ABSTRACT
With its focus on Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance and Mysteries of Udolpho , Chapter 3 demonstrates how established courtship novel traditions pertaining to peril and protection are perpetuated, in amplified fashion, by the presence of supernatural terrors, nature’s tumultuous forces, and eerie settings. These Gothic novels, with their blend of seduction and courtship scenarios, violent adventure-packed plots, and exaggeratedly black and white characters, highlight the gender stereotyping present in earlier discussed works. In particular, danger/protection language heightens the impression of the heroine’s vulnerability, purity, and victimization and magnifies contrasts, within the established two-suitor pattern, between quintessentially chivalric heroes who offer genuine protection and diabolical villains who obstruct the courtship process in terrifying ways.
