Contexts -- The Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew, a figure in European legend, scorned Jesus on his
progression to the cross at Calvary, and as punishment for that was doomed
to wander without end until the Second Coming. This mythic figure, then,
reenacts in Christian terms the primal alienation experienced by Cain in
Genesis. As early as the thirteenth century he appears in legends,
wandering about the world and piously atoning for his sin.
The figure, however,
assumes a much darker complexion in the early writing of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, appearing as the wild radical Ahasuerus in Canto 7 of Queen Mab (1813) (see also the further
account in Shelley's note).
In 1815, as scribblings in the
manuscript pages of his "On the Vegetable System of Diet" attest, Shelley
was even planning to write a novel centered on the figure of the Wandering
Jew. Thus, in the cultural context in which Mary Shelley found
herself, this shadowy figure from ancient legend carried a substantial
presence. As is customary with her assimilation of legendary materials,
however, Mary Shelley allows the prototype implicitly to raise serious
questions about characters in her novel. For instance, who denies whom?
who curses whom?
