My previous post featured Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), a classic gothic horror novel, that to me seemed to be the seedling for modern vampire fiction. Dracula sensualized terror and danger, and ruminated on the complexity of immortal beings in a nuanced way that made it possible for later authors to develop even more complex and tortured characters, such as Interview with the Vampire’s Louis, created by Anne Rice. I want to take a look even further back, to the seedling for Dracula, as well as all speculative fiction, romantic and horrific. I read this particular story in school and understood it to be the first gothic novel ever written: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole in 1764.
In The Castle of Otranto, the supernatural and the prophetic converge into a haunting, Oedepus Rex-esque fulfillment of horror. Manfred, lord of the castle, is obsessed with protecting his own family line, which is threatened in the very beginning of the novel where his son, Conrad, who is set to marry Princess Isabella, is crushed to death out of nowhere by a huge flying helmet. Through several fruitless attempts to capture the princess and marry her himself, Manfred becomes enraged and decides to thwart her secret love by killing her—and instead accidentally murders his own daughter, Matilda.
Otranto is a brief piece of literature with several elements: horror, the supernatural, lust-driven madness and murder. What made the book so revolutionary in its time was its ability to blend realistic characters (read: tread lightly with the concept of “realistic” when reading the book using your contemporary consciousness of realism) with fantastical situations and elements, such as large helmets falling from the sky, spectral skeletons, statues dripping blood, walking portraits, mysterious sounds, doors opening by themselves. All of these elements seem fairly commonplace now but back then they were zany, highly entertaining, and imaginative.
Otranto came just twenty years after the revolutionary romance novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, by Samuel Richardson: the antagonist, Mr. B, abducts Pamela, locks her up in one of his estates, and attempts to seduce and rape her. She rejects him continually, but starts to realize that she is falling in love with him. She eventually wins him over with her innocence. The literary community of the time was accustomed to very conservative romantic notions and were unfamiliar with such dangerous episodes. One such person of the day could not un-see the sensual danger that their imaginations conjured by reading Pamela. The lucky few who lived long enough to read and enjoy Otranto’s licentious and cruel Manfred twenty years later would have most certainly been avid readers of Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, Twilight, of authors like J.R. Ward and Christine Feehan, or myself.
Otranto (the gothic, the supernatural) and Pamela (erotic notions in romance) were not considered masterpieces of their day. In fact, these books were “low” forms meant to appeal to the masses with their sexual and fantastical elements. These books thrived because audiences wanted to experience the dark side of their imaginations. Novels after them saturated the market, exploring similar elements in different combinations, until several helixes of gothic and romance mixed and eventually created paranormal romance. Otranto and Pamela and their revolutionary look at the dark side gave way to the “Libertine” novel, which features anti-establishment, anti-church, and strong pro-erotic elements. It took bravery to write in these early forms, at the risk of abhorrent criticism and ostracization from the very conservative body (almost everyone at the time) in society.
What kept these books (and their genres and sub-genres) alive, was the solidarity shown by supportive readers.
Even now, it isn’t the conservative, ivory tower elite that commands the tide of Paranormal Romance literature. It is the reading community. Readers do not just dictate what’s hot, and what’s not in the latest lycanthrope hunk buzz. New sensibilities about romance are being thought of collectively, shared, and then responded to through authors’ pieces, in dialogue. Fan fiction of speculative fiction, paranormal romance forums, adaptations of paranormal romance into movies, all of these show the strong consciousness of many to share in the fantastical and to keep pushing against boundaries in the emotional, erotic tenets of paranormal romance.
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