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The paper locates Svengali, the Jewish villain of the novel Trilby (1894), within historical and literary contexts that informed the culture of his creator, George Du Maurier. It argues that Svengali emblematizes the figure of the Jew that is seen by late nineteenth-century European culture as troubling the cultural categories invoked for purposes of national self-definition; additionally Svengali reflexively troubles the generic categories that work to contain and define the novel in which he appears. In doing so, Svengali re-enacts the situation of the transgressive Wandering Jew, escaping the confines of his text to wander textually homeless in the popular imagination.
June 2005: Ruth Bienstock Anolik received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and teaches at Villanova University. Most of her work focuses on the Gothic with a special interest in the interplay between Gothic literature and social and cultural structures. Her publications include: “The Missing Mother: The Meanings of Maternal Absence in the Gothic” and “Appropriating the Golem, Possessing the Dybbuk: Female Retellings of Jewish Folktales” in Modern Language Studies”; “Horrors of Possession: The Gothic Struggle with the Law” in Legal Studies Forum; “‘All Words, Words, about Words:’ Linguistic Journey and Transformation in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers” in Studies in American Jewish Literature. She has recently completed editing a collection of essays, The Gothic Other: Racial and Social Constructions in the Literary Imagination published by McFarland, and is currently at work on two projects: a companion collection on the sexual other in the Gothic, also to be published by McFarland, and a book on the concept of possession in the Gothic mode.
