Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

Theresa M. Kelley

ELH, Volume 75, Number 3, Fall 2008, pp. 625-652 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.0.0015

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/247221

Access provided at 20 Mar 2019 15:53 GMT from Lancaster University

Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and
Mary Shelley

by theresa m. kelley

How can we not feel that time percolates rather than flows? Far from
flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river
under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back
on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides, blends, caught up
in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and
fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the Yukon River. . . .
Sudden explosions, quick crises, periods of stagnant boredom, bur-
densome or foolish regressions, and long blockages, but also rigorous
linkages and suddenly accelerated progress, meet and blend in scientific
time as in the intimacy of the soul, in meteorology as in river basins.
Would we have understood such obvious facts without the theory of
percolation? . . . [T]he word time [temps] goes back to the aleatory
mixtures of the temperaments, of intemperate weather, of tempests and
temperature. If the time of a planet and the time of a river can have
such subtlety, what about historical time? We can say, at the very least,
that history is chaotic, that it percolates. Simultaneously unpredictable
and deterministic, its course blends all paces.

—Michel Serres, “Science and the Humanities: The Case of Turner”1

i. introduction

In this essay I imagine how Michael Serres’s geological figure for

historical time might be used to convey the role of time in romanti-
cism as eddying, feathering out, percolating within an uneven substrate
rather than productive of a linear chronological development. I do so
by pursuing the conceptual and historical filiations between two topics:
contingency in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thought
and fictional contingency in Mary Shelley’s historical novel Valperga.
My argument responds to these related questions: what would happen
to our sense of romantic history and chronology if we were to think of
both as inhabiting uneven temporalities akin to those uneven strata of
events through which time flows like water? How might we understand
romanticism as marked by contingency rather than philosophical or

ELH 75 (2008) 625–652 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 625
historical necessity, even within the philosophical frame of G. W. F.
Hegel’s desire to ward off contingency as a threat to the restlessness
of a truly dialectical spirit? 2
The first section of the essay assesses the role of contingency in
early modern and romantic arguments about probability, history, and
temporality and, particularly for Hegel, the problem of contingency
as a barrier to the development of spirit or mind. Ian Hacking and
Reinhart Koselleck provide distinctive itineraries for romantic thought
about chance and probability. For Hacking, the mathematical transfor-
mation of chance into the logic of probability signals a profound desire
to tame the unexpected. For Koselleck, the French Revolution is the
modern watershed for inserting chance and the unexpected into the
very notion of historical time. Both views recognize a gradual, often
unwilling divergence from what Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous,
empty time,” that view of history which assumed that it was always the
same everywhere, embedded in a chain of continuities that secured
our sense of who we were (as long as “we” were only Europeans) and
where we belonged.3
Contingency names what happens when chance, rather than a
prescribed order or continuity, is recognized as having a role in the
course of events. Because it interrupts an expected sequence, troubling
notions of causality and even the very idea of the event as something
with a before and after, contingency perplexes efforts to write history
or write about it.4 Alain Badiou’s considerations of being and event turn
on the perplexity of thinking about events via instances in modernity
that effectively unseat expectations about the sequence of events.
One such event for Badiou, as for Koselleck, is the French Revolution
because it opens up a space in time that was not anticipated and that
was marked in turn by other, contingent eruptions, among them the
Terror.5 In spite of William Blake’s hope in his poem Milton for a mo-
ment that Satan cannot find, such moments either affront or gesture
toward the ethics of the future that Percy and Mary Shelley imagine
in works they wrote in Italy between 1819 and 1822.6
The second section of the essay presents Mary Shelley’s Valperga,
written in Italy as she and Percy Shelley imagined better political
worlds than their own, as a fictional intervention in history states what
contingency does to a development that is understood to be linear
and unstoppable. As Tilottama Rajan has observed, the novel offers a
counterfactual narrative about how to disrupt a march of history shaped
by military conquest and authoritarian rule; in doing so, Shelley revisits
questions and philosophical disappointments that her father William

626 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

Godwin explored, first in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice and
later in works of fiction, beginning with Caleb Williams.7 The character
in Mary Shelley’s novel who represents the usual history of conquest
and the defeat of republican possibility is Castruccio, whose career
figures in histories of medieval Italy by Niccolò Machiavelli, J. C. L.
Sismondi, as well as others that Shelley consulted. Looking back on
this history, I surmise, she found there a story often repeated from the
thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries as liberal republics—whether
those of late medieval Florence or modern France—submitted to
conquest and rule.
In reconfiguring historical accounts of Castruccio, Shelley invents
two women, Euthanasia and Beatrice, who recall a whole battery of
powerful and often maligned medieval Italian women, among them
Matilda of Tuscany, Dante Alighieri’s Beatrice, and several mystics
and heretics (some were both). Shelley’s Beatrice is a weak, outcast
version of such women. Euthanasia, by contrast, is by birth, position,
and character the one who might, if she could, halt Castruccio’s career
before he demolishes her hopes for a republican Florence. For this
reason, Euthanasia might be said to mimic the work of contingency in
the expected (and completed) course of events, akin to those swerves
that Lucretius had long before imagined as capable of effecting change
in the nature of things. For the Shelleys, who had read Lucretius, a
political swerve from a monarchical to a democratic society would be
the desired outcome.
In Valperga, the fictional addition of Euthanasia, the aristocrat who
imagines a future democracy for Italy, fails to produce the desired
political swerve in the course of events: both women die and Castruc-
cio carries on to the end of his short but remarkable life, crushing all
contenders. Even so, or perhaps because of this failure, the novel’s
imagined intervention in the historical record has a curious pungency
for readers. Writing against modern histories of failed republican
experiments, Shelley imagines history and time not as a given linear
sequence but as competing narrative possibilities that exceed a single
historical trajectory, much as Shelley’s presentation of the story of
Castruccio repeatedly marks this character’s proleptic resemblance
to Napoleon. By breaking up the march of history, however briefly,
Valperga creates a space for imagining other worlds and outcomes.8
In this fashion Mary Shelley becomes both the future historian of her
own time, as Godwin had urged in the Enquiry, in the service of dis-
interested justice, and one who reflects on her own history by looking
back to late medieval Italy, where hopes for a perpetual peace broke on

Theresa M. Kelley 627

the wheel of military and imperial conquest.9 The novel’s performance
of romantic contingency thereby instantiates a view of history that is,
like Serres’s view of time, “aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating” as its
narrative turns back and projects itself forward.
The local difference which Shelley’s novel makes for thinking
about romantic temporality matters at least as much as the more
global reading of the early modern and modern history of chance and
contingency which is the other focus of my essay. To put this point
more emphatically: the opposition between the local and the global
that Clifford Geertz codified for a generation of scholars suppresses
the relation between these two domains in romanticism, and even at
times in Hegel, whose resistance to the local and the particular in
the name of spirit best captures the idealizing gesture of the era.10
The restlessness of romantic temporality has everything to do with its
sense of local, particular interventions in the movement of time, akin
to Serres’s geological metaphors for the way time works through and
against particular resistances. Whatever else it might be, contingency
is both local and unexpected in that it happens in one moment, creat-
ing unexpected disturbances that in turn may have global effects—or
not, as Shelley’s novel reminds us. Her version of romantic negativity
on this point has, however, significant aftershocks; it also carries a bit-
ter depth charge aimed backward toward romanticism’s unsatisfying
records of the lives of women.

ii. contingency and romantic time

Romanticism inherits an unsteady modern legacy of thinking about

historical time as riddled by chance, the best reading of which was
probability, while the worst was sheer hazard. The channels of this
inheritance are philosophical, mathematical, and, as it were, event
driven. As Hacking and Lorraine Daston have observed, from the
onset of the plague in medieval Europe to its recurrence in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, from the 1660 Lisbon earthquake
to pre-revolutionary anxieties about the revolution that finally reached
France in 1789, the pressure of the aleatory and unbidden became
more insistently identified with the course of events.11 Over the same
period, the philosophical and mathematical development of the laws
of probability from Blaise Pascal to Jakob Bernoulli made the best,
because most rational, case for what might be predicted.
The story begins, Hacking suggests, with Pascal’s wager concerning
the existence of God, which responds pragmatically to the question of

