Note: This Paper was presented at the 3rd International Gothic Association Conference, Strawberry Hill, London. This work is far from complete and is only a detail of a work in progress. This paper represents the direction my research is going and will over time be reworked extensively.

Amongst the Gothic novels of the period 1764-1794 an examination of the disintegration of the castle is necessary, first to differentiate between the various characteristics which distinguish the decaying edifice from the atmosphere of the novel, a fundamental characteristic in the emergence of the castle, and secondarily to examine terror and horror and their role as the governing principles of that atmosphere in accordance with the environs of the castle and its eventual ruin. The publication of The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho provide the specific parameters to study this disintegration which allowed the ruin to emerge as a metaphoric embodiment of the problematic structure of Protestant society. This will provide a firm foundation on which to view the representation of English society by the early Gothicists as deriving beauty in apprehension but pleasure in the actualization of chthonian horror.

The disintegration of the castle offers a unique study in the inevitable force of decay. The singular importance of the castle is undeniable. "So important," wrote Eino Railo in The Haunted Castle, "that were it eliminated, the whole fabric of romance would be bereft of its foundation and would lose its predominate atmosphere." The castle itself is discernibly anachronistic, while the setting of the novel is predominately situated in the medieval ages, the chief edifice is inevitably submissive to the power of decay and in a state of ruin. Complete with its antique courts and decaying turrets, haunted chambers, dark corridors 'amid whose mouldering gloom is heard the rustle of an unseen robe, a sigh, a hurried footfall where no mortal step should tread' the castle emerged as the central focal point, a feature unique to the early Gothicists. While its accessory characteristics seize the imagination, its architectural associations, accentuated by an atmosphere governed by terror and horror, emerged as a fundamental source of terror. This development of the castle from insipid paraphernalia to the central feature of the atmosphere is achieved by the privileging of terror and horror the two principles that are primarily responsible for evoking the atmosphere.

Simply stated, the atmosphere's primary purpose is to awaken the reader's imagination. The atmosphere of the early Gothic is one of brooding apprehension. This is achieved through the use of the standard Gothic paraphernalia. The vaults and secret panels, the subterranean passages, the trapdoor, and the inevitable marks of decay were replete with terrible possibilities while wild landscapes, ruined castles and pastoral simplicities are convenient conventions that serve as a standard method of achieving the atmosphere. The setting provides the physical background on which the narrative operates and functions chiefly to evoke the atmosphere. By the nature of its physical composition, the setting evokes an environment which adds intensity to the atmosphere by extracting elements of terror or horror which enliven the physical background of the text. The utilization of terror and horror awoke the sense of brooding apprehension by expanding the functions of suspense and constricting the architectural mass of the castle.

Any examination of the castle is a study of terror and horror and their roles within the environs of the castle. Terror, the principle function of suspense expands the atmosphere 'as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation. . . And leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink.' Horror, though 'contracts . . . and nearly annihilates' the effects of the atmosphere within the castle by hindering the transcendence of supernatural dread. Nevertheless, the definition of terror and horror in their mechanistic role of the atmosphere is vastly different from their function within the motif of the castle and must be considered in its singular architectural effects.

Mrs. Radcliffe's delineation of terror and horror in her posthumously published essay 'On the Supernatural in Poetry'(1826) gives the atmosphere clear constraints allowing the breath and width of the atmosphere to be defined in expanding or collapsing terminology. The principle of Terror, expands the atmosphere by as it "expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life"(149). Terror creates intensity by enlarging its boundaries. Obscurity is the principle tool in this process for it "leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate"(149). What one cannot see clearly, one intensifies. Terror, through a series of dread possibilities, allows the reader to plunge from great heights to extreme depths through the elevating of expectations and apprehensions. Terror enlivens the imagination and allows the gradual disintegration of the domestic order by eroding the conventional boundaries of reason. Therefore, terror expands the atmosphere by gradually obscuring the source of terror postponing the actualization of horror. Put simply, terror excites horror as it enlarges the atmosphere.

The principle of Horror differs from terror distinctly in the machinations of the atmosphere. Horror's process is one of external reduction rather than terror's internal expansion. It is subject to specific circumstance, an externalization of fear. Terror consists of apprehensive moments while horror is the moment of realization. Horror denies any possibility of imaginative magnification, instead, it collapses as it 'contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates'(149) infinite space rendering the moment finite, definite, a moment of cathartic contraction. Horror, in its contracting frenzy disables the imaginative process. One is left to ruminate on the moment of disintegration and recoil.

