‘How do we ape thee, France!’ The Cult of Rousseau in Women’s Gothic Writing in the 1790s

Abstract

The Gothic’s novel’s liberal nourishment from a range of foreign, domestic, literary, aesthetic and scientific sources has been acknowledged by both its authors and critics since its first apologetic beginnings in the 1760s. Horace Walpole inaugurated this confessional tradition with his Preface to the second edition of The Castle of Otranto (1765). There, in a bid to excuse the literary hoax established in the first Preface, where he had posed as the putative translator of the text, William Marshall, Gent., Walpole adopted a more considered literary approach to his novel. Citing ‘diffidence of his own abilities’ as the reason for his initial disguise, he proceeded to defend Otranto as ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern’. He justified his new hybrid creation by acknowledging his indebtedness to Shakespeare:

The result of all I have said is to shelter my own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced. I might have pleaded, that having created a new species of romance, I was at liberty to lay down what rules I thought fit for the conduct of it: but I should be more proud of having imitated, however faintly, weakly, and at a distance, so masterly a pattern, than to enjoy the entire merit of invention, unless I could have marked my work with genius as well as originality.¹