628 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

whether God exists by concluding that it is more advantageous to bet
that God exists than not, for nothing will happen if He doesn’t and
damnation might ensue if He does.12 The theological climate conveyed
by thinking about God in terms of a safe bet is evidently one that had
at some level already concluded that chance or hazard may direct what
happens in the world as much as or more than divine plan. At best,
probability describes what is likely to happen, rather than a temporal
sequence governed by cause and effect, as David Hume argued in
Enquiry into Human Understanding. Even so, Hume insists in the
section on probability that chance does not exist, that it is only our
ignorance of “the real cause of any event” that prompts us to imagine
it has occurred by chance.13
Hacking divides the idea of probability in two: aleatory probability
has to do with whether it is physically possible for X to occur, whereas
epistemic probability concerns belief or knowledge of the probable.14
This unsteady linkage of knowledge with the probable conveys how
thoroughly anxiety about knowing what might happen is embedded
in such questions. In game theory, in juridical proceedings, and in the
mathematical developments that both inquiries helped to advance, the
mirror relation between probability and its unreliable other, chance or
contingency, is both evident and vexing. Jakob Bernoulli’s Ars conjec-
tandi (1713) puts this point succinctly: “a proposition is called necessary,
relative to our knowledge, when its contrary is incompatible with what
we know. It is contingent if it is not entailed by what we know.”15 The
theological undertow of Bernoulli’s claim did not go down easily. In De
mensura sortis (1711) and The Doctrine of Chances (1756), Abraham
de Moivre insisted that words like “fate, necessity, a course of nature,”
words often taken to be synonymous with “chance,” contradict “divine
energy.” Any other idea of chance is evil or, better still, a non-entity,
“a sound utterly insignificant,” or a “mere word.”16
The desire to be certain about the course of events, to link them
in a necessary chain, recurs in the usage of words like “chance” and
“contingency” throughout the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson
defines chance as “fortune, event, luck, misfortune.” Precisely because
the word “contingency” hovers between an idea of the relation be-
tween adjacent or linked events or forms and pure chance, its lexical
fortunes convey much in little about the desire to keep chance in line
or putatively grounded in a shadow image of cause and effect. John-
son specifies this difficulty by defining the adjective “contingent” as
“accidental” or “uncertain” and the substantive as “chance or propor-
tion.”17 In the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), what is contingent is

Theresa M. Kelley 629

“something casual or unusual” that “denotes a conditional event which
may or may not happen, according as circumstances fall out.” Here
contingency is hardly threatening since it may not even happen. This
comfortable distance disappears in the next definition. In geometry,
a tangent is a “contingent” line. It is very much as if we have been
looking at contingent events in a rear view mirror, not realizing that
they are closer than they seem, even touching. So understood, con-
tingency might be said to touch events and temporality in ways that
the logic of probability is never wholly able to domesticate. Here too
“Probability” is presented as something that is harmless, “nothing but
the appearance of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas by the
intervention of proofs whose connexion is not constant or immutable,
or is not perceived to be so; but is, or appears for the most part to be
so; and is enough to induce the mind to judge the proposition to be
true or false, rather than the contrary.”18
Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia elaborates the mathematical and
juridical laws of probability in which chance is allied with fate and
destiny, as in the medieval wheel of fortune where one’s fortune or
chance could be expected, was even fated, to rise and fall. He then
unsettles the definitional picture by suggesting that accidental killing
(also known as “homicide by misadventure”) involves the conjunction
of chance with “the killer’s ignorance or negligence.” What is “con-
tingent” is “something casual, uncertain, or dependent upon chance,”
but it can kill you. In the list of field-specific definitions that follows,
the military usage looks paradoxically and suspiciously unhazardous:
contingency is here “a term of relation for the quota that falls to any
person upon a division,” as in, each nation will supply a contingent
of the total number of forces required to invade an enemy nation. A
similarly fixed application marks its meaning in matters of property
and inheritance; the term “contingency” refers in English usage to
limitations on conveyance or inheritance.19
As if solicitous to rein in the vagaries of chance, the Encyclopèdie
firmly distinguishes between chance and hasard: chance is synonymous
with bonheur (good fortune rather than happiness), it is “hors de notre
portée,” literally, outside what we can carry or manage, hence outside
our control. Yet so defined, chance looks very much like a synonym for
hazard, despite the Encyclopèdie claim that these two terms should not
be confused.20 Eighteenth-century discourse about financial specula-
tion and the probability of favorable outcomes is awash with just this
confusion as writers (and financial speculators) either mark out or
bridge the difference between chance and probability.21

630 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

 For Immanuel Kant, the problem was hardly insignificant. Just after
completing Metaphysics of Morals and under the influence of J. G.
Herder, Kant wrote the defense of freedom of will that became the
opening paragraph of Idea for a Universal History:

Whatsoever difference there may be in our notions of the freedom of

will metaphysically considered, it is evident that the manifestations of
this will, viz., human actions, are as much under the control of universal
laws of nature as any other physical phenomena. It is the province of
History to narrate these manifestations; and, let their causes be ever so
secret, we know that History, simply by taking its station at a distance
and contemplating the agency of the human will upon a large scale,
aims at unfolding to our view a regular stream of tendency in the
great succession of events—so that the very same course of incidents
which, taken separately and individually, would have seemed perplexed,
incoherent, and lawless, yet viewed in their connection and as the
actions of the human species and not of independent beings, never
fail to discover a steady and continuous, though slow, development of
certain great predispositions in our nature. Thus, for instance, deaths,
births, and marriages, considering how much they are separately
dependent on the freedom of the human will, should seem to be
subject to no law according to which any calculation could be made
beforehand of their amount: and yet the yearly registers of these events
in great countries prove that they go on with as much conformity to
the laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.22

In the first study of Kant’s critical philosophy for English readers,

published in 1798, A. F. M. Willich omits the complicating factors in
Kant’s analysis of will: “Determinism is the principle of determining
the will from sufficient internal (subjective) reasons. To obtain this
principle with that of freedom, i.e., absolute spontaneity, occasions
no difficulty.”23 Omitted here are Kant’s distinctions between free-
dom of the will on the metaphysical plane and the constraint which
he argues the “universal laws of nature” impose on human will, laws
whose outcome is suggested by statistical measures that establish the
probability of a pattern of births, deaths, and marriages across time.
As physical beings who marry, give birth, and die, we are subject to
a nature whose inexorable movement is conveyed by statistical prob-
ability. As an incentive for the life of the mind in quest of metaphysical
truths, Kant’s argument is impeccable. It is less satisfying for human
beings living in time who cede freedom of the will in exchange for
statistical probability. Quite apart from the question of whether one
can substitute for the other, this outcome sidesteps the question with
which the discourse of probability was concerned: how to account for

Theresa M. Kelley 631

events in the world such that they do not appear to be simply contin-
gent, the work of chance.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Koselleck argues, the task of
eliminating chance from history had been implicit in historical argu-
ments for a half century. Hegel makes that task explicit:

Philosophical reflection has no other intention than the removal

of the accidental. Chance is the same as external necessity, that is
a necessity which relates to causes which are themselves merely
superficial circumstances. We must seek a general purpose in history,
the ultimate purpose of the world. . . . We must bring to history the
belief and conviction that the realm of the will is not at the mercy of
contingency.24

Hegel’s brief against contingency follows from his recognition that the
world of nature, including its species and their classification, is riddled
with the effects of contingency such that no fixed order of things can
be ascertained. He adamantly separates nature from mind or spirit to
preserve a space in which the will can operate and claim agency as
things in nature cannot.25
The lexical and philosophical history of contingency, chance, and
probability recurs in romantic writing, where it registers a near-somatic
understanding of hazard or chance as the hidden rule (in other words,
the hidden is made to resemble a rule called probability). Such narra-
tives do so by taking chances, telling stories in which chance operates
like a familiar, if unpredictable companion. In The Prelude, William
Wordsworth engages in a fairly chancy management of chance, from
the discarded passage in the two-part Prelude (1799) which character-
izes the assembled “spots of time” as “accidents in flood and field” to
his scattering of sublime chance encounters across later versions of
the poem, including one episode staged on the sands of Leven, where
the poet learns that Robespierre is dead.26 With the Reign of Terror,
like the shallow sea on the sands of Leven, “far retired,” Wordsworth
can proceed, having once again safely housed a chance encounter that
requires some payment in kind for its sublime offering.27
In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, chance
is most fully presented in the dice game (which could as easily and
more truthfully be called a game of “hazard”) that decides the Mari-
ner’s immediate fate. The climate of the voyage seems in some ways
as marked by chance as the poem’s ethical and juridical complaints
about the Mariner, recalling Kant’s claim that the law of probability
governs “oscillations in the weather.”28 Although the laws of probabil-

