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Excerpts from
Triangulating Sympathy: Threats of Gender to
Narrative Structure in The Castle of Otranto and
Matilda











Kristine Lu
Professor Nicole Horejsi
The Gothic Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century
17 December 2012
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Although the primary terrors in Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto and Mary
Shelleys Matilda are transgressions of love, both narratives also prominently feature two
contrasting portraits of friendship, each of which appears to withstand Gothic horrors while
unexpectedly propelling more subtle undercurrents against patriarchy and traditions of inheritance.
These two friendships between Matilda and Isabella in Otranto and Matilda and Woodville in
Matilda are equally tested by tensions of triangulation: Matilda and Isabella find themselves
caught in an uneasy love triangle with Theodore, the legitimate heir to Otranto, while Shelleys
Matilda becomes herself an agent of anxiety to the plot as she unconsciously conflates her friend
Woodville with her would-be lover-father. Notably, the unequal resolutions leaving Otranto a
proper tale of male retribution but Matilda a dangerous product of female authorship further reflect
the chronological progression in the Gothic genre towards a more lenient control over gender and
patriarchy. While Horace Walpole uses the constructs of platonic female friendship to sublimate
sentimental perversions revealed by romantic triangulation and thereby reinforce patriarchal
dominance over the narrative, Mary Shelley empowers her female heroine with the novelists pen,
allowing the transparencies of first-person authorship to illuminate the complications of
triangulated sympathy and its potency as a Gothic force of terror against traditions of masculine
authority.
To begin, it is important to first define the precise terms by which this paper will examine
narrative triangulation. A triangulated relationship is one formed amongst two individuals of the
same sex and one individual of the other which utilizes pretenses of sentiment (frequently of a
romantic nature) to disguise deeper issues of unequal bonding and power contention. As has been
critically analyzed in the seminal works of Eve Sedgwick and Terry Castle, triangulated
relationships often obscure a homosocial or sometimes homosexual bond between the two
members of the same sex involved. Terry Castle explains that it is the very nature of a female-
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male-female triangulation that threatens, in an aptly Gothic fashion, the patriarchal structure
present in eighteenth-century novels: Female bonding, at least hypothetically, destabilizes the
canonical triangular arrangement of male desire, is an affront to it, and ultimatelyin the radical
form of lesbian bondingdisplaces it entirely (73). When Matilda and Isabella both find
themselves attracted to Theodore, the triangulation of their desire quickly becomes what Castle
calls an alternative structure [] in which one of the male terms [] occupies the in between or
subjugated position of the mediator. [Thus,] not only is male bonding suppressed, it has become
impossiblethere being no male terms left to bond (73). Indeed, perhaps most distressingly in
The Castle of Otranto, the all-important male homosocial bond is not only underwhelmed, but is
not, in fact, even present. Any potential for strong homosocial male bonds are annihilated in favor
of Gothic elements of the text, which forefront the mystery surrounding Theodores identity and
Manfreds oppression over every character in the narrative; Manfreds paranoia and patriarchal
tyranny undermine every male relationship that germinates, including those between Jerome and
Theodore, between Frederic and himself, and, most significantly, between Theodore and himself,
the two main male figures of the text.
What remains, then, is an unexpected female-male-female triangulation that possesses,
according to Terry Castle, all the requirements to threaten the novels fragile patriarchal dilemma.
The dangers of female homosociality become even more acute when Isabellas loyalties are
revealed. Driven away from the potential romances presented to her by Conrad or Manfred and
instead
treated by Hippolita like a daughter, [Isabella] returned that tenderness with equal
duty and affection, [and] was scarce less assiduous about the Princess; at the same
time endeavouring to partake and lessen the weight of sorrow which she saw Matilda
strove to suppress for whom she had conceived the warmest sympathy of friendship.
