Charles Robert Maturin and the haunting of Irish romantic Fiction 9781526125552

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Chronology of Maturin’s life
Introduction: Spectres of Maturin; or, the ghosts of Irish Romantic fiction
Reviving Maturin: the life and works
Communing with the dead: the medium and media of Fatal revenge
Conjuring Glorvina: The wild Irish boy and the national tale
Witnessing the past: the textual ruins of The Milesian chief
Narrating history: the burden of words in Women; or pour et contre
Paratextual possession: rereading Melmoth the wanderer
Rethinking Scott’s revolution: The Albigenses as historical novel
Conclusion: Room for more: the future for Maturin research
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Poignantly describing himself as ‘a disappointed author’ in his own lifetime, Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824) acutely foresaw the cultural amnesia into which he would fall after his death in 1824. Remembered today for his Gothic masterpiece, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Maturin has remained largely marginalised in critical attention to Irish Romantic literature. In this book – the most complete and up-to-date reading of Maturin and his novels available today – Christina Morin reinstates Maturin as a key figure in the development of Irish Romantic fiction. Working from Jacques Derrida’s influential theory on ghosts, this book counters the traditional understanding of early-nineteenth century Irish fiction as constituted by national and regional literary forms comprised of totalising narratives of reconciliation and closure. Instead, tracing the continued emergence of an atavistic past – cultural, social, and political – in the novels of Maturin and his contemporaries, this book reveals the Gothic mode’s persistent spectral influence in Ireland throughout the Romantic period. In particular, it lucidly demonstrates the manner in which Maturin’s six novels dramatically underscore the haunted and haunting nature of Irish literary production in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union (1801). Correspondingly, it proposes a new paradigm by which to understand Irish Romantic fiction while also exhorting renewed attention from academics and enthusiasts alike to an author all but forgotten, despite his central influence on literature from the early-nineteenth century to today, for far too long. Christina Morin is an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. She is co-editor of the online Irish history blog Pue’s Occurrences (http://puesoccurrences.com)

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MORC000 cover

Cover image: Maturin’s home in York Street, Dublin, in 1967. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

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Charles Robert Maturin and the haunting of Irish Romantic fiction

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Half-length portrait of Maturin painted by William Brocas (c. 1794–1868), later engraved by Henry Hoppner Meyer (1782–1847), and published in the New monthly magazine in 1819.

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Charles Robert Maturin and the haunting of Irish Romantic fiction Christina Morin

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Christina Morin 2011 The right of Christina Morin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN 978 0 7190 8532 1 hardback

First published 2011 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10/12pt Perpetua by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

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Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgements Chronology of Maturin’s life Introduction:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Spectres of Maturin; or, the ghosts of Irish Romantic fiction

Reviving Maturin: the life and works Communing with the dead: the medium and media of Fatal revenge Conjuring Glorvina: The wild Irish boy and the national tale Witnessing the past: the textual ruins of The Milesian chief Narrating history: the burden of words in Women; or pour et contre Paratextual possession: rereading Melmoth the wanderer Rethinking Scott’s revolution: The Albigenses as historical novel

Conclusion: Room for more: the future for Maturin research Bibliography Index

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1 21 33 58 83 106 129 154 177 189 203

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List of illustrations

Frontispiece

1 2&3

4

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Half-length portrait of Maturin painted by William Brocas (c. 1794–1868), later engraved by Henry Hoppner Meyer (1782–1847), and published in the New monthly magazine in 1819. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. ii Maturin’s home in York Street, Dublin, in 1967. Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. 3 Four sequential pages (pp. 14–17) in the first volume of The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio (1807). Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin. 39 One of ten illustrations provided by R. Huttula for the 1885 London edition of Melmoth the wanderer (1820). Courtesy of The Board of Trinity College Dublin. 181

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Acknowledgements

This project had its inception as a PhD thesis undertaken at Trinity College Dublin under the auspices of an Irish Scottish Academic Initiative Studentship (2002–5). As with that earlier endeavour, this study has been a long time in fruition, and many thanks are due. In particular, I am grateful to my PhD supervisor, Ian Campbell Ross, for his untiring support, both academic and personal, throughout the years. Without him, I certainly would not be where I am today. I am also indebted to my friends and colleagues at University College Cork, where I found my legs as an English lecturer from 2007 to 2009 and further developed the arguments and thought processes informing this book. Those deserving thanks are too numerous to list here, but special acknowledgement is only right for Graham Allen, Barry Monahan, and David Coughlan (now at the University of Limerick), who, in addition to providing the support of their friendship, selflessly offered time from their busy schedules to proofread, comment upon, and helpfully critique my work. Equally, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast, where I held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Institute of Irish Studies from 2009 to 2010. I am particularly grateful to the Institute for allowing me the opportunity, space, and, most importantly, time to complete this monograph. Thanks also to the many people in the Institute and the wider Queen’s community who willingly assisted not only with proofreading, critiquing, and sounding out this project but also with supporting my mental health with endless cups of tea, plates of traybakes, and encouraging chat: Danielle Blaylock, Dominic Bryan, Thérèse Cullen, David Dwan, Richard English, Moyra Haslett, Eamonn Hughes, Liam Kennedy, Edward Larrissy, Caroline Magennis, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, Olwen Purdue, and Sara Templer, among many others. Further thanks go to Jarlath Killeen and Claire Connolly, both of whom have given generously of their time and energy over the past several years, critiquing my work, offering helpful suggestions, and writing a small mountain of reference letters. Much of the research for this project was completed at the libraries at Trinity

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College Dublin and Queen’s University Belfast, as well as at the National Library of Ireland, the British Library, and the National Library of Scotland. I am much indebted to the librarians at each of these libraries for their assistance in finding and procuring the materials in which I was interested. I am also grateful to the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, which now administers Walter Scott’s personal library at Abbotsford. My particular thanks go to Andrea Longson and Lindsay Levy for facilitating my access to Scott’s collection of first-edition Maturin novels and, in the case of Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand (1816), pre-publication manuscripts. Thanks are also due to the editorial and production teams at Manchester University Press, who have patiently answered my many questions and encouragingly guided me through the process of preparing my manuscript for publication. Finally, on a more personal note, I would like to thank my family and friends for their unfailing support and assistance over the years. Special thanks to Kate and Jonathan Hogan, Eveline Masco, Gunther De Vos, and Kristin and Séan Tessyman for their valuable friendship, and to my ever-encouraging and supportive family, Pam, Mike, and Craig. Last but not least, to my wonderful, long-suffering husband, Bruce, who has been with me through the writing of both thesis and monograph and lives to tell the tale.

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Chronology of Maturin’s life

1780 – Born in Dublin, 25 September. 1795 – Enters Trinity College Dublin. 1800 – Graduates from Trinity with a BA before pursuing orders in the Church of Ireland. 1802 – Maturin’s father, William, begins to suffer reductions in his salary as Clerk of the Munster Road in the Postal Service. 1803 – Ordained a curate in the Church of Ireland; marries Henrietta Kingsbury, sister to Sarah Kingsbury, mother of Lady Jane Wilde. 1804 – Assumes curatorial duties in the parish church of Loughrea, Co. Galway. 1806 – Returns to Dublin as curate of St Peter’s Church in Aungier Street; his eldest son, William, is born. 1807 – The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio published under the pseudonym ‘Dennis Jasper Murphy’. 1808 – The Wild Irish Boy published under the pseudonym ‘Dennis Jasper Murphy’. 1809 – William Maturin loses his job on account of a false accusation of misconduct; shortly after, Maturin stands security for a loan to a family member, possibly his brother, and assumes the brunt of the burden when the loan-taker defaults. 1810 – Sir Walter Scott reviews The fatal revenge and praises Maturin’s skills as a writer. 1812 – The Milesian chief published, also under the pseudonym ‘Dennis Jasper Murphy’; writes his first letter to Scott in belated response to Scott’s earlier review of Fatal revenge. 1813 – Writes Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand. 1816 – Bertram produced, with the help of Scott and Byron, at the Drury Lane Theatre in London; Maturin’s identity as the author of Bertram and his three earlier novels is revealed; his position within the Church is subsequently seriously threatened.

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Chronology of Maturin’s life

1817 – Manuel: a tragedy in five acts performed and published. 1818 – Women; or pour et contre published. 1819 – Sermons published; Fredolfo: a tragedy performed and published. 1820 – Melmoth the wanderer published. 1824 – The Albigenses and Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church published; dies, possibly to an overdose of laudanum (accidental or otherwise), 30 October. 1825 – ‘Leixlip Castle’ published. 1830 – Osmyn the renegade; or, the siege of Salerno performed in Dublin. 1831 – Osmyn the Renegade performed in London.

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Introduction: Spectres of Maturin; or, the ghosts of Irish Romantic fiction

When this you see, remember me.1 He – in his own dark way – understood many people; but nobody understood him in any way.2 [T]here is not one whose memory is so much neglected or whose works are so much forgotten.3

Dead and gone: Marturin’s current status The year 2010 marked the 230th anniversary of the birth of the Anglo-Irish clergyman and author Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824). Famous for his popular Gothic drama, Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand (1816) and a landmark Gothic novel, Melmoth the wanderer (1820), Maturin is considered a ‘wellknown’ early nineteenth-century Irish author.4 Yet, in comparison to many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish writers who have also earned this continued memory, including Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) and Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan (1783?–1859), Maturin remains something of a cultural blank. Tellingly, despite the fanfare, academic colloquia, and cultural events frequently held to honour the anniversaries, centenaries, and mere existence of Ireland’s celebrated authors, no such elaborate festivities were or have been held to mark Maturin’s birth. The lack of such commemoration presents a stark contrast to the attention and popular interest often trained on Maturin’s contemporaries and near-contemporaries: Thomas Moore (1779–1852), for instance, regularly forms the central focus of academic conferences, and a now-annual Moore festival was inaugurated in Dublin in 2008 on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first of Moore’s Irish melodies (1808–34). Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) has an annual four-day weekend devoted to him in Trim, Co. Meath, while the 260th anniversary of the graduation from Trinity College Dublin of Edmund Burke (1730–97) was in 2009 celebrated with a lavish

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exhibition in the university’s library. Maria Edgeworth’s works received press coverage and tourist consideration recently during the 2007 Abbé Edgeworth Bi-Centenary Celebration, and Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) is honoured every year with the Goldsmith International Literary Festival, which, in 2006, replaced the annual Goldsmith Summer School begun in 1985. In the midst of this enthusiastic literary commemoration, Maturin has fallen by the cultural wayside. Although he continues to be remembered, talked about, and occasionally taught by academics, the average Irish person (not to mention English, American, Chinese, or any number of other nationalities) stares vacantly at the mention of Maturin’s name. Where Edgeworth’s Longford home still attracts a multitude of tourists every year, Maturin’s Dublin home now no longer exists, having been torn down in the 1970s to accommodate the expansion of the Royal College of Surgeons (Figure 1).5 The church to which he was sent in Loughrea, Co. Galway, after being ordained a minister of the Church of Ireland in 1803 is also gone, replaced in the decades after Maturin’s short residency with a building that now houses a public library. All that remains of Maturin is a dusty tourist placard noting, among other things, that Maturin once preached there. Not even that remains at St Peter’s Church on Aungier Street in Dublin. The church at which Maturin served as curate for nearly twenty years was torn down in the late twentieth century to make room for a tourist hostel. As a result, the grave in which Maturin was buried at his death in 1824 was excavated and Maturin’s remains reinterred in a communal crypt in St Luke’s in the Coombe. That church closed in 1975, and, despite apparent plans to refurbish both church and crypt by their current owners, Dublin City Council, nothing identifiable remains of Maturin’s final resting place.6 Largely ignorant of Maturin’s works, Irish society has allowed the sights of his life to slip through the nets of cultural preservation efforts, just as it has let Maturin himself fall from the realm of cultural memory. In this regard, the question that Kevin Brennan posed in 1979 is even more pressing today: ‘who is, OR was Charles Robert Maturin?’7 The problem of recognition was one that Maturin himself dealt with throughout his life. Describing himself to his long-time correspondent and literary patron, Sir Walter Scott, as ‘an obscure Irishman’,8 Maturin underscored his liminal position in the competition for primacy among the British readership of the day. With the exceptions of Bertram and Melmoth the wanderer, in fact, Maturin’s novels and plays remained largely ignored and critically unpopular. Unsurprisingly, Maturin’s writing consistently reveals a concern with personal and professional marginalisation. Authorial figures, in particular, are frequently depicted as poor nobodies, literally starving to death from an undue lack of popular and critical notice. One such figure appears in Melmoth the wanderer; never named, he disappears quietly from the novel after a mysterious death that

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1 Maturin’s home in York Street, Dublin, in 1967, shortly before it was torn down to accommodate the expansion of the Royal College of Surgeons.

authorities refuse to investigate because of his lowly status.9 His forgotten fate resonates quite poignantly with the novel’s concluding scene. Just before he disappears from the book, whether alive or dead no one can be fully sure, Melmoth has a terrifying vision of the hellish fate awaiting him: The burning waves boomed over his sinking head, and the clock of eternity rung out its awful chime – ‘Room for the soul of the Wanderer!’ – and the waves of the burning ocean answered as they lashed the adamantine rock – ‘There is room for more!’10

Beyond doubt, there is room for more when it comes to scholarly attention to Maturin and his literary works. In particular, this book attempts to address the intriguing incongruity between the naming of Maturin as a ‘well-known’ author

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of the Romantic period and the lack of any real sustained critical analysis of his works in the past thirty years. So often mentioned alongside Edgeworth and Owenson, both of whom have received a tremendous outpouring of attention in recent years, Maturin is positioned as an equally significant author. And yet, there is no accepted biography of Maturin akin to Marilyn Butler’s literary biography of Edgeworth or the biographical studies of Owenson by Lionel Stevenson and Mary Campbell.11 This lack may be explained at least partially by the dominance accorded to Edgeworth and Owenson by recent feminist research and its concern with recovering the experiences and perspectives of female writers marginalised precisely because of their gender. Ironically, however, given feminist literary criticism’s desire to validate the voice of the marginalised, in this instance at least it has effectively worked towards the further marginalisation of a male author whose literary reputation remains as uncertain as that of Edgeworth or Owenson until the recent revaluation of these writers. The result has been a collective overlooking of Maturin and his works, in spite of his apparent inclusion in the ‘canon’ of nineteenth-century Irish literature. This book, while making no claims to producing the desired literary biography of Maturin, nevertheless attempts to recuperate an author of recognisable significance who has been all but forgotten for far too long. H(a)unting ghosts: Romantic Ireland’s spectral inheritance The central thesis of this book is that Maturin’s novels provide the key to a new understanding of Irish national fiction as a peculiarly haunted form of literature. Specifically, it argues that Maturin’s too often overlooked body of fiction forcefully underscores the haunting presence of the past and past literary forms in early nineteenth-century Irish literature – a presence so often omitted and/or denied in current critical studies of Irish Romantic fiction. By retrospectively highlighting Maturin’s importance to our understanding of early nineteenth-century Irish fiction, this book is driven fundamentally by Maturin’s ghost. As such, it seeks to fulfil a Derridean inheritance by ‘bear[ing] witness’ to Maturin’s all too frequently ignored legacy.12 In this sense, this book represents a project of ghost-hunting and ghost-conjuring. By extension, it is, in essence, a textual séance – a space and time in which the ghosts of the past, including those of Maturin, the Gothic, and Irish history, are invited into our presence and the present not only to enlighten us but also to ensure that we do them justice, or at least begin to do so. In its belief in the present’s debt to the past, this book works primarily from the theory of Jacques Derrida on ghosts. In his seminal text, Specters of Marx: the state of debt, the work of mourning and the new international (1993) – from which the title of this introduction is taken – Derrida set forth his influential theory of

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haunting. His comments relate largely to Communism and its continued hold on twentieth-century thought, but they are relevant also to nineteenth-century Irish national fiction in their emphasis on the ghostly presence of past ideas, events, and peoples in contemporary everyday life. In the context of this continual interruption of the present by the past, Derrida insists that we as individuals and as a society must ‘learn to live with ghosts’, necessitating, in Derrida’s terms, ‘a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’.13 Derrida therefore demands that we ‘rethink ourselves through the dead or, rather, through the return of the dead (in us) and thus through haunting’.14 Using the example of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Derrida contends that the spectre – the ‘non-present present’15 – always implies an inheritance and, therefore, a sense of debt to the departed. In Hamlet, the ghost of the eponymous hero’s father appears, demanding that Hamlet ‘do justice, . . . put things back in order, . . . put history, the world, the age, the time upright, on the right path, so that, in conformity with the rule of its correct functioning, it advances straight ahead . . . and following the law’.16 This is, in effect, Hamlet’s inheritance, a legacy that insists that he grapple with the spectre of his father as well as that of his murder: One never inherits without coming to terms with . . . some specter, and therefore with more than one specter . . . that time is ‘out of joint’ is what is also attested by birth itself when it dooms someone to be the man of right and law only by becoming an inheritor, redresser of wrongs, that is, only by castigating, punishing, killing. The malediction would be inscribed in the law itself: in its murderous, bruising origin.17

Inheritance, in other words, always implies more than the unexpected windfall or gift we receive: ‘Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task.’ What is bequeathed to us is the duty of ‘bear[ing] witness’ to the past that produced us and made us possible.18 The inheritance that Maturin bequeaths to us is his literary oeuvre and, ghostlike, he demands that we do it justice. Maturin’s spectral presence, and the claims it makes, are emphasised in the 1892 edition of Melmoth the wanderer, one brought out with the assistance and input of Maturin’s great-nephew, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who famously took the name ‘Sebastian Melmouth’ during his exile abroad after being imprisoned for gross indecency. In the preface to this edition, the editors argue against Maturin’s unjust marginalisation as simply a poor imitator of authors such as Edgeworth, Owenson, and Scott, contending instead that Maturin’s literary borrowings never precluded his works from being entirely unique. In fact, Maturin’s ideas and characters always remained ‘peculiarly his own’. More than that, the preface maintains, ‘the familiarity which

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strikes a reader at the present time with some of [Maturin’s] scenes’ derives precisely from later authors’ use of the ‘masses of raw material’ provided by Maturin’s works. These raw materials, the preface posits, ‘if disguised in more elegant diction, can be borrowed without fear of discovery’. Implicated in this ‘borrowing’ are both Scott and Byron: It is not to be supposed that Scott consciously imitated incidents or that Byron intentionally adopted ideas to the detriment of a man whom both loaded with kindness, but it must not be forgotten that The Milesian Chief [1812] was written before The Bride of Lammermoor [1819], and Bertram [1816] before Manfred [1817]. The influence of Maturin, so evident in Scott and Byron, and acknowledged with pride by so original an author as Balzac, may well have affected their lesser successors.19

The 1892 edition’s striking defence of Maturin suggests exactly the kind of work this book proposes to do: a reversal of the conventional relationship whereby Maturin is seen to imitate his peers and an investigation of Maturin’s ghostly infiltration of the works of his contemporaries and those who came after him. Much as the eponymous hero of Wilde’s only novel, The picture of Dorian Gray (1890; rev. 1891), enjoys preternatural youth and beauty, Maturin maintains an eternal appeal in the literary world, despite his current marginalisation. Indeed, the preface to the 1892 edition calls upon an image of eternal youth like that in Dorian Gray to suggest Maturin’s haunting presence in nineteenth-century literature and beyond. Referring to the ‘fine bust’ of Maturin owned by Lady Jane Wilde, the preface highlights Maturin’s enduring appeal and undying influence on his literary successors. Although portraying Maturin as ‘an older man’, this bust ostensibly denies Maturin’s age: ‘years seemed to have told very little on his face, if we compare it with the strikingly youthful countenance that appears in the New monthly magazine’ – the image reproduced as the frontispiece of this book.20 Emphasising, in this way, Maturin’s continued youth, the preface forcefully underscores Maturin’s spectral presence in the present and, by extension, in the literature of his successors. Such continued fascination with Maturin repeatedly resurrects him, despite literary criticism’s best attempts to bury him in the past or, at least, the dusty shelves of disused libraries. A kind of ghost lurking in the corridors of Irish literature and literary history, Maturin is very much a Derridean spectre haunting literary production in Romantic Ireland and beyond. Frequently called upon by contemporary and later authors, both consciously and unconsciously, Maturin’s presence is continuously conjured and Maturin himself continually revived, so that he comes to occupy the strangely ambivalent but also extremely telling space of everywhere and nowhere, here and there, present and absent, living and dead. In this state of all-encompassing ambiguity, Maturin assumes a striking

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similarity to the eponymous hero of Melmoth, a novel that opens with the return of the young Anglo-Irish student John Melmoth to his uncle’s Wicklow home in the autumn of 1816. He has travelled to this once grand but now dilapidated Big House in order to attend to his dying uncle, whom he finds to be suffering from an illness less physical than mental. Convinced that the subject of a seventeenthcentury portrait hidden in his bedroom closet still in fact lives, the elder Melmoth succumbs to his ‘fright’ (Melmoth, p. 18). Whether his fear is contagious or not, the young John Melmoth very quickly falls victim to it as well, as he improbably sees the portrait’s subject in flesh as he sits by his uncle’s bedside. Although John attempts to persuade himself that the mysterious figure who appears at the door is actually just ‘a living man’ bearing an unfortunate ‘likeness’ to ‘the portrait of a dead one’, he soon realises his error (Melmoth, p. 20). Haunted and pursued by this spectral figure – the Wanderer himself – John descends into a bizarre and nightmarish reality whereby he becomes horrifyingly immersed in the narration of Melmoth’s repeated haunting of others with his unspeakable offer. Having, Faustus-like, sold his soul for forbidden knowledge, Melmoth has been doomed to wander the world searching for a replacement. Despite his apparent evil power, however, Melmoth remains remarkably unsuccessful in his attempt and returns to his ancestral home in Ireland to end his unnatural existence. Yet, while his death is suggested, it is never confirmed, and we as readers remain primed for his return – a return Maturin himself envisaged but never completed. Melmoth’s continued haunting – of John Melmoth, of the other characters in the novel, of us as readers, of Maturin, and of Ireland – is an apt illustration for Maturin himself. A revenant-like figure, Maturin continues to exert something akin to the ‘horrible fascination’ attributed to the ‘unearthly glare’ of his living-dead creation (Melmoth, p. 34). Indeed, the final suggestion of Melmoth’s future reappearance exemplifies what this book argues is a central literary preoccupation for Maturin and his contemporaries: the Gothic return of an atavistic past that relentlessly haunts and disrupts the present. In the case of Melmoth the wanderer, this may seem self-evident. A re-representation of legendary figures like Faustus and the Wandering Jew but also of the villainous figures of the enormously successful Gothic novel of mid- to late eighteenth-century Britain and Europe, Melmoth represents a haunting eruption of the past not only for the characters he tempts but also for the Gothic as a literary form. Frequently understood as the belated last gasp of the dying Gothic mode made popular by Horace Walpole (1717–97), Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis (1775–1818), among others, Melmoth is, in a sense, an unwelcome revisitation of a literary form that, while tremendously popular amongst its largely female readership, was critically castigated as aesthetically inferior and morally unsound. As such, Maturin’s novel itself, like its central character, fittingly encapsulates the

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Gothic’s central theme of the destructive return of the past, even as it ironically foreshadows the later ‘Irish Gothic’ mode popularised by works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a glass darkly (1872), Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Yet, while critical analysis has frequently posited the death of the Gothic novel in Ireland by the first decade of the nineteenth century,21 its influence continued to exert itself in forceful if subtle ways in Irish fiction.22 This is true not only for Maturin, whose literary career began with what many critics dismiss as a servile imitation of Radcliffe – The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio (1807) – but also for writers less traditionally associated with the Gothic, such as Edgeworth and Owenson, as the following chapters show. Critical analysis, however, frequently elides this ongoing Gothic influence in Ireland in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. In fact, the same kind of collective amnesia afflicting literary studies when it comes to Maturin also seems to affect the way we think about literary forms in Ireland during the Romantic period. The result is an effective demarcation of specific Gothic periods which correspondingly designates the period in which Maturin and his contemporaries wrote as a Gothic-free zone – a time in which the Gothic had become both obsolete and immaterial. In this scenario, Maturin himself becomes a rogue figure in his continued deployment of the Gothic, despite the fact that, as Siobhán Kilfeather points out, his works were ‘more or less contemporaneous’ with ‘the Faustian gothic of Godwin, Byron, Shelley, and Hogg’.23 Nevertheless, the publication history of Gothic novels by Irish authors in the early nineteenth century certainly suggests the form’s fall from favour. After enjoying a peak of popularity between 1786 and 1805 – a period in which twelve Gothic novels were published – the production of Gothic novels by Irish authors decelerated markedly.24 This is not to say, however, that the Gothic disappeared from Ireland in this period. On the contrary the first two decades of the nineteenth century represent a particularly prolific period for Gothic novelettes. Twelve such chapbooks were published between 1800 and 1820, and while these were generally ‘potboilers of original works’, they nevertheless validate the Gothic as a continuing influence in Ireland well into the nineteenth century.25 Why then do we tend not to think of the Gothic in early nineteenth-century Ireland, or at least in the first two or three decades of the nineteenth century? The number one reason is arguably the sheer dominance of what we now call ‘national’ literature that appeared in response to the controversial Act of Union (1800) and the subsequent Anglo-Irish Union (1801), which saw Ireland effectively merged with England. Attempting to represent, explain, and/or validate the Irish to an English audience, writers like Maturin, Edgeworth, and Owenson are seen to engage in repeated acts of literary unionism, whereby the allegorical marriage of English or Anglo-Irish hero and

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Irish heroine in their texts correspondingly resolves national tension and strife. The form par excellence of this project of literary reconciliation is the national tale, as initiated by Owenson’s The wild Irish girl (1806). Establishing the narrative pattern that would come to characterise the national tale as a form, The wild Irish girl envisioned the removal of its English hero, Horatio Mortimer, to the horrors of Ireland, a country he expects to find both ‘semi-barbarous’ and ‘semi-civilized’.26 Instead, he learns to appreciate Irish culture through exposure to its people and their ways, under the tutelage of the amazingly learned Irish princess, Glorvina, and her family and friends. He then cements his cultural ‘conversion’ through his marriage to Glorvina, thereby confirming Ireland’s suitability for union with England and also allegorically and idyllically uniting the two countries.27 Fittingly, Horatio’s marriage to Glorvina is said to be ‘prophetically typical of a national unity of interests and affections’ between Ireland and England (Wild Irish girl, p. 241). A conclusion that has influentially, if myopically, been termed ‘the Glorvina solution’,28 the national tale’s allegorical marriage underlines the conciliatory objectives of its writers. Yet, attention to the allegorical nature of the national tale very often ignores elements of ambiguity and ambivalence lying just beneath the surface. Maturin’s The wild Irish boy (1808), for instance, showcases the ways in which the national tale’s allegorical project refuses closure and instead flirts threateningly with continued conflict. The hero’s projected but never completed conversion from absentee landlord and profligate socialite to happily married family man and responsible estate owner underscores the similar ambivalence found in texts like The wild Irish girl, Ennui (1809), and The absentee (1812). Reading The wild Irish boy, in fact, reminds us that marriage proposals do not always and necessarily lead to marriages – an incongruence central to The wild Irish girl, where Glorvina’s acceptance of Horatio is coupled with the death of her father, the sole remaining reminder of the past sins of Horatio’s family. With his death, the memory of the Mortimer ancestor who had dispossessed Glorvina’s family in Cromwellian times seems to be forgotten and then later subsumed in the happy marriage of equals envisioned between Horatio and Glorvina. Yet, we would do well to remember ‘the piercing shriek’ uttered by Glorvina as she almost at the same moment witnesses her father’s death and consents to marry Horatio (Wild Irish girl, p. 234). This shriek and the accusation of murder that follows it represent the ‘renewal of an old grievance[,] demonstrat[ing] the inevitable reincarnation of the Irish past in the present and explain[ing] [the] entrenchment of history in the collective Irish memory’.29 Tellingly, the consent Glorvina offers to Horatio’s marriage proposal remains ambiguous at best. Still grieving over her father’s death – a death she believes directly caused by the treachery of Horatio and his father, as well as the historical brutality they represent – Glorvina can only provide Horatio with ‘such hope as the heart of a mourning child could

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give to the object of her heart’s first passion’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 237). Far from certain, Glorvina’s marriage to Horatio is cast in a nebulous future, suggesting the possibility that Glorvina may not always willingly play into the necessary forgetting of the past symbolised by her marriage. Similarly, in Edgeworth’s national tale, The absentee, the apparent disgrace marring Grace Nugent’s good name – the supposed sexual deviancy of her mother – is finally lifted, enabling her marriage to the hero, Lord Colambre. Yet, as is the case with The wild Irish boy, The wild Irish girl, and, indeed, Regina Maria Roche’s Gothic novel The children of the abbey (1796) before it, The absentee finally resists closure and reconciliation. Although Grace Nugent returns with her intended husband and his family to Ireland, marriage between Grace and Colambre is only promised, never confirmed. Moreover, Colambre’s renunciation of his absenteeism, understood as dependent on his domestic settlement with Grace, never properly materialises. Instead, both are cast as potentialities, and, significantly, both are haunted by Grace’s indignant memories of the aspersions cast upon her mother and, by extension, herself.30 The disservice that the notion of ‘the Glorvina solution’ does to the national tale is an omission, indeed repression, of the influence of such eighteenth-century texts as Roche’s long-popular The children of the abbey, and their more overt emphasis on discord, violence, and Irish independence.31 These are elements seen to be incompatible with the national tale as a totalising form of fiction engaged in a project of, as Walter Scott put it, ‘completing the Union’ between England and Ireland.32 As suggested above, however, a closer analysis of the national tale reveals that the superficial optimism of its allegorical marriages is very often undercut by striking elements of violence and ambivalence, elements that are understandable if we consider the national tale and the form that grew out of it – the historical novel – as inherently influenced by the Gothic novel of the mid- to late eighteenth century. Maturin’s fiction, with its explicit use of Gothic themes and motifs, provides a perfect window into the continued influence of the Gothic novel in Irish Romantic fiction. Drawing frequently and fruitfully from the Gothic mode, while also responding to contemporary crises in Irish social, cultural, and political life, Maturin’s novels urge us to consider the Gothic influence in the fiction of contemporaries generally seen as divorced from the Gothic. What I argue in this book, therefore, is that just as Melmoth might be seen to represent a peculiar kind of formal ‘haunting’, early nineteenth-century Irish fiction is also possessed by the past, both formally and narratologically. As ‘inheritors’ of the Gothic novel, the national tale and the historical novel necessarily reveal its traces in their narratives. Haunted by the Gothic novel, they are forced to ‘bear witness’ to its important influence. Authors like Maturin, Edgeworth, and Owenson

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therefore engage in a writing that is, for all intents and purposes, ‘a kind of ventriloquism through which multiple “voices” are encrypted’: as Jodey Castricano suggests, that which ‘returns’ in and ‘speaks’ through the national tale and early nineteenth-century Irish fiction is other texts, ‘themselves already inhabited – shall I say, haunted – by other texts’.33 Colonised by these many spectres, Maturin’s novels, like those of his Irish contemporaries, resemble nothing so much as haunted houses, an image that has an instructive parallel in Jarlath Killeen’s recent description of the Irish Gothic. Entering into an ongoing debate about the existence of an Irish Gothic literary tradition,34 Killeen argues that we might see ‘a (much complicated) version of a tradition’ connecting prominent Irish writers such as Maturin, Le Fanu, Wilde, Stoker, Yeats, Synge, and Bowen if we understand their texts as forming a kind of ‘Gothic edifice, full of suggestive gaps, obscure corners, imposing promontories (the “great” works), fractures, [and] fragments’.35 What Killeen’s image perceptively highlights is the fact that the Gothic mode in Ireland is never easily compartmentalised, nor does it simply include overtly Gothic novels such as Melmoth, Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), and Stoker’s Dracula. Instead, it comprises a considerably wider array of literature, much of which might not be classified immediately as Gothic. Indeed, just as Gothic fiction as a form images the breakdown of boundaries and the disruption of normative modes of identification,36 so too does it bleed into other fictional forms that we tend to think of as inherently distinct. Like the spectre, which, in Derrida’s arguments, confirms the lack of boundaries between past, present, and future, the Gothic insists on the fluidity of literary forms and genres. Killeen’s ‘construction’ of the Irish Gothic further emphasises the importance of place when speaking of either the Gothic novel as haunting, or Irish fiction as haunted by, the Gothic. To clarify, central to the Gothic as a form is its edifices – the haunted houses, castles, and abbeys that provide the apposite settings for Gothic narratives of secrecy, abduction, incest, and other illicit sexual relationships.37 Perhaps more importantly, however, as Derrida suggests, the very notion of haunting relies on physical locations: ‘haunting implies places, a habitation, and always a haunted house’.38 Such an emphasis is also present in Freud’s much-cited notion of das unheimlich, literally ‘the unhomely’.39 For both Derrida and Freud, ‘[h]aunting cannot take place without the possibility of its internal eruption and interruption within and as a condition of a familiar, everyday place and space’.40 The centrality of place in haunting emphasises the appropriateness of thinking of early nineteenth-century Irish fiction as a haunted house, its allegorical narrative forever interrupted by the ghosts of an ostensibly incompatible literary form. Its ‘architecture’, in Julian Wolfrey’s helpful terms, ‘is traced by a double, an incorporeal phantasm, or a “gap”, to use Nicolas Abraham’s word’.41

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Here, The wild Irish girl provides an illustrative example of the ‘gaps’ puncturing Irish Romantic fiction. In this novel, Owenson’s well-noted literary allusiveness constructs her text as a Gothic repository of the ghosts of past texts. As it does so, it highlights the ways in which the novel always straddles the borders between the conciliatory aim of the national tale and the inherent confusion, disorientation, violence, and dissolution of boundaries instigated by the Gothic novel. In other words, the literary voices echoing throughout Owenson’s text function in much the same way as Derrida’s spectre. On the one hand, they provide important substance and animation, acting as, in Anne Fogarty’s terms, ‘a welcome . . . spirit or essence’. On the other, however, they augur terror, taking the form of a frightening ‘spook or phantom’ from the past.42 Much like the ‘spectropolitical’ vision of Ireland Owenson presents in her novel, therefore, the voices of these previous literary sources ensure that her text always ‘hover[s] precariously’ between its ostensible objective – to placate national adversaries and ‘conjure up an amenable and forward-looking vision’ of Ireland – and its frequently bitter recollection of the violence of the past, a long-lasting memory that underwrites a representation of Ireland as ‘a space of uncanny repetitions, visitations and hauntings’.43 Fogarty’s arguments alert us to the ways in which early nineteenth-century Irish fiction is haunted by at least two different pasts: one artistic and literary, the other social, cultural, and political. The former relates to criticism’s current collective amnesia about the ways in which the national tale and historical novel develop out of and continue to be informed by earlier forms such as the Gothic novel. The latter refers to the specific historical conditions and events in Ireland, including the 1798 Rebellion, Anglo-Irish Union, and Robert Emmet’s abortive uprising (1803), which continued to shape literature long after they occurred. Whether traumatic episodes such as the 1798 Rebellion are mentioned explicitly or simply gestured towards, the memory of these events subtly underpins and spectrally possesses Irish Romantic fiction. Traumatised by their witnessing of prolonged historical violence, authors like Maturin, Edgeworth, Owenson, and John Banim make it clear that repetitions of the past are to be feared. Such fears bridge the sectarian divide between Anglo-Irish and Catholic writers while forcefully underlining the ways in which these authors are motivated fundamentally by a fear of the past. As Kilfeather points out, however, this fear is not always simply that of the past repeating itself but that society will continue to ignore its spectres. Speaking of the macabre short stories contained within The terrific register; or, record of crimes, judgments, providences and calamities (1825), Kilfeather perceptively notes that many of its narratives are actuated by anxiety over the manner in which ‘a preoccupation with the past lays a curse on posterity’. Even more frightful, however, is that ‘each story ends in tragedy [precisely] because the [characters]

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do not reflect on the past sufficiently’. Kilfeather ultimately concludes, ‘It is silence, sleep, and forgetfulness that produce disaster’ in these tales.44 Engendering a fear that knows no sectarian boundaries and equally manifests itself in strikingly diverse ways, the past possesses the narratives of early nineteenth-century Ireland. In so doing, it demands acknowledgement, speech, and memory. Thus, just as authors such as Maturin, Edgeworth, and Owenson are inheritors of the Gothic novel, they are also inheritors of the violence, disruption, and bloodshed of Irish history. As such, their narratives are necessarily informed by and therefore evocative of recent historical events in Ireland. Where, however, The terrific register suggests that witnessing the past will ultimately prevent further terror and atrocity in future, the novels discussed in this book are less optimistic about the results of their speaking to and for the past. Highlighting the destructively repetitive cycle in which Irish society is trapped, these texts instead suggest that spectral possession is the condition of modern Ireland, no matter how much ‘progress’ is made, socially, economically, or politically. The violence of the past, even when acknowledged, will always form the bulk of the Irish individual’s social inheritance, just as previous literary forms will continue to influence, however subtly, later literary texts long after they have ostensibly died away. Learning from the dead living: the lessons of Maturin’s fiction Acutely aware of the ways in which Maturin, like his works, has fallen from cultural consciousness, this study begins with a brief biographical sketch in Chapter 1: ‘Reviving Maturin: the life and works’. Along with the chronology provided in the preliminary pages, this chapter is intended as an introduction to the central dates, places, and names of Maturin’s life. It thus allows for a thorough contextualisation of Maturin’s works and, in particular, his novels, a chronological study of which begins with Chapter 2: ‘Communing with the dead: the medium and media of Fatal revenge’. This chapter explores the continuous and varied interruptions of Maturin’s first novel. As a prose narrative constantly hedged, framed, and intruded upon by poetry, Fatal revenge is a text that, in its very form, reflects its central thematic concern with disruption and fragmentation. Similarly, despite the novel’s seventeenth-century Italian setting, paratextual reminders of Ireland repeatedly insert Maturin’s native country into the text, forcing us to consider the ways in which the narrative might be directly informed by and/or informative of contemporary Ireland.45 Such disruptions highlight the convergence of Gothic novel and national tale in the early nineteenth century while also underlining Maturin’s understanding of the Irish past’s devastating intrusion into the present.

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Chapter 3, ‘Conjuring Glorvina: The wild Irish boy and the national tale’, considers the continued awareness of ghostly inheritances in Maturin’s second novel. A text blending a variety of literary forms and genres, The wild Irish boy highlights the fractured nature of contemporary Irish society in its own formal fragmentation. As it does so, it emphasises the repeated Gothic intrusion of past violence – the 1798 Rebellion and Emmet’s 1803 resurrection in particular – undermining peaceful and united Irish identity in the early nineteenth-century. Calling upon the Gothic mode to image this destructive and debilitating presence of the past, The wild Irish boy attests to the Gothic’s ongoing influence in early-nineteenth century Irish fiction. At the same time that it speaks of both the Gothic and the Irish past, however, it warns readers of the destructive potential of ghosts. In particular, it presents the imagery of Owenson’s The wild Irish girl as needing exorcism. If Owenson’s images of Ireland and the Irish people are not conjured away, Maturin’s novel suggests that they will continue to fragment and undermine a unified Irish identity. Yet, as Maturin’s text makes clear, he remains all too aware of the literary and historical double-bind of conjuration. Just as his novel attempts to conjure up in order to conjure away the past, both literary and national, it remains fundamentally unable to give that past a voice or to speak truthfully of and for it. As a result, it continues to be enthralled by that same past. Chapter 4, ‘Witnessing the past: the textual ruins of The Milesian chief’, considers Maturin’s third novel as an example of what Ina Ferris calls ‘a ruin text’.46 Resisting and countering the traditional aesthetic tropes of ruin deployed in Romantic fiction, Maturin’s novel figures ruins as symbolic of the colonial violence Ireland has continually suffered over its history. Maturin’s ruins are resolutely not those that Scott turned to in a bid to maintain and preserve the past. Instead, they are threatening, physical reminders of who destroyed what, who killed whom, and who should be held accountable for the present disordered and fragmented state of the country.47 The voices of the dead in The Milesian chief are never silenced, and the violence of the past continues to repeat itself, despite the characters’s desperate attempts to escape history’s deathly grip. At the same time, the idea of ruin also applies to the way in which The Milesian chief calls upon the ostensible literary ruins of previous literary works in order to investigate the ruins of Irish national identity. Chapter 5, ‘Narrating history: the burden of words in Women; or pour et contre’, investigates the ways in which Maturin’s fourth novel attempts to build on the ruins of the Irish nation by describing the fissures produced by religious sectarianism in the country. This is not, as we might expect, a discussion of Catholicism and Protestantism but, instead, a consideration of Methodism, a religious sect that quickly gained ground in Ireland in the early nineteenth century and caused much concern owing to its division of the Anglican Church in Ireland. A combination

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of Gothic novel, national tale, and society novel featuring a Continental heroine modelled on Madame de Staël’s Corinne as well as a domestic heroine reflecting the influence of Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Hannah More’s Coelebs in search of a wife (1808), Women is a composite text entirely suited to Maturin’s desire to project the divisions of Irish society. Where, however, he attempts to portray a more optimistic conclusion for Ireland than that of The Milesian chief by reaching for an ideal domestic solution reliant on the location of the perfect domestic heroine, he ultimately falls back on Gothic negativity. Of all the main characters, only one survives to the end of the novel and she, like Ireland itself, remains forever haunted by the memory of those she has lost. Chapter 6, ‘Paratextual possession: rereading Melmoth the wanderer’, is a study of what is, by far, Maturin’s best-known work. In addition to considering the novel’s much-discussed structure, the chapter makes use of the rarely consulted correspondence between Maturin and the publisher Archibald Constable,48 in order to emphasise the manner in which Maturin’s completion of his novel was at all times crowded by, and, indeed, infiltrated with, his work on competing texts, including books of sermons, Gothic dramas, short stories, and epic poems interspersed with prose narrative. The resulting text is a fascinating combination of literary forms and genres which, however accidentally assembled, provides an enlightening glance into the formally diverse nature of Maturin’s literary career and publications. In addition, this chapter focuses on the parallelism between the multiplicity of formal and generic devices in Maturin’s most famous novel and a multiplicity of voices produced not only by the various narrators but also by the competition between what might be seen as the multiple texts of the novel. By this, I mean to refer both to the distinct tales that comprise the novel but also to the narrative proper and the paratextual commentary that surrounds it. The conflict between the latter two, as Susan B. Egenolf has recently argued in relation to the works of Edgeworth, Owenson, and Elizabeth Hamilton, produces a multiplicity of voices,49 and, more specifically in the case of Melmoth, of temporal and geographical concerns that verify and confirm the novel’s focus on Maturin’s contemporary Ireland. Published the same year as the author’s death, Maturin’s last novel, The Albigenses, is, in a sense, an unfinished work, intended as it was to form the first of three historical novels offering fictional accounts of three sequential periods of European history – early, middle, and modern. Chapter 7, ‘Rethinking Scott’s revolution: The Albigenses as historical novel’, considers this text as a historical novel modelled upon Scott’s Old mortality (1816) and Ivanhoe (1820) but also details the by now usual layering of forms and genres as well as temporal and geographical settings of Maturin’s writing style. Set in thirteenth-century France, The Albigenses blends Gothic novel, national tale, historical novel, Oriental

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tale, and religious tract in its description of the conflict between the medieval Catholic Church and the Cathar heresy, which numbered the Albigenses among its believers. Although Ireland may seem remote to the novel’s central concern and setting, Maturin clearly merges thirteenth-century France with his contemporary Ireland, using his characterisation of the Albigenses, about whom little concrete information is known, to explore and comment upon the campaign for Catholic Emancipation that would very soon result in a total disruption of Irish society. In effect, Maturin makes his Albigenses proto-Protestants and, in so doing, constructs them as spectral banshees foretelling the continued persecution and disruption that would haunt Irish society even after Catholic Emancipation in 1829. In the end, Maturin died before he could see Emancipation effected, but the haunting voice of his final novel lives on in the repeated disorder and disturbance of Irish society throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Formally, the apparent re-emergence of the Gothic novel in late nineteenth-century Ireland confirms the continued influence of the Gothic mode in Irish literary production, but this book argues that the Gothic had been haunting Irish fiction long before Dracula was published. And, of course, like any good ghost, it will continue to haunt literature in Ireland and abroad for many years to come. Maturin, too, repeatedly emerges in literature produced after his death. Encouraging further consideration of Maturin’s haunting presence in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury society, this book makes no pretence to having satisfied Maturin’s ghost and finally laid it to rest. Instead, it ends with a brief consideration of Maturin’s ghostly influence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish, British, European, and American fiction. By pointing to the ways in which the spectres of Maturin might be detected in the works of authors as diverse as Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, James Clarence Mangan, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Christina Rossetti, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, this book ends where it began: emphasising the everyday haunting, of literary forms and history, made evident in Maturin’s life and works. Notes 1 This handwritten note, attributed to Maturin by Jim Kelly, to whom I am grateful for pointing its existence out to me, appears on p. 250 of the first volume of the National Library of Ireland’s edition of The Albigenses, a romance (1824). A comparison of the handwriting in which the note is written with that of Maturin’s letters suggests that Maturin did, in fact, write this note, signing it with his own name. 2 James Clarence Mangan, ‘Sketches and reminiscences of Irish writers. No. 1: C. R. Maturin’, The Irishman, 1.12 (1849), 187.

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3 This assessment appeared in the Irish quarterly review in 1852; quoted in Robert Welch (ed.), The Oxford companion to Irish literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 360. 4 Rolf and Magda Loeber, A guide to Irish fiction 1650–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), p. xlix. 5 The photograph reproduced here is identified in the catalogue of the National Library of Ireland (NLI) as no. 7 York Street, ‘home of author Charles Robert Maturin’. In most of his correspondence, however, Maturin addresses his letters from 37 York Street or simply, York Street. Whether this is a clerical error on the part of the National Library is unclear, but comparison of this image with photographs of York Street available in the Irish Architectural Archives suggests that number 37 is at the end of the row on the north side of York Street, as shown in the left of the NLI photograph. 6 Personal e-mail correspondence with Dr Raymond Refaussé, Librarian and Archivist, Representative Church Body (RCB) Library, 26 August 2010. See also ‘St Luke’s conservation plan’, prepared for Dublin City Council by Shaffrey Associates Architects, 2005. Available online at www.dublincity.ie/SiteCollectionDocuments/ conservation_plan_plean_caomhnaithe_st_lukes.pdf. 7 Kevin Brennan, ‘Charles Robert Maturin (1782–1824): forgotten Irish novelist’, Dublin historical record, 32.4 (1979), 135. 8 National Library of Scotland (hereafter NLS) 3883/157, letter from Maturin to Scott, 18 December 1812. 9 On the representation of authors and the authorial profession in Melmoth the wanderer, see Regina B. Oost, ‘“Servility and command”: authorship in Melmoth the wanderer’, Papers on language and literature, 31.3 (1995), 291–312, and Christina Morin, ‘Delightful cannibal feasts: literary consumption in Melmoth the wanderer’, The Irish journal of Gothic and horror studies, 5 (2008), no pagination. Available online at http:// irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Thevault.html. 10 Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the wanderer, ed. Douglas Grant, introd. Chris Baldick (1820; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 539. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 11 Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: a literary biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); Lionel Stevenson, The wild Irish girl: the life of Lady Morgan (London: Chapman and Hall, 1936); Mary Campbell, Lady Morgan: the life and times of Sydney Owenson (London: Pandora, 1988). Claude Fierobe’s excellent, if now somewhat dated, literary biography of Maturin is, unfortunately, only available in French; see Fierobe, Charles Robert Maturin: l’homme et l’oeuvre (Lille: Université de Lille, 1974). 12 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: the state of debt, the work of mourning and the new international (1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf, introd. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 68. 13 Quoted in Jodey Castricano, Cryptomimesis: the Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s ghost writing (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 18. 14 Castricano, Cryptomimesis, p. 19. 15 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 5.

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16 17 18 19

Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., pp. 24–5. Ibid., pp. 67, 68. ‘A note on Charles Robert Maturin’, in Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the wanderer, 3 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1892), 1: lv. ‘Memoir of Charles Robert Maturin’, in Maturin, Melmoth the wanderer (London, 1892), 1: xxviii, xxix. The picture originally appeared in The new monthly magazine, or universal register in March 1819 and is reproduced as the frontispiece of this book. Although it is unclear if the portrait was both drawn and engraved in 1819, the editors of The new monthly magazine treat the image as an accurate, current depiction of Maturin and emphasise the youthful qualities later highlighted in the 1892 edition of Melmoth. Indeed, mistaking Maturin’s birth, The new monthly magazine states, ‘He must be now 37 years old, having been born in the year 1782, though the advantages of a figure unusually slight and juvenile, give him the appearance of being many years younger’; ‘Memoir of the Rev. C. R. Maturin (with a portrait)’, The new monthly magazine, or universal register, 1st ser. 11 (1819), 165, 167. Siobhán Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register: the Gothicization of atrocity in Irish Romanticism’, boundary 2, 31.1 (2004), 55. Kilfeather points out the frequent critical assumption that by 1807 – the year Maturin published his first, overtly Gothic novel – the Gothic had become both dated and irrelevant in Ireland. W. J. McCormack suggests that it was the continuously violent nature of Irish society and politics throughout the Romantic period and beyond that ensured the ‘edur[ance]’ of ‘the gothic mode’ long after we tend to assume the Gothic novel had died out; W. J. McCormack, Introduction to ‘The Irish Gothic and after’, The Field Day anthology of Irish writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, vol. 2 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), p. 831. See also Christina Morin, ‘“Gothic” and “national”? Challenging the formal distinctions of Irish Romantic fiction’, in Jim Kelly (ed.), Ireland and romanticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 172–87). Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, pp. 55–6. These novels, as identified by Rolf Loeber and Magda Stoughamer-Loeber, who also mistakenly include Maturin’s Fatal revenge (1807), are Anne Fuller, Alan Fitz-Osborne (Dublin, 1786); James White, Earl Strongbow (London, 1789); Regina Maria Roche, The maid of the hamlet (London, 1793); Stephen Cullen, The haunted priority (London, 1794); Mrs. A. Burke, The sorrows of Edith (London, 1796); Mrs. F.C. Patrick, More ghosts! (London, 1798); ‘A Young Lady’, The monastery of Gondolfo (Limerick, 1801); Anna Millikin, Plantagenet; or, secrets of the house of Anjou (Cork, 1802); Catherine Selden, Villa nova (Cork, 1804); Marianne Kenley, The cottage of the Appenines, or, the castle of Novina (Belfast, 1804); Sydney Owneson, The novice of St. Dominick (London, 1804); Rolf Loeber and Magda Stouthamer-Loeber, ‘The publication of Irish novels and novelties, 1750–1829: a footnote on Irish Gothic fiction’, Cardiff Corvey: reading the Romantic text, 10 (2003), 9, 17–18. Available online at http://www.cardiff. ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/cc10_no2.html, accessed 15 February 2011. Ibid., p. 9.

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26 Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The wild Irish girl: a national tale, ed. and introd. Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley (1806; London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), p. 10. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 27 Katie Trumpener, Bardic nationalism: the Romantic novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 141. 28 Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: legality versus legitimacy’, Nineteenth-century fiction, 40.1 (1985), 10. 29 Bridget Matthews-Kane ‘Gothic excess and political anxiety: Lady Morgan’s The wild Irish girl’, Gothic studies, 5.2 (2003), 16. 30 For the influence of The children of the abbey in The absentee, see Morin, ‘“Gothic” and “national”?’. For the identification of The children of the abbey as ‘the earliest national tale’ as well as a discussion of the similarities between Roche’s novel and The wild Irish girl, see Miranda Burgess, ‘Violent translations: allegory, gender, and cultural nationalism in Ireland, 1796–1806’, Modern language quarterly, 59.1 (1998), 33– 70. 31 Ian Campbell Ross, ‘Irish fiction before the Union’, in Jacqueline Belanger (ed.), The Irish novel in the nineteenth century: facts and fictions (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 37. 32 Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, ed. Claire Lamont (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 352. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Anne Fogarty refers to the ‘totalising fictions’ of Edgeworth and Owenson; Anne Fogarty, ‘Imperfect concord: spectres of history in the Irish novels of Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan’, in Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (eds), Gender perspectives in nineteenth-century Ireland: public and private spheres (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1997), p. 116. 33 Castricano, Cryptomimesis, p. 64. 34 See, for example, W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and tradition in Anglo-Irish literary history from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Victor Sage, Horror fiction in the Protestant tradition (London: Macmillan, 1988); McCormack, Introduction to ‘Irish Gothic and after’; W. J. McCormack, Dissolute characters: Irish literary history through Balzac, Sheridan LeFanu, Yeats, and Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch: connections in Irish and English history (1993; London: Penguin, 1995); Julian Moynahan, Anglo-Irish: the literary imagination in a hyphenated culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Luke Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic: race, colonization, and Irish culture (Galway: Arlen House, 2004), and the recent exchange between Jarlath Killeen and Richard Haslam in the first, second, and fourth issues of The Irish journal of Gothic and horror studies, available online at http:// irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com. 35 Jarlath Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic: a theoretical introduction’, The Irish journal of Gothic and horror studies, 1.1 (2007): no pagination. Available online at http://irishgothic horrorjournal.homestead.com/The vault.html, accessed 11 February 2009. 36 See, for example, Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the literature of subversion (1981; London: Routledge, 2003), p. 48.

