ROMANTIC ANGLO-ITALIANS: CONFIGURATIONS OF IDENTITY IN BYRON, THE SHELLEYS, AND THE PISAN CIRCLE

by Maria Schoina

A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

In fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2005

Maria Schoina

Romantic Anglo-Italians: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle

Doctoral Dissertation

submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Date of Oral Defence: 11 January 2005

Dissertation Committee:

Prof. Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou, Adviser

Prof. Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, Co-Adviser

Prof. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Co-Adviser

Assoc. Prof. Litsa Trayiannoudi, Examiner

Prof. Yiorgos Kalogeras, Examiner

Assist. Prof. Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Examiner

Assoc. Prof. Phivos Ghikopoulos, Examiner i

Acknowledgements

Many people have inspired, helped, challenged, and supported me during the four and a half years that I have worked on this dissertation and it is a great pleasure to have this opportunity to thank them. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Dr. Ekaterini Douka

Kabitoglou for her invaluable critical guidance and unfailing interest from the first conception of this project to its final revisions. Above all, I wish to thank her for kindling the “flame” and for strongly encouraging a shy, reticent undergraduate’s bid, back in 1994, to write a term paper on

Blake’s artistic expression and one on Keats’s Odes. I thank her for many wonderful classes and thought-provoking sessions, for her warm intelligence, her generosity of spirit, and her unadulterated love for poetry. Last but not least, I thank her for her numerous perceptive readings of the chapters that follow, as well as for providing me with so much love and support along the way and for boosting my faith at critical moments.

I am indebted to my co-adviser Dr. Karin Boklund Lagopoulou for her insightful and thorough commentary at various stages during the planning, research and composition of this dissertation. I owe her thanks for her enthusiasm in the project from the start, as well as for her practical advice on a number of matters. I wish to thank deeply my co-adviser Dr. Ruth Parkin

Gounelas who, with infinite kindness and patience, listened to me talk through new ideas, generated tough challenges on the reading of texts, encouraged theoretical rigor, read individual chapters with great care and a remarkable critical eye, and offered many stimulating conversations about Mary Shelley. I am also grateful to the four members of the defence committee, Dr. Litsa Trayiannoudi, Dr. Yiorgos Kalogeras, Dr. Katerina Kitsi Mitakou, and Dr.

Phivos Ghikopoulos for reading the dissertation with insight, for asking probing questions, and for making perceptive, improving comments.

Two people provided me with significant study and research guidelines in the field of

Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations at the very start of this project: Prof. Jonathan Cook, my research supervisor at the University of East Anglia, and the author and biographer Richard ii

Holmes. The latter uncannily foresaw the emergence of something larger than an MA thesis in the long drafts and numerous questions I presented him with back in 1999 in Norwich, as well as in my fascination with the complex implementation of biculturality by the expatriate British

Romantics in Italy.

My dissertation research has enormously benefited from a memorable six-month visit to the University of Bologna in Italy, funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Prof. Lilla

Maria Crisafulli, director of the Centro Interdisciplinare degli Studi Romantici in Bologna not only welcomed me warmly as a member of the group, but helped me locate important sources and gain access to libraries and collections in Pisa, Florence and Rome. I thank her for her unflagging generosity, both intellectual and personal. I am grateful too to Professors Timothy

Webb and Michael O’Neill for many inspiring conversations during these last four years, for their enthusiasm in the project from the start, and for responding so promptly and insightfully to all my urgent mails. Both of them were influential and opened my eyes to nuances in “things

Anglo-Italian”. Roderick Cavaliero from a distance has been not only a good friend and a caterer for out-of-print books and off-prints but also an engaging and critical reader, generously sharing his deep historical knowledge about the Romantic period.

Opportunities to present the arguments and parts of the chapters from this dissertation at conferences have been extremely helpful. Interchanges with Romanticists in Greece and abroad have significantly shaped the intellectual life of this project and I owe especial thanks to all those distinguished scholars whose seminal work is a constant source of inspiration for me and whose comments and advice on my work were invaluable.

Financial support for this project has been provided by the Greek State Scholarship

Foundation between 2000-2002. The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs offered a generous research scholarship, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki granted a bursary and partly funded some of the conference trips. A bursary from The European Society for the Study of

English (ESSE) significantly defrayed the cost of my short sojourn in the States while the North iii

American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) kindly offered travel grants for participation in its last two international conferences, 2003 and 2004 respectively.

My greatest source of emotional support for this project has come from my family and friends. My parents Christos and Stamatia have always provided steadfast support of every kind, particularly during the last critical months when encouragement and affection were sorely needed. This dissertation is dedicated to them, as a token of my gratitude and love. My brother

Vassilis has supported me in different, but equally important ways: his love, guidance, optimism, exuberance and good humour have helped sustain me in ways that are hard for me to express adequately. My sister-in-law Helen has also been unwavering in her support. My friend and colleague Eleftheria Arapoglou helped me survive the rigors and anxieties of research and writing, and offered numerous critical and perceptive comments on early drafts. In Eleftheria I found the most intellectually lively and creative of colleagues and I thank her deeply for these four years of true, “Romantic” fellowship at its most congenial. Irene Psomiadou and Evgenia

Vlachou have provided me with necessary distractions along the way and have been inestimably caring, sympathetic, patient and willing to help.

Finally, this dissertation is affectionately dedicated to my nephew Christos, whose birth in spring 2003 endowed the ensuing months of my work with a livelier imagination, despite the increasingly demanding circumstances; an endearing child whose “fingers make early flowers of

/ all things”.

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Abstract

My dissertation discusses the identity and spatial politics of post-Napoleonic British expatriates in Italy, recovering the discursive techniques employed in their identification with

Italinanness and assessing the relevance of such activities in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in Romantic culture. More specifically, I assert that the so-called “Anglo-

Italians” – defined by Mary Shelley as “a well-informed, active and clever race” in her review essay “The English in Italy” (1826) – fashioned a hyphenated identity and displayed varied degrees of identification with Italianness, in an attempt to establish a bicultural sensibility, and, thus, an alternative coalition with “foreigness”, namely, with Italian place, culture, language, and community. In my opinion, the professed mission of these acculturated literati to “Italianise” their compatriots at home and “to disseminate among them a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the peninsula” suggests the distinctive role Anglo-Italians wished to play in the construction of cultural and political models for British society. My contention is that Mary

Shelley’s qualifications designate a complex identification with Italy and Italianness, and can retrospectively offer some insight into the identity politics of the Pisan circle in particular, and of the British emigrants in Italy in general, and cast further light on the discursive nature of this eccentric self-representation.

Considering that the fashioning of special identities is historically contingent, I argue that the emergence and “mission” of the Anglo-Italian is inextricably linked to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the age: the forging of the British identity in the midst of an expanding empire, the rise of the English middle-class and the establishment of a competitive print culture, and the envisioning, by a group of male and female Romantic liberal intellectuals, of a social and political reform. In view of the importance and currency Italy had assumed in the

British consciousness after the Napoleonic wars, the “mobilisation” of Italianness into the construction of a hyphenated self-representation has, in my opinion, considerable political hold. v

Assuming a cultural-geographical approach, and drawing on the theoretical insights of

Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu, my work revolves around the construction of identity in relation to place(s), culture(s), and travelling (routes), and sets out to explore the ambivalences, fluctuations, and modalities which underpin the fashioning of the

Anglo-Italian. In other words, and as revealed through a number of texts of the period – poetry, prose, visual culture and journalistic discourse – the imagined nature of this Romantic configuration does not undermine its discursive effectivity: hence the crucial connection between figuring and configuring an identity. It is in this context that I attempt a re-evaluation of Byron’s

“all meridian” heart, Percy Shelley’s “Pisan roots”, Mary Shelley’s “Anglo-Italicus” self – cast as a strategy of gender distinction – and of the “Italianised Cockney” vestiture of The Liberal.

My close reading of their selected texts (e.g. Shelley’s Italian review of Sgricci’s improvisation,

Byron’s The Prophecy of Dante, Mary Shelley’s reviews, Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad) suggests that the Romantic expatriates’ investment in the Italian culture is significantly informed, but also complicated, by this professed in-betweenness.

The first chapter traces the origins of this hybrid identity and looks at some of its manifestations in the art and literature of the late 18th and early 19th century. The second chapter examines Mary Shelley’s Anglo-Italianness, as this is revealed in her less well-known reviews, essays, letters, and her travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy (1843). Another chapter focuses on Byron, and looks at his Anglo-Italian discourse with particular reference to his poems

Beppo, “To the Po” and The Prophecy of Dante, but also considers other Anglo-Italians who employ rhetorical strategies similar to Byron’s. My last chapter attempts a contextualised reinterpretation of the Pisan circle, with particular emphasis on Shelley, as well as on Leigh Hunt and the related publication of The Liberal.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. British Connoisseurs in Rome, by James Russel page 61

Figure 2. Roma Antica, by Giovanni Antonio Panini 62

Figure 3. Bacino di San Marco with the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, by Canaletto 65

Figure 4. Westminster Bridge, London, with the Lord Mayor’s Procession

on the Thames, by Canaletto 65

Figure 5. London: Saint Paul’s and Old London Bridge, by Antonio Joli 67

Figure 6. Prospect of London from a Colonnade with St. Paul’s and Old London

Bridge, by Antonio Joli 67

Figure 7. Capriccio: St. Paul’s and a Venetian Canal, by William Marlow 71

Figure 8. Entrance to Pisa from Leghorn, by Sir Augustus Wall Callcott 241

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ABBREVIATIONS AND SHORT TITLES

BLJ Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973-1982). BP Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993). EI “The English in Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). L The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, 2 vols., 4 issues (London: John Hunt, 1822-1823. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1978). MI “Modern Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). MWSJ The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, eds. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott- Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). MWSL The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). PBSL The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederic L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). Poems Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Prose Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophesy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954). Rambles Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1996), vol. 8: Travel Writing, Index, ed. Jeanne Moskal. RI “Recollections of Italy”, The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). TC “The Choice”, The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, vol. 2, pp. 490-494. VB “A Visit to Brighton”, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1996), vol. 2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Roots, Routes, and Hyphens: Reconsidering Romantic Identity i.“A well-informed, clever, and active race”………………………………………………….1 ii. Culture, place, identity, politics ...…………………………………………………………7 iii. Italy and the British Romantics ………………………………………………………… 19 Notes ………………………………………………………………………………………. 30

Chapter 1 Anglo-Italian Spaces and Metaphors in the Cultural Discourse of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century 1.1 A Tale of Two Countries ……………………………………………………………….. 33 1.2 Cities of the Mind: Venice and London in Late Eighteenth-Century Capriccio Paintings ………………………………………………………………………… 58 1.3 “Melancholy feelings expressed […] with Italian imagination” in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy ………………………………………………………………… 78 Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 87

Chapter 2 Mary Shelley, Anglo-Italicus: Female Self-Assertion and the Politics of Distinction 2.1 Identity Re-construction and the Uses of Betweenness ………………………………... 94 2.2 Mapping the Anglo-Italian Paradigm in the Reviews and in Rambles ………………… 106 Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………… 145

Chapter 3 “My heart is all meridian”: Byron and the Poetics of Acculturation 3.1 “To see men and things as they are”: The Discourse of Authenticity in Post-Napoleonic Travel Writing ………………………………………………………….. 152 3.2 “Out of love with your Nativity”: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, “To the Po”, Beppo, The Prophecy of Dante ……………………………………………………………168

Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 211

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Chapter 4 “Rooting” the Anglo-Italian: Place and Identity in Percy Shelley’s Pisan Group 4.1 The Cultural Geography of the Pisan Circle: A Revisionist Reading …………………… 217 4.2 “Elective Affinities”: Letter to Maria Gisborne, the Pisan Lyrics and the Review of Sgricci’s Improvisation ………………………………………………………………….. 225 4.3 Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad and the Anglo-Italian Discourse of The Liberal…... 265 Notes ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 282

Epilogue “To engraft ourselves on foreign stocks”: (Post)Romantic Reflections on Acculturation ………………………………………………………………………….. 290 Notes ………………………………………………………………………………………. 298

Works Cited …..………………………………………………………………………….… 299

1

INTRODUCTION

Roots, Routes, and Hyphens: Reconsidering Romantic Identity

i. “A well-informed, clever, and active race”

[F]u nel piu alto stile della poesia tragica, ed ellettrizzava il Teatro. […]

In questo talento, e tutto pur d’Italia – l’imaginazione fa, fra di noi, in

un momento l’opra che l’intelletto consomma fra gli altri in lungo tempo,

o dopo molte tentative, e questo dono e il pregio del nostro presente

destino, ed il pegno del futuro. 1

The event recorded in this rapturous account is Tommaso Sgricci’s celebrated performance of La Morte d’Ettore [The Death of Hector], a practice of poesia espontanea, which took place in the theatre of Pisa on 22nd January 1821. In fairly inaccurate yet spirited

Italian, the writer-spectator communicates his euphoria and admiration for not only the improviser’s artistry, but also the “miraculous” transformation of the Pisan theatre, through the power of imagination and poetry, into an abode of inspiration, creativity, and love.

The enthusiastic admirer of the improvvisatore Sgricci is Percy Bysshe Shelley, who attended the event with Mary Shelley and other members of the small English community of

Pisa. His review of the performance, which was never published, is a relatively unknown document which is nonetheless important, as it complicates established critical views on

Shelley’s intransigence towards modern Italians. In effect, Shelley not only engaged with

Italian society but he often attempted to “naturalise” his relationship to his surrounding environment, establishing ties and connections while at Pisa. The above text is an appropriate though rare example of Shelley’s “immersion” into Italianness: first through the employment of the Italian language for what was intended as a public text, and second through Shelley’s use of the first person plural to associate himself with the Pisan audience. 2

Shelley’s atypical attachment to Italy’s place, language, and community – three fundamental “systems of meaning which produce culture” according to Stuart Hall (“New

Cultures for Old” 180) – is symptomatic of a wider discourse of acculturation which many

British Romantic expatriates developed while in Italy or after their return home. Accordingly,

Byron’s much-discussed acclimatisation to the Italian way of life and his versatile identification with the Italian society of his day remain challenging and open-ended chapters in the legendary (hi)story of the Regency aristocrat’s six-year sojourn in the peninsula (1816-

1822). The portrait of Byron as an Italianised Briton occurred frequently in both the English and Italian cultural discourses of the time, a result of the poet’s popularity in both countries and of his own efforts to promote a bicultural image of himself through his letters and poems.

Thus, it is not surprising that in 1832 Mary Shelley would cite her husband’s famous

Italianised friend and co-expatriate in a review of a book with an Italian theme, James

Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo: a Venetian Story.2 Mary Shelley’s skillfully rendered portrait of Byron as an exemplary “insider” in Italian society has profound and far-reaching effects.

Thus, on the one hand, the sketch pits the book’s author against Byron’s “authentic”

Italianisation, and, on the other hand, establishes Byron’s insider knowledge as a pattern of acculturation. By instancing Byron’s “amalgamation” – to use Mary Shelley’s arresting term

– into Italian society as a paradigm of second culture acquisition, the reviewer of The Bravo exemplifies and theorises acculturation, mapping the intricate “rites” and logistics which pertain to the experience of crossing-over cultures and of adapting foreign elements as one’s own.

Having been a participant-observer in the culture of Italy, and a member of the notorious Pisan circle, Mary Shelley would often engage with the subjects of acculturation and authentic knowledge of other places in her works. More particularly, after her return to

England in 1823, her reviews of literary or artistic works about Italy offered suitable space 3 for vigorous comparative portraits of Italy and England and for the exploration of

“betweenness” as “the place of the subject, as the issuing point of the subjective or subjectifying utterance” (Saglia, Poetic Castles 144). Mary Shelley’s discussions engage with cultural matters crucial to her contemporaries but they also raise modern issues about identity construction, intercultural perception and representation. To return to her portrait of Byron, the ideas expressed in this review originate in her 1826 essay “The English in Italy,” where

Mary Shelley, in a deftly resonant move, labels Byron the initiator of an intercultural literary movement: “Lord Byron may be considered the father of the Anglo-Italian literature, and

Beppo as being the first product of that school”.3 However, as we go on to read, the qualification “Anglo-Italian” departs from the standard dictionary meaning of the compound form, that is, English in connection with something else. Instead, the term is used to designate the literature which derives from “Italianized” English proper:

This preference accorded to Italy by the greater part of the emigrant

English has given rise to a new race or sect among our countrymen,

who have lately been dubbed Anglo-Italians. […] [T]he Anglo-Italians

may be pronounced a well-informed, clever, and active race. (EI 343)

The repeated use of a term as complicated and loaded as “race” in Mary Shelley’s elaborate portrait of the Anglo-Italian calls for a brief look into the history of its use in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,4

“race” denotes, in its broadest sense, common biological descent or origin as regards a group of persons, animals, or plants. The term was also used at the time to describe “a tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock” and the example dated 1827 reads “[t]he worst race of people inhabiting that part”. The OED also registers the meaning of race as “a set or class of persons” without any explicit reference to blood ties, as in “Race of Coxcombs” (dated

1712), “The race of learned men, Still at their books” (1748) and in “The Two Races of Men, 4 the Men who borrow, and the men who lend” (1821), a phrase used by the poet and essayist

Charles Lamb in his Essays of Elia.

According to Raymond Williams, the difficulties of the term race begin “when it is used to denote a group within a species” (248), and when the old senses of blood and stock extend to the classification of wider social, cultural, and national groups (249). In the

Romantic period, racial difference was explained in terms of environmental modification of human physiology, a belief deriving from Enlightenment sources. Although the age witnessed the beginnings of a shift in the way race was related to nationality and culture, it was in the mid-nineteenth century and onwards that scientific work in the field of anthropology and biology was systematically implemented by political and social thought.

These discourses capitalised on the precept of a hierarchy of races, justifying theories of imperialism, the slave-trade, and racial superiority (Kitson 19).

In her definition of the Anglo-Italian, Mary Shelley maps a community of cultured, sophisticated emigrant British in Italy with a distinct standard of taste, a unified sensibility, a discrete sense of place-attachment, and a shared vision for cultural reform. Considering the meanings of “race” in context, as well as the highly specific characteristics Mary Shelley assigns to these literati, it can be deduced that the “race” of Anglo-Italians is used in the third sense of the word, namely to refer to a set or group of people with common interests. In addition, the idea of bonding inherent in the meaning of race underscores the Anglo-Italians’ awareness of their professed civilising mission to italianise their compatriots, as a communal, not an individual undertaking. In a sense, Mary Shelley portrays the Pisan circle without naming it, five years after its dissolution. Percy Shelley, Byron, Claire Clairmont, Thomas

Medwin, the Williamses, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and she herself hover behind the distinctive patterns of behaviour she de/pre-scribes for the “race” of Anglo-Italians. 5

Nonetheless, as previously noted, the early nineteenth century was a time when the old and “new” meanings of “race” seriously overlapped. Furthermore, the ideological discourses that began to impinge on the term based their theories largely upon the premise of common descent. Therefore, it seems to me that the nuance of common blood ties cannot be easily disengaged from the other uses of the word “race” during that period, even if we speak of imagined blood ties. Interestingly, the OED tells us that “race” also denoted “a tribe, nation, or people regarded as of common stock” (emphasis added). The imagining – and subsequent imaging – of these people as a race is indeed a cultural process which establishes the existence of the group of Anglo-Italians by defining what makes them a community. This denominator complicates Mary Shelley’s text as to its function and meaning. In my opinion, although the biological connection is imaginary, it is nonetheless powerful. Thus, the author asserts this “new” identity position for the acculturated British by laying claim to imagined natural and unchanging qualities, such as filial bonds and common ancestry, rather than

“added on” features. As a result, the community of Anglo-Italians demarcate their space of action through difference in two directions: “we” versus our “un-Italianized countrymen” (EI

343), and “we” versus the less “refined” Italians (EI 343). In this way, the Anglo-Italians seek to legitimate their cultural authority concerning things Italian, but they also strictly qualify their acculturation processes in relation to Italian society.

By figuring Italianness as a necessary and constitutive element for the identity of the modern British, the texts by Mary Shelley confirm the importance and currency Italy had assumed in the British consciousness after the Napoleonic wars. They also hint at the fact, however, that in the process, Italianness was de-contextualised from its geographical-cultural reality and was intimately infiltrated into British narratives and “keyed” to various British concerns, such as the forging of British identity, the rise of the English middle-class, and the envisioning, by a group of Romantic liberal intellectuals, of a cultural and social reform. In 6 the light of this contradiction, the “mobilisation” of Italianness into the construction of a hyphenated self-representation has, in my opinion, considerable political hold.

This study discusses the “Anglo-Italian” identity politics of post-Napoleonic British expatriates in Italy, recovering the discursive techniques employed in their identifications with Italianness, exploring the ambivalences and contradictions which beset the fashioning of this configuration, and assessing the relevance of these activities in the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in Romantic culture. More specifically, I propose that the so-called Anglo-Italians fashioned a hyphenated identity and displayed varying degrees of identification with Italianness in an attempt to establish a bicultural sensibility and, through this, an alternative coalition with “foreignness”, namely, with Italian place, culture, language, and community. My contention is that Mary Shelley’s configuration of this eccentric self- representation designates a qualitative, complex, and multifaceted alliance with Italy and

Italianness, and can illuminate the acculturating “plots” of the members of the Pisan circle in particular, and of the British emigrants in Italy in general.

To avoid confusion with the chronology of the texts examined, it is important to note from the beginning that although the hybrid figure does not appear in Mary Shelley’s writings until she is back in England (1823), I argue that the intriguing literature around the “race” of

Anglo-Italians Mary Shelley constructs back home casts a retrospective light on the identity and spatial politics of the circle of expatriates which had formed around her and Shelley in

Italy in the early 1820s. Nonetheless, although my interpretation of Romantic Anglo-Italians builds on Mary Shelley’s elaborate definitions, it also heavily relies on the insights rendered by an examination of the expatriates’ own discourse of acculturation, as they developed it while in Italy. Thus, Mary Shelley’s retrospective critical assessment of the Pisan circle is viewed in its rich dialectic with the concurrent acculturating practices of Byron, Percy

Shelley and Leigh Hunt. 7

My thesis addresses a set of critical questions related to the issue of cultural identity, such as why people invest in a particular identity position and adopt it, and what the processes involved in the creation and assertion of identities are. It also enquires into the political stakes involved in the formation of “alternative” identity positions and the intriguing relationship between place and self. In order to tackle these questions, I will first have to provide some theoretical explanations which can highlight the key concepts employed in this work. The discussion of these concepts in the next section of the introduction will supply a framework for the chapters that follow and will, hopefully, contribute towards a fuller understanding of what is involved in the construction of historically-specific bicultural identity positions.

In addition, the contextualisation of the self through places and cultures in the works of Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Leigh Hunt poses a number of questions about the theoretical conceptualisation of Romantic identity. Indeed, one of the central concerns of this study is to explore not only the generative role of place, culture, and travel in the formation of the Romantic identity but also the configuration of the self as inhabiting a qualitative “betweenness”, oscillating between essentialism (roots) and relationality (routes), between the familiar (English) and the foreign (Italian). Thus, the section that follows will also consider contemporary critical discussions of Romantic subjectivity, which in recent years have removed Romantic identity from the “depth model” and its traditional, idealistic illustrations, and have attempted to redefine it according to the “contextualist” paradigm.

ii. Culture, place, identity, politics

The publication in 1983 of Jerome J. McGann’s The Romantic Ideology precipitated a return to historical and political studies of the Romantic period. Critics began to analyse notions of ideology, class, and gender in an attempt to deconstruct previous notions of 8

“Romanticism” as a mainly aesthetic and literary movement. Much effort has been made ever since to return Romantic discourse to the contexts in which it was written and read, to what

Marilyn Butler calls the “actual literary communities as they functioned within their larger communities in time and place” (“Repossessing the Past” 72). Butler’s comment acquires particular significance in the context of British Romantic writers who lived or travelled outside Britain and functioned perforce within the indigenous communities of host countries.

One of the principal aims of this study is to re-locate the literary community of Anglo-Italians to the larger geo-cultural coordinates of time and place, and to examine their identity configurations and acculturating strategies which emerge in their various writings about Italy.

The present examination of their works attempts to follow in the direction indicated by

Edward Said’s Orientalism and the revisionist literature it has generated, as well as by Michel

Foucault’s notion of discourse as a series of practices which produce and legitimate knowledge. This study also significantly draws on poststructuralist theoretical insights on identity, particularly on the work of Stuart Hall.

An awareness of time and place is always significant in historical readings of literature, and critical writing of this direction seeks to anchor literary works to the specific social, cultural, political, and economical environment(s) in which they were produced, and re-discover the ways in which these contexts have infused them. For instance, cultural historicisation, namely, the exploration of issues of cultural power using the insights of postcolonial and feminist theories, is one of the main concerns of current Romantic studies.

Thus, in considering Romantic travel accounts, Amanda Gilroy emphasises the necessity of confronting “the situated nature of experience” (4), where “situation” suggests cultural specificity, and, by extension, the various ideological prescriptions which are enmeshed in the geopolitical locales to which an observer/narrator/speaker belongs. This “situatedness” 9 emerges most visibly in cases of intercultural perception, in the transcodification of foreign realities, and in constructions of the “other”.

Ever since Edward Said’s seminal study of Orientalism (1978) and the extensive revisionist criticism it generated in cultural theory, literary studies have become more alert to the discursive practices which underlie representations of other cultures in travel writing and empire literature. Based on Foucault’s discussions of the relationships between power and knowledge, Said capitalises on the ideological nature of representations and hence on the contrived nature of cultural meanings. Central to the emergence of discourse, that is, to the practices of signification which provide a framework for understanding an-other culture, is what Said calls imaginative geography. The latter, in his words, “legitimates a vocabulary, a universe of representative discourse” (71) that “infuses history and geography” (55) and

“naturalises” the way in which the other culture is seen. A related corollary of Said’s argument is that cultures gain their sense of identity from contemplating their “cultural contestant[s]” (1) and that they construct their self-representation through difference. As he notes in the Afterword to the 1995 printing of Orientalism, “[t]he construction of identity

[…] involves establishing opposites and ‘others’ whose actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from ‘us’. […] Far from a static thing then, identity of self or of ‘other’ is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies” (332). Critiques of Said’s theory argue that Orientalism postulates a unified, dominant, and even monolithic conception of discourse and Western culture, and point out the theorist’s failure to recognise forms of ambivalence, conflict and contradiction in the colonial encounter. Appropriately, Homi Bhabha’s reflections on the heterogeneity of colonial and post-colonial experience, which he attributes to a fundamental ambivalence in the coloniser’s relation to the colonised, is an important contribution to this debate. Bhabha 10 develops his ideas through a set of key concepts, such as hybridity, indeterminacy, “the in- between”, interstices, and the “third space”, all of which articulate ideas of split selves and discourses in the relationship between dominant and subaltern groups.5

A study on Romantic Anglo-Italians begins essentially as a study of the two cultures involved, and of how these cultures interact in the period examined. Although the Anglo-

Italian encounter does not fall into the category of the interchanges that Said’s model prescribes, that is, between Britain and its non-European others, I believe that intra-European

“Meridionism” – the term being used in academic parlance as a counterpart of global

Orientalism – raises a number of issues similar to those posed by Said’s theory. Thus, assuming that in the course of five centuries of Western European history the affixture of the

Italian identity to the English one via cultural practices is qualified and conditioned by very specific historical coordinates, it is my suggestion that the propensity of the English to reinvent, depict, and ultimately ground themselves as English and/or Italian in the long eighteenth century is very much related to their need to understand their own historical destiny and their changing role on the Continent in a rapidly changing age. Nevertheless, precisely because the relationship between cultures is not as unified and unambiguous as Said has described it, Britain played an equally important, though different and less defining role as a “constitutive outside” (Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 4) in the formation of an Italian communal identity. In other words, the two cultures “invaded” and appropriated each other’s spaces in the cultural discourse of the time in an act of self-definition.

Cultural studies are becoming increasingly aware of the geographies of culture, that is, the ways in which culture is, among other things, a matter of different spaces, places and landscapes. Thus, in our case, Englishness or Italianness can not be understood outside the places they make meaningful or outside the national/cultural boundaries they mark out.

Theoretical issues central to cultural studies such as issues of identity, power, and 11 representation are deeply geographical. Rooted in the importance of locations and places in the literary text, the cultural-geographical approach represents a development of the intersection between the human sciences, cultural theory and literary criticism that has characterised the study of literature in the last decades. What has been broadly called

“cultural geography” or “new geography”6 seeks to recover an essentially geographical dimension, namely, to explore the intimate relationship between people and their environmental setting. This rethinking of the connection between human subject and geography has renewed interest in philosophical questions of space and place and has created various strands of thought, such as the poetic/phenomenological and the social/ideological

(emerging from Marxist cultural analysis).7 Central to the cultural-geographical approach is the intersection of locality, spatiality, and historical subjectivity. According to Stephen

Cheeke, this re-emphasis on “situated embodiment […] inscribes the human subject with the reality of their physical environment, as it conversely marks that environment with human experience and culture at a deep level” (“Geo-History: Byron’s Beginnings” 132).

The term “place-identity” acquires rich nuances and becomes particularly meaningful in the context of these two “antagonistic” theoretical approaches – the phenomenological and the ideological. On the one hand, environmental psychologists have been using the term to define an individual’s strong emotional attachment to particular places or settings. They largely concur with humanistic geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph in that places may engender a sense of belonging and rootedness and they may also serve as contextual markers for establishing one’s social identity. However, according to the psychologists, place-identity is influenced by a wide range of experiences and relationships based on a variety of physical contexts. Thus what emerges as “place-identity” is “a complex cognitive structure characterized by a host of attitudes, values, thoughts, beliefs, meanings and behavior tendencies that go well beyond just emotional attachments and belonging to 12 particular places” (Proshansky et al. 62). This understanding of place is more grounded, contextual and specific than Tuan’s notion of place, which is largely essentialist. The psychologist Theodore Sarbin highlights the aspect of place-identity as a cognitive construction by drawing on the “emplotment” of self in literature. He argues that “[p]eople engage in epistemic actions to fashion their place identities – they do not come ready-made”

(339) and adds that “human beings are guided in their acts by the particular emplotments they create in the service of maintaining an acceptable personal narrative […] People assign to place metaphorical qualities (rather than spatial dimensions) that appear in answer to the place-identity question: ‘where am I?’” (341).

On the other hand, a series of more sociological understandings of place introduce notions of power relations into the way of understanding localities. “Senses of place” are thus identified as part of the politics of identity, because such subjective renderings of place often work to establish differences between one group and another. As Gillian Rose points out,

“[t]he politics of claiming to be an insider are also often the politics of claiming power”

(116). Similar interpretations also emphasise the qualitative construction of places and argue that the politics lie not just in particular characterisations assigned to places but in the very way in which the image of place is constructed. For instance, in The Condition of

Postmodernity (1990) David Harvey writes of the significance of place-identity in what he sees as the horrendous flux and complexity of the postmodern condition. However, the way he characterises place-identity is highly specific. Thus in writing of the limited spatial reach of organisations oppositional to capitalism, he argues that “the capacity of most social movements to command place better than space puts a strong emphasis upon the potential connection between place and social identity. […] In clinging, often of necessity, to a place- bound identity, however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed upon” (303). 13

The approaches so far discussed outline two ways of understanding place – which I view as complementary rather than as oppositional – both of which pertain to the logistics of place in this study. The special significance that a local sense of place acquired in British

Romantic literature and sensibility due to the historical circumstances of the age becomes meaningful in the context of what humanistic geographers describe as place-identity. More specifically, in reaction to a burgeoning international economy and to Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, an inclination towards localism or place-attachment arises. Thus, for instance, in my chapter on Percy Shelley I explore the poet’s naturalising metaphors in his poetry and prose which mark an act of identification with the place of Pisa. Conversely, for a

Romantic cosmopolite such as Byron, a location is an itinerary rather than a bounded site – a series of encounters and translations. As I argue in the relevant chapter, despite claiming natural attachment to Italy, Byron’s conception of place (stability, safety) is mediated by his conception of space (mobility, insecurity), to use Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between the two notions.

However, as I hope to show in this thesis, the Anglo-Italians construe their identities at the nexus of bounded sites and itineraries, of roots and routes, and this complex positioning calls for a more power-laden, “situated” consideration of place. Their identities are place- based rather than place-bound, meaning that place serves as a point of reference, and not necessarily as “the central reference point of human existence” (Relph 20). Considering that the expatriated Romantics claim cultural power through figuring, and ultimately configuring particular meanings of Italy’s place and systems of culture, I argue that Italy is systematically deployed in the articulation of their identity politics. For example, Mary Shelley carefully utilises Italy and Italianness in the construction of a new personality, a new cultural model with which she identifies, the Anglo-Italian, and which she wishes to prescribe as a standard of taste, learning, and aesthetic competency. In addition, she exploits the dynamics of this 14 discursive configuration in order to construct a distinct literary and political identity as a woman writer of her age.

The term “identity politics” requires further investigation in the theoretical context of cultural studies. As a concept, identity has been made central to a number of theoretical debates and political problems nowadays. Despite the deconstructive and anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, racial and national conceptions of cultural identity, “we live in a world where identity matters” (Gilroy 301). As Stuart Hall succinctly puts it, identity is “an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all” (“Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 2). Principally, identity provides a way of understanding the interplay between our subjective experience of the world and the cultural and historical settings in which subjectivity is formed. Our identities are shaped by social structures (such as gender, class and culture) but we also participate in forming our own identities. This interrelationship between the personal and the social can also be expressed as a tension between structure and agency.

More specifically, Hall rejects the transparent notion of the subject as the centred agent of social practice (“transcendental consciousness”), while he equally challenges essentialist, unified views of identity grounded in some essential, “true” quality, such as race, kinship ties, or tradition and argues for identity as the product of history. Yet, at the same time he makes a case for the “irreducibility” of the concept of identity (2). Following the direction indicated by Foucault’s work, Hall adopts the discursive approach, arguing that what the decentring of the subject requires “is not an abandonment or abolition of the subject but a reconceptualization – thinking it in its new, displaced or decentred position within the paradigm. It seems to be in the attempt to rearticulate the relationship between subjects and discursive practices that the question of identity recurs” (2). In his own effort to reformulate this debatable relationship, the culture critic uses the term “identification” instead of identity, 15 further arguing that despite the material and symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is ultimately “a construction […] conditional, and lodged in contingency” (2-3).

In other words, identification is seen as the product of an intersection of different components, of political and cultural discourses and particular histories. Hall sums up this central point in the following way: “Cultural identities are the points of identification […] which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position …” (“Cultural

Identity and Diaspora” 226).

The models of identity narrated through the “Italianized” texts of Byron, the Shelleys and their circle in the 1820s are contextual rather than essentialist. On the one hand, the figure of the Anglo-Italian per se begs the issue of identity construction. Moreover, it destabilises the traditionally Romantic idea of culture being rooted in one place and thus revolutionises the notion of identity, which is figured as the product of cultural interrelation and connection. On the other hand, however, we see the self being imaginatively grounded in fixed qualities, when Mary Shelley wishes to essentialise cultural traits by appealing to the solidarity of those who belong to the “race” of Anglo-Italians. In my opinion, this contradiction is due to the fact that the Romantic expatriates’ politics of identity, that is, their conditional, shifting identification with Italy and Italianness does not cancel their propensity to create an illusion of unity and of a unified subjectivity via the cultural systems of their adopted country.

The Romantics’ positioning into the Italian scene of their day by means of a rhetoric of Anglo-Italianness suggests fresh perspectives on intercultural perception in the field of

British Romanticism, while, on the other hand, complicates established ways of thinking about place and the Romantic subject. This intricate relationship has been largely conditioned by William Wordsworth’s paradigm of place as structuring subjectivity, or of place as 16 nurturing the psyche, a model which often transcends the geographical and the historical and figures place as a “natural”, non-specific locale, as in the following lines from “Home at

Grasmere”: “Something that makes this individual Spot, / This small abiding-place of many men, / A termination and a last retreat, / A Centre, come from whereso’er you will, / A whole without dependence or defect, / Made for itself and happy in itself, / Perfect Contentment,

Unity entire …” (ll.164-170, qtd. in Kelsall 37). Revisionist criticism in Romantic studies, especially historicist approaches, has brought about a repositioning of the issues of selfhood by showing the way historical and ideological circumstances informed the conception of subjectivity. The traditional idea of the deep self as a transcendental centre of consciousness, inherited by the German philosophers’ privileging of the creative mind and the imagination

(Kant, Fichte, Schelling), and ardently expressed in M.H. Abrams’s conviction that

Wordsworth’s “vision is that of the awesome depths and height of the human mind, and of the power of that mind as in itself adequate” (28) has been replaced by models of selfhood as historically constructed, such as Jerome McGann’s identification of a “consciousness industry” in Romantic discourse (91).

