{"id":91387,"date":"2015-10-29T12:04:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-29T16:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91387"},"modified":"2015-10-30T12:26:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T16:26:30","slug":"sympathy-for-the-devil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/29\/sympathy-for-the-devil\/","title":{"rendered":"Sympathy for the Devil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Melmoth the Wanderer\u00a0and the bizarre appeal of gothic horror.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From the Penguin Classics edition of Melmoth<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. The reluctance comes from never quite knowing if it\u2019s a genre worth caring about. How well, really, do any of my favorite works hold up? Is The Castle of Otranto <\/em>actually good, or just campy? Is The Monk<\/em> great literature? Probably not\u2014but as genres go, there\u2019s none quite so pleasingly ridiculous as this one.<\/p>\n

Gothic horror usually revolves around the sinister absence of God inside some religious framework. These are stories that couldn\u2019t exist outside a culture obsessed with sin and hellfire, and yet they\u2019re not morality tales: the only lesson to be drawn from most gothic romances is that the supernatural can be easily substituted for the divine. Any benefits to leading a religious life seem to be completely erased in these stories, with paranoia and persecution complexes to take their place. There seems barely time to contemplate the afterlife when everyone\u2019s so busy trying to escape the traps laid for them on earth\u2014traps set by heredity and fate. The \u201cgood\u201d characters are, for the most part, idiots: foolish clergyman, one-dimensional lovers doomed to die horrible (sometimes cannibalistic) deaths, and so on. The only character with any power of personality happens, more often than not, to be the devil himself.<\/p>\n

This is especially true of Charles Maturin\u2019s Melmoth the Wanderer<\/a>,<\/em> a shapeless tale of transformation, loneliness, and evil as shown in complete isolation from good. Maturin, an Irish clergyman and great-uncle to Oscar Wilde, wrote the book in 1820, at the height of the vogue for gothic romance. By the end of the nineteenth century, the book had taken on cult status. Baudelaire adored it. Balzac wrote a sequel to it. Wilde himself, after being released in disgrace from Reading Gaol, based his entire identity around his uncle\u2019s story, renaming himself after its hero, Sebastian Melmoth. What was it in the story that spoke to them so deeply?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Melmoth<\/em>\u2019s plot models itself after Faust, the urtext that provided the outline of all great gothic horror to come, in which an unholy trade is made on earth that bars entry to heaven. Maturin\u2019s novel brought the genre into a sort of imperfect maturity according to the late Victorians and early Edwardians, most notably H. P. Lovecraft, who, in his discussion of the genre, found in it \u201ca pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind\u2014a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer\u2019s part which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound of artifice.\u201d<\/p>\n

Melmoth<\/em> opens with a deathbed scene: The young John Melmoth leaves Trinity College to attend the bedside of his dying uncle, a superstitious miser. Young Melmoth happens to see a portrait of one of his ancestors, dated 1646. When his uncle learns of his interest in the painting, he tells him that \u201cthe original is still alive\u201d: \u201cYou shall see him again,\u201d he says before dying.<\/p>\n

There are many things about this scene that feel familiar in retrospect. The portrait, the equation of agelessness with evil, the quiet foreboding: by these traits alone it becomes clear that Wilde\u2019s only novel could not have existed without its campy predecessor. But while Dorian Gray desired eternal youth, Melmoth\u2019s immortality\u2014he\u2019s sold his soul to the devil for another 150 years of life\u2014is a burden. He moves restlessly around the world, trying to foist it onto someone else.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

An illustration from the Melmoth<\/i> playscript by B. West.<\/p><\/div>\n

Melmoth\u2019s third-person narrator is reliable, but the manuscript\u2014the book-within-the-book written by an observer about Melmoth\u2019s travels, from which we get most of our information, inside of the John Melmoth framing device\u2014is not. It is in extreme disrepair when John finds it, \u201cdissolved, obliterated, and mutilated beyond any that had ever before exercised the patience of a reader.\u201d It\u2019s basically unreadable, breaking off sometimes at midsentence, a device which allows the second narrator (whose voice is suspiciously like the primary) to propel us at an instant into a ridiculous part of the drama without needing to situate it inside the story. In this manuscript, the man in the portrait is referred to as \u201cThe Englishman,\u201d though he is a man without a country, born in Ireland, and having spent so much time on \u201cthe Continent\u201d that his family in Dublin despaired of ever seeing him again.<\/p>\n