The delineation of terror and horror however must be taken one step further to clearly understand their role within the atmosphere. Terror works internally to enliven and enlarge the imagination. Horror, however, works externally, apprehensions turn to actualization. There is no better example of this then Emily's arrival at Udolpho. "From the deep solitude, into which she was emerging, and from the gloomy castle of which she had heard some mysterious hints, her sick heart recoiled in despair, and she experienced that, though her mind was already occupied by peculiar distress, it was still alive to the influence of new and local circumstances; why else did she shudder at the idea of this desolated castle?"(225) Emily shuddered at the dread possibilities that awaited her within Udolpho. But at this point, that is all that they are, terrifying internalized possibilities. However, a few pages late, Emily's apprehensions are realized. "Emily's heart sunk, and she seemed, as if, she was going into her prison; the gloomy court, into which she passed served to confirm the idea, and her imagination, ever awake by circumstance, suggested ever more terror, than her reasoning could justify. Another gate delivered them into the second court, grass grown and more wild than the first, where, as she surveyed through the twilight its desolation--its lofty walls, overtopt with briony, moss and nightshade, and the embattled towers that rose above--long suffering and murder came to her thought. One of those, instantaneous and unaccountable convictions, which sometimes conquer even strong minds, impressed her with its horror."(228) This is her moment of realization, the moment when external circumstances are actualized. There are no more dread possibilities in store for Emily, her internal terrors have been realized in the external form of Udolpho.

The influence of terror and horror in the atmosphere is most evident in the emergence of the castle. The close relationship of the setting and atmosphere has its earliest roots in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto which firmly solidified the importance of terror and horror as governing principle of the atmosphere. The conflicting external and internal roles that terror and horror embodied became the predominate struggle that early gothicist, such as Walpole and Radcliffe used to enlarge the motif of the castle. This motif was not new to literature, nor were many of its various trappings. Elizabethan literature, particularly Shakespeare utilized the motif to heighten the atmosphere. The castle itself, however relevant to the narrative, always assumed a secondary role. It was a fixture of the landscape, an accompanying element of the central movement.

Having thus established the use of terror and horror within the atmosphere of early Gothic novels, we can now move on to examine the castles themselves and the utilization, if any of these principles. 1764 marked the emergence of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. From the beginning, Otranto is a complete castle devoid of overwrought description and excessive detail. Of the castle's physical appearance, the details are sparse at best. The chief properties of the castle include a chapel, where the solemn marriage ceremony between Isabella and Conrad is about to take place and the courtyard, where rests a giant casque atop of the young Conrad. The castle itself contains various rooms, oratories and corridors, whose walls are adorned with ancestral portraits, a banqueting hall and galleries shadowed in darkness which hide love and dark secrets. Subterranean passages leading to the church of St. Nicholas and a cave in the forest beyond the walls, echo in the silence of their gloomy solitude and wait for a fleeing heroine to fly to it for safety.

With the few details provided, suffice it to say that Otranto is a formidable edifice. It is the very rapidity of these details that obscures the clear hues of the castle walls and blurs the brilliant colors, constricting the physical structure depriving the reader "of the power of discrimination."(215) The obscured details of the physical structure itself convey a vague sense of the remote past, sufficient to displace the moral standards of eighteenth century society and offer the reader an uncertainty, accentuated by its association with barbarity, superstition and apprehension.

It is the utilization of these three features that Walpole infused terror and horror into the castle. He considered the use of terror and horror as necessary tools to heighten the atmosphere which is one of mystery, brooding apprehension with elements of supernatural dread. Clearly Walpole privileged one principle above another. In the Preface to the First Edition he wrote that "Terror, the authorÕs principal engine, prevents the story from ever languishing; and it is so often contrasted by pity, that the mind is kept up in a constant vicissitude of interesting passions"(p. 4). The terror in The Castle of Otranto does not lie in the Theodore's fate, or Manfred's evil determination, or Isabella's nocturnal pursuit, but in the constricting atmosphere of Otranto and the inability to escape it structurally.

The architectural effects of the Castle of Otranto lend to the constricting nature of the atmosphere, primarily through its use of the principle of obscurity. In her dissertation Ann Radcliffe and Her Influence on Later Writers, J.M.S. Tompkins suggests that while the principle of obscurity was refined by Radcliffe "everything . . . in Walpole is too distinct"(40) while Walpole's particular use of the supernatural is bombastic, his use of architecture is fundamentally half concealed and obscured. The function of light to obscure is used by Walpole to obfuscate reality enabling terror to actively operate without exposing it to eighteenth century skepticism. Most action in the Castle of Otranto takes place in the twilight, by the light of a torch or moonbeams breaking the darkness. The diffused light evokes terror by obscuring the physical structure. Such architectural effects evoke terror which operates distinctly different in the castle than in the atmosphere. Within the castle, terror is external, centered within the structure which confines and constricts. Walpole, in The Castle of Otranto seldomly evokes horror which is not associated with the supernatural.