As Andrea Henderson claims in her important study Romantic Identities: Varieties of

Subjectivity 1774-1830 (1996), the depth model which traditional criticism has canonised as the Romantic view of subjectivity, was only one available model among many during the

Romantic period (2). Henderson argues that “[t]he character of Romanticism, like the characters within many Romantic works, has no deep truth. It is the creature of surfaces, of context, and of varying forms; and when it appears most self-consistent, it may be least so”

(5). Although her critical reconstruction of Romantic identity via the contextual model is not always effectively substantiated, that is, in proportion to the scope of her argument,

Henderson is right in emphasising the plurality of identities competing for cultural validity in 17

Romantic discourse, and thus in multiplying the number of “places” where subjectivity is discursively elaborated.

Precisely because Romanticism has traditionally been burdened with transcendental notions of the self and nature as previously indicated, it is perhaps one of the most problematic and interesting fields of literary studies in its relation to the cultural-geographical approach. Moreover, the period between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century features a variety of crucial geo-cultural events and the increasing opening up of British culture to other traditions and places through travel-writing, fictional narratives, exotic objects and commodities, visual culture, archaeology, and antiquarianism.

Significantly, a cultural-geographical approach replaces traditional ideas about the Romantic fascination with an “elsewhere” with less escapist views, as the Romantics’ writing of other and of their own places is enhanced by a variety of geo-cultural and geo-political contents.

Two recent studies in the field of Romanticism have explicitly drawn on this approach in order to assess the import of place in Romantic definitions of the self. Diego Saglia’s Poetic

Castles of Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (2000) focuses on representations of Spain in British literature (poetry) of the 1810s and 1820s, investigating the discursive materials employed in these fictional representations. Saglia’s book is an act of authorial, textual, and geographical recovery of Romantic hispanism; at the same time it offers valuable insight on the issues of intercultural perception and intra-European cultural relations in the Romantic period. Drawing mainly on Foucault’s notion of discourse and on postcolonial theory, the author attempts to address “models of identity shaped within and by the Spanish text” by delineating “a Romantic topography of the self, that is a writing in terms of culture-specific places” (148).

The second book, which is formally, if only partly, more akin to the content of my study is Stephen Cheeke’s Byron and Place: History, Translation, Nostalgia (2003). Cheeke 18 draws substantially on geography and history in order to analyse the palimpsests produced by

Byron’s situatedness. In his view, Byron’s poetry explores the philosophical relation between the materiality of geo-history and the mysterious supernatural of the genius loci. Cheeke examines the way in which the notion of “being there” becomes the central claim and shaping force in Byron’s poetry up to 1818, and investigates Byron’s self-imposed exile in Italy and the gradual process of translation and acculturation which marks the period 1818-1821. In the section on the years in Italy, which is entitled “Translation”, Cheeke attempts to showcase the

“inescapable connections […] between the cultural, the linguistic and the sexual, [which] would come to dominate Byron’s life and writing” (111). The author examines a number of poems of that period placing them in the context of Byron’s paradoxical “double Anglo-

Italian cast” (145). Cheeke successfully employs the idea of translation, both figurative and real, to describe not only the act of literal translation with which Byron was engaged at the time, but also the acculturation processes through which the poet aspired to become acclimatised in the Italian society.

Although Cheeke makes some original and interesting points, especially in the close readings of poems, he does not place much emphasis on the political hold of Byron’s positioning among different kinds of “insider knowledge and outsider estrangement” (145), on the one hand because he pays little attention to Byron’s interactions with the wider Italian milieu, and on the other hand because he reads Anglo-Italianness as a stylistic device which indicates the (im)possibility of hybridity, rather than as a case of identity politics. For a book that follows the theme of place in tracing Byron’s routes, I believe it is strange that the section on Italy leaves out the Pisan period and Byron’s joint efforts with Shelley, Hunt and his other acculturated compatriots to translate Italianness anew into an English context.

19 iii. Italy and the British Romantics

The majority of traditional scholarship in the area of Anglo-Italian relations in the

Romantic period has attempted to explore the Italian aesthetic and literary influence on the

Anglo-Saxon world, or on specific British Romantic poets and writers. Thus, for instance,

Peter Vassallo’s Byron: The Italian Literary Influence (1984), and Timothy Webb’s relevant chapter on Shelley’s indebtedness to Dante in his The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and

Translation (1976) are classic studies of Italy’s enriching intellectual influence on the two expatriate poets. In addition, there is a considerable, though not fully consistent body of work by Italian Romanticists between 1920 and 1970, which focus on the findings of extensive research concerning the Romantics’ sojourn in the various cities of Italy.8 These studies draw on archival material and other contemporary Italian sources and have thus provided Anglo-

Italian scholarship with valuable historical information on the various incidents that marked the Italian experience of Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, and others. The problem with these monographs, however, is the often indiscriminate mixture of historical facts with idealised, story-bound accounts of the Romantics’ life in Italy, a result of the authors’ own enthusiasm and admiration for the British expatriates who had achieved extraordinary fame in the late nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, this “cult” has survived even to date in Italy by being commodified and marketed via the re-production of these poets’ “romantic”, Italianised images.

Recent scholarship has attempted a more in-depth reading of the complex historical, political and cultural contexts which have informed the British Romantics’ Italian experience.

Within a climate of Romantic studies currently attuned to themes of travel, imperialism, politics, and feminism, the studies which engage with the Romantics’ relations to Italy consider more carefully the problematics inherent in the encounter of the two cultures, re- examining key issues such as national/cultural identity, place, translation, representation. 20

Thus, in their evaluations of these poets’ works, these critical investigations attempt to remove “Italy” from the sphere of unmarked space to a culturally resonant locale, to a place overwritten with stories and histories, to a place structured by historical subjectivity. Without overlooking their diversities and distinct methodological approaches, five characteristic instances of such scholarship are Mario Curreli and Anthony L. Johnson’s edited volume

Paradise of Exiles: Shelley and Byron in Pisa (1988), Alan Weinberg’s Shelley’s Italian

Experience (1991), Edoardo Zuccato’s Coleridge in Italy (1996), Lilla Maria Crisafulli’s edited volume Shelley e l’Italia (1998), and Daryl Ogden’s “Byron, Italy and the Poetics of

Liberal Imperialism” (2000) in the Keats-Shelley Journal. Drawing mostly on cultural theory, 9 these studies investigate, more or less extensively, the Romantics’ apprehension of the Italian immaginario as “alterità e identità” [alterity and identity] (Crisafulli,

“Introduzione” 2) in their poems and works.

Pursuing the path indicated by these works, one of the principal aims of this study is to attempt a revisionist reading of Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley and Leigh Hunt’s

“italianità”, moving it away from the idea of a purely aesthetic or “poetic” attachment to Italy to re-place it in situ, in its “situatedness”, that is, in its complex ideological prescriptions.10 In my opinion, the varied degrees of identification these writers display with Italy’s geo-history

– that is, with its culture, politics, language and community – are part of a complex and qualitative attempt to configure a bicultural identity. My use of the verb “configure” in the context of their identity formation is deliberate, and the volatility and interpenetration of the two meanings of “figure” (a rhetorical expression and the act of shaping) wishes to suggest that the narrativisation of the self does not undermine its discursive effectivity. Seen differently, if the verb is hyphenated (as in “to con-figure Italianness”) it combines the verb

“figure”, meaning to represent or picture something, and “configure”, that is, to arrange parts or elements in a particular form. These observations on etymology are meant to reinforce one 21 of the underlying concepts of this study, namely, that representations are involved in the production of a version of the world, and are therefore involved in its construction. Finally, the hyphenated verb alludes to the hyphenated identity of the Anglo-Italian.

My study also seeks to recover the Romantics’ own discourse of acculturation, as well as to highlight the ways this discourse is mediated by wider historical contexts. In this respect, Mary Shelley’s role in the conceptualisation of this project has been instrumental, and has proved highly rewarding. Despite being the least well-known for her association with the Italians among this company of expatriates, “the author of Frankenstein” carried further, in a sense, Percy Shelley’s plans for an ideal community of Italianised British by designating a subject position for them, by retrospectively interpellating the group of acculturated

Romantics, calling them into critical being, and theorising their intentions and social conduct.

As a result, the “Anglo-Italian” paradigm may serve as a “key” to interpreting the various meanings which Percy Shelley, Byron, and the other expatriates considered here attach to their conflictive identifications with Italianness. Nonetheless, Mary Shelley’s texts and the premises they profess are meant to expand, not limit, our understanding of this cultural phenomenon, as my work recognises that her perspective is largely conditioned by a number of cultural, societal, political, and economic coordinates, and is therefore contestable and qualitative. Gender, for instance, is a major determinant when examining Mary Shelley’s

Anglo-Italian politics and in the relevant chapter I try to illustrate how several gender-related issues underpin Mary Shelley’s construction of Anglo-Italianness.

Complicit with the idea of an intertextual dialogue on configurations of Italianness, the structure of this study itself wishes to facilitate paths of communication among the texts and contexts examined. In choosing to consider the Romantic Anglo-Italians in separate chapters, my primary aim has been to highlight the diversity and variety of their acculturating strategies as well as the spatial and temporal specificity which informs the articulation of 22 their Anglo-Italian identity. Nonetheless, this study draws significantly on the work of Jeffrey

Cox, Nicholas Roe, Greg Kucich and other Romanticists who have attempted in recent years to locate Romantic culture in the group, in the lived communities within which these writers worked. As Cox points out in a recent article in The European Romantic Review, “[w]hat a focus on the group as a middle ground of culture offers us is a way of viewing Romanticism not as the achieved vision of isolated geniuses but as the continually contested project of opposing groups of writers” (“Communal Romanticism” 332). In placing second generation

Romanticism within the circle around Leigh Hunt known as the Cockney School, Cox’s study challenges tenacious myths about Romantic isolation, and purports that second generation

English Romantics should be seen in the context of a rich network of writers, editors, dilettantes, associations and friends who published, read, and reviewed each other’s work.

The subject of communal Romanticism, according to Cox, invites a re-theorisation of

Romanticism not only as a field of literary study, but as a scholarly practice, too, encouraging more collaborative, collective effort in editorial and writing projects among Romanticists.

Thus, although this study is organised around four individual writers, it makes a conscious effort to see them all as part of a group – the Pisan circle – which embodied the ideals and aspirations of a community of expatriate liberal writers, and which was ideologically allied to the Cockney School. Even though my study purports a revisionist reading of the Pisan circle, that is, in the context of Anglo-Italian politics, it omits a thorough examination of less well-known members of the community of expatriates, who deserve to be studied in a separate project relating to the specific issues they raise. Similarly, The Liberal is considered mainly in relation to Leigh Hunt’s travelogue on Italy, and not in the full dimension of its Anglo-Italianness, as it is rendered in the works of the other contributors.

Nonetheless, the grouping of these particular Romantics in this thesis is not based on habit or traditional literary practice. To fully appreciate the implications of the Anglo-Italian 23 as a historically specific self-fashioned identity, one needs to consider that its major propagators shared the cultural and political vision of post-Waterloo liberalism, and inevitably shared in all the contradictions and ambivalences which beset this vision. More specifically, the professed mission of these acculturated literati to italianise their compatriots at home and “to disseminate among them a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the peninsula” (EI 343) suggests the distinctive role Anglo-Italians claimed in the construction of cultural and political models for British society. Therefore, assuming that the fashioning of special identities is historically contingent, I argue that the emergence and

“mission” of the Anglo-Italian is inextricably linked to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions of the age, as well as to the envisioning, by a group of Romantic liberal intellectuals, of social reform built upon a reconfigured space, identity, and culture.

Finally, the primary texts under consideration represent a cross-section of literary genres and arts – poetry, fiction, periodical review, travelogue, visual culture – and are intended to suggest that Englishness in relation to its “others” was an issue at stake in all these domains. As I argue, these texts are spaces in whose interstices the Romantics figure and configure betweenness and make a case for their Anglo-Italianness, while at the same time they problematise this positioning by casting the second half – Italianness – into a hermeneutics of suspicion. I hold that these texts combine to create a conflictive, shifting map of alternative subjectivities and imaginative geographies which foreground the problematics of identity and representation. Byron’s “all meridian” heart, Percy Shelley’s “Pisan roots”,

Mary Shelley’s “Anglo-Italicus” self, and the “Italianised Cockney” vestiture of The Liberal as it is revealed in Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad are debatable maps of meaning where poetry and geography overlap, clash, and interact.

Taking its bearings from the problematics involved in the interaction of cultures, my opening chapter attempts to trace affinities between pre-nineteenth-century Anglo-Italian 24 imaginative geographies and the figure of the Romantic Anglo-Italian. More specifically, I argue that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a significant part of the British cultural discourse registers the Anglo-Italian encounter in the form of hybridised spaces, identities, and narrative forms. My suggestion is that the British expatriates’ identity politics in the post-Napoleonic era draw on a pre-existing cultural geography of Anglo-Italianness.

Thus, the hyphenated identity Mary Shelley invents in the 1820s to legitimise the young

Romantics’ “elective affinities” with the adopted country and its people is, to a degree, anticipated in the atypical inter-spaces and volatile bicultural landscapes created in the art and literature of the preceding century.

Although I am not arguing for a direct, unambiguous connection between the two constructions of Italianness, I believe that the demarcation of an alternative geography of cultural identity in late eighteenth-century Capriccio paintings (by English and Italian artists) and in Madame de Staël’s Corinne underpins the makeup of the Romantic Anglo-Italian. At the same time, however, this cultural discourse pre-figures the contradictions, ambivalences, and modalities which are inherent in this Romantic identity. The Anglo-Italian, as figured and configured by Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron, Leigh Hunt and others, crystallises and consolidates not only British desires, anxieties, and interests voiced or implied in the cultural practices of the late eighteenth century, but also the problematics that rise out of this long- lasting, idiosyncratic interaction between England and Italy. In keeping this last parameter as an informing frame for my work, the first section of this chapter aims to establish a more concrete sense of the wider historical contexts concerning the two countries, by examining how the changing cultural, political, and social conditions modify intercultural perception.

Also, my attempt to anchor the figure of the Anglo-Italian to its ideological forerunners both in the eighteenth century and in earlier times – to the Inglese Italianato of the Reformation in particular – will hopefully reinforce an underlying assumption of this thesis, namely that the 25 fashioning of special identities is historically contingent, and it emerges when English politics, religion, or culture seek self-definition or redefinition in times of crisis or changing circumstances.

Pursuing the course indicated by sociological and geographical theorists, I assume that imaginative configurations of space in literature or art delineate ideological and physical boundaries, and by demonstrating what Henri Lefebvre calls “real possibilities” (422) they ultimately affect perceptions and practices in the material world. In an age when actual geography consisted of many blank or unknown spaces, British and European viewers could imagine alternatives to the familiar world. Specifically, the Romantic Anglo-Italian culture- scapes I examine open paths to investigate how British culture created its own familiar

“others” even by addressing neighbouring cultures and places. My aim is to explore the ways in which the conflation of spaces and the relocation of borders in the cultural discourse of the time, on the one hand contribute to the conceptual construction of Englishness, while on the other hand they upset and complicate established notions of cultural and national identity by exposing their figurative aspects.

The second chapter traces the textual origins and evolution of the Anglo-Italian in

Mary Shelley’s writings. Since the most complete sketches and references are made in her reviews and essays, my discussion focuses on “The English in Italy”, “A Visit to Brighton”, and “Modern Italy”, but it also utilises her letters and other subject-related documents, most of which have received scanty critical attention. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of her travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843

(1844) in order to show how the figure evolves through time and how Mary Shelley’s last work, in an instance of self-assessment, projects a critique of in-betweenness. Although the chapter is centred on her post-Italian period, there are frequent cross-references to her Italian 26 experience because the latter helps to elucidate her subsequent remarks on the “race” of

Anglo-Italians.

In discussing these texts and contexts, I wish to qualify Mary Shelley’s strategy as particularly enabling. More specifically, I argue that she prescribes the Anglo-Italian condition of “betweenness” as a model of acculturation into the Italian society, and as a distinct standard of taste. By capitalising on her own aesthetic competence conferred by this exclusive taste, as well as the professed originality of her views on things Italian, Mary

Shelley claims distinction as a mediator of cultures, and as a female author. Her discourse on

Anglo-Italian taste is examined within the context of contemporary aesthetic doctrines and theories on taste, while my reading is also informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological insights on taste and culture. Furthermore, the bicultural configuration offers an important index to Mary Shelley’s gender politics. When writing as an Anglo-Italian, she asserts her cultural authority with surprising tenaciousness, exposing her male competitors’ lack of authenticity, taste, and insider knowledge. As I see it, the hybridised figure is a covert but effective way of expressing her positions and feelings without breaking the rules of propriety and ladylike behaviour dictated by her age; consequently, it eases her entrance into the arena of the social sphere, and balances her lasting oscillation between self-assertion and self- effacement.

While the second chapter is concerned with the Anglo-Italian as a standard of taste and as Mary Shelley’s strategy of gender distinction, chapter three engages with the discourses of authenticity and acculturation this figure exemplifies. As I argue, Byron’s assimilation into the Italian scene of his day is conditioned by highly specific social, political, economic, and cultural coordinates. His Anglo-Italian discourse, significantly informed by his Romantic cosmopolitanism, configures identity as a hybrid structure which inhabits “an interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 4). More 27 specifically, by tracing Byron’s varied attempts to chart his meridian self along/despite his northern one in his poems Childe Harold IV, “To the Po. June 2nd 1819”, Beppo, and The

Prophecy of Dante, I wish to show that in the realm of his geographical poetics, Byron conceives of identity as an active process that involves inclusion and exclusion, identification and detachment, that is, a process in which the building of identity is at the same time an evasion of it.

In order to address Byron’s atypical identity formation process, this chapter explores the intricate and multi-layered discourse located at the nexus of “detachment” and

“involvement” and examines the implications that the configuration of this in-betweenness carries within its culture-specific, historical milieu. I believe that his adoption of a supplement identity (Italian) is an oblique assertion of the incompleteness of his native identity, as well as a critique on the deficiencies of British society and the liabilities of the

British empire. Hence, Byron’s attachment to Italianness proves problematic and contradictory in its practice, because it is complicated by his imperialist rhetorical strategies.

In addition, by endorsing both an English and an Italian perspective, Byron demonstrates a mental grasp of more than one culture and thus figures Anglo-Italianness as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism, which is, nonetheless, never entirely free from place/home and containment, the two alternatives being mutually dependent in the Romantic age.

Informed by this study’s concern to restore context, the first section of this chapter situates Byron’s rhetoric of Anglo-Italianness in the climate of the rich topical discourse of authenticity recorded in post-Napoleonic periodicals and in the travel writings of such

“Anglo-Italian” authors as Lady (Sydney Owenson) Morgan and Henry Digby Beste. The texts considered prefigure the various plots that stage the mediation between the two cultures, and raise issues concomitant with Byron’s own experience of acculturation. Thus, a parallel 28 reading of these writings further elucidates the cultural assumptions which lie behind their affinities, divergences, and problematics.

My final chapter continues the task of exploring how the Romantics fashioned their identity via the meanings of place, only this time place is examined both in its material reality and in its oneiric transfiguration. More explicitly, I argue that Shelley’s relation to the social, economic, and political space of Pisa evidences an “egocentric structuring” (Relph 50). His alliance is qualitative, conflictive and shifting, and defies simple categorisation under the headings of insideness or outsideness. While most critics generalise over Shelley’s attitude towards Italian history, culture, and politics and qualify it as divided or ambivalent, I argue that such characterisations are reductive, unless Shelley’s acculturation practices are examined within a specific geographical-political context. To support this argument I introduce primary material which clarifies the poet’s response to the Pisan milieu, such as the lyric poems “The Tower of Famine”, “Evening: Ponte al Mare, Pisa”, as well as Shelley’s

Italian review of Sgricci’s improvvisazione, a document which was discovered by P.M.

Dawson in the Shelley MSS in the Bodleian Library but which has been largely ignored since its first publication in 1981 in the Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin. I contend that Shelley’s politics of alliance with the Pisan community are informed by his identity politics, which are in turn formed by his association with a group of liberal intellectuals, the Pisan circle, an affiliate to the Cockney School. Hence I argue that the implementation of Pisa – as a real place and as a commonplace – in the construction of an alternative community by the British liberals is deeply embedded in the politics of their age.

This is a point I set out to exemplify in connection to Leigh Hunt and the publication of The Liberal. After investigating the logistics of this ambitious project and its inception as a reformist publication, I focus on Leigh Hunt’s epistolary travelogue Letters from Abroad. It seems to me that while Hunt seeks to legitimate through a series of topographies his 29 professed “liberal” affiliation with Italianness, he parochially configures the latter into a zone of contention, contradiction, and suspicion. Nonetheless, what I ultimately wish to suggest is that the historical importance of the Pisan circle and the related periodical work lies not only in its symbolic significance as an act of communal sensibility and Romantic contestation, but also in its attempt to give provisional “ground” – both figurative and real – to a bicultural social space, identity, and literacy.

As well as an index to the Romantic expatriates’ identity and politics, the makeup of the Anglo-Italian can offer, in my opinion, an insightful view on ideas of culture, class, and society of the early decades of the nineteenth century. Accordingly, one of the central questions that this thesis poses is to what extent the Anglo-Italian reflects and illuminates the contradictions and ideological conflicts that beset early nineteenth-century British society.

Ultimately, it enquires how this discursive operation combines to produce one of the most complex maps in the history of European culture, namely, that of British Romantic – and even post-Romantic – Italy.

30

Notes

1 Taken from P.M. Dawson, “Shelley and the Improvvisatore Sgricci: An Unpublished

Review,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin Rome XXXII (1981): 19-29. “[It] was in the highest style of tragic poetry and electrified the theatre. […] In this ability, is the most distinctive characteristic of Italy – among us the imagination performs in an instant the work which the reason accomplishes among others in a long period of time, or after many attempts, and this gift is the glory of our present destiny, and the pledge of our future” (Translated by

Dawson 28-29). Shelley’s review is discussed in detail in chapter four.

2 Mary Shelley’s review essay, originally published in the Westminster Review, is reprinted in

The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering 1996), vol. 2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays.

Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, 218-229. The excerpt I am referring to is the following: “Lord Byron was one of the few strangers who was admitted, or would choose to be admitted, behind the scenes of that singular stage [of Venetian society]. The money he was willing to squander there, the extreme ease with which he acquired and used the idiom of language, and the facility with which he amalgamated himself with, and gave a zest to their customs, by an openness of practice which transcended even their liberality of sentiment, all tended to initiate him into the very arcana of Venice. […] Mr Cooper has visited Venice, we imagine; he has probably dwelt there some time, but he has not Italianized himself, nor is he in the slightest degree familiar with the language; […] nor does he attempt to lead us into the interior of families, nor to dwell upon the forms of life belonging to the æra he has undertaken to describe” (220-221).

3 Originally published in Westminster Review 6 (October 1826): 325-341. “The English in

Italy” is reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles Robinson 31

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 341-357. All subsequent references are to this edition. Henceforth quoted as EI.

4 The Oxford English Dictionary, being a corrected re-issue with an introduction, supplement, and bibliography of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1933. Rpt. 1961. Henceforth quoted as OED.

5 See, for instance, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) esp. pp. 1-18, 66-84, where Bhabha argues for a much more complicated (psychoanalytically informed) relationship between coloniser and colonised. The notion of “third space” is thoroughly discussed in “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” Identity: Community, Culture,

Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) 207-221.

6 According to Caroline Mills, cultural geography draws on two sources. One, firmly anchored in geographical soil, is the Berkeley tradition which maps out the texture of material artifacts in the landscape and traces their association to ways of life. The other is rooted in cultural history and literary theory and alerts geographers to the politics of landscape and the instability of meanings assigned to a world of material objects. See her article “Myths and Meanings of Gentrification,” Place/Culture/Representation, eds. James

Duncan and David Ley (London: Routledge, 1993) 149-170. For an articulate introduction to the new cultural geography, see Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1989; rpt. 1999). After offering a critical review of the Berkeley School of cultural geography,

Jackson develops a materialist approach to the geographical study of culture, considering the work of such cultural theorists as Raymond Williams, Clifford Geertz and Stuart Hall.

7 The poetic/phenomenological approach has been closely associated with the name of

Gaston Bachelard and his book The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1964), as well as with the humanistic geographers Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph. The 32

social/Marxist strand has emerged from the thinking of Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja and

David Harvey (see relevant entries in Works Cited).

8 See, for instance, Giovanna Foa, Lord Byron, poeta e Carbonaro (Florence, 1935), Piero

Rebora, Civiltà italiana e civiltà inglese: studi e ricerche (Firenze, 1936), Nazzareno

Meneghetti, Lord Byron a Venezia (Venice, 1910), A. McMahan, Con Byron in Italia (1929),

B. Bini, Shelley nel Risorgimento Italiano (1930?).

9 Although the majority of recent scholarship on Romanticism deals with the restoration and examination of “ignored” texts as well as the social contexts of literary experience, there are also other strands of enquiry in terms of theoretical approach. For instance, the Spring 2002 volume of Studies in Romanticism featured a series of psychoanalytic articles, including

Joshua David Gonsalves’s “What Makes Lord Byron Go? Strong Determinations –

Public/Private – of Imperial Errancy” and Richard Marggraf Turley’s “ ‘Strange longings’:

Keats and Feet”.

10 Although many British Romantic poets and writers travelled to Italy and were inspired by the country’s landscape, culture, or history, this has not been my major criterion for including them in this study. As I argue later on, the pairing of these particular Romantics – and hence the exclusion of others – is not based on scholarly habit, nor does it adhere to any form of

“canon”. What brings the Shelleys, Byron, and Leigh Hunt together in this work is their temporal and spatial contiguity/coexistence in Italy, their designation by Mary Shelley as a

“race”, and their systematic figuration (re-presentation) and configuration (plotting, shaping) of a qualitative, ambivalent bicultural identity through place, in different yet subtly related ways. 33

CHAPTER 1 Anglo-Italian Spaces and Metaphors in the Cultural Discourse of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code and decode all its meanings and contents? Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

Her genius is more soft, harmonious, fine; Ours bolder, deeper, and more masculine: In short, as woman’s sweetness to man’s force, Less grand, but softening by the intercourse, So the two countries are, – so may they be, – England the high-souled man, the charmer Italy. Leigh Hunt, To the Right Honourable Lord Byron on his Departure for Italy and Greece

Now – Italy or London, which you will! P.B. Shelley, Letter to Maria Gisborne

1.1 A Tale of Two Countries

The relationship between England and Italy, based on a long history of cultural encounters and exchanges, acquires particular interest in the Renaissance and in the long eighteenth century, for both historians and literary critics. On the one hand, in the

Renaissance Italy’s influence over England is so pervasive that, according to the eminent critic Mario Praz, one can safely speak of an essential contribution to the formation and development of another culture, rather than of merely sporadic influence (7-8). On the other hand, in the eighteenth century Italy becomes the primary destination for the classically educated Grand Tourists, while, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the reopening of the European Continent, it attracts larger numbers of British middle-class travellers who wish to flee modernity and indulge their imaginations in the physical and artistic beauty of the country. Salient in the geography of the Romantic imagination for its classic associations, natural landscape and alluring, though destabilising, coincidentia oppositorum, Italy 34 constitutes a pole of attraction for British poets, writers, and artists. In the 1820s, Italianismo becomes associated with the groups of English residents or expatriates in the peninsula, who often form groups, sects, or colonies and claim affiliative bonds with Italianness.

Nonetheless, as Grand Touring gradually converts itself into ordinary tourism, the attitudes of visitors to Italy change. Thus, Italy is being visited for pleasure as well as for instruction.

Much as this often-cited historical synopsis documents Italy’s uninterrupted

“presence” in the English, and later, British immaginario from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, it inevitably fails to register a whole series of equally important concurrent “presences”, issues, and concerns which beset a phenomenon as broad and complicated as the interaction of cultures. Cultural theory has shown us, especially after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and the revisionist literature it has generated,1 that the relationship with other countries is not natural, transparent or unproblematic, but involves a web of issues which relate to power, representation, and ideology. Following the directions indicated by such a theoretical framework, recent scholarship in the area of Anglo-Italian relations has attempted a more in-depth reading of the complex historical, political, and cultural contexts which formed and informed Europe in the long eighteenth century.2

Drawing on cultural theory in the analysis of literary texts and other cultural and historical documents, these studies have come to register the encounter of Britain with Italian culture and geography not as an uncomplicated, one-way trajectory, but as a map of cultural, political, and economical intersecting itineraries. Accordingly, contemporary scholarship has set out to highlight and interpret not only the underlying causes of the Italian “allure” for the

Anglo-Saxon imagination, but also the ambivalences, contradictions, fluctuations, and modalities inherent in this cultural phenomenon, in the context of the rich and compelling interaction which informs the encounter of the British with the Italian world at the time, an 35 interaction which points towards a dynamic, multifarious, but also intricate and ambiguous relationship between the two countries.

It is worth noticing, for instance, that Italy, despite its long established cultural authority over Britain, the moment it becomes a constant reference point in British narrative and material space through its fictionalisation and commodification, particularly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, is instantly codified in thought and language and is

“trapped” into rhetorical frames and representations which reproduce it according to specific value signs, socially and historically conditioned. As it will be argued later in this chapter, and in the course of this thesis, Italy proves an exemplary case of a place whose geography was not merely represented but literally reshaped by the various topographies of British poets, novelists, and travel writers. Artemis Leontis’s proposition that “the citations of sites, through an act of repossession, may shape the sites of citations” (23) aptly suggests how topoi of the imagination and literary geographies can, in the end, prove supremely territorial.

All these facts add valuable insight into the intricate nature of power relations between the cultural coloniser and the culturally colonised, particularly if examined, as

Shearer West suggests, in the context “of the complex and changing political, social and economic situations in a Europe that was increasingly cosmopolitan even while nations were promoting their distinct cultural identities more self-consciously” (17). Although the Anglo-

Italian encounter does not fall into the large-scale category of the cultural and material interchanges between the British nation and its non-European “others”, – such as India,

China, or Africa – it is my contention that it offers fertile and energetic reflection on the interaction of cultures and ideas. More specifically, it contributes to the consideration of intra-European relations in an important historical era, and to the highly specific problematics posed by Britain’s interaction with its various European “others” – such as France, Spain, and

Greece – a field that has not been subjected to the same sort of analysis as the interchanges 36 between the empire and subaltern elements outside it. As Manfred Pfister observes, although intra-European “Meridionism” has not had the same far-reaching and devastating political consequences that Orientalism had, yet “it has played an incisive role in the formation of

British and European selfunderstanding, in cultural representations, practices and politics, in the ‘Political Unconscious’ […] forever busy conflating distinctions of class, race, gender, nationality and religion” (3).

Nonetheless, to avoid a monolithic, coherent notion of Meridionism, this study assumes that Meridionism is not a closed system of cultural domination but a contact zone3 between Britain and Italy which is marked by mutual vulnerability, as the cultural identities of both the “coloniser” and the “colonised” are not immune to the effects of this encounter.

More significantly, as the circulation of power involved in the exchange of authority perpetually reverses and undermines the two positions, the reversibility of “self” and “other” comes as a result of the constant negotiation between opposite forces and impulses. As Lisa

Lowe points out, assuming Michel Foucault’s theory, “power is not static, nor does it inhere in an agency or a position or practice in itself; rather, it is found in the spatial and relational nonequivalences of the discursive terrain, in the active shifting and redistribution of the sites of inscription” (9). Given that the construction of identity involves establishing opposites and others, as Said informs us, Italy and England would have imaginative recourse to each other in order to fulfil a sense of cultural/historical/national lack and thus enhance their self-image.

In other words, by (temporarily) appropriating the other, and by invading each other’s spaces, they sought to remedy existing deficiencies. In fact, it was all these oppositions and differences – a mixture of fact and fiction perpetuated through the ideological discourse of the time – that defined the qualified attraction of the Italians for the English and of the

English for the Italians. The result of this conscious juxtaposition in the cultural discourse of the time is the formation of a space between them which allows them to mirror one another, 37 the space becoming a condition for self-reflexivity, which inevitably results in self- confrontation. Englishness and Italianness confront each other in an intermediate space, where previously set hierarchies fall and are reorganised, providing a constant renewal of the act of identification.

As Pfister argues, British constructions of Italy are based on an interconnected set of oppositions, which are relatively stable in content but shifting in emphasis, pitting Italy against Britain (5): North vs. South (not only in terms of geographical latitude, but also in racial terms of human physiology and character), Germanic vs. Latin, male vs. female, cold vs. hot, Protestant vs. Roman Catholic, modern achievement vs. classical heritage, efficiency vs. disorganisation, honesty vs. deviousness, civic liberty vs. papal despotism, political power vs. anarchy, and so forth. This set of correlated oppositions aptly illustrates how the “other” helps a culture – in this case Italy helps Britain – to establish and maintain an identity, “by serving as a screen onto which the self projects its unfulfilled longings, its repressed desires and its darker sides which it wishes and sees itself constrained to exorcise” (Pfister 4; emphasis added).

On the other hand, the reversibility and change in rank of the opposites in different historical eras creates a pluralisation of discourses about Italy, often in the form of two sharply contrasting discourses, “giving rise to the antithetical poles of italomania and italophobia” (Ellul-Micallef 88). This apparent paradox is further reinforced by the fact that these diametrically opposed attitudes towards Italy not only existed, but coexisted at the time, perpetuating, though on a different scale of values, contradictory perceptions of Italy which had subsisted side by side since the sixteenth century. Thus, in the Renaissance, Italy was a land of cultural wealth and scholarship and, at the same time, a pattern of vice, popery, and religious superstition. Correspondingly, Romantic Italy is recast in the cultural discourse of the time as both self and other, as that which, in Homi Bhabha’s words, “is at once an object 38 of desire and derision, an articulation of difference contained within the fantasy of origin and identity” (The Location of Culture 67). Considered in this perspective, Italy is mapped out as

Britain’s “dangerous supplement”. For Jacques Derrida, the notion of supplement floats between its two senses, of that which is added on, and that which substitutes for and supplants (from the verb “suppleer” in French).4 Thus, while Italy is called on to feed the

English imagination with what it lacks and desires, it is always viewed as a potential menace, as the “other” which undermines and threatens to eliminate the self.

In the face of English cross-cultural fantasies (and premonitions), on which this thesis focuses, the literature of the time ventures unrestrained crossings and brings forth elaborate comparisons 5 between the two countries. Rooted in historical coordinates, the imaginative geographies of the period – in painting, fiction, poetry – are infused with elements from both cultures and mentalities. Many works of art become an arena of Anglo-Italian encounters, as two distinct geographies, climates, mind-sets, and languages confront each other in fanciful ways and re-imagine/re-negotiate their borders, differences, and affinities. In other words, the

British cultural discourse of the time does not solely engage with the representation of Italian cultural, geographical, social, and historical spaces but flirts with the idea(l) of hybridised

Anglo-Italian spaces. Notably, this experimentation with “opposing” geographies and poetics assumes a pan-European dimension, as it is pursued not only by the countries involved, but by “outsiders”, such as the French author Madame de Staël. These “new” spaces temporarily upset established dualities and oppositions by exploring the uncharted, interstitial passages which cross neatly defined domains, and by exposing in a strikingly (post)modern way the historical constructedness of geography. In this respect, P.B. Shelley’s light-hearted call to

Maria Gisborne, cited in the epigraph, to make an instant choice between the two settings –

Italy or London – cancels the function of the disjunctive mode and invites a variety of combinations to form new cultural landscapes. 39

The present chapter argues that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a significant part of the British cultural discourse registers the Anglo-Italian encounter in the form of hybridised spaces, identities, and narrative forms. These imagined culture-scapes configure alternative geographies of spaces and identities, in an age when real geography proves fluid and uncertain, in an age when, as Michael Wiley notes, “geography could become the basis of utopian texts” (10). Notably, these Romantic geographical poetics signify an active engagement between imagined and real spaces, and by demonstrating what Henri

Lefebvre calls “real possibilities” (422), challenge existing ideologies and ultimately affect perceptions and practices in the material world. Therefore, my aim is to explore the ways in which the “unorthodox” conflation of spaces, the “audacious” relocation of borders and the problematisation of cultural identities in the collective imagination, on the one hand demarcate, and on the other hand contest the social, political, cultural, and economic status quo. It is my suggestion that the propensity of the English to reinvent, depict, and ultimately ground themselves as English and/or Italian in the long eighteenth century is very much related to their need to understand their historical destiny and their role on the Continent in a rapidly changing age.

This chapter ultimately assumes that the British expatriates’ identity politics in the post-Napoleonic era draw on a pre-existing cultural geography of Anglo-Italianness. The hyphenated identity Mary Shelley invents in the 1820s to legitimise the young Romantics’

“elective affinities” with the adopted country and its people is, to a degree, anticipated in the atypical inter-spaces and volatile bicultural landscapes created in the art and literature of the preceding century. Although I am not arguing for a direct, unambiguous connection between the two constructions of Italianness, I believe that the demarcation of an alternative geography of cultural identity in late eighteenth-century Capriccio paintings and in Madame de Staël’s Corinne underpins the makeup of the Romantic Anglo-Italian. At the same time, 40 however, this cultural discourse pre-figures the contradictions, ambivalences, and modalities which are inherent in this Romantic identity. The Anglo-Italian, as figured and configured by

Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Byron, Leigh Hunt and others crystallises and consolidates not only British desires, anxieties, and interests voiced or implied in the cultural practices of the late eighteenth century, but also the problematics that rise out of this long-lasting, idiosyncratic interaction between England and Italy.

