Keats-Shelley Journal Feature: Kim Wheatley

This post is the second in a series presenting blog publications from the authors featured in the latest volume of the Keats-Shelley Journal, Volume LXV. In these short pieces, authors reflect on their recent work and dialogue with other scholars in the discipline. Below is a Q&A with Kim Wheatley addressing her article "'Strange Forms': Percy Bysshe Shelley's Wandering Jew and St. Irvyne". This series is curated by Lindsey Seatter, for the Keats-Shelley Association of America Communications Fellows Team. 

You argue that the Wandering Jew, as a character type, paved the way for popular “blended hero-villains” such as Lord Byron’s Manfred and Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Can you say more about how Shelley uses the Wandering Jew to create the Romantic anti-hero?  Specifically, how and why does Shelley draw upon the stereotypical (possibly, tired) qualities of characters from Gothic fiction?

Shelley’s Wandering Jew poem is extremely Gothic in plot, setting, themes, trappings, and narrative strategies, so the act of drawing upon the stereotypical characters of Gothic (relatively passive hero, charismatic villain) is practically a genre-driven imperative. Paulo, Shelley’s version of the Wandering Jew in this poem, is heroic in rescuing the victimized Rosa, yet at the same time comes across as a man of mystery haunted by past transgression. The fear-inducing aspects of this new blended stereotype never get old. Many critics have pointed out that the threat that the Gothic hero-villain poses to the innocent Gothic heroine adds to his sexual allure. As Curt Zimansky noted in the 1978 article that I cite, Shelley partially conflates the Raymond/Agnes/Bleeding Nun story from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), which includes Lewis’s intriguing depiction of the Wandering Jew. This conflation generates ambiguity about the extent to which Paulo invites identification. Zimansky suggests Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) as another possible source, specifically the hero Vivaldi’s rescue of the heroine Ellena from a convent. What’s surprising is how unvillainous (and unsexual) Paulo appears. I also mentioned in my article that Shelley was influenced by a prior hero-villain: William Godwin’s St. Leon from the eponynmously titled novel  (1799). Paulo anticipates the Byronic hero that Lord Byron created and then embodied later in the 1810s. However, unlike the authors of St Leon, Manfred, and Frankenstein, the young Shelley does not yet seem very interested in exploring psychological interiority. Rather, his Wandering Jew poem helps to confirm Laurence Lerner’s insight, in an essay on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), that “[In the Gothic] characters merge into one another . . . identities are undermined and resemblances re-arrange themselves . . . . [This] mutability . . . [is] not the result of incompetence but the source of strange power” (“Bertha and the Critics,” NCL 44 [1989], 295). This “strange power” emerges from borrowing across texts as well as from doubling or multiplying characters within them.

You cite St. Iryvne’s use of intertextual elements, specifically the inclusion of verse and epigraphs, as one of the novel’s central features. As a generic characteristic common to many Gothic texts, could this type of deliberate interactivity be read as another “strange form”?

Yes indeed. “Those dreadful poems,” as one of my students put it. However much one loves poetry, there’s something jarring about encountering pieces of verse while reading a suspenseful prose narrative. There’s a tendency to think, “Wait – what? I have to read a bit of poetry now?” It can be hard to transition from quickly turning the pages to find out what happens next, to the different kind of attention that a poem demands. One is tempted to skip the poem. Yet in the Gothic, as in sentimental fiction, the piece of verse often expands upon or complicates the narrative. The ballad that one of the bandits recites in St. Irvyne, for example, forcibly injects the supernatural into the text early on, raising the possibility that ghosts will resurface at some point. Its reference to the “half-eaten eyeballs” in which “two pale flames appeared” (St. Irvyne ed. Stephen Behrendt [Peterborough: Broadview, 2002], 181) foreshadows the “two pale and ghastly flames” that “glared” in the “eyeless sockets” of the villain Ginotti on the final page (St. Irv, 252). The same poem recycles the name of Paulo’s love-interest Rosa from the Wandering Jew poem (as in, “Rosa’s form” (St. Irv, 177) – another strange form since she’s an animated skeleton). This act of borrowing creates another link with the earlier text, and thus with Rosa Matilda, the pen-name of the Gothic novelist Charlotte Dacre, and more remotely with the fascinating character of Matilda in The Monk. Of course, early readers of Gothic fiction did not necessarily react impatiently to the inclusion of verse. Some reviewers of The Monk admired its poems.