The Jeovah Imperative: Images of Incest and Blood Sacrifice in Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto" and Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood"

This thesis compares and contrasts Biblical images in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (1949), seeking to illuminate their common participation in Judeo-Christian philosophy (referred to herein as the Jehovah Imperative) and in the tradition of Gothic fiction. Although both books center on a religious hero who defies an "irreligious" authority, and both are resolved when a major character is murdered by a legitimate legal agent, historical and feminist perspectives will show: (1) the ways in which Walpole's Otranto manipulated Biblical images in favor of eighteenth-century Protestant ambition and the furtherance of the father-son inheritance chain begun in the Bible, and (2) the formula by which O'Connor's Wise Blood reverses the Gothic/Biblical "realities" to expose that manipulation in a "grotesque" mirror-image. Examining those acts of brutality -specifically incest and blood sacrifice -long legitimized by Biblical texts, and tracing their historical sexual dynamics to an inter-testamentary economic paradigm, this thesis will look at how those biases were fixed in place by the first Gothic novel, and transferred through history by similarly biased lexicological and critical exegeses, invisibly maintaining the social, economic and political sovereignty of the white Protestant (Gothicized) male in the western world.

(1) the ways in which Walpole's Otranto manipulated Biblical images in favor of eighteenth-century Protestant ambition and the furtherance of the father-son inheritance chain begun in the Bible, and (2) the formula by which O'Connor's Wise Blood reverses the Gothic/Biblical "realities" to expose that manipulation in a "grotesque" mirror-image. Examining those acts of brutality --specifically incest and blood sacrifice --long legitimized by Biblical texts, and tracing their historical sexual dynamics to an inter-testamentary economic paradigm, this thesis will look at how those biases The term has a complicated history which is difficult to trace, but whatever reality it represents may certainly be applied to the two books which form the basis of this study: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel ever written (in 1764), and Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, a twentieth-century theological parody whose central character embodies the "apocalyptic visions of those who ••• preach fire and the plague"(Rubin, Added 53).
Except that both these Gothic novels have been canonized under the double rubric of literary significance and cultural import, they seem to have little in common. Walpole's book, set in twelfth-century feudal Italy, is a fantasy --a romance involving a royal tyrant in a miraculous castle, a pair of generic princesses, a peasant hero, and the timely execution of an ancient family curse; O'Connor's book is a post-World War II "grotesquerie" about a young soldier from the American South who comes home to find his house and family gone, and so seeks comfort in squalid sexual encounters and acts of violence, expressing his existential torment in the theolo- Even within the Biblical framework, ambiguities have accrued to the history of the signifier "apocalyptic." "Apocalypse" now denotes "a prophetic revelation" but it didn't always; the singular noun "apocalypse" shares a stem with the plural noun "apocrapha," which originally (in the first century A.D.) meant "hidden or secret things." When the word was first coined, "apocalypse" --from the Greek kaluptein, "to cover" --was included within "Apocrypha" --which comes from the Greek kruptein, "to hide"; the prefix "apo" in both cases means "away." So "Apocalypse" denoted a prophetic text which was covered, or hidden away, while the "Apocrypha" referred to a collection of these texts.
But language is an active thing, presupposing a speaker, an audience, a message, a forward motion; secrets will "out" and find lasting expression, particularly in written form which can live on long after the disappearance of its initiator. The same historical tensions that made certain prophetic texts "dangerous" in the first century A.D. also created a forum for them, so the shared stem split; while "Apocrypha" continued to mean "secret prophecies," the de-· finition of "apocalypse" shifted to include its own reversal: an "apocalypse" became a prophetic text that could be both hidden and revealed, depending on the circumstances.
The shift in emphasis was almost certainly a result of the social, political, and economic upheavals in Israel which followed the death of Jesus, the popular Hebrew outlaw whose religious and political views contradicted those of the Hebrew ruling class, and whose site of discourse was not the Temple, with its associations of an elitist and sa-    Henry was also debt-ridden, and no doubt saw in an Old Testament marriage policy the clearest way toward mustering an unpaid army, soldier-sons whose blood could (with longestablished Biblical sanction) be sacrificed to fulfill his imperial ambitions. In a way, Henry VIII --as man and as master --was the first Gothic hero.
