SUMMERS, KAREN CRADY, Ph.D. Reading Incest - The University ...

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and economics” (Williams 29). The failure of Walpole’s patriarchs to maintain proper
order threatens not only familial but societal structure if, as I have argued, the family is
one of the last bulwarks of social organization standing unchanged, after Catholicism and
the monarchy.
At the same time that the castle serves as a potent symbol of the power of the
patriarch, the castle symbolizes the female body. According to Heiland, the castle is a
place containing “cavity/womb-like spaces . . . meant only for breeding” (73) and is like a
female body whose “parts are defended, penetrated, and entrapped” (75). Heiland notes
sexual tension in this imagery as males with large swords penetrate the walls of the castle
(83) and as, except in the unfortunate Manfred’s case, heirs emerge after a successful
penetration. Part of the control of women involves regulating access to the female body,
for penetration of the female body—or by analogy, the castle—by an unapproved man
may result in impurities in the blood line. Patriarchy depends upon, in part, regulation of
access to the female, who can produce heirs legitimate or illegitimate. Certainly Manfred
is aware of this, as he himself is a usurper of Otranto, and because he in enraged at the
peasant Theodore’s attention to the woman that he himself desires. Female sexuality is
often figured in literary works as a fearsome thing, hence the desire for control. Apart
from the potentially disastrous results of unauthorized breeding, the patriarch also fears
monstrous, devouring female desire. This fear may be articulated in the scene in The
Castle of Otranto in which Frederic arrives to fetch his daughter Isabella. He leads a
team of men, his party well-endowed and well-supplied, with ‘an hundred gentlemen
bearing an enormous sword” (65). The castle walls cannot withstand such penetrating