The Castle of Otranto

Dali's The Castle of Otranto

We can find many inexplicable or improbable events in The Castle of Otranto, as well as a supernatural atmosphere that contrasts with the realism of other novels, so The Castle of Otranto is full of information and details that make it “true” or, at least, a bit more trustable. Reality was somehow linked to information and details. I find this very interesting, as Swift did the samewhen he wrote Gulliver’s Travels -maybe in a different way though- , and actually I talked about it in another post.

As people did not think that reading false or “unreal” stories was worthy, many writers had to claim the story true, and Walpole did it by giving many details and by saying that the book was originally a manuscript. I think that one important device is the original title:  The Castle of Otranto, A Story. Translated by William Marshal, Gent. From the Original Italian of Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of the Church of St. Nicholas at Otranto. It tells us not only about the original novel, but also about the writer and his profession. If readers take the narrator as a real person, they would probably believe the story itself to be true.

By making the story “real”, Walpole attracted many readers that, otherwise, would not be interested in reading that kind of stories since, as I said before, many people thought that “fake” stories were not good stories, and that reading them was unworthy.

Realism was somehow linked to density of detail and to actions that could possibly happen, so many writers of the period used this technique in order to make their stories read.