Beatrice's gaze revisited: anatomizing 'The Cenci.' - by Percy Shelley

... Yet I fear Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze, Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts.

--Orsino from The Cenci I. ii. 83-87(1)

1. Reading Shelley Reading: A Feminist Inquiry

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

--Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 491

What does it suggest that a poet's fascination with a beautiful woman in a painting triggered a lengthy poetic representation of the historical figure that is not the woman in the painting after all? How can we explain that Percy Shelley, a poet with a Promethean ideal, stopped after the third act of Prometheus Unbound (considering it done at the time), and wrote a play invoking a female Prometheus, who turns out to be at once fascinatingly enigmatic and formidably monstrous? What does it mean that while undertaking a "just" representation of an awe-inspiring figure in a tragic maelstrom, Shelley still faces "the chasm" in the character of Beatrice on which he cannot help but equivocate? By examining these interconnected questions on The Cenci, as well as the focal points of the play--"a nameless wrong" (the rape), an unspeakable crime (the patricide), and an unanswered answer (Beatrice's "casuistry")--I argue that The Cenci provides a feminist reader with a particularly useful textual instance to investigate not just abominable incidents of paternal tyranny and parricide but much more complex operations of violence, law and desire that intersect with gender issues.

Shelley's "Preface" to The Cenci starts with a description of his encounter with the transcription of an "eminently fearful and monstrous" tragic incident: "A Manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy which was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one of the noblest and richest families of that city during the Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599" ("Preface," 238). The violent sequence of the Cenci tragedy comprises Count Cenci's calculated rape of his daughter Beatrice, the murder of the Count, and the Pope's execution of Beatrice and her allies. Although it happened two centuries before his arrival at Rome (1818), Shelley notes that this tragic family history was not only widely known among "all ranks of" contemporary Romans, but never failed to generate their "deep and breathless interest," or "a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged [Beatrice]" ("Preface," 239).

Shelley's emphasis in his "Preface" on the Romans' sympathetic attitude towards Beatrice seems to have stemmed from his projection of the audience's sympathetic reception of his play at home, especially since he strongly wished for its production on the London stage. With an eye to his British readership in an increasingly reactionary milieu,(2) Shelley stresses both his own "delicate" approach to the subject and its highly "dramatic" (tragic, aesthetic) nature, while downplaying the political implication of Beatrice's active involvement in parricide: "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself" (240). Shelley thus asks his readership to suspend "vulgar" and "dogmatic" moral judgment of Beatrice's act. Such a view also corresponds with his later description of drama (or dramatic lyric) in the Defense of Poetry (1821): "In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect" (491).

Since Shelley proposes teaching the knowledge of the human heart itself through a literary representation of a historical event, the question of how he does it in the play becomes his great concern: "I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true, thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth century into cold impersonations of my own mind" ("Preface," 240; emphasis added). This concern with representation leads him to a related query on poetic language:

I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description, unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's murder should be judged to be of that nature.

In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal passion. (241; emphasis added)

On the one hand, Shelley expresses his alliance with Wordsworthian poetics especially where dramatic poetry is concerned ("it must be the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong" [241-42]); on the other, the climactic point of the play, Beatrice's parricide (and its unnameable cause--the Father's rape of her), is construed through a literary trope, because it is perhaps beyond "the real language of men in general." And the precise links between imagination and passion, imagination and "real language," remain open to interpretation.