Within the first chapter, readers encounter a prophecy, the supernatural, a beautiful virgin, a dutiful, abandoned wife, a persecuted maiden, ridiculous servants, a young, handsome peasant, and a ghost, all set within the labyrinthine corridors of the eponymous castle. In the words of Robert Spector, the ensuing events, “provided all the machinery of the genre its setting, theme, and subversive subject matter remained the stock material of the Gothic whatever changes it underwent” (9). Manfred, having only this one heir and a wife incapable of bearing additional children, immediately sets upon Isabella with the aim of taking her as his own wife. In the opening pages of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Manfred, whom readers will come to recognize as a definitive Gothic villain, sends a servant to fetch his son, Prince Conrad, who is to marry the Lady Isabella however, the servant discovers Conrad crushed to death beneath an impossibly large, black-plumed helmet.
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