UNSAM – Universidad Nacional de San Martín

The Wanderer
and the English Romantics

ANGELICA SANTI
DNI 20029315

English Literature II

Lecturers: Mg. Silvia Sneidermanis

February 2017
 Table of Contents

Page

I.Introduction

The Romantic Age ................................................................................................. 3

Romantic themes and ideas................................................................................... 5

II.The Wanderer and the English Romantics

Wordsworth ........................................................................................................... 7

Coleridge ............................................................................................................... 10

Byron ..................................................................................................................... 10

Mary Shelley .......................................................................................................... 12

Percy Bysshe Shelley ............................................................................................ 12

III.Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 15

IV.Notes ..................................................................................................................... 16

V.Works Cited ........................................................................................................... 19

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 I - INTRODUCTION

The Romantic Age

The name "Romantic period", given to the span between the year 1798 and

1832, refers to a turbulent period, during which England experienced the ordeal of

change from a primarily agricultural society, where wealth and power had been

concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation. This change

occurred in a context of revolution—first the American and then the more radical

French—and of war, of economic cycles of inflation and depression, and of the

constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which

the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties. These socio

political events led to a new way of shaping and creating literature that is known as

“The Romantic Revolution”.

It is stated in the Norton Anthology of English Literature that this period, though

by far the shortest, is at least as complex and diverse as any other period in British

literary history (Greenblatt 1)1. During the twentieth century, five poets were selected by

scholars to construct the notion of a unified Romanticism on the basis of their works:

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe

Shelley, and John Keats. Being William Blake lately added to make a sixth, they would

be known as the Pleiades of English Romantic poetry because, “like that famous six-

star constellation in Taurus, [they are] well-observed and known to all” (McCalman

270). 2

But to create the notion of an integrated group would not be an easy task, as

their relationship was troubled and, in some cases, almost inexistent. Wordsworth and

Coleridge would fit no single definition, though they were close collaborators, Byron

strongly and openly rejected both Coleridge's philosophy and Wordsworth's poetry,

Shelley and Keats were stylistically and philosophically at opposite poles and, finally,

Blake was not at all like any of the other five.

first appeared in 1798 the word ‘Romantic’ was no compliment. It meant ‘fanciful’,

‘light’, even ‘inconsequential’. Originally coined in disagreement, and largely debated

among scholars, the concept has remained fluid ever since but never reached

universal agreement. In that respect, Romanticism is distinct from movements formed

by artists, which tend to be more coherent, at least to begin with. The British Romantic

poets could not have done this. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and

Keats never met in the same room and, had they done so, would probably have fallen

out immediately. One factor was the generation gap. Byron, Shelley and Keats might

have enjoyed the company of Wordsworth as he was in his later twenties and early

thirties, but by the time they reached artistic maturity – c.1816 for Shelley and Byron,

1819 for Keats – he was well into middle age and appeared to have abandoned the

religious and political views of his youth. Byron caught up with the critical debate

surrounding the concept of Romanticism in 1821, but Coleridge beat him to it by a year.

In 1820 the sage of Highgate compiled a list of ‘Romantic’ writers in which the only

English poets of the day were Southey, Scott and Byron. The oddity of this serves to

underline the inbuilt resistance of the concept to satisfactory definition – something that

guarantees its usefulness as a critical and pedagogical tool. Critics continue to adapt it

to their various needs while teachers use it to make connections between sometimes

disparate writers of the period.

Thus, the preeminence of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and

Shelley was largely the invention of the twentieth century.3

Romantic Themes and Ideas

Many of the Romantics became fascinated with the notion of the “sublime”, a

state that Classical authors as Plato and Longinus defined as physical, moral,

intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic “greatness”. Sublimity was

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usually associated with the power it has on the perceiver’s senses and imagination

although the emphasis in this period is given to the mixture of ecstasy and terror that

an encounter with the sublime generates.

Wordsworth’s The Prelude recounts the poet’s powerful emotions felt during the

ascent of Mount Snowdon. Shelley’s Mount Blanc reflects on nature’s power and

indifference to human life. Byron depicts, based on his own personal experience, some

of his memorable romantic heroes as standing on the edges of precipices, or

weathering ocean storms, or experiencing the vastness of a wilderness alone.

