The Shelleys and Dante’s Matilda

Abstract

My focus is the extraordinary intertextual moment that has, as its principal points of reference, Dante’s episode of Matilda (Matelda) gathering flowers in Canto 28 of the Purgatorio, Percy Shelley’s unfinished translation of Dante’s episode, and Mary Shelley’s unpublished novella Mathilda. Entangled in the tripartite configuration with which I am mainly concerned is a more extensive intertextual web that includes Book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Alfieri’s 1785 drama Mirra, Wollstonecraft’s fragmentary philosophical narrative of 1787 The Cave of Fancy, Cantos 3 and 4 of Byrori’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and of course Percy Shelley’s The Cenci and his translation of Plato’s Symposium. I should say at the outset that I am especially indebted in this essay to Timothy Webb’s important account of Shelley’s translation of Dante in The Violet in the Crucible, to Terence Harpold’s revealing 1989 article in Studies in Romanticism on ‘Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda’, and to Betty Bennett’s and Charles Robinson’s Mary Shelley Reader, which made it feasible for me to discuss Mathilda in a seminar at Brown University with graduate students whose questions and responses have been invaluable spurs to subsequent thinking. I cannot claim that this thinking has yet shaped itself into anything like a definitive argument about intertextuality and incest. But that phrase, despite its sounding all too much like a fashionable critical jingle — maybe like something out of a David Lodge parody of current academic conferences — does fairly represent the underlying trajectory of my line of inquiry.