Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction by Christina Morin

Abstract

Christina Morin. Charles Robert Maturin and the Haunting of Irish Romantic Fiction. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011. Pp. 256. $90. Shadows of the intrude upon the present. In minds troubled by guilt, fears, or anxieties, these intrusions may be construed as ghosts. Among the Irish, in a land where the seems to intrude more persistently than elsewhere, more particular names have been invented to discriminate nuances of the manifestations. They may be known as Death-Lights, as Fetches, as Banshees, as Thevshi or Tash. John Banim, Maturin's contemporary, brought much of the supernatural lore of the Irish into his tales. But as Christina Morin emphasizes in discussing John The Boyne Water (1826) in relation to Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1812), Banim was writing on the other side of the great Protestant/Catholic divide. Banim's desire to exonerate nineteenth-century Irish Catholics from the wrongs of the required an illustration valorizing their ancestors as rational, civilized beings. For Maturin that same historical was under the sway of wicked barbarism (96-98). Banim traces his supernatural pestilence to a very different source, but it is not just the religious divide that defines the difference. Maturin wrought tales of a mode of more deeply rooted in the shared history, in a belated Christianization, in an unresolved Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in a nationalism driven by occupation and resistance, in radical disparities of wealth and poverty. Maturin's works, Morin declares, provide the key to a new understanding of Irish national fiction as a peculiarly haunted form of literature, haunted historically and psychologically. In pursuing this claim as her central thesis, she enlists the mode of tracing the presence of the past set forth in Jacques Derrida's Spectres of Marx (1993). Just as Derrida addressed the continued hold of Marxist thought throughout the following century, Morin traces the spectres of Irish history in Irish national literature as mediated by Maturin. She reiterates Derrida's requisite politics of memory and the capacity to rethink ourselves through the dead or, rather, through the return of the dead (in us) and thus through haunting (4-5). With each example of Maturin's fiction, Morin reiterates and elaborates her central thesis. Best known of Maturin's works were his tragedy, Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand (Drury Lane, 9 May 1816), and his novel, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The tragedy opens with Bertram's experiencing shipwreck off his native coast near the castle of Lord Aldobrand, the haughty nobleman who had driven Bertram into exile and taken Bertram's beloved Imogine as his bride. Bertram seduces Imogine, kills Aldobrand, and in the final act commits suicide. In his vigorous denunciation of the play as melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind, Samuel Taylor Coleridge himself has promoted continued interest. At Drury Lane Maturin's Bertram was chosen over Coleridge's Zapolya, which subsequently opened at the Surrey (9 February 1818). In his review, Coleridge introduced an old man seated next to him in the theater who pointed to Edmund Kean in his role as Bertram and declared: Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been committing adultery! Coleridge's attack on the scandalous immorality of Bertram, as Morin acknowledges (25), had its lasting effect on the critical reception, but it ignored Maturin's strategic ploy of dramatizing present action as the consequence of the intrusive persistence of the past. The love of Imogine and Bertram, as primary moving force, existed years before the chance event of the shipwreck brings the lovers back together. Not Bertram but Aldobrand was the intruder, the interloper. Because the causal events of history cannot be reversed or undone, the tragic consequences of the triangle, temporarily impeded by Bertram's banishment, continue in their inevitable course. …