The Translator’s Invisibility

I derided the notion that he could command the powers of darkness, and laughed at the superstitious fears with which he was regarded by the vulgar. He was a wise philosopher, but had no acquaintance with any spirits but those clad in flesh and blood.

(ibid.:226)

The uncertainty which Shelley’s text generates about male physical superiority is maintained by the characterization of the assistant. He is a weak, vacillating figure, dominated by the woman he loves, at times ridiculous, a most unlikely candidate for immortality. His name is “Winzy,” which, as Charles Robinson observes, is related to “winze,” the Scottish word for curse, but which also “might suggest that the protagonist of this story is a comic character” (Shelley 1976:390). After listening to his friends’ “dire tale” of the “accident,” Winzy’s reaction to Cornelius’s offer of employment is sheer slapstick: “My teeth chattered—my hair stood on end:—I ran off as fast as my trembling knees would permit” (ibid.:220). Winzy’s characterization satirizes the ideological basis of patriarchy in biological determinism because his {169} physical superiority is not innate, but an error: he drinks the elixir of immortality only because Cornelius has deceptively told him that it is a philter to cure love. Since part of the comedy in Winzy’s character derives from his utter lack of psychological control, the satire also extends to a distinctively bourgeois version of patriarchal ideology, the link between male power and the individualistic concept of the free, unified subject. Winzy’s fearful retreat from Cornelius’s workshop leaves him with so little presence of mind that he lapses into poverty and must be browbeaten by his love Bertha in order to return to work: “Thus encouraged—shamed by her—led on by love and hope, laughing at my late fears, with quick steps and a light heart, I returned to accept the offers of the alchymist, and was instantly installed in my office” (ibid.:220–221). Because Winzy is so submissive to Bertha, so cowered by the fear of her rejection, he endures her “inconstancy” and can gain the “courage and resolution” to act only when he is deceived that the potion he drinks cures him of his unhappy love (ibid.:221, 224). Winzy never possesses the inner autonomy of male power; he is in fact a man who does not want any power, who by the end of his narrative deeply regrets his longevity.

Shelley’s tale follows Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique most closely in the characterization of Bertha. Just as Wollstonecraft finds male domination most oppresssive of women in the affluent classes because “the education of the rich tends to render them vain and helpless” (Wollstonecraft 1975:81), so Shelley’s text marks an unfortunate change in Bertha when her parents die and she is adopted by “the old lady of the near castle, rich, childless, and solitary” (Shelley 1976:220). Living in the aristocratic splendor of a “marble palace” and “surrounded by silk-clad youths—the rich and gay,” Bertha becomes “somewhat of a coquette in manner,” and her relationship with the poor Winzy is endangered (ibid.:220–221). Women develop “coquettish arts,” Wollstonecraft argues, because they assimilate the patriarchal image of themselves as the passive object of male desire: “only taught to please, women are always on the watch to please, and with true heroic ardour endeavor to gain hearts merely to resign or spurn them when the victory is decided and conspicuous” (Wollstonecraft 1975:115, 147). Hence, Bertha’s change is manifested in her devious and perverse manipulation of Winzy:

Bertha fancied that love and security were enemies, and her pleasure was to divide them in my bosom. […] She slighted me in a thousand ways, yet would never acknowledge herself to be in the {170} wrong. She would drive me mad with anger, and then force me to beg her pardon. Sometimes she fancied that I was not sufficiently submissive, and then she had some story of a rival, favoured by her protectress.

(Shelley 1976:221)