Furthermore, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats also

wrote about the power of the human imagination and speculated about the sources of

the artist’s inspiration. To symbolize the truths and perils of this quest these poets used

the figure of the wanderer or traveller, who, through a variety of extreme emotional and

mental states reflected about nature, man’s place in society and politics. Also pervaded

by Transcendentalism and pantheist notions of religion, these wanderers were the

vehicle through which the Romantics portrayed the reflections of Man confronting

Nature, frequently using the metaphor for the sublime: the power and mystery of forces

that inspired awe, solace, and self-discovery. They also reflected about the vicissitudes

that Man faced in modern society.

The renowned psychologist Carl Jung defined several archetypes that represent

the fundamental human motifs of our experience as we evolved, consequentially, they

evoke deep emotions. The Wanderer, also known as the seeker or explorer, is an

archetypal character that goes on a journey, either physically or mentally, from his

known home to the unknown, to find a greater meaning to life. This Wanderer can also

be a traveller that does not belong to a settled group or tribe, an outcast, or someone

on the run.4

Among these wandering characters, some stand out because they have been

the source of inspiration to many writers, including the English Romantics: (1) The

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Wanderer, an old English Poem5, that presents the despair of a vassal whose lord and

retainers were slain in a marauders' attack, and the whole town and its people wiped

out. The poet has survived, but the horror of that day haunts him. He takes up a little

boat to seek out a new lord and a welcoming village, but everywhere he goes he

encounters the same carnage and destruction. And so the poet is a wanderer on the

face of the land and sea, suffering a grim and irreconcilable solitude; (2) Melmoth the

Wanderer (1820), by Charles Robert Maturin, an interpolation of ancient tales and

elements drawn from Dante’s Inferno (1321) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote

(1615)6; (3) the wandering Jew, a popular motif of the doomed sinner in Christian

folklore, the legend of the wandering Jew influenced Gothic fiction, particularly the

creation of such characters as Ambrosio, the hero villain in Matthew Gregory Lewis’s

the Monk (1796); the guilt-ridden wanderer in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ballad The

Rime Of The Ancient Mariner (1798); and Father Schemoli in Charles Robert Maturin’s

The Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), among others.7

All these explained, it is the purpose of this monograph to identify instances of

the use of this archetypal figure in the works of the English Romantics. It will also aim

to find similarities and differences in them, and the importance of its use in the

depiction of the turmoil and confusion that pervaded their time, mostly remembered as

the Age of Revolutions. I will resort to the works of Maunder, Andrew, Encyclopedia of

Literary Romanticism; Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, Encyclopedia of Gothic literature; Wu,

Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology; Mason, Emma, The Cambridge introduction to

William Wordsworth and Greenblatt, Stephen, The Norton Anthology of English

Literature.

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 THE WANDERER AND THE ENGLISH ROMANTICS

WORDSWORTH

William Wordsworth saw in the French Revolution the promise of freedom for

the human race. He left for France and stayed there for a while, married a French

woman and had a daughter. However, the Revolution brought about chaos and murder

and the promise of freedom faded away, so Wordsworth returned to England in search

of peace and started to remember his past by practicing what he called “emotion

recollected in tranquillity”8. It could be said that he even became a wanderer himself,

meeting people whom he could ask questions and restore his faith in humanity.

In his works, Wordsworth stresses, with simplicity of language, the purity of the

people and of their countryside, praising nature, which first opened his eyes to beauty.

Being his desire to study human nature in the abstract as well as exposing to the

elements, the pastoral scenes of his own youth were peopled with men and maidens.

Hence, one of his most famous poems “I wandered lonely as I cloud” (1807) remind us

of his ability to reflect upon his own feelings when exposed to nature.

The Norton Anthology of the English Literature explains that most of

Wordsworth's greatest poetry had been written by 1807, when he published Poems, in

Two Volumes, The Excursion (1814) and the first collected edition of his poems (1815).

His particular style, in which some object or event in the present triggers a sudden

renewal of feelings he had experienced in youth result in a poem exhibiting the

discrepancy between, as he called it, “two consciousnesses": himself as he is now and

himself as he once was.

Though through his work he explores the theme of the traveller extensively, for

the sake of brevity, this monograph will refer exclusively to The Excursion (1814), more

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specifically, to Book I, The Wanderer.9 The first of the poem’s nine books incorporates

“The Story of Margaret,” or “The Ruined Cottage,” which was originally written as a

separate fragment, after which the poem advances largely through a series of debates

among its four main speakers: the Poet, the Solitary, the Wanderer and the Pastor. The

Poet, a younger man, is travelling with the Wanderer, a philosophically minded pedlar

who takes him to meet his friend the Solitary in the secluded mountain vale where he

lives. The Solitary is a former soldier and revolutionary preacher whose sadness

overwhelms him, following his wife and children’s deaths and the destruction of his

political hopes in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. The Wanderer and, to

a lesser extent, the Poet gently reprove the Solitary for his misanthropy, his withdrawal

from society, and his irreligious views, and the Wanderer suggests that an

imaginatively apprehended faith in God could cure him of his despondency. The three

men then travel to a secluded churchyard among the mountains, where they meet with

the Pastor, who joins in their debate, drawing examples of the harmonizing effects of

virtue and religion from the histories of the dead parishioners who are buried in his

churchyard10.

Andrew Maunder, in his Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism claims that The

Excursion has often been condemned by critics who, while acknowledging the great

beauty of some of its passages, have seen it as overly didactic. In recent years,

however, more sympathetic critics have emphasized the poem’s performative aspects,

reading it as a work that foregrounds problems of reading and ideology while refusing

definitively to endorse the philosophical position of any of its characters. Adding to that,

in The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth, Emma Mason states that many

critics read The Excursion not as a story or religious allegory, but as a public

commentary on contemporary historical events. Even these references to history are

given particular, rather than general meaning. Mason says that “the Wanderer, Solitary,

Pastor and Poet each [are] working to engage the reader in their own memories of
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these events to communalize them as shared memories on which a nation of readers

might draw” (Mason 93). Nature is central to The Excursion, since It provides the

poem’s topography and also transforms it into a spiritualized site that produces a real

change on the travellers. The Wanderer’s argument clearly specifies at the beginning

of the poem that it is “a summer forenoon. The Author reaches a ruined Cottage upon a

Common, and there meets with a revered Friend, the Wanderer, of whose education

and course of life he gives an account--The Wanderer, while resting under the shade of

the Trees that surround the Cottage, relates the History of its last Inhabitant.”

(Wordsworth 1).

The story of “The Ruined Cottage”, thus, becomes a cautionary tale that aims

to warn the reader about the dangers of disengaging with the natural world, when the

Wanderer finds Margaret isolating herself within a sterile depression even as nature

grows up around her cottage. “. . . And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust /

Burn to the socket. Many a passenger / Hath blessed poor Margaret for her gentle

looks, / . . . / But he was welcome; no one went away / But that it seemed she loved

him. She is dead, / The light extinguished of her lonely hut, / The hut itself abandoned

to decay, / And she forgotten in the quiet grave.” (I, 500-510)

Wordsworth’s Wanderer, in this particular case, seems to be a character who,

unmarried and childless, “argues for a collective model of domestic affection that

overrides biological, geographical or class limitations.”11 Again, Mason claims that

Wordsworth moved, in this more mature period of his life, from an exploration of self-

identity towards a social model of subjectivity that he developed more fully in The

Excursion, providing this archetypal traveller that would help integrate the material

world with a spiritual one, “joining the lives of the companions through communal

response and feeling.” (Mason 95).

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COLERIDGE

It is written in the Encyclopedia of Gothic Literature by Mary Ellen Snodgrass

that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gothic fantasy ballad, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

became a favourite poem of both the intellectual and the ordinary reader by reflecting

the romance of sea tales and, especially relevant for this monograph, the timeless

memories of the wanderer who has plied the waters of the Pacific and the Antarctic and

survived a voyage on a ghost ship. The killing of the bird with a crossbow, an image

suggesting crucifixion, is a symbolic act of pride that breaches nature’s wholeness and

creates an extended isolation from humanity.

