Unisonance and the Echo: Popular Disturbances and Theatricality in the Works of Charles Maturin

Abstract

While Charles Robert Maturin significantly influenced Balzac and French realism, as well as André Breton and surrealism, he has had only a minor reputation in English literary history. He is remembered for his Gothic drama Bertram (1816), mainly because Coleridge devotes a chapter to it in Biographie Literaria. When Coleridge arrives at the moment in Maturin’s tragedy—the consummation of the adulterous relationship of Bertram and Imogine—that convinces him that the “shocking spirit of jacobinism” (2: 229) has migrated from politics to morals, he borrows language from Wordsworth’s attack on “sickly and stupid German Tragedies” (William Wordsworth 599) in order to condemn the audience’s “craving… for the grossest and most outrageous stimulants” (Coleridge, Biographie 2: 229). Maturin is famous by association as the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde as well as a correspondent of Walter Scott, upon whose generosity with money, literary patronage, and critical advice he came to rely. Finally, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)—a novel in which the Commonwealth and Restoration scenes owe a considerable debt to Scott’s historical fiction—is often viewed as the culminating achievement of the Gothic novel in the historical period of its flourishing, a period that began with Walpole’s Castle of Otrtznto in 1764.