Henry's short-range paternal ambitions went unrealized, holds, as a moral absolute, the right to relinquish that theological idea, to protest the existing doctrine and create another, opposed doctrine. Within Protestantism, theological oppositions not only may but must exist side by side; whatever doctrine the Protestant claims must co-exixt with that which he denies, so that the Protestant morality, and its social 30 value-system, contains a war within itself, a conflict between the two parts of itself: that which is accepted and that which is denied. It is a religion which defines itself by defining (creating) an "Other," a rejected part which like the Apocrypha (perhaps because of the Apocrypha) must claim an existence and yet be officially silenced.
The process is a painful one for the definer. The husband was also the Old Testament patriarch who ruled his home, wife, and children as completely as God ruled him.
In the female was invested the sacrificial Victim Christ, bound by love (and law) to obey the commands of a God that was constructed from the combined authorities of husband, father, church, state, and Paul the Apostle. Not that she did not wield power; if the eighteenth-century Protestant wife was forced to unite within herself Old Testament tribal loyalty and the "piety" defined by Paul, she was at least permitted to enter the negotiations. Like the victimized Webster's application of one unit of meaning --the common noun "word" --to three separate "character" texts (one character is one book, one character is eighty-eight books, and one character is not a book at all but a man) enhances the illusion that all three Biblical signif iers agree in some real sense, some "eternal" sense. But they do not share a "wholeness"; the historical Scriptures (both Testaments in one Bible) are different from "the Gospel" (presumably one of the four), and the Logos is different from both. When Webster created the illusion that they are not different, he obscured the history that divided them.
In Webster's "enhancement" of those three proper nouns under the single word "word" (unit of meaning) is buried not just a philosophical but a cultural contradiction: the Testaments did not share a racial or an economic philosophy, nor did they share a religious vision. Although they testified to the existence of the same God, the Old and New Testament covenants (signs of sanctification) are as different as blood and water. That Webster links their meanings rather than their etymologies is a subtle example of how Biblical significance has been lexigraphically slanted in favor of the Old Testament patriarchy. The word "testament" is likewise slanted: "testament," meaning "promise," shares a Latin root with "make," "will" (as volition or document), and "testicle." (This semiotic link was appro- Critic Caroline Spurgeon first ( i n 1907) dissected the self-consuming Gothic formula into three parts: the rising castle or conqueror's house (both spatial edifice and historical lineage), the chaos outside the castle (often random or "grotesque" events made of purely physical elements -light, darkness, gravity, wind and weather, geographical location), and the "brooding Byronic hero" whose presence at the threshold between them puts him at enmity with both.
This unresolvable discord --based on Biblical imperatives hidden within the first Gothic novel --serves the "modern man" but at the same moment it indicts him. His historical legitimacy does little to heal his indeterminate but unquenchable guilt over his unlimited "Godlike" powers; the sexual mirror that is Woman has been "demonized" and so deceives and "unmans" him; his moral guide --the Bible is inherently ambiguous and infects h i m with doubt; his Biblical legitimacy is based on the fragile foundation of his own personal Protestant interpretation of scriptural significance.
The Gothic hero lives on a threshold between the selfconsuming Godhead whose Act is the creation of the Logos that must --if it is true to Old Testament values --damn the Christian hero for the crime of patricide, and the Logos itself. This line drawn between autocracy and autonomy is both a major cause and an inevitable effect of the tormented psychological "realities" on which the Gothic novel feeds.
The Gothic heroine has a drawn line, too; the fertile young female is warned --then and later --to shun the company of strangers, alien men whose sexual aggression and foreign seed endangers the existence of any closed tribe. If she would leave home safely, she must first center herself ·between the patrilocal male and the virilocal male, and -using as a lever her sexual desirability and vulnerability engineer an economic deal between them.