632 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

ity are teased and strained in gothic fiction, Ann Radcliffe’s novelistic
insistence that the terms of the probable be reinstated by the end
of the narrative suggests a strong fictional wariness of contingency.29
In On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller grants the
conflict between contingency and freedom, noting that transcendental
philosophy requires clearing “form of content” to obtain necessity “in
its pure state, free of all admixture with contingent” (Zufälligen).30
Whether translated as “chance” or “contingency,” Schiller’s German text
uses Zufall and its cognates. At its most potent, it is “formless chance.”
Only once does the modern English translation use contingency or
chance where Schiller does not. It is a key exception: Schiller identi-
fies time as the “condition of all contingent being or becoming.” Here
“contingent” refers to the German abhängiger (“hanging from”).31 If
suspended or becoming being is dependent on time, the distance to
Zufall in time may not be far off.
These glimpses of chance and contingency in romantic writing
re-stage the strong historical premonition that Koselleck identified in
discourse leading up to the Revolution. A remark published in Abbé
Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du
commerce des Européeans dans les deux Indes, but which Koselleck
attributes to Denis Diderot on the basis of manuscript evidence,
reads: “All hear one cry ‘Freedom’. But how can this valuable thing
be secured? what will succeed this revolution? No one knows” (Quelle
sera la suite de cette révolution? On l’ignore).32
By 10 May 1793, Maximilien Robespierre believed he knew what
the Revolution would entail: “The time has come to call upon each to
realize his own destiny. The progress of human Reason has laid the
basis for this great Revolution, and the particular duty of hastening
it has fallen to you” (le tems est arrivé de le rappeler à ses véritables
destinées; les progrès de la raison humaine ont préparé cette grande
révolution, et c’est à vous qu’est spécialement imposé le devoir de
l’accélérer).33 Koselleck has argued by way of such examples that the
onset of modernity is marked by two features: the increasing speed
with which time approaches us and its unknown quality. “Unknown,”
Koselleck argues, “because this accelerated time, i.e., our history,
abbreviated the space of experiences . . . so that even the actuality or
complexity of these unknown quantities could not be ascertained. This
began to be apparent well before the French Revolution.”34
On this view, Robespierre speaks for modernity’s new time, as indeed
Wordsworth himself does in the unpublished Letter to the Bishop of
Llandaff and, more retrospectively and guardedly, in the 1805 Prelude.

Theresa M. Kelley 633

And yet, where Robespierre saw the workings of a Supreme Reason or
Being, his contemporaries saw disaster and an accidental, haphazard
pattern of condemnation and execution that ended only when it finally
curled round, scorpion-like, to sting Robespierre. What interests me
here is the relay between temporal urgency and temporal disturbance
that deepens the romantic inheritance of early modern and Enlighten-
ment thinking about chance and contingency. Diderot’s sense in 1780 of
being unmoored and uncertain about what would occur under the sign
of revolution seems to have sharpened by 1793, after the Republic was
declared and on the eve of the Terror. The list of romantic writers who
in different degrees viewed the Terror as the end of their hopes for the
Revolution is long: Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Coleridge, William
Hazlitt, Blake, Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Germaine de
Staël, and Benjamin Constant, to name only some among many. Those
hopes had been built on optimism about the great Enlightenment
project of perfectibility; in France that optimism for a time survived
even the Terror. In an extraordinary speech after the Terror, P.-C.-F.
Daunou reviewed the development of fields of knowledge before and
during the Revolution, emphasizing the role of the moral and political
sciences in that development:

Paris, 15 germinal de l’an IV [April 1796]: Isolated, and almost without

any support, with neither public schools nor elementary textbooks,
deprived of most of the means of propagation and influence, the moral
and political sciences—strong only in the energy that is provoked by
opposition to oppression, and using time and again the resources that
arise from an instinct for liberty—the moral and political sciences,
whether deceiving tyranny or defying it, prepared our century for the
overwhelming revolution that brings it to a close and which recalls 25
millions of humankind to the exercise of their rights, to the study of
their interests, and to their duties.35

Daunou delivered this speech at the inauguration of the Institut

National to the entire Directory. Among those sitting in the room
were, says Hacking, “almost all the notable artists and scientists who
had (quoting Daunou’s reiterated figure of the revolutionary time as
tempête, or tempest) ‘survived the storms of the revolution.’” Nearly
half of those present who listened to this exhortation on the rights of
humankind were women.36 As one of many such speeches printed in
a more than weekly gazette that reported the course of the Revolu-
tion as an enterprise of speech and legal decision-making from 1789
forward, Daunou’s speech assists the larger project of this and similar

634 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

publications: to create the citizen as a participatory, revolutionary
subject. And so, in the projective imagining of the future that was in
part the work of the Revolution, perfectibility met with an accident
whose face wore a mask like Robespierre and, in some quarters, sur-
vived to tell the tale.
I read this relay between the desire for the future and the con-
tingency that rolls obstacles into the path of that desire as signaling
romanticism’s own accidental history. By 1794, the idea of futurity had
acquired a double, ironic valence in romantic writing on history. As
romantic writers made what they could from the matter of contingent
events, they invented ways to register, direct, recognize, and mytholo-
gize readings of their own time(s) that unseat chronological predict-
ability. David Collings has argued that Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, and
Kant each respond differently to what Godwin came to understand
as the problem of justice. For Godwin, because justice is severely
circumscribed by its incapacity to anticipate contingencies, let alone
the future, it can only be realized by what Collings resonantly charac-
terizes as “the romance of the impossible.”37 Mary Shelley construes a
different, equally negative romance in which her hope for the future
is already in the shadow of an earlier, Italian history that signaled a
powerful, but failed instantiation of that hope.

iii. mary shelley’s valperga

In Valperga Mary Shelley fights back at the disruptive temporality

of her era and life with temporal upheavals of her own. She intervenes
in the historical narrative of Castruccio, an Italian renaissance power
broker who is one model for Machiavelli’s Prince, by adding two
fictional female characters whose eventual demise in the novel tells
much in little about her bitter understanding of women in history.
Shelley’s fictional heroines, dramatize both the narrative possibilities
made available by rupturing a received historical narrative and the
political logic that makes such ruptures inadmissible in the fourteenth
century and in her own, thus echoing Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura,
which argues that a sudden, unexpected interruption might alter the
course of events and thereby alter the nature of things.38
By according these female characters more affect that she does
Castruccio, Shelley makes their presence in the novel seem more
real, more like life, and yet also and paradoxically more resonantly
allegorical than that of Castruccio, the historically real protagonist.
Perhaps because these women characters occupy a charged narrative

Theresa M. Kelley 635

space in which verisimilar passion and allegorical possibility hover,
what happens to them matters more to most readers than Castruccio’s
feats or his death without progeny.39 Like any event that is contingent,
the fictional insertion of Euthanasia and Beatrice into the history of
Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, imagines the possibility of a different
historical development.
The view of history Shelley’s novel retrospectively imagines is sharply
ironic, for it acknowledges that, from the novel’s historical moment in
the fourteenth century to the post-Napoleonic era in Italy and across
Europe, time keeps presenting the same old story in which might rolls
over the ideals of a republican state, as Napoleon (and Robespierre)
did to France and as Castruccio did to the Italian city states and above
all to republican Florence. Hence the novel’s repeated figural notice
of parallels between Castruccio and Napoleon.40 Even when hope
and a sense of possibility occupy the back of beyond in Valperga, its
rhetoric sustains a negated hopefulness, embittered but also committed
to ironic critique or a theatrical spirit of negation that goes beyond
Byronic irony or nihilism. That is to say, Shelley’s negation opens up
a space for thinking critically and productively about how particular,
contingent events or characters might resist the model of history as
juggernaut, which forcibly pushes aside chance interventions, and the
swerve in the course of events that such interventions might initiate.
Near the end of Valperga, the narrator explains what happens to
Euthanasia after Castruccio sends her by boat to exile in Sicily. A
storm comes up, and sentinels later report seeing the wreckage of a
vessel with Euthanasia’s scarf and a few blond hairs still attached to
a broken mast. Mirroring the haste with which the novel reports this
event, the narrative tone is instantly elegiac:

She was never heard of more; even her name perished. She slept in
an oozy cavern of the ocean; the seaweed was tangled with her shining
hair; and the spirits of the deep wondered that the earth had trusted
so lovely a creature to the barren bosom of the sea, which, as an evil
step-mother, deceives and betrays all committed to her care.
Earth felt no change when she died; and men forgot her. . . .
Endless tears might well have been shed at her loss; yet for her none
wept, save the piteous skies, which deplored the mischief they had
themselves committed;—none moaned except the sea-birds that flapped
their heavy wings above the ocean-cave wherein she lay;—and the
muttering thunder alone tolled her passing bell, as she quitted a life,
which for her had been replete with change and sorrow. (437–38)

636 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

This is pastoral elegy at half-mast. Although elements of the natu-
ral world that witness or are responsible for her death weep or
moan—skies, birds, thunder—a key formal mechanism of the genre,
the aggregate term “earth” is not changed by her death (compare the
“heavy change” Milton’s speaker proclaims as one sign of the death of
Lycidas).41 “Men forget her” and “her name perished.” So much for
fame and fortune. Despite the bittersweet invocation of pastoral in
these lines, some readers of the novel have suggested that Euthanasia
is less definitively “lost”—as the subtitle to this chapter puts it (430).
Taking refuge in the euphemistic possibilities of “lost,” they argue that
she is, metaphorically speaking, not dead but asleep in the “oozy cavern
of the ocean,” a figurative equivalent to becoming “a phantasm in the
political unconscious.”42 Here we might recall Kevis Goodman’s sense
that euphemism can undo its desired effect. For although it appears to
smooth, even prettify, an ugly reality, euphemism creates what Good-
man calls an “acoustical unconscious, a reverberation” that carries the
reader away from euphemism, pushed back as it were to a brutality
that is not washed away or submerged.43 Precisely because her name
means “easy death,” Euthanasia’s death by water (or by Castruccio)
calls attention to the likelihood that it was anything but easy, except
perhaps for Castruccio, who has much to gain as a fictional character
once she exits the novel. Buried perforce at sea, in some “oozy cavern,”
Euthanasia’s bloated body and the unseen corpses of her co-conspirators
are thereby exiled from a narrative now controlled by Castruccio, who
has already staged Beatrice’s death euphemistically, as the hallowed
departure of a great woman, complete with hired mourners.44 It is
pertinent to note that Euthanasia had refused to attend that service.
This time she has no choice.
The critical desire to revive Euthanasia, to effect an apotheosis
which the text of the novel specifically refuses, discloses what I take
to be the romantic hope that clings to the fate of this “feudal count-
ess,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley describes her in a letter urging Charles
Ollier to publish his wife’s new novel.45 For countess though she is,
Euthanasia’s advocacy of republican government forecasts hopes that
the Shelleys and Lord Byron identified with the revolutionary politics
of their Italian contemporaries.46 And yet, of course, Euthanasia, like
the other heroine of this novel, the failed prophetess Beatrice (who also
loves Castruccio and also dies), is a figure of romance. As a figure of
romance jettisoned by the Italian history of Castruccio’s rise to power,
Euthanasia negatively marks a vision of Italian society in which ideals
and republican values might rule the day and the body politic.47

Theresa M. Kelley 637

 This explanation is not, however, sufficiently explanatory. What is
it about Euthanasia that demands keeping her alive, even in a virtual
time and space? My response turns on the way her espousal of ideal
republican values works in stubborn opposition to the realpolitik of
Castruccio and his world. From one perspective, the story of Eutha-
nasia and Beatrice presents the posited, then defeated, freedom of
the romantic subject. Valperga is in this sense a stubborn, allegorical
meditation on the inassimilable dialectic suggested by its published
title: Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of
Lucca. The realist affect Shelley gives Euthanasia’s character works
oddly but powerfully to enhance her allegorical appearance as a marker
of the romantic subject under the heel of imperial dominion. For it
is precisely this trafficking between the real and the allegorical that
romantic writers know best.48 While it is true that the title of the novel
was not Mary Shelley’s invention but almost certainly her father’s,
its odd bifurcation performs one of several possible readings of the
novel’s narrative path.49 As Euthanasia’s ancestral palace and kingdom,
Valperga is the scene of her early instruction in and subsequent brief
for republican ideals. Built on rock in the front range of the Appe-
nines, this apparently impregnable stronghold is eventually besieged
and razed by Castruccio’s troops, whose real history is the subject of
the novel’s much longer subtitle.50 Neither term is commensurable
with the other in either the title or the novel. “Valperga” comes first,
at least in the published title, but Castruccio’s part is longer and, in
Mary Shelley and Jane Williams’s view, made more akin to fable and
romance with Godwin’s addition of the tag “the life and adventures
of Castruccio.”51
So schematic a presentation risks moderating a dialectic that neither
Mary Shelley nor Percy Shelley could resolve in other works they were
writing during their years in Italy. Several earlier works by the Shel-
leys, including Percy Shelley’s “Mazenghi,” published in Mary Shelley’s
edition of her husband’s Posthumous Poems, “Lines written among the
Euganean Hills,” Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817),
Frankenstein, and her essay on Giovanni Villani, a Florentine historian
whose work she used in writing Valperga—all these recognize what
Michael Rossington calls “the ironies of republican history” and “the
vagaries of revolutionary politics” that afflict Italy in the fourteenth
century and England and the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth.52
Although Valperga is in many ways a stinging inversion of the ideal-
ist triumphs offered in Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Mary
Shelley’s critique foregrounds the negativity that haunts both Shel-

638 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

leys’ meditations on the incommensurable relation, in different times
and places, between idealism and political reality.53 The utopian or
futurist hope that readers identify with Euthanasia as a virtual if not
bodily presence tends to muffle this negativity before its ideological
and philosophical work is done.
The name “Euthanasia” is the lexical focus and vanishing point for
this negativity. Although it means in the original Greek “a good, easeful
or peaceful death,” the drowning death of Mary Shelley’s Euthanasia
hardly seems to fit this definition, except perhaps in preference to
continuing to live under the circumstances she confronts.54 In other
ways, her death uncannily echoes late-eighteenth- and early-nine-
teenth-century definitions.
Prior to its later nineteenth-century identification with instrumen-
tal death to relieve suffering, the meaning of euthanasia shifts easily,
perhaps all too easily, between euphemism and the fact of death. The
OED definitions and illustrative examples are a case in point. The first
definition echoes the Greek etymology; the third declares the “more
recent,” that is Victorian, meaning, “the action of inducing a gentle
and easy death.” Wedged between these is the second, which hedges
by defining euthanasia as “the means of bringing about a gentle and
easy death.” The enabling vagueness of those means is sustained by
the eighteenth-century phrases used to illustrate this meaning. Hume
pointedly observes in 1742 that “absolute monarchy . . . is the easiest
death, the true Euthanasia of the British Constitution.” A. Young’s
1794 Travels in France puts euphemistic usage uncomfortably close to
the deaths of many: “if [great cities] conduct easily to the grave, they
become the best euthanasia of too much populousness.”55 In Valperga,
killing off Euthanasia by sending her to Sicily in a boat that goes down
in a storm keeps the role of euphemism alive, as it were, in the service
of the state. From its perspective, Euthanasia’s is a merciful death, a
mercy killing because it spares the state by making an accidental death
by drowning do the work that would otherwise have to be done by
Castruccio or his henchmen.
Yet it is also apparent that euphemism serves to keep Euthanasia
alive in the allusive net of texts invoked by her name and the novel’s
narration of her death. The most obvious of these is Asia, the spirit
of love and Prometheus’s beloved in Prometheus Unbound. As Rajan
notes, the “oozy cavern of the ocean” where Euthanasia, euphemisti-
cally speaking, sleeps echoes Percy Shelley’s use of this adjective in
“Ode to the West Wind” to describe the “woods” of the ocean floor.
Euthanasia’s final resting place also echoes the moment in Prometheus