My choice of these two cases as cultural paradigms for my argument – late eighteenth-century Capricci and Madame de Staël’s Corinne – has been partly determined by this very last parameter, namely, that in both of them the construction of an Anglo-Italian symbiosis, in the atypical form of a unitary space or identity, foregrounds its feasibility, as well as its vicissitudes. More importantly, and considering their immense popularity in their time, these works exemplify how imaginative geography affects real geography, what

Lefebvre calls “the objective effects of reflections and mirrors” (2). Finally, the paradigms I am using not only engage with the current political, cultural, and social discourses that underpin the relations between England and Italy, but involve a more complex diorama of perspectives, which, however, enriches our view of the Anglo-Italian map. For instance, even though they are executed by Italian painters, the Capricci of London, which precede William

Marlow’s work, are systematically commissioned by British aristocrats. On the other hand, the author of what is probably the most famous “Anglo-Italian” novel, is neither English nor

Italian.

Before setting off to highlight how the Anglo-Italian interaction is envisaged in the visual culture of the early Romantic era and in Madame de Staël’s prolific cross-cultural novel, it would be helpful to establish a more concrete sense of the wider historical contexts concerning the two countries, on the one hand by examining how the changing cultural, political, and social conditions modify intercultural perception, and on the other hand by 41 prefiguring the established ideological premises the works I employ challenge, as regards relations between England and Italy – religious, geographical, political – via their non- canonical configurations. Moreover, the anchorage of the figure of the Anglo-Italian to its ideological forerunners both in the eighteenth century and in earlier times – to the English

Italianate of the Reformation in particular – will hopefully reinforce an underlying assumption of this thesis, namely that the fashioning of special identities is historically contingent, and it emerges when English politics, religion, or culture seek self-definition or redefinition in times of crisis and in the face of changing circumstances.

Hence, the attachment of “Italianness” to the English identity is contingent on various discursive practices which shape its meaning and condition its function as an asset and/or a liability in relation to Englishness. An indication of the huge transformation “Italian” and

“Italianness” have undergone in the collective imagination can be offered by a comparison between the Romantic Anglo-Italian and its sixteenth-century nominal “counterpart”, the

Italianate Englishman. In the early nineteenth century Mary Shelley enthusiastically propagates the Italianised English as an exemplary intellectual who combines high culture, fine taste, and the authentic experience that stems from his/her immersion in Italy’s “local colour”. Conversely, in The Scholemaster (1564), Roger Ascham strongly denounces the ill- effects of Italian education in the wider sense on English youth, for the latter return home

Italianati to the detriment of the customs and culture of their native land:

I know as many […] for whose sake I hate going into that country the

more, who, parting out of England fervent in the love of Christ’s doctrine,

and well-furnished in the fear of God, returned out of Italy worse transformed

than ever was any in Circe’s Court. I know diverse, that went out of England,

men of innocent life, men of excellent learning, who returned out of Italy,

not only with worse manners, but also with less learning: neither so willing 42

to live orderly, nor yet so able to speak learnedly, as they were home, before

they went abroad. (qtd. in Pfister 78; emphasis added)

After this aphoristic invective, Ascham goes on to give an explicit definition of what an English Italianate is:

If some yet do not well understand, what is an English man Italianated,

I will plainly tell him. He, that by living, & travelling in Italy, brings home

into England out of Italy, the Religion, the learning, the policy, the experience,

the manners of Italy. That is to say, for Religion, Papistry or worse: for

learning, less commonly than they carried out with them: for policy, a

factious heart, a discoursing head, a mind to meddle in all men’s matters:

for experience, plenty of new mischieves never known in England before;

for manners, variety of vanities, and change of filthy living. (qtd. in Pfister 79)

Paradoxically, Italy, at the time, was perceived by the English humanists as a land of cultural wealth and scholarship well in advance of their own, whose learning they aspired to imbibe. “Italian influence” had a wide range, from various influences on the forms of English literary works, to the spread of models of conduct rising out of courtesy books such as

Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano.6 Therefore, at a time when things Italian were inordinately admired in England, the word “Italianate” should have been a term of praise – but it never really was. Punctuated by strong anti-Catholic and anti-papal bias, Ascham’s educational treatise projects Italy as a land of vanities, vice, debauchery and corruption, a land where

English youth do not learn wisdom or honesty but have their religious and moral values severely undermined. The implications of “Italianate” acquired an even more sinister and pejorative significance as used in Elizabethan drama, “becoming synonymous with devilry, hypocrisy, intrigue, secret murders and public treachery […] [and being] virtually interchangeable with Machiavellian” (Ellul-Micallef 90). The Elizabethan dramatists saw 43

Italy through the eyes of religious prejudice and sensationalism, and sought to ground the country’s exotic thrill through their tragedies’ Italianate backgrounds, as in Christopher

Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi.

Alternatively, or concurrently, they relied on the figure of a fictitious Machiavelli – which, according to Praz, had given to the principle of evil a dramatic mask – in order to construct their villains (14).

In identifying the threatening other with Italy’s religion, culture, and people, Ascham and other italophobes of his time7 feared the erosion of English culture by elements alien to the fabric of the native character. It is of note that the alteration of one’s distinctive status effected by the attachment of the epithet “Italianate” to the term “Englishman”, or in the italianised form “Inglese Italianato”, 8 designated the injurious transformation of one’s national and cultural identity, religion, and morality. Ascham’s sneer at his affected compatriots for apishly adopting Italian manners and carrying them home gives voice to

English anxieties over Italy’s subversive influence. At the same time, however, his reactive stance against Italy and alterity in general can be attributed to a growing nationalist feeling in the Elizabethan era which dictated such anti-Italian or xenophobic sentiments in defence of the English culture. Most tellingly, in King Richard II (1597), Shakespeare writes in the tradition of Ascham’s invective on the Italianated Englishman, by combining an attack on foreign fashions with a patriotic appeal: “The open ear of youth doth always listen, / Report of fashions in proud Italy, / Whose manners still our tardy-apish nation / Limps after in base imitation” (II, 1, 20-23). The term “proud Italy” is denigrating, rather than laudatory, portraying the country as a den of fashions, conceit, and vice. The configuration of the

Italianate Englishman illustrates that identification is a complex construction which arises in specific historical conditions. In contradistinction to the figure of the Anglo-Italian which entails a process of assimilation of otherness, albeit partial and selective, the figure of the 44

Italianate Englishman entails a process of rejection of otherness, through a manifestation of its corrupting influence on the self. Both cases, however, result in the building of a new identity, be that a term of praise or of dispraise. Tellingly, the English establish their sense of who they are by identifying with, or identifying against Italianness.

The seventeenth century witnesses a critical phase of Italian economic reversal which, according to Andrew M. Canepa, is largely responsible for the “decisive transformation from mere Italophobia to contempt for the Italian” (132). English travel writing of the time discloses a strong sense of English economic, political, moral, and intellectual superiority in the ways it deplores Italy’s economic backwardness, its political and cultural decadence, and its inhabitants’ reactionary state. As the British industry and commerce expand, and Italy is all the more identified in the popular imagination as a land of classical heritage and scenic beauty only, the divided perspective in the view of Italy becomes more acute. Joseph

Addison’s contribution to a discourse of parallelly-running contrasting constructions of Italy is definitive. For Addison, there is a positive Italy of natural beauty and classical inheritance, and a negative one of exploitation and despotism. His verse epistle “A Letter from Italy”

(1701) emphatically sets British liberty against Italian beauty in the “Italy vs. Britain” opposition:

How has kind Heaven adorned the happy land,

And scattered blessings with a wasteful hand!

But what avail her unexhausted stores,

Her blooming mountains and her sunny shores,

With all the gifts that heaven and earth impart,

The smiles of nature, and the charms of art,

While proud oppression in her valleys reigns,

And tyranny usurps her happy plains? 45

..………………………………………………

We envy not the warmer clime, that lies

In ten degrees of more indulgent skies,

Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine,

Though o’er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine:

’Tis liberty that crowns Britannia’s isle,

And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains

smile. (35, 37)

The revival of the English interest in Italy that began to emerge in the eighteenth century, strongly associated with the institution of the Grand Tour, reinforced the country’s oversignified terrain and its richness in association and suggestion. The Grand Tourists were attracted by the country’s classical inheritance, Renaissance culture, and varied landscapes, all of which were considered to be of great edifying and ennobling value. In the majority of cultural artifacts of the time, Italy rises as a topos of spiritual illumination and immediate gratification. Speaking of the country’s oversignification, Andrew Wilton notes that “in the eighteenth century Italy was a female goddess […] endowing her votaries with a unique spiritual and sensory experience. She did so by being the birthplace of Dante, Petrarch,

Macchiavelli, Michelangelo and Raphael, Vivaldi and Farinelli, Galileo and Aldovrandi. Italy was Parnassus, the Elysian Fields and the Garden of Hesperides rolled into one” (15). Wilton critically evokes the state of Italy as a rich system of signs and citations, relayed through allusions, images, and metaphors, also foregrounding the cultural processes through which

Italy loses its specificity as a physical reality and is reduced into a series of common-places.

On the other hand, the treatment of Italy in the gothic novel of the late eighteenth century provides an apt index of the palimpsests of meaning with which the country had been vested since the fifteenth century, and of the selective adaptation of these signifiers into 46 current generic modes and historical contexts. Drawing largely on the Machiavellian image of the Jacobean dramatists, on seventeenth-century guide-books with strong anti-Catholic bias, on the arcadian landscape of Claude Lorrain, and, last but not least, on Salvator Rosa’s wild, cryptic, and savage etchings with pictures of bandits, gothic romances associate Italy with emotional excitement, intrigue, villainy, and sensationalism. In this context, the most influential representation of Italy was created by Ann Radcliffe. Even though she had never been to Italy, and had little sense of its geography, her picture of the country, and particularly of its landscape in novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and A

Sicilian Romance (1790) proved of major importance to the Romantic apprehension of Italy.

Radcliffe was believed to convey to her readers the authentic colour of Italy – “an Italy of gondolas, stiletti, banditti, intrigue and inquisition” (Cavaliero, Italia Romantica 3.4). Not surprisingly, Radcliffe’s “artificial” image of Italy, which proved commercially successful, spawned a whole series of novels in the early years of the nineteenth century which relied heavily on the previously mentioned sources and patterns of representation. As Kenneth

Churchill points out, by that time, almost every “Italian” novel or story figured a stock Italian setting (19).

Another series of Italian maps was produced in Britain after the reopening of the

Continent. The influx of British travellers to Italy in the post-Waterloo period generated a wide cultural agenda which included a plethora of accounts and topographical materials on the Mediterranean country – travel-books, works of fiction, memoirs, articles in periodical literature – all of which charted, registered, and valued Italy by re-inscribing its fragmented spaces, by creating various topographies. In his bibliography of travels-books describing Italy published in England (1800-1850), C.P. Brand cites the titles of approximately seventy travel-narratives for the period between 1815-1826, designed primarily for the general reader, or for travellers to Italy, including the best-sellers A Tour through Italy by John Chetwode 47

Eustace (1813), Remarks on Antiquities, by Joseph Forsyth (1813), and Travels on the

Continent by Mariana Starke (1820).9 In these, the authors set out to describe their experiences and impressions during a tour or stay in Italy, with specific references, as they announce in their titles, to “antiquities and curiosities”, “scenery”, “manners and customs”, and the country’s “inhabitants”. Italy’s geopolitical territory is being gradually transformed through narration, objectification, and commodification into a series of conceptual maps, many of which, as it will be argued in chapter three, lack originality despite their constant appeal to it.

In the Romantic age, the country’s re-inscription into British codes of meaning is particularly ramifying. Through the power of figuration, Italy becomes an alternative language, a reservoir of palatable phrases, expressions, images and motifs by means of which

British Romantics can, on the one hand, criticise the deficiencies of contemporary Europe and, on the other, intimate more optimistic forms and visions of human civilisation. Being employed as a living source of metaphors, symbols, and allusions for the identity crisis and troubled spirit of the age, Italy serves as one of the major idioms of the Romantic generation of poets. Subsequently, the transformation of Italy’s sites into sites of discourse through the deliberate conflation of place and commonplace in the writings of the period, inevitably reflects the parallel (hi)story of the English processing and re-construction of Italy. Most importantly, topographies of Italy are more about Britain than Italy, and attest to the fact that, far from being a passive process, intercultural perception is a particularly accentuated case of a constructive and de-constructive dialectic. Hence, the transformation of Italy into a storehouse of meanings is intrinsically related to the appropriation and careful interweaving of these meanings in English national, cultural, and historical narratives.

A case in point is the classic past, which had to be decoupled from its associations with Italy before it was internalised by the English political unconscious and reinvested in the 48 concerns of the upcoming British nation. Mario Praz observes that in the eighteenth century the English became fully aware of their strength and wisdom, and “the more they felt they were the true heirs not only of the republican virtues, but also of the imperial glories of ancient Rome, the more they were ready to condemn the ‘degenerate’ Italians” (20). The appropriation and re-invention of antiquity to the interests of the British, and in disfavour of modern Italians, is also registered in the cultural discourse of the early nineteenth century. In his review of Corinne published in the Edinburgh Review in 1807, the influential critic

Francis Jeffrey clarifies the hierarchy of “Great Britain and Italy, the extremes of civilised

Europe” (183) :

The climate of Italy is not probably very different now from what it was in

antient times; and yet, what a difference between the antient Romans and

modern Italians? We are persuaded we shall not […] be accused of any

immoderate partiality in favour of our countrymen, when we say that an

Englishman bears a much greater resemblance to a Roman, than an Italian

of the present day. Here, therefore, the possession of liberty and laws, and

above all, the superiority a man derives from having a share in the

government of his country, has, in opposition to climate and situation,

produced a greater resemblance of character, than the latter was able to

do, when counteracted by the former. (194)

At a time when the British national identity was being forged, and the middle-class consciously sought ways to define itself, the associations of the classics became extremely important for the English. In their effort to form their national consciousness, the encounter with other countries, especially Italy and Greece, largely served to confirm the superiority of

British social arrangements over those found elsewhere (Buzard 100). Jeffrey constructs

English strength in opposition to Italian weakness, and reclaims England as possessing 49 something positive that Italy lacks: a constitutional government and an effective political system. The reviewer presents the British fighting Napoleon as analogous to ancient Romans, and dismisses modern Italians, who, in 1807 are ruled by Napoleon himself. Italy’s history, culture, and landscape signal a range of aspirations and anxieties concurrent with the events of history and with the Britons’ nationalist and imperialist dilemmas.

Paradoxically, Jeffrey’s laudatory views on the political system of his country were shared and voiced by many Italians of his time. Were we, at this point, to reverse the “mirror” and look at the constructions of Britain that inform the British experience of Italian travellers, we would come up with some interesting conclusions regarding the dynamics, as well as the mutability of this relationship. Significantly, these constructions map positions comparable to

“italomania” and “italophobia” – what we could call “anglomania” and “anglophobia” – acted out, however, on a smaller scale. Although a comparative approach exceeds the scope of this study, it is worth mentioning that in Renaissance Italian accounts of Britain, Britons, along with other “transmontanes” were chastised for being, in the words of the sixteenth- century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, “disrespectful, uncouth, crude, rustic, savage and ill-bred” (qtd. in Canepa 110). When, however, humanism ceased to be an Italian monopoly, anti-barbarian invectives directed beyond the Alps waned, particularly when in the sixteenth century Italy experienced a crisis of self-esteem due to its political and economic decline, and above all, due to the eclipse of its religious and cultural hegemony.

On the other hand, while in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the

Romantic Italian stereotype is erected essentially as an imaginary alternative to commercialised Britain and the constraints of the home environment, the English stereotype of the Italians is set up as an alternative to the sad effects of Italy’s political and economic backwardness, papal despotism and foreign domination. The social and economic experiences of England in the eighteenth century had great importance in stimulating and 50 forming Italian reform movements. In the eyes of many Italians who travelled or fled to

London for political reasons, England was a land where one could be politically free, a land where “liberty was a custom, a part of daily life, not a hope but a reality” (Venturi 393). This is a major reason why, as Arturo Graf argues in his book with the telling title L’Anglomania e l’influsso Inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (1911), opposition to British influences was rare.

Laudatory views on England’s political and social structure were expressed by many well- known Italian literati, poets, political scientists, and philosophers of the time, such as Cesare

Beccaria, Vittorio Alfieri, Giuseppe Baretti, Ugo Foscolo, as well as by the liberal writers of the Milanese circle – Ludovico di Breme, Silvio Pellico, Giovanni Berchet – who constituted the core of the Italian Romantic movement and launched the radical periodical Il Conciliatore in 1818.

Thus, in the general climate of Anglophilia recorded in the eighteenth century, the congratulatory view on Britain’s political system expressed by Cesare Beccaria in the famous chapter on torture of Dei delitti e delle pene (1764) [On Crimes and Punishments] was indeed influential. Beccaria portrayed England as a wealthy and powerful nation, glorious in letters and providing examples of virtue, courage and enlightened jurisprudence: “Inghilterra, nazione in cui la gloria delle lettere, la superiorità del commercio e delle ricchezze, e perciò della potenza, e gli esempi di virtù e di coraggio non ci lasciano dubitare della bontà delle leggi” (42).10 In addition, many Italian intellectuals and writers who travelled to England and/or resided there for some time, continually brought forth elaborate comparisons between their native land and the adopted one. For Vittorio Alfieri, England appears to be the politically ideal state. The Italian dramatist admits in his Vita that “all these true and unique gifts of that fortunate and free country astonished me before, […] and I have never changed my opinion, there being too much difference between England and the remainder of Europe in the diffusion of public happiness resulting from better government” (qtd. in Venturi, The 51

End of the Old Regime in Europe 395). For Giuseppe Baretti, despite his strong invective in his Lettere Familiari that the country’s prosperity is destabilised by moral ambivalence and political corruption, England is still “Inghilterra gloriosa […] madre di gente valorosa, madre d’uomini dotti, magnanimi e buoni” (Opere Scelte 108).11

Of course, exaltatory remarks idealised, but were incapable of disguising the tensions and problems that beset British politics in those years. Interestingly, next to the image of the noble, powerful Briton existed that of the avaricious, introverted tourist and of the arrogant and treacherous imperialist, particularly during the French occupation. During that time, the theme of “perfida Albione” was emphasised; years later, however, the Britons would still be disapprovingly addressed as “i gravi figli di Albione” (Nuovo giornale dei letterati 59).12

Political changes in Britain, such as increasing awareness of empire, agitation for political reform, and the American and French revolutions, ultimately transformed perceptions of

Italy, multiplying, complicating and problematising them. An elusive Italy symbolised the elusive realities of a mature British empire. Correspondingly, the social and political decadence of eighteenth-century Italy conditioned perceptions of England. A free, powerful but unreliable and treacherous Britain symbolised the aspirations and fears of a rising Italian nation.

Despite the two countries’ highly distinct histories, the history of their relations and interconnected interests proves that the creation of their national image at the time was an idealised projection of traits carefully selected from “outside”, in an effort to “discover” and establish a pattern of values that would help them attain identity, autonomy, and power.

Although Italy’s constitutive role in the formation of Britishness is generally acknowledged, particularly as regards the British appropriation and implementation of Italy’s classic associations at a time when the British national identity was forged, one should also stress

England’s role as a constitutive outside in the formation of an Italian communal identity, or in 52 the words of Gerald Newman, of “a more distinct sense of a we-group consciousness”, in the cultural activity of “conscious self-comparisons with the alien culture” (55).

As historian Christopher Duggan observes, Italy’s cultural isolationism of the seventeenth century – which was mostly due to the provincialism in which Spanish rule had kept Italy for two hundred years – had given way to active engagement in the world of ideas which, in turn, gave rise to new economic, social, and political ideals to which reformers aspired (85-86). Giuliano Procacci stresses that as well as being politically and economically integrated within Europe, Italy shared in the “cultural revolution” of the eighteenth century, particularly in the “promotion of culture on a mass scale in modern Europe” (222, 223), a point that becomes more pertinent to my discussion of Italian topographical painting.

Consequently, this situation would lead to the country’s desire to emulate foreign models, a project that was occasionally hindered, however, by Italy’s identity crisis and sense of inferiority, which mainly stemmed from its being charted on the European map as an anachronistic and stagnant patchwork of states.

The period designated as Romantic was a restless period in British cultural history which witnessed the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, industrialisation, urbanisation, the growth of dissenting religions and the expansion of the

British empire. The period marked a particular phase in the history of travel, between the slow decline of the traditional Grand Tour and the advent of mass tourism in the 1840s. On the other hand, explorations, expeditions and diplomatic or religious missions to non-

European destinations were crucial factors in the widening of the horizons of Romantic period culture, with such landmarks as Captain Cook’s voyages in the South Seas between

1768 and 1780 (Saglia, “Romantic Heterographies” 20). Fictional literature and travel writing are a good testimony to the expansion of the geo-cultural vistas of the time, as well as to the 53 perforce destabilisation of the travellers’ national, racial, gender, and class affiliations provoked by their experience of geographical displacement.

The construction of binary oppositions in the encounter of the “self” with the foreign, much like the ones outlined apropos of the Anglo-Italian encounter, was a common strategy of that time for translating the other into something coherent and familiar. On the other hand, encounter with diverse systems of manners of other nations voiced contemporary considerations about the specificity of “national character”, and its relation to history, physical setting, and climate, a position that questioned the long established premise of a universal human nature. As Diego Saglia argues, “Romantic culture contemplates the idea of a geographically based psychology and of a national identity created through historical and climatic influence” (Poetic Castles in Spain 149). In other words, the national character is believed to be endowed with traits stemming from historical developments and geographical features through the influence of landscape. This model was largely based on the eighteenth- century sociological and anthropological studies which investigated the interdependence of geography, culture, and manners in human life. David Hume’s and Montesquieu’s middle-of- the-century essays on national character and manners made a case for the contribution of physical and moral causes to the formation of a nation’s character. As John G. Hayman notes, although their analyses were based more on common knowledge and travel accounts rather then on close, scrupulous observation (14), their conclusions were well received by contemporary opinion. Unsurprisingly, Montesquieu’s pointed contrast between northern industry and southern idleness13 offered a sound pretext for critiquing southern economical backwardness, while it also provided the ground for a series of related, arbitrary oppositions between the north and south – by extension, between England and Italy.

Understandably, the larger discourse that determined the representation of southern and northern topography at the time capitalised on differences in matters of economy, 54 politics, religion, culture, and physical character. A contrast which was particularly frequent and well-received in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries concerned the economic and political condition between the two regions: the underdeveloped, decadent south, divided and under foreign rule versus the industrialised, urbanised north. Having managed to control the dissenting voices and internal agitation within its boundaries, Britain was by this time an established commercial and colonial power that sought opportunities to affirm its status, superiority, and sway in the world. Italy, on the other hand, divided and under foreign yolk, experienced an identity crisis, while its decadence and economic regression made the prospect of an Italian nation appear weak, not only to political circles abroad, but to the country’s own inhabitants. Italy’s map was an uneven chart of differing cultural conceptions and mental attitudes, with occasional anarchic uprisings against the conquerors, culminating in the insurrections of 1820-1821.

Religion was another issue of controversy and tension between the two countries.

There was a deep gulf that separated the Protestant North from the Catholic South. Roman

Catholicism was viewed as an evil influence on Italians, on their character and their history, while the Catholic church with its rituals and ceremonies was seen as a potential threat to the

Puritan ethos. According to C. P. Brand, most English travellers were confirmed in their anti-

Catholic beliefs as a result of their journey, and made no attempt to reconcile this admiration for Italy with the aversion to the Roman Church (Italy and the English Romantics 219, 233).

As an example of the anti-Catholic traveller, the Romantic essayist and critic William Hazlitt is perhaps typical in his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826):

The Popish religion is a convenient cloak for crime, an embroidered robe

for virtue. It makes the essence of good and ill to depend on rewards and

punishments, and places these in the hands of the priests, for the honour of

God and the welfare of the church. […] Popery is […] to substitute lip- 55

service, genuflections, adoration of images, counting of beads, repeating

of Aves for useful works or pure intentions, and to get rid at once of all

moral obligation, of all self-control and self respect, by the proxy of maudlin

superstition, by a slavish submission to priests and saints. […] This religion

suits the pride and weakness of man’s intellect, the indolence of his will, the

cowardliness of his fears, the vanity of his hopes, his disposition to reap the

profits of a good thing and leave the trouble to others. (214, 215)

Nevertheless, the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 in Britain, slightly mitigated the Protestant intolerance towards Roman Catholicism and, despite the evidence of anti-Catholic feeling, a number of Protestants were favourably impressed by certain aspects of the Catholic religion as practised in Italy. Moreover, there were cases of conversion and a strengthening of Romanist sympathies.

In her study of British identity and the construction of the British nation, Linda Colley speaks of the absolute centrality of Protestantism to the British experience in the 1700s and long after. Britons defined themselves in terms of their common Protestantism as contrasted with the Catholicism of Continental Europe. As she argues, “Catholics, as a category, remained in popular mythology an omnipresent menace” (“Britishness and Otherness” 317).

It is important to note that the feud with France, Britain’s greatest imperial and military rival, was intensified by the fact that France was a Catholic state. Setting this premise in a wider historical context, Colley quotes J. G. A. Pocock’s thesis that the British history could only be understood as “the interaction of several peoples and several histories” (312), adding that what the historian means is “not only the relations that existed over time among England,

Wales, Scotland, and Ireland but also the broader connections between these four countries and North America and the rest of Britain’s ‘white’ empire” (312). Colley thinks of

Britishness “as the result of an integration and homogenization of disparate cultures” (316) 56 and concludes that “Great Britain […] was heavily dependent for its raison d’être on a broadly Protestant culture, on the threat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with

France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire” (327).

Apart from the political system and religion, the sharp contrast in geographical latitude and climate between England and Italy was deemed largely responsible for the existence of difference in human physiology, character, and Weltanschaung. Stretching in diametrically opposite directions and being separated by the sublime Alps, Italy and England, despite their island (or near island) identity, were often associated with two different worlds in the atlases of literary imagination, namely, the countries north of the Alps and the countries south of the Alps. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin wryly concedes to the failure of modern cartographic science to give a convincing pictorial representation of the

“contrast in physical character which exists between Northern and Southern countries” (161-

162). Through the cultural discourse of the time – epitomised by the French philosophes and

Madame de Staël – this geographical distinction becomes a resonant metaphor for two opposing cultural tendencies in European culture. As a consequence, the terms “north” and

“south” become figures of speech; they are “not territories but abstract places that appear only to relate to each other in terms of each other” (Derrida 267). Hence, the north and the south are recreated as the image of each other’s desires, aversions, anxieties and interests, yielding forms of knowledge that are “governed not simply by empirical reality, but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections” (Said, Orientalism 8).

The eighteenth century saw the great expansion of travelling in Britain and abroad, and the emergence of the figure of the English gentleman as the epitome of the cultured traveller. The crossing of the boundary between north and south, inherent in the practice of

Continental travel, was an activity that took on symbolic significance, and attention was 57 drawn to the fact of geographical traversal per se and to the consequences that this experience invited for the traveller. On the other hand, the realisation that cultural boundaries among

European countries are rather permeable and contingent prompted the literature of the period to explore the possibility of rapport between peoples whose cultures would otherwise be represented as alien. As regards Britain and Italy, the restriction on physical travel imposed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars made British access to Italy, at least for a crucial transitional generation, primarily conceptual, privileging the imagination in important ways.

Although there are strong lines of continuity between the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, Romantic modes of travelling and modes of “writing” the journey present a series of specific features. For the Romantic traveller, boundaries are to be crossed without fear of what lies beyond them, as mystification is part of the excitement of the act of traversal: the border is the site of adventure. Images of ceaseless striving, exploring, and wandering are famous Romantic motifs which suggest the idea not only of crossing borders, but of transcending them, breaking through limits, longing for boundlessness and freedom. In fact, the mere act of traversal is a deeply felt and significant experience for the mental/real traveller and generates rapture, because it is viewed as an adventure of the self which leads to personal liberty and self-fulfillment. As regards the north and the south, the crossing of the boundary between them signified flight and escape from the constraints of (English) domesticity. For the Romantic traveller or writer, the crossing of geographical borders is the first step towards transcendence, namely the experience of the sublime, and the discovery of foreign locations that lie beyond the crossing line are correlatives of inner spiritual landscapes.

The Romantics were noted for their propensity to range imaginatively and eclectically outwards in space and backwards in time. Most of them liked to inhabit ideal and idealised 58 places which they were keen to reconstruct as a hybrid of their own by fusing real and imaginary features. Attracted by the lure of the foreign, yet at the same time held back by the binding force of the familiar, the Romantics would neither totally surrender to pure fantasy nor compromise with the real world: the Romantic topos par excellence, both imaginatively and physically, would figure as an inter-space, as a space in between. The configuration of such an Anglo-Italian space in the visual culture of the period is the topic of my next section.

1.2 Cities of the Mind: Venice and London in Late Eighteenth-Century Capriccio

Paintings

The notion of London as a Venice on the Thames, or as a reincarnated Rome, is central in the works of Italian vedutisti (view painters) of the mid-eighteenth century, particularly Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, and Antonio Joli, whose capricious views of London capitalise on the implied parallels between the English metropolis and the Italian cities, promoted by their recurrent identification in earlier literature. The appeal of Venetian and Roman scenes to British Grand Tourists, buyers, and private collectors has, therefore, strong ideological foundations: in a fanciful reconfiguration of temporal and spatial borders, the transplantation of (sixteenth century) Venice and

(ancient) Rome in (mid-eighteenth century) London advance the notion of the English capital as the centre of civilisation, political power, and commercial supremacy.

The imaginative connection between London and Venice, in particular, is further reinforced, but also complicated, in William Marlow’s Capriccio: St. Paul’s and a Venetian

Canal (ca.1795), a work which, even within the tradition of capriccio painting, “arouses curiosity as to its function and meaning” (Liversidge, Canaletto and England 146). Informed by the cultural-geographical approach in literary studies, this part of the chapter (re)views the

“Anglo-Venetian metaphor” against the ideological, cultural, and historical changes which 59 characterise the turn of the century. In this respect, it attempts to read the ambiguity of the representation in Marlow’s painting in the context of the rich and compelling inter-action which informs the encounter of the British with the Italian culture at the dawn of the

Romantic age. More specifically, I argue that the volatile bicultural cityscape in Marlow’s

Capriccio projects a cross-cultural narrative through the confrontation of diverse identities and the relocation of borders. It is also my contention that Marlow’s imaginative landscape points to a Romantic topos (a place) which takes the guise of an inter-space: a space where the real alternates with the ideal, where opposites coincide but are not neutralised, and where binaries are overcome, giving way to a more complicated, more indeterminate landscape which invites the cohabitation of vision and scepticism.

Few countries of Europe did not change in some material way as a result of what had been seen and thought in Italy in the course of the Grand Tour. The returned British tourists reconsidered the architecture of their dwellings and public buildings in the light of Palladio or

Vitruvius, while “the Roman- or Venetian-inspired mansions that sprang up […] [in England] were set in gardens strewn with imitation Temples of the Sibyl and copies of ancient and modern Roman sculpture, while their interiors glimmered with gilt-framed Old Masters […] knick-knacks and souvenirs” (Wilton, Grand Tour 272). The British Grand Tourists sought to validate their experience of Italy through objets d’art, books, souvenirs and above all paintings which they purchased or commissioned to Italian artists. The Grand Tour served a vast community of artists and designers, patrons, agents, and collectors, and proved a very profitable business for some Italian painters. The views of the cities and scenery of Italy would decorate the houses of British buyers upon their return home, “serving as tangible signs of their classical travels – and their membership of the cultural élite” (Edwards 10). By accumulating the objects appropriate to their class and wealth, Grand Tourists acquired what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic capital”. Bourdieu observes that 60

the purchase of works of art, objectified evidence of ‘personal taste’, is

the one which is closest to the most irreproachable and inimitable form

of accumulation, that is, the internalization of distinctive signs and symbols

of power in the form of natural ‘distinction’, personal ‘authority’ or

‘culture’. […] To appropriate a work of art is to assert oneself as the

exclusive possessor of the object and of the authentic taste for that

object, which is thereby converted into the reified negation of all those

who are unworthy of possessing it. (Distinction 282, 280)

Accordingly, by purchasing and commissioning vedute, British Grand tourists asserted their refined taste, knowledge of the fine arts and distinction, and subsequently claimed a privileged position in social space. As Dorothea Terpitz pointedly adds, “[g]ood taste and virtù (fine discrimination) were […] regarded as moral duties, giving rise to what became known as the ‘gentleman virtuoso’” (94). James Russel’s British Connoisseurs in

Rome (fig. 1) depicts a group of six well-groomed “gentlemen virtuosi” whose connoisseurship on classical art is suggested by their extravagant gestures, pose, and vivacious discussion in front of the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine, which are hazily portrayed in the background. In many respects, this portrait group is the quintessential representation of the Grand Tour in Rome.

Considering that Rome and Venice were the two essential stops on the Italian itinerary of the Grand Tour, it was only natural for visitors to want to acquire paintings which represented the two cities. Regarded as the quintessence of antiquity, and being the place where the greatest number of ancient sites were concentrated, Rome was always the focus of the Grand Tourist. This fact explains why pictures of the classical remains of the Città Eterna were reproduced and sold in large numbers. A very characteristic example is the classical scenes painted in the mid-eighteenth century by Giovanni Paolo Panini, the leading view 61

62

63 painter of his time in Rome. His famous canvas of Roma Antica (fig. 2), which provides a striking summation of architectural and sculptural achievements in Rome, is an instance of his vedute ideate (capricci), that is, architectural fantasies which recreated an idealised vision of the classical past, and effectively provided Grand Tourists with convenient and impressive anthologies of sights and monuments, frequently to be incorporated in decorative schemes.

Venice stood rather apart, both geographically and historically. Medieval rather than classical, this ancient commercial republic, ruled by a Doge and a Council of Ten, had long enjoyed diplomatic relations with the English who had respected its government and stability.

Despite its decline in the eighteenth century, aspects of the British culture of the time attest to the fact that the Serene Republic had remained an important ideological reference point and a potent symbol. John Eglin attributes the continuing prominence of Venice on the itinerary of the Grand Tour to the resilience of what historians of political thought have identified as the

Venetian metaphor in English and, later, British political culture (3). The Anglo-Venetian metaphor originally consisted in the appropriation of Venetian constitutional models by

English political thinkers of the seventeenth century (Eglin 5). More specifically, the ancient origins of this polity, its remarkable endurance as an independent power, its confrontation with the papacy in the early seventeenth century, and its highly idiosyncratic geography had made the Venetian Republic a source of direct and explicit parallels with England in general, and with London in particular.14

In the eighteenth century, Venice continued to stir the British political imagination while representations of and references to Venice were part of a still-living language of ideological and cultural identification and classification. Venetian artefacts included a cultural agenda with broadly partisan connotations, so much so that “political culture converged with cultural politics” (Eglin 6). Accordingly, the vogue for Venetian topographical view paintings is closely related to the reflective process that was occurring at 64 the time, and which was portrayed on the canvas through a language of idealised parallels and identical attributes. Considering that by the middle of the century there was a well-developed visual culture in England, views of Venice hung on the walls of English households, Eglin notes, “were reminders of the cultural politics of the previous generation of elites, visible allusions that allowed oppositionist Whigs to claim a cultural as well as a political heritage”

(108). Not surprisingly, the majority of the views of Venice purchased by Canaletto’s patrons did not have a real contemporary referent, but pointed to a mythologised Venice – or, rather, to an idealised Britain. As Linda Colley points out in Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837,

[t]he crumbling stucco, dark canals and tattered beggars that characterised

the real Venice of this time […] were not what these titled buyers wanted

to see on their walls. What they wanted [… ] were views of Venice painted

as if it were still in its fifteenth-century prime, the perfect maritime

republic, with turquoise lagoons, golden masonry, bustling harbours and

well-dressed inhabitants. (67)

Rightly regarded as one of Canaletto’s major works, the Bacino di San Marco with the

Bucintoro on Ascension Day (fig. 3) depicts one of the city’s most important activities in a riot of colour, light, and exuberant detail. Most English collectors chose views that featured similar political and ceremonial centres of the Venetian Republic. Colley continues her analysis by insightfully observing that

Venice, or rather the legend of Venetian power and prosperity,

exerted a powerful attraction, because it suggested that commercial

energy, imperial dominion, a taste for liberty, and stable rule by an

exclusive elite could all be painlessly combined. Most British patricians

were sufficiently assured in their status to believe that these things were

fully compatible in their own island also [.] (67). 65

66

Thus, the discourse of analogies and paragons which had been drawn between

England and Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth century would continue to infuse the extensive travel discourse on Venice and the cultural practices associated with it, even until the city’s collapse at the end of the eighteenth century, presenting Britons with ample occasion to reflect on the myth and counter-myth of the Serene Republic, and almost inevitably, to reflect on their own history, politics, and culture. All these ideological associations are unmistakably suggested by some of the London views produced by Italian vedutisti who lived and worked in London between 1710 and 1746, particularly by Antonio

Joli and Canaletto.15 Their efforts to recreate London as a new Venice or as a new Rome is consolidated in their capricci. Capricci or else vedute ideate are fantasy landscapes, composed of real buildings and places fancifully recombined or relocated. The artist lets his imagination – or memory – take control and mingles the real and the imagined. Dario Succi aptly defines the capriccio mode as “gioco virtuoso, programma ideale, enunciato iconico, sregolamento regolato” (38)16 and underscores its importance as an “atto trasgressivo” (15), an act that adheres to a code of configuration and to a poetics of metamorphosis (23). By granting precedence to the artist’s intuition, by breaking established norms and genres, and by embracing ambiguity and equivocality, the capriccio mode resonates important aspects of the Romantic aesthetic ideology, particularly in the way it proposes an artistic project of constant redefinition and expansion, open to the realm of possibility, rather than of certainty.