The Gothic landscape is bleak after Otranto until the publication of Clara Reeve's The Old English Baron. The Gothic castle was back looking more like an English manor than a medieval castle, but this time it had a new architectural association to evoke terror and noticeable distance from elements of horror. The chief invention was of course the haunted wing, a suite of rooms in ruinous conditions, which, since the death of Lord Lovel, has remained closed. Within are various new trappings to evoke the terror of dread possibilities, but nothing more. Horror, again is submissive to terror, if not entirely dismissed by Mrs. Reeve.

By 1786, the motif of the castle was reduced to ruins. In that year was published St. Bernard's Priory; An Old English Tale by Mrs. Haley. A true commingling of The Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Lee's The Recess, St. Bernard's Priory marks an early attempt, though a failed one, to utilize the motif of the ruin. Terror is again use to infuse the ruin with intensity, but it remains operating internally in the atmosphere. Though an attempt is made when Lord Raby enters a chamber "where, upon a high pedestal, arranged in armor, a waving plume of feathers on his casque, and in his hand a pointed spear, stood the image of Lord RabyÕs father!--Rivetted with astonishment, he gazed upon the lifeless statue, and, by some unknown impulse (he) kneeled at the foot of the pedestal. . . while in this position a violent burst of thunder shook the place, and a terrible storm succeeded." Although the nature of the ruin is constrictive, the principle tool is not obscurity, but rather a claustrophobic reaction to the architectural space.

The disintegration of the castle had commenced. A dramatic shift had occurred in the use of terror and horror within the atmosphere effecting the motif of the castle. Dreary and full of dark and terrible secrets, the castle was associated with various medieval edifices - convents, cathedrals and graveyards, particularly ruinous, to suggest a feudal past closely associated with superstition and fear. Gothic architecture, whose emphasis on irregular form demonstrated the spatial and temporal estrangement with the past and its values from the eighteenth-century reader. The triumph of terror and horror occurs from the emergence of the vague and remote past. Terror works externally rather than internally within the castle by constricting the space by using architectural associations. While it expands the atmosphere by obscuring the source of the terror, it renders the atmosphere within the castle constrictive and confining. Remote turrets, locked chambers, gloomy corridors and subterraneous regions not only physically imprison the principle characters, they compress the atmosphere. Terror operates in the confined setting of a castle by using obscurity as its primary tool to evoke dread possibilities similar to its application within the atmosphere. With the mind unable to exaggerate the obscure, the confining physical attributes to the collapse or contraction of the atmosphere under an extensive bombardment of heightened suspense by delaying the actualization of fear. Likewise, horror functions within the castle distinctly different then in the atmosphere. Rather than an actualization of excess, horror enlarges and intensifies by an exact portrayal of the internal actualization and impending dread. The physical structure of the castle, vague and indefinable in obscurity, is restored to clarity.

The shift from functionality to ruin in the 1780s is indicative of the castle's inability to evoke terror and horror through stock features that provide the embodiments and evocation of social and religious anxieties. The eighteenth century emphasis on the externalization of objects of terror such as the castle by objectifying the ambiguity of evil allowed Otranto with its series of dread possibilities and supernatural incursions to emphasis the tension thus created by terror and horror conflicting roles in the atmosphere and in the castle. The polarization of terror and horror within the castle allowed the motif of the ruin to emerge and be associated with the collapse of the Medievalism, and its various superstitious attendants. Whilst Devandra Varma proclaims in The Gothic Flame that "the prominent Gothic motif of the 'ruin' may be explained as being symbolic of the collapse of the feudal period; the phantom that wanders along the corridors of the haunted castle symbolizes the inexplicable fear of the return of bygone powers; the subterranean passages are the dark alleys through which the individuals stumble as they move towards the light; in the sound of thunder and in stormy settings there is the rumbling note of a distant cannon"(218) he neglects the conflict between terror and horror. The function of the Catholic church in evoking terror is not entirely lost in Varma's discussion of the ruin and its role as a source of terror he insists that "Catholicism alone is never use by Gothic novelists as a means of evoking terror . . . Thus it is the incidental vestments, not the doctrine of Catholicism, that serve as a source of terror"(219). However, Sister Mary Tarr in her study of Catholicism in Gothic Fiction noted that "It is through a ruined gateway leading to the mouldering walls of an ecclesiastical ruin that characters in Gothic fiction approach the Catholicism of the Middle Ages. Ecclesiastical ruins symbolize 'in the distracted pomp of wasting columns, tot'ring walls and gasping [sic] windows, all the havoc of infatuated zeal . . . Whilst in widow-weeds of mantling Ivy, Religion sits, and mourns the desolation of her house"(99). It is through the evocation of the ruin that one arouses the emotions of 'pious terror' and religious horrors (104). The role of Catholic dogma in the disintegration of the castle is closely associated with the incursion of the supernatural.