Like the Wandering Jew, the unnamed speaker survives a hellish voyage

wracked by divine vengeance and recounts its fearful episodes to an absorbed

wedding guest. Throughout the allegorical drama, the grizzled storyteller, as though

bearing the mark of Cain, makes no effort to return to normal life. (Snodgrass 294) The

poet pictures him as surviving like a soulless spectre amid the corpses of his fellow

sailors. (Snodgrass 294) “God save thee, ancient Mariner! / From the fiends, that

plague thee thus!— / Why look'st thou so?"—With my cross-bow / I shot the Albatross.”

(Coleridge I,79-82) Submerged in a gothic scenario, Coleridge’s wanderer, perhaps

due to his religious background, seems to be more charged with symbolism than

Wordsworth, depicting him in the agony of sin.

BYRON

According to Snodgrass, the controversial English romantic poet George

Gordon, Lord Byron, as a leading member of the romantic circle, earned a vast cult

acting out the Gothic themes of licentiousness, seduction, cruelty to women and

children, and incest. While channelling his considerable artistry into verse, he also

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incorporated Gothic touches in his works. Byron’s egocentric behaviour and his

masterful development of the antihero gave rise to the “Byronic hero,” a complex male

egotist covered in mystery and prone to dark brooding.12 This quasi-satanic type

relates to the Greek Prometheus, a suffering god, and the Wandering Jew, suffers

alienation as his occluded spirit searches for some divine truth or link to a deity or

supreme being. A lone wanderer usually endowed with an electric appeal, the Byronic

hero may occur in a variety of representations. Considering in the first place one of

Byron’s most well known works, Don Juan, a new type of wanderer is portrayed. Byron

even mentions Wordsworth’s The Excursion in Don Juan, but gives its protagonist a

sexual turn of the screw. He even uses the verb “wander” in an iniquitous way: “My way

is to begin with the beginning; / The regularity of my design / Forbids all wandering as

the worst of sinning.” (Byron I, 50-52). Through these few lines the speaker announces

his intention of beginning his account of Juan's life and parentage by comparing

“wandering” as “the worst of sinning”. It seems that Byron uses “wandering" in this case

as a synonym for immoral behaviour or, in a different context, as a reference to

incoherent or illogical self-expression.

However, a more cheerful occurrence of the verb to wander appears at the

beginning of Canto I of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage: “Oh! let that eye, which, wild as the

Gazelle’s, / Now brightly bold, or beautifully shy, / Wins as it wanders, dazzles where it

dwells,” (Byron I, 28-30) In this case, the verb “wander” seems to be filled with

happiness and joy at the beginning of the pilgrimage. It could be worth for the purpose

of this analysis that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is a long, semiautobiographical poem in

which Byron records his impressions of places he visited during several tours of

Europe. This work is imbued by Byron’s love for nature and meditations on the passing

of time and the transience of human endeavours.

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MARY SHELLEY

It appears to be an easy task to relate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the

archetype of the Gothic wanderer. At the beginning of the novel, Victor Frankenstein

shows the traits of the wanderer who is seeking knowledge. This quest leads him to

leave his family and embrace isolation. Moreover, the monster he creates can also be

regarded as a wanderer. In an effort to adapt to human behaviour, learn their ways and

their language, he becomes a wanderer, as it is uttered by Captain Walton, “Will you

laugh at the enthusiasm I express concerning this divine wanderer?” (Shelley Mary 21)

In addition, Mary Shelley would also make use of the features of the Byronic

hero in many of her novels. Ernest J. Lovell explores this feature in Mary Shelley’s

works, stating that the presence of the biographical element in her novels is now well

known and Byron has long been recognized as the model for Raymond in The Last

Man (1826) and for Lodore in Lodore (1835), Castruccio, the hero of Valperga (1823)

and John Falkner in Falkner (1837). 13

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Maunder explains that, as part of his personal and poetic program designed to

remove, or at least to evade, mechanisms and practices that he felt as secured

systems of oppression, Percy Bysshe Shelley shared with the other Romantics the

sense of dissatisfaction with the inequities of power and representation in the world.

