From the Gothic Castle to the Romantic Haunted House: Disbelief, Conversion, Aporia, Abjection

Abstract

We all acknowledge that the haunted house that saw an effulgence in Victorian English literature looks back to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first text to call itself A Gothic Story in its second edition (1765), and transplants its castle replete with fragmentary ghosts, recalling that these are haunted by Walpole’s prefaces to both editions that urge readers not to believe in the medieval supernatural that underwrites his tale’s apparitions. Yet the decades that intervene between eighteenth-century Gothic and later Victorian hauntings (what we still call the Romantic era) produce only occasional haunted houses, and what appears in this vein exhibits a struggle, rooted in Otranto, over which elements of the Walpolean Gothic to convert, reject, half-employ, or half-satirize. By analyzing examples from Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” to Walter Scott’s The Antiquary and Byron’s Don Juan, this article shows that such insecurity in the Romantic haunted-house motif epitomizes the fundamental relationship of the Gothic to the Romantic. Here Gothicized houses become microcosms for abjecting the unresolved tugs-of-war among conflicting but pervasive ideologies over and against which Romantic writing strives to build its imaginative, and even its ironical, resolutions.