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37 Julian Wolfreys, Victorian hauntings: spectrality, Gothic, the uncanny and literature (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), p. 5. 38 Quoted in Wolfreys, Victorian hauntings, p. 5. 39 Sigmund Freud, ‘The uncanny’, in James Strachey (ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud; Vol. XVII: An infantile neurosis and other works (1919; London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 220. As Strachey (p. 219, note 1) observes, the German word ‘unheimlich’ only improperly translates into English as ‘uncanny’. Literally translated, ‘unheimlich’ means ‘unhomely’. 40 Wolfreys, Victorian hauntings, p. 5. 41 Ibid., p. 6. 42 Fogarty,’Imperfect concord’, p. 119. 43 Ibid. 44 Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, p. 53. 45 The paratext, as Gérard Genette explains it, consists of the ‘accompanying productions’ – table of contents, footnotes, appendices, prefaces, titles, illustrations, etc. – which ‘surround’ and ‘extend’ a given literary work ‘in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book’. As I will later discuss in Chapter 6, the paratext constitutes an important ‘threshold’ between fictional narrative, authorial commentary, and, by extension, the extra-diegetical world; Gérard Genette, Paratexts: thresholds of interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–2. 46 Ina Ferris, The Romantic national tale and the question of Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 104. 47 Ibid., p. 111. 48 Sharon Ragaz has used these letters in a compelling study of the publication history of Melmoth; see Sharon Ragaz, ‘Maturin, Archibald Constable, and the publication of Melmoth the wanderer’, Review of English studies, 57 (2006), 359–73. 49 See Susan B. Egenolf, The art of political fiction in Hamilton, Edgeworth and Owenson (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

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Reviving Maturin: the life and works

Writing to Walter Scott in July 1816, Maturin acutely foresaw the current cultural amnesia concerning him and his works. Unhappy with the publisher’s decision to print his play Bertram as it had been performed rather than as he had written it, Maturin complained: They have printed it as acted, and if I may be allowed a coined and apparently affected expression, have un-Maturined it completely, they have broken my wand and drowned my Magic Book, and Prospero himself, without his storms, his Goblins, & his Grammary sinks into a very insignificant sort of Personage.1

Although Maturin’s comments apply specifically to what he believed to be the unauthorised corruption of his greatest dramatic, if not literary success, they also tellingly reflect on Maturin’s own position within contemporary and twentyfirst-century society. Already judged a literary failure by the time of his death in 1824, despite having produced six novels, three plays, two books of sermons, and a handful of essays and poems over the course of his career, Maturin believed himself unjustly written out of consequence. Unable to produce the equivalent of a modern-day bestseller, Maturin turned the blame on circumstances around him. He was, as he wrote to Scott shortly after the publication of The Milesian chief, ‘a disappointed Author’.2 This was so because his talents went unrecognised in Ireland, perhaps understandably at that point, given his use of a pseudonym. Be that as it may, Maturin complained bitterly to Scott: ‘there is no excitement, no literary appetite or impulse in this Country, my most intimate acquaintances scarcely know that I have written, and they care as little as they know’.3 If only his reviewers had been more constructively critical, if only he had had a more receptive audience, Maturin’s comments suggest, his literary prowess would not have gone so long unappreciated. As it was, however, Maturin remained critically unpopular in his own lifetime, and assessments of Irish Romantic literary production have generally followed suit. They have thus confirmed the characterisation of Maturin as a failed author even as they position him

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alongside Edgeworth, Owenson, William Carleton (1794–1869), and Gerald Griffin (1803–40), as a ‘well-known’ early nineteenth-century Irish author. Critical suspicion of Maturin – and the ensuing trivialisation of both Maturin and his works – is evident in early studies of the Irish novel in which Maturin is very often dismissed as a mere imitator of Owenson, with questionable literary skill at best. More recently, work on Irish literature, while gesturing towards an acknowledgement of Maturin’s literary importance, more often than not confirms his peripheral position in the annals of Irish literary history by reproducing him as a marginal figure. In this respect, Irish literary history has largely erased Maturin’s existence from the central narrative of early nineteenth-century Irish literature, thereby effectively ‘un-Maturin[ing]’ Irish Romantic literature and its historiography. In so doing, twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism has produced and supported a general cultural ignorance when it comes to Maturin and the details of his life. Without such contextual evidence, Maturin’s works lose much of their immediacy, dependent as they frequently are on Maturin’s personal religious and theological beliefs as well as his perspective on current affairs in Ireland, Britain, and Europe. This chapter, therefore, briefly traces the major people, dates, and places of Maturin’s life in order to provide a solid biographical basis for the discussion that follows. Born in Dublin on 25 September 1780,4 Maturin was the sixth and final child of William and Fidelia (née Watson). He was raised in the comfortable circumstances provided by his father’s prominent position with the postal service, and, in 1795, entered Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled as a scholar. In 1800, he graduated BA, before taking orders in the Church of Ireland. He was ordained a minister in 1803, the same year he married Henrietta Kingsbury. Soon after, he assumed curatorial duties in the parish church of Loughrea, Co. Galway. Unsuited to country life, however, Maturin returned to Dublin two years later, moving into the position of curate at St Peter’s Church on Aungier Street in 1806, the year of the birth of his eldest son, William. At St Peter’s, Maturin was apparently well loved by his parishioners and impressed many with his sermons, but he never received further preferment within the Church – a lack of advancement incongruous with Maturin’s family history: Maturin’s greatgreat-grandfather, Gabriel Maturin, had been a French Huguenot pastor who relocated to Ireland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Gabriel’s son, Pierre, served as the chaplain of St Patrick and St Mary parish in Dublin before later acting as Dean of Killala. Pierre’s son, Gabriel James Maturin, in his turn, was Dean of Kildare and succeeded Swift as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Maturin’s father, William, had been the first in several generations to buck the trend of prominent Church service, first pursuing an acting career until the death of his patron rendered the plan unfeasible and then entering the service

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of the post office. Maturin himself also considered acting as a career choice but eventually laid it aside in preference for the ostensible financial security attendant to Church ministry. He nevertheless maintained a notable penchant for drama, one which, as we shall see, never sat well with his duties as a curate and certainly contributed to his lack of preferment in the Church. In his personal correspondence, however, Maturin blamed his professional stasis on conflict with his ecclesiastical superiors over theological doctrine and practice. As he explained to Scott, ‘from the Church I have no expectations, for . . . I am a high Calvinist in my Religious opinions, and therefore viewed with jealousy by Unitarian Brethren and Arminian Masters’.5 Yet, critical attention focused not so much on Maturin’s apparent tendency to theological deviation but on his evident delight in fashionable life and his authorship, both of which were seen as indications of Maturin’s improper conduct as a clergyman. Gossipy anecdotes of Maturin pasting communion wafers to his forehead when in the midst of creative inspiration and making the bishop wait for hours whilst he finished his latest poem confirmed Maturin’s histrionic idiosyncrasies and suggested his lack of vocation in and dedication to his religious profession. One of Maturin’s university acquaintances later attested that ‘no curate in the diocese performed its duties more zealously and irreproachably’ than Maturin did at St Peter’s.6 Nevertheless, Maturin’s characteristic eccentricity drew much unwanted attention. Highlighting Maturin’s taste for social refinement and polish, contemporary critics snidely commented upon Maturin’s repeated transgressions of social and cultural boundaries. One writer for The gentleman’s magazine accordingly described Maturin as characterised by ‘affectation’, ‘eccentricity’, and ‘folly’. His evident love of singing and dancing became a mark of the ‘Reverend Gentleman[’s]’ arrogance, presumption, and social transgression. Desiring to be ‘better than any other divine’, Maturin only succeeded in proving himself a foolish social climber lacking ‘the refinements of a correct taste’.7 The ‘Memoranda of Maturin’ appearing in Douglas Jerrold’s shilling magazine in 1846 less caustically noted Maturin’s ‘extremely polished tastes, and elegant habits’. Despite the gentler tone, however, the ‘Memoranda’ included a latent condemnation of Maturin’s social pretension. Describing Maturin’s fondness for ‘the splendour and elegance’ he had observed in London while there for the production of Bertram in 1816, the author observed that Maturin ‘imagine[d]’ he could transfer this grandeur to his own home and become ‘the cause and centre of pursuits and pleasures similar to those that had attracted him’. Caught in false delusions of his impending ‘fame and profit’, Maturin forgot ‘the dictates of prudence’, and, even worse, ‘the necessary restrictions of his profession’. Placing ‘the gratification of his passion for the refined and splendid’ before his

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responsibilities as a clergyman in this way, Maturin evinced an astonishing clerical impropriety.8 The ‘Memoranda’ repeatedly returned to this issue of Maturin’s indecorous behaviour. Despite being ‘universally beloved’ by his parishioners, it remarked, Maturin’s attraction to ‘public amusements, his eccentric dress, and his passion for dancing’ provided incontrovertible proof of his lack of ‘correct taste’ as a clergyman.9 Against the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century understanding that clergymen should display ‘a particular decorum and delicacy of behaviour’ while also maintaining ‘a suitable composure of manners’ befitting their station in life,10 Maturin made a point of ‘mincing’ through Dublin clothed in a ‘raven wig’ and ‘corsets’.11 So vain was he about his ‘tall, slender . . . wellproportioned . . . good figure’, that he purportedly ‘took care to display [it] in a well-made black coat, tightly buttoned, some odd light-coloured stocking-web pantaloons, surmounted in winter by a coat of prodigious dimensions, gracefully thrown on, so as not to obscure the symmetry it affected to protect’.12 In contrast to what Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814) understood as the proper conduct of a clergyman, Maturin evidently saw himself ‘set[ting] the ton in dress’ and acting as a standard of ‘good breeding . . . refinement and courtesy’.13 Further complicating Maturin’s unclerical behaviour was his authorship of literary works deemed inappropriate for a man of his status. As the ‘Memoranda’ pointed out, ‘tragedies and romances are not esteemed by the public the best preparation for a bishopric’, even if it was a bishop – the Scottish clergyman John Home (1722–1808) – who wrote ‘the first romance’: Douglas (1756).14 Expected to provide useful instruction and sound advice to their readers, clergymen were effectively constrained to publishing collections of sermons and other such didactic material. Tellingly, Home was censured for writing unsuitable material just as the Reverend Laurence Sterne later was with his novel Tristram Shandy (1759–67). In the case of the latter, Sterne was advised by Bishop William Warburton to confine his literary efforts to educational works that both adhered to and displayed an apposite respect for ‘decency’ and ‘good manners’.15 Sterne’s correspondence with Warburton eventually helped convince the former that success in the Church and success as an author were two mutually exclusive ends and that, as Ian Campbell Ross contends, ‘in order to make his own way in the world’ as an author, he first had to ‘lay aside long-cherished hopes of ecclesiastical patronage’.16 Maturin faced a similar decision between preferment within the Church and the potential, if notoriously elusive, fame of popular authorship. With the success of Bertram, performed to great acclaim at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in May 1816, Maturin may well have believed he had attained celebrity status and would no longer need to rely on his curatorial salary. Critical reviews of Bertram spoke

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of Maturin’s ‘undoubted genius’ and the play’s ‘considerable merit’,17 and the drama clearly appealed to contemporary public tastes. Considered ‘the greatest dramatic success of the 1815–16 season’ as well as ‘one of the most significant dramatic products of the age’,18 Bertram was an ‘unequivocal success’ on the stage and also sold well in print, going through seven editions by the end of 1816 and selling close to seven thousand copies.19 Despite its incredible success, however, Betram failed to usher in the lasting fame and fortune Maturin had anticipated. Moreover, it invited tremendous controversy owing to its alleged moral turpitude. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for his part, castigated the play as ‘an insult to common decency’ characterised by a ‘shocking spirit of jacobinism’ as well as a horrifying ‘familiarity with atrocious events and characters’. The play’s eponymous villain/hero was, in Coleridge’s mind, a ‘monster’ – a ‘loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination’, whose ‘best deed’ was to kill himself, thereby ‘sav[ing] his betters from the degradation of hanging him’.20 Coleridge’s vitriolic attack on Bertram was admittedly partisan – his own play Zaploya (1817) had been rejected in favour of Bertram for performance at Drury Lane – but his evident moral outrage nevertheless evocatively voiced the general critical understanding of Bertram as scandalous, immoral, and potentially subversive. This was an issue that would again arise with the publication of Maturin’s fifth and most widely acclaimed novel, Melmoth the wanderer. While it was, and remains, Maturin’s most influential and most read novel, Melmoth, like Bertram before it, was seen to trespass into forbidden, or least immensely distasteful, territory. Critics were particularly keen to denounce the novel and its ‘extravagances’ as the ‘unseemly’ product of an Anglican clergyman.21 Evidently aware of the censure his writing could and would invite, Maturin nevertheless continued to publish novels and plays, consistently proclaiming as he did so that it was out of necessity rather than any particular partiality for authorship. As he wrote in the preface to Melmoth: I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to any other, but – am I allowed the choice? (Melmoth, p. 6)

Financial necessity and its demand for literary exertion became a common complaint in Maturin’s letters to Scott and also appear in his correspondence with Archibald Constable, publisher of Women; or pour et contre (1818), Sermons (1819), and Melmoth. In a letter written shortly after the publication of Women, for instance, Maturin stated that the novel ‘was composed under a distraction

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of mind arising from circumstances of the greatest privation and distress’ and promised, now that his situation was slightly improved by the novel’s sale, a better prose work to be completed in about a year’s time.22 Only a month later, Maturin claimed that ‘my present Circumstances unfortunately make profit an object with me’, proceeding to list several more potential works he could sell to Constable, despite the publisher’s transmission of £150 little over a week before.23 Maturin’s emphasis on his writing as a product of need is understandable, if we consider his annual curatorial salary of approximately £100 a year – only half of the £200 annual income Bishop John Kaye argued in 1834 was the very least that a clergyman required simply to perform his duties, not to mention support his family.24 With a young and growing family to consider, Maturin had further cause for financial anxiety in 1809, when his father was falsely accused of misconduct and dismissed from his post. Although William later cleared his name, he and his wife remained dependent on their youngest son for subsistence.25 Accordingly, Maturin turned to writing as a means of supplementing his income and also opened a preparatory school for scholars of Trinity College. Both endeavours were fraught with difficulties and promised little regular financial reward, but Maturin persevered, lamenting all the while that his profession did not provide him with an adequate living. In 1807, Maturin published his first novel, The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio, at his own expense and under the protective pseudonym, ‘Dennis Jasper Murphy’. His next two novels, The wild Irish boy and The Milesian chief (1812), were also thus published. None was the financial or popular success for which Maturin had obviously hoped. In its review of The Milesian chief, for instance, the Monthly review castigated Maturin not just for his over-the-top writing style, but also for his whiny prefatory lament of his lack of success: We are frankly told by this author that he has never been praised enough; and he then informs the Philistines, who have undervalued him, of the gift in which his strength consists. ‘If I possess any talent’, he observes, ‘it is that of darkening the gloomy and deepening the sad’ . . . Those who find this description attractive will do well to read the ‘Milesian Chief’; though we must ourselves regret that the efforts of an original genius are wasted on so defective a performance.26

Branded a ‘defective performance’ in its own day, The Milesian chief, as with Maturin’s previous two novels, continues to be seen as poorly written and excessive, both in size and in descriptive style. Moreover, all three are frequently interpreted as mere opportunistic imitations of then-current literary crazes, namely, what we now know of as the Gothic novel and the national tale. Fatal revenge, for instance, is generally judged a paltry imitation of the works of Ann

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Radcliffe, while The wild Irish boy and The Milesian chief are critically condemned as mercenary attempts to cash in on Sydney Owenson’s success with The wild Irish girl. Despite such denunciations, however, even the harshest contemporary critics were willing to point out the saving graces of Maturin’s novels. The same Monthly review piece quoted above, for instance, concluded by commending the ‘highly poetical’ language evident in much of The Milesian chief. It also added that ‘several of the scenes would afford fine subjects for the painter; and the imagination which has dictated the whole, if directed by a purer taste, would be capable of pleasing in no ordinary degree’.27 The critical review similarly admitted that ‘there are situations, characters, and scenery, pourtrayed in the Milesian Chief, which excite interest and merit attention’. Furthermore, it conceded that ‘the author is very expert in awakening strong feelings of terror, of love, of liberty and glory’. Finally, the piece lauded Maturin’s depiction of ‘[t]he wild varieties of Irish manners and scenery [which] are profusely scattered over the whole, and often powerfully conspire to make a considerable impression upon the reader’s nerves’.28 Scott reviewed Fatal revenge in equally mixed terms in 1810. ‘[S]elected’, as Scott wrote, ‘almost at random’ from a ‘hamper’ of ‘the newest and most fashionable novels’ sent to him at his request, Fatal revenge earned Scott’s disdain but also his respect. As a novel, it evidenced ‘very bad taste’, written as it was in the style of ‘[t]he imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mr. Lewis’. Nevertheless, Scott continued, the tale deserved notice because of the commendable and striking ‘powers of the author’. To put these skills to better use, Scott urged the novel’s author to seek literary patronage and assistance: We have at no time more earnestly desired to extend our voice to a bewildered traveller, than towards this young man, whose taste is so inferior to his powers of imagination and expression, that we never saw a more remarkable instance of genius degraded by the labour in which it is employed.29

In 1812, Maturin did just as Scott had advised, sending the first of many plaintive missives to the older author seeking literary assistance and guidance. Scott graciously responded and continued to offer advice, money, and his services in the literary world until Maturin’s death in 1824.30 It was largely through Scott’s efforts, in fact, that Bertram was staged at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1816. The play was, as I have noted, a tremendous success, but the controversy it caused in terms of its perceived licentiousness and extravagance permanently and grievously injured Maturin’s career in the Church of Ireland. Produced under Maturin’s alias, Bertram caused such a sensation that several imposters attempted to pass themselves off as its writer. In order to reap the benefit of the play’s production and subsequent publication, therefore, Maturin

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travelled to London – the one and only time he left Ireland – and revealed himself as the author. This trip was accompanied by bitter disappointment at the evidently unsatisfactory public response he received. Returning to Ireland after only a week, Maturin wrote moodily to Scott, ‘I know not why they pressed my going over with such importunity’.31 Maturin soon had cause to regret the trip for other reasons as well. In particular, the abandonment of his nom de plume exposed Maturin’s hitherto concealed identity as a dramatist and novelist. While Maturin’s ecclesiastical superiors evidently already had their suspicions about his literary activities, and his position within the Church seems to have been rather precarious from the start, this revelation irrevocably destroyed Maturin’s hopes for further patronage and advancement. Rumour had it, in fact, that the ecclesiastical hierarchy in Dublin was so enraged by Maturin’s literary aspirations that they were actually considering depriving him of his curacy altogether.32 Ultimately, Maturin retained his position at St Peter’s, but any remaining prospects for a Church living had been shattered irrevocably. He therefore continued to write, publishing three more novels – Women; or pour et contre, Melmoth the wanderer, and The Albigenses – two further plays – Manuel: a tragedy in five acts (1817) and Fredolfo: a tragedy (1819) – two books of sermons – Sermons and Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church (1824) – and, according to his correspondence, several original poems. Little of this proposed or recorded poetry remains, and Maturin’s poetic reputation rests on two contested pieces, Lines on the Battle of Waterloo (1816) and The universe (1821). His authorship of the former is recorded in an article appearing in the New monthly magazine in 1827, but the published piece itself bears the name of John Shee; the latter was at least partially, if not wholly, written by James Wills.33 None of these works achieved the public or critical acclaim Maturin obviously desired, and he died on 30 October 1824, very much the ‘disappointed Author’ he described to Scott.34 Rumours of suicide and possible laudanum overdoses attended his death, but the always-rather-frail Maturin had been ill for an extended period.35 A proposed visit to Scotland to see his long-time friend and mentor in 1823, in fact, was cancelled because of Maturin’s ill-health. That same year, almost twelve months before his death, Maturin addressed the Royal Literary Fund, entreating assistance in removing his family ‘to the Country’, where he had been ordered ‘as an indispensable step to my recovery, or indeed to my existence’.36 The Committee voted to send Maturin £10, after previously granting him £25 in 1822.37 Maturin’s premature death and continuing financial troubles evidently haunted his widow and their four surviving children, as suggested by Henrietta’s correspondence with Scott in the months following her husband’s death. In the first of her letters to Scott, for instance, Henrietta drew his attention to ‘a subscription

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for the benefit of [Maturin’s] family sanctioned by the Primate, and the Archbishop of Dublin and immediately conducted by the Pastor of the parish of which he  was  for twenty years the Minister’. Her purpose in doing so was to solicit Scott’s assistance in the adoption of ‘a similar plan . . . in Scotland’.38 Judging by Henrietta’s next letter, Scott did not act on her subscription suggestion but did send her a ‘very liberal donation’, which, she wrote, ‘will be of infinite Service to me, in my present situation’.39 Indicative of her dire financial circumstances, however, Henrietta at the same time addressed the Royal Literary Fund for assistance. On 15 November 1824, Henrietta acknowledged the receipt of the Fund’s grant of £50 and thanked her correspondent for the donation as well as ‘the flattering manner in which you speak of Mr Maturin’s talents’.40 Despite these charitable gifts, the financial difficulties of the Maturin family continued, prompting them frequently to seek methods of disposing of Maturin’s existing and unpublished works as a means of financial support. To this end – ‘the benefit of the family’ – Scott proposed critical editions of Maturin’s works, to which he would add a preface or introduction.41 He sought and gained permission from Constable to reprint those texts owned by the publisher, but, in the end, Scott’s own financial difficulties prevented the pursuit of this project. The editions never appeared. Neither did the memoir Henrietta requested from an unnamed but apparently close female friend of Maturin; it was evidently written and sent to Scott for advice, as recorded in a letter from him dated 9 April 1825, but never published. Maturin’s son, William, also noted the existence of several more unpublished works, including a ‘[f]ragment of a Comic Irish tale’ and ‘[a] few scenes from two unfinished tragedies’.42 Very few of these literary scraps are now traceable, lending credence to the rumour that William burned his father’s papers in an attempt to preserve his memory and his family from further ignominy.43 Other unpublished works, however, were successfully brought out. A short story titled ‘Leixlip Castle’, for instance, was published in 1825, and a fourth play, Osmyn the renegade; or, The siege of Salerno, was performed in Dublin and Edinburgh in 1830 and 1831, respectively. With the Dublin production of Osmyn and an apparently unpursued proposal for its publication, Henrietta’s correspondence with Scott came to an end. Over the next several decades, Irish cultural memory of Maturin would also peter out, to the extent that the Irish quarterly review could speak of him and his works in 1852 as almost wholly abjured and certainly incomparably ‘neglected’ and ‘forgotten’.44 Yet, Maturin’s spectral presence continued to haunt literary production in Ireland, Europe, and abroad, even as it does now. As suggested by the 1892 edition of Melmoth – one that anticipated the repeated re-publication of the novel in the twentieth century – contemporaries such as Scott and Byron were very much influenced by Maturin and his works. And, despite his reputation

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as a failure or, at least, a failed author, his works continued to attract positive popular, if not critical, attention. By the time of his death, in fact, three of his six novels had been republished. Moreover, between 1821 and 1828, five of his novels were translated into French, with the sixth, Women; or pour et contre, having already been translated in 1818 and 1820. Evidence of Maturin’s continued popularity frequently emerged and still emerges in works produced by a vast array of disparate authors over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, as I shall demonstrate more fully in the conclusion to this book. Here, it is enough to remark on a few instances of this ghostly resurrection. We hear Maturin’s voice calling to us from, for instance, Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel, The way we live now, with its anti-hero named Melmotte. His spectral presence is there in the five-act play, Melmoth the wanderer, produced in Boston in 1915, as it is in the hero’s naming of his car ‘Melmoth’ in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and in the many references to Maturin’s wanderer in John Banville’s oeuvre. Haunting literary imagination long after Maturin himself had died, Maturin’s phantom exhorts us to remember, to pay our dues to, and to bear witness to an author who, much like the Gothic novel of the Romantic period in Ireland, is denied, abjected, and abjured. Irish society seems to have done its best to forget Maturin, destroying his home, the churches in which he worked, and even his grave, but he remains a Derridean non-present presence demanding to be heard and acknowledged. As evidenced even by the few examples provided above, Maturin haunts our everyday life and literary production even now, almost two hundred years after his death. Even now, when any tangible last traces of Maturin have been lost or destroyed, he maintains a haunting, ghostly presence in Irish society, culture, and literature, demanding that we do justice to his legacy. For, having played such a vital role in the production of the haunted everyday life of twenty-first-century Ireland, Maturin, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, insists that we pay attention to our origins, to the people and events we have now forgotten but which continue still to shape and inform our society and culture. Notes 1 Letter from Charles Robert Maturin to Sir Walter Scott, 2 July 1816, appended to the handwritten manuscript of Bertram held at Abbotsford Library and consulted, with permission from the Library of the Faculty of Advocates, at the National Library of Scotland. 2 NLS 3884/10, letter from Maturin to Scott, 11 January 1813. 3 Ibid.; see also Morin, ‘Delightful cannibal feasts’. 4 Although some critics have claimed that Maturin was actually born in 1782, the

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18

19 20

21

22 23

24

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Matriculation Book of Trinity College Dublin lists Maturin’s enrolment in 1795 at the age of 15, thereby supporting the 1780 birth date, as Niilo Idman observes. The confusion derives in part from Maturin’s own implicit suggestion in the preface to Fatal revenge, dated 15 December 1806, that he was twenty-four years old; see Niilo Idman, Charles Robert Maturin (Helsinki: Centraltryckeri, 1923), p. 312, note 6. NLS 3884/10, letter from Maturin to Scott, 11 January 1813. ‘Memoranda of Maturin’, Douglas Jerrold’s shilling magazine, 3 (1846), 128. Obituary of Charles Robert Maturin, The gentleman’s magazine, 95 (1825), 84–5 ‘Memoranda of Maturin’, pp. 127, 128, 127. Ibid., p. 130. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, introd. Pat Rogers (1791; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 1124. Stevenson, The wild Irish girl, p. 244. Obituary of Charles Robert Maturin, p. 84. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. James Kinsley, introd. Marilyn Butler (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 83, 84. ‘Memoranda of Maturin’, p. 128. Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: a life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 251. Ibid., p. 250. Rev. of Christabel, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand; a tragedy in five acts, by Charles Robert Maturin, The British review, 8 (1816), 80; Rev. of Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand; a tragedy, in five acts, by Charles Robert Maturin, Monthly review, n.s. 80 (1816), 180. Massimiliano Demata, ‘The drama of publishing: a “lost” epilogue to Maturin’s Bertram?’, Gothic studies, 3.2 (2001), 170. See also Daniel P. Watkins, ‘“Tenants of a blasted world”: historical imagination in Charles Maturin’s Bertram’, Keats–Shelley review, 4 (1989), 80, for an identification of Bertram’s ‘amazing popular reception’. Demata, ‘The drama of publishing’, p. 171. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia literaria; or, biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols, in Kathleen Coburn (ed.), The collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 7 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 2: 229, 233. ‘Extract from the portfolio of a man of the world’, The gentleman’s magazine, 25 (1846), 468; J. W. Croker, Rev. of Melmoth the wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin, The quarterly review, 24.48 (1821), 311. NLS 673/7, letter from Maturin to Constable, 4 April 1818. NLS 673/11, letter from Maturin to Constable, 2 May 1818. See also NLS 790/174, letter from Constable to Maturin, 21 April 1818, in which Constable notes his remittance of the £150 to Maturin and promises further remuneration if the sale of the book allows. Frances Knight, The nineteenth-century church and English society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 131–2.

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25 For Maturin’s account of his father’s affairs, see NLS 3884/10–11, letter from Maturin to Scott, 11 January 1813. 26 Rev. of The Milesian chief, by Dennis Jasper Murphy, Monthly review, 2nd ser. 67 (1812), 322. Available online from British fiction, 1800–1829, www.british-fiction. cf.ac.uk/reviews/mile12-46.html, accessed 25 August 2010. 27 Ibid., p. 323. 28 Rev. of The Milesian chief, by Dennis Jasper Murphy, Critical review, 4th ser. 1 (1812), 397. Available online from British fiction, 1800–1829, www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/ reviews/mile12-46.html, accessed 25 August 2010. 29 Sir Walter Scott, Rev. of Fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio: a romance, by Dennis Jasper Murphy, The quarterly review, 3.6 (1810), 342. 30 Thanks to Scott’s meticulous record-keeping, almost all of this correspondence is available in the National Library of Scotland and has also been printed in Fannie E. Ratchford and Wm H. McCarthy, Jr (eds), The correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, with a few other allied letters (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1937). 31 Letter dated 2 July 1816 and appended to the Abbotsford MS of Bertram. 32 Fierobe, Charles Robert Maturin, p. 101. 33 See Willem Scholten, Charles Robert Maturin: the terror-novelist (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1933), p. 6, and Idman, Charles Robert Maturin, pp. 104–5, 271–6. See also Stevenson, The wild Irish girl, pp. 245–6, for Owenson’s intervention with Colburn on the matter of The universe to ensure that Wills received at least some compensation. 34 NLS 3884/10, letter from Maturin to Scott, 11 January 1813. 35 As Henrietta wrote to Scott, Maturin possessed ‘a constitution naturally delicate’; NLS 3899/205–6, letter from Henrietta Maturin to Scott, 11 November 1824. 36 British Library (hereafter BL) 1077/13, letter 5, letter from Maturin to the Royal Literary Fund, 23 October 1823. 37 BL 1077/13, letter 3, letter from Maturin to the Royal Literary Fund, 28 October 1822. 38 NLS 3899/205–6, letter from Henrietta Maturin to Walter Scott, 11 November 1824. 39 NLS 3899/211–12, letter from Henrietta Maturin to Walter Scott, 23 November 1824. 40 BL 1077/13, letter 9, letter from Henrietta Maturin to the Royal Literary Fund, 15 November 1824. 41 NLS 5277/69–72, letter from Scott to Henrietta Maturin, 9 April 1825. 42 NLS 3899/211–12, letter from William Maturin to Scott, 23 November 1824. 43 Ratchford and McCarthy, The correspondence of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Robert Maturin, p. 112. Ratchford and McCarthy contend that the Maturin family’s attempts to have Osmyn the renegade both performed and published refute ‘the legend that [William] destroyed his father’s literary remains, together with his correspondence with famous men of letters’. 44 Quoted in Welch, The Oxford companion to Irish literature, p. 360.

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Communing with the dead: the medium and media of Fatal revenge

The past strikes back: the Gothic novel meets national tale Maturin’s first novel, Fatal revenge (1807), fundamentally pivots on the return of the dead. Set in seventeenth-century Italy, the novel centres on the adventures of two noble brothers – Ippolito and Annibal di Montorio – both of whom have been raised to their current social status by the death of their uncle, Orazio di Montorio. In his place, their father became the current Count di Montorio, but, unbeknownst to any of them, Orazio survived the assassination attempt directed at him by his brother. Determined to avenge the murder of his wife and their unborn child as well as his own supposed death, Orazio travels back to Italy disguised as a Catholic monk named Schemoli, insinuates himself into the Count’s family, and initiates a series of mysterious and seemingly supernatural events that will eventually culminate in the murder of the Count by his own children. Just as the murder is committed, however, Schemoli reveals himself as the resurrected Orazio, not, as we might expect, to revel in his revenge but to rue his actions. Although intending to make his brother suffer for his former parricide, Orazio discovers that Ippolito and Annibal are actually his own children. In the process of retaliation, therefore, Orazio destroys not only his brother’s family but his own as well: He who sought his own elevation, and the aggrandizement of his children, was defeated and destroyed by him whom he had sacrificed to his ambitious wickedness. He who sought vengeance as atrocious as the crime that provoked it, found it poured out on his own children.1

A cyclical narrative in which a ghost from the past haunts his living relatives in order to exact justice only to become in his own turn a victim of history, Fatal revenge tells of the frightening and ultimately destructive return of ostensibly bygone periods. Bereft of family, fortune, and lands, Ippolito and Annibal remain forever haunted by the memory of what has happened. Refusing to marry and instead seeking death on a foreign battlefield, the two brothers highlight the

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devastating effects of the past’s intrusion into the present. Only with the final erasure of the Montorio name can the family find peace from the spectres of history. A narrative animated by a Derridean revenant, Fatal revenge highlights Maturin’s concern with the devastating effects the interruption of the past can have in the present and future. It also forcefully underlines the ways in which Maturin attempts to merge the Gothic novel and the national tale. Although generally dismissed by contemporaries as a paltry imitation of Ann Radcliffe’s popular Gothic novels, Fatal revenge is actually a groundbreaking novel that dramatically blends literary genres and forms in order to reveal the Derridean traces of the Gothic mode in the national tale while also emphasising the continued hold of the past on nineteenth-century Ireland. While Maturin’s later novel The Milesian chief is often identified as the transition point between the national tale and the historical novel as well as that between the national tale and the Gothic novel of the later nineteenth century,2 Fatal revenge acts as a primary literary juncture. In fact, it might be analysed usefully as a medium between Gothic novel and national tale – possessing elements of both, Fatal revenge vitally mixes the two, and, in so doing, stresses the fundamental importance of a Gothic sense of the past in the national tale. The word ‘medium’, however, is also equally applicable to Fatal revenge in two further interconnected ways. First, it references the ‘multimedia’ nature of the novel,3 which, over its twenty-four chapters and three volumes, contains thirty poetic epigraphs, as well as nineteen apparently original poems or songs comprising about sixty-nine pages, or seven per cent of the novel as a whole. Second, it connotes a spiritual mediumship, whereby Maturin and his novel enable an encounter with the ghosts of the past, including apparently dead people (Orazio and his wife Erminia), apparently dead literary forms (the Gothic novel), and apparently dead Irish history. Although I have discussed the former two, the latter may seem out of place, especially when speaking of a novel set almost wholly in seventeenth-century Italy. As Siobhán Kilfeather maintains, however, Maturin’s ‘foregrounding [of] the Irish authorship of this Italian gothic story’ in his preface to the novel effects a situation whereby ‘the opening scenes at the siege of Barcelona in 169[7] summon up images of the siege of Derry [1689]’.4 The connection of fictional narrative to Irish history is further emphasised a short time later when Ippolito recites a ballad entitled ‘Bruno-Lin, the Irish outlaw’. Inspired by Scott’s The lay of the last minstrel (1805), the poem, as its title suggests, is concerned wholly with a country described by Ippolito as ‘a nation of people wild and little known’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 96). As if to enforce the exotic strangeness of the Irish people and country, Maturin includes a footnote at the beginning of the ballad: ‘It is lamented that the scenery of this Ballad is so topical,

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that whoever has not been in Ireland, can scarce read it with pleasure; whoever has, will not be sorry to think again of the ruins of Melik, and the waters of the Shannon’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 97). A second footnote explains that ‘Melik [is] an Abbey, whose beautiful ruins are yet extant on the banks of the Shannon, where it flows between Galway and Leinster’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 98). The effect of this lengthy song – almost thirteen pages long in the original and a full eight pages long in the 1994 Sutton edition – and its repeated footnotes is effectively to insert Ireland into the text and to suggest that its story of familial decay by way of a return of the violence of the past is entirely relevant to Ireland. Footnotes and paratextual commentary such as these manifest the haunting presence of Ireland and contemporary Irish issues in the novel. Just as the text is possessed by the Gothic, and the prose narrative by poetry, therefore, Fatal revenge reveals constant traces of the spectres of Ireland’s past. In setting out to create a new kind of Gothic novel, free from the ‘abuse’ engaged in by recent writers, who, Maturin complains, have all but destroyed the powerful effects of terror, Maturin implies a lack of interest in Ireland. Yet, his mixing of literary forms, coupled with his paratextual references to Ireland, expose a concern with Ireland similar to that of Owenson’s then recently published and, as we now understand it, pioneering national tale, The wild Irish girl. The difference is, as we shall see, that Maturin dramatically uncovers, in clichéd but extremely appropriate terms, the skeletons in the closets and the ghosts in the attics of the contemporary national tale. Spectro-textual politics: gender, genre, and nation in Fatal revenge In his preface to his later novel, Women; or pour et contre, Maturin informs his reader that his original title for Fatal revenge was ‘Montorio’. But, he writes, the novel was ‘misnomed by the bookseller “The Fatal Revenge,”’ a name Maturin considers ‘a very book-selling appellation’.5 Ironically, given his constant declarations of authorship by financial necessity, Maturin regrets exactly that which was intended to sell his novel – a ‘sexy’ name that identifies Fatal revenge with the Radcliffean Gothic novels later pointedly parodied by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey (1818). Maturin’s disappointment arguably originates in his desire to dissociate his novel from its Gothic predecessors. As he makes clear in his preface to Fatal revenge, Maturin understood only too well the critical disrepute of the Gothic novel, a form that, as Austen’s novel indicates, had inundated the contemporary literary marketplace and, in Wordsworth’s terms, threatened to push ‘[t]he invaluable works of . . . Shakespear and Milton . . . into neglect’.6 Maturin’s opening remarks assert a condemnation of the Gothic novel similar to that offered by Wordsworth and, later, Scott who, in reviewing Fatal revenge

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in 1810, decried the author’s misuse of his ‘genius’ and ‘powers’ on a degraded and degrading ‘labour’.7 In his prefatory comments to Fatal revenge, therefore, Maturin first laments the ‘vulgar and unhallowed hands’ that have ‘abuse[d] the influence of [fear]’ and then negatively contrasts the contemporary vogue of Gothic fiction with the works of Shakespeare (Fatal revenge, 1: v): I have read novels, ghost-stories, where the spirit has become so intimate with flesh and blood, and so affable, that I protest I have almost expected it, and some of its human interlocutors, like the conspirators in Mr. Bayes’s play, to ‘take out their snuff-boxes and feague it away’. Such writers have certainly made ridiculous what Shakespeare has considered and treated as awful. (Fatal revenge, 1: vi)

Resolutely distancing himself from Radcliffe and ‘[t]he imitators of Mrs. Radcliffe and Mr. Lewis’,8 Maturin instead aligns himself with Shakespeare, thereby declaring the literary worth of his novel and asserting both the novelty and classical ancestry of his particular form of Gothic fiction. Not the Gothic novel that had become so popular in recent years, Fatal revenge is instead set forth as an example of true Shakespearian terror literature.9 Such references to classical literature and, as we shall see, more respected literary genres are not unusual in the Gothic novel of the mid- to late eighteenth century. In fact, as Chloe Chard points out, the authors of the Gothic novel often engaged in ‘a vigorous attempt to lay claim to a literary and intellectual status rather more elevated than that which is usually accorded to [their Gothic works]’. This endeavour helps to explain the repeated references to travel writing that construct the Gothic novel as apparently reflective of the author’s personal experiences with foreign cultures and events.10 Similarly, frequent poetic epigraphs and the snippets of poetry often interspersed with the prose narrative in texts like Radcliffe’s The romance of the forest (1791) and The mysteries of Udolpho ‘are used to suggest that the Gothic novel is composed with constant reference to English poetry’.11 In the former, Chard contends, poetic and classical literary allusions function as Radcliffe’s method of asserting literary authority. Nevertheless, The romance of the forest registers continued unease with its project of claiming such authority, largely because of its author’s consideration of her female authorship: The Romance of the Forest, on the one hand, avoids any overt proclamation of literary or intellectual ambition by situating itself within the genre of romantic fiction. This acceptance of a relatively humble literary status has, on the other hand, the disadvantage that it makes it extremely difficult for the novel to introduce its more ambitious allusions to current intellectual concerns without producing a strong effect of incongruity.12

Where Radcliffe’s authorial anxiety motivated by her female authorship emerges in hesitancy towards her novel’s intertextual movement, however, Maturin’s

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anxiety differs both in cause and effect. Radcliffe retains her ‘humble’ authorial position out of deference to her gender and the knowledge of the way in which her writing would be received by the reading public should it be seen to contravene the prescribed bounds of female propriety. Maturin, in contrast, is driven largely by a concern with the feminisation of the novel enacted from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Working in a genre and form fundamentally gendered female by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Maturin is keen to assert his reliance on male models. In so doing, he seeks to protect his own masculinity while also deflecting the common criticism of the Gothic novel as ‘an impassioned . . . suspect, subliterary form’ that encouraged dangerously excessive sensibility in its predominantly female readership and illustrated the equally threatening prospect of an anti-rational, anti-patriarchal world.13 Later, Maturin would specifically deny writing a ‘Radcliffe-Romance’ with Melmoth the wanderer (Melmoth, p. 5), but, in Fatal revenge, his gendered anxiety about his authorship is more subtle, emerging primarily in his repeated insertion of poetry into his prose narrative.14 As I have suggested above, Maturin’s merging of poetry and prose in his novel is by no means unusual in terms of Romantic-era fiction. In fact, as Ann Wierda Rowland points out, both the poetic content of novels and the extensive prose footnotes and glosses of poetry in this period highlight Romantic authors’ self-conscious engagement in ‘[a] vigorous mixing and jostling of genres’.15 In Maturin’s case, however, the high percentage of verse further underscores his unease over the coalescence of gender and genre in this period. As with contemporary authors such as Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Wordsworth, and Shelley, who mutually promoted the poetical nature of prose fiction despite its lack of verse, Maturin calls upon ‘the prestige of poetry on behalf of the novel’,16 in order both to legitimise and to masculinise his novel. He does this not by identifying his novel as ‘poetry without the ornament of verse’17 but instead by using poetry, in Gary Kelly’s terms, to hedge ‘the despised prose’ of the implicitly female Gothic novel ‘with bits of “serious literature”’, i.e. male-authored poetry.18 Maturin’s epigraphs, with their predominantly male-centred, classical poetic references – the majority refer to verses taken from the works of Shakespeare, Horace, and Virgil, or eighteenth-century male translations of the latter two19 – might be seen therefore both to ‘“literalize”’ and to masculinise Fatal revenge.20 A similar strategy used to masculinise the novel in this period involved the direct insertion of poetic excerpts into the narrative framework of prose fiction. As Mary A. Favret maintains, authors like Charlotte Smith, Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, and Lewis very often manipulated the boundaries of poetry and prose in a bid to legitimise and, hence, subtly masculinise the novel:

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[Their novels] use the tight relationship between the two genres to derail questions of the novel’s legitimacy – and history. More importantly, they show us how the novel displays poetry to its own advantage, using the structures of romance, physical appearance, and commodification to engender a ‘feminized’ lyric, while accruing to itself the virtues of the ‘real’, the true, and the natural. What happens to poetry in these works, in other words, helps the novel to write a story about itself.21

In a move that seems to contradict his use of poetry as an inherently more respected and more masculine form in his epigraphs, Maturin also deploys the original poetry and song scattered throughout his novel in order to contrast female poetry with the male novel. In so doing, Maturin reveals his awareness of the common contemporary critical technique whereby transgeneric novels such as Fatal revenge were subject to a gendered reading of fiction and poetry. For critics such as Coleridge, these works invited an understanding of poetry as feminine. ‘[F]ragile’ and ‘beautiful’, the feminine verse was separate to and distinct from the ‘adventurous’ and masculine nature of prose narrative.22 This is why, Favret suggests, the poems in The mysteries of Udolpho and other similar novels, although deployed for a variety of reasons, including expressing the emotions of the characters, often seem and appear extraneous – ‘[a] parenthetical – [or] detachable extra added “for the reader’s benefit”, but not requisite to the novel’. Because they are physically set off from the rest of the narrative, the poems are made to look different and unusual, transforming the novel into ‘the accepted ground, the norm or setting from which the difference of these objects can be viewed’. Favret therefore argues that ‘the novel displays these inserted poems as visual objects in order to make itself look good – that is, to sell itself as real, natural, well-grounded’.23 Ironically, given Maturin’s desire to distance himself from the ‘feminine’ Gothic novel and its writers, it is precisely through his replication of techniques deployed in the female Gothic in Fatal revenge – despite Maturin’s prefatory promise of novelty – that initially enacts the author’s much desired masculinisation of the novel. As with the poetry in The mysteries of Udolpho and Smith’s Desmond (1792), for instance, the verse in Fatal revenge is set off from the prose, visually marking it as distinct and inviting the kind of gendered and discrete readings set forth in many of the contemporary reviews of transgeneric novels. Turning to the novel’s first verse interlude, we can clearly see the kind of formal demarcation in which Romantic authors engaged. (See Figures 2 and 3) The indentations of the lines, as well as their noticeably smaller font visibly mark the poetry as different in kind from the prose. Similarly, the manner in which the poem is recounted attests to a fundamental separation between poetry and prose. Spoken by an as yet unidentified, masked figure to Ippolito, the verse is

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2 Pages 14–15 of the first volume of Fatal revenge, showing the prose fiction giving way to the first of the novel’s many poetic interludes.

3 Pages 16–17 of the first volume of Fatal revenge, displaying the continuation of the extended segment of verse begun on the previous page.

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described by the latter as ‘inviting’ but also slippery and ephemeral, like the figure himself, who eventually turns out to be the page Cyprian, who is actually a young novitiate named Rosolia di Vazzoli in disguise (Fatal revenge, 1: 15). Each time Ippolito approaches Cyprian to hear what he is alternately reciting and singing, Cyprian ‘abruptly turn[s] away’, and the poetic lines themselves are said to be ‘scattered among the groups’ of people at the ball (Fatal revenge, 1: 15). In other words, the poetry, like the man/woman reciting it, is dangerously alluring but somehow transient, easily lost among the throngs. Moreover, as Favret suggests of the poetry in other such transgeneric novels, the verse is largely extraneous – it simply foretells, in picturesque, but ambiguous terms, what Cyprian later explains to Ippolito in the plain language of prose. If we look at the poem, therefore, we see that it is narrated by a kind of fairy or angel who, much like the sylphs of Pope’s The rape of the lock (1714), explains what his duties on earth are: ’Tis mine to bid life’s colours glow, To swell its bliss, or sooth its woe; From doubt’s dim sphere, bid shadows fly, And people void futurity; – To sooth pale passion’s feverous dream, To feed ambition’s lurking flame, Chastise proud joy with menaced ill, Fierce pain, with promised pleasure, still, Till hope wears, ’mid the mimic strife, The tints of truth, the forms of life. (Fatal revenge, 1: 16)

In comparison, two pages later, Cyprian addresses Ippolito to tell him that ‘an aerial monitor, a little, benign, officious sylph’, like that narrating the preceding poem, is about to join Ippolito: His task is to be your moral improvement, your happiness his delight and reward. He will assume a form, he will speak a language like your own. He will attend, he will watch, he will warn you. Beware you repel him not, for if you do, he spreads his fairy pennons, and happiness flies you for ever. (Fatal revenge, 1: 18)

Against the relatively clear, if still fanciful, articulation of information provided in  discussion, the poetry is represented as not only visually distinct but also lacking in the concrete nature of prose. As such, it is visibly and symbolically differentiated from the surrounding prose, which is made to seem more masculine – real, tangible – in juxtaposition with verse. The poetry therefore works to ‘bolster’ the novel precisely by way of ‘parad[ing] [its] own ephemerality, artificiality, portability, redundant and inessential nature’.24 Maturin’s manipulation of both techniques – the use of masculine poetry to

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frame the feminine prose and the insertion of feminised verse to highlight the masculine nature of the prose narrative – indicates what I want to call his writing between genders and genres.25 Eager to represent himself as a poet, despite writing a work of prose fiction, Maturin presents verse as both more prestigious and more masculine than prose. At the same time, however, Maturin seeks to masculinise his prose narrative precisely by way of a feminisation of poetry. That he does both points to the inherent contradiction underlining the period’s conceptual shift from a familial understanding of genres to a gendered one.26 In the process of feminising the lyric and thereby masculinising and legitimising the novel as a literary form, texts like Fatal revenge reveal the ambiguity of borders between both genres and their traditional gender identifications. Considering the novels of Charlotte Smith, for instance, Favret contends that, while they distinguish prose and poetry by feminising the latter, they simultaneously suggest a close proximity between the two: ‘hidden in Smith’s transgressions [of generic boundaries . . . is] a close “affiliation” that suggests incest; with this suggestion rides the accompanying fear that the two orders, poetry and novel, are not different in kind, but rather too similar’.27 Incest, of course, is a major theme in Fatal revenge, as it is in Maturin’s later novels. Annibal, for instance, falls in love with a young novitiate, Ildefonsa, who, shortly before she dies at the end of the novel, is revealed as his first cousin. Upon discovering this kinship, Annibal is inconsolable, not simply because of the loss of his lover but also because of the danger he ran of committing incest. As he recovers from the horror inspired by Orazio’s confession, Annibal is torn between ‘the soothing remembrances of passion’ and ‘the imminent horrors of incest’ (Fatal revenge, 3: 476). Ippolito, in contrast, has no such qualms, or so it seems at first. His page, Cyprian, having disappeared earlier in the book, reappears, after Orazio’s confession, but in his, or, in more accurate terms her, true form – as Rosolia di Valozzi. ‘I am no longer Cyprian’, she tells Ippolito: Cyprian was the guardian of your innocence, but for him there is no longer any employment: let me assume my original name and form, they are disastrous, and therefore are better suited to this hour. I am Rosolia di Valozzi, who loved you, who lived for you, whose last proof of most unhappy love is to die with you! (Fatal revenge, 3: 477–8).

This revelation, although entirely unexpected to Ippolito, is less of a surprise to the reader. All along, Cyprian has been described in feminine terms: ‘slight and delicate’ with ‘a profusion of chestnut hair’, Cyprian is an accomplished musician and often amuses Ippolito on ‘the harp, or organ’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 57, 58). As he does so, he is said to pour ‘through his delicate, half-open lips a stream of sound, more resembling respiration than tones modulated by art and practice’ (Fatal

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revenge, 1: 58). His conversation on art and aesthetics is exemplary, influenced by his possession of ‘the genius of art’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 58). Gifted with skills similar to later Irish heroines such as Amanda Fitzalan, Madeline Clermont, and Glorvina, Princess of Inismore, Cyprian is just as innocent, artless, and womanly as they: ‘over all was spread a species of fragility, a certain delicacy of imperfection’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 59). As if this were not enough to convince the reader of Cyprian’s ambivalent gender, Maturin’s narrator pointedly tells us: ‘[Cyprian] would wind his slender arms around Ippolito, and with female blandishments, declare he should not quit the palace, blandishments to which he bowed with the pouting smile of yielding reluctance’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 61–2). Cyprian’s nonetoo-subtle display of his feminine skills and appearance, however obvious to the reader, nonetheless fails to attract Ippolito’s notice. Even when the evidence is right before his eyes, in fact, Ippolito finds it difficult to countenance and continues to refer to Rosolia as Cyprian: Oh, Cyprian! Cyprian! think of those times when happy and innocent . . . Oh! think of something unutterably fond and soft for this one moment, think of all that is rising in my heart this moment, think human thoughts, and melt with me in human sorrow, my love! my faithful love! my fond, dying love! (Fatal revenge, 3: 483)

Ippolito’s apparent inability fully to comprehend Cyprian’s new identity rehearses  the concluding scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth night, where, much like similar scenes in the Gothic novel, all of the preceding confusion and chaos is righted by the revelation of true identities. The pageboy hitherto known as Cesario affirms his former identity: he is, in fact, a noble woman named Viola. Despite betrothing himself to her in her new feminine form, however, Orsino continues to refer to Viola as Cesario: . . . Cesario, come – For so you shall be while you are a man; But when in other habits you are seen, Orsino’s mistress and his fancy’s queen.28

Whereas Twelfth night ends with comedy for almost all of its characters, the revelations of true identity concluding Fatal revenge end only in tragedy, as suggested by Cyprian/Rosolia’s death soon after her unmasking. Before she dies, however, Cyprian/Rosolia and Ippolito fondly kiss and embrace – repeating a kiss they had shared earlier when, inspired by Ippolito’s impassioned response to his recitation from Rosolia’s diaries, Cyprian asked Ippolito to kiss him: ‘Imagine me her; give me one kiss . . . Give me but one, and her spirit shall depart, pleased and absolved’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 183). Ippolito is reluctant but consents: ‘“Visionary,

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you do what you will with me; I never kissed one of my own sex before; but do what you will with me”; half blushing, half pouting, he offered his red lip, Cyprian touched it and fainted’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 183). The lingering of this apparently homosexual association is significant, as, like incest, it suggests not difference but inherent likeness – a similarity that Maturin had already played with in highlighting the transgendered nature of poetry and prose. Maturin’s manipulation of gender and genre in his epigraphs and inter-narrative poetic insertions highlights the fact that, in the Romantic period, both genres could assume the roles of masculine and feminine, thereby underlining the essential ambiguity of the borders separating the two. Maturin further emphasises the amorphousness of boundaries between gender and genre with the formal construction of his narrative. As he would later do with Melmoth, Maturin begins Fatal revenge with a frame narrative. In this expository preamble, the scene is laid for the narration of the story of two heroic young Italian men fighting at ‘the siege of Barcelona by the French, in the year 1697’ by an Italian commanding officer after the brothers’ death in battle (Fatal revenge, 1: ix). Although the ensuing narrative is, ostensibly, an oral narration, it is characterised by a marked materiality and textuality. The majority of the novel, in fact, is comprised of letters exchanged between Ippolito and Annibal interspersed with extracts of Rosolia’s pre-Cyprian diary as well as a lengthy written confession from Orazio near the end of the novel. This multiplication of narratives emphasises the blending of oral and written in Maturin’s novel while also foreshadowing the multiplicity of voices and narratives that would be taken to almost parodic level in Melmoth the wanderer. Of more interest to this discussion, however, is the way in which the transition between the brothers’ individual narratives function as a mediation of the divide between male and female Gothic modes at the same time that it points to the incestuous nature of genres in Maturin’s novel. Writing to each other from their respective locations, Ippolito and Annibal separately come to embody different kinds of Gothic action, as Jim Hansen has compellingly demonstrated.29 Unlike Annibal, who resembles a female-Gothiclike heroine effectively imprisoned in the Castle di Muralto, Hansen argues, Ippolito uses his more cosmopolitan, public identity in an attempt ‘to live out the masculine homosocial adventure story of the male-Gothic’.30 The frequent move between these two narratives produces, as Hansen contends, a ‘fragmentary double-text’ that ‘folds the homosocial male exile narrative into the trembling fear of the female confinement narrative’.31 Hansen’s arguments rely on the by now common critical understanding of the Gothic novel as divided into two, gendered branches – the female Gothic typified by the works of Ann Radcliffe and the male Gothic initiated by Lewis’s The monk. Although such categories are, in some

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respects, helpful, they are also frequently too easy and ‘convenient’,32 eliding the ways in which the Gothic novel was fundamentally, in Michael Gamer’s terms, ‘a “mixed” genre, assembled, like Frankenstein’s monster, out of other discourses’. As such, Gothic texts often partook in elements of both female/male, explained/ unexplained supernatural, and terror/horror categories rather than just one or the other.33 Attempting to categorise an individual Gothic novel as either/or, therefore, does injustice to the hybrid nature of the Gothic as a literary mode. In these texts, normative labels of gender and genre bleed into each other, resisting both closure and categorisation.34 Against such amorphousness, contemporary critics of the Gothic novel were keen to impose order, a situation that often prompted writers to view the Gothic as not only sub-literary but essentially different in kind from authors’ other, ostensibly, more serious literary production. Considering the perceived contrast between Mary Robinson’s most famous Gothic novel, Hubert de Sevrac (1796), and her ‘book of far more serious and scholarly tone’ published the same year, Sappho and Phaon, Gamer maintains that ‘Romantic writing, in spite of its penchant for producing generic hybrids . . . was nevertheless received and criticized by a literary culture that strongly valued cultural hierarchy, aesthetic unity, and generic purity and definitiveness’.35 Maturin himself seems eager to enforce a gendered generic hierarchy in his deployment of poetry and prose, but, as we have already seen, such a tactic falls prey to the author’s own acknowledgement of the proximity of both genders and genres. Similarly, in his attempt to disassociate himself from the so-called female Radcliffean Gothic, as clearly underlined by his denial in Melmoth of writing a ‘Radcliffe-Romance’, Maturin voices his desire to assert the masculinity of both his writing and the literary form in which he chose to write. Once again, however, Maturin finds the two genders too close for comfort and ends up writing between the two rather than squarely in one or the other. For Maturin’s readers, Fatal revenge’s insistent emphasis on the incestuousness of genders and genres may well have appeared particularly striking in the context of the contemporary Irish social and political scene, especially given the ongoing discourse on Anglo-Irish relations. Indeed, Maturin suggests an intimate connection between the amorphousness of boundaries he presents in his multiplicity of narratives and his own Irish heritage, underlining his background in his novel’s preface by identifying himself specifically as ‘an Irishman of the name of DENNIS JASPER MURPHY’ (Fatal revenge, 1: viii). As Ippolito later suggests when he describes Ireland as ‘little known’, Ireland remained a strange and alien place to the average English reader despite the country’s centuries-old connection with England. The fact that Anglo-Irish writers of the national tale in the first few decades of the nineteenth century felt the need to ‘introduce’ Ireland to their

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English readers and dispel English stereotypes of the Irish in the aftermath of Anglo-Irish Union attests to the ways in which Britain understood Ireland as ‘[a]t once too near and too far, akin and estranged’.36 Despite the ontological distance between the two countries, however, the many metaphors used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe their peculiar relationship often emphasised familial bonds. Ireland and England were described variously as mother and daughter, sister or brother countries, and lovers. The frequent deployment and, indeed, mixing of these metaphors created an ambiguity of relationship, one that became even more confused in the years surrounding Union, when imagery of heterosexual marriage dominated the discourse. Such imagery, however, never precluded the use of other familial possibilities, allowing the metaphors to become inherently jumbled and connotative of a relationship directly counter to the hetero-normative one suggested by marriage. In this context, as Terry Eagleton observes, the Union actually represented ‘a peculiarly incestuous form of congress, in which the border between difference and identity, alienness and intimacy, is constantly transgressed, and subject-positions (strangers, siblings, parents, spouses, partners) become dizzyingly interchangeable’.37 In this juncture between normative marriage and incestuous congress emerges what Hansen terms the ‘Gothic Marriage’ characteristic of the ‘hybrid’ fiction produced in early nineteenth-century Ireland: [R]epresentations of Ireland encoded the nation as the feminine sister-kingdom and sometime wife to the British Imperial husband, but .  .  . in the journalistic consciousness and in the literary imagination of the late-eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries the Union took on the character of a Gothic Marriage. Ireland became the confined, threatened, terrorized female as England became – sometimes only potentially – her terrorizing, avaricious, and lustful captorhusband. From the perspective of an Irish political consciousness, the Gothic is born where the domestic-affection metaphor miscarries.38

For Hansen, the failure of the marriage metaphor results in ‘the wrong or loveless or unholy marriage[s]’ typical of Maturin’s works but contrary to the ‘happy, sanctified marriage[s]’ of Radcliffe’s.39 Although Hansen is right to emphasise Maturin’s reliance on imagery of the wrong, disastrous, and unequal marriage, this is something already highlighted in the contemporary discourse of Union. By positing an incestuous relationship between England and Ireland that is, like that between Ippolito and Cyprian, and Annibal and Ildefonsa, implicitly unnatural and ultimately tragic, in fact Maturin puts forward an understanding of AngloIrish Union that closely dovetails with the contemporary anti-Unionist conception of it. For those that contested it, Union was not, as its supporters argued, a marriage of equals that would fundamentally benefit both countries. Instead, it

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was a relationship insidiously underwritten by violence, one into which Ireland was, ‘rather like a minor in law’, unable to enter consensually.40 As such, antiunionists understood Union as something more akin to rape,41 placing Ireland in much the same position as the average Gothic heroine. Parentless, friendless, and awaiting maturity, the Gothic heroine becomes subject to the financial demands and carnal desires of a (usually male) family member. In The romance of the forest, for instance, Adeline is given over to murderers by the man she believes to be her father only to become persecuted by the perverted amorous advances of her real father. In The mysteries of Udolpho, Emily St Aubert is similarly victimised by her aunt’s husband, who, while acting as her guardian in the absence of her mother and father, not only demands that Emily sign away her wealth to him but also attempts to prostitute her to the highest bidder amongst his friends. And, in Roche’s Clermont (1798), Madeline is preyed upon by the husband of the woman she has been taught to call her sister after the death of her adopted mother, forcing her into a position of homeless exile from the people with whom she had sought the protection and affection of a family. Such domestic violence manifests the Gothic novel’s conventional familial decay while also suggesting the kind of dark ‘family’ secrets underpinning both the Union itself and literature dealing with it. The national tale, for instance, while attempting optimistically to depict Union as the happy and consensual coupling of Anglo-Irish/English hero and Irish heroine, nevertheless emphasises continued force reliant on familial relationships gone awry. In The wild Irish girl, Horatio Mortimer positions himself as at once Glorvina’s lover and brother as he tearfully proclaims his admiration and love for her father: ‘I have a father sir; this father once so dear, so precious to my heart! but since I have been your guest, he, the whole world was forgotten’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 214). The situation becomes even more confused when it is revealed that Horatio is actually the son of Glorvina’s intended husband. Attempting to make amends for the crimes visited upon the Inismore family by his ancestors, the Earl of M— courts Glorvina in disguise, not knowing that his son has fallen in love with her. The Earl later explains that his feelings for Glorvina were always paternal: ‘though I admired her genius and adored her virtues, the sentiment she inspired never for a moment lost its character of parental affection’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 238). In the contest between father and son for Glorvina, the exact relationship between characters becomes obfuscated, underlining the similar ambiguity of genders and relationships inherent to contemporary discourse on Anglo-Irish relations. At the same time, despite professing love and paternal affection for Glorvina, both Horatio and his father seek to force her hand. Both equally desirous to heal the wounds of the past, neither is willing to admit his real motivation or reveal his true identity. In refusing to do so, Horatio and his father place Glorvina in a

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position whereby the poverty and disgrace her family has suffered is manipulated in order to compel her consent.42 The Earl, for instance, asks the Prince for permission to marry Glorvina only after rescuing him from debtor’s prison. To his request, the Prince gratefully and not unexpectedly responds with a resounding affirmative: ‘In the season of my distress you flew to save me: you lavished your property for my release, not considering the improbability of its remuneration! Take my child . . . let me die in peace, by seeing her united to a worthy man!’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 240). Although Glorvina is described as ‘silent’ and ‘obedient’ in this transaction, her consent to marry her ancestral foe is repeatedly placed in question, most strikingly by her ‘piercing shriek’ at her father’s death and her accusatory question, ‘Which of you murdered my father?’ (Wild Irish girl, pp. 241, 234). As we have seen, Owenson allows us to believe that Glorvina eventually happily marries Horatio but, in reality, refuses to write that union into her text and, moreover, pointedly undermines it with Glorvina’s reluctance to forgive and forget. Insistently undercut and interrupted by the violence of the past, just as Fatal revenge is, The wild Irish girl tellingly prefigures the familial confusion of its conclusion by representing the Castle of Inismore as a house ‘haunted by the murdered Prince’, a reference to the former Prince of Inismore brutally murdered during the Cromwellian wars by Horatio’s ancestors (Wild Irish girl, p. 37). The ancient Prince’s ghostly presence – and the history of violent dispossession he represents – repeatedly disrupts the narrative, as when, for instance, Horatio unluckily chooses ‘the anniversary of that day on which my ancestors took the life of [the] venerable Prince’ to visit the Castle (Wild Irish girl, p. 44). Similarly, just as the Earl is about to wed Glorvina, the spectre, ‘pale and ghastly’, makes his appearance in order to halt the wedding ceremony (Wild Irish girl, p. 231). It turns out, of course, that this is not the ghost of Glorvina’s murdered ancestor but an ailing Horatio driven mad by the sight of his father standing at the alter with Glorvina. Nevertheless, his appearance functions in exactly the way Derrida’s spectre does – as both Geist and Gespenst, both a ‘welcome’ spirit and ‘a dreaded apparition’.43 While Horatio’s appearance rectifies the confusion of identities and relationships that have hitherto prevented his marriage to Glorvina, it also precipitates the death of the Prince of Inismore, who, upon learning the true identities of Horatio and his father, dies in a final ‘convulsive throe’ of ‘the last violent feeling of mortal emotion’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 233). Spectral interruptions such as these ensure that Owenson’s text always threatens and undermines its allegorical promise of an amicable future between England and Ireland with continued bitter memories of the violence of the past. In presenting Ireland in this way and emphasising the continued discord between England and Ireland, Owenson arguably followed the example set

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by earlier eighteenth-century Gothic novels such as Roche’s The children of the abbey. Like Fatal revenge, in fact, The children of the abbey might be usefully seen as an early version of the national tale as we now understand it, with the latter significantly predating The wild Irish girl. Indeed, Miranda Burgess maintains that in its conflation of private and public, whereby the marriage of its Irish heroine, Amanda Fitzalan, to her Mortimer, becomes symbolic of peaceful Anglo-Irish relations, The children of the abbey represents ‘the earliest national tale’.44 More starkly insistent on continued fragmentation and disunion than either The children of the abbey or The wild Irish girl, Fatal revenge overtly denies marriage between any of its characters. Nevertheless, it bears notable similarities to the national tale later popularised by Owenson and Edgeworth. Fatal revenge’s initial insistence on the barbarity of the Catholic Italians, for instance, parallels Horatio’s understanding of the savagery of the native Irish people. Just as Horatio expects to find a country peopled by naked, man-eating ‘Esquimaux’ and lacking any of ‘those graces which distinguish polished society’ (Wild Irish girl, pp. 13, 10), Fatal Revenge introduces an Italian nation mired in superstition and lacking any sense of advanced civilisation: The general idea of the Italian character was fully realized in that of the Montorio family; weak, yet obstinate; credulous, but mistrustful; inflamed with wild wishes to attain the secrets and communion of another world, yet sunk in the depth of both national and local superstition. (Fatal revenge, 1: 2)

Like Owenson’s Ireland, Maturin’s Italy is a harsh, unforgiving landscape, ‘marked by wild and uncommon features’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 1). And, while Maturin’s narrative focuses on two native Italian brothers in their home country, it enacts a narrative movement similar to that of the national tale. Following the convention of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel, in fact, Fatal revenge displaces its narrative action on to a temporally distant Catholic Continental setting. In so doing, the novel performs, in Jarlath Killeen’s terms, ‘a movement from a stable and known space to one outside traditional maps’, a movement, like that in the national tale, from the centre to the peripheries.45 Tellingly, Ippolito experiences a process very like that undergone by Horatio in The wild Irish girl and, before him, Lord Mortimer in The children of the abbey. In all three cases, the hero is subjected to a necessary transformation initiated by contact with a female representative of a supposedly less civilised culture. For Horatio, living alongside Glorvina and learning about Irish culture allows him to become ‘another, better self’.46 In Lord Mortimer’s case it is Amanda who draws him to Ireland and marriage with her that prompts him to renounce his long-term absenteeism.47 Fatal revenge constructs a similar relationship between Ippolito and his page, Cyprian. Although the latter has no apparent connection to

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Ireland, (s)he promotes the natural wildness of Ireland as a healing balm for the confusion and disorder caused by society life. Like Horatio, banished to Ireland after ‘g[i]v[ing] way to the overwhelming propensities of the man of pleasure’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 4), in fact, Ippolito must find a remedy for ‘a mind, fevered by the noxious stimulants of artificial voluptuousness’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 61). In an attempt to help him do so, Cyprian uses poetry and a related discussion of the appropriate subjects of art to convince Ippolito of the desirability of a simpler lifestyle and its attendant peace of mind. The ballad of ‘Bruno-Lin’ highlights Cyprian’s argument that the ‘prevailing manners’ should be introduced into art only ‘so far as they [a]re conformable to nature’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 92–3). Relating ‘the actions of a rude chieftain’ from ‘a nation of people wild and little known’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 97, 96), Maturin’s ballad emphasises the attraction of people and places from ‘common life’, rather than those displayed in contemporary Continental art and literature in ‘the glare of artificial lights and picturings’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 95, 111). Although the ballad’s Irish scenery is, as Maturin’s footnotes suggest, foreign to the reader without personal experience of Ireland, it nevertheless finds great favour with Cyprian, who experiences ‘a pleasure, which [he] seek[s] in vain amid the sententious and cold concetti of [Italian] poetry’ (Fatal revenge, 1: 110). For Cyprian, it is the attachment of ‘appropriate features of scenery and character’ that is appealing not only in ‘Bruno-Lin’ but in art and literature in general (Fatal revenge, 1: 114). Cyprian’s admiration thus directs attention to Ireland both as the home of art compliant with the imitation of nature, and as a nation, though ‘rude’, ‘bold’, and ‘warlike’, deserving consideration as the locus of an atmosphere unadulterated by artifice (Fatal revenge, 1: 96). As a result, Ireland becomes a sort of Edenic natural paradise, possessing the power, it is suggested, to recall individuals ‘from a vitiated sensibility of pleasure’ to a ‘pure and innocent’ enjoyment of domestic life (Fatal revenge, 1: 114). Through Cyprian, Ippolito comes to prefer the ‘rude’ scenery of (Irish) nature over the polished finery of modern society. Yet, his personal conversion is, like that in The children of the abbey, The wild Irish girl and other national tales, including Edgeworth’s Ennui and The absentee, continuously haunted and undermined by the ghosts of the past. These ghosts consist not only in those represented by Orazio and his mysterious spectral appearances to both Ippolito and Annibal but also in what might be called spectro-textual references to Ireland’s violent past. ‘The Ballad of Bruno-Lin’ itself is arguably an example of Ireland’s ghostly possession of Maturin’s text. Functioning in much the same way as the embedded texts in Owenson’s later fiction do – as a method of highlighting the overlap of temporal and geographical zones48 – Maturin’s ballad inserts early nineteenth-century Ireland directly into his novel about seventeenth-century Italy. So long as to completely subsume the prose narrative for thirteen pages, this Irish ballad ‘infold[s]’

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Ireland into its ‘“infolding” . . . of genres and discourses’.49 The result is a ghostly reminder of Ireland that emerges not just in the ballad itself but also in Maturin’s repeated textual and paratextual references to Ireland. Maturin’s setting, for example, although apparently far removed from Ireland, fundamentally unites the novel with early nineteenth-century Ireland. As Kilfeather maintains, the novel’s opening sequence in the 1697 siege of Barcelona in the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) recalls the Siege of Derry in 1689 and the subsequent Battle of the Boyne (1690) in which James II ultimately was defeated by William of Orange and Protestant hegemony confirmed in Ireland.50 ‘Strangely enough, then,’ as Hansen contends, ‘the text’s “domestic calamity” is temporally linked to the Battle of the Boyne and the Williamite confiscations in Ireland’. Moreover, Hansen suggests, accepting this era in Irish history, along with Roy Foster, as ‘the formal beginning of the modern Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class’, we are prompted to understand Maturin’s fictional narrative in relation to the ‘foundations of the modern history of colonialism in Ireland, to the penal era that preceded the Act of Union by more than a century, and to one of the instantiating moments of Anglo-Irish identity’.51 Maturin’s coded commentary on the Irish colonial situation receives further emphasis in his description of Ippolito and Annibal as, essentially, Wild Geese – that is, members of the Irish Jacobite forces who travelled to the Continent after the conclusion of the Jacobite–Williamite Wars in 1691 to assume military roles in various European armies. These soldiers were instrumental in Louis XIV’s ongoing actions during the Nine Years’ War, of which the Jacobite–Williamite Wars from 1689 to 1691 formed a part, against the so-called Grand Alliance including England, Holland, and Spain. Maturin’s reference to the 1697 Siege of Barcelona, therefore, not only dramatically recalls the history of seventeenthcentury Irish and European conflict, it also positions Ippolito and Annibal as, like the Wild Geese, exiles fighting for the French army: At the siege of Barcelona by the French, in the year 1697, two young officers entered into the service at its most hot and critical period. Their appearance excited some surprise and perplexity. Their melancholy was Spanish, their accent Italian, their names and habits French. (Fatal revenge, 1: ix)

Featuring a Catholic army attacking what was, by way of the Grand Alliance, a British, Protestant stronghold, the Siege of Barcelona arguably comes to represent, for Maturin, a repetition of the Siege of Derry and the conclusion to the Jacobite–Williamite Wars in Ireland. By conjuring for his reader this Irish conflict, therefore, Maturin both inserts Ireland vividly into the text, much as he does by emphasising his Irish identity in the preface and interrupting his narrative with an Irish ballad, and draws attention to continued Anglo-Irish fear of a recurrence of the past.

