Melmoth opens with a deathbed scene: The young John Melmoth leaves Trinity College to attend the bedside of his dying uncle, a superstitious miser. Lovecraft, who, in his discussion of the genre, found in it “a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind-a 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’s part which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound of artifice.” Maturin’s novel brought the genre into a sort of imperfect maturity according to the late Victorians and early Edwardians, most notably H. Melmoth’s 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. What was it in the story that spoke to them so deeply? Wilde himself, after being released in disgrace from Reading Gaol, based his entire identity around his uncle’s story, renaming himself after its hero, Sebastian Melmoth. By the end of the nineteenth century, the book had taken on cult status. Maturin, an Irish clergyman and great-uncle to Oscar Wilde, wrote the book in 1820, at the height of the vogue for gothic romance. This is especially true of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, a shapeless tale of transformation, loneliness, and evil as shown in complete isolation from good. The only character with any power of personality happens, more often than not, to be the devil himself. The “good” characters are, for the most part, idiots: foolish clergyman, one-dimensional lovers doomed to die horrible (sometimes cannibalistic) deaths, and so on. There seems barely time to contemplate the afterlife when everyone’s so busy trying to escape the traps laid for them on earth-traps set by heredity and fate. Any benefits to leading a religious life seem to be completely erased in these stories, with paranoia and persecution complexes to take their place. These are stories that couldn’t exist outside a culture obsessed with sin and hellfire, and yet they’re not morality tales: the only lesson to be drawn from most gothic romances is that the supernatural can be easily substituted for the divine. Gothic horror usually revolves around the sinister absence of God inside some religious framework.
How well, really, do any of my favorite works hold up? Is The Castle of Otranto actually good, or just campy? Is The Monk great literature? Probably not-but as genres go, there’s none quite so pleasingly ridiculous as this one. The reluctance comes from never quite knowing if it’s a genre worth caring about. I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. From the Penguin Classics edition of Melmoth.
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