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

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Castle of Otranto, the knife is configured as phallic symbol and so the story ends as it
began, with the Countess engaging (symbolically) in unkynde love with her son. Only
after the wedding ceremony was complete did the Countess relay the entire story of her
incestuous seduction of Edmund years ago. When Edmund and Adeliza realize that they
are husband and wife and brother and sister, she faints while Edmund pulls out his dagger
and points it at his mother. When he hesitates she impales herself. Consideration of the
knife as phallic symbol reveals a similarity in the end of the story to the beginning; in
both, it was the Countess who initiated the fatal penetrations. In The Castle of Otranto
Manfred regained his reason when he looked at the body of his dead daughter; in The
Mysterious Mother the Countess regains her sense, also, at the extreme moment: “Not a
word,” she says, “Can ‘scape me, but will do the work of thunder, / and blast these
moments I regain from madness!” (V.5.350). She likens the storms of emotion to a
thunderclap which tells the end of her life, her castle, her body–and her family.
In the end ownership of the castle went to the Church. The fact that the Countess’
property ends up in the hands of the church, and those of the unscrupulous and
hypocritical Benedict, may raise the question of whether or not Walpole is voicing an
opinion in the debate between Catholicism as part of a decaying, superstitious past and
Protestantism as rational and progressive. Benedict’s speech notes a contrast between
organized religion and true Christianity through the character of the Countess:
This woman was not cast in human mould.
Ten such would foil a council, would unbuild
Our Roman church—In her devotion’s real.
Our beads, our hymns, our saints, amuse her not:
Nay, not confession, not repeating o’er