The Castle (Symbol)
The eponymous castle of the story is dilapidated and crumbling from the opening pages, which is reminiscent of the ruined catholic churches and monasteries after the Protestant Reformation of 1688. With a Protestant victory, Catholic churches were defaced and left derelict as visual symbols of a defeated and decaying religion. With time, the minds of locals began to fill the ruins with ghosts, suggesting an uneasiness with the past and the bloody horrors it contained. By choosing such a symbolic and ominous setting, Walpole prefigures the violence, upheaval and the supernatural tenor of his novel.
The castle has wider significance, however. The 18th century was a tumultuous time for English politics: early in the century, Walpole’s father was the leader of the prominent political party the Whigs (of which Walpole himself was a member), and during this time their power was such as the warrant the label of “Whig Oligarchy” (Holmes et al., 2014, p. 11). With the accession of George III to the throne in 1760, however – around the time that The Castle of Otranto was written – their power waned dramatically. To gain more sovereign power, King George “broke with the old Whig leadership” (Wikipedia, 2016) and granted power instead to his tutor Lord Bute. Consequently, the party was in sudden tumult, and so the castle is more widely symbolic of the dissolution and instability of English politics at the time.
The Statue of Alfonso (Symbol)
Alfonso was the beneficent former Prince of Otranto, whose statue becomes symbolic of history, its ugly truths, and the inexorable justice it imposes on the present.
It is the helmet of the statue that falls on Conrad, killing the only heir to Manfred’s line. As a symbol it has multiple applications. Primarily, it develops the novel's integral theme that the sins of the father will be visited upon his children. Later in the novel, we learn that Manfred’s grandfather, Ricardo, obtained the principality of Otranto murderously, making Manfred himself illegitimate and Conrad’s death prophetic. Paradoxically, his son’s death makes Manfred seek the hand of his would-be-daughter-in-law, an incestuous union that is duly punished when he mistakenly murders his own daughter, Matilda. Hence, past and present become inextricable from one another, with the sins and violence of history catalyzing the destruction of the present.
In a similar vein, the helmet seems to be a relic through which the dead can influence the present. When the young peasant Theodore is imprisoned under the helmet, after being accused by Manfred of necromancy, it serves in some sense to protect him from his adversary, but more importantly is a prophetic symbol of legitimacy: we subsequently discover that Theodore is, in fact, the true Prince of Otranto. Significantly, this premonition coincides with a recollection from an onlooker of an ancient prophecy foreshadowing the return of the principality to its rightful owner. Interestingly, this statement both predicts and precipitates Manfred’s downfall: the reader is made to expect his expulsion, although it is Manfred’s own awareness of this prospect that prompts his irrational and cruel behavior. This allows Walpole to create a faint psychological complexity to Manfred’s character, as we are left to wonder whether the death of his son degraded him to sin and cruelty, or if it only brought to the forefront what was already there.
Finally, the colossal size of the helmet is symbolic of the sheer magnitude of history, its inescapability, and its spectral presence in modern life that is always felt but only manifest in extreme circumstances such as this.
Dreams (Motif)
The Castle of Otranto is distinctive in its dream-like quality: elusive monsters and ghosts haunt the castle, helmets inexplicably fall from the sky, and the characters seem governed by factors above (and beyond) themselves. Although seemingly absurd, this motif serves a purpose: like the bloody reality underlying the victory over despotic Rome of the Germanic Goths, who gave their name to Walpole’s novel genre, dreams reveal the subconscious anxieties and calamities concomitant with humanity. Consequently, dreams – rather than being elusive, whimsical nonsense – come to symbolize truth, uncomfortable though it be, and suppressed fear.
Darkness/Passageways (Motif)
Walpole’s novel, much like the castle it depicts, is veined with passageways and ambiguous darkness. Again, the darkness has layers of symbolism: on one level it symbolizes the ‘blindness’ of the characters to their actions and the effects they have, though this is most applicable to Manfred. It could also symbolize moral ambiguity: is Manfred driven mad by the death of his son, or is it fear for his sovereignty that drives him to such extremes? Similarly, how just is a history that avenges death and murder by further bloodshed? This ambiguity is transferred to Friar Jerome, too, when he realizes that Theodore is his lost son. Although this epiphany saves Theodore from the execution Manfred had planned, it makes us question the legitimacy of Jerome’s monkhood: monks are celibate, and so the presence of a child suggests at best a lapse in holy devotion from the friar, and at worst blasphemy. Once again we see that the past has a way of disrupting the present.
The subterranean passageways of the novel possess a similar symbolism. Most pressingly, it is symbolic of the characters' lives: like a web of passageways hidden underneath the castle, the characters' fates and lives are intertwined so inextricably and irreversibly that they can do nothing but follow their progress in ignorance.
Walpole infrequently refers to the tunnels as shafts, which evokes a similar dark eroticism to his references to the father/daughter-in-law incest discussed previously. It is significant, then, that Isabella is the first one to use the tunnels, with Manfred doing so shortly afterwards. The chase between the two, each of them embodying innocence and sin, is symbolic of the interfamilial conflict between Manfred and his family, Friar Jerome and Theodore, and finally Isabella and her long-lost father. Eventually, it seems, good not only escapes the clutches of evil, but also usurps it.
Thunder (Motif)
Thunder sounds at three significant moments in the text, all building to the pronouncement of Theodore as heir to Otranto. When Matilda releases him from prison, thus allowing him to set the events of the latter part of the novel in motion, thunder is heard. Thunder sounds again after Matilda dies and Theodore rushes into the court of Otranto. And after the castle walls fall and a vision of Alfonso appears in the clouds to announce Theodore as the true heir, thunder resounds a third time. Thunder is symbolic of divine power, of nature's warning or sanction. It has a myriad of associations: it is a voice; it is the partner of light and illumination (lightning); it is a herald.
