The Translator’s Invisibility

Shelley’s allusion to Sheridan’s tale puts into play several themes dense with ideological significance. Nourjahad appears “happy” to Winzy, most obviously, because the burden of his immortality was eased by long periods of sleep and finally removed. Yet given Winzy’s relationship to Bertha, Nourjahad would also be enviable because he was finally reunited and married to his beloved Mandana, “a young maid, so exquisitely charming and accomplished, that he gave her the entire possession of his heart” (Weber 1812:698), but was later deceived that she died in childbirth. What distinguished Nourjahad’s relationship to Mandana was that he chose her as his confidant—“longing to unbosom himself to one on whose tenderness and fidelity he could rely, to her he disclosed the marvellous story of his destiny” (ibid.)—thereby exemplifying the eighteenth-century rise of companionate marriage, which stressed domestic friendship, a sharing of affection and interests between the spouses, while maintaining the husband’s authority (Stone 1977). It was no doubt this antecedent of Shelley’s own concept of egalitarian marriage, in addition to the fantastic premise of immortality, that attracted her to Sheridan’s tale, especially since it occurs within a narrative that can be read as a critique of patriarchy. For The History of Nourjahad, like “The Mortal Immortal,” questions a patriarchal gender image: Nourjahad represents male physical superiority pushed to destructive extremes of violence against women. Hence, when Winzy compares himself to Nourjahad, Shelley’s text signals that it will address gender differences and offers any reader of The Keepsake who could make the comparison and shared Wollstonecraft’s thinking a feminist joke at {180} Winzy’s expense: the allusion inevitably points to the discrepancy between his cringing weakness and Nourjahad’s potent excess, beginning the satire of male power that is Shelley’s theme.

Yet whatever feminist design can be detected in Sheridan’s tale is finally skewed by the racial and class ideologies that underwrite it. In interrogating patriarchy, The History of Nourjahad is clearly overdetermined by Orientalism: it simultaneously demonstrates and rehabilitates the moral inferiority of the East. Nourjahad’s characterization involves the racist procedure of naturalizing ethnic stereotypes, grounding them in biology: “he was not of an active temper,” “he was naturally choleric” (Weber 1812:698, 700). And although Islam is treated reverentially, with Nourjahad receiving his most severe punishment for blaspheming the Koran, Sheridan’s valorization of marriage is linked to an explicit privileging of the West and to a consistent representation of women as the object of male sexual desire—even in the context of companionate marriage. Thus, Mandana’s reciprocation of Nourjahad’s love is described as “a felicity very rare among eastern husbands,” and she is revealed to be Schemzeddin’s gift to his favorite, freed from her status as the sultan’s “slave” because she participated in his “contrivance” by impersonating Nourjahad’s guardian genius and later joining his seraglio (ibid.:698, 719–720). Insofar as Schemzeddin is responsible for Nourjahad’s reformation, moreover, the narrative affirms a specific political institution, a despotic monarchy that relies on paternalistic interventions. The ideological configuration of Sheridan’s tale, what can be called an Orientalist image of patriarchal despotism, jars against the bourgeois feminism that can be read out of Shelley’s allusion, forcing Winzy’s exclamation to precipitate still more contradictions in her project. “How happy was the fabled Nourjahad”—that he lived under a despot who exercised absolute power over his subjects? That he dominated his wife as well as the women in his seraglio? That he was a Persian who overcame his Oriental propensity to vice? These potential meanings would have been accessible to readers of The Keepsake: the audience for these expensive giftbooks was largely aristocratic and bourgeois women, politically conservative, accustomed to prose and poetry that was often Orientalist and filled with patriarchal constructions of gender (Faxon 1973:xxi; Altick 1957:362–363).