The Translator’s Invisibility

Yet Shelley’s authorship comes back to worry the ideological standpoint of Tarchetti’s intervention by raising the issue of gender. To be effective as a subversion of bourgeois values that deterritorialized the Italian literary standard, his text was required to maintain the fiction of his authorship, referring to Shelley’s tale only in the vaguest way (“imitation”). At the same time, however, this fiction suppressed an instance of female authorship, so that the theft of Shelley’s literary creation had the patriarchal effect of female disempowerment, of limiting a woman’s social agency. This would seem to be a consequence which Tarchetti did not anticipate: {167} some of his other fiction explicitly addressed male domination of women and the social construction of gender, whether in the graphic depiction of Paolina’s oppression or in the gender dislocations of his fantastic experiments (Caesar 1987). Most importantly, the tale he chose to plagiarize interrogates patriarchal images of male power and female weakness. Grounded in an antifeminist suppression of Shelley’s authorship, Tarchetti’s plagiarism nonetheless circulated her feminist fictional project in Italian culture. This ideological contradiction is further complicated by the fact that Tarchetti’s text is a translation. In order for Shelley’s tale to perform its political function in a different culture, it underwent a radical transformation that was simultaneously faithful and abusive, that both reproduced and supplemented the English text. The clearest indication of this uneven relationship appears in the subtle differences introduced by the Italian version: they questioned the class and racial ideologies which informed Shelley’s tale.

III

Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” is a first-person narrative in which an assistant to the sixteenth-century alchemist Cornelius Agrippa laments drinking the elixir of immortality. The opening sentence provokes the distinctive hesitation of the fantastic by citing a date that glanced at the English reader’s reality before suddenly establishing an unreal chronology: “July 16, 1833.—This is a memorable anniversary for me; on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year!” (Shelley 1976:219). The text aims to suspend the reader between the two registers of fantastic discourse, the mimetic and the marvelous, by representing the circumstances surrounding the assistant’s fateful action, particularly his relationship with the woman he loves and ultimately marries. The fantastic premise of immortality leads to a number of satirical exaggerations by which patriarchal gender representations are thrown into confusion.

By assigning the immortality to a male narrator, Shelley’s text turns it into a fantastic trope for male power, initiating a critique of patriarchy which resembles Mary Wollstonecraft’s. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that the “bodily strength [which] seems to give man a natural superiority over woman […] is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built” (Wollstonecraft 1975:124). Shelley’s fantastic narrative questions {168} male physical superiority by setting up the assistant as the unstable position from which the action becomes intelligible. There is doubt about whether he is in fact physically superior. His “story” is framed by the fundamental question, “Am I immortal?” (Shelley 1976:219, 229), and interrupted by several inconclusive meditations on the authenticity and effectiveness of Cornelius’s elixir. The value of male physical superiority is unsettled by the assistant’s contradictory representation of the alchemical science that may have made him immortal. At first, alchemy is stigmatized as unnatural and heretical. We hear the “report” of the “accident” involving Cornelius’s “scholar, who, unawares, raised the foul fiend during his master’s absence and was destroyed,” with the result that “all his scholars at once deserted him,” and “the dark spirits laughed at him for not being able to retain a single mortal in his service” (ibid.:219–220). The assistant seems to accept this association of alchemy with witchcraft: “when Cornelius came and offered me a purse of gold if I would remain under his roof, I felt as if Satan himself tempted me” (ibid.:220). In the midst of this passage, however, he drops the suggestion that the “report” may be “true or false” (ibid.:219); and later in the narrative, after Cornelius dies, this skepticism reappears to exculpate the alchemist—and reinforce the doubt concerning the assistant’s immortality: