Anahid Nersessian
'The Political Romance, 1790-1823'
Draft chapter, May 2009
"A nation made free by love": Shelley after the Jacobin novel
In his preface to the radical abolitionist pamphlet known, briefly, as the Plan for a Free
Community at Sierra Leona, the Swedenborgian writer and agitator Charles Wadström
confidently declares that the foundation of all civil society lies in the marriage contract, which
harnesses human sexual passion and directs it towards the greater good. "A more perfect political
Thermometer," he writes, "cannot be given, whereby to judge the happiness or unhappiness of
any Community" than the aggregate happiness of all the married couples who constitute its social
body1. While Keats designed his poem Endymion as a "pleasure thermometer" that would
describe and mark out the "gradations of happiness" erotic love makes available to individuals,
pleasure, for Wadstrom, gauges a happiness that is not personal, but collective: to love is to be
happy, and freedom, which rational political activity works to secure, is the necessary
precondition for contracting love as marriage2. So absolute is the Swedenborgian commitment to
marital bliss that, in this utopian model, "[n]o person ought to be permitted to participate in the
protection and privileges of the State" unless he or she signs the contract in question, which
Wadström also refers to as "the Conjugal Alliance of the Community."3
Those whose knowledge of Emmanuel Swedenborg comes indirectly, through the betterknown work of his enthusiastic reader and occasional critic William Blake, may be surprised by
1
Charles Bernard Wadström, Plan for a Free Community at Sierra Leona, upon the coast of Africa, under the
protection of Great Britain; with an invitation to all persons desirous of partaking the benefits thereof (London: T. &
J. Egerton, 1792), vi. The pamphlet, though not the introduction, is signed by August Nordenskjöld, Colburn Barrell,
and Johann Gottfried Simpson as well as Wadström, and there is some speculation, though no definitive proof, that
the Plan was actually written by Nordenskjöld. Because Wadström's name alone appears on the frontispiece of
Egerton edition of the pamphlet, I have chosen to attribute its authorship to Wadström here.
2
John Keats, letter to John Taylor, 30 January 1818, in Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 57.
3
Wadström, 28.
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this endorsement of the liberatory potential of marriage, which Blake famously dubbed a hearse4.
The "Love of the Sex" that, in Swedenborgian theology, constitutes "the first elementary,
powerful, and universal Union, or Bond of Society" is, for Blake, a force for radicalism only
when it is unconstrained by the proprietary logic of juridical law and its psychic analogue, sexual
jealousy—the sort of love that is free because it can be given not just to anyone, but to a plurality
of partners5. As we have seen, however, the ideological impulse of European radicalism in the
1790s was to consider progressive politics, and progressive models of social life, primarily in the
juridical terms proper to liberal ideology; the political romances which narrativize, and novelize,
that impulse are not only case studies in the formation of Romantic liberalism, but also
expressions of an uneasy complicity between the desire for liberty and the institutional forms that
sponsor its pleasures, both civil and erotic. For all of Wadström's rhetorical mysticism, his "Free
Society" is grounded in the same contractual formalism that underwrites Rousseau's liberal
republic, where the freedom forced upon all citizens evolves into a compulsory love between the
people and the nation, rather than between husbands and wives6.
This chapter considers free love as a limit case for the political romance, contrasting the
commitment to sexual liberty in Percy Bysshe Shelley's long poem The Revolt of Islam with
Thomas Holcroft's ambivalent politicization of the libido in Anna St. Ives, his novel of 1792. Both
texts articulate fantasies of what Herbert Marcuse would call "the juncture of the erotic and
political dimensions[s]" of human experience, and both are engaged in thinking through love, free
4
William Blake, "London," in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor books,
1997), 26.
5
Wadström 29. For Blake's political theology of free love, see Saree Makdisi, William Blake and the Impossible
History of the 1790s (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 2003), especially pp. 92-100; Helen Bruder, William
Blake and the Daughters of Albion (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and Jean Hagstrum, The Romantic Body:
Love and Sexuality in Keats, Wordsworth and Blake (Knoxville: the University of Tennessee Press, 1986).
6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 150.
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and otherwise, as a play between possession and dispossession that both mobilizes and
complicates a liberal conception of proprietary subjecthood7. Anna St. Ives, however, exhibits a
profound anxiety regarding the problem of the "meum and tuum" of private ownership rigorously
absented from Shelley's text, which, in its unswerving optimism around the potential of sexual
love to both be part of and rehearse a metaphysics of collective belonging, abandons the Jacobin
commitment to formalism—of the law and of genre—that remains central to the liberal
imagination of what is possible in political as well as erotic life8. The revolt that gives its name to
Shelley's own romance turns against the liberal posture of self-possession to improvise a political
community organized not by rights of property or marriage, but by an erotics of "mutual
dependence" that makes ecstasy political and—more to the point—the political ecstatic9.
I. More perfect unions
Percy Shelley, whom Jerome McGann calls "the most intellectually probing of all the later
Romantics," is also the most overtly political poet in the Romantic canon, as well as the one most
associated with the theory (and practice) of free love. As McGann puts it, "eroticism," for Shelley,
"is the imagination's last line of defense of human resistance against what he elsewhere calls
'Anarchy'; political despotism and moral righteousness on the one hand, and on the other
selfishness, calculation, and social indifference."10 What is missing from this characterization of
sexual love as a quixotic "last man" is an acknowledgement that, in Shelley's longer narrative
poems as well as in his prose, erotic attachment is also the basis for sociable feeling and political
action, not simply a defense against "indifference" but rather an attack on institutional relations of
7
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), xxi.
Thomas Holcroft, Anna St. Ives, ed. Peter Faulkner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36. All subsequent
quotations from Anna St. Ives are followed by page numbers in parentheses.
9
Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defense of Poetry, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B.
Powers (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), 481.
10
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press,
1985), 118.
8
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force. The Shelleyan political romance goes beyond the narration of matters overtly political in
terms of desire between persons, suggesting, instead, that to experience "love [as] a going out of
our own nature" is to encounter the possibility of a radical consonance with humankind, one that
may be realized in the form of a democratic community.11
The Revolt of Islam, first printed in 1818, is a revision of Shelley's Laon and Cythna; or
the Revolution of the Golden City, which his publisher, Charles Ollier, had withdrawn from
publication a month earlier, fearing prosecution for Shelley's depiction of incest between the two
title characters, as well as his characterization of incest itself as "a crime of convention."12 In the
revised poem, Cythna is no longer Laon's blood relative but an orphan living with his parents;
although this change, along with the deletion of Shelley's remarks about convention, is ostensibly
an attempt to make the poem less subversive, the dissolution of genetic ties between the two
lovers amplifies the importance of elective affiliation within the text itself, which, in its second
incarnation, appears more invested in social solidarities that evolve outside of and are alternative
to traditional, and patriarchal, structures of kinship13. Laon's "kin," in fact, are "cold," and it is
Cythna alone whose heart, like his, wages "patient warfare" (II.xxii) against injustice, and who
experiences the suffering of mankind as her own14:
This misery was but coldly felt, till she
11
A Defense of Poetry, 487. For a contemporary discussion of the mystical quality of The Revolt, see Leigh Hunt in
the Examiner, February 1818, reprinted in Shelley: The Critical Heritage, ed. James E. Barcus (New York and
Oxford, Routledge, 1996), 106.
