I had extremely high hopes for The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole when I ordered it from Amazon.com. This is the novel, I thought to myself, which spawned a culture of gothic novelists including Anne Radcliffe, not to mention a brilliant satire on the genre by Jane Austen in the form of Northanger Abbey. Having already enjoyed the gothic genre and garnered a taste for these novels’ Scooby-do-esque plots—plots in which supernatural phenomena are presented as fact, only later to be proven the fruit of cunning villains who are anything but supernatural—I found Walpole’s novel a bit of a let down. While there was, of course, the requisite supernatural phenomena in the form of a giant suit of armor which crushes the antagonist’s son and scares the servants in his castle, Walpole unlike many of his fellow gothic novelists, defies the rationalistic convention of 18th century literature by failing to provide a logical, non-supernatural explanation for the events of the novel. While this certainly makes The Castle of Otranto stand out as unique in comparison with Radcliffe’s novels, I found little else in the text to account for its extreme popularity during the 18th century.

The novel centers on Prince Manfred of Otranto who harbors a dark and fatal secret which will, by the end of the novel, destroy his entire family and remove him from his seat of power. At the novel’s open, Manfred is getting ready to marry his sickly son Conrad off to the supposed orphan, Princess Isabella. Isabella is the daughter of the rightful ruler of Otranto, the Marquis of Vicenza, and by marrying these two young people, Manfred hopes to unite the two families’ bloodlines thereby strengthening his own family’s disputed claim to the throne of Otranto. However, before the marriage can occur, Manfred’s son Conrad is crushed by a giant helmet and killed. In his grief and rage, Manfred accuses a peasant named Theodore of being a necromancer and faults him for his son’s death, deciding to imprison the youth in his castle.

In need of a male heir to rule Otranto after his death and still bent on joining his own family with that of the Marquis’s, Manfred decides that he will divorce his wife Hippolita and marry the young Isabella himself whether she is willing or not. Isabella runs away through a secret passage to the church on Manfred’s estate for sanctuary, in the process reaping the aid of Theodore who is caught before he can escape himself. Imprisoned once more in a room directly below that in which Manfred’s daughter Matilda inhabits, he holds a secret conversation with her about Isabella. The next day, Matilda is startled to behold the stranger supplicating himself to her father on behalf of Isabella and notices that his appearance is strikingly like that of Alfonso the good, a former ruler of Otranto and an individual whose portrait and grave her mother urges her to pray over. Consequently, when her father sets out to search for Isabella along with a crew of the Marquis’s troops (including the Marquis himself who is alive and well), Matilda risks his displeasure and releases Theodore from imprisonment. The two fall instantly in love.

Theodore runs away to a nearby forest to hide himself in a cave away from Manfred’s anger only to encounter a fleeing Isabella. While protecting Isabella, Theodore faces a knight and seriously injures him believing he is there to claim Isabella on Manfred’s behalf. However, the wounded knight turns out to be the Marquis, Isabella’s father. He, Isabella, and Theodore are removed to Manfred’s castle so that the Marquis can get medical aid. Under Manfred’s influence, the Marquis agrees to marry Matilda (who he is taken with) and bestow Isabella on Manfred after his divorce from Hippolita. However, he is forced to retract his promise when he encounters the giant knight, an apparition which he believes is a portend of doom for Manfred and his family. Simultaneously, Isabella is still unreconciled to the idea of marrying Manfred and does her best to evade him any chance she can get. This spurs on Manfred’s jealousy and suspicion and he begins to believe that she is in love with her two-time savior Theodore. Manfred goes to his church where Theodore is staying only to hear Theodore conversing with a woman whom Manfred believes is Isabella in front of Alfonso the good’s tomb. In a mad rage, Manfred pulls out his dagger and drives it into the woman’s breast only to discover he has murdered his own daughter. At the close of the novel, Manfred has lost his son and daughter and finally confesses that one of his ancestors forged a will so that it gave him the right to rule Otranto, effectively displacing the descendants of Alfonso from their rightful place as Otranto’s rulers. It is then that Theodore confesses that he is no humble peasant at all, but in reality the true Prince of Otranto, as he is Alfonso’s descendant. Manfred and his wife go off to a monestary and a convent. Theodore takes over as ruler of Otranto and eventually marries Isabella.

Essentially the same old story of greed and lust with a giant suit of armor thrown in, the novel needed a cast of strong, well-developed characters to carry it to greatness. However, character and plot development are quite limited, perhaps due to the fact that the novel is barely 100pgs in length. If you’re going to read a gothic novel, I’d suggest skipping The Castle of Otranto and going for Radcliffe’s The Italian or The Mysteries of Udolpho. While Walpole is credited with ushering in the popularity of the gothic novel, I really do believe later writers like Radcliffe perfected the genre.

Mesmerized by Alison Winter

Mesmerized by Alison Winter is a fascinating historical account of how mesmerism impacted and was received by different sectors of nineteenth century British society, including the different social classes and medical professionals. Within the text of Mesmerized, Winter suggests that the advent of mesmerism called into question power relations in Victorian Britain, with lower class individuals exercising control via the mesmeric sciences over upper class men, and more disconcertingly, upper class women. Mesmerism also challenged medical professionals--it put uneducated mesmerists, and oftentimes their patients, in charge of treating and diagnosing illness while putting "educated" doctors and surgeons out of work and out of power. In Britain the medical community would eventually market often deadly anesthetics such as ether and chloroform as "scientific" alternatives to the "magical" mesmeric influences employed to render patients insensible to pain during surgery, but in colonized India, surgeries were taking place with the aid of mesmerism alone.

