“Copying Shelley's Letters”: Mary Shelley and the Uncanny Erotics of Greek

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Notes

¹Peacock to Hogg, 26th September 1817, in Joukovsky (2001), 116. For more on the Greek activity in Marlow in 1817, see Wallace (1997), 89–104.

²In the Women of Trachis, Deineira posseses a magic potion, made from the blood of the dying centaur Nessus. This potion, Nessus had promised her, would reawaken her husband Heracles's love if he were ever unfaithful to her. Since it seems as if Heracles has a new mistress, Deineira covers a shirt with the potion and sends it to him to win him back to her. But unbeknown to her, the potion is actually a poison, derived from the poisoned dart which Heracles had shot at Nessus and which had permeated his blood-stream. Heracles dies an agonizing death, destroyed by his wife and the vengeful centaur he had killed years before.

³See for example, Sterrenburg (1978); Mellor (1988), 70–88; Allen (2008), 16.

⁴See in particular, Alan Richardson (1993); Purinton (1999).

⁵Betty T. Bennett also described the relationship as intellectually collaborative (61).

⁶There is much work to be done on classical reception as uncanny repetition or déjà vu. The doubling which is so much a feature of the uncanny (“a kind of double talk, double reading, double writing” [Royle 16]) is even more accentuated in the case of Mary Shelley, because her reading of the Greeks (“it seems new and recent but is ancient” [Royle 9]) was also combined with her reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley (“the most and the least subjective experience” [Royle 16]). Mary's Greek was therefore a double doubling. For more on the theoretical implications of “copying” as transcription, see Price and Thurschwell (2005), 6.

⁷ Medwin (1913), 253. For more on Shelley's Latin education and study, see Betty T. Bennett (1998), 14, and Jean de Palacio, 564–571.

⁸Alan Richardson states that Mary Shelley “began studying Greek” in 1820 (124). However, it is clear, from the evidence in her journal and correspondence with Percy Bysshe, that her Greek studies began long before this, in 1814.

⁹It seems highly unlikely that Mary struggled through the few fragments of Anacreon that survive, with all the technical textual issues that they raise. It is more likely that she read the more polished and coherent Anacreontica, which had been edited by Henry Stephen in 1554 and were considered, wrongly, to have been written by Anacreon for the next three hundred years: see, for example, Thomas Moore (1800), 18–22. In 1771, The “Anacreon Society” was formed in London, at which members drank and wrote poems in the Anacreontic manner, thereby imitating what was perceived to have been Anacreon's bohemian lifestyle.

¹⁰Mary Shelley's letter, bidding Percy Bysshe “goodnight” and presumably sent on 6th or 7th November, appears to be lost. There was a similar “goodnight to my love” sent on 2nd November—“may you sleep as well as though it were in my arms”—so one can imagine what might have prompted Percy Bysshe's response.

¹¹The most well-known example of P.B. Shelley's tendency to invert expected metaphors, making the vehicle more abstract than the tenor, is the opening to the “Ode to the West Wind,” in which the autumn leaves are compared to the image of the dead souls crossing over to the underworld.

¹²Prins, 436. Prins usefully sets the Brownings's discussion of Aeschylus, classical translation and their burgeoning love within the context of Derrida's “Roundtable on Translation,” with its image of the marriage contract as a form of translation. The Shelleys's relationship was, of course, precisely an elopement without legal contract, in which the heart's affections were deemed a superior alternative to any form of words or institutional structure.

¹³“Σμϵρδναισι γαμφηλαισι σνριζων φονον” (“hissing murder with horrid jaws” [Prometheus Bound, line 355]). Modern editors of the play agree that the word should actually be φoβov here (“terror”), although the alternative reading φovov (“murder”), which Shelley quotes, ‘could be right’: Griffith: |5|. It is not clear whether Mary would have recognized the allusion, as there is no evidence that she had read Prometheus Bound at this stage, nor whether she would have been able to translate it (Shelley did not provide a translation in the letter).

¹⁴Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.82–86.

¹⁵For more on how the “single voice of Aeschylus is diffused through many voices from the classical Greek inheritance,” thus “revolutionising [Shelley's] idea of translation,” see Wallace (1995).

¹⁶Mary Shelley followed the accepted contemporary custom of using Roman names rather than Greek, just as Percy Bysshe Shelley referred to Jupiter rather than Zeus in Prometheus Unbound. But the setting was still considered to be that of traditional Greek pastoral, Sicily being a Greek colony.

¹⁷The descent to the “Tartarian gulph” recalls the earlier melodramatic descent of Demogorgon and Jupiter into the abyss in Prometheus Unbound, III.i.52–83. See also Vathek (1983): 25–27.

