FEW WIDELY KNOWN BOOKS HAVE BEEN SO OFTEN MISCONSTRUED AS Charles Robert Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). The novel has earned the Anglo-Irish Maturin his reputation as a "conscious inheritor" of eighteenth-century gothic tropes, (1) but this assimilation into the genre of gothic romance has largely obscured its central focus. Critics of Melmoth tend to fixate unhelpfully on the novel's two longest episodes, the Spaniard's Tale and the wild affair between the title character and the innocent Immalee/Isadora. This selective attention has produced a rather narrow understanding of the novel, and has failed to highlight its ambitiousness. I shall argue that Melmoth is not so much a thundering gothic as an inquiry into the social imposition of religion, an anxiety no doubt heightened by the conflicts in Ireland during the early part of the nineteenth century. The standard account of Melmoth describes the novel as an anti-Catholic screed, and its eponymous hero as the diabolical "enemy of mankind." Focusing heavily on the persecution central to the two most studied episodes, critics have argued that Maturin has little sympathy for the religious impulse, and that in Melmoth religion does not save, but instead "dehumanizes." (2) Serious attention to all of its component stories produces a radically different interpretation.
