Romantic Circles Reviews

Reviewed by
Dana Van Kooy
University of Colorado at Boulder

Just as Mont Blanc has been central to the Shelleyan canon, so too the sublime as an aesthetic discourse has been pivotal to our understanding of Percy Shelley as a poet, a philosopher, and a radical. Cian Duffy’s Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime challenges the “critical orthodoxy which assumes not only that there is such a thing as a generic ‘romantic sublime’, but also that this ‘sublime’ rehearses the transcendentalist paradigms of [Kant's] Critique of Judgment” (5). Eschewing Burke and Kant, Duffy reorients the Shelleyan sublime through two other texts: C.F. Volney’s Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les Révolutions des Empires (translated into English in the early 1790s) and Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1766-88). Both texts, according to Duffy, embody the eighteenth-century idea of “ruin-sentiment” (38-9), a term which links imperial collapse to moral decadence and, as a discourse of political and social reform, offers to resolve the terrifying prospect of ruin through an appeal to moral restraint. Shelley, Duffy argues, takes this causal formulation a step further; the sublime provides the means of representing the inevitable imperial failure as a natural cultural process that mirrors society’s moral and political corruption. Shelley’s sublime landscapes—significantly, inhabited by volcanoes, avalanches, and other events marking geological catastrophe—signify the natural necessity of revolution. This essentially inverts the traditional theistic discourse of the natural sublime; instead of pointing to God as the organizing principle of life, Shelley’s sublime exposes “the artificiality, the un-naturalness of contemporary social structures” (9). Duffy’s study places a new emphasis on the catastrophic imagery of the natural sublime while it also redefines the Shelleyan sublime as an “aesthetic ideology” in order to be attentive to the figurative power of the natural sublime to change the observer’s conception of what is “natural” or what is “right.”

Organized chronologically, the first two chapters focus on the philosophical and literary influences that shaped Shelley’s early figurations of the natural sublime in the Esdaile poems, Queen Mab, The Assassins, and Alastor. Tracing Shelley’s early “radical, rationalist distrust of the imagination,” and his reactions to the theistic structure of the sublime in works like Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), Duffy maps Shelley’s shifting skepticism regarding the sublime and how it might be used in poetry as a discourse of political reform. In the first chapter, Duffy’s main concern is to identify the conflict between Shelley’s “gradualist politics and the revolutionism of his engagement with the discourse on the sublime” (48). He also shows how Shelley uses the sublime in Queen Mab to argue for Necessity and its ability as a natural process to bring about “a political and environmental utopia” (34). With chapter two, Duffy follows Shelley’s growing concern with the politics of the imagination and its relationship to the increasingly politicized notions of the natural sublime. Duffy’s reading of The Assassins is suggestive. Here, Duffy uses Gibbon and Delisle De Sales’ 1799 novel, Le Vieux de la Montagne to explore Shelley’s interest in incorporating the sublime to describe social bodies and their political activities. This transforms the sublime from a merely descriptive language into a means of visualizing political change. As with his work on Laon and Cythna in chapter four, here is a point where Duffy breaks new ground with regard to the texts and the contexts of the Shelleyan sublime. As with his reading of Alastor, he stresses Shelley’s disillusionment with Rousseau and with the post-Excursion Wordsworth, especially their politics of what Keats referred to as “egotistical sublime.”

Chapter three follows the traditional pairing of Mont Blanc with the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. This familiar ground—inhabited mostly by Byron, Coleridge, Rousseau, and Wordsworth—reveals Shelley’s growing awareness of the ideological power wielded by the sublime in travelogues, poetry, and in the works on natural history. Duffy also provides us with a view of how this super-saturated landscape was disfigured by the consumerism of tourists and by the imperial demands for natural resources such as rock (taken from ancient ruins and from the local landscape) to build roads. Responding to these unwieldy forces, Shelley, Duffy argues, pursues the need to develop a praxis for the “cultivated imagination.” A term introduced in chapter two, the cultivated imagination amounts to a means of using the sublime to reform an individual’s ideas about social and political questions. This is a central premise in Duffy’s narrative regarding Shelley’s evolving deployment of the sublime. Duffy invokes Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in order to define intellectual beauty not as a platonic idea but rather as “a product, and a defining characteristic” of the cultivated imagination (99). This pragmatic view of intellectual beauty takes it out of the idealistic realm too often associated with Shelley and makes clear the transformative power of the Shelleyan sublime as an experience and as a discourse.
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Reviewed by
Judith Barbour
University of Sydney

There is no denying the dramatic interest and thematic pertinence to the fictional writings of William Godwin and Mary Shelley of the metaphor of the “mental anatomy” (Introduction 15–17 and passim), which gives the title to William D. Brewer’s critical monograph, and contours its extended comparison of this father-and-daughter pair of authors. An anatomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (in the old form of the word “an atomie”) is a violent delapidation of an organic unity. In the primitive conditions of hospitals and morgues contemporary with the Godwin-Shelley writers, only cadavers could be anatomized and made intelligible, dissected and made visible, the veins, nerves, and musculature traced, flayed, and probed. The metonym of the eye—its “terrible aspect”—is hegemonic in Enlightenment cultural politics. In one pathetic instance, the dead foetus, or as it was officially called the abortion, could by now be anatomized in situ in the dead gravid uterus, as the “naturalistic” optics and perspective machines of graphic artists gave the burgeoning male profession of scientific obstetrics its first breakthrough. Incidentally, “abortion” was one of the key words inserted by Percy Bysshe Shelley into the manuscript-in-the making of his pregnant lover’s and soon-to-be-wife’s Frankenstein (1818).

The leading terms of Brewer’s discussion—psychological exploration, analysis of the workings of the mind, delineation of ruling passions—are announced at the start in Godwin’s pithy declaration: “The thing in which my imagination revelled the most freely, was the analysis of the private and internal operations of the mind, employing my metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions of motive” (qtd. in Brewer 15). This, Brewer writes, is Godwin’s “account of the composition of Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794)”; and he adduces the examples of dramatist Joanna Baillie and novelist Mary Hays, “a disciple of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,” whose writings in the 1790s devled into human passion and prejudice, the “power of the human mind,” and the “springs which set it in motion” (Brewer 15, quoting Hays in 1796).

Enter a caveat, pointing out that Godwin wrote his account of the imaginative jouissance that had shaped Caleb Williams, and distinguished between his own creative purposes in fiction and the then prevailing canons of novelistic realism, not in 1794, but in 1832. In hindsight, Godwin can perceive the connections between minute psychological operations, and literary authority and moral significance. The 1794 debut of Caleb Williams into the London of the Treason Trials, gripped by wartime paranoia and state repression, carries forward a history of “the private and internal operations of the mind” into the sphere of public morality and national governance. In this re-weighting of the gravitas of private conscience and self-knowledge, Godwin rejoins at the close of his career a movement, sponsored at first by women writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft, to challenge the rigidity of their exclusion from the public intellectual sphere, and moreover to redefine the formative importance of such so-called private matters as sexuality, labor, childhood education, and parenting.

A manuscript fragment was drafted by Mary Shelley in late 1836 when she was starting to compose a memoir of her late father. While she concedes that “pot-boiler” hack writing was often forced on Godwin by the need for a livelihood, Mary Shelley claims that even his earliest writings show gleams of his later mastery of psychological fiction, what Mark Philp, in his editorial introduction to the Collected Novels and Memoirs of William Godwin, terms Godwin’s unfolding of “an alternative history, the history of mentalities” (1.42). Of his apprentice sermons from the dissenter pulpits at Ware and Stowmarket, hastily got up for publication in 1783, she writes:

The Sermons are entitled Sketches of History . . . . They are peculiar from displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart, which is so principal a feature in all Mr Godwins writings – & also by that lofty conception of the excellence of human nature which led him to consider its absolute perfection no dream of the imagination . . . he had a firm faith in the powers inherent in Man to raise himself to heroism & surpassing excellence.[1]

Demonstrably, Mary Shelley in 1836 is echoing Godwin’s self-analysis in 1832, his “metaphysical dissecting knife” “displaying that tendency to dive into & anatomize the human heart.” Brewer quite rightly emphasizes the rhetoric of anatomy as a master light of Godwin’s seeing and of Mary Shelley’s reading of him. But he passes over Mary Shelley’s idealizing of Godwin’s novels, her attribution to him of a “firm faith,” irrespective of his probing analytic powers. In her youth, Mary Shelley read Godwin’s work in the afterlight of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and Godwin in old age read his own work in the reflected light of his daughter’s mollifying vision. A spate of writing from both Godwin and Mary, between 1816 and 1818, coincided with traumatic life events: Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay’s suicide; Mary’s marriage to the poet P. B. Shelley after his first wife’s violent death; and the death of the Irish barrister and defender of civil liberties, John Philpot Curran, who is the dedicatee of Godwin’s novel Mandeville (1817), written in the heat of Godwin’s reading of the pre-publication manuscript of Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus, while Frankenstein itself is dedicated to “the Author of Caleb Williams.” From 1831–1832, another flow of writing and rewriting saw Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Godwin’s Caleb Williams, St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood, or The New Man of Feeling (1805), revised and republished with a panoply of authorial prefaces in the Standard English Novels series.
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