Spectres of Law in The Castle of Otranto

Abstract

The constitutional negotiations of the late seventeenth century were founded upon regicide. As Chapter 2 contended, political discourse sought thereafter to conceal this juridical trauma, generating fictions of legitimate succession to ensure the appearance of continuous, rightful government. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto is a fiction obsessed with the origin and legitimacy of the rule of law, and a number of recent studies of the text have sought to recover the historicised ‘contemporaneous meanings’ of Walpole’s ambiguous Gothic ‘original’.1 Especial attention has been paid to the nationalist backdrop to a text which participates, on a number of levels, in the production and circulation of diverse nationalistic discourses.2 Robert Miles’s 2001 study of Otranto and its contexts prioritises the relation between nationalism and abjection and offers a reading of the text which is convincingly historicised and theorised. Setting Gelner’s theorisation of the rise of nationalism at the onset of modernity alongside Kristeva’s theory of the abject and Žižek’s notion of a national identity ‘structured by means of fantasies’, Miles gives a powerful account of a historically specific example of the ‘social hold’ of the abject as, in the eighteenth century, ‘nationalism becomes part of the semiological economy of the unconscious’.3