Divine (In)Justice in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer

• In his introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Melmoth, Chris Baldick suggests the following: “When … Melmoth defends the Protestant view of the Bible against the Catholic Church, and we recall that this uncharacteristic behaviour is being related to us in a Jewish text transmitted by a Catholic, something more is involved than mere clumsiness or forgetfulness: an inadvertent dissolution of distinctions is taking place in which the same voice can utter sacrilegious sarcasms and pious platitudes almost in the same breath, erasing the clear line that was expected to lie between them in an ‘improving’ work of fiction” (xvi). The Irish context of Maturin’s self-deconstructing project is decisive. The Protestant rhetoric only strengthens the Catholic resistance in the way it would in an Irish political context (applied power always provokes opposition). In the novel, the Protestant impulse that Maturin at least seems to be driven by is a sterness that only functions as a catalyst for the dissolving of distinctions that Baldick draws attention to. The Gothic outcome is a display of the only justice, the fate of desire. The sought purity of the Panoptic eye becomes something like the eye in Georges Bataille’s Story of an Eye: “‘Put it up my arse, Sir Edmund,’ Simone shouted. And Sir Edmund delicately glided the eye between her buttocks” (66). This paper examines the functioning of (in)justice in Melmoth, mainly in its theological dimensions.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturvetenskap (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Literary Studies (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Melmoth the Wanderer

Calvinism

total depravity

excess

textual lacunae

anti-Catholicism

Irish schizophrenia

voyeurism

the eye

Bataille

English

engelska

Literature

litteraturvetenskap

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)