That positioning is the site of meaning in the Protestant "marriage of jointure," and its enforcer is her father.
His instructions come to her from the ultimate father, Je- Walpole raises Theodore's overseas mission above the vengeance of earthly powers by having the molecular forces of the universe cooperate in the disempowering of the father.
"Tell me!" Manfred demands. "I will know thy accomplices [in escaping the prison]." "'There was my accomplice,' said the youth, smiling, and pointing to the roof." Light, gravity, the accident of a falling stone --these signs of the divine presence are made to favor the spiritual innocence of the son, the peasant, the pilgrim. "I fear no bad angel," Theodore announces, "and have offended no good one"(Walpole 53-54).
In the hierarchy of Manfred's crimes, we know which is worst by the range of Theodore's reactions. As long as the conflict between the "father" and the "son" is limited to protocol, Theodore absorbs the old man's threats cheer- The rape of the young girl is an expanding metaphor that bridges the gap between the Old and New Testaments.
By serving as an object of sexual exchange between Manfred (the possessor of the castle-house in the past) and Theodore (the future owner) Isabella reinforces the hidden contract between the aging Hebrew potentate and the young Christianized prince; each will own her in turn. By her capture, the Biblical myth of the girl who dies on the patrilocal threshold is made new, modernized by historical necessity.
By the passing of time, Theodore will himself earn the status of the patriarch one day, a fact guaranteed by his possession of a fruitful wife and an unassailable castle.
The heir of Otranto will not only conquer the young female, he will contain her forever in lawful entrapment. Within Otranto's moral system, Manfred's attempt to imprison Isabella in his bedroom is not a sexual crime; theft is the crime that must be avenged by Heaven and the forces of Good.
When Manfred accosts Isabella, claiming access to the familial-sexual bonding which will ensure the "profitable and correct" consumption of family property, he impinges not on Isabella's rights (she is an object, not a subject) but on Theodore's.
The rapist, as in olden times, has his reasons. Like the ancient Hebrew patriarchs at war with all their neighbors,  The prophecy so fulfilled, that the blood of the true ancestor will never mix with that of Manfred, places Theodore's overseas mission between Isabella and her royal pursuer. Although she will face a rival for Theodore's love in Matilda, the prophecy has disqualified the other girl.
Since the church/state coalition has been invoked in favor of Isabella, the prayerful Matilda is as good as dead; Heaven and earth have so ordained. Indeed, she dies while kneeling at st. Nicholas' altar. While she lives, however, she and Isabella share a fantasy --that of having their sexual identities absorbed by the young conqueror.
With the sexual triangulation of two girls and the boy, Happiness will not be among the blessings of Theodore's marriage to the princess whom he "saved." After Manfred murders Matilda in Theodore's presence, Theodore will go on to marry Isabella, and then punish her with a lifetime of unresolvable jealousy: "Theodore's grief was too fresh to admit ••• another love." It is only because the ever-sensible Isabella shares with her husband "frequent discourses of Matilda" that he obtains any relief from "the melancholy . that had taken possession of his soul"(Walpole 117).
Theodore's position is that of the Biblical Levite.
His presence on the threshold of a house that is not ( In the young prince, Walpole produced another familiar Gothic prototype besides the Possessive Father and the Maiden in Distress. Theodore, the necessary product of broken loyalties, bears the seed of the brooding bully, the American Desperado. As the lawful knight who was made an outlaw by the law's corruption, Theodore must remain alienated from civilization; his sanctity lies in parricide; he must continually kill off the father-principle in order to endure in lawfulness. His alienation will serve him, however; the bourgeois hero is not just the peasant bringing down the false god Royalty, or the guilty, restless husband who perpetually longs for the woman who is beyond him. He is also the clever conqueror of the marketplace whose religion serves the profit motive of These mythical elements are present, if watered-down, in many childhood fairy tales; we do not need to "believe" in them to accept the reality of their messages.