Theresa M. Kelley 639

Unbound, when Panthea, Asia’s sister, does in fact sleep in the arms
of Ione in “the glaucous caverns of old Ocean.”56 In the “Ode,” the
hope for rebirth and renewal hovers over that ocean’s oozy woods. In
Prometheus Unbound, Panthea’s restorative sleep is real, not a gentle
phrase for easeful death. Euthanasia’s death is also bound to peaceful
idylls that Percy Shelley presents as imagined or imaginable respites
from disappointment and worldly struggle. In “Lines among the Eu-
ganean Hills,” the speaker imagines an island retreat from “the wide
and patently allegorical “sea of misery” which is the bitter subject of
this poem. In Epipsychidion, the speaker dreams of an island retreat
where he and his epipsyche might live free of “Famine” and “War”
and become “one” in spirit and will.57
These echoes are powerfully invoked by Euthanasia’s hopeful dream
for the outcome of the Florentine conspiracy against Castruccio. Once
he is saved from death, her final condition for joining the conspiracy,
she imagines that they will go to an island in the sea of Baiae, identi-
fied by the narrator almost as an afterthought as “his prison.” There
Castruccio would learn to love philosophy and obscurity and eventu-
ally revel in the beauty of the natural world, and would recognize that
the erupting Vesuvius “was the emblem of his former life” (413), and
learn from the history of Vesuvius the outcome of his own volcanic
passage over the landscape of Italy. In brief, he would become the
virtual twin soul or epipsyche of Euthanasia. Mary Shelley’s narrator
is quick to point out that this imagined outcome is Euthanasia’s er-
rant fantasy: “thus she dreamed, and thus she cheated herself into
tranquillity?” (413).
One can read the allusive path of these echoes in two directions.
Read backward to Percy Shelley’s earlier writing, they help to keep
Euthanasia alive. Read forward to Valperga, they end in the real world,
where there is no retreat, where Euthanasia’s and Castruccio’s wills
are never joined, and where Euthanasia drowns before reaching the
island of Sicily. My first question, why do readers of Valperga want to
keep Euthanasia alive, here yields to a second: why does Mary Shelley
narrate Euthanasia’s death as she does? My answer has to do with the
kind of failure this character signifies, allegorically speaking, as distinct
from the different failures of the novel’s other protagonists, Castruccio
and Beatrice. The allegorical work of Mary Shelley’s novel performs
the close encounter with realism and history that so often marks al-
legory in the long reach of modernity. Fictions though they are, and
Shelley’s Castruccio is also as much a fiction as a historical figure in
Shelley’s novel, these characters are stamped with a descriptive realism

640 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

that is keyed to their historical moment, hence laden with information
about locales, costume, and characterological dispositions. By imagin-
ing her characters in this way, Mary Shelley inhibits the tendency of
idealism to make supreme fictions. Caught between the idealism for
which Euthanasia speaks and the hard facts of conquest and power
that Castruccio commands, the novel cannot slip the Gordian knot
that binds these two.
Real though he was, as a fictional character Castruccio becomes a
rigid, opaque figure, a limit of contraction in the language of Blakean
and Spenserian allegory, and a thorough-going engine of realpolitik.
Rajan rightly suggests that Mary Shelley was in some sense reluctant to
embrace this outcome.58 By making her Castruccio eight years younger
than his historical namesake, Shelley constructs a longer development
and set of circumstances that shape his adult character. As though
to put off the moment when Castruccio becomes an ambitious and
ruthless conqueror, the narrator identifies several different moments
when the young Castruccio steps toward his adult self, twice each in
books 1 and 2, and once in the last book of the novel.
At the same time, Mary Shelley’s narration seems increasingly
persuaded by a counter-gesture. As the narrative introduces more
evidence of Castruccio’s ambition and cruelty, he begins to look as
much a caricature and cipher as Benedetto Pepi, whose bitter attack
on idealist visions of a Florentine republic, augmented by his greed and
penury, make him in turn a seedier, meaner version of the novel’s male
protagonist. These narrative impulses collectively register the signifi-
cance of Castruccio’s fictional death without heirs. He is, no less that
his unsavory alter ego Pepi, a dead end in the world of the novel.
On the other side of Euthanasia is Beatrice, the failed mystic and
prophet who recalls Dante’s Beatrice and women mystics of late
medieval Italy and Europe, including some who were condemned as
heretics. The men in Mary Shelley’s life admired Shelley’s Beatrice,
whose inspired improvisation evidently recalls Germaine de Staël’s
Corinne, the improvisatrice who seeks to bring Italians of the early
romantic era to a better and more instructive understanding of the
finest moments in their history and character.59 Like so many of the
female mystics of the middle ages, Shelley’s Beatrice is a perplexing
figure, believed a saint by some and yet demonically possessed by
others. Unlike the chaste Beatrice of Dante’s Vita Nuova, the evident
sexuality of Shelley’s Beatrice complicates her sanctity in ways that
render precisely the anxiety about women and power, whether spiritual
or political, in the late middle ages.

Theresa M. Kelley 641

 As the novel chronicles Beatrice’s affair with Castruccio, his aban-
donment, her descent into pilgrimage and self-neglect, her capture
by an evil man who tortures her and other captives, her rescue by
Euthanasia, her declaration of Manichean principles, soon succeeded
by her seeming willingness to abandon this view of the world to
return to Catholicism and the convent—and so on—until her miser-
able, deluded death, the narrator misses no opportunity to specify
the weak-mindedness of this doomed woman. Rajan suggests that
in abandoning Beatrice to the forces of evil and psychic dissolution,
Mary Shelley “loses confidence in her own imagination.”60 Certainly
she might have done otherwise. Historical accounts that she consulted
while writing Valperga describe medieval women who were religious
mystics and reformers in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.61 To be sure,
these accounts tend to be more critical than exuberant about the role of
women in medieval Italian mysticism and religious reform. Sismondi’s
History of the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages, uneasily describes
the Paterin heresy—presented in the novel as a benevolent form of
Manicheanism that Beatrice adopts.62
Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Dissertazioni sopra le Antichita Ital-
iane, which Mary Shelley consulted extensively, taking copious notes
on points she would later use in the novel, comments at some length
about religious women who claimed to be inspired by God. In the first
edition of Valperga, Shelley reproduces Muratori’s judgment:

These inspired women first appeared in Italy after the twelfth century,
and have continued even until our own days. After giving an account of
their pretensions, Muratori gravely observes, “We may piously believe
that some were distinguished by supernatural gifts, and admitted to the
secrets of heaven; but we may justly suspect that the source of many
of their revelations, was their ardent imagination, filled with ideas of
religion and piety.”63

Shelley’s narrative decision to present Beatrice as a problematic en-

thusiast may register more than a slippage in imaginative power. The
ruin and death of de Staël’s Corinne suggested to an entire generation
of romantic readers, including Mary Shelley, that female prophets and
improvisers, English as well as Italian, tend to experience troubled
middles and come to bad ends. From the vantage point of her life
and career, Beatrice’s mix of religious inspiration or enthusiasm with
passionate sexuality makes her a volatile commodity in a novel writ-
ten by the lover become wife of Percy Shelley and the daughter of
Mary Wollstonecraft, the double bogey of female sexual appetite and

