The Jeovah Imperative: Images of Incest and Blood Sacrifice in Walpole\u27s The Castle of Otranto and Flannery O\u27Connor\u27s Wise Blood

This thesis compares and contrasts Biblical images in Horace Walpole\u27s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Flannery O\u27Connor\u27s Wise Blood (1949), seeking to illuminate their common participation in Judeo-Christian philosophy (referred to herein as the Jehovah Imperative) and in the tradition of Gothic fiction. Although both books center on a religious hero who defies an irreligious authority, and both are resolved when a major character is murdered by a legitimate legal agent, historical and feminist perspectives will show: (1) the ways in which Walpole\u27s Otranto manipulated Biblical images in favor of eighteenth-century Protestant ambition and the furtherance of the father-son inheritance chain begun in the Bible, and (2) the formula by which O\u27Connor\u27s Wise Blood reverses the Gothic/Biblical realities to expose that manipulation in a grotesque mirror-image. Examining those acts of brutality -- specifically incest and blood sacrifice -- long legitimized by Biblical texts, and tracing their historical sexual dynamics to an inter-testamentary economic paradigm, this thesis will look at how those biases were fixed in place by the first Gothic novel, and transferred through history by similarly biased lexicological and critical exegeses, invisibly maintaining the social, economic and political sovereignty of the white Protestant (Gothicized) male in the western world