Manfred's need to rule the world reminds us of our own.
We feel his lust for the young women as well as their terror of his deadly sexual domination. We share his pride; we are insulted by Father Jerome's priggish scoldings, and we are not even fully gratified when Heaven deposes him in favor of Theodore, the bumbling usurper who --we feel --will never be the man that Manfred is. Although we sympathize deeply with the sufferings of the cast-off wife, Hippolita, the book's moral structure leaves us free to dislike her; her plodding Christian dignity is joyless, judgmental, and ever awake. In a real sense she embodies the central evil of the book --the erosion of Manfred's sexual potency.
Critics --unable to label or even see the implications of these family sexual dynamics concealed their confusion under layers of literary jargon that was increasingly selfreifying as it evolved into deeper and deeper ambiguity.  When Critic Spurgeon dissected the formula that showed modern man to be his own Creator, she infused in the critical canon the idea that the Gothic hero is beyond human redemption. Beneath her literary jargon, Spurgeon is saying warning --that the twentieth-century Gothic hero, who is both the Logos/Rebel/Christ and its creator, must absorb the "unseen" into himself and then bear its weight. This "unseen" is the growing understanding of what he has done; he is a son attempting to consume the "father-God" whom he has killed --that is, the Law which is the Father-Destroyer in league with his earthly father, Abraham, the agent of castration. His absorbtion of the judging, castrating enemy into himself predicts that the Gothicized male (in and out of literature) is suffering not --as she says --from the "division between the seen and the unseen" but from their indivisibility. The modern man is becoming aware of his 79 Judeo-Christian moral schizophrenia, and that awareness is the site of his woundedness, as his literature confirms. In this phrase lies the kind of (Jesuit) nicety that underlay O'Connor's life and underlies her work. The "Devil", or the principle of evil, is identified within scholastic Catholicism as 'that which is not present.' "Absolute evil is evil which implies absolute privation. Insofar as every being is, it is true; it is also one, good, beautiful, and

Spurgeon doesn't imply that his wound is self-inflict
intelligible. Hence what is unintelligible is unthinkable, or a total privation. Absolute evil is that which is not and cannot be" (Koren 68 and finally doomed him to the same self-concern that doomed Manfred. To make the point that Hazel's spiritual agonies rise from an illogical doctrine --that of change for its own sake --she exaggerates the Ourobouras circularity in his philosophy, treating it as a means to isolate him with-. in himself in a closed system of nihilism from which there is no escape. Thus blocked off, Hazel's goodness --the power to reject ambiguity which is his principle of moral integrity --must be expressed in his capacity to reject to hate --the religious content of his own mind.
Hazel cannot love --that is his sickness; though his faith in the possibility of love is absolute, it is a faith without a center, a faith that has self-will and a hatred of Other at the core. Hazel, however, does not know that; from the point of view of Catholic philosophy, Hazel's intent to locate "goodness" in himself and in society will redeem him. His self-sacrifice is a truly Christian act, both because it is (in reversed form) Other-directed, and also because (Christ-like) he chooses of his own free will the site of his sacrifice. This is the essence of the Hazel's sufferings --comprehensive and endless are all connected to his obsession with the true meaning of the Christian experience. He seeks the integration of opposed 85 premises; he cannot live with the spiritual dichotomy which characterizes the "brooding, Byronic hero." His obsession will lead him to commit murder, to sexually molest a girlchild, to drive himself through increasingly painful acts of penance; he will blind himself with lye to achieve a "truthful" inner vision, and he will finally die "purified" at the hands of a young, well-fed policeman, a product of Protestant legalism whose crime will be easily absorbed within would entail a reversal of its parts; what is "low" must claim the public sphere. Herein lie the possibilities for the comic Logos: a "high" discourse, a "low" projector" of that discourse, and a public sphere. function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourse" (Foucault, 1987 108). Insofar as writing is (as to the ancient Hebrews) a sacred act, O'Connor saw her authorial function as a deliberate desacralization of that unjust system, that universe of Self over Other.