Antonio Joli’s London: Saint Paul’s and Old London Bridge (fig. 5), reflecting a theatrical background, features monumental classical architecture as a foreground to the view of St. Paul’s and London Bridge. The re-imagining of London as a new Rome is established in this strange configuration. Despite the apparent similarities, his painting Prospect of

London from a Colonnade with St. Paul’s and Old London Bridge (fig. 6) features a more mercantile theme by introducing a pair of large barges on the river, similar to those that 67

68 decorated the Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day, aptly reminiscent of Venetian festivals.

Furthermore, under the columned arcade, which suggests Renaissance rather than Roman architecture, haggle merchants in exotic garb, a picture that sharply contrasts with the elegant, well-dressed figures that stroll under the arcades of the previously shown classicised capriccio. A Venetian parallel can thus be established with the same degree of certainty as the Roman analogy made before. As Eglin aptly suggests, “in transplanting Rome in London,

Joli advanced the notion of the city as a center of polite civilization; in superimposing Venice upon London, he calls attention to its commercial importance” (129).

Likewise, Canaletto’s Westminster Bridge from the North on Lord Mayor’s Day (fig.

4) capitalises on the perceived parallels between his native city and London. Interestingly, the

Thames found its counterpart in the Grand Canal, the barges of the Lord Mayor and livery companies recalled the gaudy vessels that attended the Marriage to the Sea, and the recently constructed Westminster Bridge was easily conceived as London’s Rialto. Canaletto captured the bustling activity of the Thames in much the same way as he had depicted the basin of San

Marco on numerous festive occasions. The Venetian painter had ultimately appropriated the

English mythologically grounded perception of Venice as his own, and cleverly infused it in his London vedute, which were otherwise topographically accurate views of urban architecture that charted the progress of a vibrant, changing metropolis.

The aspiration to recreate in London some of Italy’s grandeur is intrinsically related to the forging of the British national identity. As it has already been argued, the Britons would call upon particular images and particular histories of places like Italy and Greece so as to form their national consciousness and stabilise “Britishness”. On the other hand, they sought to define themselves against a real or imaginary Other, be that Catholicism, France or a massive but alien overseas empire, vis-à-vis which they confirmed the superiority of British social arrangements. Nevertheless, encountering Otherness, as cultural theory informs us, 69 awakens awareness of a duality, which results in an experience of difference. This encounter may involve either assimilation of what seems attractive and useful, or suppression of what seems alien or threatening, or both. In this respect, each culture gains its sense of identity from its contemplation of (an)other culture(s), and “obtains its salient features not least by demarcating itself from what it is not” (Iser 32). As Edward Said notes in the Afterword to the1995 printing of Orientalism,

[t]he development and maintenance of every culture require the existence

of another different and competing alter ego. The construction of identity

[…] involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality

is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of

their differences from “us”. Each age and society recreates its “Others”. (332)

More explicitly, identities are constructed through difference, and it is only through the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to its “constitutive outside” (Hall,

“Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 4) that an identity – Englishness or Italianness – can be created.

Accordingly, although certain structures of race, culture, class, gender, environment and history can not be simply “shed”, national identities are not cultural belongings rooted in deep, natural attachments to a homeland, but are rather contingent, relational, and complex cultural constructions that have arisen in specific historical conditions, and, most importantly, have specific material effects.

Clearly, the genesis of liminal spaces, such as the one occasioned by the Anglo-Italian encounter, presupposes not only the crossing of geographical borders but their relocation and re-conceptualisation. Late eighteenth-century art and literature tampers with spatial, cultural, and temporal divides, and by venturing ambitious, though ambiguous, connections in the contact-zones, provides blueprints of spaces in which borders can be transgressed, displaced, distorted, expanded or indeed mingled. Notably, it is imagination that enables the Romantic 70 artist to envisage potentialities and possibilities by breaking through the limits of the conceivable/depictable. Being transgressive and synthetic, imagination finds likenesses among entities previously regarded as unlike. In the words of Samuel Coleridge, imagination

“dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” (Biographia Literaria I, 167).

The imaginative geography in William Marlow’s Capriccio: St. Paul’s and a

Venetian Canal (c.1795, fig. 7) is one which is impatient with rigid borders and limits, and thrives on their destabilisation – though not on their annulment. Marlow, having been trained in London under the topographical painter Samuel Scott, was known to have imitated

Canaletto with success. The particular work, however, unique in his oeuvre, is more than just a mixture of real and imaginary features, as it does not merely intersperse an English topographical view with an Italian theme, but presents the two mingled into a strange ensemble. In effect, what gives the picture a unique, distinctive character is what Andrew

Wilton calls its “surreal unexpectedness” (290), in other words, a dream-like quality, an effect which, in my opinion, is produced through the architectural game, the heightening of the tonal contrasts and the chiaroscuro, that is, contrast of light and dark, and through the vitality of the canal water. Moreover, imagination and reality are in constant play in this painting, crossing each other, sustaining each other through their difference but also sketching out a “new” bicultural geography, one which corresponds to the cultural imaginings of the two countries, Italy and England. Indeed, by visualising an inter-section of two real topoi (London and Venice) into an a-topos, the Capriccio becomes a narrative of desire, a narrative of a subjunctive mode, but also a repository of aspirations and hopes, biases and fears.

As it has been argued earlier, topographical painting of the time capitalised on the perceived ideological kinship which linked these two states in the British political imagination. However, the striking transposition of geography effected in the picture strongly 71

72 recalls the North/South dichotomy reiterated in the cultural discourse of the time, evoking differences and oppositions in matters of physical character, religion, culture, aesthetics and politics. Viewed in greater detail, the combination of these two specific sights has a disturbing effect on the viewer, not only because of the specific mode used, but in terms of thematic consistency, as the junction appears to be rather incompatible: the Anglican cathedral, a classical monument standing for religious and political authority, is “invaded” by a tattered Venetian canal inhabited by low-class people caught up in an everyday activity. In marked contrast with Canaletto’s idealised painterly representations of the Serenissima, commissioned by his English patrons, Marlow’s Venice is set within the raw reality of history: Venetian labour rather than Venetian spectacle.

According to Michael Liversidge, this worldly, realistic representation of Venice probably hints at the city’s cession to the Austrians in 1797, a historical event that marked the beginning of its decline (Canaletto and England 146). Liversidge also observes that “[t]he suppression of the ancient Republic was seen in Britain, herself at war with France, as a symbol of the threat to liberty with which Venice had been identified by earlier eighteenth- century writers” (146). The end of the Venetian Republic was the change in the map of Italy that most stirred the Romantic imagination. William Wordsworth was the first to condense his generation’s feelings of frustration and angst into his sonnet “On the Extinction of the

Venetian Republic” (1807):

Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;

And was the safeguard of the west: the worth

Of Venice did not fall below her birth,

Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.

She was a maiden City, bright and free;

No guile seduced, no force could violate; 73

And, when she took unto herself a Mate,

She must espouse the everlasting Sea.

And what if she had seen those glories fade,

Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;

Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid

When her long life hath reached its final day:

Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade

Of that which once was great is passed away. (242)

In Wordsworth’s sonnet, the independent republic has entirely given its place to a fading memory. In a similarly nostalgic mood, Byron in “Venice. An Ode” exclaims that

“Venice is crush’d” and laments not only the unconditional surrender of the city to the foreign yoke, but also the defeat of liberty by tyranny and the ensuing domination of chaos, decadence, and violence:

Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls

Are level with the waters, there shall be

A cry of nations o’er thy sunken halls,

A loud lament along the sweeping sea!

If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee,

What should thy sons do? – any thing but weep:

……………………………………………..

Oh! Agony – that centuries should reap

No mellower harvest! Thirteen hundred years

Of wealth and glory turn’d to dust and tears;

And every monument the stranger meets,

Church, palace, pillar, as a mourner greets; 74

And even the Lion all subdued appears,

And the harsh sound of the barbarian drum,

With dull and daily dissonance, repeats

The echo of thy tyrant’s voice along

The soft waves, once all musical to song … 17

The fact that the canal suddenly intrudes into St. Paul’s suggests the idea that the threat to liberty might loom over London, too, unless the latter guards its liberty and political stability. Thus, to place St Paul’s on the Grand Canal at that historical moment would have a powerful resonance in Britain, as the parallelism could elicit dire warnings about the fate of

Venice’s “sister” city, and be read as an intimation of mortality, rather than as a confirmation of London’s supremacy. Byron’s warning to England in Canto Four of Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage could not be more direct. Addressing Venice, he presents her case as a call of duty for free nations: “and thy lot / Is shameful to the nations, – most of all, / Albion! To thee: the Ocean queen should not / Abandon Ocean’s children; in the fall / Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall” (BP II, 130, st. 17). Byron’s appeal to his native country (“the

Ocean Queen”) to act in defence of its fellow maritime power and to rescue Venice (its child) from its current crisis is argued on the grounds of moral responsibility and solidarity (“should not abandon”) which derives from the assumed kinship between the two countries. London and Venice’s “joint destiny” comes to be seen here not as a blessing but as an admonition of

“fall”, decline and death, suggesting that England, despite its privileged geography consolidated in highly effective frontiers, that is the sea, is not so inviolate after all and could follow the sad destiny of Venice.

Though this historical coordinate can not be disregarded, the palimpsests produced by the configuration of the two cityscapes in Marlow’s Capriccio stimulate, in my opinion, further interpretative directions. St. Paul’s cathedral occupies a very prominent place in the 75 picture; not only does it dominate its background, gaining in stature and size, but its characteristic style – mainly classical imbued with baroque inflexions – adds to its massive, imposing presence in this imaginary view. Quite evidently, though, the Venetian canal, edged on both sides with rows of palace façades, occupies more space in the picture and includes human figures that enliven the view. The palazzi on the left, with their shutters open and clothes being hung up to dry, are part of the Venetians’ quotidian, unceremonious ambience: the gondoliers are caught spontaneously in the middle of a particular gesture or work; a mother is trying to prevent her baby from running away. The view is generally tranquil, despite the mobility of the scene suggested by the rowing of the gathered gondolas. In fact, the canal could be said to give a pervasive sense of abandonment, decay, and fatigue and is stigmatised by the erosive passage of time. The grimness is made more intense by the darkening of the surface of the water in the foreground which seems to embrace the human figures, rendering them almost timeless, dramatic and unchanging. As a result, the picture radiates a certain intimacy and realism, but at the same time an aura of mystery and obscurity.

Although Marlow follows Canaletto’s convention of staffage, that is, the use of small figures to enliven the view, the positioning of one specific figure in his veduta ideata undermines typical topography and accentuates its unexpectedness even more. The Venetian on the right-hand corner standing on the stepped quayside s,i I think, a key figure in the picture as he assumes the role of the close observer, the beholder. This role is a major motif in Romantic painting, one that recurs with remarkable frequency: the figure seen from behind, usually looking out of a window, representing the viewer of the painting. In other words, it is as if the man is watching the Capriccio from within, what could be a self- reflexive, meta-critical gaze; but even more than that, his gaze meets the two intersecting viewpoints of Italy and England, indulging in a cultural fantasy. Indeed, the fantasy cityscape that the Capriccio offers, a topos removed from history – yet created as the result of two real 76 topoi – seems to provide a sense of completeness and plenitude to the watcher, be that the

Venetian man (the figure in the painting), the English painter (Marlow himself) or the viewer.

Both the Italian and the English eye are offered the opportunity to explore the dynamics of this ideal cultural cityscape, which combines what each culture is, and what it sees in the other as part of itself.

As regards the “disadvantageous” position of Venice in relation to London in

Marlow’s painting, this is only half the truth. The palazzi may be tattered and crumbling, but a closer inspection of the painting reveals that the light entering from the opening on the right falls on the Italian part of the picture, rendering it luminous and bright, highlighting the architecture on the façade of the buildings, while the cathedral façade is shadowy. Moreover, while the canal seems to be moving initially towards St. Paul’s, intruding into it like a sudden memory, but brought to an abrupt halt obstructed by its massive presence, at second sight one sees that it by-passes it and flows towards the opening on the right hand corner. This is actually the only open space in the painting (apart from the sky), which otherwise looks extremely confined and stifling, and it may be suggested that through this the canal, and

Venice by extension, escapes and finds hope of regeneration – an idea condensed in Percy

Shelley’s address to Venice in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills: “Earth can spare ye: while like flowers, / In the waste of years and hours, / From your dust new nations spring /

With more kindly blossoming”.18 This outlet is where the pictorial centre is transferred, initially being placed at the point where the two views meet, or rather towards St. Paul’s colonnades.

On the other hand, the loosening-up of the rigid and weighty architecture of the picture is due to another element, the presence of water, which in my opinion is of unique importance for the overall effect. The sense of stability, permanence, and finality that is created by the loftiness of the cathedral is challenged by the sense of flux, movement, and 77 volatility created by the presence of water. The latter, therefore, seems literally to shake the foundations of the painting, underscore its classical pretensions, while, on the other hand, it reinforces the impression that the viewer’s gaze can not be fixed or rest anywhere safely, that what one sees is nothing but an illusion.

And this is where a “new” space begins to rise and claim attention: at the point between the real and the ideal, at the point between synthesis and friction. Although the aesthetic reconciliation takes the form of a synthesis, the latter is conditional and is presented with ambiguity, because, in Romantic art, the synthesis is whirled into the ceaseless movement of the progressive subject (Pütz 11) – just as the synthesis in the painting is whirled by the irregular, capricious movement of the water and the play of spaces.

The complex geography mapped out by this unusual picture is recognisably related to the actual world even when transforming it. Specifically, Marlow sets his liminal topos at once within the familiar landscape, and as an alternative to it, engaging in what Louis Marin calls “spatial play”. The play of spaces, as Marin suggests, is produced by utopic practice

(Utopics xiv), which is set in a critical relation to the actual world: “Utopia is a critique of dominant ideology insofar as it is a reconstruction of contemporary society by means of a displacement and a projection of its structures into a fictional discourse” (195). Through displacement, the Capriccio configures an alternative world which challenges existing

English and Italian geo-graphies.

In addition, this Romantic topos, just like Marin’s utopia, rather than being a neutral place, or a place that does not exist, “designates another referent, the ‘other’ of any place”

(“Frontiers of Utopia” 411). Accordingly, this space offers to the beholder-reader “an ambiguous representation, the equivocal image of signification contrary to the concept of limit: on the one hand the synthetic unity […] and on the other hand the active tracing of differences, the indefinite fight between opposite forces” (412). This other referent, the other 78 of Venice and London, what looks like a reconciling synthesis but at the very same time a violent schism, is the space which nurtures and upholds “a desire for an elsewhere”, but also creates a narrative matrix from which stories and histories arise.

Marlow’s Capriccio, through a fanciful destabilisation and re-inscription of spaces, maps out a topos which accommodates and sustains English and Italian cultural fantasies, rooted in historical coordinates. What we see on the canvas is a volatile bicultural cityscape–

London in Venice, Venice in London – projecting a narrative of desire through the confrontation of diverse identities and the relocation of borders. What we imagine as we see

Capriccio is an uncharted, implicit city, languishing in the interstices, nooks, and crevices which take pride of place in this painting. Significantly, the Romantic ensemble proves in a strikingly modern way how precarious, interdependent and contingent spaces, boundaries, and identities are, pointing, at the same time, to maps of “other spaces”, mutable, capricious, and ever-expanding.

1.3 “Melancholy feelings expressed […] with Italian imagination” in Germaine de

Staël’s Corinne, or Italy

After eighteenth-century empiricists and French philosophes, the most important propagator of an oppositional view of the north and the south of Europe was Madame de

Staël. Her widely-read novel Corinne ou l’ Italie (1807) popularised the central ideas which had appeared in her non-fiction, from her early political treatises, to analyses of literature from a sociological point of view in De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800). Specifically, one of the novel’s central themes, also associated with Enlightenment ideas, is the contrast between the culture of the South (Italy) and that of the North (England), the former being typified, according to de Staël, by spontaneity, freedom, sensuousness, and passion, while the latter by melancholy, conventionality, a strong 79 moral sense, philosophical reflection, and the eschewing of pleasure. De Staël’s preoccupation with national character – at a time when new nations were developing in

Europe – informed all her discussions of literature, politics, philosophy, or manners, as she always tried to relate human behaviour and disposition to the social institutions of particular nations. Although climate played a significant part, she believed that national character was determined largely by religious and political institutions (Berger 80). Being fascinated by the dynamics of the artistic, cultural, and political life of European countries, de Staël scrupulously analysed the interdependence of literature, geography, and politics in several countries and periods, in order to identify the distinctive traits of different nations (mainly

France, Italy, Germany, and England). At the birth of modern nationalism, de Staël’s ideas were so influential, that in 1818 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine praised her as the originator of a science of nations, “having created the art of analysing the spirit of nations and the springs which move them” (qtd. in Isbell x).

The male protagonist of the story is a young Scottish lord, Oswald Nelvil, who, in order to escape melancholy and pangs of guilt for the death of his father, goes to Italy. There he meets and falls in love with the immensely popular improvvisatrice Corinne,19 a woman of dual origin, Italian and English, whom he first sees at her coronation with poetic laurels on the Capitol in Rome. Their love is blighted by the scruples of Oswald, who can not enter into a marriage which he fears may offend the memory of his father. Corinne eventually reveals that she is the daughter by a first marriage of his father’s best friend, and that she had at one time been intended as Oswald’s bride, until his father decided that he should marry her younger half-sister Lucile instead. Oswald returns to Scotland and discovers that his father’s change of mind had come from a fear that Corinne was too imaginative, too vivacious, too

“Italian” to be happy in the narrow emotional climate of England, where he saw it as his son’s duty to live. Oswald therefore marries Lucile. Corinne, who has secretly followed him 80 to Britain, is devastated by this betrayal, and returns to live out her days in Florence, where, years later, Oswald and his wife find her, a physical and emotional wreck, and are present at her death. Although many questions regarding Oswald and Corinne’s lives after their separation are left open, it is implied that Oswald has been feeling unhappy and guilty.

Although the British reading public had been, by this time, accustomed to Italian characters in fiction, there were only a few cases which had explored the possibility of a cross-cultural amour and “of sex breaking down the cultural barriers between England and

Italy” (Churchill 23). Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754), a very popular and fashionable book in its day, is an apt example, as it is concerned with the difficulties of love between the hero, Sir Charles, and an Italian woman of noble birth, Clementina Porretta.

Despite the woman’s deep love for the Englishman, religious differences keep them apart, and Sir Charles marries in England. In Ann Radcliffe’s novels, on the other hand, Anglo-

Italian relationships are set within the gothic setting of the stories, as they are afflicted by problems, misfortunes, and premonitions.

Corinne’s multiplicity of meanings and ideas stimulated various interpretations and

“implementations” in the aftermath of its publication in 1807 and its almost immediate translation into English. More specifically, it was read as a guidebook to Italy, as an allegory for a suffering but rising nation, and as an illustration of the political, religious, cultural, and geographical differences between Italy and England. This last point was what most contemporary reviews capitalised on: “It is Great Britain and Italy, the extremes of civilised

Europe, that are personified and contrasted in the hero and heroine of this romantic tale”

(Jeffrey 183). Although Corinne is built upon a contrast between North (England) and South

(Italy), the novel proves in its course that both elements of the polarity are interdependent and engage in a constant, though at times traumatic, dialogue. De Staël views the cultural, geographical, and religious oppositions between the two regions in a pan-European 81 perspective, and attempts a reconciliation of (northern) distance and (southern) immediacy, of reflection and feeling respectively. Thus, the north/south dichotomy, at least in its cultural or aesthetic sense, constitutes for de Staël an essential dialectic in its contrariety, an interplay that defines European civilisation at that historical moment.

Significantly, the book had an immediate and a more long-lasting enormous influence on literary women, as it launched the fantasy of the female poetic genius, of the performing improvvisatrice – and Italy as the place for the woman of talent. For most nineteenth-century women writers, “the myth of Corinne”, to use Ellen Moers’s words, “persisted as both inspiration and warning” (264). De Staël asked her readers to re-think their preconceptions about art, women, and the Italian peninsula. Not only did Corinne explicitly confront the conventional rhetorical associations of Italy with the feminine – which had capitalised on passivity and distress – but the novel also haunted nineteenth-century women with a conflicted paradigm of the inspired female artist. De Staël gave expression to a major preoccupation of literary women of her time, namely, the split between woman’s capacity for heroism and her yearning for domesticity. Corinne provided inspiration for Felicia Hemans’s figures of women artists in her poems “Woman and Fame” and “Properzia Rossi”; it was the basic model for Letitia Landon’s The Improvisatrice (1824), which was an instant success; last, but not least, it was a strong exemplum for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh

(1857) in which, however, the story of the artistic heroine betrayed in love takes a new twist, as here it is Aurora who rejects Romney and who gains in the end both love and art.

Although I agree with John Isbell’s arguments that the Corinne-Italy link is self- evident in the text (xii) – an idea that is shared by many critics – I think that Corinne’s specific qualities as a character deserve closer examination. More specifically, I would have to argue that the symbiosis of northern and southern mind-sets is intricately mapped out in the suffering heroine’s half-Italian, half-English identity. Corinne’s actual dual heritage (and 82 hence her Englishness) and her concomitant artistic nature are stressed in the text as strongly as her “natural” connection with Italianness. In other words, Corinne’s intimate understanding of the Northern perspective along/despite the Southern one enhances her sensibility, and makes her act “as a link between them, interpreting the two countries to each other” (Wilkes 112). De Staël herself believed that a nation could immensely benefit from becoming familiar with the culture and intellectual trends of other nations, as she pointed out in De l’Allemagne (1810): “[N]ations should serve as guides to each other, and all would be wrong to deprive themselves of the mutual enlightenment they could offer” (qtd. in Wilkes

97). Corinne’s grasp of both Northern and Southern cultures, as well as the inner richness and insightfulness this combination produces, are duly outlined in the following extract which sketch the Anglo-Italian improvvisatrice as a bearer of apparently disparate and inconsistent traits:

Prince Castel-Forte read some passages of prose which were unpretentious

but nevertheless particularly suited to an account of Corinne. He began by

pointing out the special merit of her works. He said that this merit consisted

partly in the extensive study she had made of foreign literatures; she knew

how to combine to the highest degree the imagination, the descriptions, the

brilliant life of the South with the observations of the human heart which

seems to be the province of countries where the outside world arouses less

interest. (25; emphasis added)

Italy is, of course, Corinne’s motherland of choice, a fact amply illustrated by her conscious decision to flee to Italy (her mother’s land) while she’s still very young, and rename herself without a patronymic, in an attempt to forego her British paternal heritage.

Corinne’s identity choice stresses her free agency, most importantly as a woman of genius who goes against English domestic ideals and cultural standards for women, and freely 83 develops her native talents for music, recitation, art, and literature in Italy. Moreover, Corinne champions Italian culture, demonstrates her expertise on the Italian subject and, more importantly, attempts, as an Italian, to modify the attitudes to Italy possessed by Oswald as a foreigner. In this respect, she undertakes to acculturate the sceptical Briton into Italianness and to “translate” the country’s history, art, myths, and politics into a language palatable to

Oswald’s “northern” taste. This can be clearly seen in Corinne’s improvisation at the Capitol, much cited as an inspirational presentation of public female genius, where the improvvisatrice reveals her Englishness by infusing philosophical reflection, melancholy and world-weariness into the joyful, vibrant Italian landscape:

Here sense impressions mingle with ideas, all life is drawn from the same

spring, and the soul like the air extends to the boundaries of earth and

heaven. Here the genius feels at home, because here reverie is so sweet.

[…] Here one finds consolation even for the sorrows of the heart by

admiring a bountiful God and fathoming the secret of his love. The

transitory misfortunes of our ephemeral life are lost in the fertile, majestic

bosom of the immortal universe. (31; emphasis added)

Interestingly, when Corinne spots Oswald’s gloomy countenance in the crowd, she

“anglicises” her narrative even more to accommodate Oswald’s reaction: “She understood the thoughts which filled his mind and felt impelled to respond to them by speaking less confidently of happiness and by devoting a few verses to death during a celebration” (32). At this point, the novel formulates improvisation as a practice with both artistic and political implications. Corinne interrupts her triumphant historical narrative on Italy’s past and responds readily to a “new” event, a stance which emphasises flexibility, freedom, receptiveness, and which presents improvisation as “a political path between stasis and revolution, as an artistic theory of post-Terror moderate liberalism” (Simpson 349). 84

On the other hand, Corinne’s Englishness has a moderating effect on her sometimes

“too Italian” vivaciousness, spontaneity, and verve. In other words, it can mitigate, when necessary, the potentially subversive effect of Italianness on the narrower emotional climate of an Englishman’s world. Consequently, her careful temperance of feeling by reflection inspires the admiration and respect of her English listeners, who are therefore attracted not only by Corinne’s otherness, but by the reassuring presence of something recognisable and familiar in her behaviour. The following extract records the conflicting, culture-conditioned responses to her late improvisation at Cape Miseno near Naples, during her travels with Lord

Nelvil:

The Neapolitans noticed the sombre tone of Corinne’s poetry with surprise.

They admired the harmonious beauty of her language. They would, however,

have preferred her verses to be inspired by a less sad tendency. […] But the

English who had heard Corinne were filled with admiration for her. They

were delighted to see melancholy feelings expressed in this way with Italian

imagination. (238; emphasis added)

Ostensibly, Corinne’s English audience project their cultural fantasies onto the renowned improvvisatrice, configuring her as an image and counter-image of themselves, as self and other. Accordingly, in what I see as one of the most arresting passages of the novel,

Oswald suggestively confesses – via the narrator – his desire to indulge in diversity

(Corinne/Italy), yet without losing his distinctive identity:

Oswald was very prejudiced against Italian women. He thought they were

passionate but fickle, incapable of experiencing deep, permanent affection.

Corinne’s words at the Capitol had already given him quite a different idea.

How would it be, then, if he could simultaneously find memories of his

native land and, through the imagination, receive a new life, if he could 85

be reborn for the future without breaking with the past! (35; emphasis added)

Appealing though as it may seem, Corinne’s placement between the two cultures figures a spatial indeterminacy which puzzles, challenges, and ultimately unnerves Oswald.

To his dismay, the Scottish young lord slowly comes to realise that Corinne’s identity can not be contained, nor can it be charted by conventional means, as the way it conflates geographical, climatic, linguistic, and religious divides threatens his (northern) space of action and disconcerts him:

Corinne’s conversation was a mixture of every kind of mental activity,

enthusiasm for the arts and knowledge of the world, subtle ideas and

deep feeling. In short, all the charms of liveliness and verve were to be

seen in it and yet, for all that, her thoughts were never unfinished, nor

her reflections ill-considered. Oswald was simultaneously surprised and

charmed, uneasy and carried away. He did not understand how all

Corinne’s attributes could be combined in one person. He wondered if the

link between so many opposite qualities was inconsistency or superiority,

if it was because she felt everything or because she forgot everything in turn,

that she went in this way, almost instantly, from melancholy to gaiety,

from depth to charm, from conversation quite remarkable both in knowledge

and ideas, to the coquetry of a woman who seeks to please and wants to

captivate. (39-40; emphasis added)

Corinne’s indeterminacy, and Oswald’s inability to handle it, have been predicted by the lord’s father, as we find out late in the novel. In fact, the letter Oswald’s father writes to

Corinne’s father in order to forestall plans for their children’s engagement in the future, stages irreconcilable cultural difference, and the ineffectiveness of acculturation. The 86 argument of Oswald’s father, the archetypal Briton, illustrates a mix of insular English patriotism and xenophobia, and castigates Italian/female contingency and internal diversity:

She needs the independent life which is subject only to the imagination.

Our country life, our domestic habits, are bound to be contrary to all her

tastes. A man born in our fortunate native land must, above all, be English.

He must fulfil his duties as a citizen, since he has the good fortune to be

one, and in a country where political institutions give men honourable

opportunities for action and public appearance, women must stay in the

shade. […] If my son married Miss Edgermond, […] he would try to

introduce foreign ways into his house. Soon, he would lose the national

spirit, the prejudices, if you like, which unite us and our nation. (318)

Ultimately, de Staël’s novel seems to undermine many of the ideas it builds on.

Specifically, the tragic end of the love affair reinforces the idea of incompatibility of northern and southern qualities and contrasts, while Oswald’s decision to return to Scotland and marry

Lucile, wryly hints at the insularity and strong sense of moral obligation that typifies Britons.

Paradoxically, even Corinne’s self-destructiveness in the end indicates that the cultural complexity of her identity does not only enhance her insight, but causes much of her suffering, too.

87

Notes

1 Edward Said’s seminal study purports that European discourses of the “other” are exercises of power that contribute to the colonial exploitation of the Orient. Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, and styles of thought by which Europeans came to know the

Orient over several centuries, and which reached their height during the rise and consolidation of nineteenth-century imperialism. The key to Said’s interest in this way of

Europe’s others is that it effectively demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, for it “constructs” and dominates Orientals in the process of knowing them. The theoretical limitations of Said’s theory have been pointed out by various scholars. Thus, Orientalism criticism appears to postulate a largely homogeneous, even monolithic conception of discourse and Western culture. As Lisa Lowe observes, “[t]he view that a dominant discourse produces and manages otherness, univocally appropriating and containing all dissenting positions within it, underestimates the tensions and contradictions within any discursive terrain, the continual play of resistance, dissent, and accommodation” (25). See Lowe’s incisive “Discourse and Heterogeneity: Situating Orientalism” in her book Critical Terrains:

French and British Orientalisms, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) 1-29, as well as

Wang Ning, “Orientalism versus Occidentalism,” New Literary History 28.1 (1997) 57-67.

2 See, for instance, the three volumes that have developed out of a joint research project entitled “L’Italia nell’immaginario e nella cultura Britannica del Rinascimento e del

Romanticismo” co-ordinated by Valentina Poggi and conducted at the Universities of

Firenze, Cagliari and Bologna between the years 1999-2001: 1) Una civile conversazione: lo scambio letterario e culturale anglo-italiano nel Rinascimento / A Civil Conversation:

Anglo-Italian Literary and Cultural Exchange in the Renaissance; 2) Immaginando l’Italia: itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese / Imagining Italy: Literary Itineraries in British 88

Romanticism; 3) Traduzioni, echi, consonanze. Dal Rinascimento al Romanticismo /

Translations, Echoes and Consonances. From the Renaissance to the Romantic Era.

3 In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), Mary

Louise Pratt discusses the link between European travel and exploration from 1750 onwards and nascent imperialist ideologies. She uses the term “contact zones” to refer to areas located between the centre and the periphery of the journey, characterised by cross-cultural encounters or forms of acculturation between coloniser and colonised. Pratt actually suggests that European civilisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries may be seen as emerging out of these contact zones.

4 For the notion of supplement, see Derrida’s essay “… That Dangerous Supplement…” in Of

Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1976) especially pp. 144-145.

5 Speaking of his voyage to England in 1768, Vittorio Alfieri makes the following comparison: “Ed in fatti poi, dopo molti altri viaggi e molta più esperienza, i soli due paesi dell’Europa che mi hanno sempre lasciato desiderio di sé, sono stati l’Inghilterra e l’Italia; quella, in quanto l’arte ne ha per così dire soggiogata o trasfigurata la natura; questa, in quanto la natura sempre vi è robustamente risorta a fare in mille diversi modi vendetta dei suoi spesso tristi e sempre inoperosi governi” (Vita 119). (In reality, after many other journeys and more experience, the only two countries of Europe which have always made me long for them are England and Italy; the former, because art has, by way of saying, subdued or transfigured nature; the latter because nature is always strongly determined to take revenge, in numerous different ways, for its often sad and inactive governments [my translation] ). Among the many comparisons he draws between Italy and England in his

Lettere Scritte dall’Inghilterra (1817) Ugo Foscolo, a political exile in London, discusses manners and national character: “[S]ommando gli effetti de’ servigi scambievoli che la 89

diversità della educazione e dell’indole produce in Inghilterra e in Italia, parmi che si possa distinguerli e giudicarli equamente così: l’Inglese ti serve spontaneo, costante e liberalissimo, am se tu se’ altero ti disanima dal pregarlo, e se sei importuno ti respinge e ti disprezza – l’Italiano fa più commercio di minimi servigi, continui che legano di tenuissime fila gli animi umani, tanto più grati quanto meno importano gratitudine. Quindi gl’Inglesi sembrano più duri e insieme più verecondi; gl’Italiani più servozievoli e più importuni – io non so cosa vorrei più; so che ho un che di barbaro nel mio cuore – e né rinfaccio – né chiedo” (67)

(Considering the effects of different education and character in England and Italy respectively, it seems to be they can be equitably distinguished and judged in this way: the

Englishman will help you spontaneously, steadily, and very liberally, but if you are importunate he rejects and despises you – the Italian will trade more abundantly in small favors, continuously, so as to bind human minds with the thinnest threads, and to please the more as less gratitude is implied. Therefore the English seem harder and at the same time more modest; the Italians, more helpful and importunate – I do not know which to prefer; I do know that I have something barbarous in my heart – and neither throw favors to people’s faces nor ask for any [Glauco Cambon’s translation, 318] ).

6 For a detailed account of literary relations between England and Italy in the Renaissance, as well as important information on how Italian texts influenced English literature at the time, see Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot, (Gloucester,

Mass.: Peter Smith, 1966).

7 Strong anti-Catholic bias typifies the travelogues of Fynes Moryson, Thomas Coryate and

William Lithgow. However, the deep anti-Italian sentiment expressed in Ascham’s work is only similar to Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), a narrative-travelogue which epitomises the image of Italy as a Circe’s court or as modern Babylon, and the 90

Englishman Italianate as a portent of national decline. Interestingly, Nashe had never been to

Italy, while Ascham had only been there for nine days, an experience he acerbically describes in The Scholemaster: “I was once in Italy myself: but I thank God, my abode there was but ix. days: And yet I saw in that little time, in one city [Venice], more liberty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our noble City of London in ix. years” (qtd. in Pfister 79).

8 Scholars are not in agreement as to the origin of the proverb “inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato”. The proverb had its first literary use in the writing of Roger Ascham in 1564: “If you think we judge amiss, and write to sore against you, hear, what the Italian sayeth of the

English man, what the master reporteth of the scholar: […] Inglese Italianato, è un diavolo incarnato, that is to say, you remain men in shape and fashion, but become devils in life and condition” (qtd. in Pfister 79). George Parks contends that the saying can be discovered earlier in casual use amongst the English and could not be traced in a 1581 list of Italian proverbs (199-200, 216). In “England in the Italian Renaissance” (History Today, October

1960) J. Gage traces it back to the days of the fourteenth-century mercenary in Italy, Sir John

Hawkwood (sive Giovanni Acuto), whose exploits provoked the saying which was then absorbed into common Italian parlance.

9 The full titles of the books mentioned are: A tour through Italy, exhibiting a view of its scenery, antiquities and monuments, particularly as they are objects of classical interest

(Eustace’s book went into seven editions from 1813 to 1841), Remarks on antiquities, arts and letters, during an excursion in Italy in the years 1802 and 1803 (Forsythe’s was reedited three times by 1824), and Starke’s Travels on the Continent written for the use and particular information of travellers (eight editions by 1832).

10 “England is a nation where the glory of culture, the superiority of commerce and wealth, and hence of power, and the examples of virtue and bravery leave us no doubt about the righteousness of laws” (my translation). 91

11 “Glorious England, mother of valiant people, mother of learned men, magnanimous and kind” (my translation).

12 According to The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Hertforshire: Wordsworth

Editions, 1995) the phrase “Perfide Albion” is attributed to Napoleon, yet the sentiment is much older, for Bossuet (1627-1704) wrote: “L’Angleterre, ah! la perfide Angleterre” (19).

In the same spirit, Alessandro Manzoni in his youthful poem “Del Trionfo della Libertà”

(1801) criticises the avarice of the English in his verses: “E l’Anglo avaro, che mercato infame / fa de le umane vite, e in quella sciarra / lo spinsero de l’?r le ingorde brame” (127-

129) (And the avaricious Englishman, who trades infamously upon human lives, is driven to this brawl by his greed for gold [my translation] ).