Yet her own situation could not help finding its place in her thoughts. She felt no
concern for the death of young Conrad, except commiseration; and she was not sorry
to be delivered from a marriage which had promised her little felicity, either from
her destined bridegroom, or from the severe temper of Manfred, who, though he had
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distinguished her by great indulgence, had imprinted her mind with terror, from his
causeless rigour to such amiable princesses as Hippolita and Matilda. (Walpole 180)

Even before the introduction of Theodore, Isabellas preference is for the homosocial female bonds
of which her potential marriage with Conrad allows her to take advantage. Female homosociality,
however, can pose an independent threat. According to Eve Sedgewick, women in our society
who love women, women who teach, study, nurture [] or otherwise promote the interests of
other women, are pursuing congruent [] activities. Thus the adjective homosocial as applied to
womens bonds [] need not be pointedly dichotomized as against homosexual; it can dominate
the entire continuum (3). Yet, if homosociality dominates the entire continuum of female-female
relations, homosexuality necessarily must fall under the category of homosociality as is also
implied by Terry Castles purport that lesbianism cannot be perceived except apparitionally (31),
perhaps exactly because lesbianism operates under the guise of homosociality. Thus, female
homosociality constitutes an inherent risk to the order of the male patriarch, and Isabellas intense
interest in the female members of Manfreds family therefore poses valid if underacknowledged
concerns for Walpoles male-centric narrative.
Instead of introducing extra conflict to Walpoles narrative, triangulated love ironically
becomes a chance for Walpole to sublimate female homosociality, sympathy becoming a
corrective force of platonic friendship to further conflate and even minimize the female figures of
Matilda and Isabella. Formed amongst Matilda, daughter of Manfred, the supposed Prince of
Otranto; her quasi-sister Isabella; and Theodore, the rightful Prince of Otranto, the novels primary
romantic triangle increasingly subverts the distinguishing tendencies of love while simultaneously
strengthening a homogeneous bond of female friendship. In two paragraphs on pg. 235, Walpole
utilizes a rare opportunity of transparent psychological observation afforded by free indirect
discourse to juxtapose the thoughts of Matilda with Isabellas, presenting an unsettling
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psychological symmetry between the two characters that further emphasizes a demand for logical
reasoning in order to correct perversions of romantic impulse.
Walpole at once considers the two women equally, presenting them as a single unit
Matilda and Isabella via a plural they and implies the congruence of their romantic anxieties:
Matilda and Isabella were too much occupied with their own reflections [] They separated each
to her chamber [] in a situation that excluded sleep (235). Their agitation is mutual, further
prompted by the unease of secrecy, each for the first time finding no solace in the other. The two
women are nonetheless magnetically dependent upon each other: [T]hey parted with small
cordiality, [] but met with greater impatience. When Walpoles free indirect discourse reveals,
through repetition, matching thought processes, the equivalence of the two characters becomes
eerily acute. Both use the phrase it was true, and while only Isabellas voice is then explicitly
quoted, both paragraphs of individuated thought are strikingly alike; Isabella simply reiterates
Matildas vaguer It were better to clear this up, or wish[ing] to know the truth, lest she should
wrong her friend with an urgency in specificity and hypothesis characteristic of direct thought.
Strikingly, Walpoles free indirect discourse further illuminates an ironic detachment of the
entire passage from romantic sentimentality. Instead, both women particularly Isabella
prioritize an objectivity that borders scientific and legalistic in order to focus on friendship rather
than romantic frustration. For example, both fixate upon Theodores tongue and eyes as
observable proof. As the two major facial features facilitating expression, the tongue and eyes are
subject to an obsession perhaps directly responding to the disinclination in the novel and the
larger Gothic genre towards lucid and transparent communication. It may be out of necessity that
any observable cues of communication are hyper-analyzed; nonetheless, the dual impulse to
analytically sever Theodores tongue and eyes indicates an unsettling lack of genuine romantic
feeling. The language of Isabellas interior thoughts further places Theodore in a position of
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relativity at this juncture in the narrative: The sentence, Matilda might not correspond to his
passion indicates that Theodores love is an object to be corresponded to either Matilda or
Isabella could easily, upon events largely happenstance, have been placed in the sentences subject
position. In fact, Theodore himself more than once confuses the identity of the two women; he
only met Matilda thinking she was Isabella (226) and later marries Isabella as replacement for
Matilda (262). Theodores own conflation exacerbates a complex psycho-emotional
disambiguation, signaling his ineffectiveness as a romantic hero and instead highlighting the
womens relationship with each other.
