SOURCE: "Gothic Fathers: The Castle of Otranto, The Italian, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer," in Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence, Princeton University Press, 1980.

In the following excerpt from her Ghosts of the Gothic: Austen, Eliot, & Lawrence (1980), Wilt examines the religious import of Walpole's Gothic tale.

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1765) is a rather gormless tale for which Walpole claimed little, and even the claim he did make—"Terror, the author's principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing"¹—is not entirely true. Its merits are not in character, plot, or prose, nor as he had thought, in the dramatic structure, but in half a dozen memorable tableaux,² frozen moments of action, which are almost certainly lifted from Walpole's dreams, and maybe yours and mine too.

The narrative proper begins, like a primer in Gothic plot, with the father: "Manfred, Prince of Otranto, had one son...