ABSTRACT
This riff or mini chapter opens with gypsies: descendants of an Indo-Aryan ethnic group who left India in the sixth century. Their otherness seemed as exotic and alluring as their black-haired, dark-eyed, swarthy features, and a wandering, passionate lifestyle easily suggested an association between gypsy freedom and the desire to wander featured in the 1937 popular song “Gypsy in my Soul.” Gypsies may be unique among organized peoples as having “no dream of a homeland.” It is their reputation as wanderers, however, and as outsiders characterized by emotional intensity and by presumed access to exotic knowledge that Matthew Arnold draws upon in “The Scholar Gypsy” (1853). In the age of Victorian Doubt, the young Oxford scholar in Arnold’s poem abandons books and university-authorized knowledge to live with gypsies. Although he fails in his promise to write about what he learns, in Arnold’s telling his choice of life seems preferable to the rational doubts that paralyzed Victorians. The poem is like a literary experiment in doubting Doubt.