The passage is further charged by Isabellas particularly unforgiving rationalizing
technique. Though the narrative argues for her burgeoning romantic attraction towards Theodore,
her thoughts revealed in this moment are extraordinarily caustic: How! can I stoop to wish for the
affection of a man, who rudely and unnecessarily acquainted me with his indifference? [] Man is
false (235). Though arguably this may be the bitterness from the recognition of spurned love,
Isabellas thoughts resolve with a peculiar concern for her friend, directly in reaction to the
supposed dangers of heterosexuality: I will go to my dear Matilda [and] advise with her on taking
the veil [] for the cloister (235). Instead of directing her bitterness towards the rejecting party,
Isabella translates her consternation into genuine concern for her dear Matilda, suggesting that
instead of watching Matilda in a potentially unfulfilling heterosexual relationship, Isabella would
prefer Matilda to go to the cloister a celibate, safe female space and also an effective castration
that she herself took protection in when escaping different but heightened terrors of Gothic
heterosexuality (the pursuits of Manfred).
As Isabella goes to tell Matilda of her decision, deep feeling and even romantic language
marks the depiction of the friends reconciliation, seeming almost to spur the narrative towards a
homosocio-sexual reconciliation. They blush at meeting[,] too much novices to disguise their
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sensations with address (235), suddenly physiologically becoming embarrassed as two lovers
might after a taxing argument. When Matilda relates her story of typically feminine fainting,
Isabella is indifferent to the rest beyond Matildas well-being, and upon its reassurance, firmly
relates her rage with Theodore, warning that if you still retain the friendship for me that you have
vowed from your infancy, you will detest a man who has been on the point of making me
miserable for ever (237). It is at this moment that the tensions of romantic triangulation are
acutely felt: Matilda must persuade Isabella not [to] doubt her Matildas friendship (237), and
the jealousies provoked by dual desire dangerously escalate into an analysis of Theodores
affections. Here, the narrative recognizes the potential for a homoerotic reunion; deliberately, then,
it turns away from the romantic subject a triangulation of emotion that would only instigate
extraneous conflict and instead gestures towards forgiveness in sympathy. According to Stephen
Ahern, the most problematic issue of the sentimentalist or romantic mode results from failure to
recognize that ones version of reality is a lie [] the sentimentalist abstracts from the particulars
of a situation and then appropriates it for his own uses by constructing the situation in idealized or
emblematic terms (189-190). At the climax of tension between Isabella and Matilda, the selfish
constraints of sentimental and idealistic jealousy that for a moment had raised a coolness between
these amiable maidens soon gave way to the natural sincerity and candour of their souls. Each
confessed to the other the impression that Theodore had made on her; and this confidence was
followed by a struggle of generosity, each insisting on yielding her claim to her friend (237).
Thus, Walpoles romantic triangulation tests the resilience of friendship with romance, ultimately
allowing sympathy to triumph in widening the narrowed visions of sentimentality and furthermore
using genuine compassion to expand the underdeveloped psychologies of Isabella and Matilda.
Walpole cleverly introduces an under-sentimentalized and yet effective romantic dilemma in order
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to fortify the bonds of friendship, simultaneously sublimating the potential of homosocial-
homosexual attraction by introducing a crucial heterosexual element in the character of Theodore.