As part of the second-generation Romantics, they advocated for a more

radical intellectual revolution, which proceeded from the sharing of ideas, chiefly in the

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poetry and prose of members of their generation. For Shelley, the notion of revolution

permeated his own writings, many of his poems containing prefaces and notes that

articulate and examine his ideological commitments. The footnotes to his first major

attack on social order, a long poem entitled Queen Mab (1813), pointed to religion,

marriage, and diet as three practices that reinforced the social divisions and

stratifications that underwrite the oppression of individuals and cultures.

Adding to that, writing in mythic terms allowed him to leap out of his own time to

imagine the perfection of the world in some distant future. Shelley’s best-known epic

work, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts (1820), centers the rebellion

of the human race against the gods on the relationship between an erotic couple,

Prometheus and Asia. Further, the poem underscores the power of language to reset

relationships of power and to transform various contexts of oppression into those of

liberation.14

As far as the wanderer archetype is concerned, Shelley developed this

archetypal character in Ozymandias. This sonnet was written in 1817 and published in

1818. In it, a traveller comes across the remains of an enormous statue in the desert,

evidently a tribute to a once great Pharaoh. The inscription on the statue reads: “My

name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

(Shelley ll, 10–11) But as the traveller realizes, these words are in vain for now there is

“Nothing” to be seen and “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and

bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away” (Shelley ll, 12–14). In an age of

burgeoning individualism and egotism, Shelley’s sonnet offered a harsh critique to

political tyrannies.

This traveller’s tale of a former fallen empire is also reminiscent of the situation

faced by the wedding guest in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who hears

a tale of decline told by the travelling mariner. While Coleridge’s wedding guest
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becomes a sadder and wiser man upon hearing the mariner’s tale, we receive no such

confirmation from the narrator of Shelley’s sonnet, who simply relates the story to us

without overtly judging the tale, its travelling teller, or its decayed subject.

Again, Maunder explains that “It is a composition about decomposition, a tale

which heralds winter but also quietly prophesies the coming spring renewal.”15 By being

published in Shelley’s best friend’s paper the Examiner, the poem could undoubtedly

be considered an attack on tyrannical rulers, although the exact critical stance of the

poem has been a source of much debate.

Overall, Shelley’s poem presents us with a compendium of artistic dialogues:

the mocking hand of the sculptor, the storytelling traveller who comes across the ruin,

and the sonnet’s narrator, that outweigh the singular power of a selfish ruler who has

become the subject of a collective story but not its author. Ozymandias’s story is

neither timeless nor about timelessness; it is an affirmation of the Romantics beliefs

about the society of their times and the constant sense of turmoil that surrounded them.

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 CONCLUSION

To conclude, it cannot be denied that The English Romantic poets were deeply

impressed by the archetypal figure of the wanderer that pervaded the literature of their

time and employed it as a key element in their writings.

The works discussed in this monograph could be understood as manifestations

of the Wanderer for more than one reason. Some contain a form derived from the verb

to wander, and others depict the archetypal character of the wanderer or traveller. They

would use this figure for various reasons. While The Wanderer in The Excursion served

Wordsworth's needs to expose his own fears about the constant changes of the

modern world and the need to construct a more civilized society, The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner evokes references to the old English poem "the Wanderer" and tale of

"the Wandering Jew" and is overloaded with religious symbols. Adding to that, Byron

figures of the wanderer allow him to disguise the yearnings of his own licentious life

experiences, which constitute a constant in his works, mixing them with his love for

nature and resulting in an archetype with proper name.

Furthermore, Mary Shelley, in line with the Byronic hero, makes a display of

literariness by developing one of the most iconic wanderers in the history of literature.

Finally, in Ozymandias, Shelley succeeds in criticizing the negative aspects of the

political revolutions that surrounded Europe at the time.

The arguments presented in the monograph suggest that the Wanderer figure

helped the English Romantics portray the feelings of uncertainty and bewilderment that

surrounded them. This archetype leaves the known to discover and explore the

unknown, braving loneliness and isolation to seek out new paths. As it happened to the

Romantics, this iconoclastic archetype helps readers discover their uniqueness,

perspectives and callings.