To reveal the moral grotesqueries within the double- Hazel's mother, never named, is a decent Christian woman as grimly chaste as her counterpart in Otranto, Hippolita.
Hazel is obsessed with her vision of the-body-as-death, and when he comes home from the army to find her dead and gone, he begins the self-destructive journey that will take him to where she is. His journey begins ominously: "That night he slept on the floor in the kitchen, and a board fell on his head out of the roof and cut his face" (O'Connor, 1949 12 The psycho-sexual incident of the beating (for his trip to the carnival) fixes within Hazel the range of sexual/moral inconsistencies which will kill him. From his phallicized mother {long and thin) who sees Hazel through the tree, he receives Jehovah's wrath {the stick, the rod of Moses), not just for having "seen" (an act of empowerment) the humiliated woman who is both the stripper and his mother, but f or having witnessed his father's lust, a strict Old Testament taboo: "Cursed be he that uncovereth his father's nakedness" (Bible,Deut. 27:20). At the same moment he took in his mot her's justification for beating him when she invoked Jesus, the historically inf antalized and feminized man who was --like the woman-mother in the black box --stripped and humiliated before a hostile crowd. Thus, for his sexual curiosity, Hazel is accused of stripping and humiliating the woman, his mother, his father, and Jesus, and for killing Jesus as well. His crime was "seeing"; his final punishment of himself will be to blind himself with lye.
Hazel's father, nominally the Jehovah principl e within the family, did not "see" Hazel's crime as Jehovah would have, nor was he present as a fellow male to share the punishment which logically should have fallen on him, too.
The resulting loneliness formed for Hazel--in a more or less traditional way --the site of his later sexual indifference to both men and women, as well as his pathological hatred of any man who claimed a resemblance t o him.

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"Within a patriarchal system difference is ordered in the name of the father. The attributes of the father function as props for the signifier of difference, the phallus whidl signifies both power/presence and loss/absence. It is also the signifier of desire, which is produced at the moment of loss of unity with the mother. Sex is acquired at the price of the repression of the mother and submission to the law of the father" (Pollock 144). But when the father is repressed (so desired), and the mother enforces submission to the masculine force of the law, the schizophrenic confusion which results --far from being "grotesque" --is utterly natural. "In religious matters, all men must be free," a democratic innovation that shattered many of the petty, legalist, patriarchal myths (Murray's use of "men" notwithstanding) that have tainted the teachings of Christ since the Church began.
But to define a thing is not to create it. Murray's statement on freedom reveals a thing which has always been true; within Catholicism, grace is not contingent upon the acknowledgement that one's humanness is a sinful state, in need of the grace of God --that is the Protestant position of antinomianism, which refers to an apparent contradiction between equally valid principles (faith and work), and which evolved, within the self-opposing Protestant ethic, to mean that faith alone is the pre-condition of salvation. To a Catholic, this doctrine is unreasonable, except as a tool of mystification employed in the service of social/religious control; faith without works is not faith at all, since it eliminates the arena of behavior by which the grace of God may be known, by which --indeed Christ himself was known to those among whom He lived; it is a doctrine which nullifies the condition of liberty without which love is impossible; it is, in fact, the pre-condition of the state of despair which itself is sinful within Catholic theology.
Works without faith, on the other hand, presupposes --at least faith in the goodness of love, the efficacy of "filling from one's own another's cup," which is the definitive Christian principle.
Grace, rather, is contingent upon the acknowledgement of the possibility that one might be wrong, not in one's beliefs but in one's behavior toward others. "If you love me," Christ repeated three times to Peter, in the simplest possible language, "feed my lambs." If one's Christian life were based on no other activity, this one would be sufficient to identify one's state of "Christian grace." Hazel never fed anyone, but it is (perhaps) to be assumed that he would have, had he understood the basic Christian issue, which he assuredly --in his Protestant schizophrenia --did not.

