https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5354-7964
![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Julian and Maddalo is a poem about how the mind structures reality. Shelley’s focus lies in exploring what constitutes the conditions of knowledge. The first part of the essay discusses Shelley’s philosophy of mind as set forth in ‘A Treatise on Morality’. With the ‘Treatise’ as backdrop, I read the poem as Shelley’s vehicle for exploring consciousness. Each figure in the poem, not merely the Maniac, embodies a different aspect of consciousness. Each is a madman; each bends reality to prop up his view of life. The second part of the essay examines the poem in light of Shelley’s theory of mind in A Defence of Poetry. Here Shelley explores the mind’s capacity to envision alternative worlds. The tragedy of the Maniac is that he cannot do what Shelley calls for in the Defence: He cannot imagine any other life than the tortured one he is living in his mind. Maddalo’s daughter asserts a new pathway to knowledge, one that acknowledges the boundlessness of the mind and offers a new hermeneutics of the self. My argument owes a debt to Sartre’s theory of the ‘unreal object’, Freud’s notions of the preconscious and ‘the uncanny’, and Galen Strawson’s ideas on narrativity.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Stephen Hebron, the curator of the Shelley Papers at the Bodleian Library at Oxford for allowing me to study the fair copy of Julian and Maddalo. I also wish to thank Dr Jay Martin, Professor Emeritus of Claremont-McKenna College, for reading this paper and helping it take shape.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews, The Poems of Shelley: Vol. 2: 1817–1819 (London: Routledge, 2000), 673.
2 Fredrick L. Jones, ed., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, Shelley in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014), 353.
3 Byron to Medwin, quoted in J. E. Saveson, ‘Shelley’s Julian and Maddalo,’ Keats-Shelley Journal 10 (1961): 53–8.
4 The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 3–66.
5 Fredrick L. Jones, ed., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 2, Shelley in Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
6 David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophecy (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988), 186.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Richard Cronin, Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts (New York Macmillan Press, 1981), 124.
11 Clark, Shelley’s Prose, 184.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 182.
14 Ibid., 184.
15 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, vol. 2, 645.
16 Ibid., 666, line 48.
17 Ibid., 665, line 30.
18 Ibid., 665, line 31.
19 Ibid., 666, lines 55–6.
20 Ibid., 665, line 36.
21 Ibid., 670, lines 121–5.
22 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, preface, 661.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 676, line 244.
26 Ibid., line 242.
27 Ibid., line 229.
28 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, preface, 662.
29 Ibid., 670, lines 144–5.
30 Ibid., 671, line 148.
31 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, preface, 662.
32 Ibid., 672, lines 172–3.
33 Ibid., 674, line 201.
34 R.D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 38.
35 Everest and Matthews, 667, lines 270–300.
36 Ibid., 678, line 271.
37 Ibid., line 277.
38 Ibid., lines 280–1.
39 Ibid., lines 301–35.
40 Ibid., 678, line 292.
41 Ibid., 679, line 300.
42 Ibid., line 308.
43 Ibid., 680, line 320.
44 Ibid., 680, line 336.
45 Ibid., line 323.
46 Ibid., line 321.
47 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 183.
48 Laing, The Divided Self, line 368.
49 Everest and Matthews, 683, line 371.
50 Ibid., lines 683, 371–2.
51 Ibid., line 373.
52 Clark, Shelley’s Prose, 193.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 194.
55 ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 245.
56 Thomas Ogden, The Primitive Edge of Experience (Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield Publisher, 1989).
57 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 680, line 334.
58 Ibid., 684, line 395.
59 Ibid., lines 400–5.
60 Ibid., line 407.
61 Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 218–221.
62 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 685, line 421.
63 Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 4.
64 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1943), 349.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 360.
67 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 685, line 424.
68 Ibid., 685, line 425.
69 Ibid., 685, line 429.
70 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of the Imagination (Secasusus: The Citadel Press, 1972), 177–93.
71 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 474–93.
72 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 684, lines 405–8.
73 Ibid., 689–94, lines 510–615.
74 Clark, Shelley’s Prose, 294.
75 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 694, line 619.
76 Ibid., 692, lines 565–6.
77 Ibid., 676, line 245.
78 Ibid., 693, line 592.
79 D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (Madison: International Universities Press, 1965), 44.
80 Fredrick L. Jones, ed., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 2, Letter #463, Shelly in Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 9.
81 Ibid., 10.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 672, line 157.
84 Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge Classics, 1971).
85 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 694, line 610.
86 Ibid., 671, line 154.
87 Ibid., 694, line 617.
88 Galen Strawson, Things That Bother Me: Death, Freedom, the Self, Etc. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2018), 60.
89 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, 681, lines 351–2.
90 Ibid., 690, line 526.
91 Everest and Matthews, Poems of Shelley, preface, 663.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kathleen J. Schultheis
Kathleen J. Schultheis is an independent scholar of American and British literature. She earned her doctorate at the University of Southern California, where she studied under Jay Martin. Her dissertation on Gore Vidal was a psychoanalytic study of both Vidal’s literary work and his persona as a major commentator on the American political scene. Recently, she has published articles in Skeptic Magazine and British Journal of Psychotherapy. She is currently working on a larger study of Shelley’s relationship with Emilia Viviani and the presence of Emilia in Epipsychidion.