Thus, even though the foundations are introduced, Walpole carefully corrects any potential
perversions by delimiting the psychologies and thought processes of Matilda and Isabella, utilizing
a triangulated romance that further conflates, rather than individualizes, its two female terms. As
Castle explains, the male-female-male erotic triangle remains stable only as long as its single
female term is unrelated to any other female term (73); a female-male-female triangle turns
dangerous as soon as the female terms become their own independent variables, in which male
relationships can further be fractured rather than enforced. In other words, Walpoles triangle is
stabilizing to the patriarchal tradition because it looks like

That is, even though Theodore-Matilda-Manfred and Theodore-Isabella-Manfred triangles are
both, at many junctures in the text, revealed as possibilities, neither is ever legitimated by the
narrative: Theodore only desires Matilda, and Manfred only desires Isabella. Therefore, even
though only a female-male-female triangle is present, Walpole further confounds the psychologies
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of Matilda and Isabella so that they never provoke independent male-female-male conflicts,
furthermore reinforcing their platonic female bond through corrective sympathy and ensuring that
the existent female-male-female triangle is a sublimating rather than perversive force within the
narrative.
By contrast, in Mary Shelleys Matilda, the narrative triangulation is much more unstable
and, therefore, more effectively Gothic. It is, in fact, a triangulation of three characters that is never
physically established in the novel:

Instead, the triangulation occurs psychologically, related through the narrated thoughts of Matilda,
who gradually and unconsciously conflates her friend Woodville with her father; the triangle is
thus unequally extended towards Matilda and absent of a third corrective male homosocial link. In
fact, even more dangerously, not even Matilda herself is consciously aware of this triangulation.
She denies recognizing a similarity between Woodville and her father: He was younger, less
worn, more passionless than my father and in no degree reminded me of him (Shelley 195).
However, by virtue of Matildas transparent psychological narrative, the reader can himself or
herself recognize the equivalence of Matildas reaction to each man. For example, Matilda writes
that her father distracted my thoughts from my sorrow by comparing it with his despair when he
lost my mother, (162-163), much in the same way that Woodville suffered under immediate
grief [so that] when we were together I spoke little yet my selfish mind was sometimes borne away
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by the rapid course of his ideas (195). There is, of course, the very obvious similarity that both
Woodville and Matildas father possess the imagination of a poet, her father describ[ing] the
whirlwind that then tore his feelings he gave his words the impress of life so vividly that I believed
while I trembled (162-163) while Woodvilles conversation [similarly] glowed with imagination
and sensibility; the poetry [hung] upon his lips and [made] the very air mute to listen to him
(195). Furthermore, Matilda is equally attached to both men: She immediately isolates herself in
excursions with her father, regret[ting] whenever we were joined by a third person (163), and
much in the same way viewed all [Woodville] did with jealous eyes. If he did not visit me at the
appointed hour I was angry, very angry (198). Unsurprisingly, these two relationships are truly
the only two from which Matilda gains any interpersonal male interaction in the course of her
lifetime, and thus it is not entirely surprising that she reacts to both men in very similar ways.
Nonetheless, while these similarities remain largely unconscious to Matilda, even an
internalized triangulation becomes all the more dangerous to the genres canonical patriarchal
tradition when the text unembarrassingly pronounces Matildas very female authority. As William
Davis argues, [t]he novella concerns itself chiefly with a particular variation of romantic male
subjectivity that it both adores and loathes [] finally fail[ing] to find a moral voice because its
very efforts to criticize are immersed in masculinitys own formulations (175). Indeed, as Matilda
learns of her fathers unspeakable transgression and then traumatically attempts to recover from it,
her consolation strategies in fact render her even more masculine and empowered to enact her own
pejorative conscience. Matilda struggles to comprehend the romantic male subjectivity that is
forced upon her by her father; her distresses against Woodville are largely an after-effect of her
own uncertain role in the texts model of gender. For example, when Matildas father, in revealing
his romantic feelings toward Matilda, exclaims, Yes, you are the sole, the agonizing cause of all I
suffer, of all I must suffer until I die [] Why do you bring me out, and torture me, and tempt me,
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and kill me [] I tell you I am on the verge of insanity; why, cruel girl, do you drive me on [] I
hate you! You are my bane, my poison, my disgust! Oh! No! [] My daughter, I love you! (171-
173), he vacillates between extreme loathing and adoration for the perversion he is about to admit.