12
Shelley, "Preface" to Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City, in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed.
Thomas Hutchinson and G.M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 886.
13
In Shelley's play The Cenci (1819), incest has lost its radical potential and become a "poetical circumstance"
designed to stimulate our sympathy for the heroine Beatrice. In this dramatic exploration of the Godwinian principle of
sublime casuistry, Shelley's rational (which is not so say unemotional) assessment of political violence marks a
departure from the commitment to bloodless rebellion in The Revolt of Islam. For a suggestive discussion of Shelley's
treatment of incest as a displaced representation of homosexuality, see Amanda Berry, "Some of my Best Friends are
Romanticists: Shelley and the Queer Project in Romanticism," Romanticism on the Net, Numbers 36-37 (November
2004), http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2004/v/n36-37/011137ar.html.
14
All quotations from The Revolt of Islam are from Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. [Mary]
Shelley (London: Edward Moxon, 1839), and are followed by canto and stanza numbers in parentheses.
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Became my only friend, who had endued
My purpose with a wider sympathy.
Thus Cythna mourned with me the servitude
In which the half of humankind were mewed,
Victims of lust and hate, the slaves of slaves;
She mourned that grace and power were thrown as food
To the hyena Lust, who, among graves,
Over his loathèd meal, laughing in agony, raves. (II.xxxvi)
The coldness of kin is supplemented, indeed replaced, by Cythna's romantic friendship,
which warms Laon into a "wider sympathy" with his human "kind." Her effect on Laon is to push
him toward an identification with the half of human society to which he does not presumptively
belong, with the female "slaves of slaves" whose sexual servitude drains the world of the affective
and aesthetic resources ("grace and power") necessary to the total liberation of society. What
McGann refers to as indifference is reversed by a feeling of intimacy which, despite Laon's
characterization of Cythna as his "only" like-minded friend, activates a series of inclusive and
broadly social emotions that do much more than transform the isolation of the individual into the
sympathetic companionship of the couple. As Shelley makes clear, Laon and Cythna are held
together not simply by physical but by political desire, the expression of a will towards universal
human freedom that focuses natural sympathy into a concrete revolutionary purpose. In this case,
that purpose is to make men and women "free and equal" (II.xxxvii) with one another, and to end
the sexual inequality whose eradication must proceed comprehensive social and political reform.
In Cythna's first vision of "the Revolution of the Golden City," she sees herself "lead[ing]
a happy female train" from the countryside to the town, while Laon organizes its inhabitants to
overthrow the Sultan and liberate his enslaved people. The image is one of sexual division—as
though the revolution itself had separate spheres—that, at the same time, promises the elimination
and transcendence of the inequities imposed on one half of the world's sexed subjects. Men,
Cythna argues, will never "dare/To trample their oppressors" so long as their "mates are beasts
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condemned to bear/Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish" (II.xliii). The sufferings of men and
women, too, are divided (into "toil and anguish" and "scorn"), but the destruction of women's
unique space of oppression inside "their home,/Among their babes" will effect a cohesion of
insurgent "millions" as "multitudinous," and ungendered, "as the desart sand" (II.xlv):
Then, like the forests of some pathless mountain
Which from remotest glens two warring winds
Involve in fire which not the loosened fountain
Of broadest floods might quench, shall all the kinds
Of evil catch from our uniting minds
The spark which must consume them:—Cythna then
Will have cast off the impotence that binds
Her childhood now, and through the paths of men
Will pass, as the charmed bird that haunts the serpent's den. (II.xlvi)
In this passage, the revolutionary multitude seems to shrink into synecdoche, so that the
"two warring winds" of Laon and Cythna and their "uniting minds" take on, even appropriate, the
apocalyptic force of the collective now contained inside the dyadic structure of the couple. At the
same time, however, that couple does not assume a status of exemplarity with respect to the
millions whose uprising it inspires and leads: Laon does not stand for men nor Cythna for "their
[female] mates," nor do they precisely embody the revolution itself. Like Shelley's celebrated
injunction to the West Wind—"Be thou, Spirit fierce, my spirit!/Be thou me, impetuous one"—,
the couple's metaphorization into winds that stoke the fires of revolutionary action suggests a
willing annexation of the self to the abstract, but no less potent, drive of historical necessity, and
what is, for Shelley, its incontrovertible movement towards a universal democracy15. In ceding its
particularity to the revolution's "will omnipotent" (II.xli), itself a metaphysical subversion of the
Rousseauvian general will, the self becomes an agent of transmission for the mental "spark" of
15
Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 221-23; 223. For Stuart Curran, The Revolt of
Islam may be read as the later poem's "long first draft"; see Curran, Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an
Epic Vision (San Marino: the Huntingdon Library, 1975), 27. For a thorough discussion of the "Ode" as a narrative of
historical necessity told in the language of seasonal change, see James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of
Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1999), 532-54.
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radical ideology, which is spread, like a contagion, "through the paths of men."16 The "lamp" of
truth Cythna says Laon has "kindled in [her] heart" (II.xliv) grows into a fire that holds some
irreducible essence of the two lovers themselves, who "will meet again/Within the minds of men,
whose lips shall bless/[Their] memory, and whose hopes its light retain" even after they have
died, and their bodies disintegrated into the earth (II.xlviii).
In this political phenomenology of love, sexual partnership becomes a conduit not only of
belief, but of the ability to convert others to that belief as well as the power to turn a vague
utopian vision into a lasting material reality. Love appears to be founded in a form of solidarity
that is felt intuitively, and that pre-exists the physical relationship that brings it out of its latency
and inaugurates an intellectual, as well as an erotic, "communion" that compels each lover toward
an "intenser zeal" for the liberation of the world (II.xxxii). Shelley's unrepentant optimism
surrounding the couple form is thus complicated by its presumption that, before the consolidation
of two individuals always in the midst of "uniting" themselves into one mind, there already exists
a zone of ontological indistinction between the individual and some notion of collective identity.
The binary logic of sexual subjecthood, the understanding of oneself as male or female, is a
preliminary condition of developing both an erotic desire that resolves itself into heterosexuality
and a political desire that, before it identifies its object as universal human freedom, first allies
itself with other humans whose structural position is determined by their biological sex. Put a bit
differently, heterosexuality, in this poem, intensifies and extends political feeling without
relinquishing its mandate over the bodies it presumes to emancipate from socio-sexual identity.
16
Compare Anna Letitia Barbauld's poem "Corsica: Written in the Year 1769," in which Barbauld's English readers
are enjoined to sympathize with the Corsican struggle for independence through exposure to the contagious fires of
nationalism: "What then should BRITONS feel? should they not catch/The warm contagion of heroic ardour,/And
kindle at a fire so like their own?" See Barbauld, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth
Kraft (Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd., 2001), lines 15-17; 60.
