along with Christmas. I was given an e-Reader (a wondrous thing) and it came with 100 books prepackaged. Many of these were selected for the very good reason that they are in the public domain, and thus The Castle of Otranto.
I'd never read it. I'd heard of it because it, along with Ann Radcliffe, was introduced as background in English literature courses I took a long time ago. None of my professors thought these things worth reading. The woman who taught me, who now lives up the street from me, dismissed Gothic literature as stuff for empty-headed 18th century girls. Another professor who taught me gave the impression that classic Gothic novels were just like the stuff you find the in Fantasy Literature section of bookstores today.
It was only last year that I read Ann Radcliffe for the first time and only this Christmas that I read The Castle of Otranto for the first time. It's great stuff.
There is not a lot of characterization in these novels. Some might argue that they are, therefore, not really novels but romances. That's fine with me. That they are very entertaining is all I'd claim.
Two things about them jump out at me. The first is the very heavy debt to Shakespeare. I know, I know, serious readers will say, "This is nothing like Shakespeare," meaning by that that it is not nearly as great. And that is fine but consider the famous comparison of classic French cooking and Big Macs. In classic French cooking it is not the meat that gives a dish its distinction so much as the sauce that goes with it and in a Big Mac ... I'm sure you can figure the rest out.
These writers also tell stories that feel like told stories just as Shakespeare does. It isn't hard to imagine how Shakespeare might have treated them.
This is armchair tourism literature. Like Shakespeare, neither Walpole nor Radcliffe had seen the foreign places they right about. Radcliffe obviously spent a certain amount of time with guidebooks creating background but background is all it is. All her scenes could take place on a stage with a painted background. Or you could leave the background out as Walpole does; the settings for Otranto are "a castle", "a monastery", "some caves" and various "private chambers" within the castle. And that is all there is. When reading this, you imagine people with wooden swords standing on a stage acting out parts.
The other thing that jumps out at you when you read these stories is the Catholicism. It jumped out at first generation readers too. It is partly a real Catholicism but also partly an imagined one. In theory these writers, especially Radcliffe, are giving us a critique of Catholicism and the presentation is not intended to be charitable.
In one of history's many ironies, the effect was quite the opposite for many because the caricature of Catholicism that was presented, probably precisely because it was a caricature, proved to be liberating for many.
We do this all the time if you think about it. Cultural caricatures are often demeaning for the people who are, in theory anyway, targeted by the caricature. But often these caricatures are just as much, if not more, about wish-fulfillment fantasy for the people promoting them.
Modern soul and dance music as well as Japanese Anime cartoons, for example, trade in racial and sexual stereotypes that are often enthusiastically embraced by young black men and young Japanese women. Pay attention to both sets of stereotypes and you can see what young white women and men wish there partners were like.
You may say, but these things are an exaggerated cartoon and not real life at all! And you are right but that is precisely what makes it safe for those young women who listen soul singers exalt a very muscular, dominant forceful idea of male sexuality. But don't kid yourself, if the men in their own lives could be more like that they wouldn't say no. Likewise the image of womanhood you find, for example, in Anime is not one that most men would say no to; that is to say very feminine and even girly and dressed in a very neat, feminine and erotically elaborate fashion. Again, we have all been taught that we aren't allowed to ask for this sort of thing so we don't ask (most of us anyway). But if the gift were offered, it would not been turned down by many.
The Catholicism you find in English Romanticism beginning with the Gothic novels is often like that. It gives in to the sensually appealing aspects of Catholicism in a "safe" way.
As it turned out, not as safe as was imagined. Anyway, as the year starts off that is where my interest will be. It's something that has always fascinated me and a natural follow-up to Brideshead Revisited.
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