From innocence to experience. The seduction of knowledge in Melmoth the Wanderer

Abstract

This essay discusses one of the masterpieces of English Gothic literature: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Robert Maturin. The analysis focuses on the complex relationship established by the eponymous protagonist, Melmoth, with the young and innocent Immalee, within the interpolated Tale of the Indians. The corruption of innocence, the Wanderer’s attempt to attract and seduce, unfolds on the fringes of the erotic sphere and its rhetoric, thus becoming a marker of both epistemic and aesthetic tension. Most unexpectedly, the diabolical seducer’s act brings about no impulse towards assimilation. On the contrary, it arouses in the designated victim an irrepressible desire for differentiation and distinction between the self and the other, fostering a drive to separate and to learn, yielding to the entropy of becoming to experience the energy of difference and the giddying vertigo of the extreme form of Gothic trespass: the (Blakeian) marriage of Heaven and Hell.