Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes Read Free Book Online Page B

one begins to understand the force of the image he gave to the difficult process, ‘like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind’. A directly autobiographical interpretation is possible, for one can see in turn the shadowy reference first to Harriet, then to Mary and finally, perhaps to Claire. These have indeed been attempted exhaustively by scholars, but they are not in the end satisfactory: Shelley wrote the poem precisely in order to distance himself from his own lived experience. More general observations do however throw light on his own psychological development. The Poet rejects sexual experience in the waking, domestic world, and the girl is turned away, speechless, panting and frustrated. But in the fantasy world, in the world of ‘dream’ or ‘waking reverie’ or ‘trance’ or ‘vision’, the sexual experience, and specifically the sexual act — what Shelley called in Queen Mab the ‘sexual connection’ — is celebrated and indulged.
    Shelley was in two minds about condemning this. In the overall context of Alastor composition, he condemns it as not only socially inadequate but also destructive, opening the poet to the ‘furies’. Yet within the poem the ambiguity remains. One remembers his recommendation to Mary about ‘kissing the insubstantial image’ when they were separated. It was a subject to which he was to return frequently, but there is one passage, part of a prose essay written three years later in Italy, which is immediately relevant. It came in the preface to his translation of Plato’s Symposium and was suppressed by Mary in her edition of 1840. Shelley is somewhat circumspectly discussing modes of the ‘sexual act’which might take place without physical penetration. The context is homosexuality, but this is not significant here.
If we consider the facility with which certain phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of puberty, associate themselves with those images which are the objects of our waking desires; and even that in some persons of an exalted state of sensibility that a similar process may take place in reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist . . . . 30
    Clearly, the second Alastor passage is his first attempt to describe such an ‘involuntary consequence of a state of abandonment’. There were to be many subsequent ones in his work, and it became one of his most powerful images. It is one of the triumphs of Alastor that Shelley succeeded in isolating this split in sexual nature as he had experienced it, and further, implied that it was a type or metaphor for a universal ‘split’ between the actual and the ideal, between the act and the desire. It was not merely the metaphor, either; it was part of the condition itself.
    Another suggestive thing about the dream is the passive role which it assigns to the Poet in the sexual encounter. It is the girl who ‘Folded his frame in her dissolving arms’. Throughout it is the female figures who are active, and more or less aggressive, and the Poet who is passive and receptive. This also was to become a feature of later descriptions, and may have something to do with the context of the dream or reverie itself.
    When Mary edited Alastor , it is suggestive that she tried to draw a veil across the subject matter and implications of the poem, and referred instead to the general difficulties of Shelley’s life in 1814 and 1815. Following her lead, most critics have been prepared subsequently to look at the poem in vague terms of a ‘search for ideal beauty and ideal truth’. 31 Mary wrote in 1839, ‘This is neither the time nor the place to speak of the misfortunes that chequered his life. It will be sufficient to say that, in all he did, he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own