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
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Notes
Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy, 2nd edn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 3.
See Toni Wein, British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms and the Gothic Novel, 1764–1824 (London and New York: Palgrave, 2002)
Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
James Watt, Contesting the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Emma J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Robert Miles, ‘Nationalism and abjection’, in The Gothic: Essays and Studies 2001, Fred Botting (ed.) (Cambridge: English Association, 2001), pp. 47–86.
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), p. 3. Hereafter FA.
See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambidge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 73–4.
Pierre Legendre, Leçons IV (Paris: Fayard, 1985), p. 10.
Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logos of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Wedenfield and Nicolson, 1990), p. 250.
Jerrold Hogle, ‘The gothic ghost of the counterfeit and the progress of abjection’, in A Companion to the Gothic, David Punter (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 293–304.
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 24.
Jacques Derrida, ‘The force of law: The mystical foundation of authority’, Cardozo Law Review, 11 (1990), p. 921.
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© 2007 Sue Chaplin
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Chaplin, S. (2007). Spectres of Law in The Castle of Otranto. In: The Gothic and the Rule of Law, 1764–1820. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801400_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230801400_4
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