Broken mirrors and multiplied reflections in Lord Byron and Mary Shelley.

AT A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN MARY SHELLEY'S SECOND NOVEL, VALPERGA; OR the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), Shelley describes the pain experienced by the central female character, Euthanasia dei Adimari, following the dissolution of her relationship with the tide character of Castruccio. The narrator explains, "She determined to think no more of Castruccio; but every day, every moment of the day, was as a broken mirror, a multiplied reflection of his form alone." (1) In her note to this passage, Tilottama Rajan suggests that this image of the multiplied reflection of a shattered mirror may echo a passage from Percy Shelley's De fence of Poetry, in which he describes drama "'so long as it continues to express poetry,' as a 'prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature ... and multiplies all that it reflects'" (459n). Owing to the relative contemporaneity of the composition of the passages, this connection is logical. Mary Shelley completed composition of her novel, after a period of over four years, by December of 1821, while Percy had completed his essay in March of that same year. Nevertheless, the brightness of Percy Shelley's imagery and the celebratory attitude he expresses in this passage and in the larger essay as a whole offer a stark contrast to the gloomy discussion found in Mary Shelley's treatment of the similar image in her novel.

A clearer precursor to Mary Shelley's use of the image of the broken mirror is in the writings of Lord Byron, whose often skeptical views offer a more fitting parallel to those found in Shelley's writings. No connection has previously been made between Shelley's use of this image and Byron's, even in criticism of Shelley's novels that incorporates consideration of Byron's influence on Shelley's writing. Such discussions most often focus on the presence of Byron the man, rather than Byron the poet, and therefore diminish the focus on Shelley's skills as a writer, instead often portraying her as a deeply troubled woman seeking to relieve her personal sufferings through the incorporation of autobiographical parallels into her fiction. (2)

Although such parallels do exist, the professional relationship between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron provided a more important influence on her writings. During the summer of 1816, again in 1818, and also after Percy Shelley's death in 1822, Mary Shelley acted as copyist for some of Byron's works, including The Prisoner of Chillon, Don Juan, and, most important for the present discussion, the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. (3) Consequently, Shelley's use of the broken-mirror image reveals a more complex connection to Byron than other treatments of their relationship might suggest, and it demonstrates her sophistication as a writer, even in a novel that has not received the critical praise of her other two early novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. Valperga thus reveals her ability to deal successfully with a precursor writer in order to develop her own unique perspective, a perspective that at the same time both stands in sharp contrast to, and aligns her closely with that precursor. (4)

For Byron and Shelley, the close connection between external events and personal identity was an important component of the perspective they developed. Both writers drew heavily on their own experiences for the formation of characters who "reflected" their own beliefs or attitudes. Because their less optimistic views contrasted with the more utopian views of a number of their contemporaries and predecessors, their employment of a unique version of the mirror image is particularly significant. Although writers such as Percy Shelley describe multiple reflections that occur in many-sided mirrors or prisms (for example, in Prometheus Unbound and Epipsychidion, in addition to the Defence), only Byron and Mary Shelley make use of the image of the broken mirror, and the multiplied reflections thus created, to convey the intensely negative power of excessive emotion, especially in the context of political events, but also in terms of personal experience. That Byron and Shelley's broken-mirror images occur in works that are increasingly more historical in nature reinforces the importance of this recognition. Mary Shelley's employment of the image, therefore, precisely because it involves such an intimate reworking of Byron's, provides a logical culmination for this process.

This study examines three examples from Lord Byron---specifically in The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), and the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1816)--as predecessors to that found in Mary Shelley's Valperga. Although only Byron's Childe Harold deals directly with contemporary political events, both his oriental tales and Shelley's Valperga employ references to events that have significant parallels to the political occurrences of the day, parallels that can be elucidated through the exploration of the different images of reflection.

The image of the mirror has been particularly important to recent critical consideration of the literature of the period. What so many texts of the period enact, such criticism suggests, is an important break with tradition. In The Mirror and the Lamp, for example, M. H. Abrams asserts, "In the generation of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the transformation of the key images by which critics pictured the process and product of art is a convenient index to a comprehensive revolution in the theory of poetry, and of all the arts." (5) The transformation Abrams identifies here primarily involves the figure of the artist and his transition in the eyes of the Romantic critic from a passive mirror reflecting the world around him to a more active participant, one whose own imagination acts as a lamp projecting itself out into the world it experiences. As Abrams clearly demonstrates, this reconceptualization of the image of the artist as mirror, an image that originates in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, is certainly innovative. At the same time, even the very writings that help to enact this movement forward also maintain a firm hold on the thoughts and texts of the past. For example, in the passage from A Defence of Poetry that Rajan associates with Valperga, Percy Shelley utilizes the traditional concept of the artist as mirror, but reconfigures it to attribute greater creative power to the artist. This dual vision lends importance to the use of the broken mirror image in the texts of Byron and Mary Shelley. Byron and Shelley's use of the image, in fact, makes more explicit what is presented in most contemporary discussions of the artist figure in the literature of the period.