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Without saying that heterosexual eroticism is the only kind of experience that heightens
political feeling and rouses it to action, it is, nonetheless, the generic form that Shelley uses to
compress the abstraction of a revolutionary will into the more coherent idiom of revolutionary
love. What distinguishes The Revolt of Islam from the political romances of the 1790s is that,
rather than presenting the institutional sponsorship of love (or of love marriages) as the
paradigmatic concern of progressive politics, the poem adopts sexual desire and experience as a
hermeneutic device for understanding what it means to orient oneself towards utopia, and to a
political futurity apprehended philosophically rather than pragmatically. Although David Duff's
reading of The Revolt as a reworked romance emphasizes the "technical" aspects of Shelley's
revision, namely his incorporation of "motifs from earlier romances"—wise hermits, evil tyrants,
faithful lovers on epic quests—, this analysis simplifies romance as an idealization of the world
that implicitly proposes its reinvention17. If the political romance the anti-Jacobin writer George
Walker characterized as "hurry[ing] away the mind from common life into dreams of ideal
felicity"18 contained its ideals within a new, but no less restrictive, zone of narrative probability,
Shelley's poem refuses the claims of realism and situates itself squarely within a fantasy of social
transformation that is "romantic" insofar as it suspends any difference between the representation
of political and erotic experience. It is therefore in its "loose sense of being a love story"19 that
The Revolt articulates itself as a revolutionary text, one which comments upon and opposes the
generic and ideological framework of the Jacobin novel, if not its heterosexual symbolics.
17
David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 158. Duff's identification of the idealistic with the critical or interventionist effectively reproduces
Northrop Frye's reading of the romance, particularly in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976) and Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957).
18
George Walker, The Vagabond, ed. W.M. Verhoeven (Ontario: Broadview Press Ltd., 2004), 54.
19
Duff, 156.
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That said, the representational and theoretical centrality of the couple to The Revolt of
Islam situates it in a line of literary-historical continuity with the earlier Jacobin romances, as well
as the national tales of the early nineteenth century. In the "Dedication" to Mary Shelley that
prefaces the poem, her husband stages a proleptic, and predictable, identification between himself
and his wife and the revolutionary pair who originally gave their names to the poem itself. Just as
Laon and Cythna live luminescently on in the minds of men who have encountered their political
philosophies, so too do the Shelleys defy their status as social outcasts and, like stars, light up the
world from outside its earthly limits:
Truth's deathless voice pauses among mankind!
If there must be no response to my cry—
If men must rise and stamp with fury blind
On his pure name who loves them,—thou and I,
Sweet Friend! can look from our tranquility
Like lamps into the world's tempestuous night,—
Two tranquil stars, while clouds are passing by
Which wrap them from the foundering seaman's sight,
That burn from year to year with unextinguished light. ("Dedication," xiv)
Single, the individual is stripped of self-sovereignty, open to the violences of censorship,
slander, and a dangerous disregard. When he becomes, however, part of a dyadic "thou and I,"
one-half of a unit whose components are as indistinguishable from one another as two stars, he
exchanges an immediate and confrontational relation with the world for an irenic contiguity to its
troubles. Shelley's repetition of the word "tranquil" in two different forms suggests a statis
enlivened by the final line of the stanza, in which the constellation of "thou and I," being
"unextinguished" and eternal, maintains a vital radiance that cannot always be seen, but is always
there to be looked up toward. The image is one of benevolent exemplarity, as the couple trades in
the individual's "cry," with its vaguely public quality, for the visual projection of "truth's deathless
voice," whose "pause" is not its silence but rather its synaesthetic displacement inside the light of
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those twinned stars. Truth seems, then, to be togetherness—specifically a cosmic togetherness—
itself, the "one voice" that, as Shelley writes in the previous stanza, comes "forth from many a
spirit," but is best illuminated by an image neither of oneness or multiplicity, but of the doubled
subjectivity of erotic friendship.20 ("Dedication," xiii)
If Percy and Mary are two tranquil stars, Shelley's characterization of Laon and Cythna as
two warring winds ascribes what is, by contrast, an active and agentive effect to the couple as an
exemplary form. The revolutionary pair, like Cythna herself, passes through the paths of men
rather than lingering on the outskirts of society, disrupting environments of oppression while the
Shelleys sit still outside historical time, guiding lights embedded in a other-worldly atmosphere. It
is this more direct and purposive notion of romance that seems, to readers of Anna St. Ives, to bear
a striking rhetorical and conceptual similarity to the one professed by the character of Frank
Henley, the devoted suitor of Holcroft's titular Anna. The novel, epistolary in form and Jacobin in
content, narrates Anna's struggle to integrate her own political principles, which are identical to
Frank's, into her erotic life. Drawn to Frank—the son of her father's landscape gardener—but
convinced that the dissolute aristocrat Coke Clifton needs her love more than the upstanding and
self-sufficient gardener's son, she half-heartedly but (up to a point) successfully resists Frank's
attempts to convince her that they would make a better, more effective couple. The novel thus
takes up the question of love's uses in a way that prefigures Shelley's own investment in desire,
sexuality, and the intimate encounters that intensify and sustain political activity, of which erotic
experience is here, as in The Revolt of Islam, an inseparable and a constituent element.
20
Alain Badiou has proposed an idea of erotic "Twoness" that stands in contradistinction to the couple, which is
always constructed in reference to and in the projected sight of "a third party." Although Shelley's metaphysics of
love in many ways resembles Badiou's, the exemplary status he assigns to the erotic pair requires that they maintain
themselves in an orientation toward some "party" or public, namely the impoverished and disenfranchised members
of society who have yet to be organized into a revolutionary collectivity. See Badiou, “What is Love?”, trans. Justin
Clemens, in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000)
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The passage that follows is taken from the scene of what Anna calls the "eclaircissement"
of her and Frank's mutual feelings, which "swell and overflow" after Frank demands to know why
Anna seems to have replaced him with Clifton in her affections. Anna responds that "it is not
[her] heart that refuses" Frank, but rather her "understanding," "principle," and "determination not
to do that which [her] reason cannot justify": Clifton's moral needs aside, she cannot betray her
father and her family by marrying herself to poverty, and she enjoins Frank not to help her "set
mankind an example which would indeed be a virtuous and good one, were all the conditions
understood[,] but which, under the appearances it would assume, would be criminal in the
extreme." Accordingly, it is to Anna's refusal of exemplarity that Frank responds:
If the union of two people whose pure love, founded on an unerring conviction of mutual
worth, might promise the reality of that heaven of which the world delights to dream, both
burning with the same ardour to attain and to diffuse excellence, would mingle and act
with incessant energy, who, having risen superior to the mistakes of mankind, would
disseminate the same spirit of truth, the same internal peace, the same happiness, the same
virtues which they themselves possess among thousands; who would admire, animate, and
emulate each other; whose wishes, efforts conformable, and principles would all combine
to one great end, the general good; who being desirous only to dispense blessings, could
not fail to enjoy; if a union like this be not strictly to the laws of eternal truth, or if there be
any arguments, any perils, any terrors which ought to annul such a union, I confess that
the arguments, the perils, the terrors and eternal truth itself are equally unknown to me.
(134)
For Frank, coupledom bears a discursive property, insofar as it exists to diffuse and
disseminate not, precisely, political and social views but rather the image of a perfect union that
literally embodies a phantasmatic utopian future. With that image comes a collection of qualities
and affects which circulate with it, so that the couple appears less a site of exclusionary
attachment and more like the nucleus, the radiant core, of an ideal yet wholly accessible lifeworld.
