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

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God bless me; and pass’d on. I urged him farther:
Good master, cried he, go not to the castle;
There sorrow ever dwells, and moping misery. (I. 1. 1-21)
The castle is a place of silence and emptiness, resembling a graveyard. Not only does the
churl wear an aspect of horror, but it has been worn to “habitude.” The despair in
Narbonne is longstanding. Though suitably grand, the castle is nonetheless a home, a
supposed haven from the threats of the outside world. In Narbonne and in Otranto,
though, the home is paradoxically a place of danger. Instead of a male authority figure
menacing a vulnerable woman, in The Mysterious Mother the mother, supposed source of
protection for her children, presents a danger to her son and thus to future generations,
and to society as a whole. This is a clear example of contemporaneous anxieties over the
perception attack on the family. Women in power destroy not only social institutions
such as patriarchy and monarchy, they destroy the family itself and by implication the
entire social fabric.
The comparison of castle to the Countess’ psychological state may be expanded to
analogize the castle to the female body, as it did in The Castle of Otranto. Heiland’s
description of the interior of the castle, noted earlier, relates that it is “womb-like . . .
meant for breeding” (73). But in Castle Narbonne the Countess’s maternal function, and
the safety of the home, are perverted. Because of the incest and her resulting guilt, the
Countess fails in her role in many different ways. She is unavailable to Edmund as a
mother and he is banished from home. She did not protect the “body” of the castle—nor
her own body—from defilement, allowing not only unauthorized but also incestuous
sexual activity to bring both to ruin. This home is unable to contain dangerous female