13 In De l’esprit des lois (1741) Montesquieu characteristically notes: “In Europe there is a kind of balance between the southern and northern nations. The first have every convenience of life, and few of its wants: the last have many wants, and few conveniences. To one, nature has given much, and demands but little; to the others, she has given but little, and demands a great deal. The equilibrium is maintained by the laziness of the southern nations, and by the industry and activity which she has given to those in the north. The latter are obliged to undergo excessive labour, without which they would want everything, and degenerate into barbarians. This has naturalized slavery to the people of the south: as they can easily dispense with riches, they can more easily dispense with liberty” (qtd. in Chard 41 note 3).

14 Z.S. Fink points out that the notion that Venice was a modern Rome can be found in

English writers as early as 1612. It was James Howell who first proposed Venice as a model for England by publishing in 1651 his Survay of the Signorie of Venice, of her admired policy, and method of government, at a time when the governement in England was in a fluid and temporary state (159,160). Howell devotes a whole section to an elaborate description of

Venetian governmental institutions, and asserts that if one were to attempt to set up a stable, 92

healthy government, “the Republic of Venice were the fittest pattern on Earth both for direction and imitation” (qtd. in Fink 161). In 1656 James Harrington published his Oceana, and the constitution he proposed for the English commonwealth was modeled closely on the

Venetian system. The idea that underlies the whole Oceana, and which is responsible for its being read as a utopia, is that it is possible to construct political institutions which will last forever (Fink 162).

15 By the time Canaletto arrived in London in 1746, a number of his fellow professional countrymen had already ventured the journey north. Antonio Joli had come a few years earlier, primarily to paint scenery at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. The decorative history painters Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini and Marco Ricci arrived as early as 1708 under the patronage of the earl of Manchester. Sebastiano Ricci and Jacopo Amigoni were called to

London a few years later to meet the increasing demand for decorative history painting (Allen

29).

16 “Masterful game, ideal programme, iconic expression, regular irregularity” (my translation).

17 Byron’s poems are cited from Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J.

McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993). All references to Byron’s poems are cited parenthetically as BP, followed by volume number, page number, and, where necessary, canto/stanza number. Unless otherwise mentioned, references to the Prefaces and

Notes to Byron’s poems come from the same edition.

18 Shelley’s poems are cited from Shelley: Poetical Works edited by Thomas Hutchinson

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971) and quoted in the text as Poems followed by line numbers.

19 Improvvisazione, or the Italian art of composing extempore verses, was a radically new concept for the British audience, and, according to Erik Simpson, “Corinne gave Britain its 93

first major theory of improvisation” (345). Prior to that, the name of improvvisatore was equated, quite wrongly, with the figure of the British minstrel, which had developed in

Britain as an overwhelmingly male mode of performance. In this context, de Staël’s text was the first “to give women a corresponding matriarchal muse of minstrelsy” (352). See

Simpson’s excellent article “ ‘The Minstrels of Modern Italy’: Improvisation Comes to

Britain,” European Romantic Review 14.3 (2003) 345-369. For a more general but equally effective introduction to the art of improvisation in British culture, see Caroline Gonda, “The

Rise and Fall of the Improvisatore, 1753-1845,” Romanticism 6.2 (2000) 195-210.

94

CHAPTER 2 Mary Shelley, Anglo-Italicus: Female Self-Assertion and the Politics of Distinction

– without a metaphor I cannot live. Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley II

My power was but a woman’s power, Yet in that great and glorious dower Which genius gives, I had my part; L.E.L., The Improvisatrice

2.1 Identity Re-construction and the Uses of “Betweenness”

And thou, strange Star! ascendant at my birth

Which rained, they said, kind influence on the earth,

So from great parents sprung I dared to boast

Fortune my friend, till set, thy beams were lost!

And thou – Inscrutable! by whose decree

Has burst this hideous storm of misery!

Here let me cling, here to these solitudes,

These myrtle shaded streams and chesnut woods;

Tear me not hence – here let me live & die,

In my adopted land, my country, Italy! 1

Written in Genoa a few months after Percy Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley’s mourning poem “The Choice” records the speaker’s dejection and bereaved condition caused by the loss of her husband and two children while in Italy. Johanna Smith rightly observes that the poem is “an extended meditation on memory and loss” (25), since the agonising verses ply between the speaker’s grief over “fierce remorse and unreplying death” (TC 491) and her tranquil memories of “past scenes – past joys – past hopes, in long array” (TC 493). Not surprisingly, Italy is identified as the abode of Shelley’s “Gentle Spirit” (TC 490) and 95 acquires a metonymic function from that point onwards in Mary Shelley’s writings.2 In the first months after her return to England in August 1823, her journal entries manifest her struggling efforts to overcome her despair and insecurity by nourishing her imagination on the intellectual and spiritual communion that had linked her to her husband, a memory which

Italy contained and preserved: “England I charge thee dress thyself in smiles for my sake – I will celebrate thee, O England, and cast a glory on thy name – if thou wilt for me remove thy veil of clouds – & let me contemplate the country of my Shelley & feel in communion with him” (479).3 In a passage where geography is distinctly poeticised, England stands for Mary

Shelley’s overpowering feelings of anxiety and dislocation which disallow her entrance to the

“liminal world that Italy now represents” (Crisafulli, “Mary Shelley”, 309), to the comforting dreaming land where Percy Shelley’s spirit reigns.

Interestingly, though, “The Choice” depicts Italy in contradictory, and often con- fusing colours. Italy’s re-signification, effected through a process of appropriation and objectification of its cultural maps, draws on patently juxtaposing qualities. On the one hand, the country assumes a soothing, almost therapeutic role on account of the happy memories it evokes, of its natural setting, and stimulating environment: “Such memories have linked these hills & caves, / These woodland paths, & streams – & knelling waves / Fast to each sad pulsation of my breast / And made their melancholy arms the haven of my rest” (TC 493-

494). On the other hand, however, Italy looms as an implacable accomplice to the domestic misfortunes and tragic destiny which beset the speaker. In the following lines, for instance, the memories of the death of her son William fuse with the Roman landscape and transform it into “dark earth”, a site of mourning and demise: “In Rome’s high palaces – there were no taints / Of ruin on his cheek – all shadowless / Grim death approached […] / His spoils were strewed beneath the land of Rome / Whose flowers now star the dark earth near his tomb”

(TC 492). Mary Shelley’s journals and letters of this period show a similar love-and-hate 96 relationship towards the country of her exile. Italy, cast simultaneously as Inferno and

Paradiso is both a “murdress” and a healer. In the following journal extract, a poetics of nostalgia alternates with a poetics of damnation:

Italy – dear Italy – murdress of those I love & of all my happiness –

one word of your soft language coming unawares upon me has drowned

me in bitterest tears – When shall I hear it again spoken? When see your

sky your trees your streams. (MWSJ 476)

Alternatively, in a letter she writes to Leigh and Marianne Hunt on her way back to England in 1823, Mary Shelley confesses her genuine, though conditional, affection for Italy in a more composed and distanced tone. Specifically, she admits her aversion towards the Italians, a feeling that epitomises her overall response to her “adopted land”:

[T]he inhabitants were never favourites with me – I had been habituated

to many of their defects until I was hardly aware of them, but the absence

of them strikes my as agreable [sic] Still I love & turn to Italy as the place

where all my delights were centred & where I can feel most forcibly

that I am still united to those I have lost – besides I like its country &

the life & the daily habits one has there better than any others – Besides

& besides I love Italy with all my heart & all my soul & all my might &

all my strength (you know the catechism, Hunt) and all my hopes are

centred in returning there. (356)4

In 1823 and 1824 Mary Shelley oscillates between Italy and England, past and present, presence and absence. The sphere of liminality and displacement she occupies in this moment of transit creates a strong sense of disorientation, confusion, fluidity, and uncertainty. Appropriately, both “The Choice” and the journal extract, written in a critical period of Mary Shelley’s life, duly record this state of spatial and temporal “betweenness”. 97

Interestingly, however, the liminal space that once constituted an erratic subject position, would soon “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood” (Soja 143) and for initiating new signs of identity. More specifically, and as I am going to argue in this chapter, the condition of “betweenness” is implemented in Mary Shelley’s life and fictions, and becomes the raison d’ être of the Anglo-Italian, a highly sophisticated figure she invents in her writings a few years later, and with whom she strongly identifies. Thus, space undergoes a change in signification, with the condition of “betweenness” being prescribed as the Anglo-

Italian’s most meaningful quality.

Furthermore, although the hybrid figure does not appear in Mary Shelley’s writings until she is back in England – for reasons I undertake to explain in this section – I suggest that knowledge of Mary Shelley’s Italian experience elucidates her subsequent remarks on the Anglo-Italian, and offers further possibilities for interpreting her later works with Italian themes. Conversely, the intriguing literature around the “race” of Anglo-Italians Mary

Shelley constructs in England, casts, I believe, a retrospective light on the identity and spatial politics of the circle of expatriates which had formed around her and Shelley in Italy in the early 1820s. Subsequently, although my interpretation of Romantic Anglo-Italians builds on

Mary Shelley’s elaborate definitions, it also relies on the insights rendered by an examination of the expatriates’ own discourse of acculturation, as they developed it while in Italy.

Whereas the general critical opinion tends to regard Mary Shelley’s afflilation with the Pisan circle as subsidiary to that of its male members, I would like to argue that her contribution proved, in due course, defining and instrumental. This is because Mary Shelley retrospectively interpellated this group of Romantics, called them into critical being, and theorised their intentions and social conduct. As a result, the “Anglo-Italian” paradigm can serve as a key to interpreting the various meanings which Shelley, Byron, and the other expatriates considered here, attached to their multifaceted identifications with Italianness. 98

Nonetheless, Mary Shelley’s texts and the premises they profess are meant to expand, not limit our understanding of Romantic acculturation processes. In other words, it is necessary to recognise that Mary Shelley’s own perspective is largely conditioned by what Betty

Bennett calls “a particular ‘intertextual’ history and literature” (“Editing Mary Shelley” 25), meaning, a number of social, political, and economic coordinates. Under this assumption, her discourse, ultimately, exposes its contestability and “blindness”.

Mary Shelley’s contradictory feelings for Italy, rendered in highly charged and emotive language, have partially been attributed to the unusual strains brought to her by her relationship with Percy Shelley during their sojourn in the peninsula (1818-1822): the deaths of their children; financial worries; Shelley’s interest in other women; domestic responsibilities; and a transient existence. Despite the several impediments to her development as a young writer in that period, her literary objectives and enthusiasm persisted. Of course, Mary Shelley was profoundly influenced by Shelley’s artistry, intellect, and socio-political philosophy, and was generally encouraged by her husband to read, write and develop her ideas. During their years in Italy she learned Italian, Greek and some Latin; she expanded her reading in the great writers and thinkers of the past and present; she wrote

Mathilda, a novella, Valperga,5 a well-researched historical novel, several short stories and two short verse dramas; finally, she was the only woman contributor to The Liberal.

Like her husband, Mary Shelley adored Italian nature and its climate, as well as the country’s rich cultural heritage. By 1820, she was fluent in the Italian language and literature and showed a keen interest in the art of improvisation, as practised by the famous improvvisatore Tomasso Sgricci. In this respect, Italy had an enriching and positive influence on her mind and work. On the other hand, however, she generally kept an “alien’s” outlook on her Italian surroundings. In her letters to their English friends, she often engaged with

English politics and proposed Italy as the only viable alternative to the socio-political 99 degradation England had purportedly sunk into. The following extract from a letter to

Marianne Hunt amply reveals Mary Shelley’s careful positioning between the two cultures, as, on the one hand, she dissociates herself from “[their] northern island” in an almost

“Byronic” gesture of disenchantment, whereas, on the other, she is prompt to reassure the

Hunts that despite her repudiation of English politics, she is by no means rejecting her native identity:

Not that this is a Paradise of cloudless skies & windless air just now the

libechio is blowing hurricanes […] but it is so much better than your

northern island. But do not think that I am unenglishifying myself – but

that nook of ci devant free land, so sweetly surrounded by the sea is no

longer England but Castlereagh land or New Land Castlereagh, – heaven

defend me from being a Castlereaghish woman.

(MWSL 137; emphasis added)

As mentioned earlier, Mary Shelley expressed her indignation and resentment towards the Italians in the places where she resided, as she found them “so very disagreeable” (MWSL

85), money-minded (88), and tattlers (230). Her sharpest comments are recorded in her letters during the Pisan years (1820-1822), when domestic complications and hardships amplified her awareness of being a cultural alien:

Pisa is a pretty town but its inhabitants wd exercise all Hoggs

vocabulary of scamps, raffs &c &c to fully describe their ragged-

haired, shirtless condition. Many of them are students of the university

& they are none of the genteelest of the crew. Then there are Bargees,

beggars without number; galley slaves in their yellow & red dress with

chains – the women in dirty cotton gown trailing in the dirt – pink silk

hats starting up in the air […] that mean to look like the lords of the 100

rabble but who only look like their drivers – The Pisans I dislike more

than any of the Italians & none of them are as yet favourites with me.

Not that I much wish to be in England if I could but import a cargo of

friends & books from that island here. (MWSL 136-137)

Despite her temporary affiliation to some cultured, “refined” Italians of the Pisan circle (Pacchiani and Sgricci for instance), her letters and journal continue to attest to her disdain towards the Pisans, whom she considered ignorant, ill-mannered, servile, and incapable of learning. Notably, Mary Shelley establishes her own and the (English) circle’s distinction by the mode of distaste and disapproval, when, in reporting one of improvvisatore

Sgricci’s performances, she cuttingly contends that “to improvise to a Pisan audience is to scatter otto of roses among the overweighing stench of a charnel house: – pearls to swine were oeconomy in comparison” (MWSL 171-172).

In the years that follow her return to England, however, and while she struggles to establish a new life for herself and for her son, slowly uprooting herself from the paths that

Percy had traced for her, her divided attitude seems to give its place to admiration, sympathy, and deep nostalgia for Italy. Apart from editing her husband’s poetry and publishing her own work, Mary Shelley sets herself the task of supporting Italy and Italians and of advocating, in her writings, Italian unification under a liberal constitution. 6 As Esther Schor, Jeanne Moskal and Nora Crook7 have variously shown in their important discussions of Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844), the latter travelogue, which is also Mary Shelley’s last published book, is an epitome of her defence of Italian nationalism, while at the same time it constitutes a shrewd treatise on her political vision and on her Enlightenment ideas for educational and cultural reform.

Assuming a psycho-biographical approach, the majority of scholars and literary critics, at least until recently, have interpreted Mary Shelley’s change in attitude and ardent 101 defence of Italy as a sublimation of her love for Shelley, or as an effort to assuage her guilt.

In my view, this reading, though it does not lack an entirely logical basis, is limiting and reductive, as it simplifies Mary Shelley’s intricate relationship to Italy and her configuration of Italianness, one of the most fascinating and rich chapters for critical enquiry. Interestingly,

Mary Shelley’s Italian experience,8 though in part more significant, polyvalent, and far- reaching than that of her husband’s, has for many years of scholarship been treated as an addendum to Percy Shelley’s biographies. For a nineteenth-century woman author who until recently was either represented by a single work (Frankenstein),9 or read in relation to her poet-husband and the male-dominated “Satanic School” of British Romantic poetry, a subject as challenging as her representation of and identification with Italianness offers, I believe, fresh insight into the study of her oeuvre, whether the latter is approached through feminist politics, through culture theory, or through post-colonial criticism.

Mary Shelley’s literary production during the years in England figures numerous topographies of Italy, as various and as far-reaching as the genres in which they appear: historical fiction, science fiction, romances, literary biography, travelogues, tales, short stories, reviews, essays.10 Her conceptual maps of Italy, as well as her instructive, detailed accounts of the customs and mores of a different people are extremely vigorous and insightful as pieces of cultural criticism. At the same time, however, they are topical and acclimatised to the needs of a wide reading public, which emerged in the 1820s and 1830s, following the post-Napoleonic influx of British travellers to Italy. The phenomenon known as Italomania generated a wide cultural agenda which included a plethora of accounts and topographical materials on the Mediterranean country.

After Percy Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley’s struggling passage from “romance to reality”11 included writing extensively for profit, such as stories for the popular annual The

Keepsake and articles in periodicals. Periodical writing was a fashionable and remunerative 102 activity at the time. In fact, as Lee Erickson points out, essay writers were “at the centre of public attention in the 1810s and 1820s in a way that never were before […] so that almost for the first time it was possible to make a living as a freelance essayist” (qtd. in Dart 147). In order to render her writings more competitive and commercial, Mary Shelley did not only

“exploit” the symbolic text of Italy, like many of her contemporaries, but given her long

Italian experience, she very early claimed the incontestability of her opinions on “things

Italian” and earned an authoritative voice as an Inglese Italianata. Because of the extreme topicality of “Italy”, the implementation of her Italian experience into lucrative forms of writing significantly increased the chances of a substantial income. Financial considerations did affect Mary Shelley’s writing and the marketing of her work. Thus, Italy did not remain in the sphere of memory and reverie but was variously thematised, narrated, and ultimately reinvented in her elaborate descriptions of Italian landscape and works of art, in the (often stereotypical) sketches of Italian characters, in lengthy digressions on the country’s literature and history of the past and present, on customs and manners, and, last but not least, on the country’s politics.

Stories with Italian themes abound in Mary Shelley’s “canon”. Most of these are set in medieval Italy, and are stories of passions, of love and hate, of revenge, of strife and reconciliation. 12 Like much of Shelley’s historical fiction, they often embed political reflections in domestic plots and, like her late fiction, they are concerned with domestic/sentimental forms of feminine devotion. The author shows a profound knowledge of Italian history and politics and often calls on her personal observations on religion, domestic customs and mores to complement the scene of the story. In my opinion, Mary

Shelley’s qualification of Italy as an “exhaustless theme” in her review essay “The English in

Italy” (EI 352) becomes meaningful in this context of cultural production and cultural consumption. Although the characterisation points to the established associations of endless 103 variety, plenitude, and abundance with which the country was invested in the Romantic age, it also prefigures in its wording, ironically perhaps, the material aspects of her relationship to

Italy. In other words, Mary Shelley utilises her “adopted land” as a source of inspiration and as a resource for literary topics for some of her writings, so as to support herself materially and stand out in a largely competitive market.

Consequently, her trajectory from an overshadowed figure to a respectable woman writer of her age, and, tellingly, to one who earned herself a professional living, is related to

Italy in an intrinsic and multifaceted way. If, according to Pierre Bourdieu, cultural and economic capital are understood as “the set of actually usable resources and powers”

(Distinction 114), Mary Shelley’s “cultural capital” – which, incidentally, conditions her economic capital – is precisely the resources and powers arising from her “acquisition of legitimate culture” (70), namely, from her acquisition, endorsement and display of an exclusionary Anglo-Italian taste. Furthermore, by capitalising on the aesthetic competence conferred by this taste, as well as on the presumed originality of her views over “things

Italian”, granted by personal experience and years of study, Mary Shelley claims distinction as an Anglo-Italian, as an author, and as a woman. I believe that the latter strategy is ramifying, as it enables Mary Shelley to legitimise her voice not only as an acculturated author, but as an acculturated woman author, and to claim the authenticity and originality of her Italian experience among a milieu of male “competitors”.

More specifically, and as I argue in this chapter, Mary Shelley carefully employs Italy and Italianness in the construction of a “new” personality, a new cultural model with which she identifies – the Anglo-Italian – while at the same time exploiting the dynamics of this discursive configuration in order to construct a distinct literary and political identity as a woman writer of her age. Notably, in an article with newly uncovered letters and poems by

Mary Shelley (1997), Betty Bennett points out that a number of her letters to editors dispel 104 the myth of Mary Shelley as non-assertive (52). I would add, more specifically, that the letters in which she refers to her commissioned reviews on books about Italy indicate even more Mary Shelley’s assuredness and firmness in dealing with editors.13 Therefore, the country she exceptionally identifies in “The Choice” as “[her] adopted land” is literally adopted and variedly implemented in the reinvented geography of this identity. In this respect, Mary Shelley forms part of a wider literary tradition of Romantic women writers of the period – including Lady Morgan, Letitia Landon, and Felicia Hemans – all of whom pave the way for the Victorian women poets and artists, who will revise the hitherto gendered portrait of Italy as “a woman in distress”, and transform its fluidity and sensuality into a new aesthetic. Such women writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti

“transform Italy from a political state to a female state of mind, from a problematic country in

Europe to the problem condition of femaleness” (Gilbert 28). In other words, both Browning and Rossetti inscribe the Italian Risorgimento as their own struggle for female assertion, artistic identity, liberty, and creativity.

In my opinion, however, the difference lies in the level of sophistication and valorisation with which Mary Shelley vests her “metaphors”, as cited in the epigraph to this chapter. After carefully configuring Anglo-Italianness into a strategy of distinction in terms of culture and taste, she uses the authority gained by her professed superior knowledge and expertise as a means of asserting her female self. In point of fact, Mary Shelley politicises and genders the Anglo-Italian, albeit in an indirect way. This is particularly important, especially if one considers her struggling effort to attain “a possible cohabitation of artistic needs and domestic obligations” (Douka-Kabitoglou 225), as well as the fluctuations in her views and contradictions in her politics: her liberalism and reformist beliefs on the one hand, and her conservative gender ideology and dependent femininity on the other. If, however, as

Mary Poovey claims, Romantic women “created opportunities for self-expression through 105 strategies of indirection, obliqueness, and doubling” (42), Mary Shelley’s hybridised figure is a covert but effective way of expressing her positions and feelings without breaking the rules of propriety and ladylike behaviour dictated by her age.

As well as an index to Mary Shelley’s identity and gender politics, the makeup of the

Anglo-Italian offers a penetrating look into ideas of culture, class, and society in the nineteenth century. One of the central questions that this chapter poses is to what extent the

Anglo-Italian reflects and illuminates the contradictions and ideological conflicts that beset early nineteenth-century British society. On the other hand, it investigates how this discursive operation – where “discourse” is used in the Foucauldian sense of a series of practices which produce and legitimate knowledge – combines to produce the complex map of British

Romantic Italy.

Before attempting to analyse and evaluate the palimpsests produced by the Anglo-

Italian’s ambivalent acculturation in Italian society, as well as the social ramifications of the

Anglo-Italian and of his/her professed mission, I will trace the textual origins and evolution of this figure in Mary Shelley’s writings. It is worth pointing out that the most complete sketches and references are made either in her reviews and essays – a major tool of cultural criticism – or in her letters. Thus the chapter will focus on “The English in Italy”, “A Visit to

Brighton”, and “Modern Italy” but it will also utilise other subject-related documents.

Therefore, a parallel reading of the public text and the private document, a parallel look at the public Mary Shelley and the private one – as well as at the tensions between them – will throw more light on the figurative and ideological uses of the Anglo-Italian. Finally, this chapter will briefly consider her travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and

1843.

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2.2 Mapping the Anglo-Italian Paradigm in the Reviews and in Rambles

Mary Shelley’s first attempt to distinguish the experience of a tourist in Italy from that of a traveller, previously punctuated in her letters only, appears in a semi-fictional essay entitled “Recollections of Italy”, published in the London Magazine in 1824.14 According to

Bennett and Robinson, in this narrative essay the author fuses together a number of autobiographical elements, taken from her own and Percy Shelley’s previous writings and

Italian experiences, particularly from journals and descriptive letters (255). Tellingly, the physical appearance of Edmund Malville, who “loved Italy, its soil, and all that it contained, with a strange enthusiasm” (RI 257) is an idealised portrait of Shelley himself.

Prompted by the narrator’s remarks, the young Malville sets out to counteract touristic truisms about the country, while he substantiates his authentic knowledge of Italy and its people through elaborate descriptions of its major cities, landscape, and human character. On the other hand, Malville criticises the “staged” posts of tourists, consisting in journeying too fast, staying in hotels with other English people, expecting to find “gorgeous temples” on every corner, lounging in coffee-houses, and sampling unenthusiastically high-society, opera, and art (RI 258-259). Parting company with his compatriots’ “tedious routine”, Malville declares that “I am a lover of nature. Towns, and the details of mixed society, are modes of life alien to my nature. I live to myself and to my affections” (RI 259). By highlighting the young man’s openness and attachment to Italy, Mary Shelley anticipates in Malville the figure of the Anglo-Italian. By highlighting his solitary sensitivity and Weltschmerz, on the other hand, Mary Shelley unmistakably romanticises his figure, as well as the place of

Malville’s/her own recollections.

Mary Shelley formally introduces the term “Anglo-Italian” in a review of three novels

– Lord Normanby’s The English in Italy, Charlotte Anne Eaton’s Continental Adventures, and Anna Brownell Jameson’s The Diary of an Ennuyée – which begins with a gentle satire 107 of Continental travel after the Napoleonic Wars. After an enraptured description of the fruitfulness of the Italian terrain and an enumeration of the chief sources of pleasure readily available to the British traveller, Mary Shelley distinguishes between the tourist and the

Anglo-Italian. However, and as it is revealed in the extract that follows, the hyphenated configuration is not merely a metonymy for the cultured, sophisticated, Italianised emigrant

British in Italy, but a designation of a distinctive standard of taste which combines intellectual rigor and aesthetic competencies:

The Anglo-Italian has many peculiar marks which distinguish him

from the mere traveller, or true John Bull. First, he understands Italian

and thus rescues himself from a thousand ludicrous mishaps which

occur to those who fancy that a little Anglo-French will suffice to

convey intelligence of their wants and wishes to the natives of Italy;

the record of his travels is no longer confined, according to lord

Normanby’s vivid description, to how he had been “starved here,

upset there, and robbed everywhere” [English in Italy, vol.ii. p.229].15

Your Anglo-Italian ceases to visit the churches and palaces, guide-book

in hand; anxious, not to see, but to say that he has seen. Without

attempting to adopt the customs of the natives, he attaches himself

to some of the most refined among them, and appreciates their native

talent and simple manners; he has lost the critical mania in a real taste

for the beautiful, acquired by the frequent sight of the best models of

ancient and modern art. (EI 343)

Mary Shelley’s observations emphasise the clear-cut distinction between the cultured, sophisticated emigrant English in Italy and the ephemeral or unitalianised visitor/tourist.

Endowed with a “real taste for the beautiful”,16 an inquisitive mind, and a higher sensibility, 108 the Anglo-Italian, according to Mary Shelley, is perfectly aware of the fact that, by coming into contact and achieving communion with the Italian aesthetic experience, which is acquired “by the frequent sight of the best models of ancient and modern art”, he/she becomes a rightful citizen of the locus classicus Italy embodies, of the ideal, the ageless, and the monumental. Except for his/her admiration and love for classical values, however, the

Anglo-Italian is claimed to be equally open and receptive to the Italy of his/her day.

Knowledge of the Italian language, hailed by Mary Shelley as another specimen of his/her sophistication and expediency, is a sine qua non to the Anglo-Italian’s understanding of “the complicated form of Italian society” (EI 344), and a passport to his/her integration in the adopted culture.

In a recently published article, Timothy Morton argues that in this review essay Mary

Shelley “looks for general cultural patterns in the behavior of Anglo-Italians […] [and] displays her knowledge that culture constitutes an environment, a set of unwritten rules that literally demarcate social positions” (260; emphasis added). Rather than simply describing or recording the behaviour of this group of expatriates, Mary Shelley, as Morton aptly observes, seeks to classify and categorise their conduct according to wider “structures of feeling”, to use Raymond Williams’s well-known phrase. It is my contention, however, that Shelley’s designation of this “new race or sect” of Anglo-Italians ultimately functions as a prescriptive schema of classification in matters of taste, which constructs social reality as much as it expresses it. Pierre Bourdieu speaks of “the performative power of designation, of naming” and adds that

a group, a class, a gender, a region, or a nation begins to exist as

such for those who belong to it as well as for the others, only when

it is distinguished, according to one principle or another, from other

groups, that is, through knowledge and recognition (connaissance et 109

reconnaissance.) […] The power to make visible and explicit social

divisions that are implicit, is political power par excellence. (“Social

Space ” 23)

If social space tends to function as a symbolic space, and as one which is organised according to the logic of difference, then the qualitative differences outlined between the

Anglo-Italians and the “un-Italianized” expatriates “function as distinctive signs and as signs of distinction” (Bourdieu, “Social Space” 20). In the construction of the truly cultivated

Anglo-Italian, “real taste” becomes an exclusive and exclusionary aesthetic competency, so much so, that “un-Italianized” English are scoffed at for their narrow experience and insularity, what Mary Shelley ironically calls their “stayathomeativeness” (EI 343).17

Interestingly, the expression of distaste and disapproval towards the aesthetic dispositions of others is still a manifestation and assertion of distinction. As Bourdieu points out, “tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes” (Distinction 56). Accordingly, the fact that Mary Shelley repudiates and casts as unnatural and erratic the aesthetic preferences of the “un-Italianized” English reinforces the exclusive standard of Anglo-Italian taste, as well as the standing of those who endorse it. In my opinion, the discourse of an Anglo-Italian cultural capital, which is meant to place the discussion on the level of aesthetic competencies rather than on the level of social class, fails to so do, since the aesthetic is, as I argue, a code word for the social.

Mary Shelley’s reification of taste in her discourse on Anglo-Italianness becomes more meaningful in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetic doctrines and theoretical speculations about taste. Earlier in the seventeenth century, English writers had imported the Italian term gusto, meaning taste, to denote a spectator’s artistic sensibility, and sometimes in the sense of keen relish or zest. As it was argued in chapter one, 110 gusto was an indicator of upper social class and was thus considered a moral duty for the

British Grand Tourists. Consequently, it formed part of the discourse of Continental travel, particularly as regards the Grand Tourist’s response to the classical sites of Italy. Thus, given the resonance of the notion of “taste” and its ramifying social, political, and cultural implications, to engage with this topic in eighteenth-century debates on aesthetics was almost de rigueur, partly because it was considered classy, and partly because its exploration was related to dominant concerns of the time: the search for general laws which were thought to govern human behaviour, and the response of the human mind to aesthetic experience

(Boulton x). Accordingly, a crucial issue was whether a standard of taste can be fixed and in what way(s). In the “Introduction on Taste” which begins the second edition to his Enquiry

(1759), Edmund Burke adopts a sensationist/Lockean standpoint. Although he divides the faculties concerned with taste into the senses, imagination, and judgement, he finally asserts that “as the senses are the great originals of our ideas […] the whole ground-work of Taste is common to all, and therefore there is a sufficient foundation for a conclusive reasoning on these matters” (23).

The aesthetician proceeds judiciously to qualify taste in relation to its formation and development in individuals. Interestingly, Mary Shelley’s observations about the complex sensibility required by art and literature – outlined apropos of Anglo-Italians – echo Burke’s judgements from his “Introduction on Taste”:

There is no difference in the manner of their being affected [by taste], nor

in the causes of the affection; but in the degree there is a difference, which

arises from two causes principally; either from a great degree of natural

sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to the object. (21)

Indeed it is for the most part in our skills in manners, and in the 111

observances of time and place […] that what is called Taste by way of

distinction, consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined

judgement. (23)

The cause of a wrong Taste is a defect of judgement. And this may

arise from a natural weakness of understanding […] or, which is much

more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of proper and well-

directed exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready.

(24; emphases added)

In his treatise, Burke reiterates many of the critical commonplaces of his time which prioritise decorum, uniform principles of judgement, and the importance of education. On the other hand, the early nineteenth century propagates a more sceptical and compromising outlook on how taste is measured; nonetheless, it still establishes distinction with reference to specific types of art or literature. In a lecture fragment known as “The Definition of Taste”

(1808), Samuel Coleridge notes: “By Taste, therefore, as applied to the fine arts, we must be supposed to mean an intellectual perception of any Object blended with a distinct reference to our own sensibility of pain or pleasure” (37). On the question of whether taste has any fixed principles or standards, he asserts that “[n]o person of common reflection demands even in feeling, that what tastes pleasant to him ought to produce the same effect on all living Beings; but every man does & must expect and demand the universal acquiescence of all intelligent

Beings in every conviction of his understanding” (38). Coleridge’s compelling qualification is similarly outlined in his essay “On the Principles of Genial Criticism concerning the Fine

Arts”, where he claims that “it would be impossible either to praise or to condemn any man’s taste, however opposite to our own, and we could be no more justified in assigning a corruption or absence of just taste to a man, who should prefer Blackmore to Homer or 112

Milton, or the Castle Spectre to Othello …” (qtd. in Chard 243). As it will hopefully become evident in the course of this chapter, Mary Shelley draws extensively on the aesthetic theories which dominate the cultural climate of her time, and whose diversity and incongruities are articulations of a constantly changing historical experience and of a milieu powerfully charged with political and social conflict.

Although Mary Shelley does not openly assert her Anglo-Italianness in the beginning of this review essay, but rather prefers to cite Lord Byron as a paradigmatic agent of this

“new race or sect”, she lays claim to it in a number of interesting ways when she engages in literary criticism. After dismissing Charlotte Anne Eaton’s and Anna Browell Jameson’s works as examples of “Anglo-Italian literature” (EI 343),18 on account of their guide-book style and “all English” (353) groundwork, Mary Shelley focuses on Lord Normanby’s The

English in Italy, and generously praises it for bearing the “perfect Italian stamp” (353). Her praise, however, is conditional, and the authority of Lord Normanby’s “opinions and conclusions” (344) is in many places questioned or undermined by Mary Shelley, who boldly

“marks her experience as the standard to which he must measure up” (Smith 161).

In addition, in order to valorise her voice even more, and show that the opinion she expresses is not biased and personal, but legitimated and sanctioned by the whole sect of

Anglo-Italians besides herself, Mary Shelley contests Lord Normanby’s credibility under the sign of a knowing “we” throughout the review essay: “We frequently, it is true, dissent from his lordship’s opinions and conclusions but we always assent to the truth of his facts” (EI

344). This narrative mode, however, serves a double purpose. By identifying with a larger, male-dominated Anglo-Italian group – albeit in part imagined – and by handing it authority and weight, she calls less attention to herself as an individual, and as a knowledgeable woman. Thus, on the face of it, Mary Shelley does not break the code of female propriety and conforms to the social norm of her time which dictated that women, instead of drawing 113 conclusions for themselves, should accept conclusions offered by an authoritative male voice.

Under the clever guise of self-diminution, Mary Shelley’s challenge to Lord Normanby’s authority as an Anglo-Italian appears less formidable; yet, in essence, it is an act of female self-assertion.

More specifically, Mary Shelley asserts her own Anglo-Italianness by distinguishing her experience of Italy from that of Lord Normanby in her criticism of his stories. For instance, her commentaries on both “L’Amoroso” and the “Politico” vaunt a more thorough and scrupulous understanding of the Italian conjugal system and of Italian politics respectively. In “L’Amoroso”, Lord Normanby recounts the love story of a “high-bred

English girl” with a “Neapolitan count” (EI 344) and the strains this relationship places on the girl, on account of the marked differences between English and Italian domestic customs.

Although the development of the story is deemed as “admirably managed” (344) and Mary

Shelley concurs with the author’s approach, her criticism ultimately sets her gendered understanding of both English and Italian customs against Lord Normanby’s. In particular, her insightful, balanced consideration of the position of the female in both the English and

Italian marital systems and codes of behaviour outwits Lord Normanby, and shakes his professed authority as a true Anglo-Italian:

[Y]et in all this, there is something besides the comparative merits

of English and Italian domestic customs. We can none of us attempt,

with impunity, to engraft ourselves on foreign stocks; […] We are

far from advocating the Italian conjugal system, which puts the

axe to domestic happiness, and deeply embitters the childhood

of the offspring of the divided parents; nevertheless, we must observe,

that the misery suffered by the English girl in Italy would on other

accounts, but in no minor degree, become the lot of an Italian married 114

to an Englishman. (EI 344)

In my opinion, Mary Shelley professes a deeper understanding of Italian domestic mores, first, on account of her Anglo-Italianness, and second, on account of her female perspective, which she pits against Lord Normanby’s narrow (male) viewpoint. By considering the case of an Italian girl’s marriage to an Englishman – that is, by reversing

Normanby’s version of the story – Mary Shelley flaunts a more comprehensive and authoritative opinion than his. It is worth pointing out that, in order to accredit her opinion and validate her bicultural sensibility, she purposefully adopts a double perspective by figuring an Italian self along her English one. Appropriately, English domestic life – grimly described in the extract that follows – is “seen” through the eyes of an Italian woman, when, in reality, it is represented by a cultural alien. Mary Shelley confidently assumes an Italian woman’s point of view, a rhetorical position which, incidentally, allows her to be outspoken and criticise with acumen the codes of propriety imposed by English society on its women.