As we have seen, the development of the motif of the castle clearly has its roots in Otranto. Walpole provided the primary features, the subterranean passages, the chapel, the long corridor and the element of terror. From Mrs. Reeve and Mrs. Haley, the utilization of ruinous features increased the elements of terror, but above all others that Mrs. Ann Radcliffe developed the most terrifyingly beautiful edifice. Strong, clear lines adorn her castles, they are in and of themselves, the object of terror and the object of beauty. A study of Mrs. Radcliffe's novel reveals that her books outline the disintegration of the castle. From the strength of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne to the romantic mouldering ruins of The Mysteries of Udolpho. In Radcliffe's earliest fiction, The Castle of Athlin and Dunbayne, the castle of Athlin is reminiscent of Otranto. "The edifice was built with gothic magnificence upon a high and dangerous rock. Its lofty towers still frowned in proud sublimity and immensity of the pile stood record of the ancient consequence of its possessors".(13) Malcolm, as Manfred is a usurper with false claims to the castle of Dunbayne. Terror is still the privileged principle governing the atmosphere, but this time, Radcliffe alters the definition slightly by applying Burke's aesthetic theory of the Sublime to the atmosphere. RadcliffeÕs application of obscurity fits nicely into Burke's theory for he wrote "To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of apprehension vanishes."(43) However, even with the introduction of the sublime to the principle of terror it still operates internally with the atmosphere as well as within the castle. Mrs. Radcliffe's first attempt illustrates the first developments toward a terrorized castle as a antagonist.

In The Sicilian Romance, Mrs. Radcliffe's second novel, the Gothic edifice now becomes an Italian manor of sorts with a ruinous wing, remarkably similar to Clara Reeve's deserted wing in the Old English Baron. It was with the assumption of this ruinous motif that Mrs. Radcliffe first endeavored to infuse terror into the ruin. Within that ruinous wing, terror began to have some external effect. By obscuring the physical structure with the clutter of decay, the edifice is rendered constricting and hence heightening the aspect of terror. This conflict between the expanding atmosphere which is terror induced and a constricting and collapsing atmosphere within the castle. This brazen conflict quickly became the standard centerpiece of Mrs. Radcliffe's work. In The Romance of the Forest she endeavored to apply this conflict to the entire ruin, reminiscent of course of Mrs. Haley's attempt in St. Bernard's Priory. This time however, the architectural associations of the ruin embody terror. The edifice whose very presence is terrifying is constrictive. Externally the architectural effects terrorize Adeline while the evil designs of La Motte are horrifying. Horror has assumed an internal function while terror exists externally within the walls of the abbey.

However, it is within the pages of The Mysteries of Udolpho that this grand enchantress achieves the highlight of her architectural achievements. By eery measure Udolpho is grand. "The Gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object."(227) With Udolpho we come full circle, face to face again with Otranto. Udolpho emerged from the same fabric as Otranto and at a glance Udolpho is Otranto 30 years after its abandonment by Manfred. The atmosphere of the castle had undergone extensive renovation, and Mrs. Radcliffe had perfected the use of terror and horror as principles that governed the atmosphere. In Udolpho, both terror and horror function within the castle neither terror nor horror is privileged, each function within their own sphere. Terror functioning externally through architectural associations and horror by internal actualization of those terrors. The external force of terror is found in the castle itself. Udolpho is a large castle where Emily can constantly find areas, large areas, to explore. Rambling down corridors, through avenues, across courtyards, down stairs, up stairs, and even though she constantly ramble she does not have the ability to leave. Above all other elements and circumstances that induce terror, Emily's inability to escape is the greatest. Architecturally, Udolpho has a constrictive atmosphere, too many rooms, too many corridors tend to obscure Udolpho's size. The internal force of horror is also found in the castle for her apprehensions about Udolpho being her prison is after the death of Madame Montoni, actualized.

Before I conclude I would like to say a bit more on the emergence of the ruin and a possible metaphoric association. Michael Sadlier once wrote "a ruin expresses the triumph of chaos over order." Building on that statement I argue that the ruin is a metaphoric embodiment of the problematic structure of English protestant society. The ruins were means whereby to triumph over order of the day. In some sense the introduction of mysticism and ritualism of Catholicism allowed the supernatural to assume it rightful place in society without deriding the function of reason within that society. A time of simple belief, not simple doubt was needed to allow the reader to find beauty in guarded terror and pleasure in chthonian horror.