642 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

revolutionary zeal or, as it was pejoratively called, “enthusiasm.”64
Even so, Shelley’s critical portrait of Beatrice looks like more than
self-camouflage. As a character whose reliance upon inspiration and
idealist vision makes her unavailable to reason, to restraint, Beatrice is
malleable for good or for ill. As such, she is an exaggerated figure of
idealism as prey, as subject to the sway of inspiration, as self-deluded.
It is evidently strategic that Beatrice’s weakness throws Euthanasia’s
strength into high relief. Engaged to Castruccio and linked to him by
an intimacy founded in their childhood friendship, Euthanasia nonethe-
less resists his will to power (which he disguises as a desire to protect
her from the slings of his outrageous fortune), on the grounds that
his ambitions and actions offend her republican ideals. Beatrice, in
contrast, desires only to live with and for him, even to the extreme of
celebrating his acts of murder. Euthanasia resists Castruccio’s winning
ways at enormous cost and, from the perspective of realpolitik, she
fails. Like Beatrice, Euthanasia is written out of the history of heroic
conquest or imperialism—take your pick—that Castruccio represents.
That is to say, although Euthanasia exercises the consistency and moral
stubbornness that are, Charles Taylor has argued, key traits of the
ethical, modern self, doing so gives her no traction, no power to move
events or other actors in the direction of her democratic hopes.
Euthanasia’s status as a political leader echoes a surprisingly rich
history of women rulers in late medieval Italy, notably Mathilda of
Tuscany, who built at least one castle that she expected would be im-
pregnable, as well as subsequent Medici women who ruled Florence
at various times, either officially, as regents for a minor male heir, or
in place of their absent lords. Speaking favorably about women who
rule, Baldassare Castiglione’s Lord Medici nods to this precedent.
Looking backward to this moment, Shelley chooses to emphasize the
failure, not the success, of Euthanasia as such a leader. That failure
counts hard against romantic hopes for the thinking, autonomous,
liberal subject of modernity. According to Taylor, the traits of the
liberal subject include a disposition toward self-mastery governed by
reason, which in Kantian fashion assists the self in becoming disengaged
enough to reflect on oneself, thereby becoming the ironic, doubled
consciousness of the romantic and modern subject. Reason regulates
desire and its agent, the imagination, by asserting its priority within
the mind over against earlier tendencies to surrender the self and its
agency to external forces, including magic. Thus the work of reason in
modernity is to help the self achieve radical individuation, figured as
inner depth or an inexhaustible inner domain. As one might imagine,

Theresa M. Kelley 643

this view of the emergence of the modern self also imagines “a history
of the narrative forms of human life” in which individuals proceed
toward self-discovery even as they acknowledge their connection to
the past as part of “the whole human story.”65
Among the protagonists of Valperga, only Euthanasia conveys the
sense of an inner life connected to a view of history that is private but
also social and political. Whether seeking to persuade Castruccio to
adopt her republican vision of the future of Italy, or trying to reason
Beatrice back to psychic steadiness and sanity, Euthanasia embodies the
modern and romantic understanding of the self and its inner capacities.
Generically, Euthanasia’s speeches work against the romance that is
one element of Mary Shelley’s plot. Whereas Beatrice’s inner life is
unstable, measured in extremes and Castruccio’s is nonexistent, Eutha-
nasia holds the parts of her history and inner being together as much
as she can, even as Castruccio murders Florentine compatriots and
close relatives and destroys the Castle of Valperga, and even when she
knows the conspiracy will be betrayed by the unsavory Tripaldi.66
In the world of Valperga, then, Euthanasia cultivates her reason in
ways that predict the best hope of romanticism and the modern demo-
cratic state. No wonder readers have read the novel’s last paragraphs
on her death euphemistically to argue that although she is “lost,” she
remains as a virtual presence available to the future. Writing in that
future, Mary Shelley is more skeptical, even negative about saving
Euthanasia and what she represents. Recall these lines at the end of
the chapter that concludes her part of the narrative: “Earth felt no
change when she died; and men forgot her. . . . Endless tears might
well have been shed at her loss; yet for her none wept, save the piteous
skies” (438). Better to be “lost” in the “oozy cavern of the ocean” than
given a state burial like the one Castruccio orders for Beatrice and
Euthanasia refuses to attend. Buried like that, the self is indeed lost.
Although there is no body, the textual and literary sign of Euthanasia’s
death, the elegiac features of the paragraphs that announce her loss
and likely death by drowning, cannot be wished away. They indicate
the sharply negative dialectics of Mary Shelley’s representation of
republican idealism and the status of women in fourteenth-century
Italy, and in her own historical moment. The peculiar energy created
by that dialectics and readers’ resistance to it constitute the delayed
temporal site of Shelley’s novel as a meditation on the interpellation
of different moments in time.
Thus if Euthanasia embodies the romantic hope for an emancipa-
tory political culture in which an inner self might live and prosper,

644 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

the novel refuses to protect or ratify this hope either in the historical
moment in which it is set or in the romantic future. In the paragraphs
that narrate the end of Euthanasia’s life after she is “lost” at sea (430),
these hopes cannot find the body they require to live and act. Writing
as much against her own idealisms as those of Percy Shelley, Mary
Shelley offers here another version of what David Clark has described
as “suspicions about idealism’s triumphant faith in the power of the
philosophical imaginary” in Friedrich Schelling. Idealisms have no
body or, more precisely, the world of realpolitik is not willing to let
that body and spirit go on. What Clark identifies in Schelling as “the
violent exclusion of an alterity figured as feminine” aptly captures
Euthanasia’s predicament.67
When readers of the novel try to imagine Euthanasia alive, in some
form, they express a utopian desire for a world in which Euthanasia
might live. As Clark says of Schelling, this longing “promises . . . a form
of desire that refuses to absorb and reinvest” its loss. As such, it is
“an unresolved remainder,” “a negativity that will not be economized
by the engine of the dialectic.”68 In its most consistent and sustained
articulations, Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics similarly recognizes
the flicker of utopian desire that is registered when a work is troubled
by a formal incoherence between its desires and the imperfect form
available to represent those desires. In other words, the loss and
failure of Euthanasia might be thought of as formal markers for the
incoherence of republican idealism in Castruccio’s life and times and
in the era in which Shelley lived and wrote.
From the perspective Adorno’s negative dialectics makes avail-
able, the shortcomings and incommensurable desires of an object
of inquiry are not so much failures as they are haunting markers for
what is most desired and most unavailable. If Euthanasia’s death
cannot be economized within a dialectic that saves readers from the
negative truths of the novel’s outcome, it remains available to mark
a cautionary, doubled reminder (and remainder) of utopian desire
and its defeats. For Shelley’s novel binds the story of Castruccio to
the failure of revolutionary projects in her romantic present, a failure
that includes the shortfall in “the revolution in female manners” which
Wollstonecraft had projected.69 In Shelley’s novel, then, the aesthetic
operates much as Adorno was later to suggest it might: by offering
“the reflected glimmer of life free from oppression: in its defiance of
ruin it takes the side of hope.”70 If it is anachronistic to read Shelley
via Adorno in this way, or to read Adorno via Mary rather than Percy
Shelley, let this anachronism mark romanticism’s persuasive as well as
difficult suture to our cultural moment.71
Theresa M. Kelley 645
 In Valperga, Castruccio’s embodiment of a lockstep historical
progress of conquest and mastery finally overcomes the interruption
created by the fictional Beatrice and Euthanasia. If their addition to
Castruccio’s history creates a catchpoint where the course of events
might be diverted, this project evidently fails. That failure marks the
realpolitik of Mary Shelley’s historical understanding and idealism. It
also inhabits a temporality that is uneven and porous such that one
can imagine passageways backward and forward in time. This sense of
time passing is haunted, like Serres’s geological figure and the rhetoric
of the French Revolution, by the proximity of “temps” as both weather
and time to tempest as a climactic figure for an unsettled history in
which the geological event is always a rupture. In this romantic universe
contingency is not, as Hegel would have it, what inhibits freedom, but
rather what creates openings for imagining how to blast away the self-
satisfied dead end of an undifferentiated and complacent view of history
as what has always been the case, what Benjamin called “homogeneous
empty time.” Invoking Robespierre and the French Revolution, Ben-
jamin argues that “the time of the present” can potentially “blast . . .
out of the continuum of history.”72 In Valperga Shelley presents the
failure of this revolutionary and emancipatory project, but by insuring
that this failure is indelibly marked, she also points, by a via negativa
that is thoroughly her way, to an emancipatory future imagined and
chastened by its past.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
notes
1
Michel Serres, “Science and the Humanities: The Case of Turner,” trans. Catherine
Brown and William Paulson, in SubStance 26.2 (1997): 15–16.
2
My argument against a fixed romantic temporality or chronology is allied to re-
considerations of the absolute in Tilottama Rajan and Arkady Plotnitsky, ed., Idealism
without Absolutes (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004): Rajan (“Toward a Cultural Idealism:
Negativity and Freedom in Hegel and Kant,” 51–71) emphasizes Kant’s and Hegel’s
contributions to romantic aesthetic resistance to limits, categories, concepts; Andrzej
Warminski (“Allegories of Symbol: On Hegel’s Aesthetics,” 39–50) examines that
dimension of Hegel’s thought which wavers about its kingdom of ends and its impli-
cations for his view of symbolic and romantic art; Plotnitsky (“Curvatures: Hegel and
the Baroque,” 113–34) directs his unusual defense of Hegelian anti-materialism via
the baroque, Leibnizian view of the future as folded inside the manifold of spirit and
matter; and David Farrell Krell (“Three Ends of the Absolute: Schelling, Hölderlin,
Novalis,” 135–60) tracks philosophical alliances of the absolute with heterogeneity
(Friedrich Schelling) and “asymptotic approximation” (Novalis).
3
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in his Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 261. James

