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

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Young-Ok An

rather tall, of a fair complexion; and she had a dimple on each cheek, which, especially when she smiled, added a grace to her lovely countenance that transported every one who beheld her. Her hair appeared like threads of gold; and, because they were extremely long, she used to tie it up, and, when afterwards she loosened it, the splendid ringlets dazzled the eyes of the spectator. Her eyes were of a deep blue, pleasing, and full of fire. To all these beauties she added, both in words and actions, a spirit and a majestic vivacity that captivated every one. She was twenty years of age when she died.(5)

Compared with this transcript, Shelley's reading of the painting actually shows another (more subtle) misrecognition on his part: as the pivotal feature of Beatrice's countenance, he conjoins Beatrice's captivating vivacity in words and actions with her fiery eyes into a symbolic feature of "vivacious eyes." If we come back to Shelley's description of the portrait and compare his natural assumptions (that the figure in the painting is Beatrice) with historical findings (that it is not), we find that the poet takes an interesting leap in reading and highlighting the eyes of the figure: "swollen with weeping, lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene." In the mind's eye of the poet (not "cold impersonations of [his] own mind"?) the "swollen" vivacious eyes of the portrait (that seem to conceal and reveal at the same time her tragic fate) becomes the core of her being.

Shelley's illustration of the "Guido portrait" shows that "Beatrice's" piercing gaze works as the symbolic repository in which he invests his profoundly paradoxical desire. Already marked by the tragicality of Beatrice's predicament, "the swollen ... but beautifully serene and tender" eyes seemed to intrigue and impress the beholder with their radical ambiguity. Certainly this gaze, the most unforgettable and unfathomable manifestation of "Beatrice," is inscribed in Shelley's main text in multifarious ways, even if he, at the same time, seems to avoid presenting Beatrice's countenance in a direct authorial voice. For any writer, representing Beatrice's gaze would be a fundamentally paradoxical task, not only because to do so would imply freezing the active force of a body into a still image, but more profoundly, because her subjectivity lies beyond the writer's conscious grasp. Such alterity, in fact, might have been what haunted Shelley and inspired his impossible Utopian passion to give a face to the broken fragments of an image, despite his ambivalence about a "chasm" or "casuistry" in Beatrice's character.(6) A woman rebellious against a matrix of masculinist, authoritarian and systemic violence thus emerges through the "imagination . . . that assumes flesh for the redemption of mortal passion" ("Preface" 241). Reconstructing "a thing-world of destructive forces in which human autonomy was drowned,"(7) Shelley ironically gives face (the painting) to a name (Beatrice), brings "the dead" to life, and remaps the conflicting forces of the past. With its relevance and cross-references to his contemporary world (which outraged the self-designated bourgeois moralists),(8) The Cenci is an attempt not only to destabilize the norms and values of his contemporary culture but to re-write history through and through, restaging the present according to a re-imagined past. Shelley's endeavor to represent Beatrice's "casuistical" gaze shows the blindness and insight of the author's desire to grasp the alterity in the other and the problematics of representation.