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

143
the wrong party and ends up restoring it to the rightful owner. And it is discovered in the
last pages of the novel that Otranto is Theodore’s by way of his mother’s inheritance and
not by his father’s, which disrupts and undermines the idea of patriarchal supremacy and
adds to the destabilization of the family. The true wealth and power comes through
matriarchy, not patriarchy, but Manfred and his father before him ignored and suppressed
this fact for decades so that they could consolidate and power for themselves. Thus in
Walpole’s novel matriarchy restores order while in his drama it destroys order—but both
instances serve to promote the idea that patriarchy is the only viable way for a society to
succeed. The threat to the family in the novel comes from Manfred’s loss of self-control,
a theme that we have seen at work before. Like Gower’s King Eolus who killed his
young daughter out of unchecked rage, Manfred’s ego overpowers his reason. Both
fathers are consumed with a sense of their own self-importance. Manfred’s sole desire is
to retain his castle, his lordship, and his power; his passion is excited primarily by his
obsession with the family curse which predicts that his line will lose dominion over
Otranto. Manfred came into possession of Otranto as a result of his grandfather’s
usurpation of the rightful owner. Walpole is at pains to explain to his reader in the
preface to the first edition that he wishes the ‘author’ of the tale had “grounded his plan
on a more useful moral than this; that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children
to the third and fourth generation” (Walpole 7).
By the end of The Mysterious Mother, Adeliza is sent to a convent, Edmund
leaves Narbonne to seek his death in war, and the unfortunate Countess stabbed herself
with Edmund’s knife. As in Gower’s tale of Canace and the Duchess of Malfi, and in The