The Translator’s Invisibility

And when Bertha’s vanity drives her to ridiculous, alienating extremes, Winzy helplessly acknowledges the gender hierarchy established by his physical superiority: “this mincing, simpering, jealous old woman. I should have revered her gray locks and withered cheeks; but thus!—It was my work, I knew; but I did not the less deplore this type of human weakness” (ibid.:228). Bertha’s return to the bourgeoisie ultimately contradicts Winzy’s attack on the protectress: their marriage shows that the bourgeois family is not an egalitarian refuge from aristocratic patriarchy, but a continuation of male dominance.

This ideological contradiction lies at the center of Shelley’s feminism. As Anne Mellor has argued,

Mary Shelley was a feminist in the sense that her mother was, in that she advocated an egalitarian marriage and the education of women. But insofar as she endorsed the continued reproduction of the bourgeois family, her feminism is qualified by the ways in which her affirmation of the bourgeois family entails an acceptance of its intrinsic hierarchy, a hierarchy historically manifested in the doctrine of separate spheres [and] in the domination of the male gender.

(Mellor 1988:217)

Shelley’s characteristic valorization of marriage emerges in “The Mortal Immortal” primarily because Winzy is the narrator: he makes his love for Bertha and their marriage the positions from which their actions are intelligible, and hence the bourgeois family, with its patriarchal construction of gender, is established as the standard by which they are judged. What the text imposes as true or obvious is that Winzy is the devoted lover and husband, attending to their material needs, controlling their destiny in the public sphere, whereas Bertha controls their private life, compelled by her vanity to trifle with his affection, envy his youthfulness, even threaten their lives. Reasoning that Winzy’s unchanging appearance could get them executed “as a dealer in the black art” and his “accomplice[,] at last she insinuated that I must share my secret with her, and bestow on her like benefits to those I myself enjoyed, or she would denounce me—and then she burst into tears” (Shelley 1976:227).

{176} Tarchetti’s translation probes the contradictions of Shelley’s feminism by subtly revising the ideologies her tale puts to work. The Italian follows the English in having Vincenzo assert that “io divenni marito di Ortensia” / “I became Ortensia’s husband” (Tarchetti 1967, I:123), but it repeatedly omits signs of their marriage. When Bertha becomes aware of Winzy’s immortality, he renews his conjugal vows to her: “I will be your true, faithful husband while you are spared to me, and do my duty to you to the last” (228). Tarchetti deletes this entire statement. And where Winzy and Bertha address each other with “my poor wife” and “my husband” (227, 228), Vincenzo and Ortensia say “mia buona compagna” and “mio amico” / “my good companion” and “my friend” (I:128). These changes show an effort to weaken, however slightly, the valorization of marriage in Shelley’s tale and perhaps reflect a scapigliato rejection of bourgeois respectability. Most significantly, Tarchetti’s changes locate the very ideological determination which qualifies Shelley’s feminist project, and they do so by emphasizing friendship rather than marriage, hinting at the possibility of an equal relationship between the lovers, questioning the gender hierarchy of the bourgeois family.