¹⁸Ino was Bacchus's aunt. Driven mad by Juno, she was later transformed into the sea goddess Leucothoe by Neptune (Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.416–562). Eunoe was the name of the mythical river with the power to “bring remembrance back of every good deed done” in Dante's Eden (Purgatory 28.134–135).

¹⁹While Mary Shelley recorded in her journal that she read Virgil's Aeneid and Georgics, there is no specific record of her reading Virgil's Eclogues. However Virgil is included in her joint reading list with Percy Bysshe of 1815, and mentioned again by Mary as having been read by her on 4 July 1818, so one can speculate that this could have been the Eclogues. Virgil modeled Eclogue III on Theocritus's fourth and fifth Idylls. Percy Bysshe read Theocritus regularly during their marriage, most significantly in August 1818 at a time when he was composing Rosalind and Helen: A Modern Eclogue, which Mary transcribed. There is, however, no specific record of Mary reading Theocritus in the original.

²⁰Alan Richardson reads Percy Bysshe Shelley's lyric as “idealizing Alphaeus's violation of Arethusa as amorous pursuit resolved in erotic union,” bringing out the “usually repressed connotation of ‘licentious’ in the term ‘poetic licence’ ”(126). But this does not seem to do justice to the lyrics which move from singularity to fluid relationality and animation, reminiscent of The Cloud, even as the rivers converge in the new spring in Sicily: “Like friends once parted,/Grown single-hearted/They ply their watery tasks.”

²¹Julie Carlson interestingly calls into question the female communal paradise of storytelling in the drama: see Carlson (1999), 356–358.

²² Midas was not published until 1922, despite Mary Shelley's attempts to interest editors in the manuscript; Proserpine was published in the literary annual, Winter's Wreath, in 1832.

²³Percy Bysshe read Aristophanes for a concerted period in June and July 1818. There is no evidence in her journal or letters that Mary Shelley read him. However, Aristophanes's play, The Frogs, was a strong influence on Percy Bysshe's Swellfoot the Tyrant, as Mary's note on the poem makes clear: “Shelley read to us his Ode to Liberty; and was riotously accompanied by the grunting of a quantity of pigs brought for sale to the fair. He compared it to the ‘chorus of frogs’ in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus—and Swellfoot was begun” (Shelley: Poetical Works 410). Mary transcribed the poem.

²⁴While there is no record of Mary Shelley reading Richard II specifically, she did immerse herself in Shakespeare in the year immediately prior to composing Proserpine and Midas. See Pascoe (2006), 183.

²⁵Percy Bysshe Shelley translated the Ugolino episode from the Inferno with Thomas Medwin, whom Mary said understood Dante “very imperfectly” (LMWS 1: 178).

²⁶Percy Bysshe had an idealized, ethereal image of the god, despite his reference here to Euripides's violent play, The Bacchae. He considered the true Bacchus to be “as one who walks through the world untouched by its corruptions, […] who unconsciously yet with delight confers pleasure and peace,” and he disliked the statue of Bacchus by the Catholic Michelangelo because its “drunken, brutal and narrow-minded” appearance did not seem to be faithful to “the spirit and meaning of Bacchus” (“Notes on Sculptures in Rome and Florence.” Shelley's Prose 348, 352).

²⁷Initially Percy Bysshe and Mary both wrote in the journal, but after a few months, the notes were made by Mary alone. However, it seems as if Percy continued to have access to the journal, necessitating Mary's occasional use of coded symbols.

²⁸Mary's self-comparison to moonshine lends an additional poignancy to the song of the Moon in Prometheus Unbound IV, driven mad by Dionysus and by her love for the Earth.

²⁹Thomas Jefferson Hogg had encouraged her in her reading of Homer after Shelley's death; see his letters to her of 30 October 1823 and 26 September 1824: Bodl. MS. Abinger Dep. b.211 and Abinger reel 10. Cited in JMS 2: 471.

³⁰Shelley had written to Peacock: “This scene was what the Greeks beheld. (Pompeii you know was a Greek city.) They lived in harmony with nature, and the interstices of their incomparable columns, were portals as it were to admit the spirit of beauty which animates this glorious universe to visit those whom it inspired. If such is Pompeii, what was Athens?” (LPBS 2: 73).

³¹The narrator confesses that the “selected and matchless companion of my toils” died during the course of their task of deciphering the leaves. This means that “their dearest reward is also lost to me,” that, in other words, some of their significance is lost and must presumably be compensated for by her imaginative recreation. Collaborative decipherment or narrative hypothetically produced plenitude; solitary labor results in the futile but continually creative recovery of loss.

³²Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, 69–70.

³³See, for example, Sterrenburg (1978), Lokke (2003), and Kilgour (2005).

³⁴For “reversibility” in The Last Man, see Allen (2008), 95–110.