646 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

Chandler experiments with, and in a sense adopts, this phrase to describe key mo-
ments in English romanticism in England in 1819 (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press,
1998), 67–72, 85–91.
4
See Jon Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers: On Necessity and Contin-
gency in Romantic Narrative Theory,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities
of Genre, ed. Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998),
21–38.
5
See Alan Badiou, L’Être et L’Evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 201–2; and Reinhart
Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 49–57.
6
See William Blake, Milton, vol. 5, Blake’s Illuminated Books, ed. Robert N. Es-
sick and Joseph Viscom (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), plate 35, line 42,
page 193.
7
In Shelley: The Last Phase (London: Hutchinson, 1953), Ivan Roe describes the
political climate of Italy at the time the Shelleys lived there and observed radical political
efforts in Italy (Naples) and beyond (Spain). See also my “Percy Bysshe Shelley: Life and
Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 17–34; Rajan, “Between Romance and
History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley’s Valperga,”
in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001), 88–102; and Rajan, “Framing the Corpus,” Studies
in Romanticism 39 (2000): 511–31. In her forthcoming book England’s First Fam-
ily of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 2007), Julie Carlson traces the compositional and psychic histories of
Mary Shelley’s relation to William Godwin and other family members. David Collings
characterizes the problem of justice and contingency that Mary Shelley inherits from
Godwin in “The Romantic of the Impossible: William Godwin in the Empty Place of
Reason,” ELH 70 (2003): 847–74.
8
See Gottfried Leibniz, “The Source of Contingent Truths,” in Philosophical Essays,
ed. and trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 98–101;
Michael Rossington, “Future Uncertain,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, 103–18; Joseph
W. Lew, “God’s Sister: History and Ideology in Valperga,” in The Other Mary Shelley,
ed. Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor, and Esther Schor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993),
159–81; Linda Hutcheon, “The Politics of Impossible Worlds,” in Fiction Updated:
Theories of Functionality, Narratology and Poetics, ed. Calin-Andrei Michailescu and
Walid Hamarneh (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1996), 213–25; and Ruth Ronen,
“Are Fictional Worlds Possible?” in Fiction Updated, 21–29.
9
See Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern
Morals and Happiness, ed. Isaack Kraminick (Harmmondsworth: Penguin, 1976),
311–12.
10
See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthro-
pology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Anna Tsing develops a more contentious and
permeable account of the local and the global in her Friction (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 2005).
11
See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1975) and The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990);
and Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1988).
12
See Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 78.

Theresa M. Kelley 647

 13
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning
the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), 56; see also 96.
14
See Hacking, Emergence of Probability, 12, 123, 137.
15
Jakob Bernoulli, Ars conjectandi (Basle, 1713), quoted in Hacking, Emergence
of Probability, 150.
16
Abraham de Moivre, Doctrine of Chances (De mensura sortis, seu, de probabilitate
eventuum in ludis a casu fortuito pendentibus), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society 27 (1711): 213, quoted in Hacking, Emergence of Probability, 171.
17
Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (London: 1795), s.v.,
“chance.”
18
Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), s.v., “contingent.”
19
Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia (London: W. Strahan, 1778–1788), s.v., “contin-
gent.” See also OED, compact ed. (1971), s.v., “contingency,” def. 2, 4.
20
Encyclopédie (1751–1772), s.v., “chance,” “bonheur.”
21
See Thomas Kavanagh, Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1993); Paula Backscheider, ed., Probability, Time, and Space
in Eighteenth-Century Literature (New York: AMS Press, 1979); and Daston.
22
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, in
On History, trans. L. W. Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 11–12. The transla-
tion given here is Hacking’s amended version of Beck’s translation. See Hacking, Taming
of Chance, 15. Kant responds to J. G. Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte
der Menschheit. For a critique of Hacking’s thesis, see Douglas Patey, Probability and
Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), 266–73.
23
A. F. M. Willich, “Glossary of Argument,” in Elements of the Critical Philosophy
(1798; repr., London: Garland, 1977), 154, quoted in Hacking, Taming of Chance,
152.
24
G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Amherst, NY: Pro-
metheus Books, 1991), 10, quoted in Koselleck, 126. The first German edition was
published posthumously in G. W. F. Hegel’s Werke, ed. Phillip Marheineke, 18 vol.
(Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1832–1845).
25
For a discussion of Hegel’s critique of nature, see my “Romanticism Bites Back:
Adorno and Romantic Natural History,” European Romantic Review 15.2 (2004):
193–204, and “Adorno / Nature / Hegel,” in Language without Soil: Adorno and Late
Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham Univ. Press,
forthcoming).
26
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805 and 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth,
M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 1799: book 1, lines 289,
280, page 8. For the sands of Leven, see the 1805 Prelude, book 10, line 525, page
386. See Peter Manning’s trenchant account of the allusive passage of this phrase in
Wordsworth’s poetry in “Reading Wordworth’s Revisions: Othello and the Drowned
Man,” Studies in Romanticism 22 (1983): 3–28.
27
Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), book 10, line 529, page 386. For a fuller analysis,
see my Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1988), 118–19.
28
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in Coleridge’s Poetry
and Prose, ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano (New York:
Norton, 2004), 58–99.

648 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

 29
Margaret Russett examines the unsettled relation between the probable, improb-
able, and Enlightenment interpretation in “Narrative as Enchantment in The Mysteries
of Udolpho,” ELH 65 (1998): 159–86.
30
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkin-
son and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 86n.
31
Schiller, 17, 72–73.
32
Abbé Raynal, Histoire Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du commerce
des Européens dans les deux Indes, 5th ed., 7 vol. (Maestricht: Jean Edme Dufour and
P. Roux, 1777) 4:488, quoted and translated in Koselleck, 24 and 278n. Koselleck cites
manuscript evidence that Denis Diderot wrote the passage.
33
Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres complèts, ed. M. Bouloiseau, 10 vol. (Paris: Press-
es Universitaires de France, 1958), 9:495, quoted and translated in Koselleck, 5.
34
Koselleck, 16–17.
35
P.-C.-F. Daunou, Gazette nationale, ou Le Moniteur universel, no. 203 (12 April
1796), 809, quoted in Hacking, Taming of Chance, 35.
36
Hacking, Taming of Chance, 35.
37
Collings, 849.
38
The collated reading lists editors Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert append
to Mary Shelley’s Journals (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987) indicate that
both Shelleys read Lucretius—Percy in 1816 and 1819, and Mary in June and July of
1820. A year later, she was reading portions of Valperga to family and friends.
39
This affect prompts Curran, among other readers, to place the two women in the
foreground of her assessment of the novel. See Curran, “Valperga,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003),
103–15.
40
The comparison to Napoleon is the most emphatic when Castruccio strategically
asks for a co-consul to mitigate evidence of his own ambition. The narrator notes
with irony Castruccio’s hidden “plan of conduct” (Mary Shelley, Valperga, ed. Rajan
[Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1988], 162). Hereafter cited parenthetically
by page number.
41
John Milton, “Lycidas,” in John Milton: Paradise Regained, the Minor Poems and
Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey Press, 1937), line 37.
42
In her introduction to Valperga, Rajan quotes from the novel (“But she does not
die: she is ‘lost’ and ‘never heard of more’”) to conclude that Euthanasia becomes “a
phantasm in the political unconscious” (38). See also Rossington: “But she is inde-
structible too, ‘lost,’ not killed” (118).
43
Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 2004), 139.
44
In England’s First Family of Writers, Carlson notes Godwin’s call in his “Essay
on Sepulchres” for history to perform what Carlson calls “enlightened necromancy, a
public raising of the dead in the service of national mourning and renewal” (150). In
Valperga Mary Shelley ironizes Castruccio’s use of just such a ritual to put his stamp
on the history of his life and times.
45
Percy Shelley to Charles Ollier, 25 September 1821, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 2:353.
46
See Rajan, “Romance and History,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, 99; and Ross-
ington, 103.
47
See Rajan, introduction to Valperga, 18–22, and “History and Romance,” in Mary
Shelley, 90–96.

