“Some Fatal Secret”: Mortmain in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto

In Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matilda spends hours gazing at a portrait of a knight, Alfonso the Good. She explains to her maid, “[…] some how or other my destiny is linked with something relating to him. […] I am sure there is some fatal secret at bottom.” The “fatal secret” is just one of many tropes present in the novel that came to define the genre of “terror fiction” or, as it is now more commonly known, the Gothic novel. Frederick Frank argues that, as a “prototype” for the Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto “furnishes a symbolic glossary for evoking dread, for arousing pleasure in the irrational and for establishing an iconography of an unholy and malignant cosmos governed only by absurd forces.” One of these “absurd forces” is the notion of property and the laws surrounding it. Questions about what constitutes property and what it means to own it were subjects of widespread public debate throughout the eighteenth century, a debate in which Gothic literature had a powerful voice. The uncertainty surrounding the changing economy and the tensions resulting from it are manifested in the novel’s depiction of a Gothic world, an imaginative landscape dominated by a haunted castle and founded on a fatal secret. This paper examines how the novel uses the “symbolic glossary” of the Gothic to interrogate issues of property, arguing that supernatural forces at work in the novel embody economic ideas: dead hands keeping a grip on their property from beyond the grave. The haunted castle is one of the most ubiquitous symbols in Walpole’s “symbolic glossary.” Indeed, castles are omitted from Ann Tracy’s index to Gothic motifs in The Gothic Novel, 1790–1830 because, as she notes, “Castles, […] are so pervasive a device that no purpose can be served by the recitation of two hundred novels that have them.” The haunted castle is rich with interpretive possibilities and is variously read as a symbol of the female body, as feminized space, and as a symbol of England’s feudal past. This paper, however, reads the castle as a material object—a piece of real estate that can be inherited, bought, and sold—in order to focus on the economic ideas at the core of The Castle of Otranto. The field of political economy emerged out of the same cultural and historical moment as the Gothic—Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published just twelve years after The Castle of Otranto—and the notion of property is central to both. Issues surrounding property were particularly contentious in late–eighteenth-century Britain, as Paul Langford explains in Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798. Property law was complex and often self-contradictory, as it sought to reconcile legal regulations with laws of custom as applied to different types of ownership. The complex of ideas surrounding property law was wide-ranging, covering slavery, marriage, and the property of one’s person; intellectual property and copyright; public versus private property and enclosure; and legitimacy and inheritance. Legitimacy concerns not only the legalities of primogeniture and strict settlement, which were themselves complex, but also questions about the very source of legitimacy. As Langford explains, some believed property to be divinely granted, while others located the source of authority in the less exalted sphere of social, political, and economic convention. Ownership of land had, since the Revolution of 1688, taken the place of royal lineage as a source of power. Modes of ownership that preserved the economic and political dominance of the aristocracy based on land ownership, such as inheritance by blood, were increasingly challenged by a rising bourgeoisie and their …