"Strange Forms": Percy Bysshe Shelley's Wandering Jew and St. Irvyne

Complaining about "shocking weather" in the winter of 1809, the young Percy Bysshe Shelley told a friend, "I … read Novels & Romances all day, till in the Evening I fancy myself a Character."¹ Shelley's statement appears to welcome the fuzzy dividing line between text and reader that supposedly typifies the genre of romance, especially Gothic romance. Such fuzziness characterizes two of his own early ventures into the Gothic: his first long narrative poem, The Wandering Jew, or The Victim of the Eternal Avenger, which he wrote in 1809–1810, and his second Gothic novel, St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, published a year later. Both texts concoct a fantasy of so-called "strange forms" (WJ, I, line 94), a phrase that I take to apply not only to representations of the supernatural but also to predictable plotlines, stereotyped characters, and generic narrative strategies, in addition to fanciful figures of speech that strain against the confines of genre.² The Wandering Jew himself is one of the quasi-supernatural "strange forms" who seems uncannily at home in the Gothic, while inevitably on his way to somewhere else. I will argue that in retelling the Jew's story of endless suffering, these two relentlessly non-realist texts combine strangely familiar conventions and strangely unfamiliar language to dramatize the limits of readerly—and authorial—control vis-à-vis the powerful dictates of the Gothic genre.

It might seem surprising that Shelley first depicts the Wandering Jew in a verse romance rather than in a Gothic novel, given the influence of Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) on the young writer's initial conception of the legendary pariah, a character with whom he remained obsessed.³ The decision suggests that the Jew's story deserves a more upmarket format. However, for the most part, The Wandering Jew embraces the Gothic genre rather than seeking to transcend it. After composing this poem at the age of seventeen, Shelley turned to prose fiction with Zastrozzi (1810) before writing the more ambitious St. Irvyne, a novel that features a Wandering-Jew-like villain and that uses passages from his unpublished Wandering Jew poem as two of its epigraphs. In what follows, I will first discuss how these two portrayals of the immortal outcast rely on staple Gothic components such as the theme of persecution, the doubling and polarizing of characters, and the exploitation of what Eve Sedgwick calls "discontinuous and involuted" form.⁴ Questions of who is to blame and who wins out are alike muffled by the Gothic's structural peculiarities even as they draw in the assumedly spellbound reader. Then I turn to what I will call the local weirdnesses of these works to show that the Gothic's conventional blurring of story and reader takes place at the level of the sentence in St. Irvyne even more so than in The Wandering Jew. In this strange situation, a trashy novel and an even trashier poem both reward close analysis. Such scrutiny will reveal that the texts' very language has its own stories to tell. In both cases, Shelley crafts an obtrusive narrator, distinguished from the texts' implied author, to explore the agency of form.

The apocryphal Wandering Jew, forced to roam the earth until the Second Coming as a punishment for denying rest to Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion, had been depicted repeatedly in European literature and folklore prior to his migration into British Gothic fiction as The Monk's mysterious exorcist. Lewis's unnamed Wandering Jew, whose sparkling eyes recall those of the novel's villain Ambrosio and more remotely those of Satan in Paradise Lost, recounts multiple failed suicide attempts in a passage echoing Christian Schubart's 1786 poem Der Ewige Jude: Eine Lyrische Rhapsodie. He repels by the horrifying burning cross on his forehead but attracts by relieving Raymond, one of the novel's heroes, from persecution by the spectral Bleeding Nun. The exorcist, who in Lewis's rendering cannot stay more than two weeks in one place, then disappears from the narrative, never to be heard from again. The...