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In particular, Maturin’s anxious referencing of the Siege of Derry underlines sustained Anglo-Irish fear throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a repetition of Catholic violence akin to the 1641 or 1798 rebellions. Like many Irish Anglicans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Maturin clearly understood the potential for recurrent sectarian violence, viewing the 1798 rebellion as a repetition of the 1641 Rebellion and the violence of the Jacobite–Williamite Wars of the 1680s and 90s. Having lived through and personally witnessed the 1798 rebellion, Maturin cannot help but write into his novel his understanding of the possibility of persistent Irish Catholic violence. His disquiet on this account was no doubt supported by contemporary historiography of 1798, which was, as a whole, haunted by the memory of previous ‘popish plots’. Moreover, regular publication of Sir John Temple’s History of the Irish rebellion (1646) after 1798 highlighted ‘[t]he perception of Irish history as a recurring cycle of rebellion and repression’, one that ‘resulted in a culture of fear on both sides of the sectarian divide’.52 It is this fear that fundamentally underwrites Ireland’s national literature in the early nineteenth century. As Jim Shanahan persuasively maintains, although the Act of Union ‘is generally seen as providing the impulse for the development of the “national tale” . . . it was not so much the act of union, but the perceived horrors of the 1798 rebellion, that immediately captured the imagination, and provided the subtext for the national tale’.53 Shanahan further points out that ‘[t]he 1798 rebellion was the single most popular historical topic in Irish fiction of the nineteenth century. Its unresolved and contentious nature made it a metaphor for the unresolved and contentious nature of Irish history itself.’54 Yet, at the same time that Maturin reveals a typically Anglo-Irish fear of repeated Catholic rebellion in Fatal revenge, he also manipulates the geographical distance of his setting in order to suggest a contradictory fear possessing the collective mindset of the Anglo-Irish population. Traditionally, the Gothic novel’s use of such geographical displacement reinforced the fundamental differences between Self (Britain) and Other (Catholic Europe). In this scenario, the desecrated Continental family home served as evidence of British superiority and thus functioned as an important tool in the creation and maintenance of an idealised vision of an uncontaminated, morally sound, and inherently rational British family-politic. For late eighteenth-century Britons, as Darryl Jones observes, the Gothic novel played a pivotal role in the construction of a specifically Protestant British national identity.55 Its exaggerated caricaturing of the Catholic Other encouraged its Protestant readers in the widely held belief throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Britons ‘were in God’s special care’ and were, like the Israelites before them, a ‘chosen’ people.56 More than that, the Gothic novel helped to establish a central antithesis between ‘the European Other’ – ‘Catholic, superstitious, barbarous, irrational, chaotic, rooted in the past’ – and

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the British reader – ‘Protestant, rational, ordered, stable and modern’. This, in turn, fostered an image of Britain as the seat of rationality and realism in comparison to ‘the domain of fantastic unreality’ that was Continental Europe.57 In terms of Maturin’s references to the Jacobite–Williamite Wars, Fatal revenge emphasises the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century recognition that the absolutism of Catholicism was never ‘safely’ confined to Continental Europe. Instead, its threat was identified within Britain itself, in the native Catholic population of Ireland. Within this Celtic periphery, the construction of a Protestant British identity struggled not only against the Catholic Other located safely outside national boundaries, but also the Catholic Other that proved dishearteningly rooted in British political territory. As a result, Anglo-Irish identity relied heavily on a model of Anglican ‘chosenness’, which, in turn, depended primarily on a distinction between the Protestant Self and the Catholic Other, much like the one in the British mainland. Just as the Gothic novel acted as an expression of the fear of the Catholic, Continental Other that loomed large in the British imagination, therefore, it also served as a vehicle for the anti-Catholic sentiments of Anglican Ireland. The anti-Catholicism evident in Fatal revenge consciously continues what Killeen refers to as an Irish ‘pre-Gothic aesthetic’ arguably discernible in works as diverse as Temple’s Irish rebellion, Jonathan Swift’s A modest proposal (1729), and the elegiac Graveyard poetry of the 1740s.58 These early stirrings of the Gothic imagination in Ireland evocatively reveal the ways in which the Gothic mode provided, as Killeen maintains, ‘the means by which late eighteenth-century Irish Anglicanism expresse[d] itself’.59 As discussed above, Maturin makes important paratextual references to Ireland in Fatal revenge in order to effect a convergence of threatening identities – Continental Catholic and native Irish. Yet, at the same time, Maturin strategically employs his tools of differentiation towards a separate but related end – the articulation of Anglo-Irish difference from, and dissatisfaction with, the English. Suggesting the inherent ambiguity of Anglo-Irish identity in the eighteenth century, Ian McBride points out the way in which the Protestant community in Ireland continually defined itself as ‘Irish’, ‘English’, or ‘British’ according to social, political, and cultural situations.60 Even when a term was chosen, it remained open to ongoing negotiation, underlining the frequent merging of apparently distinct categories.61 Thus, for instance, despite the atrocities of the 1641 rebellion and the late eighteenth-century Jacobite cause, the Anglo-Irish population adopted the term ‘Irish’ throughout the eighteenth century.62 This was, in Nicholas Canny’s arguments, at least partially a method of asserting Anglo-Irish attachment to Ireland as well as symbolically protesting against what the Anglo-Irish community interpreted as British hostility to its concerns. Although Irish Anglicans temporarily renounced the ‘Irish’ label in

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the aftermath of the 1641 rebellion, they nevertheless felt dissatisfied with the ‘British’ label, given their understanding of the British government’s inexcusable laxity in effectively resolving the crisis to the benefit of the Anglo-Irish population.63 Feeling themselves deserted and undermined by British authorities, Irish Anglicans embraced ‘Irishness’ rather than ‘Britishness’ as a symbolic gesture, and would continue to do so despite the Jacobite–Williamite Wars that closed the seventeenth century. As with 1641, in fact, the Jacobite–Williamite Wars highlighted Anglo-Irish disillusionment with the British government. The unsatisfactory Treaty of Limerick that followed the Battle of the Boyne was considered by many Irish Anglicans as much too lenient on the rebellious Catholic population. Although Irish Catholics ultimately gained very little from the settlement, the Anglo-Irish community found the treaty’s generous terms emblematic of British betrayal of the Anglican interest in Ireland.64 Dissatisfaction with the solutions to both the 1641 rebellion and the Jacobite– Williamite Wars forcefully underlined the politically complex relationship between the Anglo-Irish, their Catholic brethren, and the British government. Never completely happy with England, the Irish Anglicans were, nevertheless, continuously frightened and appalled by the Irish Catholic majority. Maturin emphasises the essential conflict of loyalty inherent to Anglo-Irish identity in the early nineteenth century. As he does so, however, he also reveals the scars marring the Anglo-Irish body and mind. Like much of the fiction that was published in the first half of the nineteenth century, Fatal revenge voices what Kilfeather identifies as a central component of the Anglo-Irish psyche – ‘survivor guilt’; that is, ‘a form of trauma experienced by people who have escaped life-threatening situations and whose experience of the existence of their consciousness in time is fractured by repeated intrusive memories of the time of danger, memories in which visual images of horror predominate’.65 Wounded and raw, both physically and mentally, early nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish writers like Maturin find themselves compelled to speak of the past precisely because it always intrudes itself upon their memory. This past and its ghosts are their Derridean inheritance. As heirs to the trauma of history, Maturin and his contemporaries are forced ‘to bear witness’ to it. Attesting to this pressing need to speak of the past, as demanded by its ghosts, Maturin begins Fatal revenge with an account of the deaths of Ippolito and Annibal. Having fought valiantly with ‘a kind of careless and desperate courage’, the two brothers are killed in the final French attack on Barcelona. Their comrades insist that they be taken from the rubble and, when the brothers are drawn ‘[w]ith difficulty’ from the city’s ruins, they all turn in unison to the Italian commanding officer who had betrayed signs of prior knowledge of the mysterious pair (Fatal revenge, 1: xii). His narration constitutes the novel’s narrative proper, confirming

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Derrida’s supposition that a spectre always ‘begins by coming back’.66 Handed the bleeding bodies of Ippolito and Annibal, the Italian officer must tell their story, just as Maturin and his contemporaries, as witnesses to and inheritors of the violence of the past, must tell the stories of its dead.

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Notes 1 Charles Robert Maturin, The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807), 3: 492–3. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 2 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 141; Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 101. 3 Ann Wierda Rowland, ‘Romantic poetry and the Romantic novel’, in James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (eds), The Cambridge companion to British Romantic poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 119. Rowland’s term is useful in reassessing the generic distinctions upon which twenty-first-century criticism of Romantic literature is so often based. At the same time, however, it is important to recognise here that the novel, from its outset, was what might be termed a ‘lawless’ genre, one that often blended prose and poetry, and which, in its use of interpolated narratives, frequently mixed sub-genres. 4 Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, p. 57. 5 Charles Robert Maturin, Women; or pour et contre, introd. Robert Lee Wolff, 3 vols (1818; New York: Garland, 1979), 1: iii. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 6 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (1798; 2nd ed.; London: Routledge, 1991), p. 249. 7 Scott, Rev. of Fatal revenge, p. 342. 8 Ibid., p. 341. 9 Christina Morin, ‘Charles Robert Maturin (1780–1824)’, in Fred Burwick, Nancy Goslee, and Diane Hoeveler (eds), Blackwell encyclopedia of Romanticism (London: Blackwell: forthcoming, 2011). 10 Chloe Chard, ‘Introduction’, in Ann Radcliffe, The romance of the forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xix. 11 Ibid., p. xxii. 12 Ibid., p. xxiii. 13 Bradford K. Mudge, ‘The man with two brains: Gothic novels, popular culture, literary history’, PMLA, 107 (1992), 93. 14 For a compelling discussion of Maturin’s anxiety over his place within a literary culture dominated by women and his ensuing tactic of dismissing and rejecting the works of female contemporaries, especially in The wild Irish boy, see Jacqueline Pearson, ‘Masculinizing the novel: women writers and intertextuality in Charles Robert Maturin’s The wild Irish boy’, Studies in Romanticism, 36.4 (1997), 635–50. 15 Rowland, ‘Romantic poetry and the Romantic novel’, p. 118.

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16 Ibid., p. 119. 17 Ioan Williams, Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: a documentary record (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 2; quoted in Rowland, ‘Romantic poetry and the Romantic novel’, p. 120. 18 Gary Kelly, English fiction of the Romantic period 1789–1830 (London: Longman, 1989), p. 54. 19 By way of comparison, only two of the thirty epigraphs refer to female texts, and both references are to poems. 20 Kelly, English fiction of the Romantic period, p. 54. 21 Mary A. Favret, ‘Telling tales about genre: poetry in the Romantic novel’, Studies in the novel, 26.3 (1994), 283. 22 Ibid., p. 282. 23 Ibid., pp. 291, 294. 24 Ibid., p. 294. 25 Morin, ‘Charles Robert Maturin’. 26 Favret, ‘Telling tales about genre’, p. 289. 27 Ibid., p. 288. 28 William Shakespeare, Twelfth night, or what you will, in Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (eds), The complete works of William Shakespeare, introd. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 805; act 5, scene 1, ll. 381–4. 29 Jim Hansen, ‘The wrong marriage: Maturin and the double-logic of masculinity in the Unionist Gothic’, Studies in Romanticism, 47.3 (2008), 361. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Robert Miles, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’, in David Punter (ed.), A companion to the Gothic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 43. 33 Michael Gamer, ‘Gothic fictions and Romantic writing in Britain’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Gothic fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 86. 34 Against this argument, Robert Miles suggests that a useful distinction between the two forms – ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic – is the way in which they interact with gender. ‘The writers of the female Gothic’, he argues, ‘were primarily absorbed in the struggle for sexual and political rights .  .  . whereas the male Gothic aimed to disrupt the legitimacy of normative gender patterns’. In this way, they could be linked, respectively, to feminism and queer theory, an idea that receives partial support from the homosexuality – overt or covert – of major male Gothicists, including Horace Walpole, William Beckford, and Matthew Lewis; see Miles, ‘Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’, p. 45. Although there has been some critical speculation on Maturin’s own sexual orientation, the fact that his writing combines elements of both ‘male’ and ‘female’ Gothic undermines the usefulness of Miles’s arguments. 35 Gamer, ‘Gothic fictions and Romantic writing’, p. 93. 36 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: studies in Irish culture (London: Verso, 1995), p. 128.

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37 38 39 40 41

Ibid. Hansen, ‘The wrong marriage’, p. 356. Ibid. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, p. 130. Mary Jean Corbett, ‘Allegories of prescription: engendering Union in The wild Irish girl’, Eighteenth-century life, 22.3 (1998), 102. Matthews-Kane notes the suggestion of incest in the courting of Glorvina by both father and son, a situation which, she rightly argues, echoes that in The castle of Otranto (1764). Matthews-Kane also points out the way in which both Horatio and the Earl of M–, although ostensibly motivated by innocent feelings of love and duty, nevertheless are centrally concerned with money, power, and territory, thus undermining Glorvina’s ability to consent freely to marriage; see Matthews-Kane, ‘Gothic excess and political anxiety’, pp. 16–17. Fogarty, ‘Imperfect concord’, p. 119. Burgess, ‘Violent translations’, p. 40. Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: horror and the Irish Anglican imagination in the long eighteenth century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), p. 17. Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English writing, 1790–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 58. Morin, ‘“Gothic” and “national”’, p. 181. Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 88. Ibid., p. 87. See above, p. 34. Other terms also exist to refer to the Nine Years’ War: War of the Grand Alliance, the War of the League of Augsburg, and King William’s War, among others. John Childs, however, insists that the term ‘Nine Years’ War’ is ‘[t]he only neutral and generally satisfactory’ one, given the political and ideological implications often driving the adoption of other terms; see John Childs, The Nine Years’ War and the British army, 1688–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 5. Hansen, ‘The wrong marriage’, p. 361. See also R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600– 1972 (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 138–63. Jim Shanahan, ‘Fearing to speak: fear and the 1798 Rebellion in the nineteenth century’, in Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy (eds), Fear: essays on the meaning and experience of fear (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), p. 35. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid. Darryl Jones, Horror: a thematic history in fiction and film (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 8. Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 28, 29. Jones, Horror, p. 9. For the ways in which Swift’s A modest proposal prefigures the Gothic novel, see Killeen, Gothic Ireland, chapter 3. On Graveyard poetry and its anticipation of the Gothic novel’s obsession with death and decay, see Killeen, Gothic Ireland, pp. 163–7,

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and David Punter, The literature of terror, 2 vols (2nd ed.; London: Longman, 1996), 1: 29–40. Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 13. Ian McBride, ‘“The common name of Irishman”: Protestantism and patriotism in eighteenth-century Ireland’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and national identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 245. Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 66. Nicholas Canny, ‘Identity formation in Ireland: the emergence of the Anglo-Irish’, in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial identity in the Atlantic world, 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 201. Ibid., pp. 198–201. See J. G. Simms, Jacobite Ireland, 1685–1691 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 257. On the Jacobite–Williamite Wars and the Treaty of Limerick, see also David Dickson, New foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (2nd ed.; Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), and Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite cause, 1685–1766 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, p. 60. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 11.

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Conjuring Glorvina: The wild Irish boy and the national tale

‘Murderous, bruising origin[s]’: Maturin’s response to Owenson Maturin’s second novel, The wild Irish boy (1808), is, like Fatal revenge before it, very much aware of its ghostly inheritance. Its title immediately recalls that of Owenson’s The wild Irish girl, lending credence to the conventional understanding of The wild Irish boy as yet another simplistic, financially driven imitation. Its derivative title, as well as its central female character’s late appearance as ‘the wild Irish girl’ herself, are frequently seen as proof of ‘Maturin’s attempt to benefit from Miss Owenson’s great success’.1 Despite these obvious reminders of Owenson’s earlier novel, however, Maturin’s preface very quickly dispels readerly expectations of a national tale à la Owenson. First explaining that the novel ‘from its title purports to give some account of a country little known’, Maturin then proceeds to excuse himself for his ensuing lack of engagement with Ireland: ‘I lament I have not had time to say more of it; my heart was full of it, but I was compelled by the laws of this mode of composition to consult the pleasure of my readers, not my own.’2 Writing ‘with an hope of being read’, Maturin asserts that he was obliged to cater to the public demand for illustrations of fashionable high society (Wild Irish boy, 1: x). In so doing, Maturin claims, he ‘sacrifice[d] his inclination and habits’, while also leaving Ireland largely still ‘a country little known’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: xi). Correspondingly, as Joep Leerssen contends, ‘[d]espite its Morgan-derived title, the book is not at all “Wild Irish”’. Instead, with a majority of the action located within the hero’s upper-class social milieu, Leerssen maintains, ‘the only shadow of Gaelic Ireland is vested in . . . minor characters’ who remain marginal in and marginalised by the text.3 Similarly, Jacqueline Pearson claims that, while The wild Irish boy may sometimes recall The wild Irish girl, it cannot be classified as an ‘Irish’ novel in the same way that Owenson’s national tale can: Maturin’s treatment of Ireland and Irish issues simply remains too minimal to qualify the novel as a national one like The wild Irish girl, with its central focus on English

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conceptions of Ireland.4 The reason for this lack of engagement with Ireland, Pearson asserts, rests in the fact that Maturin was less concerned with refuting common English stereotypes of the Irish than he was with reclaiming the novel as a male form and novel-writing as a legitimate male activity. Accordingly, the heavy intertextuality of Maturin’s novel, including its references to Owenson and The wild Irish girl, participate in a specific act of masculinisation undertaken by a ‘purposeful borrowing from, resistance to, and remaking of, female-authored models’.5 In other words, referring to, but also denigrating the example set by The wild Irish girl, just as Scott was later to do in the introductory chapter of Waverley, Maturin declares his desire to reassert a masculine hegemony over a literary form that had become increasingly defined as a female one over the course of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. As he does so, however, Maturin also seeks to reveal the ghosts haunting Ireland and Irish literary production. Through its frequent recourse to Gothic imagery and themes, The wild Irish boy poignantly highlights its Gothic literary ancestry. At the same time, it attests to the continued spectral presence of the past in contemporary Irish society. As is the case with Fatal revenge, frequent, seemingly inconsequential references to Ireland ensure a vital infiltration of Irish social issues and the Gothic mode, transforming Maturin’s novel into a clear instance of what Kilfeather refers to as the ‘literature of atrocity’ produced in Ireland in the decades after the 1798 rebellion.6 In its juxtaposition of Ireland with the bloody supernaturalism of the Gothic, The wild Irish boy exposes its author’s desire ‘to come to terms with things that had been seen and that could be neither fully remembered nor completely forgotten within the various genres available for narrating experience’.7 Once again, therefore, Maturin produces a conglomerate novel – an intriguing mixture of society novel, national tale, Gothic novel, and early stirrings of both the Silver Fork novel and the roman à clef – that attests to and underlines the fractured nature of contemporary Irish fiction and society. While, however, The wild Irish boy speaks to and of the ghosts of Irish history and its literary past,8 it also issues a warning against the power such spectral influences can exert. In particular, it specifically presents images such as Owenson’s Glorvina as false representations of Ireland and the Irish people and, in so doing, constructs them as a destructive Gespenst form of Derrida’s spectre. Although created with the admirable intent of countering negative English stereotypes of the Irish, they have the power, Maturin suggests repeatedly, to undermine contemporary negotiations of Irish identity. The wild Irish boy therefore responds to The wild Irish girl by conjuring it in two different senses. On the one hand, it calls up or evokes the spirit of Owenson’s text while, on the other hand, emphasising the need to – and, indeed, attempting, however abortively, to – exorcise that

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same spirit.9 Maturin’s novel thus both conjures The wild Irish girl and seeks to conjure it away. Accordingly, this chapter examines Maturin’s novel as something more than a mere ‘opportunistic imitation’ of Owenson.10 Instead, it contends that Maturin remained constantly aware of his indebtedness to Owenson’s novel throughout the composition of his own. Rather than simply replicate it, however, he attempts to speak for its ghost(s), thereby putting it and them to rest. In this effort, however, Maturin remains unsuccessful, suggesting, along with Derrida, that the ‘murderous, bruising origin[s]’ of any piece of work, of any historical period, are always with us, forever demanding that we come to terms with them.11 (Un)veiling the past: inviting and exorcising history in The wild Irish boy The wild Irish boy centres on a hapless young Anglo-Irish man named Ormsby Bethel. Abandoned in France by his parents, Ormsby moves from one foster home to another, from France to London to Cumberland, receiving, along the way, an irregular education that transforms him into ‘an incurable visionary’ consumed by ‘romantic intoxication’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 101). Just as he is becoming engrossed in the Ossian myths and fantasising about personally saving ‘a people that seemed to stretch out its helpless hands, like the infant Moses from the ark, and promise its preserver to bless and dignify the species’, Ormsby is summoned to Ireland by his father, Lionel Bethel, to matriculate at Trinity College, ‘acquire the habits of a country resident, and conciliate the favour of [his] uncle, on whom much depended’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 103, 131). Attesting to the excessive sensibility provided by an early ‘desultory’ course of ‘idle reading’ akin to that of Edward Waverley in Scott’s Waverley (Waverley, pp. 14, 15), however, Ormsby is less concerned with securing his inheritance than he is with courting one of his father’s elegant neighbours, Lady Montrevor. The matriarch of an English family banished to its Connaught estate and the general ‘horrors of Ireland’ after a scandal involving Lord Montrevor’s political manoeuvres (Wild Irish boy, 2: 322), Lady Montrevor captivates young Ormsby, but the impossibility of a relationship with her drives him to sickness and despair. Upon the advice of his friend and mentor, Mr Corbett, Ormsby travels to Dublin in an attempt to overcome his inappropriate infatuation but there becomes enmeshed in a course of debauchery completely at odds with his reformist intention. Shortly thereafter, he falls ill and, still suffering from an overly sensible nature, wishes for death. Before he can succumb to his maladies, however, Ormsby receives word that his uncle, the Chieftain de Lacy, has been imprisoned for his debt. Guilt-stricken, Ormsby rouses himself from his sickbed and returns to Connaught in order to resolve

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the situation but again falls victim to Lady Montrevor’s enthralment, despite being married, at his uncle’s insistence, to her youngest daughter, Athanasia Montolieu. When the Montrevor family returns to London, Ormsby follows them only once more to immerse himself dangerously in the vices of fashionable city life. Preyed upon by various manipulative characters scheming to ruin him financially and socially, Ormsby sinks into debt and is imprisoned for his supposed illicit affair with Lady Montrevor. Eventually, the allegations are proved false, and Ormsby is released from prison and subsequently reunited with his real father, not Lionel Bethel as he had believed, but Bethel’s brother, an unnamed man who, until this point, has been known only as a silent, almost supernatural stranger haunting both Ormsby and Lady Montrevor. The death of Lord Montrevor and the discovery that Lady Montrevor and Ormsby’s real father were former lovers releases Ormsby from his unnatural infatuation with the older woman and enables him to commit himself fully to his young wife and their newborn child. With this conclusion, Maturin’s novel ends with an apparently optimistic vision of an idealised family unit derived from Burke’s Reflections on the revolution in France (1790), in which the model body-politic is likened to the archetypal, hierarchical family.12 As such, it allegorically gestures towards a national resolution mirroring its linking of a hero of native Irish descent and an English heroine, and their promise to renounce absenteeism, ‘return to Ireland’, and ‘once more [inhabit] the castle of [Ormsby’s] ancestors’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 405). In this way, despite the alterations it makes to the basic narrative plot Owenson established in The wild Irish girl, including switching the genders of the English and Irish characters and sending its hero on an educational journey from the centre to the peripheries and back again, The wild Irish boy ostensibly conforms to the apparently positive and confident allegoric nature of the national tale. Yet, the constant intrusion of the Gothic mode into the novel undermines such optimism and highlights a darker pessimism surrounding the future of Anglo-Irish relations. From the beginning of the novel, in fact, the Gothic mode is deployed to interrupt and potentially derail romance’s constitutive fable of identity,13 a movement that simultaneously undermines a peaceful domestic settlement intended to mirror that of the Irish nation. Conventionally, the national tale has been understood as a literary form that not only ‘privileg[es] [the] nation as the locus of individual identity’ but equates the two, so that the discovery and establishment of personal identity becomes analogous to the settlement of national confusion caused by the Act of Union.14 In this context, Ormsby Bethel’s growth in the novel should involve a re-education whereby his excessive sensibility – his ‘folly’ and ‘madness’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 345) – gives way to a rationality ultimately fitting him for domestic life and the proper management of his west-Ireland estate. And

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ostensibly it does: from neglected orphan, ignorant of his family history, Ormsby becomes reunited son, contented husband, and happy father. Moreover, from a nomadic existence in France, London, and Dublin, Ormsby resumes his rightful place in his ancestral castle surrounded by his family and friends. ‘Recovering’ his identity, therefore, Ormsby becomes, for all intents and purposes, ‘a domestic . . . a happy man’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 181). As such, the novel suggests, he is finally able to contribute meaningfully to his country’s wellbeing. At the same time, however, the continued and continuous interruption of the novel by various Gothic moments highlights an ongoing sense of fragmentation – both personal and national. From the very beginning of the novel, in fact, Ireland is presented as a place of curious enchantment. The letters of Elmaide St Clair that begin the narrative constantly couch their descriptions of the country and of Ormsby in terms of magic and bewitchment. Elmaide thus describes Ormsby as casting a spell on her and, indeed, on the country as a whole: ‘There was a spell in the streets’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 29). She further speaks of Ormsby as unearthly: ‘I wish he would be either angel or human, and I might then have peace. But this mixture of loveliness and depravity, this beauty and brightness of a fallen angel . . .’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 34). Immersed in this fairy land and infatuated with a supernatural being, Elmaide feels herself divorced from reality: ‘All life appears to me a dream’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 40). Ormsby’s own identification of himself as ‘an incurable visionary’ underlines Elmaide’s conception of him and depicts him as, above all else, otherworldly and disconnected from everyday life and concerns. The novel’s early sense of unreality continues with Ormsby’s introduction to the Irish countryside upon his return to Ireland. Taken on a tour by his cousin, Deloraine, Ormsby finds himself drawn to ‘the haunted house’ that sits alongside the various ‘great houses’ of the countryside (Wild Irish boy, 1: 177, 176). Ormsby later meets an odd stranger ‘wrapt in a dark cloak [. . . whose] face was as pale as that of a corse, and [whose] two dark eyes, which though fixed on me, did not seem to see me, gave an expression to his face that was almost supernatural’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 212). Still later, Ormsby is forced to take refuge from a violent storm in the haunted house and, while he waits for the weather to improve, witnesses the stranger entering the house and fleeing upstairs. Within moments, Ormsby is frightened by the groans coming from the room above and escapes into the night when ‘drops of blood, fresh and warm’ begin falling on to his hands from the ceiling above (Wild Irish boy, 1: 214). A bizarre, nightmarish scene that neither Ormsby nor the stranger (later revealed as his real father) ever refers to again, the episode poignantly recalls the warnings Ormsby is given about his tendency for long, rambling walks in the countryside: ‘The people with whom I live, tell me, I must be very courageous to venture into places so

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wild, and disturbed so lately’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 62). Such comments relate not to the supernatural fear inspired by Ormsby’s experience but to the then recent violence of the 1798 rebellion and Emmet’s 1803 uprising. While the former is not mentioned specifically in the text, indications of the time period, including Ormsby’s birth in France at the height of the French Revolution, his return to Ireland at the age of sixteen, and frequent references to the Napoleonic war as well as the campaign to repeal Anglo-Irish Union, suggest that these are events Ormsby’s friends and family have experienced first-hand. Not only that but such allusions position the action of the main narrative in Maturin’s present-day Ireland, a temporal setting that forges a clear connection between the bloodshed that Ormsby witnesses and that of the recent bloody conflicts disrupting Ireland and, indeed, Europe. Ormsby attempts to run from and forget the horrific sight of blood and gore in the haunted house, but he continues to be reminded of it every time the mysterious stranger appears to him. Much like Melmoth after him, Ormsby’s father seems to possess a supernatural foresight as well as an amazing ability to cross normal temporal and geographical boundaries at will. Determined to watch after Ormsby and save him from himself if need be, the stranger secretly follows his son, mysteriously appearing at one point to urge Ormsby to prevent murder. Ormsby rushes to his uncle’s castle to find ‘a fiend’ attempting to strangle the chieftain (Wild Irish boy, 2: 145). Later, the stranger appears to Ormsby and Lady Montrevor just as the former is about to be ruined by Lady Delphina Orberry and her husband in London. Emerging from the crowds at an elite social gathering, the stranger causes a Gothic disruption in which his apparent victim – Lady Montrevor – ‘sink[s] on the steps’ before he himself mysteriously ‘disappear[s]’, leading ‘the German readers [to declare] she must have seen a spectre’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 234, 235). Finally, the stranger materialises at a ball near the end of the novel dressed ‘in the ancient Irish habit’ – an attire in keeping with Lady Montrevor’s costume of ‘Glorvina, in the Wild Irish Girl’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 355–6). Shortly thereafter, the stranger’s true identity as Ormsby’s father and rightful heir to the de Lacy estates is revealed. Much like the rationalised Gothic of Ann Radcliffe’s fiction, this revelation seems to explain away the novel’s apparently supernatural events. Yet, it does nothing to dispel the recurrent memory of the past physically represented by the stranger throughout the narrative. Nor does it mention the bloodshed with which the stranger has been associated. The novel’s evident urge mentally to erase these past events, despite the reader’s clear recall of them, suggests the personal and national desire, but simultaneous inability, to forget the past, a conflicted psychological state that Kilfeather observes animating the confessional and autobiographical works of contemporaries such as Jane Barber, Jane

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Adams, Dinah Goff, Elizabeth Richards, and Edgeworth. Despite attempts ‘perhaps unwittingly, to follow Burke’s Reflections into celebrating a calcification of family affections and normative family values’, these writers’ continual return to ‘tropes of rape’, violence, and bloodshed suggest their ongoing traumatic memory of the past. Similarly, while the writers of the national tale attempt ‘[to project] onto the union’ the same ‘reverence for family’ that emerges in contemporary non-fiction, they are also constantly aware of the past and its disruption of this ideal.15 The traumatic memory of the past explains why Ormsby’s return to Ireland, like the marriages in The wild Irish girl and The absentee, is only ever projected, not completed. The deferment of this conclusion – that which is presented as necessary for Ormsby’s transformation from society man driven mad by vice to family man and responsible landowner – highlights Maturin’s understanding of the implausibility of Ireland’s restorative nature. As Kilfeather points out, ‘One of the propositions in Irish gothic fiction after 1798 was that it was becoming impossible to find the asylum as pastoral retreat within Ireland’.16 Still fragmented and disrupted by rebellion and the threat of recurrent violence, Ireland can promise nothing; even imagining it as an idyll is impossible. Added to the physical and emotional devastation of the rebellion is the subsequent social sea change effected by the Anglo-Irish Union. Shock and anguish over this degradation of the Irish country are evident in early nineteenth-century fictional works. Edgeworth’s The absentee, for instance, speaks of post-Union Ireland as characterised above all by an affronting social chaos: Immediately, in Dublin, commerce rose into the vacated seats of rank; wealth rose into the place of birth. New faces and new equipages appeared: people, who had never been heard of before, started into notice, pushed themselves forward, not scrupling to elbow their way even at the castle; and they were presented to my lord-lieutenant and to my lady-lieutenant.17

In response to this social disorder, ‘most of the nobility and many of the principal families among the Irish commoners, either hurried in high hopes to London, or retired disgusted and in despair to their houses in the country’ (Absentee, p. 83). Similarly, commenting upon the difference between Dublin in 1792 when the city was ‘in the zenith of its greatness’ and post-Union Dublin, the narrator of William Hamilton Maxwell’s O’Hara; or, 1798 (1825) mourns ‘the wonderful change’ that has come about; from the tremendous ‘splendour and display’ of ‘[t]he court of 1792’ – an obvious reference to the short-lived period of Irish parliamentary independence from 1792 to 1798, now frequently called Grattan’s Parliament – Dublin has been overtaken by the merchant middle classes, and all the lords, ladies, and MPs have been exiled to the countryside.18 If, however,

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they expected to find their new pastoral abodes unaffected by the drastic changes in Irish society, they were sorely disappointed, as suggested by Maxwell’s description of the destitution brought about by the ruin of the linen trade in the wake of Union. With the industry that once supported them gone, the rural Irish towns described in Maxwell’s novel are characterised by ‘ruined edifice[s]’, ‘filth, misery, and dilapidation’. The countryside as a whole is ‘bare and broken’, causing at least one character to weep ‘bitterly’.19 Fittingly, the recognition of Ireland’s descent into total confusion and its accompanying lack of natural havens in which to take refuge plays out in the fragmentation of the national tale’s fundamental premise of reconciliation. For her part, Katie Trumpener maintains that it is only the later national tale – from 1812 or 1814 onwards – that displays such disruption. With the transformation of the national tale into historical novel, Trumpener argues, the form becomes marked by the emergence of ‘a new literary schizophrenia’ characterised by a problematisation of the national tale’s essential equation of personal and cultural identity.20 This, in turn, results in the breakdown of the Burkean family-politic as well as a movement from the early national tale’s position of ‘celebratory nationalism’ to one of increasing alienation and estrangement from the idea of reconciliation.21 If, however, we consider the constant interruption of the Gothic into earlier examples of the national tale, we see clearly that the notion of reconciliation is always already troubled and ambiguous. I have pointed out already such Gothic moments in The wild Irish girl and The absentee, but it is worth reiterating here how and to what effect the Gothic mode emerges in these texts. In The wild Irish girl, as Bridget Matthews-Kane maintains, ‘heavy Gothic components’ appear at the beginning and end of the novel and work to counter its ostensible aim of reconciliation. ‘[F]raming the sentimental and traditional marriage plot’, these Gothic images and figures, including the ghost that haunts the castle’s halls, the castle itself, and the alien and foreign nature of Glorvina as Horatio first encounters her, provide the means by which Owenson ‘articulate[s] the troubled colonial status of Ireland in a style that masks the subversive nature of speaking such political truths’.22 Subtle in tone, the Gothic mode in The wild Irish girl, Matthews-Kane suggests, is implicitly veiled while, at the same time, it veils the marriage plot by enclosing it within its parameters. The notion of the veil is a particularly compelling one, for it finds its parallel in the veil that initially hides Glorvina from Horatio’s view, thereby averting his colonial gaze, and also the one that covers her face at her abortive marriage to the Earl. The former ‘confounds [Horatio’s] lurid glare’ and later appears in a frightful nightmare Horatio experiences after injuring himself in his quest to espy Glorvina’s ‘charms’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 47):23 ‘I dreamed that the Princess of Inismore approached my bed, drew aside the

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curtains, and raising her veil, discovered a face I had hitherto rather guessed at, than seen. Imagine my horror – it was the face, the head, of a Gorgon!’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 58). Picturing Glorvina as a man-eating monster, Horatio discloses his fear of the colonial Other, a fear that is later reversed when Glorvina’s marriage veil becomes her father’s shroud: ‘kissing his cheek, she threw her veil over his face, and putting her finger on her lip, as if to impose silence, softly exclaimed, “Hush! he does not suffer now!”’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 234). As Matthews-Kane maintains, ‘The transformation of the wedding veil to a funeral shroud demonstrates that while Glorvina can perhaps cast off her otherness in her marriage to the Anglo-Irish [hero], this simultaneously represents the death of her culture’.24 Similarly, the Prince’s violent reaction to the revelation of identities that precipitates his death underlines the overriding belief at the end of the novel that ‘the Gaelic Irish are the ones with the true cause for concern’.25 Sympathetic to the plight of the native Irish and a proponent of the repeal of Union, however, Owenson refuses to sanction the erasure of Irish identity. Instead, with Glorvina’s poignant resistance to her father’s death and her subsequent (proposed) marriage to Horatio, Owenson reasserts Glorvina’s native Irish affiliation: ‘[Glorvina’s] shriek, and its connotations with the Irish tradition of keening, reinforce her essential Irishness, and her accusation of murder links her father’s demise with the death of his ancestor in the Cromwellian wars’.26 With this reiteration of Irishness and its concomitant reminder and renewal of past colonial strife, Owenson emphasises ‘the inevitable reincarnation of the Irish past in the present and explains this entrenchment of history in the collective Irish memory’.27 Against Glorvina’s resistance, the Earl insists that they ‘drop the veil of oblivion over the past’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 241), but this veil and its allegorical suggestion of peaceful Anglo-Irish relations in the wake of Union had already been threatened extra-diegetically by Emmet’s 1803 Rebellion.28 Owenson further underlines this very real threat by pointedly shrouding the novel’s romantic conclusion – marriage between Glorvina and Horatio – in ambiguity. A similar uncertainty clouds the conclusion of Edgeworth’s later novel, The absentee. Throughout the narrative, the central female character, Grace Nugent, retains a certain indistinctness. Referred to solely as ‘Miss Nugent’ for the first fifteen pages of the novel, she remains a largely silent character, allegorically veiled from Lord Colambre’s view by the insidious misconstruction of her identity as his cousin and the product of a tainted woman. When, however, this ‘veil’ is removed and Grace’s real identity revealed, the memory of the past continues to cast a shadow over the narrative. After ‘faint[ing] dead’ upon hearing Lady Clonbrony’s revelation that she is, in fact, a heiress and should therefore begin ‘lov[ing] [Colambre] as fast as you please’, Grace feels herself ‘in a dream’ (Absentee, p. 256). Although she does not, like Glorvina, indulge in outright

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mourning for her wronged relative, she does clearly resent the false accusations that have indemnified both her mother and her in the eyes of the people she has hitherto regarded as friends and family. Fittingly, like Glorvina’s marriage to Horatio, Grace’s union with Colambre remains a matter of possibility rather than fact; the narrative proper concludes with ‘the reasonable expectation’ that Colambre will ‘[win] the whole heart of the woman he loved’ (Absentee, p. 260). Emphasising the essential ambiguity of this prospect, this conclusion is followed by a letter from the peasant, Larry Brady, to his brother in London wherein he relates a dream he had that ‘Miss Nugent . . . will sometime, and may be sooner than is expected, my lady viscountess Colambre’ (Absentee, p. 266).29 Recalling the dream that Horatio experiences in The wild Irish girl, Larry Brady’s dream threatens to transform unexpectedly into a nightmare, violently disrupted by the memories of the past. In this way, both novels highlight the fragmented nature of Irish society and identity, one that is strikingly manifested in Glorvina’s momentary madness after her father’s death. Trumpener maintains that such madness is characteristic of the later national tale, wherein the marriage plot becomes graphically distorted, resulting in ‘prolonged courtship complications, . . . marital crises, and even . . . national divorce’. The trauma of what Jim Hansen calls ‘[the] “wrong marriage” plot’ in turn causes mental instability and breakdown.30 So, for instance, in The Milesian chief, Armida Fitzalban experiences increasing bouts of mental incoherence as she attempts to deal with the reality of her love for Connal and his involvement with national rebellion. And, in Women; or pour et contre, the Continental heroine, Zaira Dalmatiani, descends into a state of madness brought about by the discovery that Eva Wentworth, the woman to whom her lover once had been betrothed, is actually her long-lost daughter. Similarly, in Melmoth the wanderer, Immalee experiences ‘many dreams . . . many – many wanderings’ as she awaits her sentence in the Inquisition prisons (Melmoth, p. 532). Pursued by the image, and, indeed, the mysterious presence, of her lover, the eponymous wanderer, Immalee can find no peace. Even her death and its promise of Paradise is marred by the troubling exclamation: ‘Will he be there!’ (Melmoth, p. 533). Far from remaining the remit of the post-1812 national tale, however, bouts of madness also significantly emerge in the earlier national tale. In Owenson’s The missionary: an Indian tale (1811), for instance, the Indian heroine, Luxima, finds her mind ‘wandering and unsettled’ as she awaits the death of her English missionary lover, Hilarion.31 Culturally alienated by her relationship with Hilarion, Luxima undergoes a process of identity fragmentation that translates directly into mental derangement and insanity.32 A similar moment occurs in The wild Irish girl. As she kneels beside the body of her father, Glorvina sings ‘in a voice scarcely human . . . a soul-rending air she had been accustomed to sing to her father from

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her earliest infancy’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 234). Although those around her weep with sorrow, she alone does not cry: ‘no eye save hers was dry’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 234). Suddenly, however, she ‘break[s] off her plaintive strain . . . dr[a]w[s] the veil from her father’s face’ and utters a ‘piercing shriek’ before shouting out ‘a loud convulsive laugh’ and ‘f[a]ll[ing] lifeless into the priest’s arms, who was the first who had the presence of mind to think of removing the still lovely maniac’ (Wild Irish girl, p. 234; my emphasis). Likewise, in Roche’s The children of the abbey, the Irish heroine, Amanda Fitzalan, gives way to hysterical laughter and ‘violent’ tears on her return to Castle Carberry, her new home as the wife of Lord Cherbury but also the earlier site of her father’s ignominious death.33 The frenzied responses of these early national heroines remain completely at odds with their apparent resignation to their roles of forgetting past dispossession and personal imputation. Literally driven mad by the return of the past, these characters attest to the breakdown of identity and reconciliation even at the inception of the national tale. Such personal and national fragmentation parallels that presented in one of the central literary influences for both Maturin and Owenson: Germaine de Staël’s Corinne; ou, l’Italie (1807). Ina Ferris points out that both authors would have recognised Corinne as a national tale and understood its eponymous heroine as a national one akin to Glorvina.34 The Italian nation that Corinne is said to embody is, in Ferris’s terms, ‘a zone of potentiality’.35 Historically, Italy at the start of the nineteenth century was not a unified nation but instead consisted of a multitude of separate and distinct states. Rather than presenting these units as fully unified, Corinne emphasises the fragmented nature of the nation in order to present it as a nation in forming, considering its possibilities. Such potentiality is represented metaphorically by Corinne herself. A professional improvisatrice, Corinne works as a ‘poetess, writer, and improvisor’, a public career that fundamentally relies on her ability to perform and assume myriad personae.36 Fittingly, at her first appearance in the novel, Corinne is dressed as ‘Domenichino’s Sibyl’ and, in this character, is viewed as ‘the image of our beautiful Italy’ (Corinne, pp. 23, 27). Epitomising an idealised Italy free from ‘the ignorance, the envy, the discord, and the indolence’ to which ‘fate has condemned’ all normal Italians, Corinne is both ‘an offshoot of the past’ and ‘a harbinger of the future’ (Corinne, p. 27). In other words, in her role as performer, Corinne metaphorically represents the fractured nature of the Italian nation as well as its potentiality. The ambiguity and amorphousness of Corinne’s identity is further emphasised in her transnational loyalties. ‘A heterogenous “mixture” of Englishness and Italianness’, Corinne can claim neither nationality as completely hers and, as such, ‘frustrates social fantasies that posit national identity as something homogenous and unified’.37 In this, Corinne becomes, as Esther Wohlgemut

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points out, what Slavoj Žižek has defined as a ‘social symptom’ – she highlights the gap between the social fantasy of unity and the reality of fragmentation characterising the modern nation.38 In her simultaneous nativeness and foreignness, Corinne becomes a threatening cosmopolitan heroine, ‘confound[ing] rather than confirm[ing] clear national demarcations’.39 Ferris contends that such inbetweenness is a fundamental feature of Owenson’s later national tales, where she focuses on an ambiguity of identity and gender in order to create and ‘[valorise] a femininity that not only knows itself to be compromised and estranged but makes such knowledge the condition of its national authority’. In these later national tales, Ferris further argues, the heroines are always performative, secretive, and disguised, thereby highlighting the amorphousness of their identities and by extension national identity, and constructing them as ‘interstitial heroine[s]’ possessing a fundamental ‘hyper-hybridity’. This then feeds into narrative structures, such as that of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys (1827), ‘marked by the shifts, tangles, and discontinuities that prompted one reviewer to describe [the novel] as a “splendid phantasmagoria”’.40 As with Trumpener’s arguments about an increasing awareness of the impossibility of reconciliation mirrored in the insanity of fictional characters, Ferris’s claims here miss the point that such ‘entanglements’ – of form, genre, gender, temporality, geography, and national loyalty – had already strikingly emerged in the early national tale.41 In fact, considering The wild Irish boy – a text, it bears repeating, published only two years after The wild Irish girl – we see that a general hyper-hybridity is present from the very start, evidenced first and foremost in Maturin’s narrative structure. Although it has neither the embedded texts of The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys nor the interpolated tales and narratives of Fatal revenge and Melmoth the wanderer, it does present a curious hyper-hybridity of form. Like The wild Irish girl, for instance, The wild Irish boy begins as an epistolary novel focused on an exchange between Elmaide St Clair and her aunt before abruptly switching to Ormsby’s first-person narrative. This, in turn, yields to Lady Montrevor’s autobiographical confessions, and all of these are interspersed with continual reminders of the Gothic mode as well as gestures towards the society novel Maturin initially promises in his preface.42 And, in perhaps the most striking piece of gossip in the novel – one that foreshadows the roman à clef first formalised by Lady Caroline Lamb’s scandalous and barely fictionalised account of Lord Byron and his social circle, Glenarvon (1816) – Maturin gives his hero a name that certainly would have recalled a specific individual for Owenson and many within the middle- to upper-class Anglo-Irish social circles in which she moved. Sir Charles Ormsby (1767–1818) was a leading barrister in Dublin who had also served in the short-lived Grattan’s Parliament. One of Owenson’s admitted admirers around the time of The wild Irish girl’s publication, he was

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‘a widower, deeply in debt, and a good deal older than Sydney’, and, ‘if there was no actual engagement, there was certainly an “understanding” between the pair’.43 Maturin almost certainly knew him, as Ormsby’s first wife was Henrietta Maturin’s sister,44 and though Maturin’s Ormsby is a young man infatuated with an older woman – the reverse of the actual situation – he is, like the real-life Ormsby, ‘always in debt and a bit raffish’.45 Owenson eventually parted ways with Ormsby, later marrying Sir Charles Morgan in 1812, but Maturin’s snide reference to her one-time lover draws attention to the scandal in Owenson’s life. As George Paston pointed out, Owenson’s not-strictly-proper behaviour provided ‘plenty of occasion for scandal’; she was once said to attend a Viceregal ball, for instance, ‘in a dress, the bodice of which was trimmed with the portraits of her rejected lovers!’46 Maturin’s decision to highlight, however derisively, Owenson’s private life suggests his disapproval of her behaviour. Although he was never below soliciting her help in financial and literary matters, and frequented the salons she held after her marriage,47 he was evidently jealous of Owenson’s success, a bitterness that emerges in his subtle fictionalisation of Charles Ormbsy. Maturin’s moralistic reform of his fictional character and domestic settlement with a woman of his own age highlights Maturin’s censure of Owenson’s inappropriate flirtations. Maturin’s inclusion of a ‘Wild Irish Girl’ costume also further comments on Owenson’s well-documented habit of appearing in public dressed as Glorvina and performing as her famous Irish princess. Such performances – which Owenson clearly understood in patriotic terms – allowed her quite literally to veil ‘her political agenda [in] an attractive performativity’, with the result that, even as she ‘was providing a national stereotype for her audience, she was also disseminating antiquarian scholarship through her conversation and presence’.48 Although Owenson eventually tired of the way in which her upper-class ‘friends’ took advantage of her, she clearly revelled in her theatrical performances and the notoriety they brought her. Judging from Maturin’s own love of performance and his belief that ‘[n]oteriety in any direction is serviceable to an Author’,49 it is difficult to believe he would have condemned such actions outright. Indeed, his inability to mimic Owenson in this regard and to attain even a small portion of her fame, however ill-gotten, no doubt inspired intense jealousy. In The wild Irish boy, however, Maturin posits a less petty, more ideologically inflected disapproval of performance like that in which Owenson engaged. Specifically, Maturin’s deployment of performativity in his novel connects itself firmly to the issue of Irish identity and insists that, ‘to know’ Ireland, the veils concealing its true nature must be removed. For this reason, Maturin constructs Lady Montrevor as, like Corinne and Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour but also de Staël and Owenson themselves, a

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performer. Trapped into a loveless marriage, Lady Montrevor embraces a selfconscious theatricality and insists on performing her role at any cost:

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I have assumed my part . . . and I must go through with it . . . a full theatre and loud applause for me till the curtain drops . . . Besides, if I retreated now . . . no one would believe it real, the fictitious character was so well supported. (Wild Irish boy, 2: 63)

On the one hand, the dissemblance Lady Montrevor adopts is represented as somehow involuntary. It is, as Lord Westhampton suggests, ‘the town [that] is to blame’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 126). On the other, however, there is an indication that Maturin’s illustration of Lady Montrevor, like Edgeworth’s description of Lady Delacour in Belinda, is meant to investigate ‘erratic maternal behavior, evidence of a subversive female “inheritance”’.50 By her own acknowledgement, Lady Montrevor’s character is unnatural: ‘Is the rouge washed off my face? Or does this veil conceal it? They must not see Lady Montrevor’s mind or face either in their natural colours’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 178). While Ormsby willingly dismisses Lady Montrevor’s deviancy from her natural domestic role, other characters are less prepared to smile upon behaviour directly threatening to patriarchal establishment. As Ormsby’s childhood friend, Hammond, describes her, Lady Montrevor is ‘[a] woman who could be impelled to the disregard of domestic duties, a wife who could be indifferent to her husband, a mother who could neglect her children’; for such a woman, Hammond has ‘no mercy’ (Wild Irish boy, 2: 191). In this respect, Hammond’s response mirrors that which Edgeworth hoped to inspire against Lady Delacour in Belinda. Arguably one of the key literary texts influencing The wild Irish boy, Belinda features quite prominently in Maturin’s novel.51 There are, in fact, several important direct references to Edgeworth’s text throughout The wild Irish boy, as Pearson observes,52 and Maturin pointedly singles out Edgeworth as a significant contemporary author. Obviously referencing Maturin’s own contempt for the literary tastes of his readers, The wild Irish boy contrasts Edgeworth with Thomas Skinner Surr (1770?–1847),53 who, despite being described as ‘the most distinguished novelist of the day’ is nevertheless seen to publish inane drivel – ‘melancholy mêlange[s] [sic] of extracts from morning papers, information extracted from the menials of noble families, and hints from manuscript histories’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 163, 165). Edgeworth, however, writes novels that refuse to cater to public demands for such gossip and instead offer ‘faithful representation[s] of life, with just modes of reasoning, and a forcible inculcation of good principles’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 166). Her Belinda is praised in the course of the narrative as ‘a work that has never been equalled, and, perhaps, never will be equalled’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 167).