The "promise of reality" two excellent people may make together, not unlike Marx's "revolution
of the nineteenth century," creates "its poetry from the future," but it is a future collectively
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dreamed up and projected by the world, not any single individual or even single pair.21 In the
dense tissue of exemplarity, which always involves a mutual layering or lamination of the general
and the particular, the couple frames the world even as the world gives its vision of futurity over
to the couple, which makes it visible in the poetry, or the "vitally metaphorical" form, of their
own alliance22. The vitality of love's metaphor, in this instance, lies in the uncertain distinction
between metaphoric similarity and metonymic continguity: the continuity or "sameness" Frank
presumes between himself and Anna at once resembles and affirms a version of human equality
on which Frank's sense of "the general good" is predicated while expressing their intimate contact
with a future only partially available to the present.
This ascription of sweeping pedagogical efficacy to the couple extends the claim Holcroft
himself makes elsewhere, that "the labours of the poet, of the historian, of the sage, ought to have
one common end, that of strengthening and improving man." Arguing against the "puerility" of
emotion inspired by "the historical romance," Holcroft observes that "the good writer teaches the
child to become a man, [while] the bad and the indifferent best understand the reverse art of
making a man a child."23 Read in this critical context, the politicization of Anna and Frank's
romance, like Frank's own vision of the vibrant, incessantly energetic eroticism that overflows the
limits of their private relationship, implicitly identifies social melioration with sexual maturity.
However, the marital union of which Frank speaks has, as its object, not biological but moral and
ideological reproduction, itself accompanied by an intensity of feeling previewed in the case
Frank makes for the socio-political utility of Anna choosing him over Clifton. Frank's point about
21
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 2004), 18.
A Defense of Poetry, 482.
23
Holcroft, review of The Castle of St. Vallery, An Ancient Story, published anonymously in the Monthly Review,
second series, No. 10 (March 1793); 297. For a discussion of Holcroft's remarks on the romance as a critique of the
Gothic mode in fiction, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 60.
22
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love's ability to encourage imitation seems proven, furthermore, when Anna, "staggering" beneath
"the beauty, force, and grandeur" of his speech, bursts into tears and admits that she loves him as
she "must not, dare not, ought not"—in a word, "infinitely"—before kissing him with an ardor
that, she insists, is essentially ethical in its intention even as it is amorous in its effects:
The chastity of my thoughts defied misconstruction, and the purity of the will sanctified
the extravagance of the act. A daring enthusiasm seized me. I beheld his passions
struggling to attain the very pinnacle of excellence. I wished to confirm the noble
emulation, to convince him how different the pure love of mind might be from the meaner
love of passion, and I kissed him! I find my affections, my sensibilities, peculiarly liable
to these strong sallies. Perhaps all minds of a certain texture are subject to such rapid and
almost resistless emotions; and whether they ought to be encouraged or counteracted I
have not yet discovered. But the circumstance, unexpected and strange as it was, suffered
no wrong interpretation in the dignified soul of Frank. With all the ardour of affection, but
chastened by every token of delicacy, he clasped me in his arms, returned my kiss, then
sunk down on one knee, and exclaimed—Now let me die!
After a moment's pause, I answered—No, Frank! Live! Live to be a blessing to the
world, and an honour to the human race! (135-6)
Just as Frank has predicted, the vehicular operation of love spreads moral excellence
around like a benignant virus, one which cures desire of the "meaner" affliction of lust. In his
study of the discursive centrality of "enthusiasm" to English Jacobin politics in the 1790s, Jon
Mee has emphasized the symbolic apposition of contagiousness to the idea that emotional
"extravagance" (which, in his account, motivates people to potentially violent political action)
might be passed from person to person. Invoking this same idiom of affective transmission and
communicability, Holcroft situates his characters inside the struggle between "the two strands
within the [English radical] movement," between the temperate rationalism of liberal reformers
and the less respectable tradition of enthusiasm frequently associated with religious
evangelicals24. In the case of Anna St. Ives, the agonist of reason is not religion but sexuality,
which, far from being the obverse of rational thought and action, is rather its medium. The
24
Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially pp. 82-128.
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phenomenon of "collective effervescence" famously described by Émile Durkheim operates here
as a propulsive affect that passes from one person to another in the form of erotic attraction and
longing, producing emulative impulses that heighten, amplify, and extend the passions which
circulate between their two bodies while affirming the moral utility of the exchange.25 Good
intentions, like kisses, are catching, and the positive consequences of swapping sound principles
justify the means that make sharing them an ambivalent, but no less overpowering, pleasure.
It is arguable that Anna's indifference to the sexual content of her gesture, and of the
desire that motivates it, ought to be read ironically, as a joke at the expense of her allegedly chaste
thoughts and pure will; her remarks about "the pure love of mind," meanwhile, might be glossed
as self-serving reinscriptions of "the meaner love of passion" inside an alibi of moral rectitude.
However, if we take both Anna and Frank seriously, a compelling ideal of love emerges, one
which evinces an instructive discontinuity with the tradition of the political romance already
elaborated. With its generic investment in the belief that love itself, as "a blessing to the world,
and an honour to the human race," might best represent, or even be, the aspirational end of
progressive politics, the political romance dramatizes liberalism's own commitment to the
symbolic and juridical displacement of public with private concerns26. By way of contrast, in
Frank's installation of the couple as the organizing sign of the social collective, erotic intimacy
becomes the paradigmatic expression of political agency, understood as the orientation of the self
toward "the general good." William Hazlitt's somewhat uncharitable characterization of Frank and
Anna as "machines put into action" thus misrecognizes the affective pedagogy at work in
Holcroft's presentation of his hero and heroine as "vehicles of certain general
25
See Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press,
1995). I am indebted to Kathleen McDougall for pointing me towards Durkheim's uncannily Shelleyan phrase.
26
In my first chapter, I discuss this displacement as, in Wendy Brown's terms, a cession of "political ground" to
"moral and juridical ground." See Wendy O. Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 27.
Nersessian 15
sentiments…operat[ing] in particular situations."27 It is Anna and Frank's affective "vehicularity"
that distinguishes them from the couples of those romances which, insofar as they align love with
privacy, and with privacy's protection by the law, foreclose the possibility that love might express
an intent that, in Cythna's words, "renovates the world" by making itself mobile, and by opposing
and evading the institutional structures that would mitigate its re-creative force. (II.xli)
II. An enquiry concerning sexual justice
As Nancy Johnson has observed, the precise object of Anna and Frank's shared politics is
an interest in the reorganization of extant forms of property, whose "correct and careful
management" seems, in this novel, to define "the ideal of the new citizen" under political
modernity.28 Not long after his confrontation with Anna, Frank, in another of his "bold and
splendid pictures," presents Anna and Clifton with a verbal image "of the felicity of that state of
society when personal property shall no longer exist, when the whole torrent of mind shall unite
in enquiry after the beautiful and the true,…when individual selfishness shall be unknown, and
when all shall labor for the good of all" (278). This speech, like the one quoted above, brings
together an emotionally charged, somewhat vague utopian rhetoric and the more practical idiom
of reform, which, in its reference to a general good, evokes utilitarian philosophy as much as The
Social Contract. Interestingly, when Hazlitt attacks utilitarianism (which he does often,
particularly in The Spirit of the Age and in his later journalistic writings), he uses strikingly
similar language to that featured in his unflattering analysis of Anna St. Ives, whose characters are
"pure creatures of the understanding, mere abstract essences, which cannot kindle too warm a
27
William Hazlitt, Memoirs of the Late Thomas Holcroft (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1852),
145. The Memoirs, begun by Holcroft himself, were completed after his death in 1809 by Hazlitt, to whom Holcroft's
widow, Louise Mercier (daughter of Louis-Sebastian Mercier, author of the 1771 utopian novel L'An 2440, rêve s'il
en fut jamais) turned over her husband's unfinished manuscript and notes.