But Melmoth is a bit of a false devil, interesting only in that he is indecipherable. His motives are so inexplicable that they must belong to an idea of pure evil\u2014as when he convinces a woman he\u2019s seduced to swear her love for him and then damns her. He seems to be a satanic character without all that much nuance\u2014he has neither the humor of a Mephisto nor the charm of a Dorian Gray, nor the overwrought, outright campy qualities of Matthew Lewis\u2019s monk. In fact, Melmoth is more an action hero than a horror villain. He is defined by his movements, by the fact that he is, like the cyber-villains of Gossip Girl<\/em> and Pretty Little Liars<\/em>, everywhere and nowhere.<\/p>\n

And this archetype\u2014the faceless villain whose evil stems from a great burden of personality\u2014is perhaps the only aspect of gothic horror that carries over into present-day storytelling. It makes sense, in this light, that Wilde would have so deeply identified with the character. The devil in exile: shunned, doomed, unable to shift his burden, unable to be anything but himself, unable to transfer his personality onto anyone else.<\/p>\n

Wilde famously pissed off Henry James at their first meeting by claiming that he had no nationality but was rather \u201ca citizen of the world.\u201d For James, a writer obsessed with place, this was nothing less than an affront. Wilde made enemies in conversation throughout his entire life, and ended his life in complete exile. Melmoth, as a character, feels like a prediction of how his story would end.<\/p>\n

Richard Ellmann writes, in his biography of Wilde, of the author\u2019s last days in France, living in exile and poverty:<\/p>\n

\n

Wilde, no doubt pining for his sons, invited fifteen small boys of the neighborhood, along with with cure, the postman, the schoolmaster, and other local worthies. He got Bonnet to decorate the banqueting room at the Hotel de la Plage with colored lamps and English flags. The children were given strawberries and cream, apricots, chocolates, cakes, and grenadine syrup. A huge iced cake bore the words \u201cJubile de la Reine Victoria,\u201d in pink sugar rosetted with green, encircled by a great wreath of red roses. Each child was allowed to choose a present; six chose accordions, five trumpets and four bugles. The postman got an accordion. They sang the \u201cMarseillaise,\u201d danced a rondo, sang \u201cGod Save the Queen.\u201d Wilde proposed a toast to the Queen, then to France as \u201cla mere de touts les artistes,\u201d and finally to the President de la Republique, after which the children cried, \u201cVivent le President de la Republique et M. Melmoth.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps Wilde never hoped to find anonymity in France. In the seemingly inherited sense of doom passed on from his uncle, he found a way to live. He made Melmoth his own. In the final assessment, that\u2019s really the greatest pleasure of the gothic\u2014stories that offer us central characters just vague enough, and just weird enough, to place ourselves inside of.\u00a0 Sometimes we can see ourselves in the characters like Conrad in The Castle of Otranto<\/em>, the ones who die before the story even begins and haunt the rest of the action as if they\u2019d never left it, despite having been too weak to survive the world that created them. And we can\u2019t condemn Dorian Gray or Faust: we\u2019ve all wanted the kind of beauty and immortality they were lucky enough to be granted. Rather than existing as a symbol of fear, the devil becomes a point of access. It\u2019s through this trick that we\u2019re allowed to enter into the story not as impossibly romantic heroes but as brooding outsiders. And that feels, despite the genre\u2019s rickety approach to the macabre\u2014like the most modern thing of all.<\/p>\n

Henry Giardina is a writer living in Massachusetts.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Melmoth the Wanderer\u00a0and the bizarre appeal of gothic horror. I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. The reluctance comes from never quite knowing if it\u2019s a genre worth caring about. How well, really, do any of my favorite works hold up? Is The Castle of Otranto actually good, or just campy? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[19994,19996,88,13240,1770,71,19997,19998,19999,1146,12634,11652,19995,12985,747,1435,12635,6452],"class_list":["post-91387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-charles-maturin","tag-doctor-faustus","tag-england","tag-eternal-life","tag-faust","tag-fiction","tag-gothic-horror","tag-gothic-romance","tag-gothicism","tag-halloween","tag-horace-walpole","tag-immortality","tag-melmoth-the-wanderer","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-novels","tag-oscar-wilde","tag-the-castle-of-otranto","tag-the-picture-of-dorian-gray"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nGothic Horror and the Odd Appeal of \u201cMelmoth the Wanderer\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 29, 2015 \u2013 Melmoth the Wanderer\u00a0and the bizarre appeal of gothic horror.I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. 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