ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Horace Walpole’s use of nonnormative bodies in his gothic masterpiece, The Castle of Otranto, to advance a long literary history of crip and queer affiliations. The instability which pervades the system of primogeniture constitutes much of the family drama in The Castle of Otranto. The plot tension of Walpole’s gothic tale inheres not only in the impaired body of Conrad, but also in a system that prescribes normative embodiment and heterosexual desire as buttressing authority across generations. Besides exposing the central significance of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness for the system of primogeniture, Walpole’s excision of Conrad from the first pages of The Castle of Otranto belies an enduring cultural assumption, that disability is thought to render one incapable of engaging in procreative heterosexuality.