Theresa M. Kelley 649

 48
See my Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997),
93–175.
49
In manuscript the novel was titled Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Godwin kept this
title late into protracted negotiations with possible publishers. See Mary Shelley to Jane
Williams, 10 April 1823, in The Letters of Mary Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vol.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 1:331; Bennett, “The Political Philosophy
of Mary Shelley’s Historical Novels: Valperga and Perkin Warbeck,” in Evidence of the
Imagination, ed. Donald Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Bennett (New York: New York
Univ. Press, 1978), 354–71; ed. Jane Blumberg, with Nora Crook, Valperga, by Mary
Shelley, vol. 3, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (London: Pickering and
Chatto, 1996), xiii and xvii; and Curran, ed., Valperga, by Mary Shelley (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), xxi.
50
See the map of the novel’s terrain in Blumberg and Crook, ed. Valperga, x.
51
See Mary Shelley to Jane Williams, 10 April 1823, in Letters, 1:331n.
52
Rossington, 112.
53
Mary Favret observes that the antithetical relation between Valperga and Pro-
metheus Unbound contributes to a generic disposition that will characterize distinctions
between the novel and poetry for the rest of the nineteenth century in “Mary Shelley’s
Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus,” in The Other Mary Shelley, 17–38.
Deidre Lynch notes Shelley’s negotiations between history and fiction in Valperga and
her other historical novels in “Historical Novelist,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Mary Shelley, 137–44.
54
Jonathan Wordsworth notes the perplexity of Euthanasia’s name in his introduction
to Valperga, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (New York: Woodstock, 1995), n.p.
55
OED, compact ed., s.v., “euthanasia,” def. 1, 3, 2.
56
Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil R. Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), act 2, scene
1, line 44, page 236. Rajan notes the similarity to Panthea’s account of Asia sleeping
to urge that Euthanasia is similarly and archetypally stored in a cave, like a fossil or
preserved type (Rajan, ed., Valperga, 467n).
57
Percy Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” in Poetry and Prose of Percy Bysshe Shelley, lines
455–64, 573–77, and 584–85, quoted in Rajan, ed., Valperga, 465n. Rajan suggests that
the ending of Valperga forecasts the island survival of lovers in Lord Byron’s The Island,
published in 1823, after Mary Shelley had completed the manuscript of Valperga and
sent it to William Godwin so that he might get it published. Byron’s poem imagines
another lovers’ escape, this one in the aftermath of the mutiny of the Bounty, to live in
an underwater cave. In the aftermath of Percy Shelley’s death, Byron’s poem exercises its
own wish fulfillment. See Rajan, ed., Valperga, 467, 56n. After Percy Shelley drowned
in the summer of 1822, Mary remarked that the story of Euthanasia’s death seemed in
retrospect (the novel was completed in 1821) an uncanny prophecy of her husband’s
drowning. (Mary Shelley to Jane Williams, 12 January 1823, in Letters, 1:307).
58
See Rajan, ed., Valperga, 34n, 42n.
59
For a discussion of Valperga and Corinne, see Kari Lokke, “Sibylline Leaves:
Mary Shelley’s Valperga and the Legacy of Corinne,” in Cultural Interactions in the
Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. Gregory Maertz (New
York: Univ. of New York Press, 1998), 157–73.
60
Rajan, ed., Valperga, 23
61
Crook’s “Introductory Note” (in Blumberg and Crook, ed., Valperga, xi–xii, xv–xvii)
and transcriptions in The ‘Charles the First’ Draft Notebook (vol. 12, The Bodleian

650 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley

Shelley Manuscripts, ed. Donald Reiman [New York: Garland, 1991], 396–422) identify
the authors, works, and passages which Mary Shelley consulted and adapted for Valp-
erga. Two of the Renaissance accounts that Shelley knew, Giovanni Villani’s Chroniche
Fiorentine (see a partial English translation, Villani’s Chronicle, trans. Rose E. Selfe
[London: Archibald Constable and Co, 1906], 92–95) and Baldessar Castiglione’s The
Book of the Courtier (trans. Charles Singleton [New York: Doubleday, 1959], 236–37),
mention women who ruled wisely. See Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Lucrezia Tornabuoni:
Sacred Narratives, ed. and trans. Jane Tylus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2001), 31–36,
as well as general introduction to the series in which this translation appears, 12–14.
Two of Shelley’s sources, Muratori and Sismondi, mention women mystics who claimed
alliance or identity with divinity. Modern scholars describe the volatile public reception
of women mystics in the late medieval period. See Bernard McGinn, The Flowering
of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 113–265; Barbara Newman, From Virile
Woman to WomanChrist (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) and God
and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ.
of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); and Paul La Chance, Angela of Foligno: Complete Works
(New York: Paulist Press, 1993).
62
Rajan notes Sismondi’s discussion of the Paterins; see Rajan, ed., Valperga,
461n.
63
Muratori, Dissertazioni, 3:182, translated by Mary Shelley, in Blumberg and Crook,
ed., Valperga, 136–37n. Crook identifies Joanna Southcott, who believed she was preg-
nant with a Messiah, among those Romantic women whose prophetic inclinations and
claims disturbed arguments about women’s education and capacities.
64
See, for example, Edmund Burke’s influential critique of revolutionary enthusiasm
in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1993), 72. Jonathan Mee assesses the impact of Burke’s critique in Romanti-
cism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2003), 87.
65
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), 389.
66
Neither Beatrice nor Castruccio come anywhere near the terms Taylor invokes to
characterize the modern self. Beatrice is subject to self-delusion and at best putative
magic that is, the witch Bindo’s admits, mostly craft, guesswork, and luck, a nice irony
in a novel that explores the instrumental possibilities of the aleatory. Beatrice is above
all not autonomous—she conspicuously lacks a consistent, reliable inner domain and
the capacity for disengaged reflection. Castruccio presents a problematic autonomy
grounded in a will to achieve the domination he seeks. There is no room here for the
degree of disengaged reflection that Taylor contends is necessary to the ethical develop-
ment of the modern self. To cite one episode among many, consider Castruccio’s brief
affair with Beatrice and his even briefer, highly mediated reflection on its effects on
her, on his pledge to Euthanasia. He repents—for a day and a night—and figures he
has paid his “mulct”—a term which implies both a compulsory fine and the suggestion
that it is unfairly exacted. In the same passage he compares himself (affirmatively) to
Benedetto Pepi, a character “so low and contemptible” that Castruccio decides “he
could again unabashed raise his eyes” (236). On other occasions—murders, razing the
castle of Valperga, and so on—Castruccio does not practice even this much penance,
which would require a degree of disengaged reflection that is alien to his character.
67
David Clark, “Mourning Becomes Theory: Schelling and the Absent Body of
Philosophy,” in “Schelling and Romanticism,” ed. David S. Ferris, Praxis (June 2000),
http://www.rc.umd.edu/Praxis.

Theresa M. Kelley 651

 68
Clark, n.p.
69
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Vindications,
ed. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press,
1997), 324.
70
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 296.
71
Percy is the Shelley more typically aligned with radical critique. See Robert
Kaufman’s analysis of Percy Shelley’s political commitments in “Red Kant; or, the
Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno and Jameson,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000):
682–724.
72
Benjamin, 261.

652 Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley