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Divine (In)Justice in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer
Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of English.
2021 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

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

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2021.
Keywords [en]
Melmoth the Wanderer, Calvinism, total depravity, excess, textual lacunae, anti-Catholicism, Irish schizophrenia, voyeurism, the eye, Bataille
National Category
General Literature Studies
Research subject
English; Literature
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-193091OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-193091DiVA, id: diva2:1553873
Conference
Nordic Irish Studies Network (NISN) Conference 2021: Justice on the Island, Åbo, Finland, May 6-7, 2021
Available from: 2021-05-11 Created: 2021-05-11 Last updated: 2022-02-25Bibliographically approved

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Wrethed, Joakim

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
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