Conflict as a Literary Gothic Convention

This paper examines conflict as a literary convention in the early stage of the development of Gothic fiction on the basis of two novels: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). The starting point for the analysis is the now-classic division of the genre into male and female Gothic, proposed by Ellen Moers in Literary Women (1976), to show that the focus in Walpole’s story is on the political: on the monarchic conflict of power; whereas Radcliffe concentrates on the politics of domesticity. However, as the paper aims to show, though both stories are informed by the instability of their times – an era of wars and revolutions, when political tensions and conflicts brought to light certain aspects of social injustice – both novelists place at the centre of their interest a human being, the culprit of conflict. Underneath the layers of conflict for power, dominance and property, in both texts, whether representing male or female Gothic, lies the conflicted, often tortured individual, and it is this presentation of the human side of characters that annuls all divisions, and makes Gothic stories significant voices in their contemporary political and social debate.