Speaking with the authority of a female Anglo-Italian, she asserts that an Italian woman, being “ardent, simple-hearted, [and] undisguising” (EI 354) would find it extremely hard to conform with English customs. By pointing to the deeper implications of domestic customs for women’s lives, Mary Shelley’s “other” story transgresses the bounds of a comparative portrait of cultures and, inevitably, though not inadvertently, exposes the fault-lines of

Normanby’s version :

Let us imagine the daughter of a Neapolitan noble, dragged from her

beautiful country and sunny clime […] to the toils and dulness [sic] of

an English home – to the cares of housekeeping – a charge not imposed

on Italian females – her snug, but monotonous fireside, her sentry-box

of a house; to our cloudy sky; to the labour of giving dinners and

entertaining evening parties; to those numerous etiquettes easy to the 115

natives, unattainable by foreigners; to the sotto voce tone […]

which characterises our social intercourse, to the necessity of for

ever wearing that thick and ample veil of propriety which we throw

over every act and word: introduce the ardent, simple-hearted,

undisguising Italian to this world, so opposite to her own, and she

would experience the same heart-sickening disappointment that

visited the heart of the heroine of the Amoroso. (344, 345; emphasis added)

Another issue on which Mary Shelley “dissent[s] from his lordship’s opinions and conclusions” (EI 344) is politics. Although “The English in Italy” is not ranked among her political writings, it foregrounds her advocacy of Italian nationalism, a cause she is going to defend nearly twenty years later in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843

(1844). Mary Shelley contradicts Normanby’s argument about the ineffectiveness of the

Piedmontese revolt in 1820-21, and supports her judgement of the true, beneficial, long-term effects of the revolution. Her “gentle” sneer at Normanby’s conclusions, which she finds superficial and injudicious, is another bold attempt to place her own Anglo-Italian authority against his; bold, but risky, too, if one considers that she now enters a typically “male” domain, that of politics:

The author, it is true, judging only from the apparent effects, blames

this sudden burst of impatience on the parts of Italians any longer to

bear their galling chains. He says, that they had better waited a few

years, as if the capacity of waiting did not engender a callousness to

the evils of tyranny, incompatible with a generous love of liberty. The

revolution ended unfortunately, it is true; but, most certainly, if the

attempt had not been made, the Italians would have lost their characteristic

of being slaves “ognor frementi” […]. From the smothered fire of this 116

crushed revolt a brighter flame will hereafter rise. (EI 345; emphasis added)

Her argumentation, which she develops in two long paragraphs of political analysis, is for the most part vigorous, because factually grounded, and displays insightful knowledge not only of the current historical and geopolitical state of Italy, but of European politics, too. She explores the causes of failure of the Piedmontese revolt critically and not with disapproval, extols the Italians’ “native genius”, and finally contends that “Italy possesses in her own bosom the germs of regeneration, which in spite of their late overthrow, will in the end give birth to their emancipation” (EI 346). Furthermore, Mary Shelley founds her claim to political authority on her acquaintance with the diverse maps of human and cultural geography of Italy. It is this quality that grants her knowledge of “the true Italian character”

(348), which one can encounter off the beaten track, that is, in the Italian countryside:

We are surprised that lord Normanby has not introduced more of

the country life of Italy, which bears a peculiar stamp, and which

is pregnant with interest and beauty. Generally speaking, our country-

men see only the surface of the country, and are unaware of the

minutiae of the peasants’ life, and their mode of agriculture. They

are connoisseurs in paintings, and frequenters of drawing rooms;

but the inferior classes of their fellow-beings possess no interest for

them: and yet it is in the country of Italy that you see most of the

true Italian character. (EI 348)

In discussing political affairs and the issue of national character, Mary Shelley, as

Jeanne Moskal observes, “departs from the dominant […] discourse of femininity that held politics to be an inappropriate topic for women” (“Gender and Italian Nationalism …” 189).

It is my contention that, much as this review essay contains contradictions of liberalism and political beliefs, as well as a marked fluctuation between self-assertion and self-concealment, 117

Mary Shelley eventually comes out as bold and “audacious”, particularly when she reproaches Normanby for his “offensive display of superiority of rank” (EI 357) and openly expresses her liberal view that “the prerogatives of rank can also trespass on genius” (Morton

267). Notably, as Mary Shelley thus separates herself from conservative politics, her radicalism becomes another form of distinction. The concluding lines of the review essay are strikingly forthright and piercing: “His lordship has too much real talent not to feel and appreciate the nobility of nature as well as that of birth, and some indication of such a feeling would give a grace to his productions, in which, at present, they are deficient” (EI 357). The extract, and the essay in its entirety, resonates issues crucial to Mary Shelley’s contemporaries, issues that certainly transgress the limits of literary criticism and step into the contested ground of cultural criticism. This is why, in my opinion, “The English in Italy” is a singular work, not only because of its generic ambivalence and wide-ranging scope, but because it reflects the problematics of its age.

Although Mary Shelley continued to write sympathetically on the left-wing attitude, the dominant impression is that in the late 1820s and henceforward she became increasingly conservative. In fact, and as Nora Crook argues, Mary Shelley’s public voice remains unwavering to the end of her writing career, yet it is characterised by “tactics of alternating meekness and boldness” (75), a method which allows her to pursue her political discourse without putting herself forward as much as she does in “The English in Italy”, and therefore, without provoking public disapprobation. More specifically, Mary Shelley was aware of the pressure on women writers to eschew or soften their political opinions, and knew well that women who had followed an irregular route, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Staël, and Lady Morgan, had paid the price for their defiance by being vilified in the reviews of their works. This is one of the reasons why, when she intently engaged in political writing with Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), she devised certain 118 strategies – which will be mentioned later in this chapter – in order to launch her political opinions in an acceptably feminine manner, namely, by “enlisting ‘sensibility’ to inform her discussions of politics” (Moskal, “Gender and Italian Nationalism …” 198).

In her 1826 essay “A Visit to Brighton”, 19 Mary Shelley highlights another attribute of the Anglo-Italian, best impersonated in the figure of Lord Byron, namely, that of the cosmopolitan perspective: “I had not quitted London for two years. Do not imagine therefore that I am a mere Londoner; I am, please to observe, a traveller” (VB 165). In a strikingly modern manner, Mary Shelley disconnects the idea of culture being rooted in a particular place (Morton 268) and thus revolutionises the notion of identity. By re-charting spatial and temporal divides, the figure of the Anglo-Italian problematises those traditional notions of culture and place which perceive the latter as natural phenomena. In dubbing herself “a traveller”, and partly rejecting her native filiation to London, Mary Shelley identifies with routes rather than roots. Subsequently, like many British travel memoirists at the time, Mary

Shelley assumes – via her Anglo-Italianness – the sophistication, venturesomeness, originality, worldliness, and acculturation of the (Romantic) traveller:

I am not at all sure that I do not figure in the “English in Italy.” At least,

I can bear testimony to the truth of the descriptions contained in the volumes

thus entitled […] I have slept under the guardianship of Santa Maddalena

at the top of the windy Appenines; I have rowed in a gondola over the

moon-lit Laguna to the now classic Lido; I have melted a ducat in the

lava of Vesuvius; I have witnessed the breathless interest with which

the Tuscan carbonari listened to news of the Austrian army in the Regno;

I have gone owling; and have, withal, a collection of native and Zingari

anecdotes, with which (had I equal talent) I might make a worthy

supplement to Lord Normanby’s production. (VB 165-66; emphasis added) 119

This part of the essay could be considered an addendum to “The English in Italy”, given that Mary Shelley asserts her own Anglo-Italianness in the first person, albeit in an unassuming manner. Interestingly, the use of the verb “figure” to denote her involvement in an Anglo-Italian magnum opus is arresting in its implications, as, on the one hand, it alludes to “figure” as a form of rhetorical expression such as a metaphor, and on the other, to

“figuration”, that is, the act of formation or shaping. Both connotations destabilise the notion of identity as a fixed, natural quality and highlight its mutability on account of its fashioning in culture-specific contexts. Precisely because the latter are historical, however, these identities produce and legitimate knowledge. By the same token, even though the Anglo-

Italian is, in essence, a rhetorical strategy, a figurative identity, its discursive effects are obtrusive and ramifying.

“A Visit to Brighton” also contains a strong affirmation of Anglo-Italian taste. Mary

Shelley uses culture, and Italian opera in particular, as an instrument of symbolic domination.

In this way, an aesthetic stance is transmuted into a “legitimate way of life which casts every other way of life into arbitrariness” (Bourdieu, Distinction 57):

I like to […] be secure of hearing the best performers and singers

at concerts; and go to the opera when Pasta and Velluti are strung

to the top of their bent, at the sight of the accomplished amateurs

and Italianized English, who are certainly better judges than those

lovers of noise who force Miss Paton to sacrifice her own good taste

to their partiality for cadence and bravura. I know of no civilized

congregation of men and lovely women more delightful to look upon

than the audience of an Italian opera. (VB 164; emphasis added)

As C.P. Brand notes in Italy and the English Romantics, Italian opera had been the fashionable recreation of the aristocracy in England since the mid-eighteenth century, while 120 for most cultured Englishmen and artists it was synonymous to the Italian country itself

(225). In spite of its slow decline in the post-war period, Italian singers and opera performers remained a main attraction for the opera-goer. Mary Shelley’s enthusiasm for Italian sopranos and tenors, whose names and performances she records meticulously in the essay, reflects a facet of the English fascination with opera. However, much as the aristocracy remained faithful to it until the 1850s, they often lamented its popularisation and the loss of its

“original exclusiveness” (Brand, Italy and the English Romantics 183). Mary Shelley, who adhered not to an aristocracy of rank but to one of culture, describes with caustic humour the curious medley of opera-goers:

I love to see the Peeress […] turn her plumed head smilingly to

welcome a well executed passage; to see the Exquisites [dandies

or fops] crowd into the pit at the commencement of the ballet – I

like all this, especially when I am at a respectful distance from the

Jones’s and the Smiths’, who reply to their mutual questionings of

“How do you like it?” – with – “Well, I must say, I think the play

worth two of it – why it’s all dancing and singing” – who, book in

hand, toil through the translation of the last act of the Crocciato, till

a better informed relative whispers, “It is not the same; it’s Nyna –

Nyna foolish for love.” (VB 165)

Mary Shelley takes a more polemical stance, as far as aesthetic distinction is concerned, when she comes to defend in public an Italian soprano, Giovanni Battista Velluti.

In 1826 she writes two letters to the editor of The Examiner (the second was not published) in which she insinuates that Velluti’s reviewers and censors lack that instinctive good taste and aesthetic appreciation that would allow them to judge him beyond his vocal deficiencies. As she puts it, “[t]he defects of his voice are so glaring as to be evident to the coarsest ears, and 121 are therefore the less to be insisted on by the judicious and delicate” (MWSL 517). More specifically, Velluti’s detractors have missed “his chief merit [which] is in his expression, in his perfect gusto, in his mode of linking note to note in a manner that chains the ear and touches the heart” (MWSL 517). Significantly, the classification of taste evinces its ramifications into social space more clearly in Mary Shelley’s contentious remark that

Velluti’s foremost strength, that is, his “sentiment” is “a sentiment that the generous and the gentle must instinctively feel, but which it would be labour in vain to attempt to instil into the coarse and the vulgar” (MWSL 518; emphasis added).

Although Mary Shelley’s second letter of defence focuses on particulars from one of

Velluti’s opera performances in London, the language of aesthetic elitism that permeates her first defence is once more clearly identifiable, when she maintains, for instance, that “we must be, as it were, instinctively attracted and charmed, or the spell is wholly without avail”

(MWSL 523; emphasis added). As Smith points out, this language of class-specific taste not only distinguishes “the gentle” and “the judicious” from “the coarse and the vulgar” but also implies “that the former group have an instinctive good taste that the latter group can never learn” (161). In my opinion, through the appropriation of distinctive symbols of power in the form of “natural” distinction, personal authority, and artistic culture, Mary Shelley’s aesthetic judgements command a legitimacy in the wider sphere of the social world. Being associated with a whole set of conditions of existence, taste distinguishes in a powerful way, so much so, that the affirmation of a “legitimate” aesthetic “principle of vision and division” (Bourdieu,

“Social Space” 21) is, in effect, an affirmation of power, the power to construct, designate, or

“annul” individuals and groups.

Appropriately, and to return to Bourdieu’s theory, Mary Shelley’s discourse is, I believe, a case in point of how taste “unites and separates” (Distinction 56), but also of how

“[t]aste classifies, and [how] it classifies the classifier” (6). Interestingly, both letters in the 122

Examiner are signed “ANGLO-ITALICUS”, a suggestive pseudonym which reinforces the authority and exclusivity she claims in Velluti’s defence, and affirms the legitimacy of an

Anglo-Italian taste, of which she purports to be an exponent. Carrying the reverberations of the Classical age in its Latinised form, this portentous denomination outlines in a definitive way the spatial, temporal, and affective contours of the new identity that Mary Shelley adopts at the time. Her resounding and categorical classification of tastes – undoubtedly more systematically pursued in the letters than in her review of Lord Normanby’s book – vests the

Anglo-Italian with an aristocracy of culture which enhances his/her authority and social status. This insistent affirmation of distinction is carefully mutated into a strategy for gender distinction, by way of which Mary Shelley’s female viewpoint subtly vindicates a place in a male-dominated discourse.

Mary Shelley’s conscious “manipulation” of Anglo-Italianness to the interests of her gender is best depicted in a description included in a letter to John Howard Payne in the same year (1826). In reporting a night at the Opera with her friend Jane Williams, she recounts her successful effort to pass as an Italian among a group of unversed English opera-goers:

We spoke Italian all the time are 20 were not the least annoyed

to be sure as we quitted the house, one or two parties turned enquiring

glances on the ladies without shadows […] – how odd shadowless

ladies, but our Italian changed the surprise into ah! foreign ladies

often have no shadows – We were comfortably situated as far as the

respectability of nos alentours went […] One old lady beside me with

her glass tried to follow the English of the Italian in her book. I put

her right as far as I could in dumb show. But when she obstinately

turned over the pages of the 2nd act of the “Crociato” in search of

the words of Nina I saw no hope of setting her right except by 123

speaking and that was not in the bond – I could understand a little

English but not speak a word. The personage before me offered me

his book – Apparement, Madame vous êtes etrangère, voulez vous vous

profitez de non livre ? in my character of Italian I accepted his civility,

as an English person I could not. (MWSL 519-520; emphasis added)

Mary Shelley’s unconventional behaviour is predicated on the professed advantage granted by her Anglo-Italian authority and distinction. Owing to her knowledge of Italian and familiarity with opera, she can instruct her fellow spectators and initiate them into the delights of Italian culture. The educational role of the Anglo-Italians regarding the

Italianisation of their “un-Italianized countrymen”, which had been emphasised in “The

English in Italy” is reinforced by Mary Shelley’s personal intervention at the Opera in the

“hope of setting [the old lady] right”.

More particularly, her definition of the Anglo-Italian in “The English in Italy” capitalises on the task or mission of these acculturated emigrants to “disseminate among them

[their compatriots at home] a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the peninsula”

(EI 343). It is important to note that her reference to Anglo-Italian literature as a “school” (EI

343) designates collective literary activity in the form of a poetic, cultural, and even political avant-garde.21 The civilising, refining mission the Anglo-Italians allocate to themselves suggests the distinctive role they claimed in the construction of cultural and political models for British society. As it has been argued elsewhere, this group of literati as cited in Mary

Shelley’s essay, alludes to the circle of young Romantic intellectuals she associated with in

Italy, and which purported a radical restructuring of society via an educational reform based on Enlightenment politics.

Mary Shelley shared P.B. Shelley’s egalitarian philosophy and reformist ideology, as well as his utopian vision for a society of enlightened spirits, a community of intellectuals 124 who would implement their varied educational practices into a system of cultural and political reform. The Shelleys’ group challenged dominant ideology and called into question institutional power, openly claiming, through their deviant practices, a distinctive role in the construction of political models for society. P.B. Shelley’s writings bear ample evidence to the fact that these people perceived themselves as legislators of the world, as citizens with a heightened perception who had a historic role to fulfill. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, did not overtly acknowledge the distinctive position this group sought to establish in social space until 1824, when she was back in England. Writing a letter to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a friend of P.B. Shelley and a contributor to The Liberal, Mary Shelley extols the members of the Pisan circle. Significantly, one of the pervading themes of this letter is consciousness of herself as part of this visionary company:

[T]he happiness I enjoyed and the sufferings I endured in Italy make

present pleasures & annoyances appeal like the changes of a mask –

I can sometimes for a while enter into the spirit of the game, but my

affections are in the past & my imagination is not much exalted by

a representation mean & puerile when compared to the real delight

of my intercourse my exalted Shelley, the frank hearted and

affectionate Edwa and others then of less note, but remembered

now with fon as having made a part of the Elect. (MWSL 450)

The issue of education, however, should also be considered in relation to gender and to the socio-political context of the time. As Poovey argues, “women writers were scrupulous about fulfilling the office of educator”, embracing, thus, in their writings “the social role that women as a group had generally internalized” (38). More specifically, Romantic women literary critics were anxious to instill in young people a taste for virtue and an aversion for vice. They also repeatedly insisted that contemporary and classical literature must assume the 125 responsibility of educating young people, but especially young women, to be sensible, well- informed, and prudent adults. Insisting that the cultural role of literature was to instruct, these women critics “assumed the stance of the mother-teacher, selecting the appropriate books for young people to read at different stages of their growth […] warning against licentious literature, and correcting the aesthetic taste of their charges” (Mellor, “A Criticism of Their

Own” 34).

In outlining the significant differences between the thematic concerns and ideological positionings of male and female Romantic writers, Anne Mellor, in her seminal study

Romanticism and Gender, observes that “women Romantic writers tended to celebrate, not the achievements of the imagination nor the overflow of powerful feelings, but rather the workings of the rational mind, a mind relocated […] in the female as well as the male body”

(2). In other words, Romantic literary women used their writings to challenge the existing gender ideology, which assumed that men were rational and should dominate the public sphere, while women were emotional and should be confined to the private sphere. Instead, they tried to develop, in more or less overt and assertive ways, a new image of the ideal female, as one who is rational and socially responsible, still insisting on the primacy of the family or the community and the attendant practical responsibilities.

The balance of sense and sensibility as a model for life was consistently put forward by Mary Wollstonecraft – author of the influential work A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman (1792) – who spoke of “the feeling mind” (qtd. in Mellor “A Criticism of Their

Own” 39) and maintained that “the perfection of [women’s] nature and capability of happiness must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge that distinguish the individual, and direct the laws which bind society” (12). On the other hand, in a book under the telling title A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental

Subordination (1799) Mary Robinson (under the pseudonym of Anne Frances Randall) 126 strongly advocated the right of women to equal education and free expression, and exhorted them to adhere to the ethic of reason and correct perception:

O! my enlightened country-women! Read, and profit, by the admonition

of Reason. Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you.

[…] Be less the slaves of vanity, and more the converts of Reflection […]

Let your daughters be liberally, classically, philosophically, and usefully

educated; let them speak and write their opinions freely; […] expand their

minds, and purify their hearts, by teaching them to feel their mental

equality with their imperious rulers. (242)

Mary Shelley’s perspective on gender issues was largely shaped by William Godwin’s egalitarian philosophy and Mary Wollstonecraft’s enlightenment politics for both men and women. Although Mary Shelley never openly vindicated the rights of women, by writing a tract or essay as her mother had done, she incorporated Godwin’s radicalism and

Wollstonecraft’s feminist beliefs – as well as the contradictions and ambivalences that beset these theories – into her own vision of the creation of a humane, educated, and democratic society. The rubric of Mary Shelley’s works and life represent, according to Betty Bennett,

“an alternate paradigm for resolving societal political conflict through education and universal love” (“Breaking Boundaries” 68), a paradigm that broke political as well as gender boundaries at the time, challenging contemporary post-war socio-political power systems, which effected a program of domination on both women and men.

Mary Shelley’s literary criticism, as evinced in her reviews and literary biographies,22 is, I believe, the ultimate space in whose interstices she transcribes her alternative paradigm.

Shelley belonged to a wider tradition of shrewd women literary critics – Joanna Baillie, Anna

Barbauld, Anna Seward, to quote but a few – whose criticism was strongly inflected by cultural concerns and included gender politics. As Mellor argues, “these women critics set 127 themselves up as judges, judges not just of aesthetic taste and literary excellence but also of cultural morality” (“A Criticism of Their Own” 46). Insisting on their right both to write literature and to judge it before the public eye, these women critics claimed the highest cultural authority, and because of the respect many of them enjoyed, even by their male peers, literary reviewing was gradually sanctioned as an acceptably feminine sphere. The effects of this phenomenon are more far-reaching, if one considers the impact this form of journalism had in the early 1800s, since the specialised literary review was a key to the perception of books and was literally shaping culture (Butler, “Culture’s Medium” 121-122).

By the same token, Mary Shelley assumes the role of the judge and of the arbiter of taste, and comments knowledgeably on cultural matters, though in the persona of the Anglo-Italian.

This hybrid configuration smoothes her entrance into the arena of the social sphere and balances her violent, at times, oscillation between self-assertion and self-effacement.

In my opinion, however, the extract from the letter to John Howard Payne quoted earlier is arresting in the way it registers how Mary Shelley “stages” her English and Italian selves next to each other. In pretending to be a foreigner, she relishes her anonymity and limited approachability, as well as the strange unease people around her experience. Under the guise of an Italian lady, she flaunts her familiar “otherness” and cultural superiority. As an Italian, she can indeed enjoy the courtesy of the man before her who offers her his book, while she immediately admits that she could never allow that “as an English person” (MWSL

520). In other words, her Italian “character”– the word choice is once more striking in its implications – entitles her to more freedom and opportunities for self-expression in her social conduct.

The opera incident strongly resembles a masquerade – a concept explored in more detail apropos of Byron’s Beppo – where the “switching” of cultures, via the switching of language, is treated by Mary Shelley as a playful, capricious exchange of roles. The letter 128 extract records how the adoption of an Italian persona releases her inhibitions and proves a highly liberating experience. On the other hand, the last two lines suggest the pleasure attended on her experience of doubleness, on “a fantasy of two bodies simultaneously and thrillingly present, self and other together, the two-in-one” (Castle 4-5). Mary Shelley’s stylised “doubleness” or “betweenness” at the Opera is in itself a strong statement on the issue of identity, as it exposes its mutability, plasticity, and impermanence. Accordingly, the histrionic vocabulary included in the text (“shadowless”, “dumb show”, “personage”,

“character”) aptly foregrounds the idea of figuring (re-presenting) and configuring

(constructing) identities.

In this eccentric masquerade, language switching, as pointed out earlier, plays the role of the mask, and the change in language is the emblem of a leap into a new persona. Mary

Shelley often crosses languages in her writings, private and public, during and after her residence in Italy. The insertion of foreign words in accounts of foreign places was, of course, a common rhetorical strategy in travel writing at the time. According to Chloe Chard, writers would “sprinkle the commentary lavishly with foreign words; conveniently made visible even at a casual glance through the use of italics, terms borrowed from other languages assure the reader that the traveller has indeed managed to […] grasp the topography in its full alterity, and is offering it up to the reader as an object of pleasurable speculation” (4).

Likewise, in order to add some local flavour to the letters she writes from Italy to her compatriots in England, Mary Shelley frequently “drops” Italian words or phrases, whose occurrence increases significantly, if the recipient is a speaker of Italian, too. Interestingly, when she comes to write a whole letter to Leigh Hunt in Italian from Pisa, she does exactly the opposite: she writes in the foreign idiom and drops one or two English terms to ensure that she has been understood: “I poveri Pisani lo [Pacchiani] credano matto; e racontano tante storiette di lui che ci fa credere che davero è un poco stravagante, o per parlare in inglese – 129 eccentric” (MWSL 163).23 This is another instance of Mary Shelley vacillating between two linguistic and cultural worlds. As Morton claims, “[h]aving been a participant-observer in the culture of Italy, and having been a professional woman of letters in a field dominated by male writers, Mary Shelley knew well the condition of ‘betweenness’” (262). Although this

“betweenness” complicated her politics and made her reluctant to decide between ideological polarities, it eventually proved “a useful cultural-critical tool” (262), as in the case of the

Anglo-Italian discussed earlier .

In the above mentioned letter, Mary Shelley’s conscious choice to transform herself into a cultural other through a linguistic leap might be partly justified by her wish to assert her intellectual self among a circle of English and Italian male intellectuals that form around her at Pisa in the years 1820-1821.24 In the opera episode, however, Italian ultimately proves to be the language of expressivity and power, as it allows Mary Shelley to assert her female self more forcefully. The connection between Italian language and women’s liberty to express themselves is not incidental. By Mary Shelley’s time, Italian had become an acceptably “feminine” language, variedly implemented as a gendered strategy by women writers.

It should be noted at this point that in the early nineteenth century, the fascination with

Italian music and literature instigated a keen interest in the Italian language in England, and gave an impetus to its study. C.P. Brand reports the following historical information which, on the one hand, identifies the groups of people to whom Italian exercised an appeal, and, on the other, elucidates the formal relationship between the Italian language and (middle- and upper-class) English women. The extract reinforces the idea that women writers had a different relation to Italian than their male counterparts, most of whom had been educated primarily in dead languages such as Greek and Latin:

Italian […] [was not] taught as a compulsory subject at schools. Only 130

at girls’ schools was Italian taught as a part of the normal curriculum;

its favour with young ladies was a relic of the eighteenth century

conception of Italian as a ‘light and frivolous language’, best suited

to sonneteers and tender lovers. Italian never became a ‘popular’

language: its appeal was limited almost entirely to the scholar, the

traveller, the musician, the artist and the better-educated young lady.

(Italy and the English Romantics 40)

For many nineteenth-century British women writers, the use of an alternative language signifies the emergence of a new self, which, besides being imaginatively employed as an escape route from the constraints of the northern domestic sphere (critiqued by Mary Shelley in “The English in Italy” as we saw earlier), mirrors and, therefore, exposes the real self. In revising the disturbing gendered associations of Italy inherited by their male predecessors, several women writers, especially after the 1830s, transform Italy’s signs and symbols into a new aesthetic. According to Ellen Peel and Nanora Sweet, this aesthetic is “liquid, colorful, insinuating, and sensuous; it is perishable, nonutilitarian, destabilising” (qtd. in Chapman and

Stabler 1). Thus, Italy becomes an imaginative and liberating space of creative possibilities and revelations for women, but, at the same time, the space of struggle for the vindication of female political, social, and sexual rights. Significantly, the intrinsic characteristics of the

Italian language come to emblematise this distinctively female politicised aesthetic. One of the most eloquent manifestations of the feminisation of Italian is found in Madame de Staël’s

Corinne, or Italy (1807), the novel which literally re-discovered Italy through a womanly perspective:

The sound of Corinne’s moving, sensitive voice, singing in the stately,

resonant Italian language, produced an entirely new impression on

Oswald. English prosody is regular and muted. Its natural beauties are 131

all melancholy; clouds have formed its colours and the sounds of waves

its harmony. But when Italian words, sparkling like a festive day,

ringing out like the sound of victorious trumpets, which has been likened

to scarlet amongst the clouds, when these words, still marked by the

happiness spread in all hearts by a beautiful climate, are uttered with

feeling, their softened brilliance, their concentrated power, give rise

to an emotion as keen as it is expected. (33; emphasis added)

Because of the energy and the dramatic force with which it was often enunciated,

Italian was believed to give expression to an identity which was quintessentially and recognisably “Italian”. The extract from Corinne indicates, however, that the elocutionary force of Italian words is, in effect, a synaesthetic experience which produces a sublime, destabilising effect on Oswald. The arresting similes which suggest the sensuousness, naturalness, colorfulness, delicacy, as well as the “concentrated power” of the Italian words, also delineate the contours of a female aesthetic, mapped exclusively within the bounds of

Corinne’s improvisation and forged by her discourse. Thus, the use of Italian language by

English women writers is a means of attaining not only an Italian identity, but through the existing associations, a means of asserting their female identity.

Other forms of taste and distinction appear in Mary Shelley’s review of Henry Digby

Beste’s Italy as it Is; or Narrative of an English Family’s Residence for Three Years in That

Country and of Louis Simond’s A Tour in Italy and Sicily, which appeared in July 1829 in the

Westminster Review.25 The essay begins with a long digression on Italian scenery and a detailed description of Rome, incited, as she caustically notes, “by the absence of any thing like description in the volume entitled ‘Italy as it Is’ ” (MI 361). Mary Shelley does not rank

Beste among the “race” of Anglo-Italians, as she had tentatively done with Lord Normanby, arguing suggestively that, although the book is “amusing” and “useful, for he details the 132 minutiae of his domestic life” (MI 363), “something more is required of a traveller in Italy”

(361). Once again, Mary Shelley differentiates between the tourist and the Anglo-Italian, pitting Beste against her experience, which she arbitrarily sets as a standard throughout the review.

The description of Rome and modern Italians, apropos of the critique of Beste’s book, is surprisingly denigrating, and raises questions as to its underlying cause. More specifically, the review echoes the prevalent nineteenth-century English attitude which deemed the current condition of the country incompatible with the ideals of classical antiquity which Rome epitomised. Disturbed by the “ill-assorted marriage of ancient with modern” (MI 361), Mary

Shelley laments the loss of harmony, order, and spatial unity in the modern city, and maintains that

the manners of the Romans of our days, their worldliness and covetous-

ness, disturb the solemn emotions we desire to indulge among these

time-eaten ruins. […] To render Rome really a Roman scene […] every

inhabitant should be dismissed; let the modern usurpers of the sacred

soil build elsewhere, on less consecrated ground, homes for their degene-

rate race, and let the crumbling of her ruins and the flowing of her

fountains be the only sounds to salute the ear of the classic pilgrim, who

visits this venerable conservatory of old Time’s rarest treasures. (MI 361)

In his article “Rome and its Romantic Significance”, Jerome McGann observes that “the picture of Rome dominated by ruins and monuments but deserted of people is typically

Romantic, and is often delivered to the reader (or viewer) under the most explicit of

Romantic signs, the moonlight” (315). Mary Shelley’s 1829 appraisal of modern Italy is strongly reminiscent of the marked contrast that characterised her reflections on Italy and the

Italians during her sojourn in the peninsula. 133

Cristina Dazzi’s recent research in Italy (1997) has brought to light a manuscript authored by Mary Shelley, which compiles a list of comments on Pisan University professors in 1820-1821. This “annotated” catalogue of names, written primarily in English, but also in

(Anglicised) Italian is replete with caustic remarks on most of these professors’ abilities, character, social conduct, and reputation. The significance of the document lies not only in that it further clarifies Mary Shelley’s relationship to the Pisans, but also in that it foregrounds her impulse to act as a cultural critic and to classify people on the basis of taste and social standing. In this regard, Pierre Bourdieu’s remark that “nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies” (“ Social Space” 19) proves, once more, instructive in Mary Shelley’s case. However, the strikingly blunt commentary on Gatteschi’s abuse of his wife in the last of the entries cited reveals Shelley’s concern about an issue that blighted the women of her time. As Dazzi correctly argues, “[i]l fastidio o il disgusto annotato nei confronti di Giuseppe Gatteschi che pichiavva e umiliava la moglie era l’unico sentimento che poteva infatti provare la figlia dell’ autrice di A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman” (119): 26

Pachiani P. of Fisica Teorica- l’uomo di spirito in un hospidal dei pazzi

[text in Italian]. There two latter [Piazini and Pacchiani] are the only ones

in the University that have any ideas. Pachiani has the most genius.

Piazini the best head. The latter is a great scandal monger.

Gatteschi P. of experimental Philosophy shallow Professor- avaricious-

stupid disagreeable- lively presentuous [sic] brutish- jealous- keeps his wife

on five pauls a day at Florence after having beat her & starved her at

home she being beautiful learned & agreeable. (114-115) 134

To return to “Modern Italy”, Mary Shelley’s distaste for modern Romans extends to

Beste’s Catholicism. Particularly, she largely attributes the failure of the book to his zealotry in defence of his faith, which “warps his views and diminishes the justice or utility of his observations” (MI 361). As a devotee of ancient Roman philosophy and a Protestant, Mary

Shelley feels “disgusted by the Catholics setting the corruption, profligacy and imbecility of

Papal Rome, in comparison with her ancient glories” (MI 362).

Religion was one of the major issues that alienated the British from Italy. The travellers of the period had inherited an anti-Catholic tradition of which such travellers as

Roger Ascham, John Milton, and Joseph Addison had been exponents. In the seventeenth century, the concept of Italy as a land of vice and corruption was intrinsically related to the

“evil” influence of the Catholic church on its subjects. As a result, the country’s decadence, degeneracy, and political debasement in the long eighteenth century was often seen as a direct result of papal authority. Consequently, the strong anti-Catholic bias on the part of the

English traveller did a good deal to prejudice him/her against modern Italians. During this period, however, responses to Catholic faith begin to appear more compromising and tolerant. The historical reason behind this variance from the conventional anti-papal sentiment was the growing pressure in Britain for Catholic emancipation, culminating in the

Acts of 1828 and 1829, which finally allowed Catholics to hold public office in England. As

C.P. Brand affirms, however, the whole issue stirred great religious controversy in England

(Italy and the English Romantics 223).

Taking into account this historical particular, it is my contention that Mary Shelley’s harsh review of Italy as it Is in 1829 is not entirely unconnected to Beste’s religious beliefs.

Interestingly, what she seems to denounce more than Catholicism itself, is the author’s propagandistic intents. In this respect, her position strongly brings to mind P.B. Shelley’s view that Catholicism, and religion in general, being another form of institutional power, 135 literally “warps” a person’s judgement and free will. Although Mary Shelley shared her compatriots’ admiration for certain aspects of the Catholic religion as practised in Italy, her strong anti-Catholic feelings can be traced in the majority of her writings, particularly in her early work.

Nevertheless, considerable variance from her negative feelings on Catholicism emerges in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843. Significantly, her last work figures a revisionary view of the Catholic religion. Considering the relationship between gender and the aesthetic fascination with Italian Catholicism, Jane Stabler elucidates

Mary Shelley’s qualification of her scepticism towards Catholicism in her later years. As she points out, Mary Shelley, like many of her female contemporaries who visited Italy,

“experienced a tension between their self-conscious ‘sight-seeing’ role […] and their inherited scepticism as Protestants of the visual and performative aspects of Catholic custom.

[…] Italian Catholicism provided two conflicting versions of the sublime, one based on absolute political papal authority and one on the transcendent aesthetic possibilities of music, art and communal festive joy” (15-16). It is worth noticing that Mary Shelley’s favourable presentation of Catholicism, extending to both artistic sublimity and social practice, inevitably foregrounds Italian culture and national aspirations in a travel work that she knowingly wrote as a defence of Italian nationalism.

Mary Shelley does not only find fault with Beste’s “erratic” observations, which allegedly stem from his uncontainable Catholicism; his judgements on Italian works of art are mocked and found equally distasteful. The following extract is a glaring instance of her aesthetic elitism. Mary Shelley asserts her cultural authority with surprising tenaciousness, when she exposes Beste’s lack of good taste and learning, and contends, just like in “The

English in Italy”, that aesthetic appreciation is an innate characteristic. In reading her 136 remarks, one can not fail to perceive her subtle but pregnant attempts to enter a debatable male sphere, to challenge and contest her habitus:27

Works of art belong to the imagination, certain forms of which they

realize; those who do not possess this portion of mind are incapable

of perceiving the excellence of the objects created only to be understood

by it – their criticisms stand for nothing, and an artist has a natural right

to demur at submitting his works to their tribunal. […] Mr. Best’s work

will not be revered by men of taste, nor consulted for its philosophy and

enlarged views. (MI 362-363)

The same line is pursued in the section of the review on Louis Simond’s book.

Although A Tour in Italy and Sicily is commended for its style and quality of information,

Mary Shelley does not fail to affirm her Anglo-Italianness when she sanctions “the truth and justness of his deductions” (MI 364) by consenting that “as long sojourners in the country he describes, [we] can vouch for every part of the detail” (364). Nevertheless, Simond is found to lack the culture required to express valid opinions on works of art. Mary Shelley reiterates the view expressed with regard to Beste, albeit in a meeker way. In effect, her judgement is profoundly didactic and seeks to correct aesthetic taste:

If we were at all inclined to quarrel with him, it would be with his

opinions concerning works of art; – he does not sufficiently admire –

and this arises from not having sufficiently studied – the productions

of the great masters. – The knowledge of beauty is not a simple

perception gained by the eyes; it requires refinement and education

merely to perceive the intention of the artist, to pass judgement; we

must not only, as it were, turn over the leaves hastily, reading merely

the heads of the chapters, and table of contents, but must scan each 137

page, peruse each line. (363-364; emphasis added)

The passage resonates many of the ideas elaborated by Burke and Coleridge. It is of note that, by attributing to education a role as substantial as to that of refinement, Mary

Shelley moderates, in part, the hitherto expressed view that aesthetic appreciation can not be learned. On the other hand, by reproving Simond for not seeing the objects of art the way they ought to be seen, in other words, by accusing him of speed and superficiality, Mary

Shelley ultimately categorises him as a tourist. As in her other essays, her critique of tourism operates through taste, an amalgamation of “refinement and education”, achieved only by the sophisticated traveller or Anglo-Italian, for the learning of taste requires more study and work than the mere tourist can give it.

The extract extols the role of education, setting it as a prerequisite for critical thinking and correct perception. In addition, it underlines the value of in-depth, meticulous, painstaking study through the apt image of (in)correct book reading. The insistence on scrupulousness and thoroughness, suggested by the verbs “scan” and “peruse”, reveal her complete faith in the power of education, which, when coupled with the exercise of reason, patience, perseverance, and care can lead to the intellectual and moral improvement of the person involved. As a final point, Mary Shelley’s standard itinerary through the Anglo-Italian discourse of authenticity and distinction is particularly enabling for her as a woman writer, since it elevates her above Beste’s and Simond’s “un-Italianized” discourse. As Moskal points out, “[t]he hint that femininity characterises the superior traveller” (“Travel Writing”

249) consolidates the sense that Mary Shelley creates an understated rhetoric that challenges the arbitrariness of male prerogatives.

