Abstract:
This article discusses The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole as the first gothic work
dramatizing, through the theme of “usurpation”, the emergence of the new but “greedy”
bourgeoisie in England in the eighteenth century as a threat against the long-established,
and from Walpole’s perspective, “divinely ordered” aristocratic system. Au fait with the
worries and expectations of aristocracy, for he is the son of Robert Walpole (the first Prime
Minister of England), and a member of nobility and the Parliament, Walpole, in his work,
cannot help defending the established system against the emerging bourgeois paradigm.
In the article, Walpole’s concern with the chaotic state of his country, which he reveals
through building a devastating class conflict in Otranto, will be analyzed with the help of
biographical, historical, and Marxist approaches. Finally, by referring to the Freudian theory
of “wish-fulfillment through dreams”, Walpole’s solution for the conflict will be shown to
be a self-gratifying one, satisfying the author’s aristocratic self