28
Nancy E. Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 65.
Nersessian 16
glow of enthusiasm in the breast."29 From Hazlitt's perspective, being asked to feel for Anna and
Frank is like being asked to identify with the general good: one might as easily "hold intimate
converse with the inhabitants of the Moon."30
Commitment to the general good forces a cathexis of private, local affection onto abstract
forms of life which inhabit something like a political public, a civil society that works like a
single mind and that for "the good of all." To Frank, the distended relation of the self to multiple
unknown others is an electric connection that amplifies the intensity of intimate bonds while
subjecting them to a kind of emotional refunctioning, a redefinition of love as a feeling that
necessarily sponsors democratic collectivity. The democratic principles of Frank's utopia are,
however, not what intrigues Coke Clifton about his rival's thrilling picture. Feigning capitulation
to the progressive views he has formerly found reprehensible, Clifton answers Frank's speech by
wondering if, "among so disinterested a people" as live in a society where private property has
been eradicated, servants can be said to belong to their masters ("there will be no servants," says
Frank), if children can be said to belong to their parents ("they will be children of the state," is
Frank's reply), or, if a wife can be said to belong to her husband or, more generally, if "a man
[can] even say of a woman he loves—She is mine?" That last question silences both Frank and
Anna, who remains "at a loss" while Frank takes up Clifton's challenge:
You have started a question of infinite importance, which perhaps I am not fully prepared
to answer. I doubt whether in that better state of society, to which I look forward with such
ardent aspiration, the intercourse of the sexes will be altogether promiscuous and
unrestrained; or whether they will admit of something that may be denominated marriage.
The former may be perhaps the truth: but it is at least certain that in the sense in which we
understand marriage and the affirmation—This is my wife—neither the institution nor the
claim can in such a state, or indeed in justice exist. Of all the regulations that were ever
suggested to the mistaken tyranny of selfishness, none perhaps to this day have surpassed
the despotism of those which undertake to bind not only body to body but soul to soul, to
29
Hazlitt, 146.
Hazlitt, "Jeremy Bentham" from The Spirit of the Age, in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe,
21 vols. (London; Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1930-34), XI:10.
30
Nersessian 17
all futurity, in despite of every possible change which our vices and our virtues might
effect, or however numerous the secret corporal or mental imperfections might prove
which a more intimate acquaintance should bring to light! (279)
Simply put, the "question of infinite importance" is that of free love, and whether its
redesignation of sexuality as something outside of institutional structures constitutes a promotion
of promiscuity or is, less threateningly, a way of dissolving the juridical dependency of sex on
marriage. However, in Frank's as in Clifton's reading, free love is not merely a matter of
regulating or, rather, deregulating bodies but of liberating souls, specifically by making love, like
utopia, a social state to which the logic of property and privatization is wholly inadmissible. The
impossibility of grammatical possession—there is no "mine" in the language of free love—
invoked by Clifton recalls Frank's early repudiation of property's "meum and tuum" (37), the
vernacular of ownership that synonymizes the private "tyranny of selfishness" and the public
"despotism" of marital law. In taking love out of circulation within a proprietary economy of
words and laws, Frank's philosophy clears the way for the radical union of minds that
characterizes social and political activity within a perfect, propertyless society: topicalizing sex as
the subject of politics, Frank identifies erotic intimacy as a form of intervention into the regime of
property itself, which stands not only against human equality, but also against human happiness.
The rivalry between Frank and Clifton is enunciated precisely in these terms, as a
competition between a poor man who has nothing and wants everyone to be free, and an
avaricious aristocrat for whom sex is a proprietary annexation of a female body by a male person.
In his strong misreading of free love, Clifton combines its hypothetical injunction to promiscuity
with a sly perversion of Frank's insistence that, under the aegis of liberty, no man may call any
woman his wife—which means, in Clifton's disingenuous understanding, that every man may call
Nersessian 18
every woman his wife.31 In an effort to persuade Anna of the validity of his "absolute,
indefeasible right [to] the privileges of a husband," Clifton, cornering her alone in her room,
attempts to use her "own principles…founded on avowed and indisputable truths" against her.
Declaring "I claim justice from you!", he moves to "fasten" himself upon her only to be
interrupted, in the proverbial nick of time, by Anna's grandmother (326-7). His sexual sophism
backfires, however, when a horrified Anna relinquishes her original plan with respect to Clifton
and concludes that "the reformation of man or woman by projects of marriage is a mistaken[,] a
pernicious attempt," an "act of vice" and not of "morality" (332).
Given the unequivocal distaste with which Anna responds to Clifton's suit for sexual
justice, a question arises about the distinction between his unwelcome assertion of ostensibly
bogus rights and what seems to be Frank's own insistence on a similar prerogative. After the
confrontation, and the kiss, discussed above, Anna is left haunted, and more or less persuaded, by
Frank's declaration that she "act[s] with mistaken principles," and that "to the end of time he shall
persist in thinking [her] his by right!" (137-8) This set of phrases, which appears in Holcroft's text
several times and is always italicized, functions as a rhetorical concision of the novel's central
concern, namely the attempt to rehabilitate a discourse of rights unmoored from property or its
relations. It also becomes, through Anna's emphatic repetition, the oblique but no less definite
affirmation of reciprocity between Frank's feelings and her own, which become all the more
31
Although it lacks Sade's philosophical extremism, Clifton's reformulation of free love bears some resemblance to
the argument against marriage in the fifth dialogue from Philosophy in the Bedroom, entitled "Yet Another Effort,
Frenchman, If You Would be Republicans," which, during the 1790s, circulated independently from the novel as a
political tract. Here, the critique of private property establishes as unjust the "exclusive possession of a woman" by a
man or, indeed, by her self: as Sade writes, "no man may be excluded from the having of a woman as of the moment
it is clear she definitely belongs to all men," since all forms of exclusion are grounded in forms of slavery and thus
inimical to and inadmissible in a republican society. See the Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom in Justine,
Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove
Press, 1990), 319.
Nersessian 19
insurmountable when amplified by the "awe which [Frank's] surely too hasty, too positive
assertion inspires!" (241).
Nor is "awe" an unreasonable reaction to the theoretical acrobatics on which Frank's
claims depend. According to his formula, "right" speaks, paradoxically, of a dispossession, and
gestures towards a lack that the assertion of right itself overcomes. Anna is not Frank's in life, but
in a law that addresses itself to a set of abstract positions designated affectively, by the bonds of
desire and its ambivalent resistance. Right reaches out across the distance Anna puts between
herself and Frank, establishing a virtual form of possession that evades the logic of proprietary
ownership by refusing any claim to sexual gratification. Clifton's offensively literal interpretation
of free love as ready sex only affirms the validity, and the appeal, of Frank's own insistence that
love is free when it does not ask for compensation and, more importantly, when it draws attention
to its willingness to be unfulfilled. Like a debt that remains as long as it is unpaid, Frank's right to
Anna persists so long as it describes the condition of a love that is physically unrequited but
emotionally returned. While "free love" seems to suggest a kind of giddy plenitude, an unlimited
access to unlimited bodies, what it names here is a will towards intimacy predicated by absence,
toward possession grounded in loss.
For Holcroft's novel to end, as it does, happily—with the marriage of Frank and Anna and
the teary-eyed repentance of Clifton—, the conceptual rigor of free love must buckle to a demand
for generic closure that Frank, for his part, identifies with the moral exemplarity of his and Anna's
union. Since Frank believes that "the marriage of two such people" as himself and Anna "can
benefit society at large," and that she "ought as a strict act of justice to [her]self and to him prefer
him before any other," what he insistently refers to as their "duty" to marry becomes a utilitarian
devoir that benefits them as much as the society their own happiness gratifies (261). The rational
Nersessian 20
regulation of human relationships produces "justice" at once locally and nationally, where what is
just comes to signify not only what is appropriate or useful, but, in the affective idiom of utility,
what is pleasurable. The "act" of marriage which constricts the free play of love restores common
sense to Frank's counter-intuitive formula of right or possession, according to which love
overcomes lack by recuperating it as freedom. The novel concludes by offering a satisfaction that
supplements loss, and contests a political erotics of dispossession by promising the civic pleasures
of marital stability. Identifying Shelley, then, as a critical inheritor of the political romance means
being attentive to his dismantling of the juridical framework inside of which Jacobinism shades
into liberalism; it also means tracking the play of presence and absence, possession and loss, that
Holcroft cedes to the pressures of utility but which Shelley, in his own calculus of the useful,
retains as the organizing movement of love, sex, and political activity.
This alternative perspective on utility—as amplified by love's freedom from both
monogamy and marriage rather than as dependent on its social regulation—has its roots in an
obverse ideological heritage comprised, in part, by a minor literature of erotic and political fiction
quite unlike the Jacobin novels of the 1790s. In one such text, James Lawrence's The Empire of
the Nairs, utopia is a matrilineal society which "augments the happiness and liberty of mankind"
by abolishing marriage and letting women choose their lovers, so that "one half of mankind be [no
longer] the slaves of the other."32 In a letter to Lawrence written in 1812, Shelley announces
himself "a perfect convert" to Lawrence's doctrine of free love, which, in Shelley's reading,
abrogates "prostitution both legal and illegal"—"legal" prostitution being, of course, the
32
James H. Lawrence, The Empire of the Nairs (Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, Inc., 1976), xliii, 30. As
Janet Todd points out in her introduction to this edition, the Nairs were a Hindu community living in Kerala, although
in Lawrence's version they appear, quite obviously, as "transposed and liberated Europeans." Noting the similarities
between Lawrence's text and The Revolt of Islam—the Nairs are constantly at war with "the Mohammedans," who
enslave and exploit women, while Laon and Cythna fight against "Islam," a nation in which women are oppressed—
Todd writes that "[i]t seems reasonable to assume that Shelley's Islam grew out of Lawrence's Mohammedan land and
that his heroine's liberation of the city was suggested by Lawrence's description of the exploits of Samora, the
mythical leader and founder of the Nair empire"; Todd, "Introduction" to The Empire of the Nairs, x-xi.
Nersessian 21
institution of marriage, which puts love "in…prison [and] in chains."33 Like Lawrence, who
wonders rhetorically why anyone would try first "to unfurl on Sierra-Leona the white banner of
liberty" when the women of Europe are still under wedlock's "oppressive yoke," Shelley identifies
his own nation as the site of a despotism at once primitive and, in its formalization of sexual
inequality as law, quite advanced in its technologies of power.34 It is, fittingly, the principle of
formalism, of the law and of identity, to which Shelley's own contribution to the theory of free
love addresses its critique, and whose undoing that critique tries to imagine.
In his notes to Queen Mab, Shelley extends a Godwinian attack on "the despotism of
positive institution" to include the juridical regulation of "the indisciplinable wanderings of
passion," of the sexual love whose "very essence is liberty" and so "most pure, perfect, and
unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve." Dismissing
contemporary Christianity as "hostil[e] to every worldly feeling," he introduces, in its place, a
utilitarian argument that makes "worldly feeling" the measure of socio-political progress, which
necessarily tends towards the expansion and amplification of human happiness:
[I]f happiness be the object of morality, of all human institutions and disunions; if the
worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is
calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to
the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when all its evils are greater than its
benefits.35
Approximately ten years later, A Defense of Poetry recapitulates the argument from utility,
applying it to the production and dissemination of poetry and, more significantly, poetry's
inherently democratic principles. Countering Thomas Love Peacock's assertion, in The Four Ages
of Poetry, that the utilitarian philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
33
Shelley, letter to Sir James Lawrence, August 17, 1812, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. F.L. Jones, 2
vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I, 323. Shelley refers to Lawrence's novel as "Love," presumably translating
the German title, Das Paradies der Liebe, under which it was originally published.
34
Lawrence, xliii; the reference to "Sierra-Leona" alludes to the Plan for a Free Community discussed above.
35
Shelley, "Notes on Queen Mab," in Shelley: Poetical Works, 807.
Nersessian 22
have done and will do more to improve human life than any poets could, Shelley sets out to
"examine," by which he means to revise, "what is…meant by Utility" in Peacock's account:
Pleasure or good in a general sense, is that which the consciousness of a sensitive and
intelligent being seeks, and in which when found it acquiesces. There are two kinds of
pleasure, one durable, universal, and permanent; the other transitory and particular. Utility
may express either the means of producing the former or the latter. In the former sense,
whatever strengthens and purifies the affections, enlarges the imagination, and adds spirit
to sense, is useful. But the meaning in which the author of The Four Ages of Poetry seems
to have employed the word utility is the narrower one of banishing the importunity of the
wants of our animal nature, the surrounding men with security of life, the dispersing the
grosser delusions of superstition, and the conciliating such a degree of mutual forbearance
among men as may consist with the motives of personal advantage.
The "highest sense" of pleasure, Shelley concludes, is the stimulation of extremes of feeling and
intensities of affect, from "sorrow, terror, anguish, [and] despair" to "[t]he delight of love and
friendship, the extacy of admiration of nature, [and] the joy of perception"; it is this "production
and assurance of pleasure in the highest sense [that] is true utility," while those who "produce and
preserve this pleasure are Poets or poetical philosophers."36
In The Revolt of Islam, it is the poesis of sexual love that, by strengthening and purifying
"the affections," enlarges the imagination beyond the limited phenomenology of the individual.