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 NOTES

1
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 1.
Print.
2
McCalman, Iain. An Oxford companion to the Romantic Age: British culture, 1776-1832. Oxford: Oxford U Press,
1999. 270. Print.
3
Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology, 4th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. xxxiii. Print.
4
"Stefan Stenudd." Psychoanalysis of Myth - The Jungian Archetypes. Web. 06 Feb. 2017.
5
http://www.hermitary.com/literature/wanderer.html
THE WANDERER
The solitary looks for the favor of fortune,
For serene waters and a welcoming haven.
But his lot is to plough the wintry seas.
An exile's fate is decreed for him.
Each dawn stirs old sorrows.
The slaughter of lord, kin, village, and keep.
Best to swallow grief, to blot out memories.
Best to seal up the heart's wretchedness.
There is none with whom to speak,
No one alive who will understand.
Best to hide sorrow in one's chest.
The storms of fate suffice to busy me.
Years ago, I buried my master in the ground.
Grieving, I crossed winter seas seeking another:
A generous lord to share hall and treasure,
And I a friendless man seeking order anew.
But frostbite and hunger are my lot now.
My sleep is haunted by dreams of the past:
I kneel acknowledging my master's gift.
Gladly I accept a boon of gold in service.
Then the seabirds' shriek startles me.
I shiver in the dark dawn's frost and hail.
My heart recalls the image of my dream.
The pangs of sorrow and exile reawaken.
The present is overthrown by the past.
Rue rash youth's squandering of fortune.
All things dissipate like sea mist.
There is nothing to cling to but memories.
Is not the wise man's virtue patience?
Oaths and intemperance are follies.
The wise man guards his heart with caution.
The cheerful hall will be desolate in old age.
Everywhere the wind blows through empty ruins.
A few walls are left, covered with frost.
Unburied dead, once proud kin, lie wretched.
They are the sad prey of crows and wolves.
The lands were made desolate in a stroke.
Now the halls and remnants are silent.
Stonework empty, wealth dissipated:
Everywhere the same thing meets the eye.
Horse, rider, ringgiver, chalice,
High seats, hallsounds where are they?
So asks my dark mind, full of grief.
Gone, as if never having been.
Storms blast the rocky cliffs.
Blizzards lash earth and sea.
Winter comes, darkness falls.
The world lies silent and empty.
No men or women to be found.
All in this life is suffering.
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 No good fortune to be expected.
No abode but a house of sorrow.
The wise man cloaks his heart:
Steadfastness and temperance.
He does well to dissemble his feelings.
Let his faith rest in that alone.