Intriguingly, Matilda herself undergoes a very similar reaction when she attempts to rationalize her
own feelings to his outburst: [I]t was despair I felt [] After the first moments of speechless
agony I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his
sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back with horror I spurned
him with my foot [] never may I speak to him again (173).
This reaction only becomes truly problematic to the novelistic tradition when Matilda
begins to adopt the adoration-loathing bipolarity in her independent interactions. After her
immediate masochistic reaction illustrated above, Matilda then declares to [l]et [her father] spend
another sixteen years of desolate wander [] Go! Be thy days passed with savages, and thy
nights under the cope of heaven! Be thy limbs worn and thy heart chilled [] and then return to
me [] go, and return pure to thy child, who will never love aught but thee (175). Emotionally
distraught though she may be, her private strife only becomes truly horrific and Gothic when it
prompts, even indirectly, real plot action specifically, when Matildas father dies in reaction to
her dismissal, leaving no masculine figure to restrain Matildas transparently distraught emotions
or further direct her female agency. Woodvilles entrance offers a potential solution, but it quickly
becomes apparent that Woodville is not to be the masculine corrective for the narrative; instead,
Matilda dangerously subjects him to the same treatment that she just subjected her father:
I was at peace before you came; why have you disturbed me? You have given me
new wants and now your [sic] trifle with me as if my heart were as whole as yours
[] I wished for no friend, no sympathy [] but you forced yourself upon me and
gave me those wants [] But I will not bear this, go [] You are cruel, very cruel
[] I saw his countenance bent with living pity on me [] I wept and said, Oh,
pardon me! You are good and kind but I am not fit for life [] I will bless you: all
that I, poor wretch, can desire is a painless death (199).

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Oscillating amongst antagonism, shame, and adoration, Matilda adopts a typically masculine role
in their relationship, subjecting Woodville to the treatment her father had subjected her in his own
crucial moment of vulnerability and subsequent emasculation, and which she herself then subjects
her father to upon attempting to normalize his transgression. Her friendship with Woodville thus
illustrates a Matilda who attempts to reconcile the friendship her father never gave her with her
newly found agency following his death. Indeed, rather than acting as a corrective or restraining
opportunity for the distraught emotions following her relationship with her father, Woodville
becomes only a variable that is, for Matilda, a reaction to the unresolved anguish she experienced
with her father.
As in The Castle of Otranto, Mary Shelley capitalizes upon sympathy and its importance in
friendship, but in Matilda, sympathy ironically becomes the primary source of discontentment in
Matildas friendship with Woodville. This is largely because Matilda has, since childhood, been
perversely denied sympathy by an aunt without the slightest tinge of a bad heart [yet] incapable of
any affection (156). As a result of her unfeeling education, Matilda desires, above all, sympathy
and its reciprocation; this is perhaps the one emphasis of her education from her guarded matriarch
that she feels completely lacking. As Ahern explains, romance is often driven by the ambition of
desire to make present what is absent [] what [s]he desires is not the presence of an absent
beloved, but full self-presence (188). An underdeveloped self-awareness, the result of an unequal
education, may primarily be to blame in Isabellas intense desire for sympathy. It is, in fact, in
pursuit of sympathy that Matilda first demonstrates her masculine independence: My favourite
vision was that when I grew up I would leave my aunt, whose coldness lulled my conscience, and
disguised like a boy I would seek my father through the world (Shelley 159).
