Shelley’s tale follows Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique most closely in the characterization of Bertha. Just as Wollstonecraft finds male domination most oppresssive of women in the affluent classes because “the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless” (Wollstonecraft 1975:81), so Shelley’s text marks an unfortunate change in Bertha when her parents die and she is adopted by “the old lady of the near castle, rich, childless, and solitary” (Shelley 1976:220). Living in the aristocratic splendor of a “marble palace” and “surrounded by silk-clad youths—the rich and gay,” Bertha becomes “somewhat of a coquette in manner,” and her relationship with the poor Winzy is endangered (ibid.:220–221). Women develop “coquettish arts,” Wollstonecraft argues, because they assimilate the patriarchal image of themselves as the passive object of male desire: “only taught to please, women are always on the watch to please, and with true heroic ardour endeavor to gain hearts merely to resign or spurn them when the victory is decided and conspicuous” (Wollstonecraft 1975:115, 147). Hence, Bertha’s change is manifested in her devious and perverse manipulation of Winzy:
Bertha fancied that love and security were enemies, and her pleasure was to divide them in my bosom. […] She slighted me in a thousand ways, yet would never acknowledge herself to be in the {170} wrong. She would drive me mad with anger, and then force me to beg her pardon. Sometimes she fancied that I was not sufficiently submissive, and then she had some story of a rival, favoured by her protectress.
As this catalogue of abuse suggests, Shelley’s tale satirizes the patriarchal image of woman that shapes Bertha’s characterization by transforming it into caricature. The fantastic premise of immortality results in an exaggeration of her vanity: as Winzy remains twenty years old and she becomes a “faded beauty” of fifty, “she sought to decrease the apparent disparity of our ages by a thousand feminine arts—rouge, youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner” (ibid.:226, 228). The constant concern with beauty that patriarchy forces on women in Wollstonecraft’s critique is magnified into Bertha’s ludicrous, maddening obsession: “Her jealousy never slept,” Winzy relates,
Her chief occupation was to discover that, in spite of outward appearances, I was myself growing old. […] She would discern wrinkles in my face and decrepitude in my walk, while I bounded along in youthful vigour, the youngest looking of twenty youths. I never dared address another woman: on one occasion, fancying that the belle of the village regarded me with favouring eyes, she bought me a gray wig.
Unable to maintain her attractive appearance, Bertha even goes so far as to disparage youth and beauty:
she described how much more comely gray hairs were than my chestnut locks; she descanted on the reverence and respect due to age—how preferable to the slight regard paid to children: could I imagine that the despicable gifts of youth and good looks outweighed disgrace, hatred, and scorn?
Tarchetti’s “L’elixir dell’immortalità” is a rather close translation which perfectly catches the humor of Shelley’s feminist satire, but he also made revisions which go beyond the English text. Some of the revisions suggest a strategy of amplification designed to increase the epistemological confusion of the fantastic for the Italian reader (the {171} italicized words in the Italian quotations below indicate Tarchetti’s additions to the English text). Thus, the translation heightens the marvelous register of Shelley’s fantastic discourse by adding a strong tendency toward sensationalism. Tarchetti followed the English by initiating the fantastic hesitation in the first sentence, with a date that glanced at the Italian reader’s reality, yet he inserted slight changes that intensify the narrator’s amazement:
Dicembre 16, 1867.—È questo per me un anniversario assai memorabile. Io compio oggi il mio trecentoventinovesimo anno di vita.
December 16, 1867.—This is a very memorable anniversary for me.
Today I complete my three hundred and twenty-ninth year of life.
Winzy’s first expression of doubt about his physical superiority is the simple question, “Am I, then, immortal?” (Shelley 1976:219), whereas the Italian version resorts to a more emphatic restatement: “Ma non invecchierò io dunque? Sono io dunque realmente immortale?” / “But shall I not age, then? Am I, then, really immortal?” (Tarchetti 1967, I:114). Sometimes the amplification produces a melodramatic effect: “belief” and “thought” (226) are inflated into the more stagy “illusione” and “dubbio” / “dream” and “suspicion” (I:126); “sad” (224) is rendered by “pazza” / “mad” (I:124), “fondly”—as in “my Bertha, whom I had loved so fondly” (228)—by “pazzamente” / “madly” (I:129). And sometimes the melodrama tips into the marvelous. When the aged Bertha tries to salve her wounded vanity by telling Winzy that “though I looked so young, there was ruin at work within my frame,” the Italian version turns the “ruin” into a preternaturally abrupt process: “quantunque io apparissi così giovane, eravi qualche cosa in me che m’avrebbe fatto invecchiare repentimente” / “although I looked so young, there was something in me which would make me age all of sudden” (I:130).
At other points, Tarchetti’s translation increases the Italian reader’s epistemological confusion by strengthening the mimetic register of Shelley’s fantastic discourse. The main characters are rechristened Vincenzo and Ortensia, two quite ordinary Italian names which remove the comic improbability suggested by an immortal called Winzy. Tarchetti’s strategy of mimetic amplification works by accumulating verisimilar details and explanations. When Vincenzo {172} recounts the tragedy of Cornelius’s “allievo che avendo inawertentemente evocato durante l’assenza del maestro, uno spirito maligno, ne fu ucciso” / “pupil who having inadvertently raised a malign spirit in his master’s absence was killed by it,” Tarchetti added another detail to the English passage to make the incident more plausible: “senza che alcuno avesse potuto soccorrerlo” / “before anyone could come to his aid” (I:115). The Italian version similarly enhances the psychological realism of the English text. When Winzy and Bertha part after their first falling out, he tersely states that “we met now after an absence, and she had been sorely beset while I was away” (220). In the translation, however, the meeting is much more histrionic, with Vincenzo physically expressing his passion for Ortensia and emphasizing the distress caused by their separation:
Io la riabbracciava ora dopo un’assenza assai dolorosa; il bisogno di confidenza e di conforti mi aveva ricondotto presso di lei. La fanciulla non aveva sofferto meno di me durante la mia lontananza.
I embraced her again now after a very painful absence; the need for intimacy and comfort led me back to her. The girl had not suffered less than me during my distance.