Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a fantasy/science fiction piece in his novel Zanoni. The novel’s protagonist, labeled by those familiar with him in Italy “the rich Zanoni . . . his wealth is incalculable!,” possesses special powers of the occult that give him control over his own mortality. He finds the key to eternal life is the sacrifice of all compassion toward humans and exists for 5,000 years feeling nothing toward his fellow man.
As the Spanish Inquisition winds down, France’s Reign of Terror begins, and in that setting, Zanoni finds that the power of love trumps his own dark powers.
While watching an opera in Naples, Zanoni sees Viola Pisani, daughter of the composer, on stage. “The little singer of San Carlo” so moves him that he leads the crowd in applause for her performance. She sees him close to the stage and “could not withdraw her gaze from that face.” Zanoni is veiled in mystery that forms the basis of local gossip concerning “strange reports” that the same individual had appeared “in the same splendour” in Milan, where a man recalled having seen him “sixty years before in Sweden.”
Bulwer-Lytton’s placing of an internal struggle in an environment filled with external conflict helps emphasize the extreme reaction Zanoni undergoes; others choose to die for war, while he chooses to die for love.
In a discussion with Mejnour, a stranger who the reader discerns is somehow responsible for Zanoni’s immortality, Zanoni explains, “the transport and the sorrow, so wildly blended, which have at intervals diversified my doom, are better than the calm and bloodless tenor of the solitary way. Thou . . . lovest nothing, hatest nothing, feelest nothing; and walkest the world with the noiseless and joyless footsteps of a dream!” His love for Viola leads to marriage and his sacrifice of his superhuman state.
Clarence Glyndon later warns Viola, following the birth of her child, about the powers that have affected Zanoni, describing “in words that froze the blood of his listener” the phantom with eyes “that seared the brain and congealed the marrow of those who beheld.” Although Viola is frightened at the thought of her husband captivated by such a phantom, she need not be.
As the novel moves into Book the Seventh with a first chapter titled “The Reign of Terror,” Zanoni now prefers the brighter spiritual powers that passion allows. In the face of Robespierre’s fury, he gives up not only a chance at immortality, but also his literal life as he takes the place of his wife when she is sentenced to death on the guillotine. In his thin morality fable, Bulwer presses an argument already long won in literature—that love conquers all other desires and forces.
Bulwer-Lytton considered Zanoni his greatest work, and despite his generous inclusion of hyperbole and tendency toward cliché, the tone echoes Bulwer’s honest belief in his theme. In the novel’s dedicatory epistle to a sculptor named John Gibson, Bulwer-Lytton writes that his novel, “this well-loved work of my matured manhood,” is not meant for the masses that cannot appreciate it. He adds, “I love it not the more, because it has found enthusiastic favourers amongst the Few. My affection for my work is rooted in the solemn and pure delight which it gave me to conceive and to perform.”
The novel projects his feeling that artists fare better on the Continent than in his own country. A character called Mervale, “a downright honest man,” comments to Clarence that anyone in England would believe a wealthy Englishman who married a singer had “been lamentably taken in.” When Clarence comments, “Artists have been friends of princes,” Mervale replies, “Very rarely so, I fancy, in sober England. There in the great center of political aristocracy, what men respect is the practical, not the ideal.”
Bibliography
Wolff, Robert Lee. Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction. Boston: Gambit, 1971.
Categories: British Literature, Fantasy Novels, Literature, Novel Analysis
You must be logged in to post a comment.