It goes to say with little doubt that “The Castle of Otranto” is the original Gothic tale, with its abundant tropes and cliches which litter the genre in its current iteration. It has set the stage for countless works to come, however reading it in the present day it reads more like a comedy than the expected dark and morbid piece of writing. While it does deal with the serious topics, death being one that is introduced very early, with the demise of Manfred’s son Conrad upon the morn of his wedding. And that leading to the grieving mother fainting, another trope of the genre to name a few. Overall however the the text and the context are very serious but the character of Manfred often reads like an incompetent villain on a children Saturday morning cartoon show. He does present a very serious threat to Isabella who for all intensive purposes is the maiden in distress, when he pursues her in order to take her in marriage by force and have potentially have a son in order to stave off the threat he perceives to his kingdom. However each time he deals with his subjects or for that matter even Theodore when he finds him in the cellar. While the text it self does not lend to being a comedic piece the actions surrounding it do; Manfred’s servants talking over each other, his inability to command direct authority over the affairs of his kingdom, or his rationalizing thoughts. The book is truly a Gothic work but to me only strictly in the sense that it fulfills the criteria established. Which is not difficult to do considering that the criteria are created based on the book it self.
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I agree, a lot of your examples makes this text feel like it’s a satire. Especially, how the servants always disregarded what Manfred would ask if them. I never thought of the humor in the relationship between Isabelle and Manfred. Considering the book made her seem so weak being the damsel in distress, it should have been very easy for Manfred to subdue her. Manfreds was the lord of the kingdom but acted like a child throwing fits when people wouldn’t do what he wanted. It reminds me of in Alice in Wonderland when the Red Queen would say “off with his head” at everything she didn’t like. This comment made me look at the text very differently.
I agree with you so much that this book can be passed off more as comical to us in the 21st century due to us being so much more desensitized to ghost and other random dismembered body parts laying around because our horror movies are so much worse than the 20 the century literature novels which were limited to just Horace Walpole’s imagination, but i am almost certainly positive that this may have been an uneasy read to the people of the 20th century but we can clearly establish that this had been the first write of its time.
I agree with you so much that this book can be passed off more as comical to us in the 21st century due to us being so much more desensitized to ghost and other random dismembered body parts laying around because our horror movies are so much worse than the 20 the century literature novels which were limited to just Horace Walpole’s imagination, but i am almost certainly positive that this may have been an uneasy read to the people of the 20th century but we can clearly establish that this had been the first write of its time.