One relevant view of reflection is found in Lacan's theory of the mirror stage. Essentially, this stage involves the moment in a child's development, occurring somewhere between six to eighteen months, when a child who is "still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence" as Lacan explains, (6) is able to recognize himself in the mirror and, in response, physically assumes a more upright position (sits up) and consequently develops an idealized image of himself as a being more autonomous and fully developed than he is in reality. What the child responds to, therefore, is the illusion, or what Lacan terms a "misrecognition," of a "totalized" self that is distinguished from the fragmented reality. This misrecognition, then, occurs within a complex combination of anticipation and retroaction. Jane Gallop explains in her reading of Lacan, "The self is constituted through anticipating what it will become [unified], and then this anticipatory model is used for gauging what was before [fragmentation]." (7) In doing so, the subject first begins to distinguish between the "inside" and the "outside," between self and other, thus initiating himself into the realm of the social. In an analogy appropriate for the purposes of this discussion, Gallop compares the experience of the mirror stage to the loss of Paradise. Like Adam and Eve, the subject experiences a second birth--the first into "nature," the second into "history" (85), the latter occurring within a social framework.

In fact, this sense of the lost Paradise, of the fallen Adam, is central to the consideration of what has been termed the Byronic hero, the main figure in the works under consideration. This character's sense of "psychic and social despair," as Jerome McGann explains, places him in opposition to "every form of instituted culture and authority." (8) Consequently, he isolates himself from that world, with the sole exception of an idealized beloved, whose goodness and purity offer a temporary check to the character's self-destructive tendencies. Thus, in The Bride of Abydos, one of the early Oriental tales that helped to solidify Byron's literary reputation, Selim enjoys a relationship with Zulieka that consoles him in the face of his hatred and desire for revenge against Giaffir, his uncle, who has murdered his father and raised him, quite harshly, as a sort of son.

Near the beginning of Canto One, the narrator describes the main female character, Zulieka, in idealized language:

   Such was Zulieka--such around her shone
   The nameless charms unmarked by her alone--
   The light of Love, the purity of Grace,
   The mind, the Music breathing from her face,
   The heart whose softness harmonized the whole. (9)

The unity of love, grace, mind, and heart in this portrayal appears a stable one, established on fairly conventional terms, yet the description of the "music breathing from her face" threatens this unity, conflating the auditory with the visual.

In his note to the lines just quoted, Byron undermines the integrity of the unity he is introducing at this point in the poem. Describing the phenomenon of hearing music when one sees a particularly beautiful face, Byron suggests,

   This is rather to be felt than described; still I think there are
   some who will understand it, at least they would have done had they
   beheld the countenance whose speaking harmony suggested the idea;
   for this passage is not drawn from imagination but memory, that
   mirror which Affliction dashes to the earth, and looking down upon
   the fragments, only beholds the reflection multiplied! (10)

Here, the concept of "speaking harmony" is almost immediately negated by the image of fragmentation. The speaker implies a history between himself and the object of his description, a relationship that has itself become broken. Thus, the present sense of harmony introduced in the figure of Zulieka simultaneously recalls a past period of fragmentation, one that maintains its sense of "presence" through the workings of memory, constantly being re-enacted and relived. This re-enactment, Byron suggests, occurs within the realm of experience, but not the realm of language. It is to be felt, but not described.

In this way, the note itself enacts another sense of fragmentation. The figure of the poet intrudes upon the voice of the narrator, dissolving the illusion of a coherent, unifed narrative, recalling in fact its very fictive status. The face that has inspired this invented description of Zulieka, the note asserts, is not a product of the imagination; it has some sense of historical reality. In fact, in his notes to his six-volume edition of Byron's works, McGann explains that The Bride was inspired by "the recollections of his love for Augusta, on the one hand, and of his more recent 'platonic' affair with Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster on the other." (11) In each of these relationships, Byron was unable to achieve a sense of fulfillment, as the connection to each woman was compromised through their marriages to other men (and of course, the stigma against incest). Thus, the image of fragmentation presented in the note is significant on multiple levels. Even its very placement in the text presents a break in the narrative, conflicting with the imagery of the poem itself. (12)

That the historical Byron was often associated with the Byronic heroes he introduces in his poetry only adds to this sense of instability. Especially with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold, Byron himself acknowledged that much of his imagery originated in his actual travels in the countries described, and that there was a possibility that the titular character may be assumed to be based on a real person. (13) The possibility that Byron in fact was that person certainly added to the overwhelming celebrity status he enjoyed shortly after its publication, (14) but it also introduced a struggle that would confront him at various points in his career as he attempted to delineate where Byron the private man ended and where Byron the public poet began.

This situation is particularly evident in the history of the composition of The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair. In addition to the interpersonal relationships that motivated him, Byron may also have derived inspiration from recent political events, especially those surrounding Napoleon Bonaparte, who suffered tremendous defeats in Germany, Spain, and Italy in October 1813, shortly before Byron's composition of The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair. The anxiety and disappointment associated with all of these events provided considerable motivation for Byron. He tells Lady Melbourne on November 4: "In the last three days I have been quite shut up--my mind has been from late and later events in such a state of fermentation that as usual I have been obliged to empty it in rhyme." (15) The immediate context of the letter suggests that these "events" involve Augusta and Lady Webster, as Byron discusses more personal subjects immediately afterwards, including the fact that Webster "is very angry at me for not writing" (157). Nevertheless, his closing statement refers to the more political possibility: "Buonaparte has lost all his allies but me & the King of Wirtemberg ... no matter my alliance is quite as useful as that of Bavaria" (157-58). Despite his shortcomings, Napoleon remained for Byron an important symbol of man's potential, and the public's ambivalent response to him certainly would have been familiar to Byron. Peter Manning writes that Byron perceived Bonaparte as "not so much his alter ego as his alter image, in whom he saw his reflection and with whom he was joined in popular view as the type of the Promethean genius." (16) Jerome McGann's notation to the description of Napoleon in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage develops a similar identification. "Byron uses an analysis of historical figures," McGann argues, "as a device for self-analysis" (Oxford Authors 1031). In this way, the combination of the personal and the political becomes a logical source of motivation for him.

The usefulness of composition to release real-life tensions is even more evident in Byron's next work, The Corsair, in which Byron introduces the character of Conrad, who typifies the misanthropic Byronic hero: "Feared--shunned--belied--ere Youth had lost her force, / He hated Man too much to feel remorse" (Corsair 1.261-62). Conrad becomes especially isolated following his capture by the antagonistic Seyd after an unsuccessful attack, which leaves Conrad imprisoned, not only physically immured but also psychologically confined as well. The narrator explains:

   There is a war, a chaos of the mind,
   When all its elements convulsed--combined--
   Lie dark and jarring with perturbed force,
   And gnashing with impenitent Remorse--

   (2.328-31)

The mind in isolation can only turn inward, searching itself for meaning in times of extreme distress, finding only fragmented pieces that provide no clear sense of self, as well as a paradoxical feeling of regretless regret. The chaos that threatens the integrity of one's identity can return us to Lacan, specifically an essay written some time after his original formulation of the concept of the mirror stage. In "Some Reflections on the Ego," Lacan suggests, "This illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery, entails a constant danger of sliding back again into the chaos from which it started" (quoted in Gallop 85). For Lacan, self-mastery paradoxically requires the recognition of the illusory foundation of the ego. Likewise, in revising his earlier suggestion that Conrad's hate precludes him from feeling remorse, Byron suggests that the emotion does in some way remain submerged in his psyche, and failure to keep it under control can lead to a dark, disturbing chaos.

Indeed, such a failure of self-mastery may be responsible for Conrad's imprisonment in the first place. Conrad's decision to save the women of the harem, first from the fire and then from the potential outrages of his crew, provides Seyd the opportunity to reorganize his troops and offer a successful counterattack against Conrad's men. In this regard, the complicated combination of verb tenses used in Conrad's address to his comrades suggests a loss of control. "Man is our foe," he exclaims, "and such 'tis ours to slay: / But still we spared--must spare the weaker prey. / Oh! I forgot--but Heaven will not forgive / If at my word the helpless cease to live." (17) The close combination of past and present tense in "we spared--must spare," which is further complicated by the inexact use of passive voice in the first part and the use of the "defective" verb "must" in the second, in addition to the subsequent juxtaposition of past and future in "forgot" and "will ... forgive," creates a sense of instability that reappears in the later description of Conrad's captive mind.

This troubled sense of chronology, the simultaneous looking forward and backward, appears again in the consideration of other elements of the mind, including

   The hopeless past, the hasting future driven
   Too quickly on to guess it Hell or Heaven;
   Deeds--thought--and words, perhaps remembered not
   So keenly till that hour, but ne'er forgot.

   (2.346-49)

While the account may appear to focus on the return of the repressed, the concurrent imposition of the past and present compromises the foundation upon which the development of the self-concept attempts to rest. The question of whether Conrad considers himself redeemable or not is complicated not only by his rescue of Gulnare and the other harem women, but also in his treatment of his beloved Medora, whose pleas to give up his violent life Conrad has disregarded (1.389-409). Perhaps it is in the contemplation of that decision that any real sense of remorse arises for him. (18)

Ultimately, there is a limit to the mind's efforts at self-examination in this context, as the concluding description of the chaos of the mind suggests:

   All, in a word, from which all eyes must start-That
   opening sepulchre, the naked heart
   Bares with its buried woes--till Pride awake,
   To snatch the mirror from the soul and break.

   (2.354-57)

In this second image of the broken mirror, Byron reverses the consequences of its occurrence. Whereas in the note to The Bride of Abydos, the breaking of the mirror serves only to multiply the experience of the pains of memory, here the destruction of the mirror is more complete, acting as a defense mechanism to prevent the painful recollection and revelation of unpleasant memories. In this respect, Byronic pride proves itself stronger than affliction, and serves a useful function by preventing the self from getting mired in self-reproach. Such a strategy has clear benefits for both military heroes and poets alike. The ability to move beyond past disappointments is essential to the success of one's future efforts.

In Conrad's case, however, the repression involved here traps him in passivity: achieving a sense of calm, he quickly falls asleep (Corsair 2.383), to be awakened only by the arrival of the restless Gulnare (2.430), who later rescues Conrad by coordinating rebel forces, murdering her husband, and arranging for Conrad's reunion with his surviving crew members (3.311 ft.). That his Medora is indeed dead when he returns reinforces his loss of control and inability to act. Repeatedly mute--when he first returns, when he approaches Medora's tower, when he might ask the cause of her death ("It was enough--she died--what recked it how?" (3.625), the narrator comments)--Conrad can only weep secretly at the end and then disappear. Unable even to confirm his death, his crew holds off on fully mourning him, and the poem itself becomes the only material monument to him.

In this respect, the employment of the broken mirror image signifies a sort of psychological regression in Conrad. The symbolic destruction of the mirror, which puts an end to Conrad's critical self-assessment, nevertheless appears to imprison him in a different way--in the imaginary order that Lacan associates with the mirror stage of development. Subsequently, Conrad becomes situated outside the symbolic order, in which he has used language so powerfully in his relationship with others. Indeed, because he has such authority at the beginning of the poem, he has no need for long speeches, as his crew immediately obeys his terse commands for their swift departure:

   They make obeisance and retire in haste,
   Too soon to seek again the watery waste:
   Yet they repine not--so that Conrad guides;
   And who dare question aught that he decides?

   (1. 169-72)

At the end, by contrast, his authority has disintegrated, just as his heart itself has become shattered like the mirror Pride has earlier removed from it:

   Yet tempests wear, and lightning cleaves the rock;
   If such his heart, so shatter'd it the shock.
   There grew one flower beneath its rugged brow,
   Though dark the shade--it shelter'd--save till now.

   The gentle plant hath left no leaf to tell
   Its tale, but shrunk and wither'd where it fell;
   And of its cold protector, blacken round
   But shiver'd fragments on the barren ground!

   (3.668-71, 674-77)

Devastated by the loss of his beloved Medora, Conrad becomes unable to tell any tale, neither hers nor his own, and simply disappears into oblivion. In this way, the figure of Conrad serves as an important precursor to that of Euthanasia in Mary Shelley's novel, whose ultimate powerlessness, we shall see, is also presented in terms of her relation to the linguistic realm.

The third example of the broken mirror image in Byron's poetry occurs within the most explicitly political as well as autobiographical context, and, of the three examples, it holds the most prominent position within its text. In the third canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, published in 1816, Byron provides a moving description of the fallen soldiers of Waterloo, including in his consideration not only the soldiers themselves, but also those "kind and kindred" left behind to mourn them. As in the previous two examples, Byron's imagery focuses on a broken heart forced to recover itself in response to a crisis:

   And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:
   Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
   In every fragment multiplies; and makes
   A thousand images of one that was,
   The same, and still the more, the more it breaks.

   (288-42)

In this context, the memory, not only of the loved ones themselves, but of the very pain their deaths have caused, becomes self-perpetuating, and the heart is compelled to endure, making no outward show of its devastation. "[S]uch things are untold," the narrator asserts (296), again suggesting the lack of linguistic power associated with confinement in the imaginary.

The paradox employed in these two statements allows for the recognition of the larger symbolic potential of the broken heart/mirror image. Robert Gleckner, for example, suggests that "it is symbolic of the poet's total vision ... reflecting in his own shattered individual heart the fragments of a lost Eden, a broken present, and a still more fragmented future." (19) In this respect, the vision Byron provides here speaks not only to the fleeting power of inspiration which so many Romantic poems bemoan, but also to the fragility of the heart as whole, again recalling the illusory nature of the mirror image in Lacan's conception. The kind and kindred of the fallen at Waterloo, and the poet himself, are forced by contemporary events to look nostalgically backwards to a past that, viewed retroactively, was never as Edenic as they would hope to believe, especially when viewed through the lens of a future which is itself fragmented in its uncertainty. In this way, they replicate the fruitless relationship to time that Byron attributes earlier to Harold himself." "Once more within the vortex roll'd / On with the giddy circle, chasing Time" (96-97). In both instances, as Gleckner explains, "Man giddily chases time and encounters in space only fragments to mirror his own brokenness and mortality" (245).

The specific temporal scene in which this chasing of time occurs is the ball held by the Duchess of Richmond in Brussels on the eve of the Battle of Quatre-Bras, three days before Waterloo. At that point, the poet recalls:

   A thousand hearts beat happily; and when
   Music arose with its voluptuous swell,
   Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again,
   And all went merry as a marriage bell.

   (185-88)

The immediate comparison between this and the later description, of course, involves the image of the thousand hearts beating happily, in direct opposition to the motionless hearts of the fallen soldiers, as well as their thousand images reflected in the fragments of the broken hearts of their survivors. The image of reflection is also portrayed here as a more mutual and dynamic interaction between people instead of the mournful recollections involved in the later scene. (20)

In Mary Shelley's treatment of the broken mirror image in Valperga, the impact of this frustrated optimism becomes even more complex, as is the relationship of this text to the Byron works that exert an influence on it, especially The Corsair and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In fact, Shelley's reading of Childe Harold had a particularly dramatic effect on her, not only during the summer of 1816 but also when she read it again the following spring, when she first began work on her second novel. In her journal of May 28, 1817 (as well as in a letter to Percy the following day), Shelley offers some poignant thoughts:

   I am melancholy with reading the 3rd Canto of Childe Harold. Do you
   not remember, Shelley when you first read it to me? One evening
   after returning from Diodati ... That time is past and this will
   also pass when I may weep to read these words and again moralize on
   the flight of time.

       Dear lake! I shall ever love thee. How a powerful mind can
   sanctify scenes and recollections ... How very vividly does
   each verse of his poem recall some scene of this kind to my
   memory--This time will soon also be a recollection.... the
   time will also arrive when that which is now an anticipation
   will be only memory--death will at last come and in the
   last moment all will be a dream. (21)

Just as Byron does in the poems previously discussed, Shelley here employs several chronological levels at once. Her reading of Byron's poem understandably causes her to recall the summer of 1816, which, when viewed retrospectively after the subsequent suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay in late 1826, assumes a particularly idyllic, even antediluvian quality.

At the same time, Shelley also looks ahead, anticipating a later period of looking back to the present, and the final moment when all memory will dissipate.

In Valperga, the influence of Byron's works reveals itself in a number of places, though the interdependence of the political and the personal is even more central to the development of the plot than it has been in Byron's works. At the same time, the precarious nature of the psyche and the utilization of language in the development of the self also become important subjects for exploration in the novel. In this regard, a quotation from Byron's Bride of Abydos encapsulates the relationship between Euthanasia and Castruccio in Shelley's novel. In introducing Zulieka as Giaffir's daughter, Byron asserts, "Affection chain'd her to that heart; / Ambition tore the links apart" (1.191-92). This struggle between affection and ambition is indeed essential to Shelley's novel. Shortly after Castruccio ruins his relationship with Euthanasia, both by having an affair with the prophetess Beatrice and through his cruel military practices, Shelley describes him: "Once indeed he had loved, and he had drank life and joy from the eyes of Euthanasia. His journey to Lombardy, his connection with Beatrice, although indeed he loved her little, yet was sufficient to weaken the bonds that confined him; and love was with him, ever after, the second feeling in his heart, the servant and thrall of his ambition" (Valperga 269). Unfortunately, once the romantic relationship has been destroyed, Euthanasia loses much of her ability to check Castruccio's efforts, and her inability to relinquish her own political ideals and accept Castruccio's tyrannical inclinations leads to her eventual downfall at Castruccio's hands. (22)

In developing the theme of the destructive nature of ambition, Shelley utilizes a technique identified by Paul Cantor in his discussion of another of Shelley's works, "Transformation," which he identifies as a revision of Byron's dramatic fragment The Deformed Transformed, a work that Shelley transcribed for Byron before its publication in 1824 (Cantor 99). Cantor explains that in many of Byron's works, including not only The Deformed Transformed but also his Oriental tales as well, there is an imbalanced focus on violence even in stories that appear to concentrate on romantic relationships: "Byron pushes the love story to the margins, while he focuses on the hate of man for man.... In general, Byron's poetic tales present a hypermasculine world, in which women function largely as pawns in the power struggles of men" (91). Certainly, the deaths of Zulieka and Medora in The Bride of Abydos and The Corsair provide support for Cantor's claims in this context, though he doesn't explicitly mention either character by name and deals only very briefly with The Corsair as a whole. In his discussion, Cantor proposes that the tensions at work here are motivated by what Rene Girard terms mimetic desire. Byron's characters, "despite their apparent differences in age, nationality and faith, are mirror images of each other.... What seems to draw Byron's characters into conflict is not the accidental conjunction of their desires but some fundamental similarity in their natures that from the beginning sets them on a collision course of imitation" (93). Cantor goes on to demonstrate that Shelley's revision of Byron in "Transformation" involves her recasting of this mimetic desire in such a way that a happy ending becomes possible: Guido destroys his parasitic rival and is able to unite with Juliet by relinquishing some of his "hypermasculine" qualities, especially his pride.

As an earlier work, completed only shortly before Percy Shelley's death and certainly while the bitter memories of her numerous personal losses remained fresh in her mind, Shelley's Valperga is not able to represent such a favorable outcome for masculine rivalry and ambition. Instead, it uses various forms of specular imagery to critique those factors through the presentation of feminine alternatives to the conflicts associated with extreme masculinity, as well as through the recasting of one of the two triangular relationships from Byron's Corsair. (23) Although Byron focuses explicitly on the relationship involving Seyd, Conrad, and Gulnare, the interactions among Conrad, Gulnare, and Medora are more significant here. Particularly important in this context is the motivation for Gulnare's actions. She rescues Conrad not simply out of gratitude for his earlier actions towards her and the other women of the harem, but also out of her feelings of love, feelings that become more intense precisely because she recognizes he cannot reciprocate: "Reply not, tell not thy tale again, / Thou lov'st another, and I love in vain" (3.296-97). With this speech, Gulnare initiates the second triangular romantic relationship, though her silencing of Conrad by forbidding him to repeat his claims of affection for Medora places her in a position of greater power and authority than Conrad occupies at this time. Moreover, just as an enamored lover might place himself in competition with another man to win a woman's heart, Gulnare finds herself arguing the respective merits of Medora and herself."

   Though fond as mine her bosom, form more fair,
   I rush through peril which she would not dare.
   If that thy heart to hers were truly dear,
   Were I thine own thou wert not lonely here;
   An outlaw's spouse and leave her lord to roam!
   What hath such gentle dame to do with home?

   (3.298-303)

Gulnare criticizes Medora for embodying only those characteristics associated with a typically appealing woman--a fairer form and the passive acceptance of her spouse's public life away from her while she remains confined in the private domestic sphere. Gulnare, by contrast, will not be restricted by her "fond" bosom; she will actively demonstrate her love for Conrad through her behavior, which involves her assumption of authority over him: "Speak not now" she enjoins him (3.304). Instead, she tells him, "rise and follow me" (3.307). Despite the antagonism Gulnare reveals here, this relationship doesn't actually involve the mimetic desire that Cantor discusses. Rather, Gulnare's desire for Conrad creates competition with Medora, rather than the other way around, though there is no physical interaction between the two and Medora never actually learns of Gulnare's relationship with her husband. In fact, after her rescue of Conrad leads to his safe arrival home, Gulnare disappears from the poem (3.549 ff).

In Valperga, the fates of the main female characters are quite similar to those of Gulnare and Medora, though they are portrayed in greater detail and with more consideration of their suffering. At the same time, though, Shelley reconfigures this love triangle by refusing to allow her characters to express any real antagonism. Although Beatrice does seek out Euthanasia as a way to measure up her apparent rival, it is only after Castruccio has already rejected her and there is no real hope for reconciliation. Furthermore, Beatrice describes being motivated not by competition, but rather by a desire to perform penitence: "It was a double penance to humble myself before so excelling a rival. If you had been worthless, a self-contenting pride would have eased my wounds, but to do homage to my equal--oh! To one far my superior,--was a new lesson to my stubborn soul" (Valperga 357). Here, Shelley dispatches more masculinist models of competition in order to enact a feminine, even feminist, model of desire, wherein Beatrice and Euthanasia become united through the similarity of their disappointing experiences of Castruccio and are able to help each other recover from the pain that he has caused each of them.

The portrayal of these characters' response to Castruccio's mistreatment of them occurs within a framework involving the types of specular imagery already discussed. Indeed, for both women, the broken mirror image has important implications. The more explicit example occurs with the discussion of Euthanasia's decision to break off their engagement after her discovery of Castruccio's ruthlessness. However principled it may be, Euthanasia's decision leaves her devastated: "She determined to think no more of Castruccio; but every day, every moment of the day, was as a broken mirror, a multiplied reflection of his form alone" (271). Like the memory in Byron's note to The Bride of Abydos and the heart in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, daily experience in Shelley's discussion serves constantly to recall and magnify the pain that Euthanasia has experienced. (24)

At the same time, the connection to the remaining example, from Byron's Corsair, is also significant, for it is Euthanasia's pride that facilitates her disappointment. As Shelley describes, Euthanasia has developed an idealized image of Castruccio that has also influenced her own self-image: "How I dwelt on his idea, his image, his virtues, with unblamed affection: how it was my glory, my silent boast, when in solitude, my eyes swam in tears, and my cheek glowed, to reflect that I loved him, who transcended his kind in wisdom and excellence!" (Valperga 266). (25) Having set up her lover as a god and thus subsuming her own self within him, she understandably must face a tremendous loss when her image of Castruccio is shattered. Because of the extensive degree to which Euthanasia has entwined her own identity with Castruccio's, the dissolution of their relationship increases rather than decreases the emotional investment she has in him.

Similarly, Beatrice's perception of her connection to Castruccio is also self-aggrandizing. Like Euthanasia, Beatrice sees Castruccio as a divine presence, as the narrator explains: "Even as we idolize the object of our affections, do we idolize ourselves: if we separate him from his fellow mortals, so do we separate ourselves, and, glorying in belonging to him alone, feel lifted above all other sensations, all other joys and griefs, to one hallowed circle from which all but his idea are banished" (Valperga 231). Beatrice's emotional attachment to Castmccio reinforces her preexisting sense of self-worth produced by her belief in her powers of prophecy. Consequently, her faith in her power of revelation becomes entwined with her belief in the sanctity of her relationship with Castruccio. Beatrice develops a greater sense of her own power by initiating and sustaining an intimate relationship that she believes reinforces her divinely-inspired knowledge. Ultimately, though, the knowledge that Castruccio withholds from her--that he is indeed engaged to another--prevents him from freely entering into the relationship, and renders her powerless to pursue sole possession of him and complete mastery of herself.

In both cases, then, the female characters' dependence on their relationship with Castruccio has confirmed their ultimate confinement to the imaginary order, within which they are unable to exert any real control over themselves or the events around them. Instead, like Conrad and the kind and kindred in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, they are repeatedly left silenced in the face of trauma. In Euthanasia's case, for example, shortly after their relationship ends, Castruccio forcibly captures Valperga, Euthanasia's ancestral home, as its geographical position represents a potential threat to his military security. (26) After her defeat, Euthanasia has no alternative but to surrender Valperga and stoically to accompany Castruccio's soldiers to Lucca: "she returned her horse's head, and without a word, proceeded slowly on her way to Lucca.... She took no notice of the streets through which she passed, and cared little whether they conducted her to a palace or a prison" (Valperga 315). In despair, Euthanasia seems to accept her silenced exile from the symbolic, although she loses her admiration for the visual world, which now reflects her confinement to the imaginary order:

   A few cypress and box trees, which had been cut into shape, now
   mocked the gardener's knife with the unpruned growth of three
   years; and ivy darkened the walls side by side with the orange
   trees, whose golden apples shone amidst the dark foliage.... Such
   was the desolate scene which arrested the eyes of Euthanasia, as
   she looked from her window. "The image of my fortunes," she thought,
   and turned away, while a tear flowed down her cheek. (Valperga 316)

Euthanasia, a "golden apple" among the dark foliage created by the "un-pruned growth" of Castruccio's tyranny, finds herself completely alienated from the political process, defeated and powerless.

Similarly, Beatrice repeatedly finds herself deprived of the power of voice that comprises the original source of her identity as the Ancilla Dei. Although she gains public status as a prophetess, that position is a tenuous one. Even before her relationship with Castruccio begins, she is imprisoned by representatives of the Inquisition. "When the inquisitors surrounded her," the narrator explains, "her voice was silent" (213). Though she is able to secure her freedom through the intercession of her protector, Marsillio, he later--after she has already been rejected by Castruccio--reveals the truth of her deception, thus destroying her sense of power. She later tells Euthanasia, "Unsupported by my supernatural powers, I now shrunk from all display.... My very powers of speech deserted me, and I could not articulate a syllable" (354). While the powerlessness of her position differs from the authority Euthanasia exercises, if only temporarily, after her engagement to Castruccio is ended, the nature of Beatrice's response echoes Euthanasia's: "I adored him; to whisper his name only in solitude, where none could hear my voice my own most attentive ear, thrilled me with transport. I tried to banish him my thoughts; he recurred in my dreams, which I could not control. I saw him there, beautiful as his real self, and my heart was burnt by my emotion" (355). In solitude, just as Euthanasia has done, Beatrice can proudly revel in her love for Castruccio, while publicly their connection is nonexistent. Further, like Euthanasia peering into a broken mirror, Beatrice cannot escape the multiplied reflections of Castruccio, whose appearance in her dreams reinforces the depths of her attachment to him.