By the same token, in Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843,28 several rhetorical strategies are employed to ascertain the author’s Anglo-Italian taste.

Written in epistolary form, Mary Shelley’s travel book, published in two volumes in 1844, 138 records her Italian trip of 1840 and a longer journey to the Continent that took place in the years 1842 and 1843. The allocation of space between the Italian and the German sections is disproportionate, as the former is manifestly wider and more flattering. Despite its compelling autobiographical element and psychological intensity, which typify it as an instance of life writing and as a pilgrimage to her “adopted land” (TC 492), Rambles vaunts a strongly political character in making a case for the Italian nationalist movement, the

Risorgimento. Notably, her scope proves much wider, as beyond her fervent defence of Italy and its cause, Mary Shelley proposes to “keep liberal hopes alive”, coming to terms with the political losses suffered by a whole generation of English liberals, including herself, whose visions had been dashed by the repeated blows of tyranny, oppression, and political corruption (Moskal, “Travel Writing” 247).

Rambles was written nearly twenty years after the 1820s review essays examined earlier. During this period, Mary Shelley worked hard to establish herself as a professional author, publishing novels, stories, essays, biographical sketches, and the final edition of P.B.

Shelley’s Poetical Works, all of which earned her a considerable reputation. Although her fictional writings are steadily informed by issues of power, gender and domestic politics, the general critical consensus is that her reformist agenda is partly subdued, mostly because of audience concerns. The latter is taken into account in Rambles, too, yet without compromising its intent. Despite the controversial aspects of the Risorgimento, Mary Shelley manages to make her advocacy palatable to the British audience “by reframing much of her

‘political’ agency as identical with literary and aesthetic concerns” and by having the reader befriend the traveller-author from the very beginning (Moskal, “Gender and Italian

Nationalism” 194-195).

In Rambles, Mary Shelley authenticates her Anglo-Italianness by using both well-tried strategies and novel ones. Thus, on the one hand, the discourse of distinction and taste relies 139 on the differentiation of the educated traveller from the ignorant tourist. On the other hand, however, the uniqueness of her experience derives from discourses of the self and of nostalgia, that is, long first-person reflections on her life with P.B. Shelley – another

“established” Anglo-Italian – in Italy. This highly distinct personal experience of the past sanctions her present authority on “things Italian”. Moreover, another novelty concerning the way Mary Shelley figures her hyphenated identity lies in her largely revisionist view of

Italians. Even though she reproduces stereotypes of the period regarding the “degeneracy” of the Italians – that “love of pleasure, disregard of truth, indolence, and violence of temper” stem from oppression – she is more approving of them and sympathetic to their cause, while her portraits of country people, in particular, are discerning and sensitive, as in the section on

Capri. In addition, although she still believes that the reform can be effected by the “refined”

Italians who work by “spreading knowledge and civilisation” (Rambles 323), rather than by the secret sects of the Carbonari, her topography of Italians is generally more inclusive and egalitarian. I would suggest, however, that the author’s overstated enthusiasm which typifies her revised views, as illustrated in her following statement, is largely conditioned by the book’s strongly partisan intent:

I love the Italians. It is impossible to live among them and not love them.

Their faults are many – the faults of the oppressed – love of pleasure,

disregard of truth, indolence, and violence of temper. But their falsehood

is on the surface – it is not deceit. […] There is life, energy, and talent

in every look and word; grace and refinement in every act and gesture.

[…] Their habits, fostered by their governments, alone are degraded and

degrading; alter these, and the country of Dante and Michael Angelo and

Raphael still exists. (Rambles 119) 140

Accordingly, in the Preface to Rambles, Mary Shelley contends that, in the late years, travel writing on Italy is derivative, as “travellers (with the exception of Lady Morgan, whose book is dear to the Italians), parrot the same, […] because they know no better.” (66) In view of that, she duly confirms her sense of mission, as an Anglo- Italian, to probe deeper into “the slight shadowings and evanescent lights” (EI 344) of the Italian society, and make a case for modern Italians:

When I reached Italy, however, and came south, I found that I could

say little of Florence and Rome, as far as regarded the cities themselves,

that had not been said so often and so well before […] It was otherwise

as regarded the people, especially in a political point of view; and in

treating of them, my scope grew more serious. (Rambles 65)

After stating her intent, she asserts her familiarity with the Italians – and thus her authority – by proposing to act as a kind of spokesperson or mediator on the Italians’ part, and attempt to communicate “something explanatory of their real / character” (Rambles 65) to her compatriots. The excerpt below strikingly resonates her 1820s comments – as in the idea of the Anglo-Italian becoming “attached” to the natives – albeit in a qualified form. Her view is evidently more generous and sympathetic than in the past, yet her knowledge and recognition of the Italians is strongly appended on signifying schemata of classification:

I believe that no one can mingle much with the Italians without

becoming attached to them. Their faults injure each other; their good

qualities make them agreeable to strangers. Their courtesy, their

simplicity of manner, their evident desire to serve, their rare and

exceeding intelligence, give to the better specimens among the higher

classes, and to many among the lower, a charm all their own.

(Rambles 65; emphasis added) 141

In distinguishing herself from the usual tourist, Mary Shelley critiques their superficiality by affirming once again her ethic of travel, which commands that “[w]e must become a part of the scenes around us, and they must mingle and become a portion of us, or we see without seeing and study without learning. There is no good, no knowledge, unless we can go out from, and take some of the external into, ourselves” (Rambles 213). The extract evokes the Romantic view of a person’s organic relationship to nature, while it also maintains that “the failure to sympathize indicates a homebound mind” (Schor, “Mary Shelley in

Transit” 239).

By this and similar statements, Mary Shelley attempts to arouse her readers’ sympathy and compassion for the Italian populace and their country. To this end, she often employs the mode of comparison between England and Italy, which unavoidably favours the home country. As she explicitly states in the Preface, “Englishmen, in particular, ought to sympathise in their [the Italians’] struggles: for the aspiration of free institutions all over the world has its source in England […] The swarms of English that overrun Italy keep the feeling alive. An Italian gentleman naturally envies an Englishman, hereditary or elective legislator. He envies him his pride of country, in which he himself can in no way indulge”

(Rambles 67). Nonetheless, in the course of the travelogue, Mary Shelley moderates her nationalistic discourse, and even censures the modern state of England, though in an understated tone. Thus, she cleverly condenses her critique and presents it, more “properly”, as a textual afterthought: “An English person, accustomed to the gigantic fortunes and well- ordered luxury, – to the squalid penury, hard labour and famine, – which mark the opposite orders of society in his own country, is struck by the appearance of ease and equality that reigns in Tuscany” (Rambles 324). Notably, an ensuing comment she makes is bolder and favours the Italian part: “[A]n English person, accustomed to heart-piercing accounts of suffering, hard labour, and starvation among the poor, gladly hails a sort of golden age in this 142 happy country” (Rambles 325). In my opinion, Mary Shelley’s conditional praising of

England and Italy in the face of their respective strengths and weaknesses alludes to the role of the “constitutive outside” each country played for the other in nineteenth-century cultural discourse, thus contributing to the formation of their cultural identities, as outlined in chapter one.

Her aesthetic judgements made on the sights and works of art she visits in Venice and

Florence also constitute a multifaceted discourse of taste and distinction. It is of note that

Mary Shelley sometimes states her ignorance, doubts, or lack of confidence when it comes to asserting her views on art, history, or the Italian society – an uncertainty stemming from her disconcerting awareness in the Preface that “I give fragments – not a whole” (Rambles 70).

The following instances are indicative of this recoil:

The family affection nurtures many virtues, and renders the manners

more malleable, more courteous, and deferential. For the rest, though

I cannot pretend to be behind the scenes – and though, as I have said,

their morality is not ours – I am sure there is much both to respect as

well as love among the Italians. (Rambles 287; emphasis added)

One day while wandering about the gallery, I saw a well-known face.

It was more than a pleasure; it was indeed a gain to meet the accomplished

Author of “La Poésie Chrétienne” in the very spot where his knowledge

and taste would inform my ignorance and correct my judgement; […]

His animated conversation and refined society will add more than I can

express of interest and pleasure to our rambles. (Rambles 203; emphasis added)

As it has been argued, Rambles utilises many strategies – gendered, narrative, and structural – so as to advocate the Italian cause without endangering the reputation of its 143 woman author. The recorded oscillation between assertion of authority and avowal of limited authority can be seen as a strategy used to mitigate her “boldness” and to gain approbation of her (womanly) modesty, so that her political commentary can eventually win acceptance.

What I would also like to suggest, however, is that these oscillations disclose the modalities, ambiguities, and contradictions that underpin the fashioning of the Anglo-Italian, since the hybrid identity that Mary Shelley crafts in 1826 is a powerful, but context-bound and, thus, susceptible configuration. Rambles, written in a different historical context and referring to a changed Italy (1844) seems to pose anew the question of the identity of someone like Mary Shelley, who “stay[ed] too long in a foreign country to be classified as a tourist, [and] too short to become naturalized, even if that had been her inclination” (Morton

260). In the rapidly-expanding, technological world of the 1850s, where the individual is subdued by the forces of history, and travelling is identified more with a tourist’s “rambles”, rather than with a Grand Tourist’s “six weeks’ tour”, 29 the ideological premises that buttress the Romantic Anglo-Italian appear problematic. In a compellingly self-conscious moment in

Rambles, Mary Shelley realises that all her Anglo-Italicus self can do is “give fragments – not a whole”. Rambles, in other words, begs the question of Mary Shelley’s and of her compatriots’ assumed status as privileged insiders to another culture. In a typically Romantic self-reflexive manner, the passage below produces and projects a critique of “in- betweenness” and of the professed gain of authority, as Mary Shelley concedes the difficulty of sustaining a self envisaged as inhabiting a space in-between cultures:

Nothing is more difficult than for a foreigner to give a correct account

of the state of a country – its laws, manners, and customs; – the first

often so different in their operation from what outwardly appears; the

latter, never fully understood, Proteus-like, assume a thousand

contradictory appearances, and elude investigation. A stranger can 144 only glance at the surface of things – often deceptive – and put down the results of conversations, which after all, if carefully examined, by no means convey the whole truth, even if they are free from some bias, however imperceptible, either in speaker or hearer, the result of which is a false impression – a false view. (Rambles 323-324)

145

Notes

1 “The Choice” (written 1823) is cited from The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, eds.

Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol.

II: 1822-1844, 490-494. Henceforth quoted as TC.

2 See also her 1833 previously unpublished poem “Untitled” in Betty T. Bennett’s “Newly

Uncovered Letters and Poems by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal XLVI

(1997): 51-74. The short lyric registers a tone of deep melancholy and resignation: “Fair

Italy! Still shines thy sun as bright / As when it shed love, hope, & joy on me! /… / But thy fair fields enfold the sacred clay, / The mortal part of the too early dead: – / Beside his lowly bed I long to rest” (73, 74).

3 The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, eds. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. II: 1822-1844. Henceforth quoted as

MWSJ.

4 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1980), vol. I: “A Part of the Elect”. Henceforth quoted as MWSL.

5 In this long-planned, long-prepared novel set in Lucca and Florence, Mary Shelley’s geographical accuracy, uncommon for the age, was considerably enabled by her relocation at

Pisa in 1820. According to Stuart Curran, Valperga, “reflecting Mary Shelley’s acute sensitivity to details of climate, natural phenomena, and topography, is imbued with a rare authenticity that quietly presses its authority on the events of the novel” (104), that is, the life and political career of the warlord of fourteenth-century Lucca Castruccio Castracani. See

Curran’s incisive essay “Valperga” in Esther Schor, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary

Shelley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 103-115.

6 It is of note that Mary Shelley’s alignment with the Risorgimento can be also traced in the

1831 version of Frankenstein, indicating the author’s sense of mission. Thus, Elizabeth’s 146

Milanese father is now an Italian patriot, “one of those Italians nursed in the memory of the antique glory of Italy – one among the schiavi ognor frementi, who exerted himself to obtain the liberty of his country. He became the victim of its weakness. Whether he had died, or still lingered in the dungeons of Austria, was not known” (I, 34). In context, Alfieri’s phrase meaning “perpetually restless slaves” refers to the “trembling” of the Italian population while under the Austrian rule during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See also Nora Crook’s discussion of the 1831 version in “ ‘Meek and Bold’: Mary Shelley’s Support for the

Risorgimento,” Mary versus Mary, a cura di Lilla Maria Critsafulli e Giovanna Silvani

(Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2001) esp. pp. 76-78.

7 See Esther Schor’s “Mary Shelley in Transit,” The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond

Frankenstein, eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1993) 235-257, Jeanne Moskal’s “Gender and Italian Nationalism in Mary

Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy,” Romanticism 5.2 (1999): 188-202, and Nora

Crook’s “ ‘Meek and Bold’: Mary Shelley’s Support for the Risorgimento,” Mary versus

Mary, a cura di Lilla Maria Critsafulli e Giovanna Silvani (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2001) 73-

88.

8 The phrase deliberately alludes to the title of Alan Weinberg’s book Shelley’s Italian

Experience (London: Macmillan 1991), a work which offers invaluable scholarship with regard to Italy’s role in the formation of P.B. Shelley’s poetic and aesthetic identity.

9 Incidentally, Frankenstein was the most well-known, and single most reprinted, work of the

English Romantic period. For a review of previous criticism on Mary Shelley, as well as for the variety of critical procedures and problematics that have recently been brought to bear on her work, see the introduction to The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, eds. Audrey

A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 147

and the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

10 It is of note that Mary Shelley wrote five novels after Frankenstein. Even though they were all published and sold well during her lifetime, these novels have only recently begun to receive substantial critical attention (in the last ten or fifteen years): Valperga: or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of

Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). Apart from

Valperga which is set within an explicitly Italian historical frame, Mary Shelley occasionally imbues the rest of the novels with an animating Italian or Continental setting.

11 I am paraphrasing the title of Emily Sunstein’s book Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), which is considered the most complete life written until now, celebrating Mary as an erudite and independent woman and a writer of significant merit. Miranda Seymour has recently provided us with an equally well-researched and lucid biography [Mary Shelley (London: Picador 2000)] with particular emphasis on

Mary’s transient life.

12 See, for instance, her stories “A Tale of the Passions”, “The Bride of Modern Italy” (a gentle satire of Emilia Viviani and Italian marriage customs), “The Sisters of Albano”, “The

Brother and Sister: An Italian Story”, “Ferninando Eboli: A Tale”, “The Trial of Love”.

Despite their rich allusions to Italy, these stories do not, in general, figure comparative

(English-Italian) accounts or Anglo-Italian characters. The stories cited are included in

Charles Robinson ed., Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1976).

13 I am referring to Mary Shelley’s letter of 6 March 1828 to the editor of Westminster

Review John Bowring, in which she agrees to review Henry Digby Beste’s Italy as It is (a review discussed in this chapter) but dismisses another book on Italy proposed to her (58-59). 148

See Betty T. Bennett’s “Newly Uncovered Letters and Poems by Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley,” Keats-Shelley Journal XLVI (1997): 51-74.

14 The essay is reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and Charles

Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 255-262. All subsequent references are to this edition. Henceforth quoted as RI.

15 Mary Shelley’s brackets.

16 Discussions of the sublime and the beautiful hold a prominent place amidst an extensive eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature on aesthetics. According to Edmund

Burke, a sense of the beautiful is aroused by small and pleasing objects, while the sublime is provoked by great and terrible ones. The sublime arouses admiration, while the beautiful feelings of love. This distinction was sharpened by a commonplace association of the sublime with men and the beautiful with women. In my opinion, the determinator of gender strongly pertains to Mary Shelley’s use of the term “beautiful” in her discussion of the Anglo-Italian’s aesthetic education. Nonetheless, in the early nineteenth century the natural sublime is slowly displaced by the Romantic sublime, a moment of vision, which, by providing an intuition of the absolute grounds of existence, claims to close the gap between subject and object.

17 Mary Shelley calls on the science of phrenology, which was popular in her days, and its practitioner Johann Caspar Spurzheim, to treat in a light and bantering tone her “un-

Italianized” compatriots who, as she notes, are “endowed with Spurzheim’s bump” (EI 343).

Phrenology identified the human brain as a collection of organs, each the site of a specific quality, or faculty, of emotion or intellect. It held the contours of the outer surface of the skull to be an accurate indicator of the relative size of each organ, and thus of the strength of the corresponding mental faculty in the operation of the mind (An Oxford Companion to the

Romantic Age 644). Thus, character traits, such as Mary Shelley’s clever

“stayathomeativeness” were deduced from bumps on the skull. 149

18 It becomes clear from “The English in Italy” that Mary Shelley’s use of the term “Anglo-

Italian” to qualify literature departs from the standard dictionary meaning of the compound form, that is, English in connection with something else, which would accordingly refer to works which variedly combine English and Italian themes, characters, settings, etc. Such a qualification would apply, for instance, to Ann Radcliffe’s novels or to a work like Corinne.

Conversely, the term here is used to designate the literature which derives from “Italianized”

English proper, like Byron, Lord Normanby, and herself.

19 First published in the London Magazine XVI (December 1826) 460-466. Reprinted in The

Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, 8vols.

(London: William Pickering 1996), vol. 2: Matilda, Dramas, Reviews & Essays, Prefaces and Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit, 164-171. All subsequent references are to this edition.

Henceforth quoted as VB.

20 The editor’s comments are indicated with angle brackets so as to distinguish them from my own interpolations in quoted material marked by square brackets.

21 At least, these were the connotations of “school” in literary reviewing during the Romantic period. In many cases, the term was used in a negative way and was launched by conservative circles to indicate tainted or subversive communal literary activity, as in the “Cockney

School” or the “Satanic School”. For a historically grounded examination of the concept, see

Jeffrey Cox’s article “Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School: The Lakers’ ‘Other,” Romanticism On the Net 14 (May 1999), 8 July 2004 esp. p. 6.

22 In 1834 Mary Shelley was commissioned to write biographies of European literary figures for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia; by 1839, she had written four volumes of Lives for this series. To the first two volumes of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific

Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (1835) Mary Shelley contributed by writing essays on several fourteenth- to nineteenth-century Italian authors, among whom Francesco Petrarca, 150

Giovanni Bocaccio, Francesco Berni, Niccolò Machiavelli, Pietro Metastasi, Carlo Goldoni,

Vittorio Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo. As Smith reports, at several points in these portraits Mary Shelley “uses her familiarity with modern Italy to buttress her arguments” (133). Although these literary biographies were well-known and much cited by critics and biographers of the time, they were not republished until 2002 by Pickering &

Chatto Publishers (general editor Nora Crook), completing the 1996 8-volume The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, and thus making available the collection of Mary

Shelley’s known works.

23 Mary Shelley’s letter to Leigh Hunt written in Italian is discussed in more detail in chapter four. “The poor Pisans believe him [Pacchiani] to be mad; and recount many tales about him that make one believe that he is a little odd; or to say it in English – eccentric” (MWSL 165; editor’s translation).

24 Miranda Seymour suggestively notes that Mary Shelley’s decision to write Hunt a long letter entirely in Italian was perhaps taken under “Pacchiani’s spell” (261), meaning the Pisan professor’s profound genius and extraordinary eloquence in Italian that Mary extols in the letter. As the episode pertains to her Pisan milieu, this issue is discussed in detail in chapter four.

25 The review entitled “Modern Italy” was first published in Westminster Review 11 (July

1829) 127-140 and is reprinted in part in The Mary Shelley Reader, eds. Betty T. Bennett and

Charles Robinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 358-364. All subsequent references are to this edition. Henceforth quoted as MI.

26 “The daughter of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could feel nothing but irritation and disgust with regard to Giuseppe Gatteschi who beat and humiliated his wife”

(my translation). 151

27 Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus the set of norms and expectations that defines a culture, and construes it as a powerfully determinist frame that controls cultural innovation. See Outline of the Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

For its relation to taste, see Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.

Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984) 169-226.

28 Reprinted in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, gen. ed. Nora Crook with

Pamela Clemit, 8 vols. (London: William Pickering 1996), vol. 8: Travel Writings, Index, ed.

Jeanne Moskal, 49-386. All subsequent references are to this edition. Henceforth quoted as

Rambles.

29 The allusion is, of course, to History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, an account of two Continental trips to France and Switzerland which Mary Shelley co-authored with Percy Shelley and published in 1817. For an incisive comparative reading of Mary Shelley’s two travelogues, see Jeanne Moskal, “Travel Writing,” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther

Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

152

CHAPTER 3

“My heart is all meridian”: Byron and the Poetics of Acculturation

Identities are not like hats: human beings can and do put on several at a time. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837

I’ve taught me other tongues – and in strange eyes Have made me not a stranger; Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV

3.1 “To see men and things as they are”: The Discourse of Authenticity in Post-

Napoleonic Travel Writing

While Mary Shelley configured the Anglo-Italian as a standard of taste and as a strategy of gender distinction, Byron sought to legitimate his purported biculturality on the premises of authenticity and insider knowledge. The search for authenticity of experience and validity in the representation of other people and places is symptomatic of a Romantic sensibility which succeeded – though not fully superseded – the rational and factual approach typical of much eighteenth-century practice of travelling and travel writing. As Roger

Cardinal notes, the orbits of Romantic aspiration were determined by “the passion for differentness, and the anticipation of being immersed in ‘local colour’” (137). After the

Napoleonic Wars, in an age when the influx of English travellers into the Continent had led to a proliferation of travel writings, topographical materials, and guide books on the

Mediterranean country, many authors would distinguish their works from the plethora of

Italian tour accounts by asserting that prolonged and on-the-spot experience1 of the country had granted them a true perception of its character and people and, thus, the right to speak on their behalf.

Mary Shelley’s sophisticated portrait of the Anglo-Italian becomes particularly meaningful if we assess it in the Byronic context. As mentioned earlier, “The English in

Italy” dealt with three popular works on the British experience of Italy: The English in Italy 153

by Constantine Henry Phipps, 1st Marquis of Normanby, Continental Adventures: A Novel by

Charlotte Anne Eaton, and Diary of an Ennuyée by Anna Brownell Jameson. These publications figured accounts of their Italian tour or longer sojourn, but also contained, as in

Phipps’s case, short stories with Italian or cross-cultural themes. Though at times slightly fictionalised, these versions reflected their authors’ approach to Italian life, manners and landscape. Notably, out of the three works, Mary Shelley focuses almost exclusively on The

English in Italy which she generously praises and discusses at length, because, as she says, it bears the “perfect Italian stamp” (EI 353). In contrast to Eaton’s “incongruous mixture” of “a guide-book and a romance” (EI 354) and to Jameson’s “imposture” (EI 355), The English in

Italy, according to the reviewer, is an authoritative and accurate work “where the manners of the natives form the ground-work of the tales” (EI 353). Apropos of Phipps’s case, Mary

Shelley allocates to herself the task of exemplifying the privileged position of an Anglo-

Italian:

It is difficult, after a long residence in a foreign country, to collect

one’s experience into one focus. […] It is impossible to select any form

of journal, letter, or narrative, which will combine the mass in an

intelligible form, and cause the reader to seize, as the author did, the

conclusions to be drawn from such multifarious materials.

Besides, though mere travellers are palpably negligent on this score,

the resident Anglo-Italian is withheld by honour, from the exposition

of facts and names. Lord Normanby has hit upon a medium both novel

and entertaining. He has given a series of tales, in which the English

and Italians alike figure; the contrast between the nations adds to the

interest of these sketches […] We frequently, it is true, dissent from

his lordship’s opinions and conclusions but we always assent to the 154

truth of his facts. (EI 343, 344; emphasis added)

Mary Shelley repeatedly points out that Phipps’s stories have not been written by a mere traveller but by a “resident Anglo-Italian” and this, in her view, and as discussed in the previous chapter, guarantees the truthful exposition of Italian character and manner, and therefore, the success of the publication. In a tone which reveals her confidence in her own expertise in matters that concern Italy, Mary Shelley contends that only an Anglo-Italian would be in a position to present “the verity of the delineations of character and manners” as well as to seize and express “the slight shadowings, and evanescent lights, peculiar to the complicated form of Italian society, which must have escaped a ruder pen” (EI 344). In a deftly resonant move, Mary Shelley places Phipps among the distinguished group of emigrant

English literati who “have […] been dubbed Anglo-Italians” (EI 343).

In the context of this conscious effort towards the appropriation and representation of

Italianness, the case of Lord Byron is exemplary: the expatriate British poet who claimed an unparalleled emotional attachment to the Italians – and is interpellated in Mary Shelley’s review as the father of Anglo-Italian literature – was looked on, both in his time and by posterity, as the Anglo-Italian par excellence. As I am going to argue, Byron’s assimilation into the Italian scene of his day is conditioned by specific social, political, economic, and cultural coordinates. His Anglo-Italian discourse, significantly informed by his Romantic cosmopolitanism, configures identity as a hybrid structure which inhabits “an interstitial passage between fixed identifications” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 4; emphasis added).

Byron’s intricate coalition with Italian place, culture, language, and community raises undeniably modern issues concerning identity construction. More specifically, by tracing

Byron’s varied attempts to chart his meridian self along/despite his northern one in his poems

Childe Harold IV, “To the Po. June 2nd 1819”, Beppo, and The Prophecy of Dante, I intend to show that in the realm of his geographical poetics, Byron conceives of identity as an active 155

process that involves inclusion and exclusion, identification and detachment, that is, a process in which the building of identity is at the same time an evasion of it.

Concurrently, this chapter explores the intricate and multi-layered discourse located at the nexus of “detachment” and “involvement” and examines the implications that the configuration of this in-betweenness carries within its culture-specific, historical milieu. It is in this context that I set out to consider the ambiguities, fluctuations and modalities which beset Byron’s investment in an-other culture. Accordingly, I believe that his adoption of a supplement identity (Italian) is an oblique assertion of the incompleteness of his native identity, as well as a critique of the deficiencies of British society and the liabilities of the

British empire. Hence, Byron’s attachment to Italianness proves problematic and contradictory in its practice, because it is complicated by his imperialist rhetorical strategies.

In addition, by endorsing both an English and an Italian point of view, Byron demonstrates a mental grasp of more than one culture and thus figures Anglo-Italianness as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and mobilité (changeability), which are, nonetheless, never entirely free from place/home and containment, the two alternatives being mutually dependent in the

Romantic age.

In order to render further insight into the cultural politics of the post-Napoleonic era, this chapter situates Byron’s rhetoric of Anglo-Italianness in the context of the rich topical discourse of authenticity and acculturation recorded in contemporary periodicals and in the travel writings of such “Anglo-Italian” authors as Lady (Sydney Owenson) Morgan and

Henry Digby Beste. The texts considered in the first part of the chapter prefigure the various plots that stage the mediation between the two cultures, and raise issues concomitant with

Byron’s own experience of acculturation. Thus, a parallel reading of these writings further elucidates the cultural assumptions which lie behind their affinities, divergences, and problematics. 156

The increased accessibility of Continental travel after the Napoleonic Wars gave rise to new formulations about what constitutes “original” and “touristic” cultural experience. In addition, questions of authenticity in cultural production became more pressing, partly with the renewed ideology of the subject within “the emergent professional middle-class discourse of merit” (Kelly 74) but also with the rise of the reading public. As it becomes obvious through a series of rhetorical strategies, the Anglo-Italians wished to win credit for their authenticity and acculturation. Their effort to valorise their Italian experience and legitimise their voice is suggested by their continuous claim on the uniqueness and distinctiveness of their experience, which largely derived from their professed intimacy with the real Italy, as well as the authority and originality of their response. While in the eighteenth century the pressures of following received opinions and a well-worn, approved itinerary left increasingly little room for personal impression (Webb, “City of the Soul” 22), after the Wars authenticity of response was highly prized by some English visitors, who liked to distinguish themselves from the superficialities of tourism. Therefore, a clear-cut distinction was drawn between the resident Anglo-Italian and the ephemeral/vulgar visitor, who was believed to lack the emotional-aesthetic sensitivity to discover and appreciate the genius loci of places.

According to Eric Cohen, authenticity is “a socially constructed concept and its social (as against philosophical) connotation is, therefore, not given but negotiable into society” (374). The gradual transformation of the aristocratic Grand Tour, slowly converging into more recognisably modern forms of tourism, foreshadowed a shift in the character of the tour itself. As anticipated, the topical literature records the change in the travel scene and appraises it accordingly. For instance, a writer in the Westminster Review in 1825 describes in hyperbolic and sardonic language the heterogeneous masses of English who travel to Italy, what he/she calls “the curious medley”, and witnesses in dismay the popularisation and democratisation of the Tour and the subsequent invalidation of the self-styled traveller: 157

Yet the crowds of our countrymen who do flock to Rome, and the

curious medley they make there, are truly amusing. All classes, ages,

sexes, and conditions are assembled together; the first of our nobility

with the last of our citizens – the most learned members of our

universities, with the most dashing loungers of our streets – the

prettiest of our belles, and the bluest of our spinsters, are crossing

and justling each other in every corner; talking, writing, wondering,

displaying, and rhapsodizing: – lion hunting, husband hunting, time-

killing, money-spending, view-taking, and book-making. […]

The spell which draws them here may be in one word explained.

It is the fashion to go to Rome. (359)

The journalistic discourse of the time is rife with similar pieces in which the old

élites sharpen their pens against the infringements and invasions of their own hitherto exclusive spaces of travel by common tourists. Quite evidently, beneath the mocking commentary on the unprecedented expansion of tourism lie class anxieties and fears about the mobility of the lower strata of society and about the encroachment on the advantages of privileged groups. In addition, plurality and openness seem to imply homogeneity and crudity, which automatically cancel what is believed to be the most significant function of travelling, namely, its potential to lead one towards self-realisation.

Notably, the increasing popularisation of travel – and of travel writing – and the opening up of routes to Europe and the East called up, through specific cultural gestures, the emergence of an anti-touristic rhetoric, in which Romantic travellers displayed marks of originality and authenticity in an attempt to win credit for acculturation. As James Buzard argues, after Waterloo, “the perception that the Continental tour was becoming more broadly accessible than ever gave rise to new formulations about what constituted ‘authentic’ cultural 158

experience and new representations aimed at distinguishing authentic from spurious or merely repetitive experience” (6). Thus, in the midst of inevitable compatriots, the acculturated Briton – in our case Byron, the resident Anglo-Italian – would represent him/herself as distinct from mass consciousness and would lay claim not to an aristocracy of class, but “to an aristocracy of inner feeling, the projection of an ideology of originality and difference” (21-22).

This conscious differentiation is established in works such as Henry Digby Beste’s

Italy as it is: Or, a Narrative of an English Family’s Residence for Three Years in that

Country, published in Britain in 1828.2 Here the author is keen to valorise and accredit his experience by citing the number of years of his sojourn in the very title, and aims to amend false conceptions of Italy by passing his hard-gained knowledge on to the “ignorant” or misinformed English reader at home. Beste’s Italian account had been preceded by one on the family’s four-year residence in France (1826), bearing a similarly self-explanatory title with the eye-catching caption “Rien n’est beau que LE VRAI”. In the first chapter Beste distinguishes between “residents” and “travellers” abroad and describes the English people’s formulaic tour in a disapproving and mocking manner:

The route is in truth admirably well traced, and eighteen months

might thus be passed to great advantage by a well prepared and

impartial traveller. Rarely however are these English sufficiently

acquainted with the languages of the countries through which they

pass, to be able to sustain a conversation: they carry with them their

insular prejudices, their pride of wealth, their unpliant manners,

their attachment to their own customs, amusements and cookery:

though treated with indulgence and even civil attentions by the

governments of the continent, they are suffered rather than received 159

by the inhabitants. For their choice of the objects of curiosity they

visit, and the opinion to be formed upon them, they are at the mercy

of guides and ciceroni: for society, they are guided by instinct, and

reduced by necessity, to herd together. (77; emphasis added)

As Jonathan Culler argues, “the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic, the natural and the touristy, is a powerful semiotic operator within tourism” (159). In Beste’s passage, tourists are attacked for their presumed passivity, obtrusiveness and reluctance to be immersed in local colour. The “clustering tendency” (Buzard 87) of the English abroad – a response that may be also found in comments of Grand Tourists – denies them access to genuine cultural experience, the kind of knowledge Beste proudly claims for himself in the following extract: “The care of a household and of the education of children brings the head of a family to the knowledge of many circumstances and combinations which escape the notice of the single traveller; and intercourse with the society of a place during a sojourn gives some insight into the character, some perception of the manners and opinions of people” (86). In a self-assured tone, the writer claims to have shared in the real life of the places visited, got off the beaten track and penetrated what sociologist Erving Goffman has called, a “back region” (qtd. in MacCannell, “Staged Authenticity” 590). From this rhetorical position, Beste attacks his compatriots for anglicising European places and for not compromising their home habits when abroad. Nevertheless, his acting as though he knows the real “society of a place” and, above all, the feelings of “the inhabitants” and their responses to the peculiarities and impertinence of tourists proves anything but original.

Ironically, the rhetoric of superiority that inhabits Beste’s text reproduces a tourist cliché of the period, and his “critique of tourism is based on a desire to go beyond the other ‘mere’ tourists to a more profound appreciation of society and culture” (MacCannell, The Tourist

10). 160

In much the same way, the propensity of the English to carry their nation everywhere with them – to paraphrase Thackeray’s satirical remark from his novel The Kickleburys on the Rhine – is censured by Lady Morgan in Italy (1821). Her critique is revealed through a suggestive comparison regarding the scope of English travelling to Italy and Italian travelling to England, after the Peace of 1815 and the re-opening of national borders:

The English went to Italy in groups and families made up of all ages

and ranks, from infancy to senility, from the trader to the peer, and

imported with them the comforts, and habits, and prejudices of their

wealth. The Italians who visited England were chiefly single men […]

They did not expect to find the suns of Italy, or to eat ice under the

shades of orange groves; and they did not complain that such

habits of enjoyment were denied to them. They came to contemplate

the effects and the workings of a free government, of a free press,

on manners, literature, science, and domestic happiness. (VI 200)

Initially, in this comparative portrait, the English appear facile and insular, while the

Italians prudent and discerning. Lady Morgan further underscores the superior motives and intentions of the Italian travellers through the ironic citation of English expectations and capricious behaviour abroad. Despite this sympathetic rendering, however, Lady Morgan’s position is, in essence, akin to the claims made by Beste. More explicitly, Lady Morgan attacks her compatriots for acting as though Italy is theirs; but she, much like Beste, acts in a similarly predisposed and patronising way, by allocating to herself the task of speaking on their behalf and by negotiating their intentions. Ultimately, the comparison favours the home country, since the author claims that the Italians want to emulate English values (“the effects and the workings of a free government, of a free press, on manners, literature, science, and domestic happiness”) and use them as models for their own political, social and ethical 161

system. Like most travel accounts, Lady Morgan’s piece is derivative and reproduces a tourist truism of the time which, in its turn, comes to answer a particular English need: to manufacture superiority, respectability, and domestic morality out of opposition to “inferior” peoples or imagined “others”.

Cultural theory has shown us that the issue of “who speaks” is always a crucial one in discourses of cultural imperialism. More specifically, these English emigrants and travellers lay claim to Italianness and configure a hybrid, hyphenated identity on the grounds of cultural literacy and prolonged sojourn. What is also of interest is that the steady claim on knowledge and understanding of Italianness or Italian character is not – or not only – grounded on an emotional attachment that they could naturally entertain towards an adopted country, but is presented as a direct, uncontested result of their “earned” double status: once given, the characterisation “Anglo-Italian” grants its bearer a set of distinctive traits and a new self- image. The emigrant English, by speaking for the Italians and by appropriating and adopting their identity in name, as a supplement to their own in order to legitimise their discourse, follow a strategy symptomatic of an imperialist attitude towards Italy. What is more, by virtue of this self-appointed, double identity they see themselves exonerated and instantly released from a possible charge of imperialism.