Mesmerism and modern day hypnosis, although distinctly different practices, are similar in that practitioners of each seek to produce a non-drug induced altered state in patients. Mesmerists believed that each body played host to magnetic fluids which, when out of balance, caused diseases, manias in particular. Consequently, practitioners believed that in performing certain sweeping hand movements over a patient's body and adopting specific movements and poses, that they could use their own magnetic qualities (sometimes augmented by magnets or electricity) to influence the magnetic fluids of their patients, returning patients to a state of equilibrium and healthy functioning.

While some of mesmerism's claims, such as the ability of mesmerized patients to diagnose their own illnesses, foretell future events, or even let their minds travel across continents to glean information about other people or places were and are hard to stomach, other claims were a bit more plausible and, if true, revolutionary. In the early part of the nineteenth century, for example, anesthetics (even dangerous ones like ether) weren't being used, so surgical patients were forced to "discipline" their own bodies while undergoing the excruciating pain of being operated upon. Needless to say, such fortitude was not easy to come by, but if mesmerism could be used to put patients into a deep sleep (or into an unconscious, altered state) in which they felt no pain, once impossible surgeries would become not only possible, but survivable!

Mesmerized is a fascinating text. Winter goes into extraordinary historical detail and draws many smart and thought provoking connections between mesmerism and the nineteenth century society in which it flourished. As skeptical and science-grounded as I am, I can't help wondering when reading Winter's text whether there's something to mesmerism. While I do not believe in the explanation of magnetic fluids, I do believe that given a certain state of suggestibility and expectation, an individual may be capable of allowing another--the mesmerist--to guide them into an altered state of being. How else can I even begin to explain the host of first-hand accounts Winter has drudged up from medical journals, personal letters, etc...in which terrified or awe-struck onlookers witnessed mesmerized individuals being stabbed with needles, burned with acid, or even undergoing limb amputations without a single recollection of pain afterwards? Bologna or no, I can certainly understand why mesmerism was a popular and hotly debated scientific topic in the nineteenth century and why it's still such a fascinating subject in the twenty-first.

The Kinife Man by Wendy Moore

The Knife Man, a piece of creative nonfiction authored by British medical and health journalist Wendy Moore, is a treasure for anyone interested in the state of the medical sciences in 18th century Britain. Moore's text, which details the life of Scottish-born surgeon John Hunter, is both a fascinating and gruesome account of how a young boy enamoured of nature came to be Britain's preeminent surgeon.

At the time when Hunter embarked on his journey toward becoming one of the most respected and feared surgeons of the 18th century, eminent European universities were teaching medicine, not through the postmortem observation and exploration of the human body and its workings, but via classical Greek texts which suggested that illness was the result of the humors being out of balance. Dissatisfied with the state of medical instruction at the time, and influenced greatly by his early years spent procuring bodies for his brother William’s London-based dissection school, Hunter would usher in a new mode of medical instruction reliant on a hands-on exploration of the human body in its healthy and diseased forms. Given that postmortem examination was not routine in 18th century Britain and only very select institutions were allotted a very few bodies annually by the British government for dissection, Hunter formed lifelong alliances with “resurrection men,” more plainly put, grave robbers. Sometimes alone, and often with Hunter in their midst, these “resurrection men” would prowl the cemeteries of the poor and pilfer bodies for dissection, fetching a higher price for bodies with anatomical oddities or an in-demand disease.

Forced to question the efficacy of the period’s stock medical treatments--bloodletting, the ingestion or application of mercury and other toxins, and haphazard and usually unsuccessful surgeries--by merely observing their aftermath in his dissection specimens, Hunter would champion the causes of conservative medicine and the experimental method. As a conservative, Hunter would advocate that surgery be performed only when a failure to do so would prove fatal to the patient. This was a highly effective strategy given the uncouth method of surgery practiced in the 18th century, as medical men had little understanding of the underlying causes of most illnesses and very little knowledge of human anatomy—both considerable problems when it came time to operate. Furthermore, with anesthesia limited to opium or spirits and the role of germs in breeding infection being essentially unknown and, therefore, uncontrolled for, surgery was a great shock to already sick bodies. When Hunter did operate, primarily on the poor who were attended by him and other learning surgeons for free, his operations tended to be experimental in nature. Unwilling to perform the highly ineffectual surgeries preferred by his contemporaries, Hunter devised new procedures based on his study of human anatomy, using the sick and dying as a means of testing his hypotheses about the causes of different diseases. While Hunter would readily admit that some of these experiments in surgery were failures and that he had made mistakes, he would always amend his hypothesis or improve his methodology through a postmortem examination of the deceased individual.

Aside from pioneering the experimental method in medicine, Hunter also dedicated a great deal of his life to teaching other medical students to challenge current practice as he had done. Hunter designed free lectures staged in his own home where he instructed students more about how to develop their own hypotheses and test them than how to perform surgeries. Consequently, many of his students became famous in their own right (Edward Jenner, discoverer of the Smallpox Vaccine, is just one of many revolutionary medical men borne out of Hunter’s lectures).

While The Knife Man is sometimes gruesome in its details of animals being dissected alive, human bodies being stolen by the resurrection men, and the aftermath of the atrocious surgeries and “cures” offered to individuals in the 18th century, the book is well worth the uneasiness. Although I’ve caught Moore recycling phrases, facts, and statements occasionally throughout the text, the writing is quite solid and engaging. Moore’s style is relatively simple and fast-paced, making The Knife Man a quick and enjoyable read.

Purpose Statement

I am creating this blog with the express purpose of publishing my views on and interpretations of various texts that I have read (or will be reading) for pleasure or as part of my coursework in graduate school.

The texts reviewed in this blog will largely reflect my scholarly interests-- 19th and 18th century British Literature--although additional non-period texts will be included as well. It is my hope that the opinons expressed in this blog will serve to foster intelligent discussion and debate amongst readers and expose readers to hitherto unexplored texts.