Matilda thus finds agency in seeking sympathy, and yet this quickly becomes a very
problematic objective: In striving for the sympathetic affirmation she never found from her aunt,
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Matilda ironically becomes more and more retarded by the sentimental perversions that sympathy
then awakens. For example, upon first finding her father, Matilda excitedly said to myself, let him
receive sympathy and these struggles will cease. Let him confide his misery to another heart and
half the weight of it will be lightened. I will win him to me [] Half I accomplished; I gained his
secret and we were both lost for ever (169). Similarly, prior to meeting Woodville, Matilda
began again to wish for sympathy [] for one friend to love me [] the sympathy that I desired
must be so pure, so divested of influence from outward circumstances that in the world I could not
fail of being balked by the gross materials that perpetually mingle even with the best feelings
(190). If it is from a pursuit of sympathy that Matilda arrives at her fathers traumatizing epiphany
or Woodvilles inevitable disillusionment, then Matilda is clearly subject to what David Marshall
defines as a dream of sympathy:
The dream of sympathy offers a promise of redemption, a fusion of subject and
object, a reconciliation of self and other in a moment of connection that can
transcend the condition of suffering that characterizes human life. Yet the intense
moment of identification with anothers feelings is irreducibly theatrical and
characterized by a blend of self-interested as well as disinterested motive. As a
result, Marshall concludes the dream of union through sympathy can be ultimately
nothing more than a fiction. (Ahern 188-189)
Unlike Otrantos Isabella and Matilda, Matilda actively pursues sympathy to complete the
education that her aunt left wanting, constantly seeking a reconciliation of self and other in a
moment of connection that can transcend the condition of suffering. Her agency is spent on
finding an effective recipient of her sympathy, and thus becomes that which exacerbates rather
than salvages budding feelings of problematic romance. It is through Matildas desire to find
sympathy that she conflates Woodville and her father, constantly seeking an illusion of perfect
companionship that neither seems to be able to provide for her: In her father she finds an improper
lover and disappointing friend, whereas in Woodville, she finds devotion enough for both but
cannot capitalize on either due to her own misguided attempts to punish herself. The Gothic novel
thus still, for all of its challenges to the patriarchal tradition and agency of the female heroine,
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concludes in the heroines death and consignment of her effective offspring from female
authoress to male reader, Woodville thus becoming the novels and Matildas successor and the
sole tie that binds me to existence (209).
Matilda does, however, successfully redefine the heterosexual bonds maintained in a
Gothic narrative. While in The Castle of Otranto, the psychologies of Matilda and Isabella are
conflated for the purposes of reinforcing the patriarchal structure and sublimating homosocial
loyalty, Matilda challenges the force of platonic sympathy and depicts its disturbing steepening
rather than mitigation of sentimental expectations. Matilda is furthermore herself able to effect a
triangulated male-female-male relationship, and her independent position at the triangles fulcrum
suggests a novel reinterpretation of female agency. Just as a triangulated relationship can be
offered to stabilize novelistic gender traditions (as it is in Otranto), it can also be presented to
fracture patriarchal convention: The tripartite relationship at Matildas center is one entirely
dependent on the fatherless authoresss singular perspective. Stability in a female-controlled
narrative (or any first-person narrative) is thus effected by narrative psychology that is, who
controls the text thereby leaving perhaps the most horrific aspect of Matilda not its ambivalent
Gothic characteristics but rather in the untrustworthy rationale of its narrator. Driven by uncertain
triangulation, Matilda thus directly destabilizes the patriarchal emphasis in Gothic relationships,
transcending the bonds of female friendship and sympathy proposed by Walpole and using a
singular female agent to challenge the Gothic possibilities present in narrative form.
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Works Cited
Ahern, Stephen. Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel,
1680-1810. New York: AMS, 2007. Print.
Castle, Terry. The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture. New
York: Columbia UP, 1993. Print.
Davis, William. "Mathilda And The Ruin Of Masculinity." European Romantic Review13.2
(2002): 175-81. Torrossa. Web. 14 Dec. 2012.
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509580212754>.
Reeve, Clara, Laura L. Runge, and Horace Walpole. The Old English Baron. Glen Allen, VA:
College Pub., 2002. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.
New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.
Wollstonecraft, Mary, Janet M. Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley. Mary ; Maria; Matilda. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.