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O'Connor's subliminal gender assumptions reflect her personal bias against her own sex which was encoded in all of Western literature, and against which neither men nor women had any intellectual defense until the sexual revolution --based initially on dress-decoding and the advent of birth control which followed World War II --made defense possible. She did, however, attack the basic premise of the Gothic paradigm, which may be stated in opposition to John Murray's Apocalyptic Vision regarding religious liberty: within Gothicism, it is only the irreligious male, the unparodied Gothic hero, who is privileged to exist in a state of self-control, self-knowledge, self-determination.
Because Gothicism is based on the very antinomianism which underlies to varying degrees --Protestant (Paulist) theology, to claim a life of action, to claim sexual autonomy, is tantamount to claiming the power of God, which is the center of masculine Gothic woundedness --his separation from the active, sexually autonomous Christ of history.
In Wise Blood, this patriarchal myth, this self-deceived, self-divided Gothic presumption, is overturned to reveal its true cause --which lies in the unconditional worship of Old Testament masculine privilege. Philosophically, Wise Blood echoes the Apocalypse of John wherein the Logos "spoke, discarding manhood" for the sake of a more balanced view of the Truth.

LOGOS AS EVOLUTION
To consume the two-Testament Gothic construct in any form is to experience, profitably and correctly, the schizophrenic philosophical position of the Apocalyptic Vision, which is the worship of the masculine Self as the center of the universe. It creates itself eternally; those who perpetuate the Gothic paradigm in popular culture or in "classicized" form (a contradiction in terms) warn the novelist (and scriptwriter) that public accessibility to their works depends upon the works' acceptability to the modern "Gothicized" patriarchy; the publishable logos must invest in "the military, industrial, technological [realities of patriarchal rule] ••• woman must be represented as the negative of man, the non-male, the mutilated, castrated Other"(Pollock 32).
The Gothic threshold, the "Apocalyptic Vision," does not refer to a specific literary quality, but rather to a category of literature whose hidden purpose is to identify, objectify, and eternalize those Biblical texts which would ensure the ongoing unassailability of an "elite" or "elect" 124 literary populace. The subtextual underpinnings of the masculine coalition are kept in place by all the major streams of Western literature, particularly the Gothic construct which is built across the sexual threshold between law and romance, between the father's house and the son's journey from it, between legitimate and illegitimate sex, between Self and Other, good and evil, male and female.
In the Protestant Gothic vision which defines the male as God, or "good," woman is made evil not through her own action but by philosophical default. Walpole's equation --eternalized by the lexicologist, the literary critic, and the publishing industry --has also eternalized the conflicts that drive (and torment) the Gothic hero in and out of literature. The psychological horrors suffered by the Gothicized male are unresolvable because --finally -there is no other story which makes sense to him besides those which perpetuate his "divinity," the thing consumed.
But the Logos may be stolen, as history has shown.
Flannery O'Connor stole it, and that her theft is safely canonized indicates the possibility that it may be stolen over and over again. The Word, if nothing else, is free.
Like the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, whose works (kept from publication by the Church till after his death) influenced her writings, O'Connor (insofar as her work was based on Catholic philosophy) believed in a perfectible universe. Now it is an unfinished picture, but 125 for her, as for Chardin, the hope of the world is already accomplished, and is --to the distant vision --apparent in the progress of a world under construction, a world psychically infused by a principle of intelligence who is not only benign but loving, that is made of the commonest things, of light and gravity and electrons in transit from being to being, through a process of becoming. Chardin referred to the process of evolution as the "masse du monde," the Mass of the World, the operation of the Word made Flesh, the Logos in real action, in the blood sacrifice that marks the path of true, selfless, charity toward a suffering world.
Like the sign above the animal cage, the Logos --not just the sum product of all language but of all intention --will bring together deadly enemies, will bring about the perfection it has prophesied. The salvation of the world will occur violently; the universe is violent, as the dying O'Connor well knew. It is not safe but it is certain, as it is certain that we are, as we sit in our chairs, hurt-