5 - La tía Águeda (1995) and Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764): Frightening Buildings

Summary

In this novel, Marta, a young girl who has recently lost her mother, is entrusted by her father to the care of the eponymous aunt (his elder sister) and in this unfamiliar small-town environment and disciplinary regime, the tenyear- old feels lost, trapped, orphaned and exiled from her home in Seville. As if the situation were not frightening enough, a ghost also appears in the house, that of Martín, Águeda's husband who dies in the course of the narrative, haunting his widow thereafter. Having discussed the representation of ghosts in Chapter 4, this one will not place the focus on the haunting, but rather on the fears generated by the house itself, limiting discussion of Martín's ghost to how it impacts on the representation of the house as a frightening space.

Horace Walpole's seminal Gothic work, The Castle of Otranto, is set mainly in a large castle complete with trapdoors, secret underground passages leading to a church and adjoining convents, courtyards, and at least one tower. There is an abundance of supernatural phenomena here, revolving around the figure of Alfonso the Good, the ancestor who reacts from beyond the grave to the usurpation of the principality of Otranto by the villain of the piece, a certain Manfred. The central storyline – which is extremely fast-moving and itself as labyrinthine as its setting – involves one of the main characters, Isabella, needing to escape from the castle, to distance herself from Manfred's sexually predatory intentions; this and several other twists and turns of the plot give the author a reason to use description of the buildings to intensify the frightening atmosphere.

Noticeable features of Walpole's text and ones that will serve as useful comparators for those of García Morales, are the sense of claustrophobia, of being trapped inside a building (a sensation not limited to the hapless Isabella) and the ingenious establishment of an almost seamless relationship between the hostile architecture and the unwelcome and unlawful authority of its owner. In Walpole's medieval setting, this is nothing short of tyranny, whereas La tía Águeda [Aunt Águeda] deals in subtler power games, but at bottom the dynamics are similar, even to the final humbling of the villain at the end of the story.