The Translator’s Invisibility

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.

(I:122)

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.

(ibid.:227)