Because the translation tends to favor extreme emotional states, this sort of mimetic amplification easily turns a relatively realistic English passage into overwrought fantasy. When Winzy fearfully runs away from the allegedly satanic Cornelius, he turns to Bertha for consolation: “My failing steps were directed whither for two years they had every evening been attracted,—a gently bubbling spring of pure living waters, beside which lingered a dark-haired girl” (220). The Italian version infuses the landscape and the girl with Gothic overtones:
I miei passi si diressero anche quella volta a quel luogo, a cui pel giro di due anni erano stati diretti ogni sera, —un luogo pieno d’incanti, una sterminata latitudine di praterie, con una sorgente d’acqua viva che scaturiva gorgogliando malinconicamente, e presso la quale sedeva con abbandono una fanciulla.
My steps were directed that time as well toward that place, where for a period of two years they had been directed every {173} evening,—a place full of enchantments, a boundless expanse of grassland, with a fountain of living water which gushed with a melancholy gurgling, and beside which sat a girl with abandon.
Tarchetti’s strategy of amplification effectively reproduces Shelley’s feminist critique by further exaggerating the patriarchal gender images which shape the characters. When Winzy drinks what he mistakenly assumes is a remedy for his frustrated love of Bertha, he experiences a sudden fit of self-esteem and daring which comically confirms his psychological weakness, thus continuing the satire of male power: “methought my good looks had wonderfully improved. I hurried beyond the precincts of the town, joy in my soul, the beauty of heaven and earth around me” (223). The Italian version turns Vincenzo into a parody of the romantic individual, narcissistic, chest-thumping, Byronic:
parvemi che i miei occhi, già così ingenui, avessero acquistata una sorprendente expressione. Mi cacciai fuori del recinto della città colla gioia nell’anima, con quella orgogliosa soddisfazione che mi dava il pensiero di essere presto vendicato.
it seemed to me that my eyes, previously so ingenuous, had acquired a striking expression. I dashed beyond the city limit with joy in my heart, with that proud satisfaction which made me think that I would soon be avenged.
The translation likewise accentuates the caricature of female vanity. Whereas Winzy observes that his youthfulness drove Bertha to find “compensation for her misfortunes in a variety of little ridiculous circumstances” (228), Ortensia is said to revert to “puerili e ridicole circostanze” / “childish and ridiculous circumstances” (I:129). And whereas Winzy states that Bertha “would discern wrinkles in my face and decrepitude in my walk” (228), Vincenzo complains that Ortensia “struggeasi di scoprire delle grinze sul mio viso, e qualche cosa di esitante, di decrepito nel mio incesso” / “was consumed with discovering wrinkles in my face, and something hesitant, decrepit in my gait” (I:130).
Tarchetti’s first decisive departure from the ideological determinations of Shelley’s tale occurs on the issue of class. Shelley {174} challenges the patriarchal assumption that gender identity is biologically fixed by indicating that Bertha’s transformation into a coquette is socially determined, an effect of her upward mobility. Bertha’s class position is evidently bourgeois: “her parents, like mine,” states Winzy, “were of humble life, yet respectable” (220). This “life” should be seen as bourgeois even though “humble,” not only because it is labelled “respectable,” but because it enables Winzy to be apprenticed to an alchemist with whom he earns “no insignificant sum of money” (221). Bertha and Winzy are “humble” in relation to her protectress, who is an aristocrat, a “lady” living in a feudal “castle.” Shelley’s tale thus begins by associating patriarchy with aristocractic domination, sexual equality with the bourgeois family. This is most clear in a striking passage which alludes explicitly to Wollstonecraft’s treatise. When Bertha finally leaves her aristocratic protectress and returns to Winzy’s parents, he asserts that she “escaped from a gilt cage to nature and liberty” (224), echoing one of Wollstonecraft’s metaphors for the self-oppression to which patriarchal ideology subjects women: “Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison” (Wollstonecraft 1975:131).
As the narrative unfolds, however, the class logic of Shelley’s feminist critique is undone. Although Winzy’s attack on the aristocratic protectress implicitly equates the bourgeois family with a natural state free of patriarchal gender representations, his own marriage to Bertha compels her to live them out in an even more obsessive way. They continue to be financially independent: Winzy refers to “my farm” (Shelley 1976:227), and although at one point “poverty had made itself felt” because his perpetual youthfulness caused them to be “universally shunned,” they are nonetheless able to sell off their “property” and emigrate to France, having “realised a sum sufficient, at least, to maintain us while Bertha lived” (ibid.:228). Thus, whether living with their parents or on their own, after they are married, they continue to lead a “humble life, yet respectable.” But their relationship can hardly be considered “nature and liberty” for either of them. Bertha becomes the passive object of Winzy’s desire:
We had no children; we were all in all to each other; and though, as she grew older, her vivacious spirit became a little allied to illtemper, and her beauty sadly diminished, I cherished her in my {175} heart as the mistress I had idolized, the wife I had sought with such perfect love.
And when Bertha’s vanity drives her to ridiculous, alienating extremes, Winzy helplessly acknowledges the gender hierarchy established by his physical superiority: “this mincing, simpering, jealous old woman. I should have revered her gray locks and withered cheeks; but thus!—It was my work, I knew; but I did not the less deplore this type of human weakness” (ibid.:228). Bertha’s return to the bourgeoisie ultimately contradicts Winzy’s attack on the protectress: their marriage shows that the bourgeois family is not an egalitarian refuge from aristocratic patriarchy, but a continuation of male dominance.
This ideological contradiction lies at the center of Shelley’s feminism. As Anne Mellor has argued,
Mary Shelley was a feminist in the sense that her mother was, in that she advocated an egalitarian marriage and the education of women. But insofar as she endorsed the continued reproduction of the bourgeois family, her feminism is qualified by the ways in which her affirmation of the bourgeois family entails an acceptance of its intrinsic hierarchy, a hierarchy historically manifested in the doctrine of separate spheres [and] in the domination of the male gender.
Shelley’s characteristic valorization of marriage emerges in “The Mortal Immortal” primarily because Winzy is the narrator: he makes his love for Bertha and their marriage the positions from which their actions are intelligible, and hence the bourgeois family, with its patriarchal construction of gender, is established as the standard by which they are judged. What the text imposes as true or obvious is that Winzy is the devoted lover and husband, attending to their material needs, controlling their destiny in the public sphere, whereas Bertha controls their private life, compelled by her vanity to trifle with his affection, envy his youthfulness, even threaten their lives. Reasoning that Winzy’s unchanging appearance could get them executed “as a dealer in the black art” and his “accomplice[,] at last she insinuated that I must share my secret with her, and bestow on her like benefits to those I myself enjoyed, or she would denounce me—and then she burst into tears” (Shelley 1976:227).