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The novel’s express admiration for Edgeworth and Belinda suggests Maturin’s engagement with Edgeworth’s discourse on an ideal domesticity reliant on the female assumption of her ‘proper’ familial role. The wild Irish boy ostensibly mimics Belinda by establishing patriarchal domesticity as the norm for its female characters and punishing those that are seen to deviate too far from it – the woman Ormsby initially believes to be his unwed mother, Miss Percival, parallels Harriet Freke in her radical espousal of Wollstonecraft and the rights of woman and, like her, receives due punishment in the end by being deserted by her various lovers and left destitute, friendless, and condemned by polite society. In contrast, Lady Delacour reforms her ways and reassumes her rightful place at the head of the Delacour family, no longer distracted by the demands and flirtations of society life or the influence of Harriet Freke and inappropriately masculine behaviour. In effect, by freeing herself of the (apparent) ghosts haunting her, symbolised most particularly in the spectral ‘vision’ manufactured by Harriet Freke to frighten Lady Delacour, and supposedly foretelling the latter’s death, Lady Delacour is able to commit herself to her family and family life.54 As Susan Egenolf has recently argued, however, despite establishing female conformity to the patriarchal norm as the desired end, Belinda remains haunted by continued suggestions of female transgression. In fact, as Egenolf persuasively maintains, Edgeworth purposefully subverts the domestic ideal and Burkean family unit she is conventionally seen to promote in Belinda by way of several central ‘iconic glosses’ that ‘rupture the central narrative’ and challenge its assertions. These glosses include the portraits of Virginia St Pierre as well as Lady Anne Percival with her children and the concluding stage tableau of the major characters. All are deployed by Edgeworth in order ‘[to tease] the moral expectations of the reader’ and finally undermine traditional domestic ideology by allowing ‘the disruptive feminine force’ to survive.55 Picturing Lady Delacour as ‘the witty story-teller’ in the final scene, Edgeworth questions her heroine’s confinement to domesticity and ‘cue[s] her readers to the possibility of women like Lady Delacour (and Edgeworth herself) who might construct more powerful roles for women through the artful use of language’.56 In contrast, The wild Irish boy accompanies its concluding idealised domestic solution with a firm indication of the female characters’s submission to partriarchal order. Reunited with her childhood lover, Lady Montrevor disposes of her artificial public character and resumes her proper place in the private, domestic realm of the reconstructed family, ‘no longer subverted by the necessity of artificial display’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 404). The reference to her accompanying disavowal of public performance is particularly striking in the context of Maturin’s subtle commentary on Owenson’s appearances as Glorvina, especially as Lady Montrevor’s domestic settlement is immediately preceded by her shedding of

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the ‘Glorvina’ costume she had worn at the ball near the end of the novel. An obvious reference to Owenson’s appearances ‘en princesse’,57 Lady Montrevor’s Glorvina costume underlines ‘the artificiality and commercial reproducibility of a powerful Irish national icon’.58 Arguably, this is an issue that appears not only in the response to The wild Irish girl, which, as Claire Connolly has pointed out,59 effectively commodified Glorvina and the Ireland she represented, but also in the text itself. As Ferris suggests, while Glorvina appears to live in ‘pastoral harmony’, she is actually ‘framed by a self-conscious artfulness’, which clearly evinces itself in the scene where Horatio draws her as she sings. This episode, Ferris further maintains, emphasises the manner in which Glorvina ‘is immobilized as cultural icon’.60 Having caught Glorvina’s ‘costume, attitude, and harp’ on paper (Wild Irish girl, p. 98), Horatio’s portrait threatens to turn the history of Irish culture represented by these objects into mere costume and decor. Extending the suggestion of Glorvina’s cultural immobilisation, Maturin’s novel purposely draws attention to romanticised paintings of the Inca chieftain Ataliba prominently hung about the ballroom in The wild Irish boy: as Jim Kelly argues, these decorations recall the reference to Peruvian history in The wild Irish girl and, like it, link Ireland’s cultural commodification with military subjugation.61 For Owenson, Ataliba was a counter-imperialist fundamentally misrepresented by ‘the victorious Spaniard . . . insensible to the woes he had created’, and was therefore, much like the native Irish after the 1798 Rebellion, suffering under the unfair ‘odium of cruelty’. The events of 1798, she argued, were undertaken largely by ‘ancient British settlers’, whose ‘barbarities . . . attached the epithet of cruel to the name of Irishman!’ (Wild Irish girl, pp. 171–2, footnote). The wild Irish boy expands on Owenson’s point, suggesting with its masquerade decorations that Ireland had been not only victimised by the British after the 1798 Rebellion but also essentially infantilised and commodified. As such, Ireland had been removed to ‘a static aesthetic realm’, in which it had become merely ‘a colony providing cultural commodities as opposed to actual material commodities’.62 In The wild Irish boy, the disposal of these imposed cultural commodifications of Ireland is of paramount importance. The ‘wild Irish girl’ disguise as well as the ‘Milesian chief’ costume, worn by Ormsby’s father at the same masquerade, must be shed before the novel’s concluding image of peaceful domesticity can be established. The novel therefore proposes that such cultural images of Ireland, produced for an English audience with an English readership in mind, must be discarded if Ireland’s true identity is to be recognised. Otherwise, Maturin’s narrative suggests, Ireland will continue to be haunted by images like Owenson’s ‘wild Irish girl’, which act out the horror of Louis Althusser’s idea of ‘interpellation’:63 ‘the state of being possessed by discourses that are hostile to one’s own best interest and of being helplessly spoken by them’.64 To this end, Ormsby’s

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education throughout the novel is not only a process away from excessive sensibility but also, like that in Edgeworth’s national tales, a growth into a recognition of Ireland’s ‘true’ nature and a subsequent assumption of his rightful identity as a member of the Irish landholding class. That this identity must be established and clarified by the text is clear. Like Edgeworth’s Harry Ormond after him, Ormsby must choose between several different cultural modes represented by the three brothers with whom he forms relationships over the course of the novel – Chieftain de Lacy, Lionel Bethel, and Ormsby’s real father. With the first representing antiquity and respect for ancient traditions, and the second epitomising pithy disregard for such values, Ormsby’s real father emerges as a middle road between the two. Ormsby’s discovery of his natural father is therefore pivotal in Ormsby’s adoption of an Irish identity neither archaic and misguidedly attached to the past nor scornful in its Continental modernity. These imprudent identities manifest themselves quite forcefully in the architecture described in the text. The Chieftain’s castle, for instance, is deliberately summarised by the brief sketch: ‘The principal gate here had been out of repair for some years; the chief, however, was satisfied, by seeing workmen prepare to go to it every Monday morning’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 180). Consciously referring back to Thady’s dating of his narrative in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) to ‘Monday morning’,65 this description aptly encapsulates the Chieftain: despite his lofty title, he is simply another lazy Irishman with no sense of proper estate management.66 In contrast to the Chieftain’s rundown property, Lionel Bethel’s home is characterised as a ‘French household’, where ‘not an Irish face was to be seen’. It is called ‘Lemon-grove’ from what Ormsby explains as ‘a sickly imitation of the luxuriant verdure of France’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 179, 142). The significance of the ‘French’ identification is twofold. First, it calls upon the conventional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English gendering of the French language as ‘female’ in contrast to the masculine English language. As a result, references to the eighteenth-century ‘fop’ connoted, as Clíona Ó Gallchoir explains, ‘the derided figure of an Englishman so caught up with the refinements of French manners and culture as to lose all claims to masculinity’.67 In terms of Maturin’s text, the feminine sensibility of Lionel Bethel’s French household clearly works against the trajectory Maturin outlines for his hero: the rejection of an excessively feminine nature and the final realisation of his true, inherently masculine, identity. Second, Bethel’s French domestic establishment emphasises his betrayal of his interest as a native Irishman. It not only calls attention to Bethel’s primary apostasy – his willingness both to renounce his ancestral Catholicism and to change his name ‘for the property of a maternal uncle’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 165) – but also suggests a desire to affect a falsified ‘French’ identity.

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The importance of Bethel’s aspiration to a French identity is indicated by Ormsby’s observation that ‘The Irish are easily repelled by strangers’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 179). Offered as explanation for the lack of an Irish presence at Lemongrove, this comment tellingly reflects the power of a French identity as a foreign one. Ó Gallchoir has ably traced the ways in which an affected ‘Frenchness’ could veil the disadvantages of a pre-existing Irish identity in the late eighteenth century. As she suggests, such affectation highlights the mutually foreign nature of both Irish and French identities but also, by extension, emphasises the status ladder employed in judging a foreign individual: a French-inflected accent was ‘clearly more advantageous’ than an Irish brogue, however light.68 The advantages of a French rather than Irish identity are evident, Ó Gallchoir argues, in Edgeworth’s novel, The absentee.69 In a particularly revealing incident, Lady Clonbrony, herself assuming a specifically ‘Henglish’ identity and insisting that she was ‘not quite Irish bred and born – only bred, not born’, proposes that Grace Nugent mask the Irishness of her name by transforming it into ‘de Nogent’ (Absentee, pp. 2, 16). Grace’s immediate refusal both registers her loyalty to Ireland and stresses her rejection of a false identity, even if it is more socially advantageous than her true, Irish one. In this context, Ormsby’s symbolic exchange of father-figures indicates his refusal to betray his Irish ancestry by an adoption of Lionel Bethel’s Frenchness. Simultaneously, in relation to the Chieftain, ‘obsolete as Brian Boirn [sic], or Fingal’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 181), Ormsby’s preference for his newly discovered father reads as a Scott-like recognition of the necessary passage of time and traditions as well as a rejection of the Gothic antiquarianism of Owenson’s text. Ormsby realises that the land management practices espoused by the old Chieftain are not only dated but inherently unsuited for modern Ireland. In this way, Ormsby’s father is established as a conciliatory figure, symbolising both a move away from disadvantageous reverence for the past and a rejection of national disdain. In many ways, however, Ormsby’s father remains an intrinsically shadowy figure. Having spent much of the novel secretly ensconced in a ruined old tower in the Irish countryside, his appearances have been mysterious and few. Moreover, the fact that he remains unnamed, even at the end of the novel, leaves his identity forever in doubt, despite his establishment as both Ormsby’s father and Lady Montrevor’s former lover. The role Ormsby’s father is meant to play in the text is suggested by a consideration of Edgeworth’s Ormond (1817), which frequently echoes with the voice of The wild Irish boy. In Edgeworth’s text, the eponymous hero finds in Herbert Annaly an example of a good landlord, fundamentally concerned, like Edgeworth’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, with the improvement and betterment of his land and his tenants. He is described as having produced ‘a

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considerable change for the better in the morals and habits of the people’ through ‘the sacrifice of his own immediate interest . . . great personal exertion, strict justice, and a generous and well secured system of reward’.70 Against ‘the bad example[s] of his neighbours’, Sir Ulick and King Corny, Annaly illustrates for Ormond the benefits of paternal land management practices. He thus encourages Ormond to envision for himself a future in Ireland, where he can be ‘as useful’ and ‘make as many human beings happy’ as Annaly himself (Ormond, p. 204).71 In contrast to Herbert Annaly, however, Ormsby’s father never provides an appropriate model of land management on which to shape Ormsby’s future domestic establishment. Instead, the example he supplies for his son apparently resides in his final shedding of the many false identities he has assumed throughout the novel. Of these, arguably the most important, in terms of the narrative’s discourse on Irish national identity, is that of the ‘Milesian chief’ costume Ormsby’s father wears towards the end of the novel. Juxtaposed with Lady Montrevor’s ‘Glorvina’ outfit, this disguise forcefully underscores the ways in which Ireland has been objectified and commodified in the English popular imagination of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By setting this ‘Milesian chief’ identity aside, Ormsby’s father symbolically asserts a true and authentic Irish identity finally unhindered by the Gothic interruption of such destructive images. Correspondingly, Maturin’s refusal to allow Ormsby to assume the Chieftain de Lacy’s title operates as a further suggestion that stereotypical imagery of Ireland, like that embodied by the ancient Chieftain, must be amended. The dissolution of this position and title, coupled with the disposal of the imagery of ‘Glorvina’ and the ‘Milesian chief’, indicates that such inauthentic identifications must be destroyed if Ireland is to understand her ‘truth’. At the same time, Ormsby’s (envisioned) return to Ireland contradictorily suggests the perpetuation of a colonial hierarchy by which such representations were originally fostered. Deliberately aligned with the Creole landowner, Mr Vincent, from Edgeworth’s Belinda when he is described as possessing ‘l’air d’un heros [sic] de Roman’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 236), Ormsby becomes not an Irish native but a colonising force.72 Ormsby’s initial impression of Ireland, conceived during his early education, relies heavily on a colonial representation of Ireland. Then a country unknown to him, Ireland is, in his mind, ‘some fortunate spot, some abode peopled by fair forms, human in their affections, their habits, in every thing but vice and weakness’. Ormsby’s fascination with this imaginary world made real is only enhanced by his reading of the Ossian poems, an experience which precipitates his resolution to become ‘the reformer and legislator of a country I had never seen’. Admiring the Irish people’s possession of ‘the most shining qualities that can enter into the human character’, Ormsby nevertheless forms a goal to govern the ‘excellencies’ of the Irish race. As he believes, these

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qualities want ‘regulation’, and as a natural extension, ‘both dignity and utility’. Ormsby therefore sets out to improve the Irish people’s ‘proud, irritable, impetuous, indolent, and superstitious’ nature, which he believes, indisposes them to crimes, ‘which the moment after their commission they lamented’ (Wild Irish boy, 1: 102, 104, 103). Ormsby’s early vision of the Irish people sanctions an image of himself as a civilising saviour, benevolently aiding and improving a savage people. Ironically, rather than seeing himself as an active participant in the perpetuation of colonial stereotypes, Ormsby views himself as an important figure in the battle against typical English categorisations of the Irish. Agitating for Ireland in the pursuit of his fashionable life, he is ambitious to shew . . . that Irishmen were not the degraded beings that England has a right of concluding from their scandalous desertion of their duties and their country . . . ambitious to shew . . . an Irishman was not destitute of information, or dead to national feeling and spirit. (Wild Irish boy, 3: 134–5)

And yet, despite Ormsby’s verbal dedication to Ireland, his proposed salvation of the country and its people remains a chimerical illusion. Indeed, his campaign for Ireland ensues primarily from a desire to please Lady Montrevor, who suggests he use the opportunity of being in London ‘to make himself conspicuous’ (Wild Irish boy, 2: 312), fighting for the repeal or maintenance of the Union (it matters not which to her). Her proposal, combined with Ormsby’s continued infatuation, prompts his decision to travel to London: I determined to go to London. I possessed wealth and rank and connexions; my mind wanted an object; that which Lady M. had pointed out was one capable of filling the most enlarged one. That she had pointed it out, magnified its importance, and palliated its improbability. (Wild Irish boy, 2: 314)

In other words, much like Edward Waverley, Ormsby commits himself to a cause from romantic whim rather than ardent belief. In Waverley’s case, life with the Jacobite army serves to bring him to an awareness of the reality behind his romantic visions. The same might be said for Ormsby’s development in Maturin’s novel. His transformation from chivalrous romantic lover and overly sensible society fop to rational husband mirrors his simultaneous renunciation of the ‘folly’ and ‘madness’ to which he falls prey during ‘[his] winter in Dublin, and [his] winter in London’ (Wild Irish boy, 3: 345). Yet, Ormsby’s recovery from his madness is never certain. The novel’s ostensibly happy conclusion, in fact, occurs by Ormsby’s sickbed. Still suffering from his excessively sensible nature and its attendant madness, Ormsby threatens, like Ennui’s Lord Glenthorn,73 to fall back into his old ways at any moment. Moreover, the fact that his return to the Irish countryside – a move envisioned

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as Ormsby’s return to Nature, which, in Michel Foucault’s terms, possesses ‘the power of freeing man from his freedom’, liberating him from ‘social constraints . . . and from the uncontrollable movement of the passions’74 – never happens suggests an underlying belief in the impossibility of an Irish idyll. Like Ormsby himself, haunted by his experiences, Ireland remains possessed by the past. The very resistance to speaking of the country’s violent history – manifested in the refusal to explain the blood dropped on Ormsby’s hands while in his father’s lonely, haunted tower – highlights the ineffectively stifled horror still driving Maturin’s narrative. Although it attempts to conceal the past through silence, this uneasy quietness manifests the ‘communicative pathology’ experienced by survivors of the 1798 rebellion and other such violence.75 Like Dante, Maturin’s characters, and those of his contemporaries, experience the past as something so horrifying that it defies words but equally so refuses erasure: Who ever could, e’en with untrammelled words, Tell of the blood and of the wounds in full Which now I saw, by many times narrating? Each tongue would for a certainty fall short By reason of our speech and memory, That have small room to comprehend so much.76

Finding himself undermined by his own speech and memory, Maturin’s attempt to speak to and of the past haunting Ireland and Irish literary production in his overt references to The wild Irish girl is ultimately abortive. Although the images of Ireland produced by Owenson’s novel are not in and of themselves horrifying, Maturin suggests that they have the very real potential to become so, just as Glorvina transforms into a terrifying monster in Horatio’s dream. What these images veil is the true nature of Irish identity. But, as Maturin’s novel ultimately concludes, Ireland may be so monstrously fragmented and scarred by history that its true nature may finally prove too painful to face. Notes 1 Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 43. 2 Charles Robert Maturin, The wild Irish boy, introd. Robert Lee Wolff, 3 vols (1808; New York: Garland, 1979), 1: x. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 3 Joep Leerssen, ‘Fiction poetics and cultural stereotype: local colour in Scott, Morgan, and Maturin’, Modern language review, 86.2 (1991), 276. 4 Pearson, ‘Masculinizing the novel’, p. 641. 5 Ibid., p. 635. 6 Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, p. 67.

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7 Ibid. 8 As Derrida (Specters of Marx, pp. 11–12) suggests, because spectres are invisible, they must be spoken to in order to do them the justice they demand. 9 Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 58–9. The OED usefully defines these two senses of the verb ‘to conjure’; it can mean either ‘[t]o invoke by supernatural power’ and ‘[t]o call upon, constrain (a devil or spirit) to appear to do one’s bidding, by the invocation of some sacred name or the use of some “spell”’, or ‘[t]o exorcise, allay, quiet’. 10 Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the form of the English novel, 1790–1825: intercepted letters, interrupted seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 116. 11 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 25. 12 See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, ed. and introd L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 13 See Northrop Frye, The secular scripture: a study of the structure of romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 54. 14 Jacqueline Belanger, ‘Introduction’, in Belanger (ed.), The Irish novel in the nineteenth century, p. 12. 15 Kilfeather, ‘Terrific register’, p. 68. 16 Ibid., p. 63. 17 Maria Edgeworth, The absentee, ed. and introd. W. J. McCormack and Kim Walker (1812; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 83. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 18 William Hamilton Maxwell, O’Hara; or, 1798, introd. Robert Lee Wolff, 2 vols (1825; New York: Garland, 1979), 1: 116, 117. 19 Ibid., 1: xxi, xxviii, xxix. 20 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 142. 21 Ibid., p. 146. 22 Matthews-Kane, ‘Gothic excess and political anxiety’, pp. 7–8 23 Julie Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan and the politics of style (Palo Alto, CA: Academica Press, 2009), p. 39. 24 Matthews-Kane, ‘Gothic excess and political anxiety’, p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 14. 26 Ibid., p. 16. 27 Ibid. 28 Donovan, Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, p. 42. 29 For a similar argument about the ‘aspirational’ qualities of The absentee’s conclusion, see Sharon Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and romance (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), pp. 175–6. 30 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 146; Hansen, ‘The wrong marriage’, p. 354. 31 Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The missionary: an Indian tale, ed. Julia M. Wright (1811; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 251. 32 For this argument, see Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 146. For a contrasting argument, see Joseph Lew, ‘“Unprepared for sudden transformations”: identity and politics in Melmoth the wanderer’, Studies in the novel, 26.2 (1994), 173–95. For the

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34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Conjuring Glorvina argument that the foreign setting in The missionary ‘is specifically a contrivance for addressing colonialism and the attendant issue of religious intolerance while apparently dislocating them from Owenson’s main sphere of interest, nineteenth-century Ireland, by nominally rooting them in seventeenth-century Portugal and India’, see Julia M. Wright, ‘Introduction’, in Sydney Owenson, The missionary: an Indian tale (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 19. Regina Maria Roche, The children of the abbey (1796; New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., undated), pp. 582–3. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Burgess, ‘Violent translations’, p. 63; Morin, ‘“Gothic” and “national”’, pp. 181–2. Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. Madame de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. and ed. Sylvia Raphael, introd. John Isbell (1807; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 21. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Esther Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”: the cosmopolitan heroine and the national tale’, European Romantic review, 13 (2002), 193. See Slavoj Žižek, The sublime object of ideology (London: Verso Press, 1989). Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, p. 193. See also Christina Morin, ‘Undermining morality? National destabilisation in The wild Irish girl and Corinne, ou l’Italie’, in Elke D’hoker, Raphaël Ingelbien, and Hedwig Schwall (eds), Irish women writers: new critical perspectives (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 169–85. Ferris, The Romantic national tale, pp. 83, 84, 87. Ibid., p. 87. Morin, ‘Charles Robert Maturin’. George Paston, Little memoirs of the nineteenth century (London: Grant Richards, 1902), p. 120. Debrett’s baronetage of England lists Charles Ormsby’s marriage in June 1794 to Thomas Kingsbury’s daughter, Elizabeth; see Debrett’s baronetage of England, vol. 2 (5th ed.; London: C. & J. Rivington, 1824), p. 1150. Campbell, Lady Morgan: the life and times, pp. 98–9. Paston, Little memoirs, pp. 119–20. On Maturin’s evident admiration for, frequent socialisation with, and requests for money and influence made to the Morgans, see Stevenson, The wild Irish girl, p. 244. Julie Donovan, ‘Text and textile in Sydney Owenson’s The wild Irish girl’, Éire-Ireland, 43.3&4 (2008), 52. NLS 673/28, letter from Maturin to Constable, 8 March 1819. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Their fathers’ daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and patriarchal complicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 105. Pearson (‘Masculinizing the novel’, p. 645), for instance, maintains that it is Belinda, rather than The wild Irish girl, that serves as the ‘major intertext’ of Maturin’s novel, while Kilfeather (‘Terrific register’, p. 56) contends that The wild

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54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

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Irish boy presents ‘a systematic revision of . . . Belinda’ rather than a response to The wild Irish girl. Pearson, ‘Masculinizing the novel’, pp. 645–6. Although never directly identified in the text, this criticised author has been identified recently as Surr (Pearson, ‘Masculinizing the novel’, p. 645), to whom Maturin also refers when speaking of Ormsby’s winters in Dublin and London – a clear reference to Surr’s critically castigated 1806 novel, A winter in London. See also Rev. of A winter in London, by Thomas Skinner Surr, Critical review, 3rd ser. 8 (1806), 319. Available online from British fiction, 1800–1829, www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/ reviews/wint06-64.html, accessed 22 May 2006. Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, ed. and introd. Kathryn Kirkpatrick (1801; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 307. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. Egenolf, The art of political fiction, pp. 74, 102. Ibid., pp. 102–3. Quoted in Campbell, Lady Morgan: the life and times, p. 87. Jim Kelly, ‘Why national tale and not national novel? Maturin, Owenson, and the limits of Irish fiction’, in Neal Alexander, Shane Murphy, and Anne Oakman (eds), To the other shore: cross-currents in Irish and Scottish studies (Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2004), p. 80. Kelly’s arguments in this article also appear in his doctoral thesis: Jim Kelly, ‘Questioning agency: Charles Maturin, the national tale, and the cultural production of identity’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2004). See also Jim Kelly, Charles Maturin: authorship, authenticity and the nation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, forthcoming). Claire Connolly, ‘“I accuse Miss Owenson”: The wild Irish girl as media event’, Colby quarterly, 36.2 (2000), 98–115; see also Morin, ‘Undermining morality?’. Ina Ferris, ‘Narrating cultural encounter: Lady Morgan and the Irish national tale’, Nineteenth-century literature, 51.3 (1996), 298. Kelly, ‘Why national tale’, p. 81. Ibid. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and ideological state apparatuses’, Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1971), pp. 160–70. Ibid., quoted in Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic family romance: heterosexuality, child sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish colonial order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 32. Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, in Marilyn Butler (ed.), Castle Rackrent and Ennui (1800; London: Penguin Books, 1992), p. 65. See the glossary note on the phrase ‘Monday morning’ included in Castle Rackrent; Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent, p. 123. Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: women, enlightenment and nation (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2005), p. 140. Ibid., pp. 135–6. Ibid., p. 136.

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70 Maria Edgeworth, Ormond, ed. Claire Connolly (1817; London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 203. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 71 Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and romance, p. 180. 72 Kelly, ‘Why national tale’, p. 82. 73 Murphy, Maria Edgeworth and romance, p. 166. 74 Michel Foucault, Madness and civilization, trans. Richard Howard (1961; London: Tavistock, 1967), p. 184. 75 This term is borrowed from Dr Kirk Simpson, who used it in a research seminar presentation entitled ‘Truth recovery in Northern Ireland: mastering the past?’ at Queen’s University Belfast, 27 October 2009. 76 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, trans., The divine comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1867), p. 89, Canto XXVIII, ll. 1–6. Simpson referred to this passage, in a different translation, in the presentation noted above.

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Witnessing the past: the textual ruins of The Milesian chief

Revelling in the grave: Gothic negativity and Irish reality Attempting once again to speak of and for the past, Maturin’s third novel, The Milesian chief (1812), centres on an imaginary uprising modelled on both the 1798 Rebellion and Emmet’s rebellion. Placing Anglo-Irish fears of the return of the past at its very heart, the novel is both more obvious about its discussion of contemporary Ireland than is Fatal revenge and more reliant on an explicit Gothicism than is The wild Irish boy. Although a country still ‘unknown’, like that in Fatal revenge and The wild Irish boy, Ireland is presented in The Milesian chief as a dark, fearsome place haunted by the ghosts and memories of past violence, sectarian trouble, and bloody insurrection. Characterised by its ‘dark, desolate, and stormy grandeur’,1 Maturin’s near-contemporary fictional Ireland is above all else Sublime and, as such, promises delight but also repeated terror – a fear produced not only by historic atrocities but also by the sickening probability that such social and political mayhem will continue to disrupt modern Ireland.2 Ending with the violent deaths of its main characters as well as the defeat of the imaginary Irish rebellion on which the plot centres, The Milesian chief offers no escape from these horrors. As a result, it has been described very rightly as ‘a ruin text’;3 a text about the ruins and ruin of a nation, The Milesian chief is a ruin itself, a physical reminder of the devastation of Irish history, forever haunted by the ghosts of the past, the (fictional) bodies sacrificed to history heaving within its pages. Further confirming its status as a ruin text, Maturin’s text echoes with the ghostly voices of the Gothic novel, the national tale, and the historical novel, emerging as a hybrid text that accurately reflects the social, cultural, and political fragmentation of the author’s contemporary Ireland. Oddly, in his preface to the novel, Maturin claims that his intent was to describe ‘the scenes of actual life’ rather than Fatal revenge’s Gothic fantasies, which, he suggests, were ‘so much beyond the reach of life . . . that I might as well have given a map of terra incognita, and expected the reader to swear to its

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boundaries, or live on its productions’ (Milesian chief, 1: v, ii–iii). Despite such claims, however, Maturin proceeds to write a narrative peopled with ‘unearthly’ characters and set in a country he describes as ‘the only [one] on earth, where, from the strange existing opposition of religion, politics, and manners, the extremes of refinement and barbarism are united, and the most wild and incredible situations of romantic story are hourly passing before modern eyes’ (Milesian chief, 2: 97; 1: v). Owenson would later find Irish history incompatible with her desire to describe positively and optimistically ‘the “flat realities of life”’ in O’Donnel (1814),4 but Maturin ultimately discovers that the Gothicism he apparently abjures is entirely appropriate for delineating the facts of everyday Irish life. Contemporary readers certainly understood Maturin’s novel in terms of its Gothicism; as Ferris notes, for instance, the critic of the London magazine castigated Maturin for the lack of reality in The Milesian chief: ‘His language . . . is almost the only symptom which he deigns to give of ever having either studied, or associated with, humanity. He glories in caverns – falls in love with goblins – becomes naturalized amid ruins, and revels in the grave.’5 The apparent contradiction in The Milesian chief – its stated aim of describing ‘scenes of actual life’ and its heavy reliance on Gothic imagery to do so – highlights the convergence of national tale and Gothic novel in Maturin’s work. Although Ferris suggests that The Milesian chief bridges the gap between the national tale and the Irish Gothic later popularised by Le Fanu, Wilde, and Stoker,6 the novel is more appropriately understood as an instance of Maturin’s deliberate writing between literary forms and genres. Deploying the tropes of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel within a national tale format in order to produce a hybrid genre better able to speak of and for post-Union Ireland, Maturin engages in an interstitial literary movement that fundamentally enables his creation of ‘a serious novel about the problems facing Ireland under English rule’.7 Similarly, working between the national tale and historical novel, The Milesian chief ‘historiciz[es]’ the national tale’s ‘allegorical framework’, presenting a meeting not just between two divergent national cultures – English and Irish – but also between temporal zones of past and present.8 While, however, Scott’s Waverly – a novel credited alongside The Milesian chief with effecting the transition from national tale to historical novel – nostalgically presents the past as necessarily giving way to a rational present in which historical violence is safely subsumed by modernity, The Milesian chief sees the past as both living and dead. This is, as Ferris persuasively contends, a narrative impelled by ‘the pulse of gothic history . . . that jolts the present, and renders the past not in terms of rational continuity (i.e., persistence, surmounting) but in the unpredictable, stochastic rhythm of an insistence through which one glimpses a future narrowed by fear’.9 Haunted by the spectres of the past, Maturin’s narrative presents history as that which

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fundamentally undermines the present and future, promising an ongoing disruption of peaceful modernity. Working between and across literary genres and forms, therefore, Maturin’s novel highlights the ways in which the boundaries between reality and fiction, past and present, continually break down in Ireland. Unlike Owenson, Maturin is not deterred from bearing witness to the past by a recognition of its atrocities. Instead, he makes it clear that his intention is not ‘to send forth a dove bearing the olive of peace’ but specifically ‘[to fling] an arrow winged with discord’ (O’Donnel, unpaginated preface). Laying open the implicit violence of earlier national tales such as The children of the abbey and The wild Irish girl, The Milesian chief asserts that the only writing of the past that makes sense in an Irish context is one indebted to the Gothic. Irish reality, Maturin declares, is haunted by the past, preventing any kind of meaningful mediation between conflicting temporal or, indeed, geographical zones. In contrast to Owenson who, in her preface to O’Donnel, announces her desire not to ‘raise [the] veil’ over the past ‘which ought never to be drawn’ (O’Donnel, unpaginated preface), Maturin vividly suggests that no such metaphoric veil exists to safeguard the present from the past. Fearing to speak: remembering the past in The Milesian chief Evidencing the literary hybridity of The Milesian chief, Maturin’s novel begins with a traditional national tale plot but graphically transforms and skews its conventions. While the symbolic nature of Maturin’s hero and heroine – Connal O’Morven and Armida Fitzalban – and the necessary and transformative journey into the Irish unknown mirror the national tale as we now understand it, Maturin immediately introduces variations that alert the reader to his project of subversion. Creating a transgendered national hero(ine), for instance, Maturin begins his novel with a significant and potentially revolutionary rereading of the typical national hero. Evidently modelled on the eponymous heroine of de Staël’s Corinne, Armida is a half-English, half-Irish woman born to the English nobleman, Lord Montclare. Highly educated, Armida moves in the most elite circles of Continental society, where she is lauded for her superior musical, dramatic, and conversational skills. At the start of the novel, Armida has been promised to the English officer, Colonel Wandesford, but their engagement is disrupted by Lord Montclare’s abrupt and unexpected decision to return to his Irish estates, which he has acquired through the dispossession of the native Irish O’Morven family. Although Armida, like Lady Montrevor before her, views Ireland as a cultural wasteland, she soon falls in love with the descendant of her father’s ancestral enemies – Connal O’Morven, who, from his youth, has been tutored by his vengeful grandfather to lead a rebellion against the English forces in Ireland.

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Connal recognises that this plan is both futile and inherently doomed but resolutely follows his grandfather’s designs until he meets Armida and metaphysically stumbles. Instructing her in Irish music, culture, and history, Connal encourages Armida to renounce her former disdain for Ireland and to recognise the country’s real worth. Despite falling in love with her, however, Connal refuses to propose marriage. Instead, he leaves Armida in order to command his men in battle, only for her desperately to follow him. When he is shot for his part in the insurrection, she prostrates herself beside him to await her own death from self-administered poison. Notwithstanding the evident differences in atmosphere and plot, as well as Maturin’s glaring denial of any kind of ‘Glorvina solution’, critics have read the influence of The wild Irish girl in The Milesian chief, suggesting that Armida is, at least in part, an imitation of Owenson’s Glorvina.10 Although evidently and understandably influential not only in Maturin’s career in general but also in The Milesian chief in particular, Owenson’s national tale proves only one of many literary presences in the novel. Also haunting the pages of Maturin’s text is de Staël’s Corinne and an earlier work that fundamentally echoes in Corinne: Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered) (1575). While Maturin’s access to Tasso’s epic poem is difficult to pinpoint without specific documentation of his reading, his familiarity with Tasso’s enchantress, Armida, and her general story is highly feasible.11 Confirming this probability, Trumpener observes a link between Maturin’s novel and Gerusalemme liberata, arguing that the latter is ‘a crucial intertext’ for the former. The two tales, she contends, continuously parallel each other, sharing plot devices, an emphasis on oppositional forces contesting ‘a Holy Land’, and a ‘tragic sense of the cataclysmic, incomprehensible character of so-called holy wars’.12 These similarities, combined with Maturin’s symbolic naming of his heroine and her initial location in Italy, suggest that Maturin was not only very aware of Tasso’s earlier tale but also keen to forge a deliberate and conscious link between his Armida and that of Tasso. Developed out of the models established in Gerusalemme liberata and Corinne, therefore, Maturin’s Armida Fitzalban is first and foremost a temptress and seductress. She begins the novel with a combination of Corinne’s intellectual and performative brilliance and the remarkable beauty shared by both de Staël’s heroine and Tasso’s Armida. Like her literary predecessors, Armida is both fully aware of the effects she has on her audience and exultant in the admiration of others, obviously ‘pleased to be admired’ (Corinne, p. 23). Similarly, like her Italian namesake, who passes through the camp of awestruck Crusaders, while ‘[w]ith secret joy her heart exulting glow’d’,13 Armida remains acutely aware of her power over others. Moreover, she describes herself ‘wretched . . . except in the tumultuous illusions of a crowd that make [her] forget [her]self’ and allow for

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her deceptive display (Milesian chief, 1: 26). Crucially, the chimerical image she presents to the world is depicted as a threatening one, at least for the novel’s male characters. Wandesford, for instance, resolves ‘to resist her spells’ (Milesian chief, 1: 25), and Connal repeatedly identifies Armida with mystical enchantment: He must have been more than man who could resist her – her siren tone, her attitude, at once voluptuous and timid, intimating tenderness, and inviting to pleasure; her pride, her beauty, her passion, sparkling round her Calypso figure, and blending the softness of the woman with the splendour of the genii. (Milesian chief, 2: 67)

Connal’s association of Armida with temptation and enchantment invests their relationship with a sense of fear – his fear of her powers. Like Corinne’s lover Oswald, Connal regards his love for Armida as at once dangerous and terrifyingly compelling. For both heroes, the Continental heroine is simultaneously an object of love and of fear. As Oswald says to Corinne, ‘I cannot but fear you as I love you!’ (Corinne, p. 98). As the course of their relationship proves, Connal’s fears are not entirely unfounded. Befitting her place as the daughter of the man who now owns the O’Moverns’ ancestral lands, Armida is frequently depicted as an insufferable reminder of past dispossession and indemnity. As Connal’s grandfather sees her, Armida is a person to be hated ‘mortally’ because ‘all his misfortunes are owing to [her] family, and in his rage he sometimes thinks that if he could shed [her] blood, all the charm would be broken, and he would be restored to his rights again’ (Milesian chief, 3: 143–4). In his nationalist fervour, obviously tinged with insanity, Connal’s grandfather believes Armida to be ‘Queen Elizabeth . . . the first cause of the Protestant heresy’ and understands Armida to have ‘c[o]me over from Italy to invade his country, and take his lands and castle from him’ (Milesian chief, 3: 144–5) – an event that foreshadows Owenson’s creation in O’Donnel of an Italian heroine, who first takes possession of the ancestral O’Donnel lands in order to turn them over to the O’Donnel heir, whom she then marries. While, however, Owenson’s O’Donnel reconciles himself to ownership by proxy as well as union with his ancient enemy, Maturin’s Irish chiefs are insistent only on revenge. Accordingly, Connal’s grandfather brands Armida a ‘traitress’, and, with his eyes ‘blaz[ing] with madness’, tells her: ‘I know you well, though you assume that appearance of youth and beauty to deceive me. You are the Queen of England: the false daughter of the heretic Henry. You have dispossessed me of my rightful dominion’ (Milesian chief, 3: 157–8). The memory of his family’s dispossession fresh in his mind, Connal’s grandfather emphasises the seamless continuity he understands between past, present, and future. With a ghostly Queen Elizabeth before him, he believes he can salvage his family’s fortunes by killing her and reclaiming his ancestral lands anachronistically.

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Connal ultimately saves Armida from his grandfather’s assassination attempt, but the narrative frequently posits the suggestion that Connal’s love for Armida fatally undermines his nationalist fervour. Indeed, Connal’s feelings for Armida draw him away from his espoused cause and translate into his emasculation, like that of Rinaldo in Armida’s enchanted garden in Gerusalemme liberata and Oswald in his contemplation of military desertion in Corinne. Moreover, Connal’s love for Armida literally prostrates him, sapping him of the superhuman strength with which he is characterised. Connal’s defence of Armida in the midst of the final, doomed stand of the rebels, for instance, is effected at the desertion of his own men and results in his physical failure and need for assistance: Connal, who had exhausted his utmost force in the last blow he had aimed, fell into the arms of the first who advanced to defend him. No conflict followed, for the rebels gathered in terror round their leader, whom they had never seen prostrate before. (Milesian chief, 4: 91)

A symbolic manifestation of his weakness for Armida, Connal’s vulnerability on the battlefield serves as a corporeal reminder of the emasculation generated by his love for Armida and her hold over him. More than that, it reminds the reader of the divisions Armida has caused, between Connal and Wandesford, and, by extension, Ireland and England, as well as between Connal and his men. As Esther Wohlgemut points out, it is Armida, who, in setting Connal and Wandesford in competition, actually ‘incites Irish rebellion’. Further, Wohlgemut argues, in fostering dissent within the ranks of Connal’s Irish army, thereby separating the Irish rebels into conflicting parties, one loyal to Connal and one to his secondin-command, Armida destroys any sense of Irish unity. In this way, Maturin’s cosmopolitan heroine ‘scramble[s] and divide[s]’. She becomes, in Wohlgemut’s terms, ‘a destabilizing outside force, the cause of Ireland’s social disorder’.14 Most obviously a physical demonstration of the dangers of his love for Armida, Connal’s bodily collapse on the battlefield also recalls the sense of Irish emasculation that accompanied Anglo-Irish Union. Since the Irish parliament embodied the country’s masculine public and political sphere, thereby identifying it as ‘a masculine nation’, its disestablishment effected the effeminisation of Ireland.15 For this reason, William Drennan (1754–1820) expressed outrage that Ireland should even consider the idea of Union: The nation, that does not feel the debasement of the very proposition, deserves to suffer the prostitution: for certain proposals may be made to individuals, in which the injury, monstrous as it is, is lost in the insult; which by the one sex can be repelled only by a look of ineffable contempt, and by the other, with a blow – so there are affronts to nations, on which controversy is contamination; as if we could be reasoned into making a capon of our country – an Eunuch of Ireland.16

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By accepting the inherently insulting proposition of national union with England, Drennan argued, Ireland was essentially agreeing to castration. Drennan’s image of Ireland as a eunuch aptly expressed his opposition to the coinciding disempowerment and effeminisation of Ireland that he understood would occur if Union were enacted. As he later expressed it in his poem ‘To Ireland’ (1815), post-Union Ireland was nothing but ‘A nation of abortive men, / That dart – the tongue; and point – the pen’.17 Reduced to a helpless tongue-wagger and ineffective pen-wielder, rather than active politician, Drennan’s post-Union Irishman was nothing better than ‘a wretched woman’.18 Not only politically effeminised by submission to Union, Ireland was also simultaneously stamped as racially inferior. In an era in which sexuality and race were very often conflated, post-Union Ireland became merely one of many British colonial regions – ‘female spaces making themselves available to the explorer, the settler, the adventurer’.19 Pro-unionists may have envisaged national marriage as an opportunity to profit from absorption into Britain, but for anti-unionists, it was shamefully symbolic of Irish submission to British violence and coercion.20 As the feminised wife-cum-colonial-subject, Ireland was cast as socially inferior, politically incapable, and in need of outside rule.21 Arguably in backlash against this degradation of Ireland in relation to England, Maturin allegorically insists on Armida’s final submission to Connal, effecting another radical transformation of the typical national tale. In effect, Maturin turns the national tale’s description of the fundamental submission of Irish heroine, notwithstanding her purity, independence, and amazing learnedness, to Anglo-Irish/English hero on its head, positing Ireland’s masculine victory over England allegorically, first, by picturing Connal, not Wandesford, as Armida’s chosen lover and, second, by depicting Armida submitting to Connal. In so doing, Maturin not only reinvests Ireland with an obviously male identity, he also specifically reverses the process of feminisation seen to occur with Union. Despite her position as a temptress, in fact, Maturin’s Armida, like Tasso’s Armida and de Staël’s Corinne before her, eventually falls prey to her inescapable and ultimately destructive love for her hero. Tasso’s Armida, for instance, relinquishes her powers out of love for Rinaldo. In this way, as Marilyn Migiel maintains, ‘[l]ove overcomes the hardness of Armida’s heart, thus undermining her female wiles’. In so doing, Migiel argues, love transforms Armida ‘from desired object . . . to unseen, desiring object’.22 Love proves similarly ruinous for Corinne. As she describes it, love for Oswald ‘troubles and enslaves me more each day’ (Corinne, p. 137). It is that which deprives her of her once-renowned talent, reliant as it is on ‘an independence that true love never allows’ (Corinne, p. 291). Stifling her vital creativity in this way, love ultimately leads to Corinne’s tragic and unhappy death.

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Echoing the situation of her models, Maturin’s Armida is described as ‘never [having] loved’ before meeting Connal, though it is suggested that she is made for love: ‘the energies of her heart are too powerful to be wasted even upon acquirements as splendid as her’s’ [sic] (Milesian chief, 1: 19). Her temptation of Connal, although initially proceeding from artifice and an expectation of Connal’s submission to her will, becomes rather an indication of her own captivation. Tellingly, the narrative endows this fascination with a darker connotation, presenting Armida’s love for Connal as an enslavement. Once again drawing from Gerusalemme liberata, Maturin’s narrative presents a scene recalling a central incident in Tasso’s text in which Armida begs Rinaldo to take her with him as his slave. Faced with Rinaldo’s anger after he has been revived from the spell keeping him in her power, Armida movingly declaims: Yet hence with thee deceiv’d Armida bear; The vanquish’d still attends the victor’s car: Let me be shewn, to all the camp display’d, The proud betrayer by thy guile betray’d, Wretch as I am! shall still these locks be worn, These locks that now are grown a lover’s scorn? These hands shall cut the tresses from my head, And o’er my limbs a servile habit spread: Thee will I follow ’midst surrounding foes, When all the fury of the battle glows. (Jerusalem delivered, 16: 337–46)

Similarly, Maturin’s Armida pleads with Connal to allow her to follow him wherever his fate leads him: ‘“I was a vain, proud girl, but I am no longer so: it was all false and affected, I can endure difficulty and want: I will be your faithful, humble mate,” she cried, with increasing agony’ (Milesian chief, 2: 82). In this way, Armida declares her submission to Connal, just as Tasso’s Armida proclaims hers, indicating the centrality of the ideas of submission and domestication in the novel. Indicatively, for Tasso’s Armida, domestication is both a requirement for happiness and an elusive and disappointing concept leading to a similarly discontented conclusion. Emphasising the necessity of Armida’s capitulation, Tasso describes her as not only relinquishing her powers but also submitting to Rinaldo and his religion: ‘Ah me! I yield! . . . Still on thy faith my easy heart relies! / ’Tis thine at will to guide my future way, / And, what thou bid’st, Armida must obey!’ (Jerusalem delivered, 20: 929–32). In the end, Armida’s threat to men, and, by extension, to authority, is effectively tempered by the proposition of her marriage to Rinaldo.23 Marriage proposed, however, is necessarily different from marriage enacted, and in fact, marriage remains a chimerical illusion in the poem, as the narrative continues to struggle over its

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heroine’s fate and her fundamental ability to achieve domestication. Armida’s seemingly happy ending is therefore fundamentally misleading, requiring her ultimate submission to Rinaldo without giving or even promising anything in return. Marriage is, as Melinda J. Gough observes, ‘never explicitly mentioned, much less enacted, within Tasso’s poem’. Consequently, the poem concludes with what Gough terms ‘ambiguity and . . . romance, which by its very nature resists completion and closure’.24 A similar resistance to marital completion and closure arguably also animates the narratives of de Staël’s Corinne and Maturin’s similarly modelled heroine. For the former, devastation and, ultimately, death, occurs when she is deserted by Oswald on his belief that she can never act – despite, ironically, her profession as an actress – as the ideal English wife her half-sister Lucile already naturally is. Described by Oswald’s father as ‘the kind of truly English woman who will make my son happy’ (Corinne, p. 319), Lucile is a domestic paragon who promises peace and contentment rather than the discord inevitably created not only by Corinne’s public identity but also by her conflicting national loyalties. When it becomes clear to him that Corinne will neither renounce her profession nor settle into British life and society, Oswald forsakes her and (reluctantly) embraces, instead, Lucile. Marriage with her represents Oswald’s dedication to what his father calls ‘the national spirit, the prejudices, if you like, which unite us and our nation’ (Corinne, p. 318).25 For Armida, the success or failure of her love for Connal is similarly seen to revolve around a domestication of sorts, in which she comes to learn about and love Ireland at the same time that she discards her famous and fashionable performativity. Both ends are achieved through the medium of Armida’s relationship with Connal. Love for him proves to be a truly transformative experience for Armida, just as love for Oswald is for Corinne. For both heroines, in fact, love not only dramatically changes them personally but also places them in an ambiguous position of borderlessness by forcing them to reconsider national loyalty. Without the anchor of their lovers – the representatives of the transforming ‘foreign’ culture – Corinne and Armida feel lost in this new world in which their former loyalties – their ‘cosmopolitan moorings’, as Ferris calls them26 – have been repeatedly questioned and broken down. It is for this reason that Corinne exclaims, ‘What would become of me in all situations of my life, if he ceased to love me, the most unhappy person in the world?’ (Corinne, p. 183). Armida, in her turn, observes, ‘Here the soul feels the difference between her natural and artificial demands: crowds, flattery, splendour, all are gone, and I would not give a single sigh to recall them: but what should I be, if deprived of the image of Connal’ (Milesian chief, 3: 125). Although Armida’s words highlight the transformation effected by Ireland

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as a necessary corollary to her love for Connal, they also forcefully emphasise Armida’s dependency on Connal. Love for him, like Corinne’s love for Oswald, becomes the only thing mooring her in place in the strangely amorphous world she enters in Ireland. Whereas, therefore, Lady Montrevor’s personal conversion, as symbolised by her discarding of performativity, is rewarded, at least outwardly, by domestic bliss in Ireland, Armida’s readoption of her ‘natural’ self proves disastrous. Maturin’s novel only briefly allows the reader to believe that Connal and Armida will eventually be united, and even that prospect is offered in the short-lived possibility of escape to America, where Connal promises to be truly miserable, irrevocably exiled from his native country. In fact, the only real hope of the happy domestic settlement traditionally seen to underpin Romantic national fiction in Ireland occurs in a secondary narrative concerning Connal’s brother Desmond and Armida’s half-sister, Ines. Raised in ignorance of her sister and father as well as (incredibly) her own sex, Ines believes herself to be a boy named Endymion. Her mother, Lady Montclare, who was deserted by Lord Montclare after failing to produce a son, has plotted with the evil monk, Morosoni, for years to wreak her revenge on her former husband. She plans to do so by presenting Endymion to Lord Montclare as his long-lost son, thereby claiming his wealth and land for herself and punishing him for the suffering and indignity to which he has subjected her. Before she can execute her plan, however, Endymion falls in love with Desmond who, after struggling with his apparently homosexual feelings, discovers Ines’s true identity. Suspecting Lady Montclare’s designs, Desmond marries Ines and escapes with her to a remote island where they are eventually discovered by Morosoni. In the aftermath of the ruin of their idyll, Desmond believes both his wife and unborn child have died, when in fact Ines still lives but has been driven mad by grief and hidden away by Lady Montclare in a desperate bid to salvage some of her plan. Part of this scheme involves convincing Armida to marry Desmond, an agreement into which the former enters believing it the only act that will save Connal from execution. Just as she is about to commit herself to Desmond, however, a ghostlike creature rushes on the scene, much as in The wild Irish girl. Not Horatio, however, but a hysterical Ines, this ghost halts the proceedings and leads the way for the scene of unmitigated death and horror with which the novel ends: in grief over his loss, Desmond ineffectively throws himself in front of the firing squad charged with executing Connal and dies with him and Armida on the bloody battlefield. Ines dies shortly thereafter. The couple’s brief interlude of happiness in their ‘fairy residence’ serves solely to reiterate Maturin’s essential argument that allegorical domestic ideology is highly problematic, given the nature of the modern reality in Ireland (Milesian chief, 4: 46). Crucially, the peace and contentment Ines and Desmond find

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occurs in complete segregation from society. Their retreat becomes an idyllic but isolated paradise, a hermitage that is no longer Ireland, but nature in its very essence. Yet, like nature, and, indeed, Ireland itself, this paradise is both unreal and unearthly, transforming the couple into ‘blessed spirits’ deserving the reverence of passing fishermen, who ‘crossed themselves as they rowed their boats near [their] retreat’ (Milesian chief, 4: 45). In this way, Desmond and Ines become severed from the real world, entering a secluded and bucolic refuge where their love can grow and flourish, unimpeded by the demands and constraints of vengeful family members and social strictures. As might be expected from the synopsis given above, their happiness is all too brief, and Maturin frequently gestures towards the elusive nature of contentment. A prime example of such narrative foreshadowing occurs when the two lovers are described by the allusive quote: ‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot’ (Milesian chief, 4: 45). An obvious reference to Pope’s 1717 poem Eloisa to Abelard, this line draws a distinct parallel between Maturin’s characters and those in Pope’s poem, which recounts the illicit and ultimately devastating affair between the young girl, Eloisa, and her tutor, Abelard. Discovered by her parents, the relationship ends with the literal emasculation of Abelard and the retirement of both lovers to religious cloister. Where, however, Abelard is now immune to sexual passion, Eloisa continues to struggle with her feelings for her former lover. Maturin’s excerpt is taken from Eloisa’s extended lament over her lover’s coldness and her own inability to forget or, indeed, repent their former relationship: How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sun-shine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d; Labour and rest, that equal periods keep; ‘Obedient slumbers that can wake and weep’; Desires compos’d, affections ever ev’n.27

As such, it purposefully alludes to Eloisa’s wish that she had never learned ‘’twas no sin to love’ (Eloisa to Abelard, p. 68). By inserting this seemingly innocuous reference to Pope’s poem, Maturin consciously juxtaposed his happy lovers with the ill-fated Eloisa and Abelard. In so doing, he forcefully suggested that they, like poor Eloisa, can never share ‘the blameless Vestal’s lot’, as their desires and affections, neither ‘compos’d’ nor ‘ev’n’, finally augur only death and destruction. Fittingly, the Gothic negativity evident in the relationships between Connal and Armida on the one hand and Desmond and Ines on the other is reflected in the continued savagery and mercilessness of nature itself. Upon Armida’s first

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introduction to Ireland, as Ferris points out,28 the country is described as ‘brown, stony, and mountainous’, although it also appears ‘as if the sun never shone on it, as if it lay for ever under the grey and watery sky’ (Milesian chief, 1: 54). As the political stakes mount in the increasing fomentation of rebellion, the natural landscape and scenery assume an even more sinister aspect. The country, bereft of all contentment and peace, shrouds itself in an appropriately mournful and vengeful atmospheric cloak: The sun set: the country was one bleak expanse of snow, intersected by tracts of bog, to which the unfrozen water gave a dusky hue; and the sky, livid and lowering with the pallid gloom of winter, seemed to denounce all its terrors against the travellers. (Milesian chief, 2: 185)

Personifying the Irish sky as ‘livid’ and ‘lowering’, Maturin aptly expresses the forbidding and foreboding nature of the Irish environment, which vitally informs the speech and actions of both Connal and Armida. Both characters tellingly echo the characterisation of nature as a destructive force from which they cannot escape. For Connal, ‘life is an ocean in storm’ (Milesian chief, 2: 38). Determined to weather the storm that is the Irish rebellion, Connal vows not to sink ‘without a struggle’, although he realises that failure is certain: ‘hopeless, heartless, fortuneless – cut off from life, almost forgotten by heaven, what have I to do with love?’ (Milesian chief, 2: 38). Similarly, for Armida, Ireland promises to devastate her, emotionally and physically. Entirely appropriately, therefore, she envisions the Irish rebellion as a storm that, potentially promising to ‘fertilize’ the country, nevertheless ‘crushes the rose and violet into dust’ (Milesian chief, 2: 175). Connal himself is frequently presented as a fearful figure – a vampire, a cannibal, and a ghost – that threatens not only to terrify Armida but also to annihilate her. Although Connal may fear the hold Armida has on him, she has just as much to fear from him. When she first hears of the ‘ruined Milesian family’ from which Connal descends, Armida imagines Connal non-threateningly: nursed amid the strife of pride and want, so favourable to the romantic spirit that appeases the gnawings of actual distress by listening to tales of high-seated ancestry, that comforts itself in being compelled to inhabit ruins by tracing among them the remains of ancient palaces; that like the spirit in Otranto stalks amid its ancient seat till is smells beyond it, and stands forth amid the fragments dilated and revealed, terrifying the intrusion of modern usurpers. (Milesian chief, 1: 52)

Armida’s conception of the ruins Connal inhabits and the feelings inspired by these ruins – conceived before her journey to Ireland – is, as Ferris points out, based on ‘the picturesque aesthetic of ruin’.29 In other words, it understands the ruin as ‘allow[ing] for a nostalgic turn to a heroic national past away from the

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mean-minded and utilitarian present’.30 Armida’s reference to Walpole’s Gothic tale, The castle of Otranto (1764) – conventionally seen as the first Gothic novel – is significant in this context, for it suggests the ways in which the past signified by ruins will violently interrupt the present upon her arrival in Ireland. Indeed, just as Walpole constructs his novella around the idea ‘that the sins of fathers are visited on their children to the third and fourth generations’,31 The Milesian chief makes it clear that the past spectrally stalks the present, demanding revenge. For this reason, as Ferris observes, Connal angrily discounts Armida’s nostalgic and abstract notion of ruins and proposes instead that such monuments not only remind him of the dead but also force him to act for the dead. Against Armida’s romantic ‘dream[s]’ of the past, Connal has very real ‘recollections’ (Milesian chief, 1: 186; 3: 119). While she can imagine the dead buried in the ruined abbey to which he takes her, he asserts, ‘I feel who lies below’ (Milesian chief, 1: 187; my emphasis).32 Not only does Connal preserve an intimate connection with the dead, he himself is presented as their living-dead and dead-living representative. Roaming through the graves of Connal’s ancestors, attempting to resume confidence in her picturesque sense of ruin, Armida stumbles upon a gravestone with the name ‘Connal O’Morven, prince and chief of the isles’ engraved on it (Milesian chief, 1: 187). Although the gravestone evidently refers to one of Connal’s long-dead ancestors, it is nevertheless emblematic of Connal’s ghostly representation of the past colonial violence that has degraded his family. From ‘prince and chief’, Connal has become merely another impoverished, disempowered, and dispossessed Irishman but, as suggested by the spectral resurrection of a predegradation ancestor represented in his name, he vitally remembers as well as speaks of and for past glory and honour. Armida is right, therefore, to feel ‘terror’ in Connal’s presence (Milesian chief, 1: 129): as the representative of the colonial powers that have effectively unmanned Connal and deprived him of a power that is not just a distant, dead idea but a present, living one, she should be the target of his ire. Much like Connal himself, therefore, Armida views her lover with as much fear as affection. Unsurprisingly, therefore, as Ferris points out, Connal is frequently depicted throughout the novel as a vampire, stalking Armida with bloodsucking intent. Armida’s first encounter with Connal, for instance, as Ferris observes, constructs her as a passive victim awaiting her vampire lover’s bite.33 As she is about to be thrown from her carriage over a steep cliff and to almost certain death, Armida sees Connal rushing forward to save her but, in her ‘terror’, believes he is ‘rushing forward to seize and dash her from the precipice’ (Milesian Chief, 1: 58). That Connal saves rather than kills her is less a source of joy for Armida than of continued unease over the harm he may do her in future. Having fainted at Connal’s approach, Armida awakens to find him bent over her like a vampire over his victim: ‘she had then a faint recollection of a tall figure

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bending over her, and a long curl of raven hair touching her cheek as in a dream’ (Milesian chief, 1: 58). Connal’s presentation as a vampiric figure preying on Armida reverses the relationship Owenson later imaged when she spoke of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy as a vampire sucking the life-blood from Ireland: ‘for it was ever, as it is now, the singular destiny of Ireland to nourish within her own bosom her bitterest enemies, who, with a species of political vampyrism, destroyed that source from whence their own nutriment flowed’.34 As Claire Connolly suggests, Owenson’s verbal illustration is that of ‘[a] ravished Ireland helplessly trapped in a cycle of victimhood’.35 While Owenson presents this victimhood as imposed on Ireland by England’s colonial presence, for Maturin, it seems, it is the native Irish represented by Connal who offer the real threat. Throughout the novel, in fact, Connal and his men are portrayed as cannibals, feeding off the country and people they are meant to be championing. As one peasant woman says, offering the body of her son, killed in the disastrous rebellion, as food for the starving rebels: ‘there he lies: you have laid him there. There is the feast I promised you: you may devour him yourself, for that is all you have left me to give you’ (Milesian chief, 4: 120). This deployment of the cannibal trope in The Milesian chief significantly transposes the cannibalism found in Swift’s A modest proposal, in which a novel solution to hunger and starvation in Ireland is proposed: kill, pickle, and eat the multitude of poor children running wild in the streets.36 Arguably, Swift’s central argument in his pamphlet is that, as Killeen maintains, ‘Ireland has herself surrendered to starvation’. Killeen further contends that the main problem, according to Swift, was not the damaging economic situation created by British regulations but the fact that the Irish people themselves, and in particular the Irish women, ‘d[id] not know how to help themselves’, and, even worse, ‘d[id] not care’.37 In this context, Connal’s cannibalistic rebellion in The Milesian chief becomes just another part of the problem. Not knowing how to resolve Ireland’s fissures within its Union with England, Connal and his rebels embark on a mission that proves not only futile but also destructive, plunging Ireland even further into suffering, hardship, and discontent. Further, their rebellion functions as a climactic event in a continuous process of victimisation, which, the text suggests, will perpetually repeat itself unless Ireland’s adherence to the past is forfeited. Connal himself, despite his terrific power over Armida and his authority as a rebel leader, falls prey to victimisation by the past. Raised by his grandfather, who remains perpetually possessed by memories of the past and is driven to madness in contemplating ‘his pride and his misfortunes’, Connal is schooled in ancient tradition and legends in order to bring to fruition his grandfather’s ‘frantic idea of wresting Ireland from the English hand’ (Milesian chief, 3: 49). Maturity, however, teaches Connal the futility of such a revolt, as he begins to believe

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that an independent Ireland is not a feasible or rational option. Nevertheless, having committed himself to the cause, Connal determines to carry it through, not from a sense of potential success but from a desire not to betray his followers: ‘I thought of the ties that bound me to the brave men who had embraced it, and I determined to stand by them to the last’ (Milesian chief, 3:52). In this way, Connal’s accountability is carefully and consciously minimised, as Fiona Robertson argues. Although he leads the rebels in their revolt, he is shown to be as much victim as victimiser, caught up in the rebellion by what appears to be an almost ‘Edward-Waverley-like series of special circumstances’.38 Intriguingly, a similar situation occurs in John Banim’s later historical novel, The Boyne water (1826). Given Banim’s Catholic background, his native Irish characters are naturally depicted in a manner contrasting to Maturin’s Connal. Instead of representing a misguided tenaciousness to a threatening native Irish past, the Catholic McDonnells emerge as, in Emer Nolan’s terms, ‘civil and “modern”, rather than strange and barbaric’. This is so, Nolan persuasively maintains, because Banim’s desire to exonerate nineteenth-century Irish Catholics from the wrongs of the past required an illustration valorising their ancestors as rational, civilised beings.39 Fittingly, as Nolan points out, Edmund McDonnell speaks ‘warmly’ of the confiscation of his father’s lands but nevertheless regards it with an equanimity betokening a rational loyalty and obedience to the ‘new order of things’. It is, as he says, ‘the chance of the world, and I am content’ (Boyne water, 1: 130–1). Nevertheless, McDonnell’s passive acceptance and support of the ‘new order’, echoed by other Irish Catholic characters before war breaks out, never fully convinces the reader of the Irish ‘willingness . . . to forgive and forget’.40 Indeed, under the influence of the radically sectarian Friar O’Haggerty, McDonnell enters into the Jacobite army, charged with leading a company of thirty thousand Irish men. Having dedicated himself to the Jacobite cause, however, McDonnell soon finds himself unjustly released from his office in King James’s army for alleged treachery – an accusation proceeding from assistance rendered to his Protestant friend Robert Evelyn, now an officer in King William’s army. Grief is added to shame when McDonnell, returning to his ancestral home, discovers it in ruins and his father brutally murdered by the infamous Major-General Percy Kirke. Faced with these trials, McDonnell confirms his own radical commitment to the Jacobite cause by becoming a rapparee. Although McDonnell himself seems not to carry out any of the rapparee missions – clandestine activities comprised of questionable and outright illegal practices – he is nevertheless depicted as the director of the group, having challenged the historical Galloping Hogan – the infamous rapparee leader and subsequent traitor – and bested him in a contest for leadership. In this way, McDonnell’s participation in sectarian violence is simultaneously established as an

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actively pursued goal and de-emphasised as a fundamentally violent or offensive activity. It is further explained away by McDonnell’s sister, Eva, as ‘error and madness’ induced by ‘despair and impetuosity’, which can, by the end of the novel, be regarded by McDonnell with a ‘calmed and reflective spirit’ desiring ‘an opportunity to re-assume the rank and bearing more worthy of his nature and name’ (Boyne water, 3: 417, 416). McDonnell’s calmness as the rapparee’s leader – ‘all was quietness about him; he looked a calm, unruffled, reflective man’ (Boyne water, 3: 324) – represents one stage in what Nolan identifies as ‘the usual pattern of response to grief or loss in the novel’ – ‘a period of real or feigned insanity, followed by an almost deathly resignation’.41 If McDonnell’s descent into madness in response to his despair induces the temporary loss of his ‘true’ identity, his desire, as Eva suggests, to ‘re-assume’ his former identity and salvage his reputation reads as a Waverley-like process, whereby his actions are rescued from the implication of impropriety. As a result, McDonnell’s rapparee activity becomes excusable as the product of a mind torn asunder by grief – a mind, in other words, not knowing the significance of its actions and therefore necessarily unaccountable. Of course, in Connal O’Morven’s case, an awareness of the futility of his rebellion crucially underpins the undertaking from the very start. Correspondingly, Connal is victimised not by the irrationality of a mind driven mad by grief but by the irrational, ontological hold the past exerts over his otherwise rational mind. In this way, he remains a vitally sympathetic character, even from Maturin’s perspective. Despite the power he wields as a rebel leader, he is, in many ways, a powerless, passive figure. In endowing Connal with a passivity counter to his leadership of a national rebellion, Maturin provides himself with what Fiona Robertson terms ‘an outlet for his nationalistic sympathies’. Through Connal, Robertson suggests, Maturin could safely triumph the idea of Irish self-determination, knowing that the opportunity for such self-determination had been ‘lost for ever’ with Union.42 Despite Connal’s essentially sympathetic nature, however, Maturin’s description of his rebellion is underwritten largely by fear, rather than the placid resignation Robertson’s arguments suggest. He may not ‘[fear] to speak’ of 1798 or rebellion in general, as Richard Kells Ingram later worried that people did, but Maturin speaks of these past events and conjures their ghosts in the pages of his novel in order precisely to conjure them away.43 For this reason, in fact, Connal’s rebellion must fail. Even if it combats the oppressive hold of a foreign, English regime against which Maturin bridled, it nevertheless revives memories of recent and all too vividly remembered events – the 1798 Rebellion and Emmet’s 1803 insurrection. Should Connal’s rebellion succeed where these earlier rebellions failed, Maturin’s novel suggests, the ontological hold of a destructively atavistic Gaelic

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past over the hearts and minds of the Irish peasantry would be confirmed, and the Anglo-Irish population would have more to fear from violent native Irish reprisals than ever. Moreover, in the run up to Catholic Emancipation (1829) – an event Maturin clearly opposed, as indicated by his Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church – Maturin takes the opportunity of highlighting Catholic failure, suggesting not only his fear of past upheaval but also his deep anxiety over future disruption mirroring the past – or, in other words, the endless repetition of the past. This fear, coincidentally, is also at the heart of The Boyne water, which envisions Union as a repeat of the unsatisfactory conclusion to the Jacobite–Williamite Wars in which what was promised to Ireland’s Catholic population largely failed to materialise. Similarly, Catholic support for Union relied on the implicit promise of emancipation to follow soon after Union was enacted. Anger, disappointment, and bitterness resulted when it became clear that this assurance was empty. In the run up to emancipation in 1829, Banim makes it clear that he fears a recurrence of such disappointments, ominously if apparently optimistically writing, ‘[t]he descendants of the men who have sanctioned, and by that means caused the deliberate breach of their own treaty . . . will yet pay their fathers’ debt of faith to Ireland’ (Boyne water, 3: 436). That two such novels, poised on either side of the sectarian divide, can evince a fear of an all too cyclical pattern of history attests to the ways in which the haunting past breached normative social borders in early nineteenth-century Ireland. Indeed, the fear or, as Shanahan suggests in relation to discourse on 1798, the fears of the past are evident in much of the literature produced in Ireland – fictional and otherwise – in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.44 Anglo-Irish writers in particular, in dealing with the violence of 1798, frequently turned to the 1641 rebellion as proof that the past was repeating itself. In this supposition, they seemed justified when faced with the 1803 rebellion and, later, the fomentation of the Emancipation campaign. Such repetitions were clearly on Maturin’s mind in writing The Milesian chief, which narratologically provides frequent, ghostly glimpses back on to the earlier events that foreshadow Connal’s uprising. On her way to join Connal in his rebellion, for instance, Armida passes the spot in which ‘a man [was] hung in chains for murder in the last rebellion . . . and his skeleton [remains] swinging on the gibbet, in every blast of wind’ (Milesian chief, 3: 34–5). Although reminiscent of a similar scene described in Wordsworth’s two part Prelude (1799),45 Maturin’s scene promises none of the ‘fructifying’ effects Wordsworth derives from his experience with the dreadful reminder of past violence.46 Instead, it forebodes the similar end Connal will meet; like the banshee Connal describes to Armida earlier in the novel, this spectral reminder of history augurs the defeat of Connal’s rebellion and the punishment its leader will receive for his treachery.

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Similar memories of 1798 and 1803 impel Connal later to change his military tactics:

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Connal perceived them [the English troops] approaching, and remembering the event of the engagement in 1798, in which the Lords O’Neil and Mountjoy fell, drew up his wounded and scattered ranks in as close order as the broken ground admitted, and received the charge upon their extended pikes. (Milesian chief, 3: 109)

Although the English forces never ‘discover .  .  . any disturbance .  .  . in the adjacent counties’ and believe there is no ‘connexion between this and the rebellion of 1798’, seeing it instead as another ‘Emmet’s insurrection, the isolated and hopeless attempt of a single enthusiast’ (Milesian chief, 2: 143), Connal is evidently animated by both earlier disturbances. In a sense, then, the defeat of Connal’s insurrection spells, for Maturin, the ontological success of Union. Maturin’s image of the final, tragic conclusion to rebellion and the necessary deaths of both Connal and Armida allegorically represents the only kind of ‘Glorvina solution’ Maturin can envision: the final burial of the past and its supporters in preference for dedication to a modernity in which Anglo-Irish hegemony is confirmed by way of Union. Even with Connal’s death, however, Maturin is forced to admit that the simple execution of the representatives of the past cannot provide adequate closure. Instead, Maturin suggests, Ireland remains a ruin haunted by the ghosts of those who have sacrificed themselves in her name. For this reason, The Milesian chief ends not, as we might expect, with Connal’s execution and Armida’s concomitant suicide but, instead, with a peculiar image of their graves. Wandering ‘on the spot where the lovers rest together’, Armida’s friend and companion, Rosine St Austin, retreats from ‘barren’ reality to a ‘world .  .  . brighteus in the contrast’, where she ‘remember[s] their virtues, their charms, and their misfortunes’ (Milesian chief, 4: 203). Mythologising Connal and Armida, Rosine registers the couple as romantic legend, suggesting that only in and through romance can they escape the history of violence, and, what is more, the violence of history, that had finally doomed them to death. Romance, however, only problematically distances this brutal reality. Connal’s grave itself, marked with a ‘simple inscription’ reading ‘Thou sleepest, but we do not forget thee’, recalls Connal as a spectral and vampiric presence (Milesian chief, 4: 204). Stalking the present, the figure of the ‘undead’ and ‘unforgotten’ Connal evocatively indicates the narrative’s inability either to contain historical violence or effectively to deal with the divisions of the modern nation. In Derrida’s terms, we might read Maturin’s novel as, on the one hand, mourning the failure of past attempts to achieve Irish independence and, on the

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other, fatally scuppering the project of mourning in which it engages. The work of mourning, Derrida contends, revolves around a firm knowledge of the dead and the dead’s place in the world: One has to know. One has to know it. One has to have knowledge . . . Now, to know is to know who and where, to know whose body it really is and what place it occupies – for it must stay in its place. In a safe place . . . Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt; one has to know who is buried where – and it is necessary (to know – to make certain) that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and move no more!47

As is made eminently clear from the fearful image of a resurrected Connal and its implication of a repetition of the past, Maturin believes the certainty on which mourning is predicated impossible in modern Ireland. The past and its victims are never simply dead and gone, nor can Ireland itself engage in ‘the work of mourning’ of which Derrida speaks. Instead, spectrally haunted by the past – a past that, in Maturin’s mind, threatened to re-emerge in the campaign for Catholic Emancipation – Ireland remains centrally confused and doubtful. Imaging, quite literally in the case of Connal’s resurrection of his ancestor, the present movements of an apparently dead past, Maturin’s novel powerfully expresses his awareness of the futility of the national tale’s desire for reconciliation, closure, and unification. As Maturin himself was all too aware, nineteenthcentury Ireland remained conspicuously divided, not only from other nations but internally as well. Above all else, post-Union Ireland was, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, ‘internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference’. Highlighting what Bhabha calls the ‘otherness of the peopleas-one’, Maturin’s novel becomes a ‘counter-narrative’. Repeatedly calling to mind the ‘totalizing boundaries’ established in the national tale and historical novel, which ideologically attempt to give to Ireland, as an ‘imagined community’, an ‘essentialist’ identity, it simultaneously deconstructs them. In other words, The Milesian chief challenges the largely romantic ‘strategy of the performative’ in ‘the production of the nation as narration’, in order to highlight the reality of the nation’s pedagogical identity.48 A fractured and torn society, Maturin’s Ireland is nothing like the peaceful, unified nation pro-unionists would have liked to envision. Nor does it resemble the Ireland we tend to believe the national tale and historical novel illustrate – contented with Union and enjoying, or at least destined to enjoy, a national relationship with England much like the supposed marriage of equals depicted within their pages. Instead, it is an irrefutably Gothic Ireland, shrouded in terrific, natural gloom mirroring the final devastation of country and characters

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alike. In this nightmare world, Ireland remains riven by the movement of the dead, a fragmentation that finds apt expression in the interstitial narrative created by Maturin’s combination of Gothic novel, national tale, and historical novel. Most strikingly, perhaps, Maturin’s narrative is split essentially in two. Its major concern rests with the storyline concerning Armida and Connal, but its secondary narrative diverts attention away from these protagonists and on to an even more apparently Gothic story. Like the interpolated tales of Melmoth the wanderer and earlier Gothic novels such as The children of the abbey, The romance of the forest, and The monk, the tale of Desmond and Ines reinforces the novel’s central moral. Where, however, tales like that of Laurentini di Udolpho in The mysteries of Udolpho or of Mrs Marlowe in The children of the abbey emphasise the necessity of containing excessive passion, vanity, and caprice, Maturin’s story underlines Ireland’s inescapably Gothic nature, fittingly constructing it as a tragically haunted country unable to offer any kind of safe refuge for its people. Inhabiting a society that is never characterised by composure or evenness, as Pope’s poem suggests, Armida, Connal, Desmond, and Ines can never forget, or be forgotten by, the world in which they live. Although they may be doomed to death and destruction from the very start, they face an even worse fate in the surety that, like the past itself, they will be condemned relentlessly to haunt and disrupt the world they leave behind. Notes 1 Charles Robert Maturin, The Milesian chief, introd. Robert Lee Wolff, 4 vols (1812; New York: Garland, 1979), 1: 54. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. For a discussion of Ireland as a ‘planète fantastique’ in The Milesian chief, see Claude Fierobe, ‘C. R. Maturin: nationalisme et fantastique’, Études Irlandaises, 9 (1984), 43–55. 2 The concept of the Sublime was crucial to Romantic thought and literature and fundamentally influenced the Gothic novel. Although many theorists and writers attempted to explain and describe the Sublime, arguably the most significant in terms of the Gothic novel and Romantic literary output as a whole was that put forth by Edmund Burke in his A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1757). In that work, Burke proposed that the Sublime was the most intense emotion the human mind was able to experience and that the individual’s encounter with the Sublime relied on a situation of mingled fear and pleasure. 3 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 104. 4 Sydney Owenson, O’Donnel: a national tale (1814; Gloucester: Dodo Press, 2008), unpaginated preface. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 5 Quoted in Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 104.

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6 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 102. 7 Fiona Robertson, Legitimate histories: Scott, Gothic, and the authorities of fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 224. 8 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 141. 9 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 118. 10 Robertson (Legitimate histories, p. 219), for instance, contends that Armida represents a composite of Maturin’s wife, the eponymous heroine of de Staël’s Corinne, and Owenson’s Glorvina. 11 Gerusalemme liberata was translated into English as early as 1594 and remained an essential literary influence for several centuries afterwards. The first complete English translation of the text was published by Edward Fairfax in 1600 and another by John Hoole in 1763. The latter was widely read in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and served as the translation with which Romantic writers such as Scott, Wordsworth, and Southey would have been familiar. In addition to these translations, Gerusalemme liberata inspired a number of theatrical, poetical, and operatic adaptations, including John Dennis’s Rinaldo and Armida (1698), Handel’s Rinaldo (1711), Francis Lathom’s Orlando and Seraphina (1800), and Haydn’s Armida (1783). The incredible popularity of literary translations and musical versions of Tasso’s original as well as the tale’s widespread influence on Maturin’s contemporaries suggest that Maturin would have had ready access to the poem. Moreover, Maturin’s classical education and voracious reading undoubtedly would have exposed him to some rendition of the epic. See C. P. Brand, Torquato Tasso: a study of the poet and his contribution to English literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 226–76. 12 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 332, note 60. 13 Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem delivered; an heroic poem translated from the Italian of Torquato Tasso, by John Hoole, 2 vols (4th ed.; London: 1772). Available from Eighteenth century collections online, http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/, accessed 13 January 2006, 4: 260. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text, with first book number (rather than volume number), then verse number(s). In my comparisons of Maturin’s Milesian chief and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, I have chosen to use Hoole’s translation because of the greater popularity it enjoyed during the late eighteenth century, when Maturin would have been receiving his education. On popular preference for Hoole’s translation, rather than Fairfax’s, in the late eighteenth century, see Brand, Torquato Tasso, pp. 264–5, and Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (eds), Godfrey of Bulloigne; a critical edition of Edward Fairfax’s translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, together with Fairfax’s original poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 39–40. 14 Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, pp. 192, 195. 15 Jane Elizabeth Dougherty, ‘Mr and Mrs England: the Act of Union as national marriage’, in Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), Acts of union (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), p. 207. 16 William Drennan, A letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt (Dublin: James Moore, 1799), pp. 32–3; quoted in Dougherty, ‘Mr and Mrs England’, p. 206.

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17 William Drennan, ‘To Ireland’, Fugitive pieces, in verse and prose (Belfast: F. D. Finlay, 1815), p. 13. 18 William Drennan, Letters of Orellana, an Irish helot (Dublin: J. Chambers & T. Heery, 1785); quoted in Ó Gallchoir, Maria Edgeworth: women, enlightenment, nation, p. 51. Here, Drennan is referring to the Irish Volunteers and, in his mind, their inability satisfactorily to achieve their stated goals, as Ó Gallchoir (Maria Edgeworth, p. 51) points out. However, his description of the effeminisation of the Volunteers works equally well with his thoughts on Union and its emasculating effect on Ireland. 19 Alan Bewell, Romanticism and colonial disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 23. 20 Dougherty, ‘Mr and Mrs England’, p. 207. 21 Corbett, Allegories of Union, p. 16. 22 Marilyn Migiel, Gender and genealogy in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), p. 137. 23 Ibid., p. 130. 24 Melinda J. Gough, ‘Tasso’s enchantress, Tasso’s captive woman’, Renaissance quarterly, 54.2 (2001), 546. 25 Morin, ‘Undermining morality?’. 26 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 121. 27 Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard, in Geoffrey Tillotson (ed.), The rape of the lock and other poems, in John Butt (gen. ed.), The Twickenham edition of the poems of Alexander Pope, vol. II (1717; London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 336–7, ll. 207–13. 28 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, pp. 120–1. See also Fierobe, ‘C. R. Maturin: nationalisme and fantastique’, pp. 46–7. 29 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, p. 111. 30 Ibid., p. 104. 31 Horace Walpole, The castle of Otranto, ed. and introd. W. S. Lewis (1764; London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 5. 32 Ferris, The Romantic national tale, pp. 115–16. 33 Ibid., p. 121. 34 Quoted in Claire Connolly, ‘Writing the Union’, in Keogh and Whelan (eds), Acts of union, p. 185. 35 Connolly, ‘Writing the Union’, p. 185. 36 See Jonathan Swift, A modest proposal, in Herbert Davis (ed.), Irish tracts 1728–1733 (1729; Oxford: Blackwell, 1971), pp. 109–18. 37 Killeen, Gothic Ireland, p. 110. 38 Robertson, Legitimate histories, p. 223. 39 Emer Nolan, ‘Banim and the historical novel’, in Belanger (ed.), The Irish novel in the nineteenth century, p. 84. 40 Ibid., p. 85. 41 Ibid. 42 Robertson, Legitimate histories, p. 224. 43 Ingram’s 1843 poem, ‘The memory of the dead’, contains the famous verse, ‘Who

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fears to speak of ninety-eight?’; quoted in Shanahan, ‘Fearing to speak’, p. 32. As Shanahan (p. 33) points out, Ingram worried that ‘the more noble actions, aims and intentions of the rebellion would be forgotten or misrepresented’, but many fears, not just one, were associated with the memory of 1798. Shanahan, ‘Fearing to speak’, p. 32. See Stephen Parrish (ed.), The prelude, 1798–1799, by William Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) p. 50, ll. 299–313. Ibid., p. 50, l. 290. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 9. Homi K. Bhabha, The location of culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 145, 148, 149, 150.

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Narrating history: the burden of words in Women; or pour et contre

‘These lips cannot speak’: Ireland’s linguistic excess and failure As with The Milesian chief, Women; or pour et contre (1818), Maturin’s fourth novel, concludes with a sense of tragedy encompassing not only death and destruction but ongoing despair for its central characters. Ending with a horrifying scene in which the Continental beauty, Zaira Dalmatiani, having discovered her longlost daughter, now dead, to be her one-time rival in love, is driven crazy with grief and desolation, the text attests to the terrifying result of the past’s return in the present. As she repeatedly utters, ‘My child – I have murdered my child’ (Women, 3: 408), Zaira provides a moving testimony to the fear driving Irish Romantic literary production – the destructive intrusion of the past. More than that, Zaira’s competition with her own daughter for the love of the hero, Charles De Courcy, mirrors the internal, religious conflicts Maturin describes as dividing contemporary Ireland. In particular, Women explores the current state of religious sectarianism in Ireland, focusing not, as we might expect, on the traditional Irish factionalism of Protestantism and Catholicism but on the internal segregation of the Church of Ireland into competing orthodox and evangelical groups. Representing Methodism – an evangelical Protestant sect that was quickly gaining ground in early nineteenth-century Ireland just as Catholic Emancipation was heating up – as a dangerous new (re)incarnation of Catholicism, in fact, Women investigates the perilous power of religious controversy. A country riven not only by increasing support for Catholic Emancipation but also by what Maturin describes as a war of words created by Evangelicalism’s destructively deafening debates over theological questions, however minor, Ireland is, in essence, a latter-day Tower of Babel. Unable to hear or understand each other in the chaotic cacophony of oppositional voices in Ireland, Maturin’s characters fully experience the ‘communicative pathology’ first explored in The wild Irish boy. In its emphasis on the internal segregations of contemporary Ireland as well as its understanding of Methodism as a haunting resurrection of Catholicism and

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its potential for rebellion, Women very much follows in the footsteps of Maturin’s earlier novels. Conventionally, however, it has been considered ‘an oddity in its author’s literary production’,1 not easily traced either to the Gothic novel or to the national tale – Maturin’s main literary influences. Nevertheless, from the beginning, Women is consistently underwritten by Gothic themes and imagery. Midnight abductions, vampiric figures, foreboding dreams, and prophetic mad women insistently remind the reader of the Gothic’s disintegration of normalcy and unity as well as its inevitable and inexorable progress towards chaos and entropy. Moreover, with its two central female characters, Women presents a permutation of what we now understand as the conventional national tale plot. Envisioning his hero torn between these two women, Maturin explores the problematic issues of motherhood, domesticity, and female propriety as he attempts to define a suitable figure of womanhood on which to settle a satisfactory image of national union. In the end, neither Zaira nor Eva can serve as the ideal, nationally unifying figure, and the allegorical marriage now considered, however erroneously, the hallmark of the national tale, never occurs. Instead, marriage is devolved on to minor characters considered as, in Scott’s words, ‘rather too silly for the rank which they are represented as holding in good society’.2 Writing once again across or between the boundaries established by current literary criticism’s definitions of the Gothic and the national, therefore, Maturin creates in Women a text that is entirely thematically consistent with his previous works and is, like them, a composite narrative encompassing a wide range of literary forms and modes. In Women, in fact, Gothic novel, national tale, society novel, and theological debate merge, not only attesting to the wide range of literary influences evident in Maturin’s oeuvre but also effecting a striking plurality of voices – literary, religious, political, and otherwise. Repeated references and allusions to a wide range of classical and contemporary literature throughout the narrative further add to this vocal chorus echoing throughout Maturin’s novel. Once again, however, traditional analyses of Women have ignored the incredible variety and breadth of Maturin’s influences, maintaining instead that the novel is simply another opportunistic imitation, this time of de Staël’s Corinne. Even Walter Scott suggested as much, writing that Zaira so closely resembled Corinne ‘as certainly to deprive Mr Maturin of all claim to originality, so far as this brilliant and well painted character is concerned’.3 Yet, where Corinne’s influence is evident in Maturin’s novel, it is only one of a striking number of intertextual references inserted throughout the narrative. Such allusions, like those in the Irish works of Edgeworth and Owenson, foster ‘a sense of knowledge shared’ as well as an idea of the author’s contemporary ‘reading community’ and its shared literary experiences.4 At the same time, they create a multiplicity of voices that not only textually mirrors the internal space and events of the narrative itself but

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also provides the reader with important clues to interpreting and understanding the text. Maturin’s deployment of a vast body of literary allusions in Women thus allows the voices of other authors and a variety of literary forms to speak to and inform the reader. These extra clues to Maturin’s meaning and intent are useful to the reader, but they also serve to highlight the opposing ways in which speech frequently acts in the narrative itself. Working from the maxim that, ‘Without controversy . . . great is the mystery of godliness’ (Women, 1: 149), Maturin’s Methodist characters thrive on clamorous theological debate and largely ignore issues that De Courcy considers to be far more pressing than minor differences of theological doctrine – the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, and Catholic Emancipation. Although, as Irene Whelan remarks, the Wesleyan Methodism that initially flourished in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland ‘was characterized by an open and spontaneous approach to religion; [and] as John Wesley described it, “all controversial points were left alone and Christ alone was preached”’,5 in the face of the campaign for Catholic Emancipation the universalising interests of the early Methodist community in Ireland ‘gave way to denominational self-interest’.6 In this way, as David Hempton remarks, ‘Methodism’s objective of forming an interdenominational association of religious societies foundered on the rocks of Irish sectarianism, and on its own upward social mobility’.7 Responding but also contributing to religious debate and competition in pre-Emancipation Ireland, Methodism becomes, in Maturin’s text, a dangerously divisive force in Irish society. His novel’s exaggerated account of the gleeful querulousness of its Methodist characters highlights Maturin’s belief in the movement’s contribution to the breakdown of Anglo-Irish solidarity, precisely at the moment when such cohesion was essential to the continued strength and, indeed, existence of Protestant hegemony in Ireland. To speak of the burden of words in Women, therefore, is to point to the central role that speech, words, and plurality play in the narrative as in its construction. In Maturin’s text, words function as the ‘chief theme; leading idea; prevailing sentiment’ at the same time that they also represent a heavy ‘load’ for characters and country alike.8 Fully aware of the power of speech, Zaira, Eva, and De Courcy fight to find the right words to say to each other even as the war of words around them constructs Ireland as, like the Tower of Babel, a fatalistic mess of confounded languages. The characters in Maturin’s novel all require, in essence, translation. Where, however, Maturin assists his readers to translate and interpret his text by way of his intertextual allusions, the novel’s desperate conclusion suggests that no such translation is possible in contemporary Ireland. At the end of the novel, the reduction to near incoherence of what has heretofore been presented as Zaira’s incredible, performative powers of speech, as well as the final

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silencing of Eva and De Courcy in death, stridently evokes the ultimate failure of communication in their personal lives as in the nation they come to represent.

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‘What can I say?’: the speech of literary allusion in Women Several months before Women was published, Maturin wrote to Scott a letter in which he expressed his hope and expectation that the elder author would be ‘amused’ by his forthcoming novel, even if it promised to ‘set the evangelical world in arms, if they read it’.9 Scott’s subsequent response to Women was enthusiastic, praising, in particular, Maturin’s treatment of Evangelicalism. In dissecting what he called ‘methodistical or evangelical tenets’, Scott claimed that Maturin had deployed ‘the scalpel [. . .]with professional rigour and dexterity’ and, in so doing, accomplished an important task in delineating a religious system that seemed set ‘one day [to] have its influence on the fate perhaps of nations’.10 In early nineteenth-century Ireland, Methodism had already achieved a considerable degree of influence, building on the roots laid by John Wesley during his frequent visits to Ireland from 1747 to 1790. During this period, as Irene Whelan observes, Methodism was transformed from an ‘“enthusiastic” fringe’ of Irish society to a respectable and significant, if still controversial, force in Irish religious life.11 Within the Church of Ireland, the response to Methodism’s tremendous growth and appeal during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was mixed.12 Faced with the threat of a Catholic majority arguably gaining ground against an Anglican Church in ‘grave danger’ at the turn of the nineteenth century, members of the Church hierarchy realised both the need for Episcopal reform and the opportunity for such reform represented by the Evangelical movement.13 As a result, many Church figures intent on improvement embraced Evangelicalism and its potential for change. In fact, as Whelan cogently argues, the late eighteenth-century rise of Evangelicalism amongst the Irish Protestant population relied on its appeal to members of the Established Church.14 This orthodox support of the Evangelical perspective, Whelan claims, came to be symbolised by the Bethesda Chapel, opened in 1786. Although denied a licence by the Archbishop of Dublin, and therefore necessarily registered as a Dissenting place of worship, Bethesda Chapel nevertheless maintained close ties with both Trinity College and the Established Church. Moreover, in its Calvinistic Methodism, it held firm to ‘an underlying foundation of clerical orthodoxy and episcopal allegiance’. As such, it served as a spiritual home for members of the Church of Ireland persuaded by Evangelicalism’s ‘new spirit of enquiry’ but unwilling to renounce their loyalty to or standing within the Anglican Church.15 Despite the inroads it made into the Anglican Establishment, the Evangelical

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movement could nevertheless be understood as a threatening force. This was so largely because of its perceived schismatic nature: not only did it divide the Anglican Church, it also correspondingly undermined the fight against Catholicism, which required, it was argued, Anglican unity and solidarity. It is from this sense of Evangelical divisiveness that the hero of Eyre Evans Crowe’s novella Old and new light (1825) laments the religious dissension vitally weakening the Protestant battle against its Catholic foe: ‘Heavens . . . what a land! – discord and dissension are its very elements . . . the very Protestants split instantly into parties . . . forgetful of the common enemy that rages around them.’16 Even the Evangelical mission’s commitment to Catholic conversion could be interpreted in an ambivalent and hostile manner. For its opponents, it was understood to contribute to the consolidation and strengthening of embattled Catholic forces, more firmly united in their resistance to concerted conversion attempts.17 Further, it placed the Evangelicals fundamentally at odds with the Church’s long-held practice of endorsing Irish Catholic conversion without ever ‘pursu[ing] [it] with any meaningful purpose’.18 The mission of conversion, or, specifically, the lack thereof, was merely a means of upshoring the Church’s imperial position, justifying its presence in Ireland while effectively maintaining the Catholic population as ‘permanently subordinated inferiors’.19 On the one hand, as evidenced by the Second Reformation movement in the 1820s, the Evangelical missionary efforts encouraged the belief that the Established Church could eventually break the Catholic Church’s hold over the Irish people, bringing them under the authority of the Church of Ireland.20 On the other, however, the hostility with which the Irish Catholic population met the redoubled conversion efforts of the Second Reformation sponsored an intensification of political pressure for Catholic Emancipation.21 In this way, the Evangelical commitment to Catholic conversion in the early nineteenth century ultimately served to highlight the Evangelical movement’s essentially disruptive nature – a characteristic so pronounced as to be noted by politicians in London. The Scottish radical MP Joseph Hume, for instance, believed that Britain needed to keep an eye on Methodist, not Roman Catholic, activity in Ireland: ‘the government ought to look after the methodists, instead of the catholics. For the last fifty years they ha[ve] shown themselves most anxious in making proselytes, and most assiduous in their hostility to religious liberty.’22 Honing in on this frighteningly divisive side of Methodism, Maturin introduces his young Irish hero, Charles De Courcy, to the religion in appropriately Gothic and nightmarish circumstances. Described as ‘the orphan heir to a respectable property in the south of Ireland’, the seventeen-year-old Trinity student sets out on a journey to Dublin one evening, only for his carriage to be overthrown outside of Lucan (Women, 1: 3). Compelled to walk into the city centre alone,

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on an increasingly dark and desolate evening, De Courcy is suddenly ‘startled by the cries of a female voice’ and immediately pursues the speeding carriage from which the screams issue (Women, 1: 8). He follows his mysterious quarry to the gates of Phoenix Park, where he loses sight of the carriage. Continuing on undeterred, however, he perceives the door of a miserable hovel open and close, and, bursting in on its inhabitants, hears further distressed cries from the near-lifeless but nevertheless angelic abducted girl, Eva Wentworth. After some struggle with the apparently crazed old woman holding Eva captive, De Courcy returns the girl to her aunt and uncle in Dublin and promptly falls ill from his exertions. In his delirium, De Courcy forgets all about the rescue until being brought by his Methodist friend, Montgomery, to Bethesda Chapel. There he sees again Eva’s beatific form and instantly falls in love. Although he does not share the Wentworth family’s strict Methodist views, he is admitted into their presence on account of his liberation of Eva. Eventually, he is also recognised as Eva’s suitor, and an engagement is arranged between them. Forced to endure a lengthy betrothal because of his youth and that of his fifteen-year-old fiancée, however, De Courcy soon finds himself exasperated by the theological debate he witnesses at the Wentworth home as well as with Eva’s apparent inability to speak of or voice her love for him. When the celebrated actress Zaira Dalmatiani arrives in Dublin to perform in what is billed as her last public appearance, De Courcy defies the Wentworths’ censure of the theatre to see her and, soon after, begins to socialise with her frequently. In comparison to Eva’s oppressive silence, Zaira’s powers of speech, conversation, and performance are enthralling. Finally unable to coerce an outright confession of passionate love from Eva, De Courcy renounces his fiancée and follows Zaira to the Continent. There, however, he is plagued by guilt as well as resentment over Zaira’s continued display of her talents and ultimately returns to Ireland to plead for Eva’s forgiveness. He arrives, however, only to find Eva near death and unwilling to see him. Forcing his way into her presence, a ghost-like De Courcy precipitates Eva’s death and soon after succumbs to his own. In the meantime, Zaira, too, returns to Ireland and, horrifyingly, discovers that Eva is actually the child she bore in her youth and believed to be dead. With the sickening realisation that she had actually seduced her daughter’s lover and thereby contributed to Eva’s heartbreak and ensuing mortal illness, Zaira rushes to her daughter’s side. Like De Courcy, however, she is too late, and the novel concludes with the near-simultaneous deaths of Eva and De Courcy as well as Zaira’s descent into inarticulate madness. Drawing the text to a close, the narrator observes, in reference to Zaira, that, ‘[w]hen great talents are combined with calamity, their union forms the tenth wave of human suffering – grief becomes inexhaustible from the unhappy fertility of genius, and the serpents that devour

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us, are generated out of our own vitals’ (Women, 3: 408). These remarks underline Maturin’s engagement with the notion of female sensibility and its dangers. It is, in fact, Zaira’s sensibility – that mixture of emotion and genius that has made her famous as a performer and actress – which, the narrator suggests, effects her self-destruction, and vitally links her, like Armida in The Milesian chief, to de Staël’s Corinne. Although the similarities between Zaira and Corinne have arguably been overstated, the two characters certainly bear a striking resemblance to each other. Both are actresses performing under self-chosen names that deny or, at least, occlude their pasts. Both are assumed to be Italian, but both also betray a remarkable mastery of the English language suggestive of their original British origins. Zaira, for instance, is described as ‘all the muses, and the all the graces embodied’, but it is ‘her perfect knowledge of the English language and literature’ that most animates her fans in Dublin and draws the hero to her (Women, 1: 151). Similarly, in Corinne, the heroine’s mastery of English captivates the hero: [H]er English accent brought back all the memories of his native land, naturalizing all her charms. Was she an Englishwoman? Had she spent several years of her life in England? He could not tell. But study alone could not possibly have taught her to speak so well. (Corinne, p. 34)

In Women, De Courcy equally ponders the origins of Zaira’s English language skills with astonishment: ‘It is impossible but you must have been a native, or a resident at least, in these islands before’ (Women, 1: 189). Later, De Courcy delights in Zaira’s ‘honest, virtuous, English indignation’ against Voltaire: ‘her sentiments, her language, her very prejudices appeared English’ (Women, 2: 84, my emphasis). Despite their apparently shared nationality and language, however, Zaira and De Courcy continue to experience problems of translation and comprehension. Throughout the novel, in fact, they are forced repeatedly to resort either to other languages or to silence in order to communicate with each other. In attempting to evade De Courcy’s questions about her nationality, for instance, Zaira’s ‘powers of expression seemed suddenly to fail her’, and she and De Courcy must continue their conversation in French (Women, 1: 190). Later, unable to express himself to Zaira as he would wish, De Courcy laments, ‘Why, why is there no language but that of words!’ (Women, 2: 65). Later still, when Zaira’s departure from Ireland looms, she is said to become ‘unable to speak’ and De Courcy unable ‘to listen’. Instead, they remain together ‘in utter silence’, regarding each other from time to time ‘with an unutterable expression’ (Women, 2: 248–9). Finally, as a reminder of her when she is gone, Zaira presents De Courcy with ‘her own picture, suspended . . . from a black ribbon’; De Courcy responds with despair: ‘But these lips cannot speak to me’ (Women, 2: 252).

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Such exasperating failures of verbal communication in their personal relationship seem at odds with the performative volubility for which Zaira is famed and to which De Courcy is attracted. On first hearing Zaira perform, De Courcy is struck dumb with reverent awe: ‘When the curtain dropt, a dead silence pervaded the whole theatre, and a deep sigh proclaimed relief from oppression no longer supportable’ (Women, 1: 164). Eva, too, initially attracts De Courcy with her singing. Having forgotten in his delirium what she looks like, De Courcy hears Eva’s voice as she joins in worship at Bethesda Chapel and feels himself ‘“tremblingly alive” to [the music’s] influence’ (Women, 1: 40). In deep and worshipful silence, he listens, wanting ‘the present moment . . . to last for ever . . . the sounds which he then heard . . . never to cease’ (Women, 1: 41). When they do eventually end, the ‘influence’ of the music inspires De Courcy’s love for Eva, but he very soon experiences and rebels against the silence Eva seems to impose both on herself and on him. Orphaned in childhood, Eva has been raised by the Wentworths as their niece and tutored in their Methodist beliefs, a religious system which, despite its historical encouragement of emotional tenderness in spiritual and everyday relationships,23 seems to foster her unexpressive nature in anything but religious devotion. Repeatedly rebuffed by Eva’s silence, which he misinterprets as indifference to him, De Courcy is frustrated and annoyed. In a climactic scene in volume two, De Courcy implores Eva to speak to him, to renounce her cold silence and vocally to avow her feelings for him: Eva, I call on you passionately, solemnly. This is the crisis of both our destinies. Speak – tell me that you love – love me as I wish, as I demand to be loved . . . One word, one penetrating word of fire. One word of the language of the heart. Utter it, and bless me. (Women, 2: 26)

In answer to De Courcy’s exhortations, Eva defends her silence: ‘What can I say? . . . is passion to be mistrusted, because its power renders us speechless?’ (Women, 2: 27). In his urgent demands for the proof of Eva’s spoken word, De Courcy strikingly evokes Orosmane, the hero of Voltaire’s 1732 tragedy, Zaïre, a very conceivable influence on Maturin’s text in more than just its heroine’s unusual name.24 The Muslim prince of Jerusalem, Orosmane falls in love with Zaïre, a woman of Catholic background raised in captivity to him since her birth. In a scene similar to De Courcy’s confrontation with Eva, Orosmane anxiously demands oral testimony and incontrovertible proof of love from Zaïre, but not without first implicitly threatening her with violence should her love, or her testament of that love, not match his own: You understand full well that a horrendous bitterness would corrupt the odious course of my miserable days, should you receive the gifts I bestow on you with

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anything other than the sentiments that such beneficence ought to inspire. I love you, Zaïre, and I expect to find in your soul a love equal to my own burning flame . . . my heart wants nothing but the most ardent feeling; I will think myself hated if I am loved only partially . . . If your heart is equally overcome with love, I will marry you, but only on that condition; and the dangerous yoke of hymen’s ties will make me wretched, if it does not make you happy.25

As with De Courcy’s demand that Eva should love him ‘as I wish, as I demand’, Orosmane’s declaration insists that Zaïre ‘reciprocate his all-consuming feelings wholly and unequivocally’,26 an insistence that later conflicts with Zaïre’s promise to her newly-discovered brother and father to be baptised secretly as a Catholic. Sensing that Zaïre is withholding something from him, Orosmane admits to his servant that because he himself idolises Zaïre he simply cannot allow for the idea of her not being ‘subjugated to love alone’.27 He therefore threatens to leave her, or worse, because of the incomplete devotion attested to by her silence: ‘Know that Orosmane is capable of anything, that I would rather lose you . . . than possess you under circumstances where your troth is diminished by even one sigh that is not uttered for me.’28 Similarly, late in their courtship, De Courcy expresses extreme frustration and resentment upon hearing Eva sing the same Methodist hymns that he had at first found so captivating. That she can voice her love for God but not her love for him infuriates De Courcy and no doubt encourages his attraction to the ever voluble Zaira. The ‘speechless fondness’ Eva professes for De Courcy mimics the silent affection displayed by Zaïre and, like hers, is encouraged by the religion to which she has been taught from childhood to be loyal (Women, 2: 123). It also links her with de Staël’s earlier model of female propriety, Lucile, whose ‘complete reserve’ leaves Oswald ‘in doubt and uncertainty about the nature of her feelings’ (Corinne, p. 331). Despite her deep love for Oswald, Lucile cannot allow her ‘trembling heart betray its secret’, and he, like De Courcy after him, must question, ‘What have I done to deserve this cruel silence?’ (Corinne, pp. 344, 380). Stifled by Eva’s speechlessness and fearful himself of expressing his own thoughts and feelings, De Courcy quickly registers Eva as a drain on his emotional and physical wellbeing. Correspondingly, he envisions Eva in typically Gothic terms as a vampire-like figure, sucking the life from him in her apparent coldness: ‘he felt he could no longer support the sight of that face whose every glance seemed to be drinking up his blood’ (Women, 1: 81). Although Eva’s innocence persuades De Courcy to view himself as her tempter – his attempts to introduce her to Romantic poetry are tellingly described as ‘like the attempt of Milton’s Satan to introduce into the pure region of heaven “strange fire, his own invented torment”’ (Women, 1: 137) – Eva is, in Robert Lougy’s terms, ‘as much the destroyer as the destroyed’.29 Her portrayal as a vampire is, as Lougy contends,

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fitting, for ‘in her unearthliness she demands of Charles more than is humanly possible to give’. ‘Escaping’ from her, Lougy continues, De Courcy merely confirms his need for physical, as well as spiritual, nurturing.30 Yet, Eva is not the only character to be described as a vampire in the course of the narrative. Just after De Courcy has left her to return to Ireland and to Eva, Zaira has a dream in which she and her former lover partake in a vampiric feast of Eva’s blood: I was in Ireland again, and De Courcy was there; he offered me wine, and while I drank it he told me it was blood – blood drawn from her heart; and then he pointed to her – that pale girl – oh! she was standing near so horribly pale – and she smiled on me with her white bloodless lips. (Women, 3: 88)

To the extent that her affair with De Courcy precipitates Eva’s death, Zaira is prophetic in imagining herself drinking Eva’s blood. In fact, as Zaira endures this nightmare in France, in Ireland, Eva is gradually transforming into the silent, near-lifeless ghost Zaira sees in her dream. Tellingly, Eva’s illness begins as the slow progression of her habitual ‘indifference to conversation’ to ‘an unconsciousness of what was said’ so extreme that ‘it was actual pain to give the simplest directions to the servants, or utter an answer to the plainest questions’ (Women, 3: 122). Later, in her continued despair, Eva loses her voice altogether: ‘the loss of her voice forced itself on her, as little as she had once regarded it; and she was now obliged to murmur those praises which once she uttered in tones that might have been accompanied by the harps of cherubims’ (Women, 3: 140). Zaira’s reaction to De Courcy’s desertion is strikingly similar to Eva’s. Heartbroken, Zaira is said to be able ‘no longer either [to] communicate or [to] receive’ (Women, 3: 153). Her habitual sources of inspiration and conversation – ‘[b]ooks, paintings, music’ – are described as failing her, even as, ironically, her powers of conversation failed her in her relationship with De Courcy earlier in the novel (Women, 3: 152). Like Eva, in fact, Zaira is unable to satisfy De Courcy’s demand for love, either verbally or emotionally. Insisting that they travel to the Continent together platonically, rather than as lovers, and maintaining her public performances and persona, Zaira eventually falls victim largely to her speech. Watching her sing at a concert planned to celebrate the final defeat of Napoleon, De Courcy is disgusted by and resentful of her love of performance, viewing it as a marker of her incomplete attachment to him: ‘The publicity of Zaira’s situation, – her evident exultation at it, – the very applauses which she received, stung him to the soul. He was jealous of that love of fame and distinction inseparable from her character, her talents, and her profession . . . he feared that it left room for no other love’ (Women, 2: 177). In her continued indulgence in musical recital, poetic readings, and literary debates, therefore, Zaira attests

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to her imperfect love for De Courcy precisely because she speaks too much. Yet, while she commits herself to a continued cultivation of her skills as a performer, despite increasingly realising how much De Courcy dislikes her genius, Zaira perversely refuses to allow herself to speak of love to her lover. Thus, when he vows to return to Ireland and to Eva, Zaira understands reconciliation as literally words away: If he would but hear me! . . . if I could but pour out before him the thoughts that are devouring my heart, he might not love, but he must pity me; he could not banish me; he would suffer me to follow as a slave. (Women, 3: 77)

As it happens, however, De Courcy never has the opportunity to hear Zaira’s explanations, nor does he seek to offer an explanation to her. In the end, communication fails them both, even though De Courcy, like Zaira, becomes noted for his conversational skills and linguistic prowess in Paris. Although able spontaneously to offer fluent and exceptionally beautiful translations of various English-language poets, including Byron, Scott and Moore to his literary friends in Paris, De Courcy seems unable to communicate at all with Zaira. As a result, she learns of his intent to leave her only by chance: returning home one day, she discovers a scrap of paper on which De Courcy has written, ‘I shall fly from it as soon as possible’. The slip of paper is evidently intended to be discarded, and the words themselves are unclear in their meaning, but both propel Zaira into a kind of mania, where she begins to see De Courcy’s words everywhere she looks: ‘On the walls, on the ceiling, on the floor, on the furniture, on every thing above, below, around her, she saw legibly the same words traced, shifting, revolving, burning before her eyes, the same words, “I shall fly from it as soon as possible”’ (Women, 3: 64–5). The climactic moment in which De Courcy finally decides to return to Ireland comes when he discovers that Zaira had been married in her youth. The ‘illegitimate daughter of a man of fortune in the west of Ireland’ and a native Catholic woman, Zaira is acknowledged by her father in her childhood and gifted by him with an education vastly ‘beyond what most women receive’ (Women, 3: 317, 319). Yet, she is quickly disowned by him when she falls in love with an Italian tutor, Fioretti, and runs away with him to Italy. There, her new husband reveals his true colours and forces her to perform as an actress. When it comes time for Zaira to deliver their child, he convinces her that the baby actually died at birth, and she continues her career, growing to love the applause and attention. Fittingly, she is said to enter her character, much like Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour, with such force that ‘she no more noticed the applauses that thundered round her, than if she had been the individual she represented’ (Women, 1: 161). Although initially compelled ‘to exhibit’ her ‘musical talents publicly, or, in

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plainer language, to go on the stage’ by her avaricious husband, Zaira nevertheless finds a certain satisfaction in her assumed profession (Women, 3: 331). As ‘the exertion of [her] powers’ becomes ‘quite involuntary’, Zaira learns to appreciate her art, conscious of ‘[the] powers that could justify and enjoy the applauses of assembled worlds’ (Women, 3: 332, 1: 168). While Zaira’s public identity is (eventually) a source of great personal satisfaction, it becomes, for De Courcy, a repugnant characteristic. Just as Oswald soon rebels against Corinne’s public profession, desiring that her genius ‘be silent’ so that her heart could be all his (Corinne, p. 291), De Courcy moves from enraptured awe and praise to indifference and, finally, disdain. Evidently capable of providing for and amusing herself, Zaira has, at least in De Courcy’s mind, no need for him, and, as her friend, M. de Viosmenil, explains, ‘women, who show their powers of pleasing to be independent of us [men], cannot wonder if we leave them to the enjoyment they can procure for themselves’ (Women, 3: 25). As might be expected, De Courcy, like Oswald, proves unable to resolve the conflict of Zaira’s public and private identities, viewing Zaira as ‘either a woman needing the protection of a man or a public figure immune to the emotions of a woman’.31 Anticipating this tragic conclusion to Zaira’s love affair with De Courcy, another friend counsels her to ‘dazzle on the theatre; charm in crowds; come to Paris . . . but give up all idea of being la bonne mere du [sic] famille; it will never do’ (Women, 3: 14). Her reason is simple: men demand too much. By loving De Courcy, Zaira will inevitably be forced to forfeit her talents. In so doing, she will merely imprison herself in a cell of De Courcy’s making: They [men] may twine the chains in which they bind us with the brilliant flowers of chivalric courtesy, or impassioned devotion; but still they are chains. Our best attitude in wearing them is that of graceful but conscious submission, and we never conquer effectually, but in appearing to be slaves. (Women, 3: 14)

In the end, Zaira never has a chance to choose love over talent, thereby fully submitting herself to De Courcy’s wishes. Instead, the discovery of Zaira’s past confirms De Courcy in his understanding of her unsuitability as partner to his domestic bliss. In this context, De Courcy’s final denunciation of Zaira vitally links ‘domestic femininity and national stability’, and suggests, as in Corinne, that ‘it is love of hearth and home that distinguishes the ideal English wife’.32 De Courcy’s apparent ultimate preference for Eva, like Oswald’s for Lucile, registers his natural inclination for the ‘stabilizing force’ of the domestic, national heroine, rather than the divisive energies of the Continental heroine.33 In this opposition of heroines, the narrative (problematically) constructs Eva as the woman upon whom depends Maturin’s fantasy of national union, a fantasy fundamentally reliant on Eva’s perceived domestication. For this, Maturin drew

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heavily upon de Staël’s model of the quintessentially English and properly feminine Lucile, as well as upon Hannah More’s novel Coelebs in search of a wife (1808), and her similarly named heroine, Lucilla Stanley. This latter novel, the only one More wrote, clearly exhibits the didacticism of her earlier tracts on religion and conduct, such as Thoughts on the importance of the manners of the great to general society (1798), Estimate of the religion of the fashionable world (1790), and Strictures on the modern system of female education (1799). These works, like Edgeworth’s early didactic treatises, engage with the inherently national project of defining and illustrating the appropriately domesticated woman. Similarly concerned with the delimitation of the ‘proper’ woman, Coelebs depicts the bachelor of its title – named, like Maturin’s hero, Charles – and his search for the perfect wife. Forming his opinion of the ideal woman on the basis of Milton’s description of Eve in Paradise lost (1667; 1674), Charles finds his own modern day Eve in Lucilla Stanley ‘[a]fter a long journey through a social wilderness pitted with marriageable daughters’.34 What elevates Lucilla over her competitors is, as Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace maintains, her triumph over her natural feminine proximity to nature and its connotations of wildness, unrestrained passions, and animalistic urges.35 This victory is symbolised in More’s text by the nursery Lucilla heads and from which she produces symbolically weighted apple trees to be given as presents upon the marriages of servants and others of humble means. Raising and gifting her saplings in this way, Lucilla uses them to embed domesticity as the moral and social norm while also raising herself above her inherent natural connection by taming and controlling nature. At the same time, however, Lucilla remains wholly immersed in nature, signifying her obedience and compliance to patriarchal authority. In this way, Lucilla becomes, like her little apple trees and the ordered eighteenthcentury garden in which they grow, an inherently ‘domesticated creature’.36 And she does so precisely by embracing what Kowaleski-Wallace terms ‘her father’s loving authority’, tellingly manifested in an educational programme intended to allow Mr Stanley to cultivate his daughter as a kind of natural phenomenon akin to the plants grown in his gardens.37 In Women, Eva, too, appears a daughter of nature, consistently described in terms of natural beauty and presence. The ‘colour of life’, for instance, is said to lend her cheeks ‘a hue as faint as that in the bell of a hyacinth’ (Women, 1: 30). Her hair hangs ‘like the shade of brilliant foliage over a bed of blossoms’; her lips look like ‘young roses’, and her eyes are the colour of ‘Heaven’s own blue’ (Women, 1: 42). In contrast to Zaira’s ‘brilliant colours’, Eva is envisioned as ‘pure green’, deliberately highlighting the latter’s innate connection to nature by comparison to the former’s investment in a social identity (Women, 1: 222). Characterised by a purposeful but unaffected rejection of the cosmopolitan

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urbanity Zaira represents, Eva emblematises an innate closeness to nature deliberately constructed as a sign of domestic submissiveness in opposition to Zaira’s ambitious public life. Eva confirms her symbolic victory over the intrinsic dangers of her affinity to nature through the cultivation of an allegorical nursery – her charity school for poor Irish children – that recalls both Lucilla’s ‘enchanting bower’ as well as Eve’s assistance in the ‘pleasant labour’ of ‘reform[ing] . . . flowery arbours . . . [and] alleys green’ in the Garden of Eden.38 Indeed, a direct comparison is made between the ‘school of little orphans’ Eva directs with her own money, and the gardening in which Milton’s Eve engages: ‘To Montgomery she appeared like our first mother, binding up the straggling and decaying groupes of flowers, and teaching them to bloom .  .  . unto life eternal’ (Women, 1: 241, 248). A similar comparison is made between Lucilla and Eve in Coelebs as the hero enters Lucilla’s bower. Hearing his companion quote ‘in rapture’ a verse from Paradise lost, Charles says, ‘I needed not this quotation to bring the garden of Eden to my mind, for Lucilla presided’.39 Both observations forcefully highlight the manner in which Lucilla and Eva equally overcome their female affinity to nature. Depicting this female control over nature, both novels simultaneously empower their heroines while perpetuating the notion that woman is somehow closer to nature and therefore in need of an authoritative guiding hand. In both cases, this regulatory function is enacted by a figure of patriarchal authority – the emblematic ‘father’ that is at once an earthly father figure and representative of God the father. In other words, by embracing the Evangelical edicts of her adoptive ‘father’ Mr Wentworth, and, in so doing, those of her spiritual father, Eva overcomes the wild rebelliousness underlying her natural identity. The Evangelicalism inherent to Eva’s educational programme, comprised as it is of ‘the most elementary parts of Scripture’ (Women, 1: 245), attests to her fundamental submission to Methodism. Correspondingly, it serves as the tool by which Eva is allowed to become a thoroughly tamed and domesticated ‘mistress of nature’s bounty’.40 Rather than appreciating Eva’s demonstrable domesticity, as Charles appreciates Lucilla’s, however, De Courcy simply registers a lack. Pictured in her schoolhouse, Eva is notable only for the fact that she appears ‘very unlike Zaira’ (Women, 1: 248). Moreover, De Courcy is repulsed on his visit to Eva’s school by the children’s ‘Babel of brogues’ (Women, 1: 249) – an image that forcefully recalls the chaotic dissonance of Eva’s adopted Methodist family and friends. Charting what he describes as the frighteningly deafening speech of his Methodist characters, Maturin portrays Methodism as closely resembling Catholicism in its continued vociferousness that somehow remains silent about the most important issues of all – love, tolerance, and compassion but also current political and social

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affairs that threatened to change Europe forever. After being introduced into the Wentworth family as Eva’s accepted lover, for instance, De Courcy attempts to speak about ‘the position of the allied armies, then sufficiently interesting and critical, for it was in the close of the eventful year 1813’ but is rebuffed by Macowen, who explicitly valorises ‘the means of overthrowing the power of Satan, and extending the kingdom of Christ’ over ‘the downfall of the power of Buonaparte’ as a topic of both conversation and consideration (Women, 1: 57–8). Later, De Courcy tries to join the conversation by quoting from Coelebs in search of a wife: ‘It was that fine speech of Lucilla’s father, where he speaks of the internal evidence a believer has of his own conversion; and concludes with the utmost felicity of allusion, “One thing the Christian knows, that whereas he was blind he now seeth”’ (Women, 1: 68). Again, however, De Courcy is implicitly spurned, for the Methodists regard More as insufficiently Calvinist in her opinions to be admitted as a worthy commentator on religion. More tellingly, Zaira later describes the Methodists as hearing and speaking only ‘monotonous assent, or clamorous hostility. They have but two notes in their scale, one of them is unison, the other discord – no harmony!’ (Women, 2: 144–5). For her part, Eva attempts to instill in her students a unanimous respect for the Bible – the only book on which her teaching is based. In this regard, Eva gestures towards Maturin’s belief, evidenced in his Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, in the redeeming and unifying potential of reading the Bible. In the second of these five sermons, in fact, Maturin defines what he views as ‘the true Church’: ‘an aggregate of all who worship God in spirit, and in truth, under whatever denomination, and though . . . they never can be visibly united HERE, yet they are spiritually united, and will be everlastingly so hereafter in the kingdom of their Master and their Saviour’.41 Tacitly, Maturin admits that the prominent Catholics he purported to be addressing alongside his usual congregation were not outside the fold of ‘the true Church’. As the later sermons in the collection make clear, however, Maturin understands all Irish Catholics to be deluded and misguided, largely by their priests, in their continued loyalty to Catholicism. Blaming the Irish Catholic clergy for forbidding their parishioners access to the Bible, Maturin calls on all Irish Catholics to educate (and thus emancipate) themselves: Roman Catholics of Ireland hear me! Ye call on the rulers of the land for emancipation – emancipate yourselves from the yoke that has pressed on your intellects and your consciences for centuries . . . Say to your priests, we reverence your function – we respect your persons – but we will think for ourselves. We will read the Scriptures, to know what the religion of Christ is; we will read history, to know what the Roman Catholic religion has been; we will compare; we will judge; we will decide for ourselves.42

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Urging all Irish Catholics to educate themselves by reading the Bible, Maturin’s Five sermons underlines the ways in which he maintained the popular eighteenthcentury belief ‘that Catholics, once raised to the same level of education and civilisation as Protestants, would transfer their religious allegiance to the reformed faith and be absorbed into the existing social and political order’.43 As Irene Whelan observes, however, the first two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a significant change to this opinion, whereby Protestants in England and in Ireland began to understand that a dedicated missionary effort was needed both at home and abroad. Fronting this ‘fully fledged missionary offensive’ were preachers and laypeople drawn from Methodist and other Evangelical parishes.44 Maturin, however, seems not to have shared this belief in the need for evangelising proselytism. Indeed, in comparison to Eva’s gentle nurturing of her students with the Bible, the strident evangelising efforts of Mr Wentworth and his friends are denounced as subversive rather than unifying, and their characteristic ‘enthusiasm’ condemned as socially and politically rebellious. For Maturin, this ‘enthusiasm’ – defined by Methodists themselves as a ‘great emotionalism’ central to their religion of the heart – is more realistically portrayed as ‘religious hysteria’ linked to ‘the unleashing of all sorts of desires leading to political upheaval’.45 Like many anti-Methodist figures, Maturin equates the religious fervour of Mr Wentworth and Macowen with revolutionary discontent that could eventually culminate in ‘the collapse of political, religious, and social stability.46 As later suggested by his Five sermons, where he speaks of his belief in the ultimate insignificance of minor theological differences between Protestant sects, Maturin condemns not so much Methodism’s religious teachings as its continued disruption of contemporary Irish society. In particular, Maturin makes clear with characters like Mr Wentworth and Macowen his censure of the Methodist movement’s upwardly mobile mentality. Both Wentworth and Macowen emblematise the destabilising threat of Methodism in their attention to image and social standing. Macowen’s ‘enthusiasm’, for instance, is said to be aimed at ‘the double interest of his eloquence and his importance’ (Women, 1: 245). For him, as for Wentworth, religion is ‘but a name’, and theology, that which ‘having obtained full possession of [the] head, seemed so satisfied with its conquest, that it never ventured to invade [the] heart’ (Women, 2: 15; 1: 52). More striking even than the superficiality of their shared religious belief is their investment in the possibilities of upward social movement afforded by Methodism. Although Methodism, and the Evangelical revival in general, appealed to people across class boundaries, it primarily drew its members from the lower middle class. In so doing, it sponsored an ethos of ‘upward social mobility’ fundamentally threatening to the old order of class distinctions.47 It is plainly this subversiveness that Maturin’s novel seeks to condemn, largely through the figure of Macowen.

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‘[T]he son of a poor labourer’ converted to Methodism by the Evangelical wife of his father’s master, Macowen has moved from ‘the mud-walls of his native cabin’ to the Wentworths’ parlour (Women, 1: 59, 60). There he is ‘the absolute Pope’, holding a position in the family akin to ‘the office of director in a Catholic continental family’ (Women, 1: 237, 62). Far from ending there, Macowen’s history of social climbing promises to continue in his search for an ‘evangelical female, of large fortune . . . not unwilling to share his fate’ (Women, 1: 61). Like Jason Quirk in Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, Macowen embodies the threatening prospect of the breakdown of the class borders upon which Protestant hegemony in Ireland depended for its social and political dominance. Critiquing the same kind of class-induced social chaos commented upon in The absentee,48 Maturin is far less sanguine about its effect on the Irish nation. Edgeworth’s narrative suggests that such social confusion occurring in the wake of Anglo-Irish Union eventually found a natural and beneficial equilibrium – ‘now it’s all over, we may acknowledge, that, perhaps, even those things which we felt most disagreeable at the time were productive of eventual benefit’ (Absentee, p. 83). In the face of Methodist growth and disruption as well as that represented by the campaign for Catholic Emancipation, however, Maturin portrays Ireland as fatally suffering from the vampiric forces of sectarian division and the social disruption they promise. Described as exhibiting ‘the frightful lifeless beauty of a corse’, Dublin is seen to have suffered from its first bloodsucking attack at Union: ‘the magnificent architecture of its public buildings seems like the skeleton of some gigantic frame, which the inhabiting spirit has deserted’ (Women, 3: 295). Already weakened by this assault on its very lifeblood, Maturin’s Dublin is laid open to further divisive, parasitic offensives that promise to complete the physical and spiritual degradation of both city and nation. In this context, De Courcy’s wavering between Eva and Zaira, two women who, in their different ways, equally emasculate and disempower him, assumes national import. Repeatedly discouraged from speaking of key international events in Eva’s company but also equally kept from engaging in them even as he lives in Paris with Zaira, De Courcy registers both women as drains on his masculinity and agency: ‘How contemptible his past existence appeared to him, whether passed in the conventicle with Eva, or in the boudoir with Zaira! – Equally contemptible. Europe had been won and lost, and he had not struck a blow for her safety, or her ruin!’ (Women, 3: 18–19). Later, he is warned by his guardian, Mr Asgill, to leave Zaira ‘for your country’s sake’ (Women, 3: 53), a plea that urges De Courcy to embrace again personal and political agency by way of the renunciation of a woman deemed threatening not just because she refuses a conventional domestic role but also because, as a cosmopolitan heroine, she embodies what Esther Wohlgemut calls ‘the borderless world of postwar

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Europe’ into which she leads De Courcy.49 Merging English and Continental identities as well as contrasting Irish social distinctions – Anglo-Irish and Catholic – Zaira represents the breakdown of borders between Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Irish and native Irish. In so doing, she embodies many of the fears operative in a nation split from within by both a problematic campaign for Catholic Emancipation and a concurrent sectarian division of the Church of Ireland. Moreover, her multiple identifications, with their troubling combination of religious and national loyalties, emphasise Zaira’s role as an essentially unbalancing force. For this reason, Zaira is denounced by De Courcy’s friend, Montgomery, as unfit for marriage, possessing as she does ‘talent[s]’, ‘notoriety’, and ‘distinction’ – characteristics Montgomery views as destructive to a man’s ‘happiness’ (Women, 2: 7, 8). Yet, in response to the condemnation of De Courcy’s friends, the reader is invited to question to what and, more importantly, to whom De Courcy should return. Eva herself, although ostensibly constructed as the ideal domestic partner, is also tainted by her maternal line. ‘Equally contemptible’ as Zaira, Eva is, in other words, only her mother’s daughter. Blemished in this way, Eva merges the threatening cosmopolitanism of her mother with the equally disturbing atavistic Catholicism of her grandmother – the insane hag who kidnapped her at the beginning of the novel in order to raise her as a Catholic – as well as the dangerous radical potential of Methodism. Although she has no knowledge of her mother, Eva ultimately suffers the consequences of Zaira’s mothering – in the sense of the mothering Zaira herself received and that she administered to her daughter – for it is that which is shown to finally negate the novel’s process towards domestic establishment. A kind of unredeemed Lady Delacour, Zaira symbolises monstrous deviation from natural domesticity. Where Lady Delacour manifests her maternal transgression of patriarchal norms of domesticity and femininity in her disfigured body, however, Zaira’s maternal crimes become all too evident in her legacy to her daughter – one that recalls another Edgeworth novel concerned with female domesticity: The absentee. In fact, the revelation that Zaira is Eva’s mother reverses the narrative trajectory established in The absentee, where narrative focus centres primarily on Colambre’s re-education as a responsible landlord, confirmation of which relies fundamentally on the establishment of Grace’s feminine virtue. Before their marriage can occur, Grace must be dissociated from the apparent taint of her maternal lineage. By contrast, it is Eva’s maternal pedigree revealed that irrevocably undermines her claim to the titles of either domestic or national heroine. Tainted by her own questionable maternal line, its threatening link to twinned Catholic sensibilities – Irish and Continental – and the potentially radical Methodist enthusiasm of her upbringing, Eva is deemed inimical to the ideal Irish family-politic. Neither she nor Zaira can act as the appropriately

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domesticated female figure with whom De Courcy can establish his Burkean ‘platoon’ and, from there, both foster his ‘public affections’ and participate in the love of country central to Burke’s concept of the modern nation.50 Where, therefore, The absentee purposefully rehabilitates Grace Nugent, and Belinda provides the reader with a favourable image of the ‘new-style patriarchal family’ in the Percival family, Women never provides a model of domestic bliss to follow.51 Instead, both Zaira and Eva come to represent the failure of the patriarchal domesticity (problematically) endorsed by Edgeworth, More, and de Staël alike. The public and national ramifications of this failure are clear in Maturin’s text. Observing the hero’s gravestone, the narrator poignantly comments, ‘Perhaps the date [1814] of such inscriptions is as profound a lesson as was ever taught – the tomb-stones of the young are full of instruction’ (Women, 3: 406). Sent to his grave by his ill-fated love for two distinctly different but equally divisive women in the fateful year of 1814, as the Congress of Vienna convened to remap Europe’s boundaries in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, De Courcy symbolises the increasing impossibility of national integration and unification ‘[i]n the fluid and international climate of post-Napoleonic Europe’.52 Enacting its geographical restructuring of Europe, the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe in such a way as to staunch the potential for renewed violence but also to revive a happier image of pre-Napoleonic and prerevolutionary times. This attempt to recover a halcyon past, however, was fundamentally undermined by the irrevocable fragmentation produced by decades of revolutionary and international war, the bitter memory and reality of which continued to manifest itself in literature throughout the Romantic period. As Eric Walker argues, Romantic poets and novelists attempted to imagine peace as a restitution of the order destroyed by years of war through an emphasis on ‘matrimonial paradise regained’. Yet, Walker continues, nuptials in Romantic literature are often ‘strangely lacking’, producing writing neither epithalamic nor anti-conjugal, but instead ‘antithalamic’. Unconvinced by the apparent restoration of order symbolised by the Congress of Vienna, antithalamic writing ‘find[s] itself inescapably at sea about marriage . . . confess[ing] itself in a variety of forms perplexed, stymied or otherwise balked by the nuptial, for better or for worse’.53 This ‘antithalamic’ tendency, as I have been arguing, has been at work in the texts of Irish authors for decades, suggesting the Irish desire for, but fundamental trouble with, envisioning social, political, and national ‘paradise regained’. What we might call an antithalamic conclusion, Maturin’s ending in Women adds a consideration of the Napoleonic wars into the already complex mix of social disturbances in Ireland, betraying the author’s understanding of the irreversibly equivocal nature of an idealised family-politic. If order remains an elusive concept for a Europe irrevocably damaged by the radical sensibility and fragmentation

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of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, happy conjugality remains equally and concomitantly so. This is especially true, Maturin’s narrative implies, in Ireland, where religious factionalism remains not only a consistent problem but one which seemed to be increasing with the escalation of the Emancipation movement and the growing popularity of Methodism. Dividing the country into more and more oppositional religious groups, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Evangelical revival comes to represent, in Women, a force equally destructive as Catholic Emancipation. Splintered in this way, Ireland is, in Maturin’s mind, very much like post-Napoleonic Europe – disordered, disunified, and strangely borderless, despite the numerous boundaries being established by the demarcation of religious difference. As a result, like many of his fellow authors in the Romantic period, but also many of his Irish predecessors and contemporaries, Maturin remains fundamentally ‘at sea’ about marriage in Women. Unable concretely to envision national unity in Ireland, Maturin correspondingly refrains from endorsing marriage between his hero and either of his heroines. Highlighting his troubled perspective on marriage as a symbol of the Irish nation rehabilitated after centuries of divisive religious and political conflict, Maturin concludes his novel with the image of the two Miss Longwoods, minor, ‘silly’ characters, who, ‘gay and happy, were escorted by youthful, titled bridegrooms’ to their apparent marital bliss (Women, 3: 407). This may seem an image stridently discordant with the accompanying one of De Courcy’s grave, but it fundamentally underlines Maturin’s ‘at sea’ position about marriage and its unifying potential. As they ‘tr[ea]d lightly on the graves of De Courcy and Eva’, the Longwood brides suggest not happy conjugality but merely ‘the condition of life’ (Women, 3: 407). More than that, they indicate the continuation of dangerous miscommunication in Ireland. Failing to hear, understand, and/or listen to the example provided by De Courcy, his two lovers, and the graves over which they walk so blithely, the Longwood wives and husbands emblematise the final failure of personal and national communication in Ireland. Although marriages such as theirs may remain, in Walker’s terms, ‘simultaneously unbearable and irresistible’,54 even as marriage itself fails as a unifying symbol, they finally serve to underline the ultimate lack of unity in Ireland. Disrupted by Emancipation and the Evangelical movement, Maturin’s Ireland ‘limp[s] along’, like marriage in Romantic fiction,55 but it does so in a confused and disorderly state of incomprehension. Notes 1 W. J. McCormack (ed.), ‘Language, class and genre (1780–1830)’, The Field Day anthology of Irish writing, gen. ed. Seamus Deane, vol. 1 (Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991), p. 1115. Given the evident influence of eighteenth-century

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Narrating history French literature on Maturin’s writing, as this chapter highlights, it is tempting to view Maturin’s title for Women; or pour et contre as a reference to the French periodical, Pour et contre, edited by L’abbé Prévost from 1733 to 1740. The fact is, however, that Maturin initially wanted to call his novel simply De Courcy but was urged by his publisher, Archibald Constable, to consider an alternative title, as De Courcy had previously been used in Constable’s terms ‘oftener than once’. Accordingly Constable suggested ‘another name’ with the addition of ‘Pour et Contre’ as a suitable replacement, and Maturin complied; NLS 789/829–30, letter from Archibald Constable to Maturin, 8 August 1817. Sir Walter Scott, Rev. of Women; or pour et contre, by Charles Robert Maturin, Edinburgh review, 30.59 (1818), 245. Ibid., p. 253. Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland: history, popular culture, and secret codes’, Novel: a forum on fiction, 34.2 (2001), 268. Irene Whelan, The Bible war in Ireland (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), p. 10. David Hempton, ‘Methodism in Irish society, 1770–1830’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 36 (1986), 138. Ibid. Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Available online at http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 14 June 2010. NLS 3888/132–3, letter from Maturin to Scott, 2 August 1817. Scott, Rev. of Women, pp. 253, 254. Whelan, The Bible war, p. 6. Irene Whelan (The Bible war, p. 91) notes that membership numbers grew from 6,109 in 1780 to 26,323 in 1810. Other scholars cite similar numbers to indicate Methodism’s unabated expansion in this period; see Stewart J. Brown, The national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland 1801–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 49, and David Hempton, Methodism: empire of the spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 28. Alan Acheson, A history of the Church of Ireland 1691–2000 (Blackrock: Columba Press, 1997), p. 110. Whelan, The Bible war, p. 17. Ibid., p. 18. See Brown, The national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, pp. 51–7, for a discussion of the division of the Church of Ireland along party lines in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Brown identifies two main parties – the High Church party and the Evangelical party – which, if not overtly affirmed by Church members, were nevertheless ‘recognizable groupings’ within the Church. The Evangelical party, Brown continues, consisted of those members of the clergy influenced by Evangelical thought but unwilling to view this as oppositional to their roles within the Church of Ireland. Eyre Evans Crowe, Old and new light, in Today in Ireland, by Eyre Evans Crowe, 3 vols. (1825; New York: Garland, 1979), 3: 24.

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17 Brown, The national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, p. 98; Whelan, The Bible war, p. 170. 18 Whelan, The Bible war, p. 21. 19 David Cairns and Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 7. 20 See Brown, The national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, p. 98, for the argument that the Second (or New) Reformation saw Evangelical and High Church parties united in the mutually desired end of converting the Irish Catholic population. 21 Brown, The national churches of England, Ireland, and Scotland, p. 98. 22 Quoted in David Hempton, ‘The Methodist crusade in Ireland 1795–1845’, Irish historical studies, 22.85 (1980), 39. 23 Whelan (The Bible war, p. 67) observes that ‘[t]he emotional intensity that lay at the heart of the evangelical religious experience was carried over into every aspect of life. The expression of tenderness in human relations was a standard feature of the domestic life of evangelicals, and in this way they were advocates of the cult of sensibility as much as the most ardent disciple of Rousseau.’ 24 Translated quickly into English as well as German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Spanish, Zaïre was immensely popular throughout Europe during the eighteenth century, and particularly so in England; Eva Jacobs, ‘Introduction’, in Zaïre, by Voltaire (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975), p. 26. In Ireland, an edition of Aaron Hill’s 1736 English translation of Zaïre was published in 1791, suggesting a very feasible source text for Women; see Aaron Hill, Zara; a tragedy (Dublin, 1791). Available from Eighteenth century collections online at http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/, accessed 28 October 2010. Whether Maturin read Zaïre or saw it performed, either in the original French or in translation, is difficult to ascertain for certain, as we have very few records and correspondence from Maturin’s life. Nevertheless, a comparison of the two texts provides telling evidence of Maturin’s reference to Voltaire. 25 Quoted in Caroline Weber, ‘Voltaire’s Zaïre: fantasies of infidelity, ideologies of faith’, South central review, 21.2 (2004), 47. 26 Weber, ‘Voltaire’s Zaïre’, p. 48. 27 Quoted in Weber, ‘Voltaire’s Zaïre’, p. 54. 28 Ibid. 29 Robert E. Lougy, Charles Robert Maturin (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1975), p. 53. 30 Ibid. 31 Lori Jo Marso, (Un)manly citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s subversive women (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 119; my emphasis. 32 Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, p. 193. 33 In the national tale, Wohlgemut (‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, p. 192) argues, the correlation between appropriate female domesticity and the safety and security of the nation becomes manifest in the national heroine, who acts as ‘[a] stabilizing force’ and thereby ‘underwrites fantasies of national union’.

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34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55

Narrating history Kowaleski-Wallace, Their fathers’ daughters, p. 44. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 50–2. Ibid., pp. 52, 47. Hannah More, Coelebs in search of a wife, ed. Patricia Demers (1808; Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2007), p. 201; John Milton, Paradise lost, ed. and introd. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (1667; 1674; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 103, book 4, ll. 625–6. More, Coelebs, p. 201. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their fathers’ daughters, p. 52. Charles Robert Maturin, Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church (Dublin: William Folds and Son, 1824), p. 31. Ibid., pp. 123–5. Irene Whelan, The Bible war, p. 86. Ibid. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their fathers’ daughters, p. 90. See also Hempton, Methodism, pp. 33–41, for a discussion of John Wesley’s position on and practice of ‘enthusiasm’. Hempton, Methodism, p. 87. David Hempton, Religion and political culture in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 29. See above, p. 64. Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, p. 196. Burke, Reflections on the revolution in France, p. 47. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their fathers’ daughters, p. 120. Wohlgemut, ‘“What do you do with that at home?”’, p. 196. Eric C. Walker, ‘Marriage and the end of war’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic wars: studies in culture and conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 209, 209–10. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid.

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Paratextual possession: rereading Melmoth the wanderer

‘Inveterately conrolv’d’: Melmoth’s ‘symbolic spread’ Incomprehension like that suffered by Ireland and its people at the close of Women is and has been the most frequent response to Maturin’s fifth and most famous novel, Melmoth the wanderer (1820). Often described as resembling Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, Melmoth takes the form of a frame narrative set in nineteenth-century Ireland which gives way to a series of interpolated tales tied together by the figure of Melmoth himself, despite a diverse range of characters and settings. It is this strange and bemusing structure that attracts the majority of critical attention to Melmoth and presents at once the novel’s major attraction and apparent fault. Most critics have taken the line that Maturin intended to confuse or disorient his reader with his complicated mesh of stories, thereby reflecting allegorically on his anxieties as a member of the minority Anglo-Irish population threatened from within by Evangelicalism and from without by the ever-more-clamorous campaign for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland. Proposing a quasi-autobiographical basis for the novel, for instance, Roy Foster argues that Maturin, like all major Irish Gothicists, was a marginalised figure, ‘whose occult preoccupations surely mirror a sense of displacement, a loss of social and psychological integration, and an escapism motivated by the threat of a takeover by the Catholic middle classes’.1 Similarly, Joseph Lew contends that Melmoth voices Maturin’s concerns not just as a member of a marginalised, minority population but also as a marginalised member of that community: Autobiography enters Melmoth on the political level .  .  . Melmoth the Wanderer, particularly in its analyses of questions of identity and its persistent glorification of personal integrity, springs directly from Maturin’s own compromised position as an Anglo-Irish curate out of political favour. In the guise of its Spanish Gothic and exotic East Indian settings, Melmoth explores problems of cultural and personal identity and assimilation – a problem particularly acute for the English in Ireland

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during Maturin’s lifetime, but also becoming increasingly important in Great Britain’s colonial holdings.2

Kathleen Fowler extrapolates this understanding of Maturin’s personal unease on to his organisation of his novel, maintaining that Maturin deliberately deformed Melmoth’s narrative structure in order to replicate in his readers the sense of turmoil, persecution, and general confusion suffered by his divergent but strikingly similar characters and, of course, himself: ‘The novel’, she argues, ‘is not formed in the conventional manner, nor yet unformed; it is [instead] intentionally de-formed. The reader must herself wrest its integrity from apparent chaos.’3 Along the same lines, Jack Null claims that, unless we view Melmoth as the product of ‘mere carelessness, a gigantic but beautiful freak’, we have to understand the structure as deliberate, purposely fragmented by Maturin in order ‘to reflect organically the disorientation caused by the characters’ loss of values’. It is this symbolic fragmentation, Null maintains, that produces the novel’s characteristic ‘psychological intensity’.4 In as unambiguous a statement of belief in authorial intent as possible, Null concludes: It is clear . . . that Maturin does have a definite and consistent chronology in mind, which suggests careful planning. The result of that planning should also be apparent in the unusually fragmented and asymmetrical structure. And the structural importance of Stanton’s manuscript becomes apparent because, disjointed as its shards may be, it adumbrates all the themes for the remaining tales, these tales in turn function as reflections of and variations on Stanton’s tale. In short, Maturin builds thematic parallels, announced first in abbreviated fashion and then gaining emphasis and power by non-chronological repetition of the motifs.5

Against such readings of Melmoth as ‘intentionally de-formed’ and the product of its author’s ‘definite and consistent’ plan, Maturin’s correspondence with his publisher, Archibald Constable, demonstrates that his purpose for Melmoth was vague and unclear from beginning to end. Maturin originally proposed a thenunnamed and unspecified prose narrative shortly after the publication of Women, but, as is evident from his exchanges with Constable, experienced ongoing problems with conceptualising the work. Already aware from his experience with Women of the difficulty of working with Maturin as an author, Constable suggested a serialised set of tales to be published in the Monthly magazine at regular intervals.6 Reluctantly, Maturin agreed, although he never delivered and instead channelled the idea into his first apparently concrete proposal about the unspecified prose work, which was to be structured ‘in the form or manner of Tales’.7 As he wrote these tales over the next two years, however, Maturin continued to be distracted by other works, including a tragedy, several poems, and a book of sermons. When he did turn his attention to Melmoth, he seems to have

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written sporadically and with frequent interruption, sending short, unconnected pieces of manuscript to Constable at intermittent periods and even once claiming, falsely one suspects, that whole swathes of the manuscript had been lost in the post. Tellingly, the title ‘Melmoth’ was actually provided by Constable, not Maturin, who added ‘the wanderer’ only at the last minute, suggesting the ways in which Maturin remained unclear about his work throughout its composition. Exploring this fraught correspondence, Sharon Ragaz concludes that, while such evidence does not preclude analysis of Melmoth’s intricate layout, it does highlight the ways in which this structure resulted from an author–publisher partnership rather than simply as a direct result of Maturin’s authorial vision.8 Caution, Ragaz’s arguments suggest, is necessary in interpreting the meaning of Melmoth’s organisation and, indeed, in crediting Maturin with the incredible foresight and thought necessary to endow this layout with allegorical weight. Similarly, Richard Haslam maintains that conventional allegorical readings of Melmoth’s narrative structure are all too often hasty and misleading. Although not informed either by Ragaz’s work or knowledge of Melmoth’s publication history, Haslam contends that traditional readings of Melmoth habitually and erroneously subject the novel to allegoresis, or, in other words, read allegory into a text that actually lacks the traditional and accepted characteristics denoting allegory. Rather than viewing the novel’s structure as either the product of authorial intent or expressive of Maturin’s troubled position within Irish society, Haslam insists that we view Ireland and Irish issues as ‘contiguous’ rather than ‘continuous’ with the narrative of Melmoth the wanderer. By this, Haslam means that we should resist reading too much of the contemporary context into Melmoth, because, in so doing, we risk finding political and social commentary where there is none, either extant or intended.9 Haslam’s arguments are persuasive in their emphasis on critical caution, but, as this chapter demonstrates, Maturin’s text, however unintentionally structured as it may be, is always haunted by Irish issues, perpetually possessed by contemporary Ireland and its troubled history. Haunting literary production and criticism long after its publication, as earlier noted,10 Melmoth possesses current Gothic fiction and its analysis. At the same time, however, it is itself possessed by the ghosts of the past, both literary and historical. As with Maturin’s other novels, the voices of the then seemingly dead Gothic novel, other contemporary and eighteenth-century texts, and Irish history echo in the corridors of the haunted house that is Melmoth the wanderer. Accordingly, therefore, this chapter contends that, in spite of what we know about Melmoth’s publication history, Maturin’s references to Ireland and Irish issues throughout his text strikingly manifest his preoccupation with contemporary national circumstances as he wrote. As we shall see, this becomes most notable in the paratextual commentary Maturin

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provides for his novel. Much like Edgeworth’s famously divided text, Castle Rackrent, in which footnotes and a glossary frame and interrupt the fictional narrative, and Owenson’s exhaustively annotated The wild Irish girl, Melmoth the wanderer is divided internally not only into different tales but also into what might be called upper and lower, or alternatively inner and outer, narratives, by way of text and paratext, or the authorial paraphernalia surrounding and enclosing the fictional narrative. Not as extensively annotated as either Castle Rackrent or The wild Irish girl, Melmoth the wanderer nevertheless contains several footnotes which vitally link fictional and factual narratives. Through these footnotes and other such paratextual commentary, Maturin inserts contemporary Ireland into the margins of his text and insists that it be seen in a proximate relationship to his characters. Haslam has elsewhere maintained that paratextual commentary serves as a ‘threshold of interpretation between [the] narrative and the historical conditions in which it was written’.11 Accordingly, even by Haslam’s terms, Maturin’s lower/outer narrative invites, even demands, consideration of the specific historical and social circumstances in which the text as a whole was written. Maturin’s preface and footnotes do not simply, like the letters and pamphlets among which the tales are found, surround or envelop the text itself. Instead they crucially infiltrate the text, effecting an intersection whereby Ireland begins vitally to inform our understanding of the disparate social scenes Maturin presents. Although the narrative itself may consist of a series of tales related to several temporally and spatially distanced lands and characters, all of which seem to have little or nothing to do with Maturin himself, we are nevertheless encouraged to make the connection between the two. The overlap of upper and lower, inner and outer narratives becomes especially apparent in the occasional interjections into the narration of the varied tales made by John Melmoth as he listens to Monçada, or, as in one instance, when Monçada addresses John directly during his storytelling, referring to the latter’s home in ‘happy Ireland’ (Melmoth, p. 198). Forcing our attention back to Ireland, despite our immersion in faraway places, Maturin asks us to see Ireland as neither continuous nor contiguous with the novel’s tales and their settings but, instead, overlapped, fundamentally bleeding into each other. In this respect, it might be instructive to view the title of Patricia Coughlan’s essay on James Clarence Mangan’s intertextuality – ‘“Fold over fold, inveterately convolv’d”’ – as, in a different respect, equally applicable to Melmoth.12 As Coughlan argues, texts such as William Godwin’s St Leon: a tale of the sixteenth century (1799) and Maturin’s own Melmoth were of such significance to Mangan that they ‘virtually [became] part of the fabric of his own writing’.13 In a similar way, Ireland and the problematic issue of Irish national identity represent such an important influence in

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Maturin’s life that they vitally and consistently inform his writing, no matter how distant his fictional settings. Alternatively, we might think of Northrop Frye’s idea of ‘symbolic spread’ as equally compelling when discussing the enmeshment of Ireland with Melmoth’s varied narratives. In The secular scripture, Frye considers the use of allegory in romance: ‘the haunting sense’ of further meaning often inherent in such narratives. Arguing that the word ‘allegory’ is ‘misleading’, Frye proposes instead the term ‘symbolic spread’, which he defines as ‘the sense that a work of literature is expanding into insights and experiences beyond itself’, as more appropriate. For Frye, this process of expansion relies on a particular text’s inclusion – consciously undertaken or not – of the Derridean traces of literary experiences shared by author and reader.14 This is what I have been arguing from the start of this book – that Maturin’s novels, like those of his contemporaries, reverberate with the echo of former literary texts and forms, as well as apparently distinct literary genres. Frye further maintains that it is in the realm of realism, rather than romance, that additional reverberations occur from the reflections of contemporary everyday life within the narrative.15 Yet, this argument elides the manner in which romance insistently breaks down the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. In Anne Williams’s terms, romance ‘suspend[s] or question[s]’ normative social, cultural, and literary rules, restrictions, and borders. In so doing, romance merges the real and imaginary, integrating the contemporary social circumstances in which a narrative is written directly into the narrative itself, whether or not that is the conscious intention of the author.16 Following Williams’s arguments, Maturin may not have intended to allegorise Ireland in Melmoth the wanderer, as is suggested by the troubled history of the novel’s composition, but his use of romance conventions results in the fundamental deconstruction of the boundaries between his fictional tales and his everyday reality. As Maturin wrote Melmoth, Ireland became, in essence, ‘symbolically spread’ throughout the novel by way of the paratext. Reading Melmoth today, therefore, we witness several different levels of textual possession. If we are fans of Trollope, Wilde, Nabokov, or Banville, we might very well recall later works inherently indebted to Maturin and his most famous literary character – evidence of the novel’s power spectrally to possess literary production in its own time and after. I will investigate the haunting afterlife of Melmoth the wanderer more fully in the conclusion to this book. What this chapter is concerned to demonstrate, however, is the ways in which Maturin’s novel is itself spectrally possessed: not only is the fictional narrative infiltrated and permeated by paratext and, correspondingly, by Ireland, but so, too, is it penetrated by and fundamentally imbued with earlier and contemporary works that influenced Maturin as he wrote.

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A house of mirrors: reflection and refraction in Melmoth In one of his first letters to Walter Scott, Maturin wrote of his belief that ‘my own Romances scarce exhibit vicissitudes more extraordinary than my life has furnished’.17 His preface to Melmoth continues in this autobiographical vein, mapping out the narrative’s founding inspiration in one of his own sermons and explicitly distancing it from ‘Radcliffe-Romance[s]’ by stating its reliance on actual life – ‘th[e] irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general’, rather than ‘the startling adventures one meets with in romances’ (Melmoth, p. 5). The novel’s opening pages, however, quickly encourage readerly expectations, no doubt already stirred by the text’s title, of nightmarish scenes of Gothic atrocity. Although set in near-present-day Ireland, the novel’s frame narrative immediately establishes the country as dark, desolate, and truly dreadful, much as it is in The Milesian chief. Moreover, moving quickly away from Ireland in its interpolated tales to Inquisition Spain, Melmoth seems to satisfy Gothic novel readers’ desire for depictions of Catholic Continental perversity and iniquity. In this context, Maturin’s prefatory defence of his novel as more realistic than romantic may seem either disingenuous or delusional, but it is entirely consistent with his twinned desire, earlier evident in Fatal revenge and The wild Irish boy, to distance himself from the debased Gothic novel and assert both the novelty and the worth of his writing. From beginning to end, Melmoth’s short preface concentrates on the ensuing narrative’s foundation in fact. First, Maturin informs us that ‘[t]he hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons’, which, he continues, maintained the impossibility that any human being, no matter how desperate, would voluntarily ‘resign the hope of his salvation’ (Melmoth, p. 5). Then, after noting his narrative’s reliance on ‘the misery of life’ rather than ‘the horrors of Radcliffe-Romance’, Maturin lists the tales that might be traced definitively to ‘real life’: ‘The story of John Sandal and Elinor Mortimer’, for instance, ‘is founded in fact’, and ‘[t]he original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman’ (Melmoth, p. 5). Haunting Maturin’s narrative from its opening, these facts and figures assume the guise of Derrida’s ‘non-present present’. In this way, real-life people, places, and events vitally permeate Maturin’s text, an infiltration that becomes increasingly pronounced in the novel’s continued manipulation of the notion of the ‘unhomely’. A key idea informing the Gothic novel as a literary form, the unhomely refers to what Jerrold Hogle terms ‘the deeply and internally familiar . . . as it reappears to us in seemingly external, repellant, and unfamiliar forms’.18 Transforming that which is familiar, old, and comfortable into the exact opposite – unfamiliar, new, and strange – the unhomely is a profoundly unsettling and

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alienating experience. And it is one endured by John Melmoth, the wanderer’s nineteenth-century descendant, as he returns to his uncle’s Wicklow home in the autumn of 1816 to attend his dying benefactor. Although he has always been ‘rather a stranger’ in this house, John’s homecoming enacts the process by which he will become ever more uncomfortable and ill-at-ease, even though he remains ‘at home’ for the rest of the novel (Melmoth, p. 17). Accordingly, as he approaches the house, John finds its grounds in ruins; he traverses ‘the miry road which had once been the approach’ only after ‘what had once been a gate’ finally yields to persistent force (Melmoth, p. 9). The domains he passes bear ‘signs of increasing desolation’, and he finds the house itself similarly run-down, with ‘grass-grown steps and boarded windows’ (Melmoth, pp. 9, 9–10). Inside, John finds a scene as disconcerting as the dereliction outside. Around a roaring turf fire, much too large for the approval of John’s penurious uncle, sit an old housekeeper, several peasants and servants, and ‘a withered Sybil’ (Melmoth, p. 10). John advances among the group, ‘recognising some, – disliking more, – distrusting all’ (Melmoth, p. 11). He is greeted fondly by the old housekeeper, whom he remembers from his childhood visits: ‘he was always her “white-headed boy,” she said’ (Melmoth, p. 11). Recalling a similar line in Castle Rackrent, the housekeeper’s words invite us to view this domestic scene as one of social upheaval and class reversal.19 For John, the situation is a strange one; he is discomfited and confused. Asking about his uncle, he receives such answers from the Irish peasants and servants that ‘[he] turned from one to the other, not knowing which or what to believe’ (Melmoth, p. 12). John’s incredulity only grows upon attending at his uncle’s deathbed. The mysteriousness of his uncle’s death, the hidden portrait of the wanderer, its attendant manuscript, and the appearance of a man who seems to be the portrait’s seventeenth-century subject in the flesh, magnify the house’s strangeness. In the end, the house itself guides John into a perusal of the forbidden manuscript. Wishing to read the manuscript his uncle’s will has ordered him to destroy, John is delayed by the necessity of procuring candles. While he waits, he contemplates his uncle’s garden, where he finds broken-down walls, overgrown walkways, an abundance of nettles and weeds, and several ‘dwarfish, doddered, leafless trees’ (Melmoth, p. 25). Turning from this ‘garden of death’ to the room in which he stands, John finds ‘no relief’ (Melmoth, p. 25). Instead, he sees ‘wainscotting dark with dirt’, a ‘rusty grate’, several ‘crazy chairs’, and a chimney-piece ‘tarnished more by time than by smoke’ (Melmoth, p. 25). The ‘spectacle of desolation’ drives John ‘back to his own thoughts’, and into his perusal of the manuscript, whereby he enters a fundamentally fantastical world that becomes, as the narratives multiply, increasingly more nightmarish and unreal (Melmoth, pp. 25, 26). Within the manuscript, John finds the first of the novel’s many interpolated

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tales – that of the Englishman, Stanton, and his encounters with the wanderer in seventeenth-century Spain and England. Obsessed with finding Melmoth after meeting with him in strange circumstances in Spain, Stanton is incarcerated in an insane asylum by greedy relatives. There, he is tormented not only by the frenzied outbursts of his fellow inmates but also by the thought of his own gradual descent into insanity. In these circumstances, Melmoth appears again to Stanton, promising him release for the price of his soul. Terribly shaken by what he has read, John destroys both manuscript and painting, believing that, in so doing, he has rid himself of the burden of the wanderer. Waking that same evening, John discovers that a savage storm has driven a ship into the treacherous rocks along the coastline near his uncle’s home, Melmoth Lodge. As he rushes to assist the ship’s passengers, John once again sees a figure closely resembling that in the destroyed portrait laughing at the shipwreck and its victims. John pursues the spectral character but slips on the rocks near the grounded vessel and plummets into the sea. Several days later, he wakes in his uncle’s old home (now legally John’s new home), having been rescued by the ship’s only surviving passenger, Alonzo Monçada. Shocked to discover that he is convalescing in the ancestral home of the wanderer, Monçada begins to narrate his own story – ‘The tale of the Spaniard’. Within this tale is a further embedded story – the ‘Tale of the Indians’, which recounts the wanderer’s discovery of a shipwrecked Spanish girl, Immalee, on a deserted Indian island and his subsequent nightmarish wooing of her. Two further stories – ‘The tale of Guzman’s family’ and ‘The lovers’ tale’ – are inserted into the ‘Tale of the Indians’, which acts as a kind of internal frame narrative to which we return after both have been recounted. The ‘Tale of the Indians’, however, is a frame narrative thriceremoved. When it has concluded, we return first to the final words of Monçada’s narration and thereby to the initial frame narrative set in nineteenth-century Ireland, where John and Monçada encounter Melmoth for a final time. With his 150 years of earthly wandering now at an end, Melmoth has returned to Ireland. Unsuccessful in his attempt to find someone willing to sell their soul as he did and thus take his place, Melmoth has come to give account of his existence to John and Monçada and thereafter die in his native land. Before he can offer his muchanticipated disclosure, however, he disappears, and the novel concludes with the uncertain idea of the wanderer’s death and the continued confusion of reader, John, and Monçada alike. Melmoth’s ambivalent conclusion, like that of any self-respecting cinematic blockbuster, paves the way for its sequel – one that Maturin intended to publish with Colburn but never completed. The ostensible reason for Melmoth’s ambiguous end, therefore, is to allow for his future reincarnation. The immediate effect of the novel’s conclusion, however, is to highlight the central notion

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of unhomeliness in the narrative. Viewing the site of Melmoth’s apparent death, John and Monçada exchange ‘looks of silent and unutterable horror’ and slowly return ‘home’ (Melmoth, p. 542).20 Yet, this is a home permanently marked and made strange by the presence of Melmoth, a figure who embodies the unhomely moment – both familiar and unfamiliar, human and superhuman, known and unknown. Earlier in the novel, Biddy Brannigan, the superstitious crone nursing the elder Melmoth as he lay dying, informed John that Melmoth was ‘[t]he elder brother’ of the ‘first’ Melmoth, ‘who settled in Ireland .  .  . an officer in Cromwell’s army, who obtained a grant of lands, the confiscated property of an Irish family attached to the royal cause’ (Melmoth, p. 26). This elder brother ‘travelled abroad, and resided so long on the Continent, that his family had lost all recollection of him’. Biddy Brannigan further relates that ‘[the family’s] memory was not stimulated by their affection, for there were strange reports concerning the traveller’ (Melmoth, p. 26). Having already allegedly dipped into the dark arts, Melmoth returns to Ireland to visit his brother and family, ‘and though [the traveller] must have then been considerably advanced in life, to the astonishment of his family, he did not betray the slightest trace of being a year older than when they last beheld him’ (Melmoth, p. 26). With their memories of the traveller unexpectedly revived by this preternatural blast from the past, his family members evidently feel anxious and uncomfortable. Leaving his family once more, Melmoth gifts them with his portrait – the same one hung in the closet of John’s uncle – and never again returns to Ireland, except to die. According to Biddy Brannigan, however, he continues to appear in Ireland in spectral form as a banshee-figure: ‘he was never known to appear but on the approaching death of one of the family’ (Melmoth, p. 26).21 Heralding, in his familiar but unfamiliar form, a frightening in-between state of living death, Melmoth turns home into a terrifying and alienating experience for John’s uncle and those who have witnessed him before. At the same time, however, Melmoth remains himself permanently unhomed. Travelling to Ireland so that he might die at ‘home’, Melmoth reminds the reader that he, too, has experienced ongoing social, cultural, and personal estrangement and isolation, even in his native land (Melmoth, p. 537). Unwelcomed and unloved even by his own family, Melmoth is never at home in Ireland, just as the characters he tempts find themselves fundamentally misunderstood by their closest friends and family members. They therefore experience home as a strange and unsettling place. Brought into Melmoth Lodge by way of John’s reading and Monçada’s narration, these characters and their spectral presence convert John’s ancestral home into an unhomely haunted house, not simply because their voices begin to echo in its halls but also because their narratives repeat a horrifying tale of living betwixt and between accepted social and cultural norms.

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The liminality linking all of the tempted characters together manifests itself most obviously in their divided identities. Caught between multiple identities, these characters find themselves adrift, strangers in a strange world that is both home and not-home. Antonio, in the ‘The tale of the Spaniard’, for instance, is raised in Inquisition Spain as a Catholic by his apparently Catholic father – Don Fernan di Nunez – who is actually a Jewish man in disguise. Revealing Antonio’s hidden Jewish heritage and insisting that he adopt Judaism through the symbolic assumption of a new name – Manasseh, meaning ‘causing to forget’ – Don Fernan, aka Solomon the Jew, forces his son, at an instant, into a position of division and bifurcation.22 Antonio must forget his old identity and its world to assume a new one that can be only foreign and strange to him. That this revelation should occur in Antonio’s own home is significant, for it translates his emotional turmoil in tangible terms. His father’s preparations for the sacred ceremony of his initiation turn Antonio’s home into a peculiarly unfamiliar landscape. He can only look with ‘a hollow and wandering glance on the singular furniture of the room’ (Melmoth, p. 246). The emphasis placed in this instance on personal estrangement and alienation becomes even more marked with Immalee/Isidora in the ‘Tale of the Indians’. Shipwrecked at the age of three on a deserted Indian island along with a nurse who soon after dies, Immalee – as she is named by the frightened but reverential inhabitants of the surrounding islands – believes herself to be ‘the daughter of a palm-tree, under whose shade she had been first conscious of existence’ and has an innocently misguided but firm sense of herself and her place in the world (Melmoth, p. 283). Returned to her family in Spain, however, after being discovered by an off-course ship, Immalee – now renamed Isidora – falls victim to what Victor Sage calls Maturin’s ‘real subject’ in Melmoth: ‘the distortion caused to the individual psyche by “systems of belief”’.23 Culturally alienated by Spanish Catholicism and its attendant social structure, Immalee becomes subject to a process of personal fragmentation produced by the violent conflict of her old and new identities and cultures. Unable to fit into her new society because of her attachment to her island way of life, and yet unable to return to her island paradise, Immalee finds her sense of self fundamentally shattered: ‘I cannot be what I was – Oh, let me then no longer remember it! Let me, if possible, see, feel, and think as those around me do!’ (Melmoth, p. 340). Returned to her native Spain but never at home there, Immalee, like Owenson’s Kashmir princess and priestess, Luxima, in The missionary, endures a process of cultural alienation that directly contributes to the fragmentation of her identity. For both characters, the result is disastrous: intermittent bouts of insanity find relief only in the form of death at the hands of the Inquisition. Similarly, for both, social, cultural, and personal alienation proceeds from

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their introduction to Western society and religion by their lovers. In Maturin’s novel, Melmoth introduces Immalee to Christianity in a provocative display of world religions. Such is his depiction and explanation of Christianity, especially in comparison to the violence, brutality, and heartbreak of its counterparts, that Immalee eagerly adopts the faith: ‘Christ shall be my God, and I will be a Christian!’ (Melmoth, p. 297). Her espousal of the Christian faith is not a conversion as such but a reassumption of a religion ‘breathed into her infant lip’ (Melmoth, p. 282). All the same, this renewed commitment, like Luxima’s conversion and subsequent baptism, remains problematic, for, in its apparent incompletion, it finally serves to tear Immalee’s world apart. Whereas Immalee views Christianity as an idealistic and idyllic faith, interaction with the harsh reality of Spanish Catholicism violently deconstructs her perspective. For Immalee, Christianity is a religion that ‘enjoins [its followers] to be mild, benevolent, and tolerant; and neither to reject [n]or disdain those who have not attained its purer light’ (Melmoth, p. 296). In Spain, however, Immalee discovers a very different understanding of Christianity. According to her mother, ‘true religion consists in hearing mass – in going to confession – in performing penance – in observing the fasts and vigils – in undergoing mortification and abstinence – in believing all that the holy church teaches – and hating, detesting, abhorring, and execrating [heretics]’ (Melmoth, pp. 332–3). Against this vision of Christianity, Immalee’s belief that religion should be ‘a system whose spirit was universal love’ stands in stark contrast (Melmoth, p. 333). More than that, it places her in suspicion, highlighting the ways in which she has been irrevocably tainted by her implicitly heretical Indian existence. The ‘extraordinary circumstances’ of Immalee’s early life render her, in the eyes of her family and Spanish society, no less execrable than a member of ‘the banished Moors, or the proscribed Jews’ (Melmoth, p. 337). A ‘daughter of nature’, Immalee can never wholly or effectively integrate into her new social milieu (Melmoth, p. 330). Instead, she remains somehow outside, fundamentally removed from a Spanish identification by her Indian existence. Only partially converted to or convinced by Spanish Christianity, Immalee becomes a social outcast. Like Luxima in The missionary, she is, in her own native land, ‘an apostate from her religion, and an alien to her country, branded with the stamp of infamy and of shame’.24 Moreover, like Juliet Granville, the unfortunate ‘Incognita’ of Frances Burney’s 1814 novel The wanderer; or, female difficulties, she is ‘irredeemably hybrid’.25 For Juliet, cultural conflict occurs between her native England and the country in which she is raised, France. Tied to both countries by family and fond associations, Juliet experiences longing for both of them but eventually finds that neither of them measures up to her nostalgic expectations. The novel opens, for instance, with Juliet’s disguised, midnight

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journey to England ‘[d]uring the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre’.26 Yet, while Juliet expresses fervent gratitude and joy at being once again in her native land, she soon finds homecoming to be harsh and unwelcoming. Forced upon the mercy and charity of those around her, while maintaining absolute silence about her name and background for some mysterious but honourable reason, Juliet finds very little succor in her homeland. As Tamara Wagner observes, for Juliet, ‘[r]eturning “home” from war-torn France offers neither welcome nor safety’.27 The disappointing reality of her longed-for English home prompts Juliet to yearn for France and those she has left behind there, thus ‘expos[ing] [home] as an elusive space; and the notion of a fixed home or place of origin as contingent at best’.28 Even when, after five volumes, the mystery is revealed, Juliet is vindicated as the legitimate heir to Lord Granville, and she marries her hero, Arthur Harleigh, the problem of ‘home’ remains. In marrying Harleigh, Juliet vows to partake of ‘the name, the mansion, the fortune, and the fate’ of her husband, but she immediately positions them as absentees, as they travel to the Continent to ensure that the kindly Bishop, Juliet’s adopted parent, is out of danger.29 Once there, Juliet ‘prevailed upon Harleigh to remain [in France], till it became necessary to return to their home, to present, upon his birth, a new heir’.30 Even in its conventional romance conclusion, then, The wanderer remains fundamentally ambivalent about the notion of ‘home’, which itself continues elusively to resist identification. Picturing its heroine torn between warring social and cultural associations and identities – symbolised, like Immalee’s, in her dual name: Ellis/Juliet – The wanderer positions Juliet as fundamentally unhomed, despite her ostensibly ‘happily-ever-after’ conclusion. Whether Maturin had Juliet or Burney’s novel in mind when imagining Immalee is, of course, uncertain, but the similarities between Juliet and Immalee are striking. Outcasts in their own homes, Immalee and Juliet emblematise the sense of alienation and estrangement echoed by the eponymous hero of Maturin’s 1816 tragedy, Bertram, when he potently declares, ‘I have no country’.31 Speaking of this drama as well as those of Richard Lalor Shiel, Claire Connolly maintains that both authors ‘[d]epict[ed] tragic heroes with “no country” [and therefore] invoke[d] a rootless alienation allied to a fatalistic view of the future; in these dramatic works lingering national feelings express themselves only through painful negatives’.32 For Connolly, these dramatists’ depiction of such personally isolated and estranged individuals is undeniably allegorical: ‘The abstract space of the stage mirrors the particular problems of post-union Ireland: its status both as country (site of an affective identification increasingly invoked by Irish romanticism) and no country (a site with its legal status swallowed up by the Act of Union).’33 Leaving aside, for the moment, the issue of Maturin’s engagement with Ireland, Connolly’s arguments are nevertheless compelling, especially in relation

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to Melmoth’s presentation of Immalee’s Indian island as both country/home/Eden and no-country/not-home/nowhere. The deserted island on which Melmoth discovers Immalee is, by Maturin’s description:

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an island in the Indian sea, not many leagues from the mouth of the Hoogly, which, from the peculiarity of its situation and internal circumstances, long remained unknown to Europeans, and unvisited by the natives of the contiguous islands, except on remarkable occasions. (Melmoth, p. 272)

The island retains its isolation because of superstition and the natural conditions that render it a forbiddingly unapproachable terrain. Europeans, the narrator tells us, assured by local natives that no monetary gain was to be had by visiting the island, purposely stayed away. An unexplored and unadulterated utopia, Immalee’s island, as well as Maturin’s description of it, conjure for the reader the conventional tension between such places as simultaneously idyllic and non-existent.34 Only in such an imaginary space is Immalee truly at home. Similarly, for Antonio, the life with which he has become accustomed is a fiction propounded by his parents to protect them and him from the Inquisition. Confronted with his true identity, Antonio’s fictional world – the only world he has known until this moment – comes tumbling down around him, starkly revealing Antonio’s figurative homelessness. Other characters also experience this sense of itinerant existence. Monçada, for instance, grows up in wretched conditions, visited weekly by his parents, ‘a young cavalier and a beautiful female’, who, despite their own tears, refuse Monçada’s plea ‘to take me home with them’ (Melmoth, p. 73). Later, brought suddenly to his parents’ palace, Monçada very quickly realises that it is no more home than the hovel in which he grew up. Instead, committed to the Church by his mother for her sin of pre-marital sex, Monçada is forcibly taken away from his simultaneously new and old family home to a monastery, from which he wishes only ‘liberty’ (Melmoth, p. 86). Finally escaping from it with the help of his younger brother, Monçada witnesses the murder of that brother and the final conclusion to any thoughts he had of returning to his family and reclaiming the home he never knew. In a similar fashion, Ines, in ‘The tale of Guzman’s family’, is disinherited by her inflexible brother, Guzman, upon her marriage to a poor German musician, Walberg. Forced to leave her native Spain and travel with her husband to Germany, Ines endures the alienation and estrangement of being a Catholic in a Protestant country. Later, when she is recognised again by an ailing Guzman and returns to Spain with her young family, Ines worries about ‘the possible future change in her brother’s favourable feelings towards her’ and the consequent transformation of her children into ‘strangers in the country, wholly unacquainted with its language, and averse from its religion’ (Melmoth, p. 407).

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Although returned ‘home’, Ines no longer views it as such, and, by the end of the narrative, she and her family have returned to Germany. This return ‘home’, however, remains forever marred by the continued memory of the past, and the family, though living ‘in prosperous felicity’ in Germany, are forced to witness Walberg ‘shudder[ing] with horror’ both at the frequent thought of Melmoth’s visitations and ‘the images of his family perishing with want’ (Melmoth, p. 434). Again, in ‘The lovers’ tale’, the staunchly Loyalist Sir Roger Mortimer takes in his granddaughter after the death of his younger son, disgraced and disinherited because of his conversion of Puritanism. Removed from her mother’s home to her grandfather’s, Elinor is forced ‘to hear the opinions she was attached to decried, and the characters she reverenced vilified’ (Melmoth, p. 457). Later, she falls in love with John Mortimer, the son of Sir Roger’s equally disgraced daughter. Reinstated in his grandfather’s good graces on account of his heroic efforts in the navy after the Restoration, John moves into Mortimer Castle and soon after becomes engaged to Elinor. Through the intrigues of his mother, however, John leaves Elinor at the moment of their marriage and later weds his cousin, Margaret, instead. Heartbroken but also ‘insulted’, Elinor ‘quit[s] the scene of her disgrace and her misfortune’ and ‘set[s] out . . . to the relative of her mother, a rigid Puritan, who resided in Yorkshire’ (Melmoth, pp. 473, 474). Although Elinor feels the castle to be peopled by ‘enemies’ – her memories of John – she finds her new home equally upsetting: ‘Elinor returned to the residence of her mother’s family in the hope of renewing former images, but she found only the words that had conveyed those ideas, and she looked around in vain for the impressions they had once suggested’ (Melmoth, pp. 473, 474). In this way, Elinor discovers ‘that all has been illusion’ (Melmoth, p. 474). Eventually, the crime committed against Elinor and John is revealed, but too late. The truth – told shortly after Margaret’s death – drives John insane. Tirelessly nursing him in her Yorkshire retreat, Elinor lives in a fantasy world: She sits beside him all day – she watches that eye whose light was life, and sees it fixed on her in glassy and unmeaning complacency . . . Averting her head, she thinks of other days. A vision passes before her. – Lovely and glorious things, the hues of whose colouring are not of this world, and whose web is too fine to be woven in the loom of life, – rise to her eye like the illusions of enchantment. (Melmoth, p. 495)

Only in death is Elinor’s dream world made real. Just before breathing ‘his last gentle sigh’, John ‘slowly raises his head, and fixes his eye . . . [with] intelligence in his glance . . . [and] thanks her with an unutterable look for all her care, her long and painful labour of love!’ (Melmoth, p. 501). These characters’ shared experience of social alienation as well as figurative

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and/or literal homelessness fundamentally unites them. In so doing, it highlights the mirror-like quality of their individual narratives. Indeed, despite the geographical and temporal differences between tales, as well as the huge cast of characters, the composite stories repeat, reflect, and mirror each other. In each tale, in fact, the central character – be it Stanton, Alonzo Monçada, Immalee, Walberg, or Elinor – falls victim to the demands and restraints of society and social institutions, with organised religion acting as the main culprit. Each character valiantly resists succumbing to what they understand as the false, inhumane, unjustified, and/or unjustifiable restrictions and limitations imposed by the societies in which they live, but increasingly finds himself or herself downtrodden and exposed to suffering, iniquity, and repeated injustice. It is in this situation that Melmoth makes his appearance, promising the character escape from despair for the price of his or her soul. As desperate as each character is, however, they all refuse, leaving Melmoth without a replacement and receiving, in their turn, reward, either earthly or heavenly, for their steadfast refusal of his satanic offer. Such repetition and reflection constructs Melmoth’s various tales as, in effect, a house of mirrors – a convoluted maze of mirrors around which the fairgoercum-reader must navigate to find the exit/conclusion (or, as the case may be, the entrance/beginning).35 Myriad reflections of the subject, of course, make this a difficult feat, conspiring against the reflected so that space and object, self and other become confused and confusing. At times, these mirrors also distort the subject, enlarging, elongating, swelling, and/or condensing, with a disconcerting, if often humorous, effect. Each of these reflections is an image of the subject, but the effect of the process of reflection and the way in which the mirrors are configured is a merging of reflected and reflection. All of the reflections, but so too the reflected, become the non-present present of which Derrida speaks. In this way, starting points and ending points dissolve, as do binary distinctions, causing reflection and reflected, present and absent, here and there, us and them, to bleed into each other and become confused, merged, inseparable. Adding to this essential breakdown of borders is the novel’s formal positioning as itself liminal. As in The fatal revenge, Maturin is clearly keen to dissociate his work from earlier novels conjured by his title. Nevertheless, works such as Radcliffe’s The mysteries of Udolpho, Roche’s The children of the abbey, and Lewis’s The monk repeatedly reveal themselves in Melmoth, partially through the novel’s interpolation of narratives. Such nested tales, although indicative of Maturin’s early plan to write a series of short stories, also reflect and frequently resemble the inner narratives employed by Radcliffe, Roche, and Lewis not only to explain apparently supernatural events but also to offer the reader morally sound advice. In The children of the abbey, for instance, a text divided from the start

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into two narratives – that involving Amanda Fitzalan and that centred on her brother, Oliver – further digressive tales repeatedly divert the reader’s attention away from the main characters. In so doing, however, they frequently offer counsel to their readers. The minor character Mrs Marlowe, for instance, tells of the pitiable results of her improper education. Taught by her mother to be ‘lively, thoughtless, vain, and ambitious to an extravagant degree’, the young Mrs Marlowe loses, as she believes, forever, her husband, owing to the ‘career of vice’ into which her excessive sensibility has apparently led her (Children of the abbey, pp. 117, 130). Although she is later vindicated, to a certain extent, and reunited with her husband, her tale serves to caution young female readers of the terrific potential of unrestrained passions. Similarly, in The mysteries of Udolpho, the ‘brief history of LAURENTINI DI UDOLPHO’ inserted near the end of the narrative warns the reader of the dangers of ‘unresisted passion[s]’.36 Moreover, it leads to the revelation of the mundane realities behind the ostensibly supernatural events that have hitherto frightened heroine and reader alike. Recalling earlier Gothic novels by way of its interpolated tales, Melmoth also contains repeated direct references to both the Gothic novel as a form and specific examples of the Gothic novel. As Regina B. Oost observes, for instance, in his description of John Melmoth and his dying uncle sitting ‘without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice’ (Melmoth, p. 8), Maturin deliberately alludes to The monk. Later, in another attempt at distancing his novel from earlier Gothic novels, Maturin writes of Immalee, that ‘[t]o the mere reader of romance, it may seem incredible that a female of Isidora’s energy and devotedness should feel anxiety or terror in a situation so common to a heroine’ (Melmoth, p. 372). Even Maturin’s title, in specifically recalling Burney’s similarly named novel, emphasises the author’s indebtedness to the Gothic. Although ‘wandering’ was, as Margaret Anne Doody observes, a characteristically ‘Romantic activity’, and the figure of the wanderer a ‘favourite’ amongst Romantic writers, Burney’s The wanderer, like Maturin’s later novel, also frequently bears witness to the influence of the Gothic novel.37 As Doody maintains, The wanderer is ‘in some sense “haunted” by the Gothic novel and its forms and formulae as curious instruments with which to observe repression. The Gothic novelists such as Ann Radcliffe were Burney’s own successors, but she, in turn, had learned from them.’38 Conjuring up and, indeed, repeating this Gothic haunting, Maturin’s text proclaims itself, from the very outset, a Gothic novel, even as its author continues to protest against this nomenclature. Like Maturin’s characters, then, Melmoth the wanderer is torn between warring formal and textual identifications and, as a result, sits squarely between Gothic and non-Gothic. For Oost, the combination of purposeful allusions to the Gothic novel and

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Maturin’s evident resistance to and even abjection of the Gothic mode reflects, on the one hand, Maturin’s understanding of his readers’s familiarity with Gothic conventions and, on the other, his desire intentionally to stir and then to deflate their expectations. This is, as Oost maintains, ‘Maturin’s strategy of resistance’ to a reading public he both despised and relied upon.39 According to Oost’s arguments, therefore, Maturin purposely integrated techniques, themes, and motifs made familiar by earlier Gothic novels in his own, while still distancing himself from these earlier works, in order rather maliciously to express his frustration at a reading public that refused to accord him the acknowledgement and fame he felt he deserved. Maturin’s simultaneous pandering to and frustration of readerly expectations becomes most obvious, Oost suggests, in his conclusion to Melmoth.40 Knowing what his readers would have expected from their experiences with earlier Radcliffean and Lewisean Gothic novels – either, on the one hand, a matter of fact explanation by which all of the preceding supernatural events are exposed as mundane phenomena coupled with a lesson on the dangers of excessive sensibility or, on the other hand, an outright indulgence in fantasy with, for instance, the earthly descent of Satan to deliver just punishment to the novel’s evil villain – Maturin delivers neither. Refusing both explanation and closure, Melmoth is, in Oost’s terms, both ‘conventional’ and ‘eccentric’, both Gothic and not.41 Despite or, indeed, because of, Maturin’s attempts to dissociate his novel from earlier Gothic novels, therefore, it becomes haunted by the ghosts of these past texts. The result is that, even as Maturin seeks to write a new kind of fiction, as he suggests in his preface, he produces a text that is, at the same time, thoroughly occupied and possessed by past literary forms. Attempting to refract the famous but critically derided novels of the Minerva Press, therefore, Maturin’s novel ends up reflecting them instead, creating a cyclical return of past voices and texts that mirrors the similarly cyclical and reflective nature of his interpolated narratives. The Gothic, in this way, becomes ‘symbolically spread’ throughout Melmoth the wanderer, by way of the ghostly infiltration of the Gothic mode in Maturin’s self-professed non-Gothic writing. In a similar fashion, Ireland becomes ‘symbolically spread’ through Maturin’s narrative, whether or not that was his intention. Just as the denounced Gothic novel spectrally overlaps with and filters into Maturin’s self-professed nonGothic novel, the text’s paratextual framework begins to penetrate and permeate the narrative proper. Working in conjunction with his preface, Maturin’s footnotes frequently seek to establish the factual basis for the most extreme and bizarre events. After describing, in gruesome detail, the death of the Inquisition Suprema at the hands of an angry mob, for instance, Maturin attaches the following footnote:

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This circumstance occurred in Ireland 1797, after the murder of the unfortunate Dr Hamilton. The officer was answered, on inquiring what was that heap of mud at his horse’s feet, – ‘The man you came for’. (Melmoth, p. 256)

Back in the fictional narrative, Maturin recounts Monçada’s horrified reaction to the mob’s attack and murder of the Inquisition head – a man he recognises as the parricide who helped lead him out of his imprisonment in a Spanish monastery only to turn him over to Inquisition officials. Seemingly glued to the spot by the spectacle, Monçada recounts feeling forced to watch, ‘like Regulus, with his lids cut off, compelled to gaze on the sun that withered up his eye-balls – till sense, and sight, and soul, failed me, and I fell grasping by the bars of the window, and mimicking, in my horrid trance, the shouts of the multitude’ (Melmoth, pp. 256–7). The footnote attached to the scene of Monçada’s collapse again refers the reader to an actual event: the murder of Lord Kilwarden, who was killed ‘[i]n the year 1803, when Emmet’s insurrection broke out in Dublin – (the fact from which this account is drawn was related to me by an eye-witness)’ (Melmoth, p. 257). Capturing the stupefying horror of this event, the footnote describes not only the bloody event itself – ‘Pike after pike was thrust through his body, till at last he was nailed to a door, and called out to his murderers to “put him out of his pain”’ – but also the reaction of a shoemaker who witnesses the atrocity: He stood at the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow struck – he heard the last groan uttered . . . The man stood at his window as if nailed to it; and when dragged from it, became – an idiot for life. (Melmoth, p. 257)

In each of these footnotes, as in the preface, Maturin is careful specifically to bolster the plausibility of his fictional narrative with reference to actual events, themselves verified by way of apparent eyewitness accounts. Such painstaking authentication and verification of the fictional narrative by factual account creates the same kind of mirror-house effect earlier described. Through these footnotes and their substantiation of the events described in Maturin’s narrative, fact and fiction, text and paratext become spectrally overlapped, producing a fundamental entwinement of both. Against Egenolf’s contention that text and paratext exist in tension with each other,42 I would suggest that, in Melmoth, these two forms – text and paratext – are actually reflections of each other, just as each individual tale is an echo of the preceding and succeeding tale, and fiction becomes a mirror for fact. In this way, there is not a multiplicity of voices, as Egenolf maintains, but instead a unison, which dismantles the system of binary oppositions initially encouraged by the novel’s structure and its prefatory insistence on novelty. In a similar way, text and paratext vitally link Maturin’s fictional narratives to his contemporary Ireland. The majority of the footnotes in Melmoth,

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in fact, relate to Irish events, as noted above, or Irish places, as when Maturin describes his lengthy visit to Cloghan Castle in Leixlip in order to corroborate his brief mention of ‘Cromwell’s Irish campaign’ in ‘The lovers’ tale’ (Melmoth, p. 447). Whatever Maturin’s intentions were for the actual structure of his novel, the effect of such authorial interventions into the narrative is to construct the same kind of mirroring or reflecting that occurs with the tales themselves as with the text and paratext. Each geographical and temporal setting, in fact, becomes a mirror for the other, ultimately and quite literally leading the reader back to Ireland as the paratext repeatedly inserts Ireland into the narrative proper and as the narrative itself returns to Ireland with Melmoth’s apparent death in his ancestral home. Moreover, despite the seeming relocation of narrative events to each of these far-flung places, we must remember that they are all, in fact, narrated from the (dis)comfort of John Melmoth’s ancestral home in Wicklow. When, eventually, we return to the frame narrative and, thus, to Ireland, Maturin suggests that we, as readers, might have ‘forgot’ the origins of the interpolated tales through which we have wandered (Melmoth, p. 534). Yet, Maturin’s paratextual commentary ensures that Ireland remains perpetually in mind, if not in view. Whether Maturin intended to construct his novel in the way we now read it so as to comment allegorically on contemporary Irish society seems, in this context, irrelevant, for such paratextual commentary never relies on the structure of the text for its potency. Footnotes such as those listed above attest to Maturin’s continued preoccupation with Ireland as he wrote and the spectral overlap of Ireland with the imagined worlds of his text. The effect of this overlap is to translate the fictional tales of cultural alienation into a very real one close to Maturin’s heart. Breaking down the borders between geographical and temporal zones, Melmoth encourages its reader to do the same. The social issues it investigates, the novel suggests, are not limited to the specific spaces and times his narrative establishes. Rather, the problems of social and personal estrangement, alienation, and isolation so central to its many tales are, the text implies, very much alive in present-day Ireland. In the case of the footnote attached to the brutal murder of the Inquisition Suprema, Maturin’s reference to the murder of the Reverend Dr William Hamilton in 1797 draws his readers’s attention to the 1798 Rebellion. As magistrate in County Donegal, Dr Hamilton was a vigilant opponent to the United Irishmen and remained in close contact with Dublin Castle, warning of a potentially dangerous area in the north-west of Ireland that he had identified as a hotbed of United Irishmen activity. His efforts to control insurgency did not go unnoticed. Having sheltered from a storm in Sharon rectory, the home of the Waller family, Hamilton was confronted by a group of armed United Irishmen,

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who demanded of the house’s occupants that Hamilton be sent out to them. When a single misplaced shot killed the pregnant Mrs Waller, the servants delivered Hamilton to the mob, and he was brutally beaten to death.43 Linking Hamilton’s death at the hands of the United Irishmen to that of the Inquisition Suprema at the hands of the Spanish peasantry, Maturin expressed his deep-seated fear of the native Catholic presence in Ireland. Personally affected by Hamilton’s death – Maturin’s cousin, the Reverend Henry Maturin, succeeded Hamilton as Rector of Clondevaddock, County Donegal, after Hamilton’s murder44 – Maturin cannot help but voice his horror at the power of the Irish Catholic mob. This fear becomes all the more pronounced with the addition of a similarly minded footnote only a few paragraphs later. Describing Monçada’s extreme reaction to the mob’s decimation of the Suprema, Melmoth paratextually reminds its readers of the death of Arthur Wolfe, Viscount Kilwarden. The Lord Chief Justice of Ireland at the time of Robert Emmet’s abortive rising in 1803, Kilwarden was overtaken on his way from his home in Clondalkin to Dublin Castle on 23 July 1803, dragged from his carriage, and brutally killed.45 For Maturin, Kilwarden’s ‘horrid’ murder further attests to the fearful violence of the angry Catholic mob (Melmoth, p. 257). Further, Monçada’s terrible compulsion in watching the mob’s activities purposely breaks down the distance between perpetrator, spectator, and victim. This ‘collapse of optical distance’, as Luke Gibbons calls it, implicates Monçada, and, by extension, the reader himself or herself, in the terror of the scene (s)he witnesses.46 Incapable of acting simply as spectators, Monçada and his reader find themselves, involuntarily or not, caught up in the atrocity, active participants rather than passive observers.47 At the same time, however, the painful position shared by Monçada and the reader is one of horrified helplessness. Hidden by necessity in the Jew’s home, Monçada can do nothing either to impede or to advance the crowd’s violent revenge. Similarly, the reader finds himself or herself helpless to do anything but read on. By involving his readers in this helplessness, Maturin invites us to understand it in an Irish context. The footnotes relating to Dr Hamilton and Lord Kilwarden, as Fiona Robertson contends, symbolically align the source of the fictional mob’s anger-driven violence – the Inquisition – with the governmental system in Ireland, and, in so doing, construct English authority in Ireland, sustained by the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, as equally oppressive as the Inquisitorial authority in Spain. Yoking together a symbol of religious oppression with one of political and social oppression, Robertson further maintains, Maturin suggested his belief that Ireland suffered from a peculiar kind of helplessness. In other words, subdued by a distant English government, Ireland, like Monçada and, implicitly, the reader, had become the helpless victim of a repressive and tyrannical institution.48

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In the context of the clamorous religious debate Maturin earlier described in Women; or pour et contre, as well as the increasing call for Catholic Emancipation, the double-edged fear expressed in Melmoth is telling. Fearful of the Catholic mob in its new incarnation under the leadership of Daniel O’Connell, Maturin equally fears the faraway government responsible for either granting or denying Emancipation. Emasculated and disempowered, much as De Courcy is in Women, Irish society waits helplessly by as decisions are made for it. In this position of powerless participation, Maturin suggests, Irish society and particularly, Anglo-Irish society, is fundamentally unsettled and ill at ease, awaiting what is to come. The novel’s keen emphasis on the ‘unhomely’, through Maturin’s paratextual reminders of Ireland, comes to include Ireland as well, transforming Maturin’s apparent religious parable into a politically minded piece of fiction eager to engage in the issue of contemporary Ireland and its social divides. At one point in the novel, in fact, Melmoth’s native land is termed ‘a country that no one knows’ (Melmoth, p. 326), constructing Ireland as a nameless, stateless place, no more real than Immalee’s Indian island. A place that is not a place, a home that is not a home, Ireland is, in Melmoth, fundamentally unhomely, and in this condition of unhomeliness lies the answer to the paradox of Melmoth’s existence – why would Maturin create a character who had done exactly what he avowed in his sermon that no one would ever do? The fact is, Melmoth is not the devil, the devil’s agent, or even evil incarnate. Rather, he is that unhomely presence working to reveal that horror and fear reside precisely in the ‘home’. Although the structure of Maturin’s (in)famous novel may forever remain contested, there is no doubt that Melmoth speaks of the ghosts haunting Maturin as he wrote, including contemporary Ireland and its violent past. As in Fatal revenge, Melmoth ‘begins by coming back’ in more ways than one:49 the narration of the novel’s interpolated tales commences with the return of Melmoth to Ireland at the death of John Melmoth’s uncle, but, what is more, that which begins the novel – Ireland, John Melmoth, and the novel’s frame narrative – returns in the end only to pave the way for a new beginning – Melmoth’s anticipated second return. The cyclical nature of this beginning and end again suggests the mirror-house imagery remarked upon above, while also reiterating the haunted and haunting nature of Maturin’s text. Itself haunted by Ireland and preceding Gothic novels, Melmoth continues to haunt us today, not just in works of fiction but also in literary criticism. Considered more closely, in fact, the arguments with which this chapter began – those of Foster, Lew, Null, Fowler, and Haslam – all begin uncannily to resemble Maturin’s novel itself. Informed by preceding critical works, reflecting and mirroring each other, despite slight variations in arguments, these texts assume the guise of the aforementioned house of

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mirrors. To return briefly to Richard Haslam’s arguments, therefore, is to end with the beginning, or, indeed, to begin with the end. Haslam himself admits that Maturin’s narrative, like the eponymous Melmoth, continually disregards normal temporal and geographical boundaries, while also frequently returning to Ireland.50 The manuscript in which John reads of Stanton and Monçada, as Haslam notes, is found ‘among some papers of no value, such as manuscript sermons, and pamphlets on the improvement of Ireland, and such stuff’ (Melmoth, p.  21). For Haslam, these texts, all ‘ironically dismissed’ as ‘of no value’, ‘surround a memoir of terror’ that is, in its very placement ‘in a drawer in a chest under the portrait of a damned ancestor hanging in the forbidden chamber of a crumbling Big House’ seen to be enveloped by the issue of the Irish nation.51 Similarly, the narratives contained within the manuscript are enclosed within the frame story of John Melmoth. Yet, Haslam contends, the texts amongst which the manuscript is found, along with the frame story, must be seen as contiguous rather than continuous, for, as he says, answers to the question of the relationship or correspondence between Ireland and the geographically and temporally removed regions explored in the novel remain ‘uncertain’.52 What I have argued instead is that the geographical locations in Maturin’s text are neither contiguous nor continuous but instead vitally overlapped, spectrally spread, mirroring and haunting each other throughout, just as text and paratext do, just as each individual tale haunts the other tales, and just as the Gothic haunts Maturin’s self-proclaimed non-Gothic text. And this, in an appropriate fashion, brings me back to where this chapter began – the strange fascination of Maturin’s text, which is only fitting for a work arguably best explained by taking a slight liberty with the words of Andrew Lloyd Weber, as one of the most ‘haunting haunted kind’.53 Notes 1 Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 220. 2 Lew, ‘“Unprepared for sudden transformations”’, p. 174. 3 Kathleen Fowler, ‘Hieroglyphics in fire: Melmoth the wanderer’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 522. 4 Jack Null, ‘Structure and theme in Melmoth the wanderer’, Papers on language and literature, 13 (1977), 136–7. 5 Ibid., p. 140. 6 See NLS 790/177–8, letter from Constable to Maturin, 24 April 1818. 7 NLS 790/259–60, letter from Constable to Maturin, 31 August 1818. 8 Ragaz, ‘Maturin, Archibald Constable, and the publication of Melmoth the wanderer’, pp. 372–3.

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9 Richard Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic: a rhetorical hermeneutics approach’, The Irish journal of Gothic and horror studies, 1.2 (2007), no pagination. Available online at http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Thevault.html, accessed 19 November 2009. 10 See above, p. 30. 11 Richard Haslam, ‘“Melmoth” (OW): Gothic modes in The picture of Dorian Gray’, Irish studies review, 12.3 (2004), 304; see also Genette, pp. 1–15. 12 Mangan originally used the phrase ‘fold over fold, inveterately convolved’ in a short piece titled, ‘My bugle, and how I blow it’, published in the Vindicator on 27 March 1841. As the editors of The collected works of James Clarence Mangan note, this appears to be a misquotation of Wordsworth’s line ‘. . . a growth / Of intertwisted fibers serpentine / Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved’, from ‘Yew-trees’, first written in 1803 and later published in 1815; see Jacque Chuto, Peter van de Kamp, Augustine Martin, Ellen Shannon-Mangan (eds), The collected works of James Clarence Mangan. Prose: 1832–1839 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002), pp. 362–3, note 32. 13 Patricia A. Coughlan, ‘“Fold over fold, inveterately convolv’d”: some aspects of Mangan’s intertextuality’, in Birgit Bramsbäck and Martin Croghan (eds), Anglo-Irish and Irish literature: aspects of language and culture, 2 vols (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1988), 2: 191. 14 Frye, The secular scripture, p. 59. 15 Ibid. 16 Anne Williams, Art of darkness: a poetics of Gothic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 81. 17 NLS 3884/10, letter from Maturin to Scott, 11 January 1813. 18 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘Introduction: the Gothic in western culture’, in Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Gothic fiction, p. 6. 19 In Castle Rackrent, Thady tells the reader that Sir Condy ‘was ever my white-headed boy’ (Castle Rackrent, p. 85). The phrase and the relationship it constructs between Condy and Thady indicates the former’s loyalty to a destructive retrospective identity and foreshadows his twinned inability and unwillingness to act as a responsible landowner. Handing everything over to Thady’s son, Jason, Condy effects the role-reversal whereby the Irish-Catholic Jason assumes the Rackrent estate and the Rackrent family itself is dispossessed. 20 Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic’. 21 Murray Pittock also points out Melmoth’s banshee-like qualities: Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 228. 22 Lew, ‘“Unprepared for sudden transformations”’, p. 189. 23 Victor Sage, ‘Diderot and Maturin: Enlightenment, automata, and the theatre of terror’, in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic: a spirited exchange, 1769–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 67. 24 Owenson, The missionary, p. 188. 25 Deirdre Lynch, ‘Domesticating fictions and nationalising women: Edmund Burke, property, and the reproduction of Englishness’, in Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (eds), Romanticism, race, and Imperial culture, 1780–1830 (Bloomington,

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

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Paratextual possession IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 59, quoted in Tamara Wagner, ‘Nostalgia for home or homelands: Romantic nationalism and the indeterminate narrative in Frances Burney’s The wanderer’, Cardiff Corvey: reading the Romantic text, 10 (2003), no pagination. Available online at www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/journals/corvey/articles/ cc10_n03.htm, accessed 8 July 2010. Frances Burney The wanderer; or, female difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (1814; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 11. Wagner, ‘Nostalgia for home’. Ibid. Burney, The wanderer, p. 870. Ibid., p. 871. Charles Robert Maturin, Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand; a tragedy in five acts (2nd ed.; London: John Murray, 1816), p. 26. Claire Connolly, ‘Theater and nation in Irish Romanticism: the tragic dramas of Charles Robert Maturin and Richard Lalor Shiel’, Éire-Ireland, 41.3/4 (2006), 194. Ibid., p. 211. Lew, ‘“Unprepared for sudden transformations”’, p. 181. See Victor Sage, ‘Irish Gothic: C. R. Maturin and J. S. LeFanu’, in Punter (ed.), A companion to the Gothic, p. 85 for the argument that Maturin’s narratives possess ‘a “broken mirror” effect’ and that Maturin’s aesthetic is one ‘of the broken or distorting mirror . . . close to Shelley’s in The Defence of Poetry’. Ann Radcliffe, The mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 655, 662. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Introduction’, in Frances Burney, The wanderer; or, female difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. vii. Ibid., p. xiv. Oost, ‘“Servility and command”: authorship in Melmoth the wanderer’, pp. 307, 306. Ibid., pp. 307–9. Ibid., p. 306. See Egenolf, The art of political fiction. C. W. P. MacArthur, ‘Hamilton, William (1755–1797)’, Oxford DNB online. Available online at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/12140, accessed 31 July 2006. See James B. Leslie, ‘Raphoe clergy and parishes’, in F. W. Fawcett and D. W. T. Crooks, (eds), Clergy of Derry and Raphoe (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1999), p. 51. Leslie lists Henry Maturin as the son of the Reverend Charles Maturin who was himself the son of the Reverend James Maturin. The latter is evidently a reference to the Reverend Gabriel James Maturin, who was not only father to the Reverend Charles Maturin, but also grandfather to Charles Robert Maturin. W. N. Osborough, ‘Wolfe, Arthur, first Viscount Kilwarden (1739–1803)’, Oxford DNB online. Available online at www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29830, accessed 31 July 2006.

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Gibbons, Gaelic Gothic, p. 56. Ibid. Robertson, Legitimate Histories, pp. 105–6. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 11. Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic’. Ibid. Ibid. Andrew Lloyd Webber, ‘Pilate and Christ’, in Jesus Christ superstar: the original motion picture soundtrack album (Decca US, 1998).

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Rethinking Scott’s revolution: The Albigenses as historical novel

‘The style of my friend Sir Walter Scott’: Gothicism in the historical novel Maturin’s sixth and final novel, The Albigenses, a romance (1824), is, like Melmoth the wanderer before it, a kind of textual house of mirrors. In it, fiction and historiography, prose and poetry, text and paratext become vitally overlapped, spectrally spread throughout the narrative and in each other, so much so that it is eventually impossible to distinguish one from the other. Initially, the novel was envisioned by Maturin as ‘part of a series’ – ‘the first of three historical romances, illustrative of European feelings and manners in ancient times, in middle, and in modern’.1 Maturin himself openly admitted to his publisher, Hurst, Robinson & Co., that the work had been modelled on Scott’s popular historical novel: [T]he work . . . has been flattered by some literary men to whom I have read it, with a strong resemblance to ‘Ivanhoe’ [1820] which I admit was my model, – I have studiously avoided the faults so justly charged on Melmoth, and tried to form myself on the style of my friend Sir Walter Scott.2

Maturin’s comments come in the midst of a letter in which he chastised his correspondent for asking to see the manuscript of his proposed novel before entering into an agreement. Indignantly, Maturin wrote, ‘I have not been in the habit of sending over MS on trial . . . In fact, standing as I do before the public, I feel that a romance of mine must be worth £500 to a publisher, as that sum has already been offered by two unconditionally.’3 Reflective of an authorial confidence bolstered by the success of Melmoth, but also, one suspects, indicative of Maturin’s continued financial troubles, this letter presents Scott’s influence as the chief selling point of The Albigenses. Undoubtedly, Maturin was very much affected by his mentor as by the Waverley series, and his comments underline the incredible financial and popular success Scott’s novels enjoyed. Nevertheless, The Albigenses is not, as Kramer contends, ‘a venture

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into a genre previously unattempted by Maturin, the historical novel’.4 In fact, Maturin had already dabbled with the historical novel form as later popularised by Scott in The Milesian chief and, arguably, Fatal revenge. By current critical descriptions of the historical novel, however, these texts, now narrowly defined as national tale and Gothic novel, respectively, do not conform to Scott’s model. Yet, as Trumpener argues, the historical novel emerged naturally out of and from these earlier forms. In particular, with reference to the national tale, Trumpener maintains that the historical novel apparently ‘inaugurated’ by Scott was not so much a new and groundbreaking form but simply an organic evolution of the national tale. Indeed, the progress of the realist novel in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Trumpener contends, depends less on what Georg Lukács understands as the historical novel’s ‘victory’ over other literary forms, and more on ‘an ongoing interplay and friction between two successive, related, and increasingly enmeshed generic forms’.5 For Trumpener, the national tale and historical novel ‘demonstrate both the fluidity and the stake of generic convention’.6 What this chapter is concerned to establish, however, is the continued influence of and enmeshed nature of the Gothic mode, not just in The Albigenses but in the historical novel as a whole. According to Lukács’s influential discussion of the Gothic novel and its relationship to the historical novel, Waverley and the novels that follow it differ fundamentally from earlier Gothic texts, such as The castle of Otranto, in their use of history. In the Gothic novel, Lukács’s argument runs, history is ‘mere costumery’, whereas in the historical novel, aesthetic focus on the past operates as an attempt to provide ‘an artistically faithful image of a concrete historical epoch’.7 Alongside its endeavour at historical authenticity, the historical novel also, in Trumpener’s view, seeks implicitly to juxtapose cultural-historical phases, thereby ‘focus[ing] [on] the way one developmental stage collapses to make room for the next and cultures are transformed under the pressure of historical events’.8 This is, as William Patrick Day sees it, the principal difference between Gothic and historical novels: in its concentration on the ways in which the violence of the past continues to emerge in the present, the former transforms historical, chronological time into an illusion.9 Past and present become inextricably superimposed on one another, with the result that tension between past and present as well as their respective epistemes of pre-rationality and modernity becomes irreconcilable. In contrast, the historical novel attempts to resolve the individual to the idea that the past is fundamentally lost to the present. At the same time, however, its nostalgia for a lost way of life blurs the boundaries separating past and the present, thus highlighting the ways in which the past paved the way for the present.10 Nostalgic longing for the past coupled with a firm acceptance of its necessary demise and end is generally understood as a hallmark of Scott’s historical

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fiction. For his part, James Cahalan perceives Scott’s view of the Gothic mode as very similar to this perspective on the past. Although the Gothic novel was influential in the development of Scott’s literary style and perspective, Cahalan asserts, Scott himself was uninterested in pursuing the Gothic as an aesthetic mode. Instead, he viewed Gothic tropes – ghosts, fairies, witches, etc. – as an essential and natural part of Scottish history and folklore.11 According to Cahalan therefore, any elements of Gothicism evident in Scott’s historical novel derive precisely from his desire to represent historical truths and progression. The Gothic, from this viewpoint, is simply a part of the barbaric past to be left behind, however wistfully, in the inevitable and much-desired progress to modernity. A careful consideration of Scott’s historical novels – unfortunately beyond the scope of this book – reveals a less clear-cut view of both history and the Gothic mode. Although Waverley ostensibly ends with an allegorical marriage akin to the national tale’s so-called ‘Glorvina solution’, the much-remarked upon image with which the narrative concludes – a romanticised portrait of Waverley and the Jacobite rebel, Fergus Mac-Ivor – highlights the threatening nature of the past. Only by reducing the violence of the past into what Nicola Watson terms ‘styling’ can Scott’s novel envision the safe containment of history.12 More overt about the continued destructive potential of the past’s Gothic interruption of the present, The bride of Lammermoor – arguably heavily influenced by Maturin’s The Milesian chief 13 – denies marriage altogether and, like Maturin’s earlier text, ends with the deaths of both hero and heroine as well as their respective family lines. Moreover, these deaths are represented as both a product and repetition of the evils of the past. The children of two feuding families, Edgar Ravenswood and Lucy Ashton are ultimately victimised at the hands of the long-standing quarrel between their families. Their deaths vitally underscore the continued, destructive intrusion of the past into the present: Lucy’s repeats that of ‘the murdered Nymph of the Fountain’,14 whom she is said strikingly to resemble, and Ravenswood’s transforms him into the living-dead embodiment of the Gothic past. Swallowed by quicksand, Ravenswood is neither alive nor dead, but ‘invisible, as if [he] had melted into the air’.15 In this way, he becomes a nonpresent presence, a kind of folkloric legend that, like that of the murdered lady of Mermaiden’s Well, threatens continuously to haunt the present. Such reminders of the Gothic mode and its sense of the never-forgotten, always-present past frequently reveal themselves in Scott’s historical novels, suggesting that the apparently new depiction of history ‘inaugurated’ by Waverley must be viewed as, in fact, a development of earlier models, the Gothic novel in particular, to which the historical novel remains inherently indebted. The historical novel and its ostensible predecessor, the Gothic novel, do not, as Lukács and others indicate, exist in contrast to each other. The Albigenses, in particular,

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reveals the absolute necessity of attention to the generic and formal merging of Gothic and historical modes in this period. Appealing to the usual understanding of Scott’s literary ‘revolution’ – the notion that he introduced a new kind of fictional writing and, with it, a new perspective on the intersection of history and fiction – Maturin’s novel nevertheless draws attention to the oppositional meaning of the word ‘revolution’: a ‘circular movement’ or ‘cyclical recurrence’.16 As in Banim’s The Boyne water, The Albigenses portrays the present as a frustrating, potentially destructive, but also self-perpetuating repetition of the past. For Banim, the unsatisfactory resolution to the seventeenth-century Jacobite–Williamite Wars and the attendant broken promises to Ireland’s Catholic population, are first repeated in Anglo-Irish Union and again threaten to recur in the potential defeat of Catholic Emancipation. Where Banim is concerned to privilege the cause of Emancipation and warn against the danger of revolution in both its meanings – the child conceived by the novel’s surviving heroine at the narrative’s conclusion is significantly to be named James – Maturin is attuned to the continued threat of religious division in Ireland. To this end, the sense of history in The Albigenses partakes of that of both historical and Gothic novels, as narrowly defined above. In other words, it is, on the one hand, focused on a qualified historiographical accuracy, while, on the other hand, keen to deploy historical ‘fact’ in order repeatedly to iterate the recurrence of the past in the present. Implicitly, as we shall see, this present is that of Maturin’s contemporary Ireland, threatened within, as forcefully portrayed in Women, by competing orthodox and evangelical Protestant sects but also equally, if not more so, by the ever-more vociferous demand for Catholic Emancipation. Recycling history: the place of the past in The Albigenses Formally suggesting the cyclical version of history presented in its pages, The Albigenses rehearses the structure and narrative focus of Maturin’s first novel, Fatal revenge. In it, as in Fatal revenge, attention is trained on two brothers in a medieval Catholic Continental setting. More specifically, The Albigenses opens in the early thirteenth century in the bloody aftermath of the first Albigensian Crusade, which began in 1209 and had as its goal the extirpation of the Cathar heresy, a heterodoxy which included as its adherents the Albigenses, or Cathars from the Albi area of modern-day southern France. The heresy emerged in parts of the Mediterranean, including Languedoc, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Believers in a dualistic notion of God, the Albigenses understood that a ‘good’ god would never have created the material world, as sinful as it was, and instead ruled over a heavenly realm to which individuals could ascend by renouncing the pleasures, sins, and evils of earthly existence. Fitting to Maturin’s

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novel about the recurrence of history, the Cathars understood that self-denial in this world would enable the individual to resume heavenly sainthood and thereby prevent the dreaded alternative – repeated earthly reincarnation.17 In a time of increasing solidification of Church power, the Cathar heresy was perceived as an obvious menace in Rome. Threatened by the increasing growth and strength of the heresy in the second half of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth, Church authorities demanded that secular powers in the Languedoc region – noblemen like Raymond VI of Toulouse who could call feudal armies to their service – control the situation. When such men apparently wavered in their commitment to persecuting the heretics, Pope Innocent III launched a series of crusades against the heretics that endured for twenty years (1209–29). Even with the end of the Crusade itself, however, troubles between the Catholic Church and surviving Cathars continued for several more decades. An obvious continuation of the investigation of religious strife begun in Women and Melmoth, The Albigenses commences with the entry of its two heroes, Paladour and Amirald, into a battle between the Crusaders and the Albigenses. Orphaned in childhood and thereafter separated, the brothers remain ignorant of their familial relationship and of the identity of their father – the Albigensian sympathiser, Raymond VI. As Crusaders, both men have committed themselves to eradicating the Cathar heresy, but both equally betray a ghostly inheritance from their forgotten father – a marked sympathy for those they should be persecuting and killing. Paladour, for instance, gains his knighthood and his title – Sir Paladour de la Croix Sanglante – from King Philip II himself after saving an Albigensian baby from the burning remains of a castle in an early battle of the Crusade. Amirald, for his part, falls in love with the beautiful Albigensian girl, Genevieve, who nurses him to health after he is presumed dead in a particularly savage clash. Eventually, Amirald converts to Genevieve’s creed and marries her, but, as might be expected, the course of love does not run smoothly. Instead, the two are separated for much of the novel, physically and spiritually, and Amirald comes to believe that Genevieve is lost to him forever. He therefore throws himself into battle with abandon, to be saved from almost certain death by Paladour and Raymond of Toulouse, who have discovered the mystery of the brothers’ parentage. The shared birthmark on the shoulders of both Paladour and Amirald attests to their brotherhood and confirms their father as Raymond of Toulouse. Reunited with his brother and father, Amirald then learns that Genevieve is, in fact, alive, not dead as he had believed. The couple are married, despite their heretical beliefs, by the Catholic Abbot of Nourmoutier, and, again revealing Paladour’s sympathy for the Albigenses, live with him and his wife in the castle of Raymond of Toulouse.

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In order for this picturesque conclusion to occur, however, Paladour himself must also endure a series of adventures, disappointments, and misunderstandings. Having vowed to avenge his family on its last remaining enemy, Paladour is haunted by dark phantoms from both past and future. Believing from these visions that he is destined to murder an innocent female, Paladour never expects that this woman will be the one with whom he falls in love – Lady Isabelle, the Lord of Courtenaye’s niece, and therefore the descendant of the man responsible for the death of Paladour’s mother and the destruction of his ancestral home. Ignorant of his family history, Paladour marries Isabelle, only to discover on their wedding night that she is in fact the person he has sworn to kill. Unable to complete the deed to which he has committed himself, Paladour attempts suicide instead. Isabelle, in her turn, grievously injures herself, and both are nursed secretly back to health by a mysterious soothsaying woman, Marie de Mortemar. In an echo of the pageboy disguise Eva assumes in The Boyne water, Isabelle becomes Paladour’s disfigured aide, as he heedlessly flings himself into ever more desperate situations in the guise of the Black Knight thinking his wife is dead. Eventually, having unsuccessfully sought death on the battlefield fighting against the Crusaders, Paladour solicits a promise from Raymond of Toulouse to kill him. Shortly before the execution, however, Paladour is reunited with the believed-to-be-dead Isabelle and almost simultaneously discovers his brother and father. These revelations pave the way for a conclusion in which the religious strife between Albigenses and Catholics allegorically resolves itself in the cross-border familial settlements of Paladour and Amirald. As detailed as this synopsis is, it can only gesture at the intricacies of Maturin’s lengthy tale, which is characteristically rife with narrative shifts and mistaken identities, but also kidnappings, lycanthropes, fake wakes, and lengthy séances with witches, wizards, and astrologers. In an attempt to clarify the novel’s many complexities, Dale Kramer has distinguished two simultaneously running plotlines – the historical, involving the actual Crusades and their historical figures, and the non-historical, focusing on the lives and adventures of Paladour and Amirald.18 For Kramer, it seems that Maturin’s choice of historical period and setting is simply one with which to capitalise on Scott’s success and the growing ‘salability of fiction that used history’.19 Thus, he suggests, while Maturin generally accurately portrays the Albigenses, his historiographical account of the sect is fundamentally faulty: Not only are there silent and pointless alterations, such as [the] battle in which Simon de Montfort is killed taking place at Tarascon instead of Toulouse, and gross anachronisms, such as the reference to Montezuma (1480–1520 A.D.) in 1216; but Maturin alters the sequence of actual historical events in order to tighten the

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plot . . . Maturin usually notes his changes of history, but such admissions do not help the reader know the actual circumstances or the actual chain of events.20

The confusion and near-indignation evinced by Kramer over Maturin’s historiographical licence misses the point of the use of history in The Albigenses, as in the historical novel as a literary form. Willem Scholten, for instance, in noting that Maturin’s background reading does not ensure historical accuracy,21 nevertheless observes that ‘[t]here is no reason to find fault with Maturin’s attitude towards historical reality’. Instead, Scholten claims, the ‘great liberties’ Maturin takes differ very little from the same kind of artistic licence characteristic of Scott’s works,22 which, although lauded as being both informative and entertaining, were never understood as objective historiography. In calling Scott ‘an historian’, for instance, the Monthly review suggested that Scott ‘regard[ed] a knowledge of the motives and principles of actions as more worthy of attainment than the chronological succession of those actions themselves’.23 Lukács later put it very similarly: ‘Historical authenticity means for [Scott] the quality of the inner life, the morality, heroism, capacity for sacrifice, steadfastness etc. peculiar to a given age. This is the important, imperishable and – for the history of literature – epoch-making thing about Scott’s historical authenticity.’24 To judge The Albigenses by markers of chronological or strictly factual accuracy, as Kramer does, is to hold the novel to entirely different standards than those of Scott’s historical novel. What should be more important is Maturin’s success or failure in recreating the so-called ‘inner life’ of historical characters – an issue to which I shall return later in this chapter. In any case, achieving the kind of historical exactness demanded by Kramer seems near impossible, considering the sheer dearth of information about the Albigenses. As Emily McCaffrey notes, ‘[w]hilst much is known about the Crusades led against the Cathars, little is actually known with any certainty about the Cathar heresy itself’.25 This lack of information has nevertheless done little to impede historical interest in and interpretation of the heresy and its followers. As McCaffrey remarks, the first written accounts of the Cathars began to appear in the thirteenth century and have continued to appear ever since, producing what she calls ‘very eclectic images’ of the Cathars, their beliefs, and their way of life.26 Most interestingly for this book, from the Reformation onwards, the Cathar heresy was adopted by both Catholics and Protestants as proof either of Protestantism’s heretical nature or of its continuation of true Christianity, respectively.27 Reminiscent of the ways in which eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians, both Protestant and Catholic, utilised the figure and story of St Patrick to legitimise their individual views of their respective churches as both the one, true church and the earliest extant church in Ireland,28 historical accounts of

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the Cathars reflect their authors’ ideological biases. Catholic apologists therefore frequently condemned Luther for ‘reviving “sleeping heresies”’ like that of Catharism and attempted to prove that Luther’s ideas were simply ‘part of a continuous tradition of wicked dissent which . . . could be traced through the preceding centuries in the form of Waldensians, Albigensians, and Hussites, among others’.29 The connection between Luther’s beliefs and those of the Cathars held such sway in the minds of Catholic theologians and protectors that, in his 1561 L’histoire des schismes et hérésies des albigeois, Jean Gay claimed a direct link between Cathars and Calvinists, maintaining that they each, in their respective temporalities, espoused the same evangelical faith in response to the corruption of the contemporary Catholic Church and considered themselves ‘evangelists’.30 Protestant apologists, in their turn, claimed the direct line between Cathars and Lutherans as incontrovertible proof of Protestantism’s identity as ‘true’ and ‘pure’ Christianity, relying on this link as the verification both of Protestantism’s reformed nature and of its august pedigree.31 In this way, both Protestant and Catholic writers in the sixteenth century asserted a close theological relationship between Catharism and Protestantism – an association that would continue to be upheld over the next several centuries. Indeed, the connection between Cathars and Protestants was so well established in the popular imagination that, according to Malcolm Barber, it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that Protestant writers in particular began to recognise the clear distinctions between Cathar and Protestant creeds.32 McCaffrey dates this shift in opinion even later – to the mid-nineteenth century, when Charles Schmidt declared the essential difference between Cathar and Protestant beliefs in his Histoire de la secte des cathares ou Albigeois (1849).33 Whatever the exact date, Maturin’s novel betrays its indebtedness to Protestant thought linking Catharism and Protestantism. Noting in the first volume the mystery that surrounds the Albigenses, Maturin writes, ‘Of these men it is difficult to speak; history has told but little of them; and their characters, alike exaggerated by friends and foes, has left “the middle way”, if the safest way, the very hardest to take’ (Albigenses, 1: 137). At the same time, however, Maturin’s historical source material confirms his Protestant apologist perspective. Jean-Paul Perrin’s Histoire des Vaudois (1619), for instance, was commissioned by French Protestants at the 1607 synod of Reformed Churches in La Rochelle. In it, as Barber notes, Perrin ‘claimed that Waldensians [a heretical group that accepted sixteenth-century Protestantism, thus becoming French Protestants, or Huguenots] and Cathars did not differ in their beliefs, and that both were falsely accused of Manichaeism by a Catholic Church intent upon crushing and discrediting these proponents of the true faith’.34 The 1655 English translation of Perrin’s text, titled Matchlesse crueltie, declared at large in the ensuing history of the

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Waldenses, for instance, asserts, ‘The Albigenses . . . differ nothing at all from the Waldenses, in their beleefe: but they are only so called of the Countrey of Albi, where they dwelt and had their first beginning’.35 Similarly, Alexander Ranken’s History of France (1802–22) reveals its bias toward establishing and defending the venerable theological lineage of Protestantism. Written by the Scottish clergyman and historian the Reverend Alexander Ranken (1775–1827), the History also links Albigenses and Waldensians, declaring that they were either ‘two branches of the same sect, or that the former were sprung from the latter’.36 Through such claims, both texts ‘construct a formidable martyrology for Protestants’.37 Building on Protestant apologist sources such as Perrin and Ranken, Maturin constructs his Albigenses as an ‘evangelical’ sect, possessing ‘pure’ manners, ‘strict’ discipline, and a particular regard for the Old Testament: It is . . . a curious, but indisputable matter of fact, that the majority of them were as tenacious of certain texts and terms of the Old Testament, as their legitimate descendants, the English Puritans, were some centuries later; and that, like them, they assumed Jewish names, fought with Jewish obduracy, and felt with Jewish hostility. (Albigenses, 1: 137–8)

This evangelical identity deliberately highlights the Albigenses’ understanding of themselves as God’s chosen people, much like the Israelites of the Old Testament and, closer to home, the Anglo-Irish community in Ireland. An illustrative example: Boanerges, doing justice to his name, delivers a fiery oratory to the Bishop of Toulouse in which he deploys Old Testament imagery to depict the contest between the Albigenses and the Catholic Church as that between the Israelites and their oppressors:38 And who art thou . . . that scatterest the fold of the Lord, and pushest them with shoulder and side from the fat pastures wherein they should dwell safely? Thou hast thyself eat of the fat and drunk of the sweet, I warrant me; yea, thy food hath been of the kidneys of wheat and the fat of fat rams, and thy drink of the vine of Sibmah and the vintage of Elealeh; – and comest thou here to scare the chosen people who wander in the wilderness, and are fain to feed on manna, while thou wast feasting amid the flesh-pots of Egypt? (Albigenses, 2: 73)

Combining several disparate Biblical references, Boanerges’ speech forcefully allies the Albigenses with the persecuted Israelites and suggests their unjust treatment by a Catholic Church grown too powerful and corrupt.39 At the same time, however, it gestures towards the errors into which the Albigenses fall, at least according to Maturin. Mirroring the ‘tissue of biblical phrases’ ascribed by Scott to his Covenanters in Old mortality (1816),40 Boanerges’ web of allusions highlights his selective reading and use of the Bible. In an episode very similar to Boanerges’ speech in The Albigenses, a young Covenanting preacher in Old mortality

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delivers a rousing address to his fellow Covenanters after their victory over the royal forces. Following the ‘absolute Boanerges’, Kettledrummle, Scott’s youthful preacher, Macbriar, deploys language that is at once both coarse and eloquent. Only the influence of ‘a good natural taste’ saves him from ‘the grosser and more ludicrous errors of his contemporaries’, simultaneously ensuring that ‘the language of Scripture, which, in their mouths, was sometimes degraded by misapplication, gave, in Macbriar’s exhortation, a rich and solemn effect’.41 Boanerges, unlike Macbriar, however, falls into the error of misapplication noted by Scott, highlighting the tendency of the Albigenses frequently to use ‘allusions borrowed from wholly inapplicable passages in the Jewish dispensation’ (Albigenses, 1: 348). For Maturin, the error of Biblical misapplication was a serious but nevertheless correctable one, as he explained in the first of his Five sermons.42 Yet, for the Albigenses, the propensity for a dissonance of multiple and often misleading Biblical references indicatively emerges as a symptom of internal dissension. Approached by the Monk of Montcalm – a Papal legate sent to negotiate peace in the Languedoc region near the start of the novel – in order to organise conciliatory negotiations between the Catholic Church and themselves, the Albigenses tellingly reveal the divisions separating them into two parties – the military leaders and their followers on the one hand, and the religious leaders and theirs on the other. With ‘each party fiercely insisting on their exclusive right to treat with the crusaders in the name of the whole body’, rhetoric becomes paramount (Albigenses, 1: 347). Using ‘the Jewish phraseology’ Maturin attributes to them, the Albigenses fight a linguistic battle notable, as the narrator suggests, for its abundantly misapplied Biblical passages (Albigenses, 1: 155). Rather than merely attesting to the Albigenses’ interpretative errors, this episode specifically underscores the internal strife undermining the sect’s cohesiveness. Relying on a Biblical vocabulary of simultaneous victimisation and valorisation, the Albigenses, like Scott’s Covenanters, vindicate themselves by focusing on the faults of the opposition, never acknowledging that such errors equally lie within. Their language is thus, in James Kerr’s words, ‘a form of selfdeception’.43 Kerr further argues that the language of Old Testament chosenness and victimisation in Old mortality functions as a method ‘of concealing the ugly truth of the rebels’ [the Covenanters] brutality in battle, of patching over the factionalism that divides the Presbyterian interest, and of justifying the Whigs’ intolerance for other religious and political creeds’.44 The same might be said in relation to the Albigenses. The language of the Old Testament justifies their cause at the same time that it papers over underlying contradictions of violence, sectarian intolerance, and internal dissidence. In this way, despite their oppression at the hands of a corrupt and greedy Catholic Church, the Albigenses prove dangerously similar to their persecutors:

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prone to ongoing discord, dissension, intolerance, and hypocrisy. A central indicator of the sect’s tendency for the same intolerance for which they castigate their persecutors occurs with the expulsion of Genevieve. Having been brutally defeated by the Crusaders in a chance encounter, the group’s military leader, Mattathias, returns to the Albigensian camp vowing revenge: The Lord hath forsaken us . . . and wherefore? because we have not kept our vow, – the vow we vowed on the spoiling of Beziers – on the escape from Carcassonne – over the bodies of these saints who sleep let us renew it – and keep it, as I have kept it with arm and heart to-day, – from henceforth be our persecutors accursed, body and soul, life and limb; accursed be those who help or pity them. (Albigenses, 1: 151–2)

So strong is this desire for revenge that the Albigenses forcefully expel Genevieve from their ranks once it has been discovered that she has nursed an injured Crusader back to health. Much like Owenson’s Luxima in The missionary, Genevieve instantly becomes, for this perceived transgression, a solitary wanderer, bereft of friend and family. She also emerges as a figure akin to Ivanhoe’s Jewess, Rebecca, who similarly assists individuals in need without consideration of race, creed, or class. These two ostracised women implicitly symbolise a ‘religion of deeds over creeds’, which both Scott and Maturin appear eager to endorse in their respective novels.45 At the same time, however, both women attest to the dangers inherent to an adherence to deed not creed in an atmosphere of violent sectarian intolerance. For Rebecca, abduction, imprisonment, a trial for witchcraft, a condemnation to death, and a reprieve that ultimately prepares her for exile from England are her reward for tolerance. Genevieve suffers through a similar, if even more exaggerated, situation of hardship and duress as a result of her non-sectarian behaviour. Driven from her fellow Albigenses into an impending blizzard, she finds herself on the brink of death. She wakes a prisoner in the Abbey of Nourmoutier, where the Bishop of Toulouse endeavours to seduce her. Escaping this situation, Genevieve soon finds herself once more in captivity, this time abducted by a rapacious Lewis, Dauphin of France. She is, in both instances, rescued from potential rape and further violation by the timely interventions of Amirald. Although the abuse Genevieve suffers occurs at the hands of prominent Catholic figures, the ruinous course she must follow is first initiated by the people of her own sect. By banishing Genevieve for her act of charity, the Albigenses prove themselves no better than the corrupt and licentious Catholics. As in Ivanhoe, where, as Lionel Lackey maintains, ‘Christians as a class are no better than Jews, [and] Jews as a class no better than Christians’, in The Albigenses, both Catholicism and the Cathar creed come under fire. In the end, for both Maturin

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and Scott, a lesson of toleration seems key. Ivanhoe correspondingly undergoes, in Lackey’s phrase, a ‘thoughtful pilgrimage’ whereby he moves from a ‘position of commitment to social unity, through an added transcending of religious prejudice, toward a final synthesis of Saxon and Norman nationalism, Christian and Jewish sectarianism, militarism and pacifism’.46 Ivanhoe’s counterpart, Amirald, endures a similar developmental process. Originally committed to the Church’s battle against heretics, Amirald finds himself disillusioned with the pomp and display of the Catholic cause, especially after Paladour’s apparent death. ‘Methinks’, Amirald tells Genevieve, ‘when I recall the disastrous fate of the brave and lovely, when I think of Paladour and the lady Isabelle, the world and all it contains grow dim to my view. I wonder not that men have fled from it to these sweet and solitary places’ (Albigenses, 4: 57–8). He is further persuaded of the advantages of a simple life by the representations of Genevieve and her understanding of the Albigensian faith. Apprised of the Albigensian way and its merits in this manner, Amirald turns against the Crusaders in the novel’s final battle in order to protect the Albigenses and their liberty to live and worship as they choose. Finally, although Amirald’s conversion from Catholicism is never fully described, it is concretised by his marriage to Genevieve at the narrative’s conclusion. The novel’s lesson of tolerance then receives reinforcement when, far from being ostracised or alienated, Amirald continues to enjoy the affection and approval of his friends. No further mention is made of the Crusade, and the reader is allowed to assume that the establishment of peaceful domestic accord between Amirald, Genevieve, Paladour, and Isabelle, all in one house, symbolises, or at least mirrors, a similar settlement of national and religious strife. Maturin’s implication with this ending seems clear: religious creeds have been set aside in the interest of tolerance and reconciliation. The novel’s concluding image cements this idealised vision in the reader’s mind: the Monk of Montcalm, returning to Raymond of Toulouse’s castle after a long pilgrimage, discovers the grave of Genevieve’s gentle and peace-loving grandfather, Pierre, and pauses there to ‘tell a bead or two, and utter a prayer for him – heretic as he was’ (Albigenses, 4: 276). The next morning, he is found dead on the grave, having written in the dirt next to him a testament, in Latin, of ‘his attachment to the pastor’s character, if not to his creed’ (Albigenses, 4: 276–7). Leaving us with this vision, the narrator concludes: ‘May those of different faiths, like them, imitate their tolerance and embrace their example!’ (Albigenses, 4: 277). Idyllic as this conclusion may be, a troubling air of artificiality suffuses the peace and accord trumpeted by the novel’s final scenes. Amirald’s conversion, for instance, upon closer inspection, emerges as problematic at best. In fact, he is, like Owenson’s Luxima, only partially converted.47 As Genevieve explains to

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Pierre, ‘the first impulse of his noble heart’ induced his conversion, but ‘every hour he repents the sacrifice’ (Albigenses, 4: 163). Heaving a sigh each time he passes a castle or a Catholic church, Amirald unconsciously expresses his longing for his abjured Catholicism. No longer allowed ‘the martial sport of the tourney’ or ‘the pomp of the ancient faith’, Amirald cannot help but find his new creed lacking (Albigenses, 4: 163). Even more ominous than Amirald’s continued yearning for Catholicism is the threat of future events hanging forebodingly in the margins of the text. The Albigenses draws to a close before the end of the actual Albigensian Crusade, and no mention is made of the treaties of Paris and Meaux, which ended the Crusade, or of the Papal Inquisition put in place to deal with the remaining heretics throughout the 1230s. Such omissions are particularly significant in light of the fact that the Treaty, or Peace, of Paris (1229) effectively began the Languedoc’s reluctant assimilation into the rest of France. In fact, underlying the Crusade’s proclaimed desire to eradicate heresy was a regional and hierarchical power struggle pitting north and south, the Crown and the Counts of Toulouse, against each other.48 With the Treaty of Paris, the long-coveted region finally fell under the control of the Crown: Raymond VII, the acting Count of Toulouse, took an oath of submission to Church and State and surrendered over two-thirds of his father’s lands. In future, sympathisers to the heretics were to be treated in a similar fashion – with excommunication and confiscation of their lands.49 Raymond’s capitulation thus began a process by which much of the autonomy previously distinguishing the Languedoc region from the rest of France was lost. Although omitted here, the knowledge of the Peace of Paris, its forceful process of land acquisition, and the impending Papal Inquisition makes any sense of lasting accord merely superficial. Moreover, it forces us to reconsider  the image of the mutual grave of Pierre and the Monk of Montcalm with which the novel concludes. Indicating that the violence of religious passion animating the text will soon disappear, much like the monk’s message traced in dust, the grave functions as a kind of memorial to ostensibly dead religious strife. This is an image evident in Scott’s Old mortality, where the death of the eponymous graverestorer and last remaining link between past and present signals the final end to Scotland’s history of violent religious dispute.50 Yet, as would be the case with The bride of Lammermoor and Redgauntlet (1824), there remains in Old mortality a suggestion that graves, rather than simply emblematising the death of the past, also herald an anxiety about the potential that the past will refuse to remain ‘suitably dead’.51 The same is true in the case of Maturin’s The Albigenses. The Monk of Montcalm’s message of peace, tolerance, and reconciliation is fragile, easily effaced, and transient. Soon destroyed by trampling feet or unkind elements, it

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fails to overcome historical reality: the continuing turbulence between Catholics and Albigenses throughout the thirteenth century. While Maturin never directly refers to the occluded persistence of violence and discord in his novel, he nevertheless manipulates the historical connection between Albigenses and Protestants to suggest its repetition in the present. In particular, describing the desolate tower in which Paladour and Isabelle are nursed by Marie de Mortemar as belonging to Hugo, or Hugues, Maturin identifies ‘Ugo, or Hugues’ as ‘a baron of Languedoc, who favoured the Albigeois, and from whom the French protestants of a later period derived the name of Huguenots’ (Albigenses, 4: 34). Exactly whom Maturin is referring to here is unclear, but, given the general acceptance of the German derivation of the word ‘Huguenot’,52 Maturin seems to want purposely to relocate the origins of the term geographically and chronologically in order to link the Albigenses to the Huguenots of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ‘Hugues’ thus becomes the intersection point of Albigenses and Huguenots, adding to the novel’s already heavy reliance on Protestant apologist historical sources to draw a direct ideological, geographical, and historical link between the two persecuted groups. Historically, in fact, the majority of Huguenot churches and believers inhabited the same area as the Albigenses in France, including the Languedoc region, where, as Mack P. Holt observes, Protestantism’s spread was very often twinned with an ongoing struggle for regional autonomy.53 A similar battle for local control in Languedoc was also one of the major issues in the Albigensian Crusade, as we have seen. For Maturin, however, the crucial link between Albigenses and Huguenots is less geographical than ideological. Both groups endured long histories of persecution at the hands of the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. As the Protestant minority in France, the Huguenots, including Maturin’s great-great-grandfather, had been persecuted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Ruth Whelan points out, the emergence of a Reformed tradition in France split the country along religious lines, enacting, from 1562, a series of civil wars between Catholics and Protestants known as the Wars of Religion.54 In 1598, the Edict of Nantes was issued, effectively compelling Catholics and Protestants ‘to lay down arms and live in peaceful coexistence, however begrudgingly’.55 The Edict’s success in effecting peace, however, was limited, and sectarian violence continued, with the last of the Wars of Religion only concluded in 1629 with the Peace of Alais and the subsequent disarmament of the Protestants.56 Sustained prejudice towards and persecution of Huguenot society characterised the remainder of the seventeenth century and eventually culminated in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. For his part, Maturin was convinced his own ancestors, as Huguenots,

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had been victims of this ongoing Catholic intolerance. His antipathy toward Catholicism in Melmoth, The Albigenses, and his published sermons might therefore be seen to derive, at least in part, from this understanding of past wrongs committed by the Catholic Church. More than that, Maturin’s reference to the Huguenots in The Albigenses, and, through it, their history of persecution, suggests the ways in which he wished to construct the Albigenses as a kind of ‘faithful remnant struggling against the monolithic Roman Catholicism of France’.57 Indicatively, this was a metaphor that was often deployed in the Huguenots’ quest to create a myth of origins that would uphold their belief in themselves as an unjustly beleaguered minority.58 As Ruth Whelan cogently argues, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes retrospectively became ‘the founding event’ of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Huguenot consciousness, allowing as it did the construction and maintenance of a specific comparative ‘identity-inopposition’.59 The Huguenots understood themselves as the descendants of martyrs, resolutely defending the ‘true’ faith despite the violent opposition of the Catholic majority. It is but a small step from this Huguenot myth of origins to the myth of origins espoused by Protestant settlers in Ireland from the seventeenth century onwards. Just as the Edict of Nantes came to function as the seminal moment in French Reformed tradition, the 1641 rebellion arguably retrospectively assumed this significance in its sponsoring of a specific Anglo-Irish identity. Faced with the threat of a violent Catholic majority and a distant English government unwilling or unable to support its Irish settlers as they believed they deserved, seventeenthcentury Anglo-Irish society came to see itself as a chosen people nevertheless fated to suffer ongoing violence from the Irish Catholic population. For the descendants of this embattled Anglican community, Protestant confessionalism provided an ideological justification for their privileged position within Irish society.60 The maintenance of that confessionalism was therefore crucial, for it fundamentally underpinned Protestant superiority over the Irish Catholic majority. As a result, the idea of a hierarchical elite defined solely by its Protestantism flourished from the late eighteenth century until Catholic Emancipation in 1829.61 The threat to this position of social, political, and religious power posed by the campaign for Catholic Emancipation understandably caused much anxiety within the Anglo-Irish population. By the time The Albigenses had been published, in fact, a kind of paper war was already being waged on both sides of the sectarian divide about the true aim of the Catholic Emancipation campaign. Pamphlets such as the 1823 An address to the Protestant gentry of Ireland, by ‘a clergyman of the Established Church’, accused Ireland’s Catholic population and its apologists of attempting not only to undermine the Anglican Church’s position in Ireland but fundamentally to destroy it. Envisioning the Catholic Emancipation movement

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as, in essence, a form of Crusade dedicated to the final extirpation of the Church of Ireland and its members, An address suggests that, in such volatile conditions, Irish Protestants literally were fearing and fighting for their lives: ‘The aspect of the present times, when the whole Protestant population apprehend their lives, their properties, all they hold dear, to be at stake, calls loudly for a vigorous exertion to shake it off’.62 Catholic pamphlets, in their turn, accused the Church of Ireland of widespread greed and corruption and suggested that a major goal of Emancipation was the destruction of such power rather than of the Church itself. The 1823 pamphlet A vindication of the religious and civil principles of the Irish Catholics, to which the Address responded, for instance, argued that the Anglican Church’s resistance to Catholic Emancipation was simply a jealous response to what it perceived to be a potential threat to its long-held but un-Christian ways: [The Church of Ireland] looks with extreme, and yet an idle jealousy to what she considers a rival Church, but what in reality is no Church, in her acceptation of the term; and she exerts all her energies and lavishes her wealth, to oppose the freedom of the Irish people, or the equalization of the laws, thinking that if the reign of British justice prevailed in Ireland, her utility might be questioned, and her income and possessions proportioned to the services she renders to religion and to the state.63

Depicting the Church of Ireland as a reincarnation of the medieval Catholic Church in its hunger for power, wealth, and land, the Vindication portrays the Irish Catholic population as a ‘struggling’ people, desiring only their ‘birthright, [from] a faction who would live by wrong, and fatten on the vitals of their country’.64 Careful to emphasise the subject of its ire as the corruption of the Church establishment and the ensuing denial of Catholic Emancipation, rather than the Church itself, the Vindication highlights the conciliatory efforts of the Emancipation movement. Although the cause’s vocal leader throughout the 1820s, Daniel O’Connell, ultimately desired Home Rule, he maintained a firm insistence on Irish Catholic loyalty to the British Crown throughout the campaign for Emancipation. He accordingly denounced the men involved in the 1798 rebellion as ‘irreconciliably violent republicans’.65 Condemning this radicalism, O’Connell argued that the majority of Irish Catholics were neither inherently rebellious nor hostile to Union and the British government. Catholic support for the Union of 1801 seemed to warrant this position. Although challenging the conventional understanding that Catholic support finally carried the Union, Dáire Keogh persuasively contends that Catholic passivity and compliance ultimately contributed to the passage of Union. One cause for this lack of opposition,

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Keogh maintains, was an understanding that loyalty to the British Crown had previously benefited the Irish Catholic population. Following that same course now, Catholics reasoned, might prove equally favourable.66 Such reasoning was not altogether irrational. Many Catholics believed that Catholic Emancipation would soon follow the Union, and Prime Minister William Pitt himself understood full Catholic relief as essential to the success of Union, guaranteeing as it would the support of the Irish Catholic population. Catholic Emancipation, in this thinking, was a measure taken to reconcile Irish Catholics to Union and thereby pre-empt further revolutionary violence, as George D. Boyce observes. This, in turn, would sponsor a feeling of security amongst the Protestants, who could, Emancipation notwithstanding, rest secure in their position of majority within a British nation defined primarily by its Protestantism. In this scenario, Boyce suggests, the Irish Catholics would have assumed the role of the Huguenots in France. As the minority population in wider Great Britain, they would have become necessarily subordinate to the majority Protestant population.67 At the same time, however, Boyce contends that, if the Catholics were truly understood as comparable to the Huguenots in France, they could also be interpreted as ‘an alien body, responsible in the past for civil war, insurrection and maybe even revolution: an “unassimilable minority”’.68 Many of O’Connell’s arguments for Catholic Emancipation implicitly encouraged this Protestant understanding of the Irish Catholic population as a threatening Other. Despite his vocal assertions of Catholic loyalty to the British Crown, he also believed that the Irish Catholic population had been long oppressed by a Protestant minority that maintained its power only through the support of the British government.69 Beliefs like these undermined both O’Connell’s ostensible support for Union and his contention that Emancipation presented no threat to Protestant security in Ireland. Moreover, they suggested the desire for a reversal of roles. Recognising the Catholics as the real majority in Ireland enacted a political transposition in which the Anglo-Irish assumed the minority position and became, like the Huguenots in France, the subordinate population. Against the social and political upheaval inherent to this understanding of Emancipation, The Albigenses establishes a concept of tolerance that both authorises and justifies the existing hierarchical socio-political structures in Ireland. Genevieve’s affecting plea for religious tolerance must be seen in this light. After being assisted by Genevieve to escape imprisonment and learning of her husband’s desire to reconcile, the abjured Queen of France, Ingelberg, insists on granting the Albigensian girl a favour. Pressed in this way, Genevieve pleads with Ingelberg to intercede with Philip so that he will ‘deal gently with his suffering subjects’:

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Trust me, my liege, hearts more loyal beat not in living bosoms; hands more bold never wielded lance in fields of battle. Let our liege but yield us the grace to worship Him in whom we trust after the dictates of our conscience and of his word, and then shall our sovereign see, all through fair Languedoc, every man sitting under his vine and his olive, fearing God and honouring the King. (Albigenses, 3: 308–9)

Genevieve’s insistence on Albigensian loyalty initially evokes O’Connell’s similar cry of Catholic loyalty to British rule, but, given Maturin’s linkage of Albigenses, Huguenots, and contemporary Irish Anglicans, it works to argue decidedly against, not for, Catholic Emancipation. Maturin’s vision of tolerance is, in other words, strictly delimited, relying on a continued social, political, and cultural distinction of Irish Catholic and Anglo-Irish populations. In this, Maturin subtly drew on precedent set by his Huguenot ancestors in Ireland, many of whom contested the social, cultural and political exclusion of both Dissenting and Catholic populations in early eighteenth-century Ireland.70 Yet, in arguing for toleration, Huguenot commentators like Gaspar Caillard, minister of the French Reformed Church in Peter Street, Dublin, couched their pleas in language derived from an ancien régime mentality founded on exclusivity, as Ruth Whelan has shown.71 In other words, while ostensibly arguing for general religious tolerance, writers like Caillard implicitly confirmed social division along religious lines. Maturin continues this vein of thought in both The Albigenses and Five sermons. In making his case against Catholicism in the latter, in fact, Maturin describes the Catholic Church as a maze ‘of error, obscurity, and contradiction’. In implicit contrast, the Church of Ireland/England is not only founded upon ‘sound . . . Scriptural articles’ but is both ‘genial’ and ‘native’.72 Here, the choice of the word ‘native’ is instructive; evoking that which is ‘innate’ or ‘inherent’ to an individual but also that which is natural to Ireland, Maturin establishes Protestantism and, specifically, the Anglican Church of Ireland as the one, true church in Ireland. In this way, he specifically devalues Catholicism and its claim for privileged authority and legitimacy. As noted earlier, the only real Catholic Emancipation, as far as Maturin is concerned, is conversion to Protestantism. In this context, Genevieve’s passionate plea for religious tolerance must be read with caution when applied to Maturin’s Ireland. This is not, it should be stressed again, a demand for Catholic Emancipation. Maturin’s terms of tolerance insist on the preservation of some kind of inequality. For this reason, the narrator of The Albigenses reminds us that ‘the difference of birth and creed was never known to disturb the affection that subsisted between the high-born Lady of Courtenaye and the humble bride of Amirald’ (Albigenses, 4: 275). In other words, Genevieve and Isabelle maintain their friendship despite the

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still-continuing distinctions of class and religion that divide them. The final vision of Pierre’s grave, though championing tolerance, further insists on continued religious difference. As the narrator informs us, ‘[h]is body, as a heretic’s, was not permitted to lie in consecrated ground’, and must instead be interred outside the city walls. Only there can the Monk of Montcalm pray for Pierre, ‘heretic as he was’ (Albigenses, 4: 275–6). Subtly asserting the ongoing divide between heretic and Catholic in this way, Pierre’s grave symbolises Maturin’s notion of tolerance as necessarily restrictive. Ending on this mingled note of contradictory tolerance and division, Maturin’s novel distinguishes itself markedly from Scott’s Ivanhoe, despite the inspiration Maturin admitted to finding there. The difference, however, is not that Maturin failed to grasp Scott’s historical authenticity. Although Maturin plays with the ‘chronological succession’ of historical events, he nevertheless evokes ‘the inner life, the morality, heroism, capacity for sacrifice, steadfastness etc. peculiar to a given age’ identified by Lukács as the principal part of Scott’s historical authenticity. He does this largely by reference to a selection of historiographical writing that infiltrates his fictional narrative and sanctions his depiction of the Albigenses and the thirteenth-century Catholic Church in France. That these sources are themselves heavily biased should not detract from Maturin’s evident desire accurately to evoke his subject matter and setting. This is not to say, however, that Maturin is unaware of the ideological potential of the Albigenses as depicted by his historiographical reference material. In fact, these sources allow Maturin specifically to manipulate his characters to his own ends while still being faithful to verifiable, apparently objective historical texts. It is this historical authenticity, in fact, that enables Maturin to establish the haunting sense of persistent social segregation with which the novel concludes. In contrast, as Ian Duncan argues, Scott’s novel insists on final equality, with a picture of a ‘mixed nation’ that specifically deconstructs any notion of ‘native’ and ‘alien’, ‘us’, and ‘them’. Picturing Normans, Saxons, and Jews alike as equally alien to English soil, in fact, Ivanhoe places them all on equal footing and, in so doing, suggests that the national and religious differences dividing them will eventually merge into an overarching sense of Englishness.73 Fittingly, the marriage of Ivanhoe and Rowena concluding the narrative is said to stand ‘as a pledge of the future peace and harmony betwixt two races, which, since that period, have been so completely mingled, that the distinction has become wholly invisible’.74 For Maturin, however, ‘future peace and harmony’ relied on the separation of Catholics and Protestants to which Catholic Emancipation would be fundamentally destructive. Displacing its author’s concern with an Ireland on the very cusp of a new era of political and social equalisation, The Albigenses registers Maturin’s

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opposition to what he understood as the breakdown of Protestant ascendancy in Ireland. In so doing, it insists on continued sectarian divisions, despite an overall plea for tolerance, and underlines the repetitive nature of historical violence. Fearful of social revolution in Ireland, The Albigenses focuses on revolution of a different kind: the recurrence of the past. Blurring the fundamental differences between Albigenses, Huguenots, and Anglo-Irish, The Albigenses similarly merges their specific geographical and historical contexts. Past thus becomes present (and potentially the future), as the unjust sufferings of the Albigenses emerge, like Melmoth the wanderer, in vastly disparate spaces and times. Another Albigensian Crusade or Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, Catholic Emancipation appears, in this context, as simply another recurrence of past violence against a struggling population, unjustly persecuted for its ‘true’ and ‘pure’ religious beliefs. Notes 1 Charles Robert Maturin, The Albigenses, a romance, 4 vols (London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1824), 1: vii. Future references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 2 BL 41996/27, letter from Maturin to Hurst, Robinson & Co., 25 June 1821. 3 Ibid. 4 Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin, p. 127. 5 Trumpener, Bardic nationalsim, p. 131. 6 Ibid. 7 Georg Lukács, The historical novel, trans. by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1937; London: Merlin Press, 1962), p. 19. 8 Trumpener, Bardic nationalism, p. 141. 9 William Patrick Day, In the circles of fear and desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 33. For a contrasting understanding of Gothic novels as presenting the past as ‘a lost golden Age’ that can be recovered, see Toni Wein, British identities, heroic nationalisms, and the Gothic novel, 1764–1824 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 4. 10 Day, Fear and desire, pp. 32–3. 11 James Cahalan, Great hatred, little room: the Irish historical novel (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), p. 7. 12 Watson, Revolution and the form of the British novel, p. 133. 13 See Robertson, Legitimate histories, pp. 214–25. 14 Sir Walter Scott, The bride of Lammermoor, ed. J. H. Alexander (1819; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 155. 15 Ibid., p. 268. 16 ‘Revolution’, Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Available online at http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 11 August 2010. I am thankful to Professor Edward Larrissy for highlighting this possible Derridean play

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18 19 20 21

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

Rethinking Scott’s revolution on words in discussion at the Romantic Historiography, 1780–1840 conference, held at Newman House, University College Dublin, 22–3 July 2010. Stephen O’Shea, The perfect heresy: the revolutionary life and death of the medieval Cathars (London: Profile Books, 2000), p. 10–11. Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin, pp. 128–33. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., p. 130. Throughout the novel, Maturin frequently paratextually refers to sources such as Jean-Paul Perrin’s Histoire des Vaudois (1619), François Eudes de Mézeray’s threevolume Histoire de France depuis Faramond jusqu’au règne de Louis le juste (1643–51), Paul François Velly’s Histoire de France depuis l’establissement de la monarchie jusqu’au regne de Louis XIV (1760), and Alexander Ranken’s History of France (1802–22). Scholten, Charles Robert Maturin, p. 137. Rev. of Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott, Monthly review, 2nd ser. 75 (1814), 275. Available online from British Fiction, 1800–1829, www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/ reviews/wave14-52.html, accessed 18 August 2010. Lukács, The historical novel, p. 50. Emily McCaffrey, ‘Memory and collective identity in Occitanie: the Cathars in history and popular culture’, History & memory, 13.1 (2001), 115. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 115–16. Clare O’Halloran, Golden ages and barbarous nations (Cork: Cork University Press, 2004), pp. 81–2. Malcolm Barber, The Cathars (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000), p. 213. McCaffrey, ‘Memory and collective identity’, p. 116. Ibid., p. 117. Barber, The Cathars, p. 214. McCaffrey, ‘Memory and collective identity’, p. 118. Barber, The Cathars, p. 214. Jean-Paul Perrin, ‘The firste booke of the history of the Albigenses’, in Matchlesse crueltie, declared at large in the ensuing history of the Waldenses (London, 1655), p. 1. Alexander Ranken, History of France, 9 vols (London, 1802–22), 3: 202. Barber, The Cathars, p. 214. Aside from being the name Jesus gave to two of his followers, the term ‘boanerges’ has come to mean ‘a loud vociferous preacher or orator’. The first apparent occurrence of this usage was in Samuel Hieron’s Works (1620), which spoke of ‘The crying out of some Boanerges, some sonne of thunder’; quoted in ‘Boanerges’, Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Available online at http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 1 September 2006. For the Biblical references in this passage, see, for instance, Deuteronomy 32: 14, Exodus 16, and Ezekiel 34:21; 45:15. Sir Walter Scott, Old Mortality, ed. and introd. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (1816; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 496, note 62.