Love becomes a connective tissue along which large quantities of pleasure circulate, drawing two
bodies into a proximity that amplifies the happiness of the discrete "parties" to which they belong
and, in this poem, opening them outward towards a metaphysical, but also a politically
efficacious, solidarity with humankind. Conceived in the chronological middle between Queen
Mab and A Defense of Poetry, The Revolt brings together the former's utilitarian endorsement of
free love with the latter's commitment to the poetic enlargement or expansion of feeling as a
means of "awakening…people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution"; love does
not so much replace poetry so much as become recognizable as one of its various forms,
36
A Defense of Poetry, 500-2.
Nersessian 23
organizing "a power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions" from
one mind to another37. Its usefulness, meanwhile, depends on its being exempt from the juridical
pressures of "positive institution," so that the sexual activity which enables the exchange of
pleasurable sensations as well as political sensibilities may become an expressly oppositional
tactic turned against the very institutions which presume to legitimate, but which actually inhibit,
its meliorative power. Unlike Frank Henley's characterization of his union with Anna as an act of
social as well as sexual justice, one whose exemplarity depends on its institutional recognition,
Shelley's text insists that the productive contagion of desire—for other, better worlds as well as
for other, beloved persons—can only occur between bodies that are free and, consequently,
affectively alive to the prospect of collective or universal liberation.
This much is evident in the poem's introduction of love as a revolutionary force, a flame
that spreads outward from uniting minds to catch both men and women, slaves and the slaves of
slaves, in its regenerative conflagration. Love and its pleasures appear here, in Fredric Jameson's
sense, as straightforwardly allegorical operations, representing something that is "meaningful and
desirable in and of itself, but is also at one and the same time taken as the figure for Utopia in
general, and for the systemic revolutionary transformation of society as a whole."38 As The Revolt
unfolds, however, it becomes increasingly invested in theorizing loss as part of the inflammatory
intensity that seems, initially, to depend on the physical as well as the intellectual proximity of its
radical couple. What I have been calling the erotics of dispossession that motivates Anna St. Ives
until, that is, its suturing capitulation to generic and juridical norms, is thereby retained in
37
ibid, 508. A discussion of the theoretical similarity between Shelley's philosophy of love and the utopian writings
of Charles Fourier—in particular his notion of the "attraction passionnée" which leads, among other things, to the
formation of libidinal collectivities organized by love and friendship—will appear in a longer version of this chapter.
See Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
38
Fredric Jameson, "Pleasure: A Political Issue," in Formations of Pleasure, ed. Tony Bennett et al (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul,1983), 13.
Nersessian 24
Shelley's critical revision of the romance narrative. Here, absence becomes the condition of love's
most extreme apprehension of ontological union, which exists as surely between lovers as within
a community oriented towards "a beneficial change in opinion or institution."
After Cythna has been kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery, Laon is imprisoned for his
subversive "songs," tortured and driven into temporary insanity. Rescued by a hermit, who uses
the principles of Laon's own radical philosophy to argue for his release from prison, Laon, coming
to his senses after no less than seven years, learns that he is the inspiration for a "multitude [that
has been] gathering wide," organizing itself into a revolutionary militia that only waits for his
leadership. Gazing into a mirror, the newly-lucid Laon discovers that, although his "thin hair/[is]
prematurely grey," and his face pale and lined "[w]ith channels, such as suffering leaves
behind/Not age," some "gnawing fire" remains visible beneath his shattered image:
And though their lustre now was spent and faded,
Yet in my hollow looks and withered mien
The likeness of a shape for which was braided
The brightest woof of genius still was seen—
One who, methought, had gone from the world's scene,
And left it vacant—'twas her lover's face—
It might resemble her—it once had been
The mirror of her thoughts, and still the grace
Which her mind's shadow cast left there a lingering trace. (IV.xxx)
Having assumed that Cythna is dead, Laon nonetheless restores her presence as a
supplement to the "vacancy" of his own face, whose very hollowness is recuperated as a structural
quality that lets Cythna's image echo through or within his. At first, the "one" who seems to have
gone appears to refer to Cythna herself, the lover whose face flickers inside Laon's, but this
reading is overturned by the suggestion that this face "might resemble her"; now the face seems to
be Laon's, but Laon as he was at the beginning of Shelley's narrative, before being withered by
suffering if not by time. That said, if the face Laon sees in the mirror bears the likeness of his
Nersessian 25
own, more youthful image, that image is still, as it once was, "the mirror" and "the shadow" of
Cythna's own thoughts, a replica of her mind that bears some of the substance or "trace" of the
original it copies. The lovers' fundamental symmetry, or similitude, is an ontological relation
registered on the face as an immanent resemblance, which comes to signify a condition of shared
absence or privation in spite of which they remain present to, and in, one another. The "likeness
of a shape" Laon sees in the Hermit's mirror composes two people into one indistinct identity,
whose oscillation between past and present, between what is lost or lacking and what remains
tangible expresses a poetics of being that, like Shelley's Defense, insists on a powerful synonymy
between poetry and love. Love, like poetry, is "the reflected image of [an original] impression,"39
a reshaping of the self through an internalization of some evasive otherness, as well as of the
impossibility of its absolute or comprehensive possession.
As in Jean-Luc Nancy's characterization of love as an experience of "the other's alterity,"
or of "alterity in the other together with the alteration in [the self]," Laon's recognition and
recovery of the absent Cythna in the contours of his own face, from which he is also estranged,
dramatizes an encounter with otherness as the excess or surplus of the finite subject or, more
specifically, the subject's identity.40 In its ecstatic encounter with "joy"—which, in Nancy's
account of love as an experience of being "shattered," is not necessarily enjoyable—, the subject
recovers its own limits as the very ground on which those limits may be crossed, becoming
permeable to the otherness of the beloved and, consequently, to the possibility of exteriorizing the
self and offering it up to whatever seems to lie outside of it:
It is not that identity, in joying, simply loses itself. It is there at its peak. There is in fact
too much identity—and joying opens the enigma of that which, in the syncope of the
subject, in the crossing of the other, affirms an absolute self….[T]o joy is an extremity of
39
A Defense of Poetry, 480.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona
Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 33-4.
40
Nersessian 26
presence, self exposed, presence of self joying outside itself, in a presence that no present
absorbs and that not does (re)present, but offers itself endlessly.41
Nancy's notion of the syncope recalls Prometheus's apostrophe to Asia in Prometheus
Unbound, in which the imprisoned titan (also a revolutionary) says to the lover from whom he has
been separated: "Asia! who when my being overflowed/Wert like a golden chalice to bright
wine/Which else had sank into the thirsty dust."42 As the surplus of the self flows into the other,
the other takes up the syncope, or dropped syllable, of its being, so that what cannot be contained
by the self is captured, rather than lost, inside the vessel of the other as, again, a kind of echo, an
extra beat or accent. The syncope, moreover, belongs to no one and yet "offers itself endlessly"
not simply to one other, but to a hypothetical community of multiple others; it speaks of absence
even as it points towards presence, a dispossessed sign (and sound) of the impossibility of
possession, not only of the other but of the self, of, in Nancy's words, "my identity, my sexual
property, that objectification by which I am a masculine or feminine subject."43 Love defies
property because it is essentially expropriative, cutting away that part of "me" which is exposed
when desire amplifies my self out of myself, into an ex-static relation with those objective
designations that give me an identity, a sex, a subjectivity that is stable, continuous, and closed,
deaf to the call of the specifically political community that "takes place always through others and
for others."44
In The Revolt of Islam, the syncope is literalized when Cythna, having escaped from
slavery and become the leader of a feminist uprising, changes her name to Laone—the name, as
Shelley writes, "her love had chosen,/For she was nameless." (V.xix) This new avatar nominates
41
ibid, 107.
Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, I.809-11, 189.
43
The Inoperative Community, 101.
44
ibid., 15.
42
Nersessian 27
her as Laon's own surplus or overflow, a surplus which is explicitly gendered by the sign of the
"e" affixed to the end of the masculine "Laon." As the index of Cythna's femininity and of her
sexual difference from Laon, the "e" is also the sign of his presence in excess in her, a presence
sounded by the extra syllable of the added letter and made legible by its appearance on the page.
Meanwhile, just as the "e" in "Laone" marks Laon as what has been dropped, what is missing,
from Cythna, Laon, by corollary, bears her presence with him negatively, as his name seems now
to lack the "e" that, even in its absence, silently notes the place where her name—which is to say,
in Nancy's terms, her identity—crosses invisibly into his. Laone's "e" is the sonic and scriptural
version of the "likeness" Laon sees when he looks in the mirror, a positive image of the other's
absence that is simultaneously the sign of "the crossing of the other" into the self. That crossing
is, finally, an arrogation by love of all the "objective designations" of sexual identity, and their
reconstruction as indices of a similitude that, for Nancy, never quite collapses the distinction
between self and other, but retains otherness itself as the condition of a community that must
evade objectification if it is to retain its radical potentiality, preserving a political disposition that
does not calcify into the "communion" of mindless, monotonous, and compulsory unity.
For Shelley, by contrast, love's crossing, which, "blend[s] two restless frames in one
reposing soul" rehearses the coalescence of a political community, or what Laon describes as "a
nation/Made free by love, a mighty brotherhood/Linked by a jealous interchange of good"
(VI.xxxvi; V.xiv). The immanent communion about which Nancy, for whom the idea suggests
nothing less than the "communion of everyone" that describes fascism's most catastrophic
objectives, maintains a defensive horror is extant yet in Shelley's consistently eschatological
perspective on democracy as an expression of humankind's "one harmonious soul."45 As Cythna
45
Prometheus Unbound, IV.400; 205.
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(or Laone) says of "divine Equality," its operation may be essentially reductive, a radical
dissolution of difference that borrows its authority as much from metaphysical presumptions
about the essential and organic unity of life as from a rational commitment to political democracy:
Eldest of things, divine Equality!
Wisdom and Love are but the slaves of thee,
The angels of thy sway, who pour around thee
Treasures from all the cells of human thought
And from the Stars and from the Ocean brought,
And the last living heart whose beatings bound thee.
The powerful and the wise had sought
Thy coming; thou, in light descending
O'er the wide land which is thine own,
Like the spring whose breath is blending
All blasts of fragrance into one,
Comest upon the paths of men! (V.3)
The presumptive materialism that harnesses sex as a form of political askesis, opening and
acclimating the body to an existence for others is compromised, if not wholly abandoned, by the
ultimate cession of political will to a messianic "Equality." If equality dwells in the "living
heart[s]" of human beings, its own liberation from material and historical constraints and its
seizure of incontrovertible power seems to depend on the eradication of human life itself, or at
least its sublimation into some altered nouminal state: "the last living heart whose beatings
bound" its power must be no more if that power is now free, while the assertion that the world or
"land" over which Equality sweeps is its "own" suggests that whoever that heart belonged to was
indeed the last of his or her kind, of whom only "paths," not persons, remain. Nor can that
apocalyptic reading be mitigated, exactly, by the image of "all [Earth's] children" coming forth to
"feed upon [Equality's] smiles/and clasp [its] sacred feet" that concludes the stanza, which now
seems to describe a Day of Judgment where the figure of Equality has simply replaced the figure
of Christ. Read in this context, Cythna's subsequent description of the post-revolutionary world as
a paradisical environment where "the dwellers of the earth and air" mingle happily with
Nersessian 29
humankind, "[w]hile Truth with Joy enthroned o'er his lost empire reigns," interrupts the ongoing
pressures of the political by displacing them onto a broadly theological plane, where the collective
human agency exemplified by Laon and Cythna and passed on to their followers is suddenly
concentrated in a single notional being (V.5; V.6)
Even this utopian fantasy, however, preserves an investment in the availability of "lawless
love" to those who, despite being freed from their "common bondage," are nonetheless bound to
sorrow as the essential affective circumstance of human life (V.4). Humankind's collective hearts
may be "blended" into one, and yet, Shelley implies, some sense of loss remains suspended in the
pleasures of sexual love and its reparative practices. Suffering, if not politics, remains in the
world after its transformation into a democratic paradise, and sex stays on as a form of utility
reduced to its most immediate and elementary effect—namely the reduction of pain and the
production of pleasure. In this inclusion of sorrow even (as the saying goes) in Arcadia, Shelley
retains love as the acknowledgement of a loss it cannot reclaim, but which subtends even the
freest of communities, as the condition of an orientation towards otherness detached from
political exigency if not from ethical or erotic imperatives.
The common critical assumption that The Revolt of Islam is about a failed revolution—
failed either because its representation is wholly ideal or because its conclusions are themselves
anti-revolutionary—may be considered, then, as disregarding the literary and political context in
which Shelley's narrative is situated.46 As a critique of positive institution, whose pressures and
purview would continue to extend themselves throughout the nineteenth century, The Revolt
46
I have particularly in mind three canonical texts from the tradition of scholarship on Shelley's politics: Kenneth
Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), P.M.S. Dawson, The
Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); and Richard Cronin, Shelley's
Poetic Thoughts (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981). Samuel L. Gladden's Shelley's Textual Seductions:
Plotting Utopia in the Erotic and Political Works (London: Routledge, 2002) makes important interventions into the
debate over whether The Revolt of Islam describes a failed revolution, but, in its analysis of Shelley's topographical
erotics, retains Cronin's sense of the poem as an exclusively mental description of revolutionary activity, rather than a
serious proposal about the radical potential of love, sexuality, and desire.
Nersessian 30
spirits its revolution, just as it spirits its leaders, away from the site of its defeat not by the Sultan's
armies, but by the immanent order of genre and its restrictive grip on possibility. Like Laon and
Cythna, who may or may not burn to death at the stake, but who live on in strange, ethereal forms
to recount their radical history, the nation made free by love absents itself from a narrative logic
that would require its own end, its immobilization inside a probable progression of events that
necessarily stops short of imagining futurity. The poem finally refuses to represent the utopia of
which, as Holcroft says, the world delights to dream, except in Cythna's vision of a postrevolutionary community that has transcended the political without repressing its absent center;
lack lingers inside even the most democratic of social orders so that love itself can remain
"lawless," unsettling the assumptions of positive and proprietary liberty by showing how
emphatically subjects may be shattered, and selves interrupted by others. Absence, lack, longing,
and, in a word, desire, hold fast to humans so that, as Shelley sees it, they may seek each other
out, in the space just outside themselves where everyone, in a perfect world, stands together.