The interplay of Gothic and Historicity of The Old English Baron

Abstract

Clara Reeve, born on 23 January 1729, was an author who is usually remembered in connection with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. Nevertheless, Reeve's particular relationship with Gothic literature influenced this literary genre and provided features that became essential elements of Female Gothic writing. In 1777, thirteen years after The Castle of Otranto’s appearance, Clara Reeve published The Old English Baron and defined her work as the ‘literary offspring of The Castle of Otranto, written upon the same plan’. Her intention was to remove supernatural features, whose excess ‘destroyed the work of imagination of The Castle of Otranto’: as she argued, ‘instead of attention, they excited laughter’. Therefore, Reeve composed ‘a work upon the same plan, wherein these defects were carefully avoided’; however, when Horace Walpole heard about this novel, he dismissed The Old English Baron as ‘an imitation of Otranto, but reduced to reason and probability’.

Reeve was one of the first authors to provide an accurate historical background and to employ a moderate use of supernatural machinery which would become essential elements of female Gothic writings. Sophia Lee’s The Recess and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho are indeed just two examples of how female Gothic novels developed and shaped Gothic literature, by providing a new kind of Gothic fiction which relied more on suspense and less on supernatural terror. Historical backgrounds and ambiguous, unclear situations, thus replaced detailed descriptions of supernatural presences, introducing probability and reason in a genre that up to that time presented implausible stories with ghostly apparitions.

Reeve’s admiration for Walpole’s novel is displayed through several similarities between The Old English Baron and The Castle of Otranto. The first edition of both novels was published anonymously and focused its narration on the narrative device of a recovered manuscript; moreover, both authors then asked pardon of their readers and published a second edition with their names on the title page. Not only the introduction, but also The Old English Baron’s plot engages with The Castle of Otranto on many levels: the act of usurpation (which enables the development of the story) and the conclusion (which ends the narration with the help of supernatural machinery), underline a narrative structure which recalls Walpole’s novel. Reeve’s characters too are modelled on The Castle of Otranto’s protagonists, as her dispossessed hero, who is revealed as the true heir on an ancient castle, and the respective villain, who is later discovered to be a murderer and a betrayer, demonstrate. However, the conclusions of both novels summarize the different aims of these two Gothic tales: if on the one hand The Castle of Otranto’s story ends with the destruction of the castle, which represents the past’s eruption to haunt the present with supernatural presences, on the other The Old English Baron allows the recovery of the past by concluding its story with an accurate description of the redistribution of land and inheritance, which stresses the moral purpose of Reeve’s novel.

In conclusion, The Old English Baron is not likely to surpass The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Monk in the favors of modern readers. However, Clara Reeve’s historical background and her particular use of supernatural machinery influenced later Gothic novels, playing an important role in shaping Gothic’s literature. As James Watt claimed, Reeve’s most famous novel explored new possibilities for Gothic fiction, and ‘its resonance belies the critical reputation it initially acquired at the hands of Walpole and Scott as a limited, simply derivative, work’.