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41 Ibid., pp. 199, 209; James Kerr, Fiction against history: Scott as storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 47–8. 42 Maturin, Five sermons, p. 20. 43 Kerr, Fiction against history, p. 48. 44 Ibid. 45 Lionel Lackey, ‘Vainly expected messiahs: Christianity, chivalry and charity in Ivanhoe’, Studies in Scottish literature, 27 (1992), 162. 46 Ibid., p. 160. 47 Wright, ‘Introduction’, p. 50. 48 Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. John Gillingham (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 214. For a similar argument, see Christopher Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: holy war and the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 67–8. For a description of the political and social organisation of the southern region of France and its relationship with the northern, Crown-controlled region at the time of the Albigensian crusade, see Linda Paterson, ‘The south’, in Marcus Bull (ed.), France in the central Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 102–33. 49 Mark Gregory Pegg, The corruption of angels: the Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.13–14. 50 Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, ‘Introduction’, in Scott, Old mortality, p. xi. 51 Ibid., p. xx. 52 See Raymond Hylton, Ireland’s Huguenots and their refuge, 1662–1745 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp. 7–8. See also the etymology of the word in T. F. Hoad (ed.), The concise Oxford dictionary of English etymology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 222; Robert K. Barnhart (ed.), Chambers dictionary of etymology (Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap, 1998), p. 495, and ‘Huguenot’, Oxford English dictionary (2nd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), online at http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 9 September 2006. For the nineteenth century’s similar understanding of the word, see the entry for ‘Huguenot’ in the original Oxford English dictionary: James A. H. Murray (ed.), A new English dictionary on historical principles, 12 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), 4: 440. Originally conceived of by the Philological Society of London in 1857, the Dictionary was compiled over the next several decades and published between 1884 and 1928. 53 Mack P. Holt, The French wars of religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 31–2. 54 Ruth Whelan, ‘The other ’98’, in Ruth Whelan and Carol Baxter (eds), Toleration and religious identity: the Edict of Nantes and its implications in France, Britain and Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 27. 55 Ibid., p. 21. 56 Ibid., p. 30. 57 Ruth Whelan, ‘Repressive toleration: the Huguenots in early eighteenth-century Dublin’, in Whelan and Baxter (eds), Toleration and religious identity, p. 180. 58 Ibid.

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59 Ibid. Whelan borrows the term ‘identity-in-opposition’ from Alan Falconer; see Alan Falconer, ‘Remembering’, in A. D. Falconer and J. Liechty (eds), Reconciling memories (2nd ed.; Dublin: Columba Press, 1998), p. 13. 60 C. D. A. Leighton, Catholicism in a Protestant kingdom (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 47–8. 61 Ibid., pp. 67–8. 62 ‘A clergyman of the Established Church’, An address to the Protestant gentry of Ireland (Dublin, 1823), p. 47. 63 J. K. L., A vindication of the religious and civil principles of the Irish Catholics; in a letter addressed to His Excellency the Marquis Wellesley (Dublin, 1823), p. 9. 64 Ibid., p. 15. 65 George D. Boyce, Nineteenth-century Ireland: the search for stability (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990), p. 27. 66 Dáire Keogh, ‘Catholic responses to the Act of Union’, in Keogh and Whelan (eds), Acts of union, p. 164. 67 Boyce, Nineteenth-century Ireland, p. 3 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., p. 4. 70 Ruth Whelan, ‘Repressive toleration’, p. 182. 71 Ibid. C. D. A. Leighton (Catholicism in a Protestant kingdom, p. 33) maintains that the Irish ancien régime in the eighteenth century differentiated itself from other ancien régimes by its emphasis on membership in the Established Church as the determining factor for inclusion in its system of power and privilege, confirming the restrictiveness of Caillard’s notion of tolerance. 72 Maturin, Five sermons, p. 55. 73 Ian Duncan, ‘Introduction’, in Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xiii. 74 Ibid.; Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, ed. Ian Duncan (1820; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 498.

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Conclusion: Room for more: the future for Maturin research

Unjust persecution like that suffered by the Albigenses and the Huguenots at the hands of the Catholic Church was an evil of which Maturin felt himself peculiarly privileged to speak. Condemned by the religious institution he had served for more than twenty years, Maturin believed that he, too, was unfairly oppressed by a hierarchy that refused him adequate sustenance at the same time that it punished him for seeking alternative means of obtaining the provision it denied. In their turn, Church officials evidently viewed Maturin as a liability and undoubtedly hoped that he might sink into a welcome obscurity in his own lifetime. That he did not arguably owed more to his eccentricities than to the popularity of his literary works. Indeed, as I have noted, with the evident exceptions of Bertram and Melmoth the wanderer, Maturin’s works never enjoyed a wide public or critical reception. Renowned for his strange peculiarities, Maturin was laughed at as a kind of madman and his literary works largely dismissed as the bizarre product of a diseased mind. Cultural memory and Irish Romantic literary criticism from the time of Maturin’s death to the present day have followed suit, effecting a posthumous suppression of Maturin and his works that denies the evident influence he had on a wide range of literature in his own lifetime and beyond. Consigning Maturin to a communal grave, forgetting the significant dates of his life, and allowing his works to languish on rarely used library shelves, we have effectively overlooked the Derridean traces of Maturin that frequently emerge in the works of contemporaries, near-contemporaries, and a diverse collection of more modern literary heirs. Despite our current amnesia about Maturin, however, his works undeniably possess what Joep Leersseen terms ‘radiance’.1 In other words, notwithstanding the current widespread view of Maturin’s works as a near-negligible contribution to the canon of Irish literature, despite, ironically, their author’s status as ‘wellknown’, their influence can be traced in a variety of works produced both in Ireland and abroad. This is not to argue that Maturin’s novels enjoyed a contemporary presence fundamentally contradicted by their publication and circulation

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history in Ireland. Published in London and Edinburgh for a wider British audience, Maturin’s fiction was necessarily removed from an Irish audience. This had much to do with the application of English copyright law to post-Union Ireland. As a result, Dublin’s flourishing publishing industry – one dependent on reprinting books earlier published in England – was, in the words of the bookseller William Wakeman, ‘almost annihilated’.2 Irish booksellers and authors therefore necessarily turned to England both to supply their bookshelves and to publish their works. This dependence on the English presses became so pronounced in the first half of the nineteenth century that, in 1842, William Carleton wrote in his preface to the new Dublin edition of Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry (1830–33), ‘In truth until within the last ten or twelve years an Irish author never thought of publishing in his own country’.3 This was as true for authors such as Edgeworth and Owenson as it was for Maturin. In Edgeworth’s case, only Castle Rackrent and Belinda were published in Dublin, presumably just scraping by before the extension of English copyright law to Irish presses. Of Owenson’s works, none was published in Ireland, although O’Donnel was sold in Dublin by John Cumming. How, then, do we explain the prevalence granted to Maturin’s contemporaries and largely refused to him? A cursory glance at several early nineteenth-century catalogues for Dublin booksellers suggests that circulation in Ireland depended greatly on wider British popularity.4 In other words, books which were deemed generally popular and had the appeal of a well-known author eventually found their way into the hands of Irish readers. Accordingly therefore, Owenson’s works, although increasingly respected and written about today, are generally poorly represented in such catalogues. In contrast, Edgeworth’s widely read and widely acclaimed works, though very often published in London, consistently commanded lengthy listings of available editions. This does not, of course, take into account circulating libraries, which provided books to a wider readership that may not have been able to afford new or even used copies of contemporary novels. It does, however, suggest that circulation went hand in hand with popularity. Lacking the popular reception necessary for an extended distribution in Ireland, Maturin necessarily remained rather a stranger to the early nineteenth-century Irish readership. Correspondingly, to speak of Maturin’s ‘radiance’ is to argue that, notwithstanding the apparently limited availability of Maturin’s works in Ireland, his presence and influence was felt continuously throughout his lifetime and long after his death, as was argued in the 1892 edition of Melmoth. As suggested by that edition’s reference to the preternaturally youthful bust of Maturin owned by Lady Jane Wilde, Maturin remains, like one of his own characters, an unearthly presence haunting the works of countless authors, contemporary and otherwise.

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This continued influence is most readily apparent in the reception of and unabated fascination with Melmoth the wanderer since its publication in 1820. Almost immediately republished in English in 1821, Melmoth was also translated into French and German that year. Interest in Melmoth, moreover, seemed to awaken renewed attention to Maturin’s other publications, especially following his death in 1824. If, in 1818, none of his novels had reached a second edition, by 1824, Melmoth, Fatal revenge, and The wild Irish boy had all been republished.5 In addition, as earlier noted, French translations of five of Maturin’s six novels were published in the years 1821 to 1828: Melmoth in 1821 as both L’homme du mystère, ou l’histoire de Melmoth le voyageur, and Melmoth, ou l’homme errant; Fatal revenge in 1822 as La famille de Montorio, ou la fatale vengeance; The Albigenses in 1825 as Les Albigeois, roman historique du XIIIe siècle; The wild Irish boy in 1828 as Le jeune Irlandais, and The Milesian chief also in 1828 as Connal, ou les Milésiens. Women; or pour et contre had already been translated into French as Éva, ou l’amour et religion prior to Melmoth’s publication, in 1818. It was again translated in 1820 as Les femmes, ou rien de trop. These translations attest to the impact Maturin had on French literary culture. Melmoth, in particular, was highly influential in France, engendering, as Catherine Lanone puts it, ‘a fascination which was to last for more than a century’.6 The novel’s continued popularity is evident in its translation history. In 1821 alone, three separate editions of the novel were published: Madame Émile Bégin first translated the novel as L’homme du mystère, ou l’histoire du Melmoth le voyageur. She then offered a subsequent version entitled Melmoth, ou l’homme errant. Perhaps unhappy with Bégin’s versions, Jean Cohen published his own liberally translated, six-volume (in comparison to Bégin’s three) version of the novel, also titled Melmoth, ou l’homme errant.7 Fifty years later, all of these translations were evidently deemed insufficient by Maria de Fos, who produced her own condensed version of the novel, Melmoth, l’homme errant, in 1867.8 Such an extended gap between the early translations and de Fos’s suggests that Maturin’s ‘meteoric rise to fame’, as Rosemary Lloyd calls it, was followed by ‘an equally swift fall, if not from public favour, at least from critical acclaim’.9 Although Melmoth and Maturin’s other works continued to be read in translation by the French public, critical attention was nevertheless lacking. As Lloyd observes, only two major pieces devoted to Maturin appeared in nineteenthcentury France following Melmoth’s initial twelve-year period of fame: Gustave Planche’s review titled ‘Poètes et romanciers anglais: Maturin’, published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1833 and then later in Planche’s Portraits littéraires (1836), and an extended biographical piece in Ferdinand Hoefer’s Nouvelle biographie universelle (1852–66) in 1860.10 Intriguingly, in the former, as Lloyd points out, Planche argued that, despite the existing translations of the novel, Melmoth

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remained to be translated ‘pour les lecteurs sérieux’. He was adamant, however, that ‘la réhabilitation de Maturin ne saurait tarder longtemps’.11 In response to Planche’s analysis, the twentieth century saw renewed critical attention to Maturin and to Melmoth the wanderer, as evidenced by vivid republication and retranslation activity. In 1954, Jean Cohen’s 1821 translation was republished with a preface by André Breton. Breton again added prefatory comments to a new translation – marketed as the ‘première traduction française intégrale’ – by Jacqueline Marc-Chadourne in 1965. Although Chadourne’s translation is, as Terry Hale maintains, ‘more complete’ than Cohen’s, the latter – reprinted in a Gothic compilation titled Romans terrifiants (1984) – is the one most regularly available to French-speaking readers.12 Nevertheless, Marc-Chadourne’s translation has been repeatedly reprinted since its original publication – in 1978, 1988, 1996, and 1998. Additionally, de Fos’s version was republished in 1967 in both Belgium and France.13 Despite its gaps, Melmoth’s translation and publication history in France suggests the novel’s overwhelming appeal to French readers. In fact, on translation, Melmoth became, in Victor Sage’s phrase, ‘all the rage in France’, and, following Maturin’s death, numerous French authors ‘enthusiastically plundered Maturin’, whom they had raised to iconic status.14 Certainly, the mixed ‘fear and fascination’ inspired by Melmoth emerged in the works of many nineteenth-century French authors,15 including, among others, Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) and Charles Baudelaire (1821–67). For the former, Maturin’s influence is apparent throughout his career, from early works such as Le centenaire (1822), with its focus on, in Patricia Coughlan’s terms, ‘a ghastly three-hundred-year-old geriatric who needs to ravish fresh young corpses regularly to sustain his life’,16 to later works like Illusions perdues (1837), which includes several references to Maturin’s Bertram.17 Melmoth, in particular, was an evident source of both ‘fear and fascination’ for Balzac as he attempted to distance himself from literary romanticism and instead establish himself as a realist writer. As Lanone argues, this effort relied on the abjection of the Gothic mode, and, as a corollary, Balzac necessarily sought ‘to exorcise the shadowy ghost of Melmoth before he could find his own voice’. For this reason, Lanone maintains, Balzac’s sequel to Melmoth – Melmoth réconcilié (1835) – engages in a systematic ‘devaluation of Gothic clichés’.18 Despite Balzac’s desire to renounce the Gothic mode, however, his very dependence on Maturin’s infamous wanderer highlights the ways in which the Gothic, like both Maturin himself and his novel, continued spectrally to possess nineteenthcentury literary imagination. Although Balzac’s ‘enthusiasm for Maturin’ was, in Lloyd’s phrase, ‘[m]ore exuberant’ than Baudelaire’s, the later author betrays a similar fascination with Maturin.19 At least as early as 1848, Baudelaire had come to regard Maturin

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4 A striking illustration by R. Huttula imaging the sham marriage of Melmoth and Immalee/Isidora in the 1885 London edition of Melmoth the wanderer. The monk’s radiating eyes recall the text’s description of Melmoth’s own eyes and gesture at the novel’s ‘radiance’ in nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-firstcentury literary culture.

as among the few he considered ‘romanciers forts’.20 He further believed that Maturin’s Melmoth was ‘the epitome of the romantic outcast’.21 As might be expected therefore, references to Maturin and his works, especially Melmoth, can be seen throughout Baudelaire’s oeuvre. Les fleurs du mal (1857), for instance, constructs an image of two lovers living out their lives exiled in an Eastern paradise strikingly similar to the Indian isle of Melmoth’s ‘Tale of the Indians’ but also reminiscent of the Edenic paradise to which Ines and Desmond retire in The Milesian chief. This evident reference to Maturin’s works highlights not simply Baudelaire’s deep and continuing interest in the figure of the wanderer but also the aesthetic inspiration he derived from Maturin and his fiction. To concentrate on Maturin’s legacy in France, as I have done here, is not to ignore the lasting, but often overlooked, impression he made in Britain and, further abroad, in America, after his death. Focusing again on Melmoth, the posthumous popularity Maturin enjoyed is clear. Not only republished in 1821, Maturin’s novel also appeared in further reprints in both America and Britain throughout the nineteenth century. A four-volume edition of the novel was published in Boston in 1821, for instance, and an illustrated version appeared in London in 1885 (see Figure 4). Later, in 1892, R. Bentley & Son in London

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published the new edition discussed at length in the introduction to this book. More than that, several dramatic interpretations of the novel underscored British and American attraction to Maturin’s Gothic tale. These works included Melmoth the wanderer: a melo-dramatic romance, in three acts, by B. West, which was first performed at the Royal Coburg Theatre, or, the Old Vic, in 1823. It was later published in London by J. Duncombe, although the exact publication date is unclear,22 and in America by Baltimore’s J. Robinson in 1831. Another play – Melmoth the wanderer; a play in five acts – by Gustav Davidson and Joseph Koven, was published in Boston in 1915. Alongside these editions and renditions of Melmoth, the traces of Maturin’s influence evident in the works of authors as diverse as James Clarence Mangan (1803–49), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–73), and Christina Rossetti (1830–94) confirm the novel’s lasting mark in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Mangan’s interest in his fellow Irishman and the Faustian figure of Melmoth the wanderer was evident in his decision to translate Balzac’s Melmoth réconcilié, though his rereading purposely highlights Melmoth’s ‘ridiculousness when brought into relation with modernity, and particularly with urban life’.23 Titled ‘The man in the cloak’ and published in the Dublin university magazine in November 1838, Mangan’s version of the tale makes no reference to Balzac and relocates the story’s action to Vienna from Paris. Nevertheless, Mangan’s debt to the original is obvious.24 While he would later claim that Melmoth was ‘a bore of the first magnitude, who is always talking grandiloquent fustian, and folding his cloak about him’,25 Mangan’s adaptation of Melmoth réconcilié reveals his deep interest in concerns raised by Maturin in his earlier novel: the duality of the self as well as the conflict of creative genius with the demands of the commercial, everyday world, in particular. Approximately ten years earlier, Nathaniel Hawthorne was similarly pondering Melmoth’s significance in his New England home. His novel, Fanshawe (1828), based on his experiences at Bowdoin College and published at his own expense, suggests Hawthorne had been influenced heavily by his early reading of Melmoth the wanderer. As Jesse Sidney Goldstein convincingly argues, not only is a character in the book named Dr Melmoth but ‘the source of the bulk of the incident in Fanshawe and more specific models for the main characters’ arguably derive from Maturin’s Melmoth. This connection to Maturin is further reinforced, Goldstein maintains, by the use of a quotation from Bertram as the epigraph to chapter eight.26 Later, Hawthorne’s study of New England’s history of repressive Puritanism, The scarlet letter (1850), would also tellingly reveal Melmoth’s haunting presence. The novel’s many Gothic elements, including, as Allan Lloyd-Smith observes, Mistress Hibbins’s apparent witchcraft, the forbidding

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and darkly magical realm of the forest, and the scarlet letter that brands itself on the Reverend Dimmesdale’s chest suffuse the narrative with an overt Gothic tone and setting that suitably prepare the reader for its primarily psychological message. One already extensively investigated by Melmoth, this message is the fact that, in Lloyd-Smith’s terms, ‘the horror is within the self’.27 Hawthorne’s indebtedness to Maturin is one that proved more problematic for his fellow American and contemporary author, Edgar Allan Poe. Like Mangan, Poe condemned Melmoth as a poor villain, scathingly describing him as ‘labor[ing] indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand’.28 This scorn notwithstanding, Poe’s story, ‘The pit and the pendulum’, first published in The gift: a Christmas and New Year’s present (1842), bears no small resemblance to the investigation of the Inquisition and its terrors in Melmoth’s ‘Tale of the Spaniard’, as Lloyd points out.29 Similarly, ‘The man of the crowd’ (1840) betrays a keen interest in the politics of the self and its competing desire for solitude and companionship. Forever inserting himself into the throng, the eponymous ‘man of the crowd’ vividly contrasts with the solitary presence that is Maturin’s Melmoth. Yet, at the same time, Poe’s epigraph to the tale – ‘Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul’ – hearkens back to Melmoth the wanderer and its repeated insistence that one must fear one’s self above all.30 Back in Ireland, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu continued to revive Maturin and confirmed the ongoing influence of the Gothic mode in Ireland in his early Gothic tales. Published anonymously in the Dublin University magazine between 1838 and 1840 and later collected into a posthumous edition titled The Purcell papers (1880), these short stories display a narrative style characterised, like Maturin’s in Melmoth the Wanderer, by interpolated tales and convoluted frames as well as an investigation of the idea of Faustian pacts.31 An apparent divergence from this early interest in the Gothic mode occurs with Le Fanu’s first two novels, The cock and anchor: a chronicle of old Dublin city (1845) and The fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien: a tale of the wars of King James (1847), which both reflect the author’s desire to emulate the historical novel associated with Scott. Like Scott’s fiction, however, both novels reveal a weighty Gothic undertone that would later come to the fore in texts such as Ghost stories and tales of mystery (1851), Uncle Silas: a tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864), The rose and the key (1871), and In a glass darkly (1872). In these later works, as David Punter notes, an increasingly emphasised use of the Gothic mode supersedes descriptions of historical reality.32 A kind of Gothic figure himself after the death of his wife in 1858, after which he began to seclude himself from society and earned the nickname ‘Invisible Prince’, Le Fanu clearly found the Gothic mode an attractive aesthetic category. Sharing more than just a strange eccentricity with Maturin, Le Fanu evinced the influence of the earlier

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author in many of his works, including, for instance, In a glass darkly. Many of the tales in that collection manifest a marked affinity to Melmoth, especially in their plotlines, which frequently centre on a protagonist who ‘opens his mind in such a way as to become subject to haunting by a figure which is unmistakably part of his own self’.33 In other words, just as Melmoth stalks the world persistently reminding his victims of the evil within, so too do Le Fanu’s monstrous creations. The evident hold retained by Maturin and his novels over later writers manifests itself again in the example of Christina Rossetti. In her childhood, Rossetti and her brothers ‘used to read Maturin’s novels over and over again, and they took great hold of our imaginations’.34 Correspondingly, Diane D’amico contends that many of the poems written ‘at the beginning of [Rossetti’s] mature work (1842–60)’ contain ‘numerous echoes and borrowings of Maturin’s themes and language’.35 Most obviously, Maturin’s influence evinces itself in poems such as ‘Isidora’, written in 1848 and inspired, as the title suggests, by Melmoth the wanderer’s unfortunate lover. In addition to the telling title, the poem also contains passages taken almost verbatim from Maturin’s earlier novel, as when, at her death, Isidora cries, ‘Paradise, will he be there?’36 As D’amico further notes, several other poems written in the ten-year period between 1847 and 1857 derive their titles from Maturin’s heroines: ‘Eva’, ‘Immalee’, and ‘Zara’, all written in 1847; ‘Lady Montrevor’ and a second poem titled ‘Zara’ in 1848; and a third poem titled ‘Zara’ in 1855.37 As is clear from these titles, Rossetti drew not simply from Maturin’s most famous novel but also from lesser-known works such as The wild Irish boy and, in particular, Women, which also provided the inspiration for an 1856 poem titled ‘Look on this picture and on this’. These poems, D’amico maintains, demonstrate not only Rossetti’s continued attraction to Maturin’s works and the inspiration she evidently found in them but also the ways in which Rossetti early established the themes and motifs that would recur throughout her literary career.38 In other words, even when Rossetti apparently stopped writing specifically about Maturin’s fictional characters, her poetry remained fundamentally possessed by Maturin’s ghost. In a similar fashion, twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature reveals Maturin’s haunting presence, even in a period in which Maturin appears to be all but forgotten. Arguing against Jarlath Killeen’s suggestion that the Irish Gothic mode today awaits ‘a dramatic and truly terrifying revival’,39 Richard Haslam instead contends instead that ‘[the] Irish Gothic walks amongst us still’.40 Tellingly, the primary example Haslam uses to prove his point is Maturin, a key reference to whom occurs in John Banville’s Birchwood (1973). This novel, as Haslam contends, drawing from Seamus Deane, ‘played a major part in revitalizing late twentieth-century Irish Gothic’. Haslam further argues that ‘[t]he Mephistophelean Felix’s words – “Ah, Melmoth, he said softly. We’ve been

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expecting you” – echo through other allusions to the Wanderer in Banville’s oeuvre’.41As they do so, they attest to the Derridean traces of Maturin but also the Romantic Gothic mode still evident in twenty-first-century literature and culture. As a society, we may have relegated Maturin’s works to distant library storage units, and we may have largely erased him from our memories, but, somehow, extraordinarily, we continue to remember him in our literary production. In the display of his influence in works like Birchwood – however conscious or unconscious it is – Banville effectively gives form to Maturin in his contemporary Ireland. This is exactly the kind of incarnation of which Derrida speaks: ‘the specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other.’42 The very embodiment of the breakdown of borders between past and present, living and dead, Maturin’s spectre returns today – even as it paradoxically has always remained with us – in order to demand the debt we owe it. This is our Derridean inheritance, and the scope of potential repayment is vast if, at times, daunting. As early as 1833, as noted above, Gustave Planche claimed that there was no satisfactory translation of Melmoth the wanderer, despite three such Frenchlanguage productions on sale, and that the novel, like its author, was in need of ‘rehabilitation’. Several decades later Baudelaire was still contemplating the production of an edition that would do justice both to Maturin and to his novel. In the end, Baudelaire never translated, edited, or introduced Melmoth the wanderer himself, arguably because he was, as Lloyd argues, all too aware of the demands such a work placed on its author:43 [I]l faudrait expliquer ce que c’est que Maturin, quel rang il occupe dans l’histoire de la littérature moderne, ce que c’est que la littérature satanique, par où il touche à Byron, etc., etc. – Or, voyez-vous la belle figure que peut faire une pareille préface, si la traduction ne donne pas une idée suffisamment haute de l’auteur vanté!44

But how exactly, Baudelaire evidently found himself asking, would one explain the rank Maturin held in the history of modern literature? For Baudelaire, Maturin’s centrality to literary history was both intimidating and awe-inspiring; so pronounced was it that Baudelaire felt incapable of turning his hand to the job. Ultimately, Baudelaire shied away from what he understood as a necessary but daunting project simply because he saw it as too important to be left to unsteady or unsure hands. Such scruples have not been entirely set aside in the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Although a handful of reprinted editions of Maturin’s novels have appeared alongside several critical biographies, attention to Maturin has

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remained limited. The work of this book has been to trace the continued need for recognition noted, but not acted upon, by Baudelaire. Literary production and criticism from Maturin’s death onwards is, like the literary forms in which he himself worked, haunted. Refusing to remember Maturin even as it re-members him in its pages, much as our understanding of the national tale and historical novel occludes the evident influence of the Gothic mode, current literary analysis attempts to produce inheritance as unremaindered. By outlining Maturin’s central importance to Irish Romantic literature as well as the ways in which his novels lay open the Gothic inheritance of literary forms conventionally understood as divorced from the Gothic mode, this book firmly locates Maturin as a pivotal figure in the development of early nineteenth-century fiction. More than that, in briefly demonstrating the continued traces of Maturin evident in the works of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors, it emphasises Maturin’s ongoing contribution to more modern literary production and insists on the cultural debt we owe him. In so doing, it underscores our current critical ‘totaliz-ation’ of Maturin. As Derrida explains, ‘totalizing’ consists ‘in filling in the space of the question or in denying its possibility, in fleeing from the very thing it will have allowed one to glimpse’.45 Having spoken to and of Maturin in its pages, this book opens up the filled-in space and engages in a double act of conjuration: it calls Maturin’s spectre into our presence in order to prove its ‘possibility’, and it calls for, exhorts, and demands further attention to the hitherto ignored, abjured, and denied cultural inheritance bequeathed to us by Maturin. Notes 1 Joep Leerssen, ‘Irish literary history and the problem of canonicity’, Irish Fiction 1650–1900 Seminar, Keough Naughton Notre Dame Centre, Dublin, 20 October 2006. 2 Quoted in Charles Benson, ‘Printers and booksellers in Dublin 1800–1850’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Spreading the word: the distribution of networks of print 1550–1850 (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1990), p. 47. 3 Quoted in Benson, ‘Printers and booksellers in Dublin 1800–1850’, p. 47; William Carleton, Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry, 2 vols (1830–33; Dublin: Wm Curry, Jr & Co., 1842), 1: v. 4 See, for example, Matthew Neary Mahon, Catalogue of books in various languages and classes of literature (Dublin, 1813); Richard Harman, A catalogue of modern books now selling at unusually low prices (Dublin, 1830); Grant and Bolton, A general catalogue of cheap second hand books (Dublin, 1833); Grant and Bolton, A catalogue of second hand books, in every branch and department of literature (Dublin, 1836), and Grant and Bolton, A catalogue of a very extensive collection of second hand books (Dublin, 1838). 5 The second editions of both Fatal revenge and The wild Irish boy appeared in 1824.

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6 Catherine Lanone, ‘Verging on the Gothic: Melmoth’s journey to France’, in Horner (ed.), European Gothic, pp. 73–4. 7 On the liberality of Cohen’s translation, see Terry Hale, ‘Translation in distress: cultural misappropriation and the construction of the Gothic’, in Horner (ed.), European Gothic, pp. 28–31. 8 For the argument that de Fos’s translation differs markedly from Cohen’s and ‘consist[s] almost entirely of paraphrase’, see Hale, ‘Translation in distress’, p. 36, note 17. 9 Rosemary Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, in Malcolm Bowie, Alison Fairlie, and Alison Finch (eds), Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry: new essays in honour of Lloyd Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 84. 10 Ibid. 11 Quoted in Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 84. 12 Hale, ‘Translation in distress’, p. 36, note 17. 13 Information about Melmoth’s translation history, as well as the publication history of all of Maturin’s works in both English and French, is available, in varying degrees, from several different sources. These include Montague Summers, A Gothic bibliography (London: Fortune Press, 1941); Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling (eds), The English novel 1770–1829: a bibliographical survey of prose fiction published in the British Isles. Vol. II: 1800–1829 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Garside, Jacqueline Belanger, and Sharon Ragaz (eds), British Fiction, 1800–1829, 2004, online database available at www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk, and the online card catalogues of the British Library, the Bibliothèque de France, and the Library of Congress. These last three appear on each library’s web page – http:// catalogue.bl.uk, http://bnf.fr, and http://catalogue.loc.gov, respectively. Another valuable source is the Loebers’ recently published A guide to Irish fiction 1650–1900. 14 Sage, ‘Diderot and Maturin’, p. 55. 15 Lanone, ‘Verging on the Gothic’, p. 72. 16 Patricia A. Coughlan, ‘The recycling of Melmoth: “a very German story”’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok (eds), Literary interrelations: Ireland, England and the world. Vol. 2: comparison and impact (Tübingen: Narr, 1987), p. 183. 17 Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 87. 18 Lanone, ‘Verging on the Gothic’, pp. 76, 78. 19 Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 87. 20 Ibid., p. 81. 21 Lanone, ‘Verging on the Gothic’, p. 74. 22 Both the 1892 edition of Melmoth the Wanderer and Montague Summers’s bibliography of Gothic works lists the publication date as 1825, but the online catalogues for the British Library and Trinity College Dublin library, where copies of the play are held, list an uncertain 1830; see ‘A list of works by Charles Robert Maturin, with translations and adaptations by other authors’, in Charles Robert Maturin, Melmoth the wanderer, 3 vols (London: R. Bentley, 1892), p. lxii, and Summers, A Gothic bibliography, pp. 406–7.

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23 Coughlan, ‘“Fold over fold, inveterately convolv’d”, 2: 195. 24 Coughlan, ‘The recycling of Melmoth’, pp. 183–4. 25 Quoted in Coughlan, ‘The recycling of Melmoth’, p. 188; Mangan, ‘Sketches and reminiscences of Irish writers’, p. 187. 26 Jesse Sidney Goldstein, ‘The literary source of Hawthorne’s Fanshawe’, Modern language notes, 60.1 (1945), 2. 27 Allan Lloyd-Smith, ‘Nineteenth-century American Gothic’, in Punter (ed.), A companion to the Gothic, p. 117. 28 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Letter to B—’, in G. R. Thompson (ed.), The selected writings of Edgar Allan Poe (1836; New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 590. 29 Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 87. 30 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The man of the crowd’, in Thompson (ed.), The selected writings of Edgar Allan Poe, p. 232. 31 Sage, ‘Irish Gothic: C. R. Maturin and J. S. LeFanu’, pp. 87–8. 32 Punter, The literature of terror, 1: 201–2. 33 Ibid., 1: 202. 34 Quoted in Diane D’amico, ‘Christina Rossetti: the Maturin poems’, Victorian poetry, 19.2 (1981), 117. 35 D’amico, ‘Christina Rossetti: the Maturin poems’, pp. 117–18. 36 Quoted in D’amico, ‘Christina Rossetti: the Maturin poems’, p. 120. 37 D’amico, ‘Christina Rossetti: the Maturin poems’, p. 120. 38 Ibid., pp. 129–30. 39 Killeen, ‘Irish Gothic: a theoretical introduction’. 40 Haslam, ‘Irish Gothic: a rhetorical hermeneutics approach’. 41 Ibid. 42 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 5. 43 Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 82. 44 Quoted in Lloyd, ‘Melmoth the wanderer: the code of Romanticism’, p. 82; Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler (eds), Correspondence de Baudelaire, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 2: 467. 45 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 36.

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Bibliography

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Bibliography

Primary works by Charles Robert Maturin The Albigenses, a romance. 4 vols. London: Hurst, Robinson & Co., 1824. Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand; a tragedy in five acts. London: John Murray, 1816. The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio. 3 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1807. Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. Dublin: William Folds & Son, 1824. Fredolfo: a tragedy. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1819. ‘Leixlip Castle’. Twelve Gothic tales. Ed. Richard Dalby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 1–13. [Originally published in The literary souvenir; or, cabinet of poetry and romance. London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1825. 211–32.] Lines on the battle of Waterloo. Dublin: R. Milliken, 1816. [Possibly written by John Shee, under whose name the piece appeared.] Manuel: a tragedy in five acts. London: John Murray, 1817. Melmoth the wanderer. 1820. Ed. Douglas Grant. Introd. Chris Baldick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. The Milesian chief. 1812. Introd. Robert Lee Wolff. 4 vols. New York: Garland, 1979. Osmyn the renegade; or, the siege of Salerno. [Unpublished; summary and excerpts published in The Edinburgh literary journal; or weekly register of criticism and belles lettres 3 (24 April 1830): 242–3.] Rev. of Harrington and Ormond, Tales, by Maria Edgeworth. The British review, and London critical journal 11 (1818): 37–61. Sermons. London: Archibald Constable, 1819. ‘The sybil’s prophecy: a dramatic fragment’. The literary souvenir; or, cabinet of poetry and romance. London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., 1826. 128–36. The universe: a poem. London: Henry Colburn, 1821. [Possibly written by James Wills.] ‘Unpublished poem by Maturin’. The Edinburgh literary journal; or weekly register of criticism and belles lettres 42 (29 August 1829): 183–4. The wild Irish boy. 1808. Introd. Robert Lee Wolff. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1979. Women; or pour et contre. 1818. Introd. Robert Lee Wolff. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1979.

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Charles Robert Maturin, and William Gifford. ‘The Tragic Drama: The Apostate: a tragedy in five acts, by Richard Lalor Sheil’. Quarterly review 17 (1817): 248–60.

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Manuscript materials Manuscript correspondence between Maturin, Scott, Archibald Constable, Colburn, and the Royal Literary Fund held in the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and the British Library (BL). Handwritten manuscript of Bertram presented to Scott by Maturin and currently held in Abbotsford Library under the auspices of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates. Other primary sources ‘A clergyman of the Established Church’. An address to the Protestant gentry of Ireland. Dublin, 1823. ‘A list of works by Charles Robert Maturin, with translations and adaptations by other authors’. Melmoth the wanderer. By Charles Robert Maturin. 3 vols. London: R. Bentley, 1892. 1: lx–lxii. ‘A note on Charles Robert Maturin’. Melmoth the wanderer. By Charles Robert Maturin. 3 vols. London: R. Bentley, 1892. 1: xlviii–lix. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. Ed. James Kinsley. Introd. Marilyn Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. 1791. Ed. R. W. Chapman. Introd. Pat Rogers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the revolution in France. 1790. Ed. and introd. L. G. Mitchell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Burney, Frances. The wanderer; or, female difficulties. 1814. Ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Carleton, William. Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry. 1830–33. 2 vols. Dublin: Wm Curry, Jr & Co., 1842. Chuto, Jacques, Peter van de Kamp, Augustine Martin, and Ellen Shannon-Mangan, eds. The collected works of James Clarence Mangan. Prose: 1832–1839. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2002. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia literaria; or, biographical sketches of my literary life and opinions. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. 2 vols. The collected works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn. Vol. 7. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Croker, J. W. Rev. of Melmoth the wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin. The quarterly review 24.48 (1821): 303–11. Crowe, Eyre Evans. Old and new light. Today in Ireland. 1825. 3 vols. New York: Garland, 1979. Debrett’s baronetage of England. Vol. 2. 5th ed. London: C. & J. Rivington, 1824. De Staël, Madame. Corinne, or Italy. 1807. Trans. and ed. Sylvia Raphael. Introd. John Isbell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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Index

Act of Union (1800) 8, 50, 51, 61, 140, 169–70 see also Anglo-Irish Union (1801) Adams, Jane 64 An address to the Protestant gentry in Ireland 168–9 Albigenses, the 16, 157–8, 159–62, 167, 171–3 passim, 178 see also Cathar heresy Albigensian Crusade, the 157–8, 160, 166–7, 173 allegory 131, 133, 147 Althusser, Louis 73 Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, the 50, 96, 148, 173 Anglo-Irish Union (1801) 8, 12, 45–6, 64–5, 88–9, 96, 98, 99, 100, 122, 157, 169–70 campaign to repeal 63, 66, 77 and the extension of English copyright law to Ireland 178 see also Act of Union (1800) Ataliba 73 Austen, Jane Mansfield Park 24 Northanger Abbey 35 Balzac, Honoré de 6, 16, 180, 182 Le centenaire 180 Illusions perdues 180 Melmoth réconcilié 180, 182

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Banim, John 12 The Boyne water 97–8, 99, 157, 159 banshee 16, 99, 137, 151n21 Banville, John 30, 133 Birchwood 184–5 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 37 Barber, Jane 63 Battle of the Boyne, the 50, 53 Baudelaire, Charles 16, 180–1, 185–6 Les fleurs du mal 181 Beckford, William 55n34 Bégin, Émile L’homme du mystère, ou l’histoire du Melmoth le voyageur 179 Melmoth, ou l’homme errant 179 Bethesda Chapel, Dublin 109, 111, 113 Bhabha, Homi 101 Bowen, Elizabeth 11 Breton, André 180 Brocas, William ii Burke, Edmund 1 A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful 102n2 Reflections on the revolution in France 61, 64 and the ideal family-politic 61, 65, 72, 124 Burke, Mrs. A. The sorrows of Edith 18n24

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Burney, Frances The wanderer 139–40, 144 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 6, 8, 29, 69, 116, 185 Manfred 6 Caillard, Gaspar 171, 176n71 Calvinism 23, 109, 120, 161 cannibalism 94, 96 Carleton, William 22, 178 Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry 178 Cathar heresy 16, 157–8, 160–1 see also Albigenses, the Catholic Emancipation 16, 99, 101, 106, 108, 110, 122–3, 125, 129, 149, 157, 168–9, 170–1, 172–3 campaign for 16, 101, 106, 108, 122, 123, 129, 149, 168–9 Maturin’s feelings towards 99, 120–1, 171 Catholicism and The Albigenses 16, 158–60, 162–8, 171–3 in the Gothic novel 48, 51–2, 134 in Ireland 51–3, 99, 106, 109–10, 119, 148–9, 168, 169–70, 177 Church of Ireland 2, 14, 22–3, 27, 106, 109–10, 123, 126n15, 127n20, 168–9, 171 Cloghan Castle (Leixlip, Co. Kildare) 147 Cohen, Jean Melmoth, ou l’homme errant 179, 180, 187n7 Colburn, Henry 32n33, 136 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 25, 38 Zaploya 25 ‘communicative pathology’ 78, 106 Congress of Vienna (1814–15), the 124 see also Napoleonic Wars Constable, Archibald 15, 25–6, 29, 30n23, 125–6n1, 130–1 Continental heroine, the 15, 67, 87, 117 Cromwell, Oliver 9, 47, 66, 137, 147

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Index Crowe, Eyre Evans Old and new light 110 Cullen, Stephen The haunted priory 18n24 Dante Alighieri Divine comedy 78, 82n76 Davidson, Gustav Melmoth the wanderer; a play in five acts 182 de Fos, Maria Melmoth, l’homme errant 179, 180 Dennis, John Rinaldo and Armida 103n11 Derrida, Jacques 4, 11–12, 53–4, 59–60, 133, 177, 185, 186 and inheritance 4–5, 10–11, 13, 53, 58, 185, 186 and mourning 100–1 and the non-present present 5, 30, 134, 143, 156 Specters of Marx 4–5 and spectres, ghosts, or revenants 4–5, 6, 11–12, 33–4, 47, 53, 54, 59, 79n8, 185 de Staël, Germaine 70, 124 Corinne, ou l’Italie (Corinne, or Italy) 15, 68–9, 70, 85, 86–9, 91–2, 107, 112, 114, 117 Drennan, William 88–9, 104n18 Letters of Orellana, an Irish helot 89, 104n18 ‘To Ireland’ 89 Drury Lane Theatre, the 24, 25, 27 Dublin Castle 147, 148 Edgeworth, L’abbé Henry Essex 2 Edgeworth, Maria 1, 2, 4–5, 8, 12–13, 15, 22, 48, 64, 74, 107, 118 The absentee 9, 10, 49, 64, 66–7, 75, 122, 123–4 Belinda 15, 70–2, 76, 116, 123–4, 178

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Index Castle Rackrent 74, 122, 132, 135, 178 Ennui 9, 49 Ormond 74, 75–6 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell 75 Edict of Nantes 167–8 Emmett, Robert see Rebellion, 1803 Evangelicalism 106, 109, 110, 119, 121, 129, 161, 162 and Catholic conversion 110, 121 see also Methodism Fairfax, Edward 103n11 translates Gerusalemme liberata 103n13 see also Tasso, Torquato Faustus 7, 8, 182, 183 fear in the Gothic novel 36, 43, 51–2, 102n2 of Catholicism amongst the Anglo-Irish 50–1, 123, 148, 149, 169, 173 of the past in Ireland 12–13, 50–1, 83, 98–9, 101, 107 and the 1798 Rebellion 51, 104–5n43 Foucault, Michel 78 French Revolution (1789), the 63, 124–5 Freud, Sigmund 11 see also unhomely (unheimlich), the Fuller, Anne Alan Fitz-Osborne 18n24 Galloping Hogan 97 Gay, Jean L’histoire des schismes et hérésies 161 Genette, Gérard 20n45 see also paratext Glorvina solution, the 9, 10, 86, 100, 156 see also national tale, the Godwin, William 8 St Leon: a tale of the sixteenth century 132 Goff, Dinah 64

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205 Goldsmith, Oliver 1–2 Gothic novel, the 7–8, 11–13, 16, 26, 30, 34–6, 42, 46, 48, 51–2, 59, 63, 83, 84–5, 95, 102, 107, 131, 134, 144–5, 149, 155–7 in Ireland 8–9, 10–11, 14, 16, 18n21, 18n22 ‘male’ and ‘female’ 43–4, 55n34 and poetry 36–8 Grand Alliance, the 50 see also Jacobite-Williamite Wars, the, and Nine Year’s War, the Grattan’s Parliament 64–5, 69 Graveyard poetry 52, 56–7n58 Griffin, Gerald 22 Hamilton, Elizabeth 15 Hamilton, Reverend Dr William 146, 147–8 Handel, George Frideric Rinaldo 103n11 haunted houses 11, 47, 62–3, 78, 131, 137 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 16, 182 Fanshawe 182–3 The scarlet letter 182–3 Hill, Aaron translates Zaïre 127n24 see also Voltaire historical novel, the 10, 12, 15–16, 34, 65, 83, 84–5, 97, 101, 102, 155–7, 160 Hoefer, Ferdinand Nouvelle biographie universelle 179 Hogg, James 8 Home, John Douglas 24 Home Rule 169 homosexuality 42–3, 55n34, 92 Hoole, John translates Gerusalemme liberata 103n11, 103n13 see also Tasso, Torquato

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Huguenots 161, 167, 173 in Ireland 167–8, 170–1 Maturin’s Huguenot ancestry 22, 167–8 Hume, Joseph 110 Hurst, Robinson & Co. 154 Hussites 161 Huttula, R. 181 incest 11, 41, 42–3, 44, 45–6, 56n42 Ingram, Richard Kells ‘The memory of the dead’ 98, 104–5n43 Inquisition, the in The Albigenses 166 in Melmoth the wanderer 65, 134, 138, 141, 145–9, 183 insanity (madness) 47, 61, 64, 67–8, 69, 77–8, 87, 92, 96, 98, 107, 111, 123, 136, 138, 142, 177 intertextuality 36–7, 59, 80n51, 86, 107–8, 132–3, ‘Irish Gothic’ 8, 11, 64, 84, 129, 184–5 Jacobite-Williamite Wars, the 50–3, 57n64, 97, 99, 157 see also Grand Alliance, the James II 50 Kaye, Bishop John 26 Kenley, Marianne The cottage of the Appenines, or, the castle of Novina 18n24 Kilwarden, Lord (Arthur Wolfe) 146,148 Kingsbury, Sara ix Kirke, Major-General Percy 97 Koven, Joseph Melmoth the wanderer; a play in five acts 182 Lamb, Lady Caroline Glenarvon 69 see also roman à clef Languedoc 157, 158, 163, 166, 167, 171

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Index Lathom, Francis Orlando and Seraphina 103n11 Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan 11, 16, 84, 182, 183–4 The cock and anchor: a chronicle of old Dublin city 183 The fortune of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien: a tale of the wars of King James 183 Ghost stories and tales of mystery 183 In a glass darkly 8, 183 The Purcell papers 183 The rose and the key 183 Uncle Silas 11, 183 Lewis, Matthew 7, 27, 36, 37, 55n34, 143 The monk 43, 102, 143–4, 145 liminality 2, 137–8, 143 linen trade (in Ireland) 65 Lukács, Georg 155–6, 160, 172 Luther, Martin 161 lycanthropy 159 Mangan, James Clarence 16, 132, 151n12, 182 ‘The man in the cloak’ 182 Marc-Chadourne, Jacqueline 180 Maturin, Charles Robert The Albigenses 15–16, 28, 154–73 as a house of mirrors 154 appearance 6, 18n20, 23–4 Bertram; or, the castle of St Aldobrand 1, 2, 6, 21, 23, 24–5, 27–8, 140, 177, 180, 182 career in the Church of Ireland 2, 22–4, 28, 177 confusion over his date of birth 18n20, 30–1n4 death 2, 28 eccentricities 23–4, 177 family background 22–3 The fatal revenge; or, the family of Montorio 8, 13–14, 26, 27, 33–54, 58, 59, 69, 83, 134, 143, 149, 155, 157, 179, 186n5

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Index financial troubles 25–6 Five sermons on the errors of the Roman Catholic Church 28, 99, 120–1, 163, 171 Fredolfo: a tragedy 28 health 28, 32n35 home in York Street, Dublin 2–3, 17n5 ‘Leixlip Castle’ 29 Lines on the Battle of Waterloo 28 Manuel: a tragedy 28 Melmoth the wanderer 1, 2–3, 5–7, 10–11, 15, 25, 28, 29, 37, 43, 44, 63, 67, 69, 102, 129–50, 154, 158, 168, 173, 177, 178–85 as a house of mirrors 143–4, 145–7, 149–50 The Milesian chief 6, 14–15, 21, 26–7, 34, 67, 83–102, 106, 112, 134, 155, 156, 179, 181 Osmyn the renegade; or, the siege of Salerno 29, 32n43 portrait of ii, 6, 18n20 Sermons 25, 28, 134 The universe 28, 32n33 unpublished fragments remaining after his death 29, 189 The wild Irish boy 9, 10, 14, 26, 27, 58–78, 83, 106, 134, 179, 184, 186n5 Women; or pour et contre 14–15, 25, 28, 30, 35, 67, 106–25, 129, 130, 149, 179, 184 see also Murphy, Dennis Jasper Maturin, Fidelia (née Watson) 22 Maturin, Gabriel 22 Maturin, Gabriel James 22, 152n44 Maturin, Henrietta (née Kingsbury) ix, 22, 28–9, 32n35, 70 Maturin, Pierre 22 Maturin, Reverend Henry (rector of Clondevaddock, Co. Donegal) 148

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207 Maturin, William (father to Charles Robert Maturin) ix, 22–3, 26 Maturin, William (son of Charles Robert Maturin) ix, 22, 29, 32n43 Maxwell, William Hamilton O’Hara; or, 1798 64–5 Methodism 14, 106, 108–9, 111–14 passim, 119–20, 122, 125, 126n12 and the Church of Ireland 109–10 and ‘enthusiasm’ 121, 123 see also Evangelicalism Meyer, Henry Hoppner ii, vi Millikin, Anna Plantagenet; or, secrets of the house of Anjou 18n24 Milton, John 35 Paradise lost 114, 118, 119 Minerva Press, the 145 Moore, Thomas 1, 116 Irish melodies 1 More, Hannah 124 Coelebs in search of a wife 15, 118, 119, 120 Estimate of the religion of the fashionable world 118 Strictures on the modern system of female education 118 Thoughts on the importance of the manners of the great to general society 118 Morgan, Lady see Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) Morgan, Sir Charles 70 Murphy, Dennis Jasper ix, 26, 27–8, 44 see also Maturin, Charles Robert Nabokov, Vladimir 133 Lolita 30 Napoleonic Wars 63, 108, 115, 120, 124–5 see also Congress of Vienna (1814–15), the

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national hero(ine) 85, 127n33 national tale, the 8–13, 26, 34, 35, 44–5, 46, 48, 53, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 67–8, 69, 83, 84, 85, 89, 101, 102, 107, 155, 156, 186 see also Glorvina solution, the Nine Years’ War, the 50 see also Grand Alliance, the O’Connell, Daniel 149, 169, 170 and Home Rule 169 Ormsby, Sir Charles 69–70 Ossian myths 60, 76 Owenson, Sydney (Lady Morgan) 1, 4, 5, 8, 12, 13, 15, 22, 32n33, 68, 69–70, 96, 107 The missionary 67, 79–80n32, 138–9, 164, 165 The novice of St. Dominick 18n24 The O’Briens and the O’Flahertys 69 O’Donnel 84, 85, 87, 178 The wild Irish girl 9–10, 12, 27, 35, 46–7, 48, 49, 61, 63, 64, 65–7, 67–8, 69, 73, 78, 85, 132 and The Milesian chief 27, 86, 92 and The wild Irish boy 14, 27, 58–60, 61, 66–8, 72–3, 75, 78 paratext, the 13, 15, 20n45, 34–5, 49–50, 52, 131–2, 133, 145–50, 154, 174n21 see also Genette, Gérard Patrick, Mrs. F.C. More ghosts! 18n24 Peace of Alais (1629), the 167 Perrin, Jean-Paul Histoire des Vaudois 161 translated as Matchelesse crueltie, declared at large in the ensuing history of the Waldenses 161–2 Pitt, William 170 Planche, Gustave 179–80, 185 Portraits littéraires 179

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Index Poe, Edgar Allan 16, 182 ‘The man of the crowd’ 183 ‘The pit and pendulum’ 183 Pope, Alexander Eloisa to Abelard 93, 102 The rape of the lock 40 Prévost, L’abbé Antoine François Pour et contre 125–6n1 Puritanism 142, 162, 182 Radcliffe, Ann 7, 8, 26–7, 34, 35, 36–7, 43, 44, 45, 63, 134, 143–4, 145 The mysteries of Udolpho 36, 38, 46, 102, 143–4 The romance of the forest 36, 46, 102 ‘radiance’ 177–8, 181 Ranken, Alexander History of France 162 Raymond VI of Toulouse 158 Raymond VII of Toulouse 166 R. Bentley and Son 181–2 Rebellion, 1641 51, 52–3, 99, 168 Rebellion, 1798 12, 14, 51, 59, 63, 64, 73, 78, 83, 98–9, 100, 104–5n43, 147, 169 Rebellion, 1803 12, 14, 63, 66, 83, 98, 99, 100, 146, 148 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes 22, 167–8, 173 Richards, Elizabeth 64 Robinson, Mary 37 Hubert de Sevrac 44 Sappho and Phaon 44 Roche, Regina Maria The children of the abbey 10, 19n30, 48, 49, 68, 85, 102, 143–4 Clermont 42, 46 The maid of the hamlet 18n24 roman à clef 59, 69 see also Lamb, Lady Caroline Rossetti, Christina 16, 182, 184 Royal Coburg Theatre (Old Vic), the 182 Royal Literary Fund, the 28, 29

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Royal College of Surgeons, the 2 ruins 14, 35, 53, 83, 94–5, 100 Schmidt, Charles Histoire de la secte des cathares ou Albigeois 161 Scott, Sir Walter 5, 6, 10, 14, 28–9, 75, 116, 183 The bride of Lammermoor 6, 156, 166 correspondence with Charles Robert Maturin 2, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 32n30, 109, 134 correspondence with Henrietta Maturin 28–9 and historical authenticity 160, 172 and the historical novel 155–7, 183 Ivanhoe 15, 154, 164–5, 172 The lay of the last minstrel 34 and Maturin’s Albigenses 154–5, 159 and Maturin’s Bertram 27–8 Old mortality 15, 162–3, 166, 172 Redgauntlet 166 reviews Maturin’s Fatal revenge 27, 35–6 reviews Maturin’s Women; or pour et contre 107, 109, 154 Waverley 59, 60, 77, 84, 97–8, 155–6 Second Reformation movement, the 110 Selden, Catherine Villa nova 18n24 Shakespeare, William 35, 36, 37 Hamlet 5, 30 Twelfth night 42 Shee, John 28 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 8, 37, 152n35 Shiel, Richard Lalor 140 Siege of Barcelona (1697), the 34, 43, 50 Siege of Derry (1689), the 34, 50–1 Silver Fork novel, the 59 Smith, Charlotte 37, 41 Desmond 38 society novel, the 15, 59, 69, 107 Sterne, Reverend Laurence Tristram Shandy 24

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209 Stoker, Bram 11, 84 Dracula 8, 11, 16 Sublime, the 83, 102n2 Surr, Thomas Skinner A winter in London 81n53 Swift, Jonathan 1 A modest proposal 52, 56n58, 96 Synge, John Millington 11 Tasso, Torquato Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem delivered) 86, 88, 89, 90–1 influence of 86–7, 103n11 translation of 103n11 see also Fairfax, Edward and Hoole, John Temple, Sir John History of the Irish rebellion 51, 52 The terrific register; or, record of crimes, judgments, providences and calamities 12–13 Tower of Babel 106, 108, 119 Treaty of Limerick (1691), the 53, 57n64 Treaty, or Peace, of Paris (1229), the 166 Trollope, Anthony 133 The way we live now 30 unhomely (unheimlich), the 11, 20n39, 134–5 and Melmoth the wanderer 134–6, 137, 140–3, 149 see also Freud, Sigmund United Irishmen, the 147–8 utopia 141 vampirism 94, 95–6, 100, 107, 114–15, 122 A vindication of the religious and civil principles of the Irish Catholics 169 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 112 Zaïre 113–14 translation of 127n24 see also Hill, Aaron

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210 Wakeman, William 178 Waldensians 161, 162 Walpole, Horace 7, 55n34 The castle of Otranto 56n42, 95, 155 Wandering Jew, the 7 Warburton, Bishop William 24 Wars of Religion (1562–1629), the 167 Webber, Andrew Lloyd 150 Wesley, John 108, 109, 128n45 West, B. Melmoth the wanderer: a melo-dramatic romance, in three acts 182 White, James Earl Strongbow 18n24 Wilde, Lady Jane ix, 6, 178

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Index Wilde, Oscar 5, 11, 16, 84, 133 The picture of Dorian Gray 6, 8 Wild Geese 50 William of Orange (later William III) 50 Wills, James 28, 32n33 Wollstonecraft, Mary 72 Wordsworth, William 35, 37 The prelude 99 Yeats, William Butler 11 ‘A Young Lady’ The monastery of Gondolfo 18n24 Žižek, Slavoj 69

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