6
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic literature. New York: Facts on File, 2005. 228-229. Print.
Maturin loosely based his plot on Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), a popular novel
published by William Lane’s MINERVA PRESS. Maturin shaped the protagonist after the
antiheroic title character in Percy Bysshe SHELLEY’s closet drama Prometheus Unbound
(1819).
Melmoth the Wanderer influenced an impressive list of writers: Honoré de Balzac, Charles
BAUDELAIRE, Lord BYRON, Johann von GOETHE, Nathaniel HAWTHORNE, Edgar Allan
POE, and Sir Walter SCOTT. In his last years, Oscar WILDE, after release from imprisonment
for sodomy, went into exile in Paris and wrote under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, an
indication of Wilde’s unending torment.
Maturin violated the GOTHIC CONVENTION of placing horrific fiction in the mystic Orient or in
the Catholic realms of the Mediterranean. In stead, his autobiographical plot opens in Dublin, in
the fall of 1816. The MYSTERY takes shape from a situation common to Gothic novels—a
young
title character obsesses over a compelling manuscript about a relative (in this case, someone
named Stanton). To avoid the medieval claptrap of earlier Gothic models, Maturin connects the
document to an historic era of religious fanaticism, the English Puritans’ execution of King
Charles I on January 30, 1649. From this ominous springboard, a complex series of embedded
side plots—“The Tale of the Indians,” “The Tale of Guzman’s Family,” and “The Tale of the
Lovers”— varies the narrative with motifs of alienation, temptation, fanaticism, cannibalism, and
confinement to an asylum, a suggestion of the INSANITY wrought by obsessive sectarianism.
Maturin employs the anticlerical text as an ALLEGORY on Ireland’s relationship with England
and as a commentary on morality, ILLUSION, imprisonment and CLAUSTROPHOBIA,
psychological torment, SADISM, and legalistic religion. At the heart of the story is the wretched
bitterness of Melmoth, a VILLAIN who owes much to Ann RADCLIFFE’s Montoni and
SCHEDONI. Of melmoth’s twisted personality, Maturin muses that sarcasm derived from
despair: “A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted
features of agony—and laughter which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been
the only intelligible language of madness and misery” (Maturin, 270). The pervasive savagery of
the wanderer symbolizes the evils and corruption that haunt humankind, both on the
geographical landscape and the inner terrain of the mind. In the estimation of critic Leonard
Wolf, the wanderer’s plunge into primordial iniquity “becomes an apparently accurate chart of
the cost to mankind of original sin” (Maturin, Introduction, xi).
One of the most gripping of Maturin’s digressive tales is the involvement of a shipwrecked
Spaniard named Monçada, whose story expresses the author’s ANTI-CATHOLICISM. Forced
into celibacy by the Inquisition, he relates his seduction by a Satanic SUPERNATURAL loner,
who entices him from a restrictive monastery. Paralleling diabolic stories and tales of the
WANDERING JEW, the novel reaches its high point with a confrontation between Stanton and
the unnamed demon, who has extended his victim’s life to 150 years. In an ATMOSPHERE of
moral vacuum and theological despair, the victim resigns himself to reclamation by the devil.
On his return to Ireland, Melmoth, the agent of Satan, meets his end. The demon demands a
terrible, unavoidable punishment for overreaching human boundaries, first in the sea, then in
the nether reaches. In a fearful vision, the wanderer sees himself on the lip of a precipice where
an unseen force flings him to perdition. Maturin expands on damnation with powerful imagery:
“The upper air (for there was no heaven) showed only blackness unshadowed and
impenetrable—but, blacker than that blackness, he could distinguish a gigantic outstretched
arm, that held him as in sport on the ridge of that infernal precipice” (Maturin, 409).
The descent ends with a succession of stop-motion images: “He fell—he sunk—he blazed—he
shrieked!” (ibid., 410). As a warning to the reader, Maturin indicates that Melmoth’s death does
not rid the world of persecution. French readers thrilled to Émile Bégin’s translation, L’Homme
du Mystère, ou Histoire de Melmoth le Voyageur (The man of mystery; or, the story of Melmoth
the traveler, 1820) and Jean Cohen’s Melmoth, ou l’Homme Errant (Melmoth; or, the wandering
man, 1820).

7
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic literature. New York: Facts on File, 2005. 356-357. Print.
The mythic Jewish pariah had his origin as a fictional straw man and repository of anti-Semitic
hatreds.
Identified as Joseph Cartaphilus, a porter to Pontius Pilate or an officer of the Sanhedrin, the
wandering Jew supposedly mocked Jesus on the way to execution on Golgotha. Upon
shouldering the cross, Jesus halted long enough to condemn Cartaphilus to an unending earthly
journey until Judgment Day.
Based on a cryptic verse in Matthew 16:28 and substantiated by a curse on the Roman
Malchus, who struck Jesus in John 18:20–22, the tale is a reverse of the FAUST LEGEND.

