Turning Danger into Performance – The Gothic Novel before the Discovery of the Unconscious / The Secret of “Eternity Formulas”

In fairy tales, there is no separation between moral, social, and physical order. When order is violated, the world intervenes. Transformations, curses, talking animals, and magical objects are not signals of a hidden reality. They are components of a reality that is comprehensible to all.

Horace Walpole, an English writer, art historian, and politician of the 18th century, published the novel The Castle of Otranto anonymously in 1764. In the second edition of 1765, he revealed his authorship, but obscured the further circumstances. This myth-like play with origins has shaped the Gothic genre ever since.

The setting of the mysteries is a castle in southern Italy. The events revolve around dynastic legitimacy, power, and supernatural intervention. Prince Manfred, a usurper and tyrant, wants to marry his son Conrad to the noble Isabella in order to secure the succession. On the wedding day, the groom is killed by a massive helmet that falls from the sky like a cosmic object. Manfred then decides to marry the bride himself. Isabella flees the impositions and persecutions into the underground labyrinth of the castle, while the narrative increasingly thickens into the supernatural.

The novel establishes central motifs of the genre: the decaying castle, tyrannical rule, oppressive prophecies, the supernatural as an acting force, as well as the persecution of innocence and the revelation of noble origins.

In Otranto, the supernatural does not appear as psychological projection or symbolic cipher. The falling helmet belongs to the same ontological order as the architecture. It is not a sign of a hidden truth. It is part of the order itself. The world does not react metaphorically, but causally. Disturbed legitimacy does not provoke interpretation, but action.

Modern readers often interpret monsters or ghosts as projections of the unconscious. In Otranto, however, it is not the psyche that haunts, but law itself. When dynastic order is violated, the world (as an order-maintaining force) strikes back.

The Castle of Otranto emerged at the transitional epoch between Enlightenment and Romanticism. Walpole acts like a medieval chronicler or storyteller. The world is a personal cosmology. God, fate, and justice act as directly as human agents. Later authors rationalize or psychologize the unconscious. In Walpole, the miraculous is real.

Its narrative structure is closely related to the fairy tale. There is likewise no strict separation between inner meaning and external reality. Transformations and miracles are not symbols of psychological states but real operations. Fairy tales and early Gothic narratives resist psychologization. The wolf is a predator, not a symbol. The curse is not a metaphor. The helmet does not kill the illegitimate merely allegorically.

The magic term is “eternity formulas.” 

The Gothic novel genre revitalizes itself by continuously reactivating semantically emptied but structurally stable formulas and recharging them semantically. These formulas appear repetitive and trivial. Nevertheless, in their stereotypical nature they function as carriers of affective and narrative standard constellations. The haunted house as a Gothic motif in Shirley Jackson and Stephen King shows an architectural horror lineage closely related to Walpole. The difference of two hundred years demonstrates the persistence of basic “eternity formulas.”

The haunted house remains unchanged in its massive walls, which mark its external stability and anchor it as a seemingly unshakeable body in the landscape. At the same time, its interior opens into a complex structure of labyrinths, catacombs, and dungeons that do not allow linear orientation. Doors whose locks often appear over-engineered refer to sealed access points to inaccessible times and domains of knowledge. Clandestine fireplace systems, double floors, and trapdoors interrupt the expected order of domestic space and transform it into a logic of concealment and secrecy. A hallucinatory interior includes collections of ancient weapons and trophies, which function not merely as decoration but as sedimented traces of past violence.

What does this ensemble stand for?

From a genre-theoretical perspective, it stands for a condensed structure of the unconscious, externalized in flickering spatial formations. The walls mark boundaries between the familiar and the repressed. They suggest protection, but are simultaneously the condition for the accumulation of something containable within. The labyrinth, catacombs, and hidden rooms represent the stratification of the non-integrated: memories, violence, forbidden acts, and repressed events that have found no place in the social world.

The multiplicity of hidden passages symbolizes the instability of this boundary itself. It is not permanently closed but potentially permeable at any time. This is precisely the logic of horror. The repressed is structurally inscribed in the house and can return at any moment into the present. Weapons and trophies are not props, but material indices of past relations of violence. They belong to an archive of power and aggression.

The house thus becomes a spatialized memory apparatus of the repressed—a system in which stability is only the external form of an internal excess of restless, unfinished past.

But what was the haunted castle before the discovery of the unconscious? Weren’t such castles also repositories of wealth?

The castle is initially a sign of aristocratic or feudal spatial organization; a material dispositif for securing property across generations. The enclosure of the estate separates property from dispossession, belonging from exclusion. What lies within the barriers is accumulated capital in pre-industrial form—land, weapons, heirlooms, archives, relics, utilitarian spaces.

Its labyrinthine character serves the preservation of power. The castle is spatially coded knowledge of domination. Its secret elements follow an economic logic: they serve to conceal value.

Within this system:

Fear becomes space, guilt becomes persecution, desire becomes transformation, repression becomes concealment. In this sense, castles before Freud appear as proto-psychoanalytic laboratories. This does not mean that they are such historically; rather, these stories are initially models of social order. Fairy tales and early Gothic narratives negotiate fundamental conflicts of feudal-agrarian societies.

Horror requires secrecy. A large part of classical Gothic fiction operates through locked rooms, forbidden chambers, genealogical secrets, hidden archives, and withheld letters. The secret is embedded in property, inheritance, institutions, genealogical continuity—structures capable of storing time.

The secret presupposes the capacity for media-based storage. This has nothing to do with the unconscious. Good authors anchor their narrative vessels in the harbor of time. That is magical.

Whoever controls media of temporal storage controls power. Power is not only control over bodies or resources, but also the ability to stabilize time, to order it, and to preserve information across generations. In premodern societies, genealogical order serves precisely this purpose. The castle is a spatial time medium. What exists within and around it is condensed past: land, titles, artifacts, documents, and histories of violence. These elements form a system for storing and transmitting social continuity. The complex internal structure of the castle—labyrinths, hidden doors, false floors, secret chambers—is, in this perspective, not a psychological metaphor but a spatial technology of power. It organizes access, visibility, and knowledge. What is hidden is not necessarily “inner” in the modern sense, but controlled circulating property. Secrecy emerges as an effect of regulating access to stored time.

In this order, the castle is a storage system that does not merely preserve the past but actively structures it. It allows history to be fixed in space and thereby stabilizes hierarchies across generations. Here lies the origin of what later appears as magical or uncanny: the experience that the past is not gone, but remains spatially present.