That Beatrice and Euthanasia find solace in their shared experiences of Castruccio is one of the most important revisions Shelley makes to the stories she has read in Byron's tales. Rather than engage in violent struggle over Castruccio, they develop a friendship that transcends such competition. Euthanasia takes it upon herself to reclaim Beatrice from the suffering that has followed her break from Castruccio, and their interaction during the later parts of the book serves as an important counterpoint to the relentless stories of Castruccio's heartless pursuit of power and glory. As Stuart Curran explains, "Faced with the wreck of all she desires, [Euthanasia] stoically endures and finds the strength to help Beatrice recover a sense of purpose and some measure of integrated identity." (27) It is this sense of integration that has been at issue throughout the works under consideration here, and in Valperga the threats to that integration become more powerful. The fact that Euthanasia's efforts ultimately prove just as futile in the end as each woman's relationship with Castruccio is--Beatrice dies insane after an abortive attempt to reclaim both her sense of authority and her connection to Castruccio, while Euthanasia simply disappears at the end of the novel, much as Conrad has done in The Corsair--does not diminish the importance of what Shelley has accomplished. By preventing her heroines from directing aggression towards each other, Shelley maintains the focus on the real problem: the truly destructive consequences of unchecked masculine will to power.

In this way, Shelley's text develops larger meaning when examined within its historical context. Curran suggests, "In Valperga, Mary Shelley, too, places her novel firmly within a political framework that sees the future through the perspective of this medieval past, one that offers a democratic and feminist alternative to a modern Europe that, by the 1820s, had been thrown back two generations to the dynastic autocracies against which a previous generation had unleashed ferocious, revolutionary energies" (110). Like Byron, Shelley felt considerable disappointment at these developments, as she reveals in her letters in response to the Peterloo Massacre of August of 1819 and the continuing retrogression following the Congress of Vienna. In January of 1820, for example, Shelley revealed to Gisborne her perspective on the political climate in England: "Are you not reconciled to the idea that England is become a despotism? The freedom with which the newspapers talk of our most detestable governors is as mocking death on a death bed." (28) Mary's concern for the demise of freedom in England persisted throughout the spring, as her March 24 letter to Marianne Hunt indicates: "I am too much depressed by its enslaved state, my inutility; the little chance there is for freedom; & the great chance there is for tyranny" (1: 137). The tyranny she sees in England is so profound, she tells Hunt, that the country "is no longer England but Castlereagh land or New Land Castlereagh,--heaven defend me from being a Castlereaghish woman" (1: 137). Speaking from Italy, away from the direct experience of the oppression she sees in her homeland, Mary still expresses clear disappointment.

Ultimately, it is only through the creation of two fictional women that Shelley can develop her critique of this political environment, as traditional historical works, both fiction and nonfiction, focused primarily on men and therefore offered little material from which to draw. By making Euthanasia, especially, figure so prominently in a novel focusing on the life of a historical male, Shelley's novel provides a fairly revolutionary revision of the traditionally male genre. (29) More importantly, Shelley's revision of Byron's broken-mirror image reveals a more active engagement than previous considerations of her work have acknowledged. Mary Shelley did not restrict herself to the role of copyist to one of the period's most prominent writers, nor did she simply utilize fictional portrayals of him to work out her personal issues. Rather, she met Byron on his own terms to critique the masculinist world represented so often in his works, more firmly establishing her own authority in the process. (30)

Morgan State University 

(1.) Mary Shelley, Valperga; or, the Life and Adventures of Castrucrio, Prince of Lucca, ed. Tilottama Rajan (Ontario: Broadview, 1998) 271. Subsequent references appear in the text.

(2.) See, for example, Ernest J. Lovell, "Byron and Mary Shelley," Keats-Shelley Journal 2 (1953): 35-49, and "Byron and the Byronic Hero in the Novels of Mary Shelley," Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 158-83. A notable exception is Paul Cantor's discussion of Shelley's revision of Byron's "Deformed Transformed" in her later short story "Transformation." Cantor's essay, "Mary Shelley and the Taming of the Byronic Hero: 'Transformation' and The Deformed Transformed," in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, eds. Audrey Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (NY: Oxford, 1993) 89-106, will in fact provide some important insight later on in the present discussion. Of course, a consideration of the relationship between the works of Shelley and Byron must occur within the framework of their personal history as well. Mary Shelley's relationship with Byron, while certainly not as intense as those with Percy Shelley and William Godwin, nevertheless was one of the most important of her early adult life, both professionally and personally. Lovell, for example, calls attention to "the central, even decisive part which Byron played in Mary's career as a novelist" ("Byron and Mary Shelley" 35)--As is well known, she herself relates in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein ("Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition," Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter [NY: Norton, 1996] 169-73) that it was Byron's idea to have a ghost story contest, and that she was inspired to write that novel after being "a devout but nearly silent listener" during the various conversations Byron had with Percy during the summer of 1816 (170-71).

(3.) For a discussion of Mary Shelley's role as Byron's copyist, see Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), esp. 121, 159, 204, and 229.

(4.) Similar comparisons have been made involving Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and her father, William Godwin's work. See for example, Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (NY: Oxford UP, 1993), and Katherine Hill-Miller, "My Hideous Progeny": Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 1995).

(5.) M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (NY: Oxford, 1953) 53.

(6.) Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," in Ectits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (NY: Norton, 1977) 1-7 (2). Subsequent references appear in the text.

(7.) Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 81. Subsequent references appear in the text.

(8.) Jerome McGann, ed., Oxford Authors: Byron (NY: Oxford UP, 1986) 1036. Subsequent references appear in the text.

(9.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos, The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, ed. Frederick Page (NY: Oxford UP, 1970) 264-76 (1.176-80). Subsequent references appear in the text.

(10.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, "Notes to The Bride of Abydos," in Complete Works 895-98 (896).

(11.) Jerome McGann, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron, 6 vols. (NY: Oxford, 1980) 3.435

(12.) It is useful to consider that the quotation presented in Byron's note to the work has also been attributed by Lady Blessington to a conversation she had with him in 1823. See Ernest J. Lovell, ed., Lady Blessington's Conversations of Lord Bywn (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969) 107. Interestingly, Lovell fails to acknowledge the note to The Bride of Abydos as a precursor, choosing instead to draw a parallel to the lines from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage that will be discussed later.

(13.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, in Complete Works 179-252 (179). Subsequent references appear in the text.

(14.) Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (NY: Knopf, 1970) 117-19.

(15.) George Gordon, Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973-1982) 3: 157.

(16.) Peter Manning, Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts (NY: Oxford, 1990) 145.

(17) W. George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Corsair, in Complete Works 277-303 (2-205-8). Subsequent references appear in the text.

(18.) The use of complex chronology here also has a parallel to Byron's views on the political events of the time. In a journal entry for November 23, 1813, Byron remarks that the fall of Napoleon

   has completely upset my system of fatalism. I thought, if crushed,
   he would have fallen, when 'fractus illabitur orbis," and not have
   been pared away to gradual insignificance: that all this was not a
   merejeu of the gods, but a prelude to greater changes and mightier
   events. But man never advanced beyond a certain point;--and here we
   are, retrograding to the dull, stupid old system,--balance of
   Europe--poising straws upon king's noses, instead of wringing them
   off! (Letters & Journals 3: 218)

In this case, Byron's past thoughts of what the future would bring have been proven inaccurate, and he is forced to admit that history is circular: moving forward can only ultimately lead to a return to past conditions.

(19.) Robert Gleckner, Byron and the Ruins of Paradise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1967) 243. Subsequent references appear in the text.

(20.) The irony involved with Byron's mention of a "merry marriage," composed so soon after the dissolution of his own marriage, provides further commentary on the transience of positive interpersonal relationships.

(21.) Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) 172-73.

(22.) It is also useful to consider here that Castruccio, like the heroes in Byron's works, has his own parallels to Byron himself.. Elizabeth Nitchie, for example, calls Castruccio "Mary's first Byron" (Elizabeth Nitchie, Mary Shelley: Author of Frankenstein [New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1953] 110), while Ernest Lovell, in "Byron and the Byronic Hero," also discusses this connection.

(23.) One reason that Cantor may not have chosen to discuss this text in detail is the fact that, while his reading of Girard logically could apply to the combination of Seyd, the patriarchal figure, Gulnare, his younger wife, and Conrad, the younger male who "wins" the affection of the patriarch's wife, the subsequent events don't quite follow the pattern Cantor identifies in the other Oriental tales: "the older man, who is somehow socially and politically superior to the younger, metes out a dreadful punishment to him; out of the depth of his defeat, the younger man somehow reconstitutes his strength and lives to exact a terrible vengeance upon the older man and anyone associated with him (90). As we have seen, although Seyd is indeed able to punish Conrad through his imprisonment and the impending threat of death, Conrad is in fact rescued not because of his own strength but rather despite his weak passivity. It is Gulnare, acting as a sort of Lady Macbeth, who commits the patti/regicide that allows Conrad to secure his freedom even though he proclaims such a liberation to be unmanly and undesirable (Corsair 3.358-69).

(24.) Although the recognition of the connection occurred too late to be discussed in this article, an important precursor to this image in Mary Shelley's work can be found near the end of her Matilda (Mary/Maria/Matilda, ed. Janet Todd [NY: Penguin, 1991] 149-210). In that work, the title character addresses Nature, which reflects different images in the minds of different minds, "although your reflected semblance vary in a thousand ways, changeable as the hearts of those who view thee." Matilda describes herself as "one of these fragile mirrors," one that is about to be "broken" (207). For a discussion of this passage, see Lauren Gillingham, "Romancing Experience: The Seduction of Mary Shelley's Matilda," SiR 42 (2003): 251-69, esp. 254-55.

(25.) A little later in the passage, Shelley makes a clear potential reference to Byron's Bride and Corsair. She says, "I have read of those who have pined and died, when the sweet food of love was denied to them; were their sensations quicker, deeper, more all-penetrating than mine? Their anguish greater? I know not; nor do I know, if God hath given this frame a greater capacity for endurance than I could desire. Yet, methinks, I still love, and that is why I live" (266). Unlike Zulieka and Medora, though, Euthanasia will not die of a broken heart, but will instead suffer a more difficult and prolonged downfall, one that implicates the wrongs of the beloved more explicitly than do the deaths of Byron's characters.

(26.) For discussion of the reasoning behind Castruccio's desire to possess Valperga, see Valperga 140 and 287--290. For Castruccio's actual capture of the castle, see 304-12.

(27.) Stuart Curran, "Valperga," in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (NY: Cambridge UP, 2003) 103-15 (113). Subsequent references appear in the text.

(28.) Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 vols., ed. Betty Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 1: 124. Subsequent references appear in the text.

(29.) Shelley's next novel, The Last Man, will offer an even more intricate presentation of historical reality. By employing the motif of the sibylline leaves, Shelley provides her narrator with the ability to look forward through the lens of the past in a more complex manner than that enjoyed by the narrators discussed in the works considered here.

(30.) I am gratefully indebted to Professor Robert Ready at Drew University for his criticism and encouragement as I prepared this article for publication.