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 While Faust bargained with Satan for a longer life, the longlived wandering Jew was an undying
protagonist who wished for death as an end to his unrelieved trekking throughout Europe, the
British Isles, and Russia. The story first appeared in literature in Flores Historiarum (The
Flowers of History), which English monk Roger of Wendover, the chronicler of St. Albans
Abbey, compiled in 1228. Historian Matthew of Paris enlarged on a supposed sighting of the
Jew in Armenia in Chronica Majora Anglorum (Major history of the English, ca. 1258).
The legendary Jew made a peripatetic march through theological writings and pulpit sermons, in
stage plays and ballads, as a subject for art and music, and as grist for chroniclers and folk-
story tellers. In 1547, a new version identified the wanderer as Ahasverus (or Ahasuerus), a
cobbler who refused to let Jesus rest on his way down the streets of Jerusalem to the
crucifixion. Like an earthly demon, the aged scorner was the unwilling immortal, the supreme
literary SYMBOL of alienation, OTHERNESS, and perpetual penitence. He was also a useful
threat to naughty children and to parishioners, whom parsons chastened with reported sightings
of the cursed Jew.
On a grander scale, the wanderer, yearning for redemption, justified hatred and persecution of
all Jews throughout the Middle Ages, particularly during the Spanish Inquisition and the
expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 1490s. The figure permeated much of German, French, and
English romantic and Gothic literature—the title character in Christian Friedrich Schubart’s Der
Ewige Jude: Eine Lyrische Rhapsodie (The wandering Jew: A lyric rhapsody, 1783); a questing
alchemist in William GODWIN’s St. Leon (1799); a mysterious traveler in Charles Robert
Maturin’s MELMOTH THE WANDERER (1820); and the reviled protagonist in George Croly’s
Salathiel, the Wandering Jew (1828), which is set in Jerusalem during the repressive regimes of
Nero and Titus. French novelist Eugène Sue’s Le Juif Errant (The Wandering Jew, 1844)
captures the pathos of the weary nomad: “Oh, that I might only finish my task!—‘GO ON!
GO ON!’—A single hour—only a single hour of repose—‘GO ON!’—Alas! I leave those I love on
the brink of the Abyss!—‘GO ON! GO ON!’” (Haining, 740). Marked like Cain with a black cipher
on his brow, he plods into a gale with his hands lifted in vain to heaven.
Among the romantic poets, Percy Bysshe SHELLEY made full use of pathetic, aimless figures
in The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger (1810), which pictures Paulo
marked by a cross on his forehead; in the sensational St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1811);
and for the unfinished short story “The Assassins” (1814). With “The Spectre Bride” (1822),
William Harrison AINSWORTH produced a horrible vision of an evil wanderer gazing into the pit
of hell where “the worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” (Haining, 327). In
AMERICAN GOTHIC, the motif recurs in Nathaniel HAWTHORNE’s “A Virtuoso’s Collection”
and “A Select Party” in Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) and in the MELANCHOLY figure in
poet Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Wandering Jew” (1921). The Czech playwright Karel
CAPEK reprised the wanderer as a long-lived female from 16th-century Crete in the
DETECTIVE STORY “The Makropulos Case” (1922).

8
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
245. Print.
9
Wordsworth, William. The excursion 1814. N.p.: Woodstock , 1991. Print.
10
Maunder, Andrew. Encyclopedia of literary romanticism. New York: Facts On File, 2010. 133. Print.
11
Mason, Emma. The Cambridge introduction to William Wordsworth. Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2010. 95. Print.
12
Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic literature. New York: Facts on File, 2005. 44-46. Print.
13
Lovell, Jr. Ernest J. Byron and the Byronic Hero in the works of Mary Shelley. JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2017.
14
Maunder, Andrew. Encyclopedia of literary romanticism. New York: Facts On File, 2010. 404-407. Print.
15
Maunder, Andrew. Encyclopedia of literary romanticism. New York: Facts On File, 2010. 326-327. Print.

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 WORKS CITED

 Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English

 Lovell, Jr. Ernest J. Byron and the Byronic Hero in the works of Mary Shelley.
JSTOR. Web. 5 Feb. 2017.

 Mason, Emma. The Cambridge introduction to William Wordsworth. Cambridge:

 Maunder, Andrew. Encyclopedia of literary romanticism. New York: Facts On

 McCalman, Iain. An Oxford companion to the Romantic Age: British culture,

 Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. Encyclopedia of Gothic literature. New York: Facts on

 "Stefan Stenudd." Psychoanalysis of Myth - The Jungian Archetypes. N.p., n.d.

 Wordsworth, William. The excursion 1814. N.p.: Woodstock , 1991. Print.

 Wu, Duncan. Romanticism: An Anthology, 4th Edition. N.p.: John Wiley & Sons,
2012. Print.

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