Lady Morgan’s Italy, at once one of the most comprehensive and controversial books of its time, resulted from the writer’s Italian tour of 1819-20. Despite the attacks it received from conservative English circles for its radically liberal views, the book was soon established as an international standard work. Byron praised it as “a really excellent book” 3 not only because he sympathised with the author’s liberal tendencies, but also because he could identify in Lady Morgan a fellow travelling connoisseur or anti-tourist. The writer’s insistence on authenticity – an Italy uniquely and originally “her own” – links up with the thematics of “travel-as-travail”, both integral to the Romantic paradigm. Although she 162

follows the beaten track of the Giro d’ Italia, Lady Morgan tiptoes into situations of novelty and risk – as that of travelling without a courier described in the extract which follows – where uncharted itineraries and physical effort equate states of spiritual intensity and creative insight. Accordingly, the anti-tourist explores nooks and byways in search of a more authentic experience of Italian people, landscape or art. A case in point is when Lady Morgan comments on the route to Florence by Bologna, where, normally, the traveller, as she notes, suffers “tedious detention, and much form and annoyance”. And she continues:

Most English travellers, and indeed all persons of rank escape a

great part of these annoyances, by travelling with a courier, who

constantly in advance of the carriages, removes all difficulty by

force of authority or of gold. We however, purposely avoided the

retaining this useful domestic; partly from economy, and partly

from a general desire of coming as closely as possible in contact

with a population of whom we should have such frequent occasion

to speak. We encountered, accordingly, our full share of the

inconveniences of Italian travelling; and we speak as we felt,

and as the mass of the people must feel, who necessarily travel

without couriers. (XIII, 451-52; emphasis added)

As mentioned earlier, the Romantic period witnessed a popularisation of travelling, also aimed at far-away destinations, which foreshadowed a formidable increase in the amount and diversity of travel writings. Continental and Oriental travel accounts achieved extreme popularity and created a considerable market in England which conditioned, to a large extent, the writers’ choices in relation to readers’ demands and expectations. Books about Italy, in particular, were highly saleable at that time and so was the idea of writing something original, anecdotal, and authoritative of Italy and its people. With the rise of the reading public, 163

“authenticity” was becoming a major selling point in travel writing, and a steady requirement of publishers and editors towards writers. 4

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the flow of large numbers of English visitors southwards increased the demand for books about Italy, especially travel guidebooks.

Narration constantly created Italy anew, making it a space open to endless re-imaginings, a space onto which Romantic writers projected their own concerns. Italy, of course, did not belong to the far-away, largely unexplored cultural geographies like Asia, China or Africa which through a discursive tradition had earned the role of Britain’s “others”. Much like

Greece, it represented a “marginal area of familiar exoticism” (Peckham 172). However, Italy had played a constitutive role in the formation of British cultural awareness long before the

Romantic age, and had become an essential component of the British imagination. In the early nineteenth century, various cultural, political, and social motives instigated a growing appreciation and sympathy for the Mediterranean country, a phenomenon which remained in history as Italomania, “quella straordinaria passione per l’Italia che sboccerà, caduto ormai

Napoleone, nel romanticismo britannico e durerà, violenta e multiforme, per tutti gli anni venti e ancora negli anni trenta” (Venturi, “L’Italia fuori d’Italia” 1188).5

Paradoxically, even when a few years later the initial excitement had waned and the market was saturated with travel journals, novels, and guide-books on Italy, the public would still be in search of the truly or more original, the not-yet-said or written. Reviews of travel- writings of the time, which appeared regularly in periodicals and anthologies, bear testimony to the public feeling by revealing the readers’ (often frustrated) expectations. In the April

1825 issue of The Westminster Review, the anonymous reviewer of A. Viesseux’s Italy and the Italians in the Nineteenth Century claims that Vieusseux’s work lacks the authenticity and integrity of an insider’s experience:

… we did expect that a work written expressly upon the Italians, by one 164

who was “acquainted from infancy with the language and manners,

brought up under their sky, and nursed in their homes,” would contain

some valuable and interesting details of the people; of whom, however,

Mr Viesseux tells us nothing that a stranger could not as well have told;

and we cannot but lament that he had not said more of the domestic

life, and habits, and peculiarities of the Italians, and less of the

thousand-times described scenery and sights of Italy. […] And if

Mr Viesseux would (which it appears he could) have been to us a

similar devil, and like little Asmodeus, have opened to our view the

interior of the houses, the sayings and doings of the people, their

pursuits, and habits, and modes of life, he would have been the most

popular – . (369)

According to the reviewer, Viesseux has failed to offer his readers an authentic, demystified experience of “the domestic life, and habits, and peculiarities of the Italians”.

Interestingly, the literary reference to the little demon Asmodeus suggests not only an intimate, but a prying and voyeuristic look behind the scenes and in back regions of Italian society. The desire to flee dull repetitions and be vicariously immersed in the intimate spaces of the other – construed as a quintessentially bourgeois experience – discloses the preoccupations and anxieties of a nation and a class in the making. Alienated from their own past by political and industrial modernity, the emerging English middle-class sought to appropriate Italian culture. The semi-feudal society and rural landscape of Italy represented the past to a Britain leading the world in industrialisation, and fearing the onset of democracy. Rome represented the religious past to Europe’s principal Protestant power, and the ancient imperial past to the new British empire. 165

In addition, the reviewer’s plea for differentness is compelling in its implications: as the nineteenth century wore on, Romantic travel was threatened by the spectre of belatedness.

As James Duncan and Derek Gregory argue, “the sheer number of tourists present in some places made the illusion of discovery, or even immersion in the local, harder to sustain” (7).

As it has already been pointed out, although the desire to be immersed in local colour was not unqualified or uncomplicated, yet it became a major topos in the literature of the years, and authors employed it variedly and enthusiastically in order to sustain their real or imaginative geographies. In “The English in Italy”, Mary Shelley’s qualifications when describing the unprecedented post-bellum rush of English tourists to Italy are indeed of note: “When France palled on our travelled appetites, which always crave for something new, Italy came into vogue. As preparatives for our pilgrimage to that country, whose charm is undying, we devoured the fabulous descriptions of Eustace. […] We fly to Italy; we eat the lotus; we cannot tear ourselves away” (EI 342; emphasis added). Interestingly, Mary Shelley’s piece and the review on Viesseux rely on semantically parallel phrastic modes to convey the

English tourists’ desire to experience Italy and Italianness: namely, both employ the metaphor of consumption, of eating. On the one hand, the place – the geographical territory as well as the written, re-presented place – which, incidentally, figures as a luscious, forbidden fruit (the lotus) is consumed physically, in reality or in the imagination; on the other hand, Italy is consumed visually, through the voracious, penetrating gaze of the aspiring insider (“And if Mr Viesseux would […] have opened to our view the interior of the houses, the sayings and doings of the people, their pursuits, and habits, and modes of life”). In the context of a cultural-geographical interpretation, these compelling qualifications reinforce the idea that the reviews under discussion, much like the travel writings they criticise, can not be seen as isolated interventions, but rather as “discursive networks held together by common 166

literary strategies, devices and protocols that are the building blocks of imaginative geography” (Saglia, “Romantic Heterographies” 32-33).

More specifically, and drawing on the thematics of Raymond Williams, if literary forms are a ground on which “changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions could be directly demonstrated” (qtd. in M. Hunt 333) the recurrent figures, rhetorical strategies and overstatements, such as the ones discussed, reflect divided and often conflicting attitudes in the fast-changing English society of the early nineteenth century. In an era of industrialism, exploration and imperial expansion, the old-style gentility competed for space and readership with an increasingly commercial and expansionist ethos. Hence, on the one hand, there is the burgeoning material and aesthetic fascination with foreign travel, and, on the other, the bemused and satirical responses to what was largely perceived as an erratic opening up of British culture to other places and traditions.

The final note to this brief investigation into the tropes of originality and authenticity enunciated by professed Anglo-Italians regards my observation of an absence. It is noteworthy that the anonymous eloquent reviewer of Mr. Viesseux does not include current

Italian politics in those back regions of Italian society which ought to be explored by a

“perceptive” resident Anglo-Italian. The absence of related commentary suggests little interest in or knowledge about the contemporary political scene in Italy – or even a deliberate eschewal of one of the most disconcerting aspects of Italian reality at the time. Although after

1815 Italy’s struggle for freedom from foreign rule becomes a more general concern for the

British, especially because of the expatriate Romantics’s campaign in support of the Italian cause, the country’s struggle for independence tends to degenerate into a figure of speech and a rhetorical construction, at least as it is revealed in a number of cases of journalistic writing. 167

Italian politics, abstracted in metaphors and images, are unmistakably romanticised. This is how The Examiner in 1815 advocates Italy’s right for independence from the Austrians:

You scarcely meet, in other countries, with an accomplished singer or

teacher of languages, who is not Italian; the very least shapes that are

assumed by art, in its travels all over the world, are Italian […] now

as makers of images, now as players on the organ and the tambourine;

and in short, the whole nation want nothing but the absence of the

presumptuous oppressors, who have taken advantage of circumstances

and slipped among them […] [they want] to renew the best part of their

former glory, and again warm the hearts and fancies of Europe at

their delightful sunshine. (No 385; emphasis added)

In the excerpt, the reviewer’s ambiguous praise of Italy as the arbiter of the cultural taste for all peoples, is followed by a series of commonplaces employed to express sympathy for Italy’s political cause, culminating in the closing unconcealed touristic trope. For many advocators of Italy’s liberation, these images provided a successful vocabulary for their argumentation, an effective potpourri of clichés as they appealed to the Britons’ respect for the country’s past greatness, and to their Mediterranean passion. It is of note that the projection of personal imaginings, desires and aspirations on the land was so pervasive and excessive, that it many times turned its geography, that is its human activity and social practices, into a stock but palatable citation, a fact that made a reviewer in The Edinburgh

Review wryly remark in 1842 that

the twenty-two millions of souls who, in the midst of the Roman ruins,

the Grecian statues, the paintings of the Catholic altars, live and think

and feel, and have rights and duties individual, social and political, are

left as far in the background as if they were a handful of Coptic serfs or 168

Arab robbers […] There is one section of the subject as to which our works

of this sort are “silent still, and silent all”. We mean the political status

of the nation. (159, 163)

This remark casts a retrospective light on how post-Napoleonic cultural discourse on

Italy conflated the place (Italy) with the commonplace (“Italy”), geography with literature, and ultimately shaped popular perception regarding the Romantic and post-Romantic visions of the country. Politicised or not, the Anglo-Italians’s discourse of authentic experience of

Italy brings to light a whole new set of meanings and practices concerning intra-European acculturation in the early nineteenth century.

3.2 “Out of love with your Nativity”: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV, “To the Po”,

Beppo, The Prophecy of Dante

When the frontiers of Italy were open again after 1815, the Shelley-Byron group were among a flood of Britons making their belated Grand Tour, a phenomenon which, as discussed earlier, initiated the popularisation of Continental travel and thus a new phase of tourism. In their travel letters, both Shelley and Byron marked their experience as different from that of English tourists, and aimed at a freshness and an originality in their descriptions of Italy which would be uncontaminated by the example of guidebooks. Speaking of Rome,

Shelley would warn his friend and addressee Thomas Love Peacock: “The tourists tell you all about these things and I am afraid of stumbling upon their language when I enumerate what is so well-known”. 6 With these words, Shelley voices the concern of many Romantic travel- writers, or what Dennis Porter has called “the anxiety of travel-writing” (12). Specifically, in writing their own accounts of the beaten track, travellers had to find some way of describing the familiar in novel and entertaining ways. 169

Byron, on the other hand, was satirical of the companies of his compatriots who were touring Italy guidebook-in-hand, and avoided their society whenever he could. While in

Venice he writes to Thomas Moore: “I wished to have gone to Rome; but at present it is pestilent with English – a parcel of staring boobies, who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. A man is a fool who travels now in France or Italy, till this tribe of wretches is swept home again. In two or three years the first rush will be over, and the

Continent will be roomy and agreeable” (BLJ V, 187). For all his assertion of superior originality, however, when Byron visited Rome for the first time in 1817, he himself relied significantly on Joseph Forsyth’s Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an

Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803 (1813), and urged his close friends to read it in order to share his feelings on the Eternal City. According to Keith Crook, Forsyth’s interest in Italian politics and contemporary history, apart from the aesthetic aspect, was what made Byron describe it as “all we have of truth or sense upon Italy” (BLJ VII, 182) and even use it as a source for his poetry and social observations (156-157).7 Finally, it is ironical that much as he advocated an anti-touristic attitude in his time, Byron’s own account of Italy in the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold would later achieve the status of a “best-seller” poetic guidebook and further encourage the flow of tourists (Webb, “City of the Soul” 22). In reality, Italy passed on to the Victorian traveller’s consciousness as quintessentially Byronic, due to the exploitation of Italy’s fictionalisation in his poems by the tourist industry of the time.

In contrast to his compatriot Shelley, who was often at odds with Italian society, and whose paradoxical position is captured in his address to Italy as the “Paradise of exiles”,

Byron was without difficulty attuned to the Italian way of life and established fruitful contact with the South, not only through literary means, that is by composing poetry on Italian subjects,8 but through his almost immediate identification and harmonisation with the Italy of 170

his day. The peculiar affiliation of the Regency aristocrat to the Italian peninsula contributed to the extraordinary extent of fame which Byron achieved in nineteenth-century Europe.

Because of the great degree of identification he had achieved with the Italian society and due to his involvement in the Carbonari movement, many Italians, according to the Italian critic

Luigi Baldacchini, looked on Byron not as a foreigner but in some sense as one of them:

“Nonostante i suoi errori, nostro è in gran parte Byron” (qtd. in Brand, “Byron and the

Italians” 14).9

Accordingly, and as Jerome McGann argues, besides Byron’s earlier sympathy with the traditions of the South, it was to a great extent “his acceptance and, indeed, his idolization at Venice and Ravenna [which] convinced him that his blood was ‘all meridian’ ” (“Byron to

Guiccioli” 555). Byron’s reputation seemed to precede him wherever he went in Italy, and a large number of stories, accounts, and anecdotes of that period have survived, giving a variety of information – not always reliable – about l’Anglico Mylord. In Ravenna – where

Byron stayed for more than a year, having settled with Teresa Guiccioli and her family – he became a popular figure because of his charity to the poor and affiliation with the revolutionaries. Correspondingly, records of his brief sojourn at Bologna in 1819 register, on the one hand, admiration and sympathy on the part of his Italian acquaintances, and, on the other hand, strong suspicion and alarm on the part of the Austrian and Papal Governments’ emissaries. The first extract comes from the Cronaca of Count Francesco Rangone, “a literary nobleman and an industrious gossip of Ferrara” (Origo 32) who was keen to collect stories and anecdotes about Byron so as to enhance his own impressions of the “coltissimo, ricco ma strano Mylord” (“very learned, rich but strange lord”):

He seems indisposed towards his own government and the Austrian.

He speaks freely, however, about everyone, and dedicates his life only

to study and to the pleasures of Love. […] Dear to the Learned, he is 171

not less so to the Fair – alike for his riches, for an appearance not to

be despised, for his charming manners and the singularity of his

character. (qtd. in Origo 32-33; Origo’s translation)

Being doubly suspect as an Englishman and a liberal by the Austrian and Papal

Governments, Byron’s literary pursuits and amorous adventures were seen as a smokescreen for the “true” object of his residence in Italy which was, purportedly, to incite an insurgence against the established regime:

The Romantici form a band that aims at the destruction of our

literature, our politics, our country. Lord Byron is certainly its

champion […] He is libidinous and immoral to excess; but he soon

tires of the object of his worship, and offers it as a sacrifice on the

altar of his contemptuous pride. But at the same time in politics he

is not so inconstant. Here he is an Englishman in the fullest meaning

of the term. He is like a madman in his desire to ruin everything that

does not belong to him, to paralyse every tendency that our society

displays towards natural independence, to involve us in ruin and

bloodshed, in order that at last the deserted and still smouldering

States may be divided among his greedy and demoralized conspirators.

(qtd. in Origo 106) 10

With all its hyperbole and willful distortion, the second extract gives an impression of the legendary aspect Byron had taken on for the Italians and the fretfulness and panic his name caused to the Government. Conversely, the following passage, written by Francesco

Domenico Guerrazzi, an Italian writer and a leader in the insurrection of Leghorn in 1848, who was a student at Pisa when Byron arrived there in 1821, illustrates Byron’s idolisation in 172

the Italian world. Guerrazzi’s spirited description reverberates his awe at a personality which comprised so many opposite and conflicting traits:

Corse voce in quel tempo essere giunto a Pisa un uomo portentoso

di cui favellava la gente in mille maniere, e tutte opposte, e moltissime

assurde; dicevano sangue di Re; potentissimo di averi, d’indole

sanguigno, per costume feroce, negli esercizii cavalereschi maestro,

genio di male, ma più che umano intelletto; aggirarsi come il Satano

di Giobbe per mondo a spiare se alcuno avventuroso vivesse e

calunniarlo a Dio: era Giorgio Byron: desiderai vederlo: mi parve

Apollo del Vaticano.11

Mediterranean philosophy suited Byron’s temperament, especially for its sensuousness, exuberance and freer moral code – qualities which northerners were believed to lack. The south provided him with an abundance of cultural and physical stimuli and, above all, with abundance of space that could accommodate his overwhelming personality, extravagance, flamboyance and instability of temperament. One thing that attracted him about Italy, and Venice in particular, was its resounding contradictions, its comprehensive fabric of decay and beauty, notoriety and glory, life and death. “Venice & I agree very well”

Byron wrote to his friends in England, adding suggestively that the city “has always been

(next to the East) the greenest island of my imagination. It has not disappointed me; though its evident decay would, perhaps, have that effect upon others. But I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation” (BLJ V, 129). Furthermore, having been driven from his country, where he might have played an active part in future public and political events,

Byron found in Italy a culture in which, because of the peninsula’s long history of political impotence, the aesthetic was valued more highly than the active. Byron began to adopt the

Italian aesthetic perspective in which “the fine arts and la bella figura take precedence over 173

both feudal military prowess and the financial power that had begun to replace it as a social ideal in England” (Reiman, “Byron in Italy” 188). Donald Reiman argues that Byron’s Italian sojourn – particularly in Ravenna – provided him with “psychic stability” as far as his radical political affiliations were concerned, since he could freely embody the ideal of the aristocratic revolutionary, in a setting “where aristocratic social values combined with liberal political goals” (189). Consequently, Byron felt that the Italian peninsula – and, more specifically,

Venice and the region of Romagna – was the place where he belonged more than anywhere else.

His British contemporaries and fellow expatriates found Lord Byron perfectly acclimatised to the Italian environment, although at times they did express their concern about the notoriously dissipated life he led in the first years. After visiting him with Mary in

Venice in 1819, Percy Shelley noted that “really we hardly knew him again – he is changed into the liveliest, & happiest looking man I ever met” (PBSL II, 42). Interestingly, Mary

Shelley did not simply register the strong emotional tie between Byron and Italy but identified him with the qualities of the place, and labelled him the initiator of an intercultural literary movement. Thus, in her retrospective appraisal of the Anglo-Italians in “The English in Italy”, Mary Shelley observes that “Lord Byron may be considered the father of the Anglo-

Italian literature, and Beppo as being the first product of that school” (EI 343). Nonetheless, a much more inclusive and substantial appreciation of Byron’s Anglo-Italianness comes a few years later (1832) in a relatively unknown document, namely, Mary Shelley’s review of

James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo: a Venetian Story published in the Westminster Review:

It is thus that the mere tourist may view this city. But it becomes a matter

more difficult to treat, when the curtain is attempted to be withdrawn, and

those contradictions described, which reign in Venetian society. […]

Lord Byron was one of the few strangers who was admitted, or would 174

choose to be admitted, behind the scenes of that singular stage. [..] The

extreme ease with which he acquired and used the idiom of language,

and the facility with which he amalgamated himself with, and gave a

zest to their customs, by an openness of practice which transcended

even their liberality of sentiment, all tended to initiate him into the

very arcana of Venice. […] Mr Cooper has visited Venice, we imagine;

he has probably dwelt there some time, but he has not Italianized

himself, nor is he in the slightest degree familiar with the language;

when he brings in an expression, it is Italian, not Venetian; nor does

he attempt to lead us into the interior of families, nor to dwell upon

the forms of life belonging to the æra he has undertaken to describe.

(220-221; emphasis added)

The first interesting feature of this “traveller versus resident” discussion is that the

Venetian society is imaged as a theatre, whose backstage stands for the inner operations and private doings of that community. Although this area is, by rule, inaccessible and impenetrable to outsiders, entry to that exclusive region is granted only to those who, like

Byron, Italianise themselves in the full sense of the word. To remember an earlier review,

Byron is the little demon Asmodeus who can demystify “the domestic life, and habits, and peculiarities of the Italians” and satisfy the English reader. Mary Shelley, by restructuring the geography of Venice with a deft “architectural” move into stage and backstage, reproduces, in effect, a common rhetorical strategy in travel writing, that of assigning to places an aura of mystery and intrigue. On the other hand, in this suggestive extract, the “make” of the Anglo-

Italian is further qualified: attachment to the Italian culture (a word Mary Shelley uses in

“The English in Italy”) gives its place to amalgamation with the Italian culture. Evidently, the limits of identification are extended. Italianisation – or, better still, Venetianisation – evolves 175

in stages: the crossing of a spatial divide, the subsequent formal introduction (initiation) to a realm of secret yet authentic mechanisms (“arcana”), and the solid merging of oneself with the “other”. The Anglo-Italian is, ideally, an amalgam of the two cultures, and is best exemplified, according to Mary Shelley, in Byron’s persona.

Correspondingly, throughout his residence in Italy, Byron used to differentiate his experience from that of the majority of English travellers or expatriates, who were looked upon as foreigners, and considered himself as one who had managed to enter into the spirit of the country and its people. Comparing his own experience with that of tourists, he confidently avowed – and flaunted – the high degree of intimacy he enjoyed with the Italian society.

Thus, after acquainting John Murray with some news from Italy, Byron reassured him from

Ravenna that

this you may rely upon as fact – I told you as much before – as to

what travellers report – what are travellers? – now I have lived among

the Italians – not Florenced and Romed – and Galleried – and Conver-

sationed it for a few months – and then home again – but been of their

families – and friendships and feuds – and loves – and councils – and

correspondence in a part of Italy least known to foreigners – and have

been amongst them of all classes – from the Conte to the Contadino –

and you may be sure of what I say to you. (BLJ VII, 180)

A similarly assertive tone characterises a letter of the period to his friend Thomas

Moore:

However, I suspect I know a thing or two of Italy – more than Lady

Morgan has picked in her posting. What do Englishmen know of

Italians beyond their museums and saloons […]? Now, I have lived

in the heart of their houses, in parts of Italy freshest and least influenced 176

by strangers, – have seen and become (pars magna fui) a portion of their

hopes, and fears, and passions, and am almost inoculated into a family.

This is to see men and things as they are. (BLJ VII, 170-71)

In both extracts, beneath the customary Byronic wit lie a surprising intensity and crudeness which seem to suggest Byron’s deep-rooted bitterness against his compatriots.

With a certain amount of condescension and spite, Byron pits his experience against Lady

Morgan’s, who was a potential “rival” in the book market as an “Italianized” Briton, after her

Italian tour of 1819-1820. In fact, her attachment to Italy and defence of its political cause had begun to establish her as a sympathetic voice on “things Italian” in the public’s consciousness. Byron was quite clear that he knew and understood the Italian way of life – not least because he mixed with people from all social ranks, “from the Conte to the

Contadino” – and that his own relationship with Italy was deeper and more significant than that of most English travellers. The use of the word “inoculation” to describe this bond is arresting in its implications (the insertion or implantation of a foreign body into an organism) and suggests his total and unreserved immersion in the Italian element, as well as the superiority and sophistication he felt he drew from it. Of course, the reference to the family concerns his liaison with Teresa Guiccioli, which literally made him part of an Italian family in a way which was unusual for any foreigner, namely, as Teresa’s cavalier servente, sanctioning, thus, the allegiance he enjoyed with Italian society.

Thus, Byron wished to ascertain his Italianisation and reinforce his identification with the Italians by complying with the country’s written and unwritten cultural codes and social customs, and by entering in realms where most foreigners would fear to tread. In Venice, for instance, he lived as an aristocratic libertine and experienced the Italian system of licensed adultery (serventismo). In Milan, he befriended the members of the Milanese intellectual circle Silvio Pellico and Ludovico di Breme, who constituted the core of the so-called Italian 177

Romantic movement. Pellico initiated Byron to the satirical colloquial verse of Pietro Buratti written in Venetian dialect, which Byron was keen to translate. However, Buratti’s poems circulated secretly in manuscript form, and thus Byron was involved in the clandestine activities of the Italian liberals. As far as religion is concerned, despite his Protestant heritage,

Byron was, like many of his compatriots, favourably impressed by some aspects of the

Catholic religion as practised in Italy, particularly aesthetic ones. However, in a letter he writes to Thomas Moore from Pisa, Byron seems to fully endorse Catholicism and integrate it into his identification process. Thus, religion is another cultural system used to signify his acculturation into the Italian/Catholic element :

I am no enemy to religion, but the contrary. As a proof, I am educating

my natural daughter a strict Catholic in a convent of Romagna; for I think

people can never have enough of religion, if they are to have any. I incline,

myself, very much to the Catholic doctrines ... (BLJ IX, 119)

Accordingly, Byron legitimises his representations of Italian society by hailing them as a fruit of his careful observation and deep knowledge of that society. His rhetoric becomes meaningful in the context of Edward Said’s theory on the ideological nature of representation. Representation is a process of giving concrete form to ideological concepts, of making certain signifiers stand for signifieds. The power that underlies these representations cannot be divorced from the operation of political force, “even though it is a different kind of power, more subtle, more penetrating and less visible” (Ashcroft 70). Thus, assuming that representations are embedded in the language, culture, and institutions of the cultural coloniser, one cannot fail to account for the crucial, if ambivalent, link between representation and domination. 12 In the Preface to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage, although Byron admits to the difficulties that beset his acculturating mission, he does not fail to establish his authority and credibility: 178

It is also a delicate, and no very graceful task, to dissert upon the

literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar; and requires an

attention and impartiality which would induce us, – though perhaps

no inattentive observers, nor ignorant of the language or customs of

the people amongst whom we have recently abode, – to distrust,

or at least defer our judgement, and more narrowly examine our

information. (122-123) 13

In the extract from the letter to his editor quoted earlier, Byron figures his representations as faithful depictions of the real, the authentic: “This is to see men and things as they are” he asserts, and purposefully assumes the role of the mediator or the cultural critic, who tries to explain the peculiarity of the Italian character to his “un-Italianized” countrymen, whom he considers inept to comprehend it. In a letter to John Murray, for instance – which could also be read as an informal dissertation on Italian manners – Byron dismisses his publisher’s request for a commissioned book on Venetian mores, precisely because his professed intimacy with the Italians and his interiority in their society has eliminated the required degree of critical distance.

Their moral is not your moral – their life is not your life – you would

not understand it – it is not English nor French – nor German […]

the habits of thought and living are so entirely different – and the

difference becomes so much more striking the more you live intimately

with them […] After their dinners and suppers they make extempore

verses – and buffoon one another – but it is a humour which you would

not enter into – ye of the North. (BLJ VII, 42-43)

As Stephen Cheeke argues, Byron’s letters of 1818-1821 to Moore, Murray,

Hobhouse and Kinnaird “should be read not only as serving the function of conveying 179

information about Italian culture to friends and acquaintances at home, but, crucially, as resisting the notion that another culture could be readily or easily known and understood”

(Byron and Place 114). However, the letter to Murray quoted above is not the only instance in which Byron privileges his facility in Italian cultural modes, deriding the English as “ye of the North” and discounting the possibility that Britons at home could in the least understand

Italian manners. By often using the phrase, “We Venetians” or “our way of life”, he often boasts his allegiance with the Italians and distances himself from his compatriots. Byron’s immersion into Italianness showcases his effort to “go native” and enter dynamically not only the social and domestic space of the adopted country, but its political space, too. Writing from Ravenna in April 1820, Byron warns Murray that

there is that brewing in Italy – which will speedily cut off all security

of communication and set all your Anglo-travellers flying in every

direction with their usual fortitude in foreign tumults. […] This will

make a sad scene for your exquisite traveller – but not for the resident –

who naturally wishes a people to redress itself. – I shall if permitted

by the natives remain to see what will become of it – […] I have lived

long enough among them – to feel more for them as a nation than for

any other people in existence – […] no Italian can hate an Austrian

more than I do – unless it be the English – the Austrians seem to me

the most obnoxious race under the Sky. (BLJ VII, 77)

As Daryl Ogden points out, Byron’s facility in negating his British identity, and in transforming himself into an Italian, “underscores an intrinsic lack in [his] own native culture, a lack that may be fulfilled only by masquerading as a cultural […] Other” (133).

Cultural theory informs us that identities are constructed within discourse, and therefore emerge within the play of specific modalities of power and through difference. According to 180

Stuart Hall, “identity is a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative” (qtd. in Grossberg 89). The making of identity is an active process that involves inclusion and exclusion. Every cultural identity needs its “constitutive outside” (Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 4), its “cultural contestant” (Said, Orientalism 1); no identity can ever construct itself or exist by itself without an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions (Said, Culture and Imperialism 60). Significantly, in the case of the Anglo-

Italians the cultural antagonist, that is, Italianness, is not an implied other but is present and literally named, like a mirror standing over and against Englishness. Appropriately, contact with Italianness induces the English to “reflect” on the political, social, religious or economic situation of their own nation. The temporary appropriation of the other – as well as its temporary repression or exclusion – seeks to remedy existing deficiencies. In other words, the

English appropriation of the Italian identity serves either as an asset, or a liability, and thus as a confirmation of England’s superiority as a nation.

As Joanne Wilkes suggests, Byron shared an unusual mixture of cosmopolitanism and nationalism (16). Thus, on the one hand, he was receptive to the new perspectives offered by his experience of other countries, and reproached his compatriots for their insularity and resistance to external influence. On the other hand, though, the insights he earned from his routes were assessed on the basis of what they could potentially offer into the current and future state of his native country. This can be also inferred from Byron’s telling epigraph to

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage which uses the opening sentences of Le Cosmopolite ou le

Citoyen du Monde, a book by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron (1753):

L’univers est une espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que la première page

quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre,

que j’ai trouvé également mauvaises. Cet examen ne m’a point été

infructueux. Je haïssais ma patrie. Toutes les impertinences des peuples 181

divers, parmi lesquels j’ai vécu, m’ont réconcilié avec elle. Quand je

n’aurais tiré d’autre bénéfice de mes voyages que celui-là, je n’en

regretterais ni les frais, ni les fatigues. (BP II, 3; emphasis added) 14

Correspondingly, owing to his cosmopolitan outlook and acute sense of history,

Byron envisaged the Italian example not in opposition to the English one, but in a dialectic with it. His investment in Italian culture was a means of commenting on and critiquing

Britain, a country which aroused ambivalent feelings in him. In his poems, Byron revels in cultural “reflections”, in the writing of the self through the other, of England through Italy.

For instance, in the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron reads the fall of

Venice as an intimation of mortality for England, an issue I have also raised in my discussion of “the poetics of geography” which epitomised the imaginative engagement of the British with Italy in the Romantic age :

Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine,

Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot,

Thy choral memory of the Bard divine,

Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot

Which ties thee to thy tyrants; and thy lot

Is shameful to the nations, – most of all,

Albion! To thee: the Ocean queen should not

Abandon Ocean’s children; in the fall

Of Venice think of thine, despite thy watery wall.

(BP II, 130, st.17 )

London and Venice’s “joint destiny” comes to be seen here not as a blessing, but as an admonition of “fall”, decline and death, suggesting that England, despite its privileged geography consolidated in highly effective natural frontiers, is not so inviolate after all and 182

could follow the sad destiny of Venice. According to Ogden, the implications of Byron’s concern are more far-reaching: one can discern in this ominous panorama of parallel Italian and English imperial decline, “fertile seeds of an imperial anxiety” that Byron “means to plant in the minds of his English readers” (122). One should also bear in mind while reading

Byron’s lines that in the years after Napoleon’s defeat, Italy came to assume a more real shape in the English consciousness. Still, its memories would stir and haunt the imagination of the English Romantic poets and painters, although in a different way. And this is because, much as it was a reminder of the glorious classical past, at the same time Italy was a reminder of the demoralising threat of history and the temporariness of human achievements. The country’s contradictoriness and the cohabitation of opposing states made the Romantic artists place it not in a purely imaginative realm, but in the interstices of imagination and reality.

The implied parallels between Venice and London had, in effect, strong ideological foundations and were employed in the visual culture of the late eighteenth century to advance the notion of the English capital as the heart of a thriving nation, and, by extension, to confirm the nation’s superiority. National identity is one among several ways in which people may experience a sense of cultural belonging, but it has a special political and ideological significance. In their effort to form their national consciousness and stabilise their self-image, the British sought encounter with other countries, especially Italy and Greece, the lands that bore the signs of the origins of Western civilisation. In the process of empire identity construction, particular images and particular histories were called upon to reinforce British national history and politics, such as the associations of the classics. Stripped of its current geopolitical coordinates, “Italy” was thus deployed to signify superior civilisation and ancient grandeur. In addition, considering that places are discursive formations with a rich range of metaphorical meanings, and usually become the target of emotional identification or investment, the act of identifying with Italy – not the contemporary one but that of the 183

venerable past – and of claiming a deep, quasi natural attachment to it, validated an imagined ideological kinship with ancient Romans and sanctioned the “migration” of civilisation and virtue to the British lands.

As discursive constructions, identities are specific to particular times and places.

Subjectivity is spatial, meaning that people experience the world from locatable places, which may become more or less important components in the formation of personal and cultural identity. A case in point is the so-called “sense of place” – a concept which focuses on the emotional dynamics involved in the intersection of human identity with geography – and invites people to articulate their identity in terms of belonging to a particular place. Notably, the sense of place acquires a special significance in British Romantic literature and sensibility because of the historical circumstances of the age. As Malcolm Kelsall contends, “the feeling of place at this time is linked closely to an idea of racial, national and self-identity – the very natural landscape being a pictured memory, a visible palimpsest of the dead communities who live in memory and are memorialised by place” (28).

In the postmodern age, which features geographical interconnectedness, multicultural identities and contingency of cultures, theorists strongly argue for a non-essentialism in the way place is conceptualised, and contend that senses of place are not natural, but constructed by underlying structures of power. Subsequently, cultural identity is rethought not in terms of a simple long association with one place, but “in terms of the constant mixing, the multiplicities which have come together through the complex geography of historical – and geographical – routes. […] Identity has not one but many imagined ‘homes’” (Massey and

Jess 230). Furthermore, the nomadic, displaced, and diasporic quality of postmodern life unsettles the dichotomy between home and travel and brings once more into focus the vital connection between travel and the construction of identity. 184

Byron’s construction of identity invites discussion of many (post)modern concerns, particularly as regards “the invented, fluid, multiple, relational, and […] intentional qualities of identity” (Roberson). On the other hand, Byron’s mobility and his avoidance of being fixed – epitomised in the complex compound of distancing and self-involvement – does not cancel his propensity to create an illusion of unity, nor does it efface the uneasy relations of power that connect him with other places and peoples, which become the object of his identifications. In fact, I would argue that Byron’s polymorphic positioning becomes more meaningful in the context of McGann’s thesis about Byron’s mobility, namely that the latter

“involves a structure of social relations and not simply a psychological characteristic” (“The

Book of Byron” 273).

Byron’s poetry and letters are marked by constant efforts to define himself spatially and thus construct and demarcate an identity. “I am a Citizen of the World”, “I, a northern wanderer”, “My heart is all meridian”15 are telling instances of his attempt to discover, invent, construct, assemble an identity which is always inextricably linked to place(s), and incidentally, to culture(s). His identifications or affiliations to place are ways of belonging and Byron’s fantasy of incorporation and natural attachment to Italianness results in identity building through processes of inclusion, commitment, involvement, merging. The belongingness or “suturing” through which these identifications arise is partly constructed in the imagination. However, and as in the case of the Shelleys, it is also grounded in time- and space-bound actions with real, material effects. Byron also lives in the places he imagines, and his direct experience of Italy may enrich his verses with first-hand observations, yet it naturally complicates his identification process.

Anthony Giddens also describes identity as a project, something we create, a moving towards rather than an arrival (qtd. in Barker 15-16). In this respect, Byron’s pilgrimage into the Mediterranean world is a series of identifications leading, ideally, to identity-building. 185

Yet this task is never completed; it is a process always in process, as Byron subverts the mode which he presents. His endeavors to settle, to belong to a place and define himself in relation to it are soon undermined by his disengagement and commitment-avoidance, culminating in his posturing as a detached recorder, a stravagante and a voyeur, which suggests his fear of being fixed and bound in an identity. At times he moves between the spaces of his hyphenated, reconfigured identity as situationally appropriate, which showcases

Byron’s preference for a less chartered, more volatile and whimsical geography of cultures in terms of borders, languages and customs. Yi-Fu Tuan’s comment that “Place is security, space is freedom; we are attached to the one and long for the other” (54) is, I think, instructive in Byron’s case who sways back and forth between attachment and detachment, inclusion and exclusion in what proves to be not (merely) a moving towards, but a moving in between, not linearly but in a net16 – identity loosely defined as a matter of places and the relations of places and spaces.

In Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Yi-Fu Tuan’s qualification of the distinction between space and place can offer further insight into Byron’s identification process.17 The geographer defines “space” as an abstraction, evoking openness, lack of restrictions, but also danger, whereas “place” suggests safety, shelter, and stability (6).

Nonetheless, he argues that “the ideas ‘space’ and ‘place’ require each other for definition.

From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space […] Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place”

(6). Despite the demarcation of difference, Tuan emphasises the mutability, porousness, and interrelatedness of the two concepts. Significantly, Byron’s identity is configured as a mosaic of (real) heimlich places and (imagined) unheimlich spaces, of pauses and movements. All 186

these elements concur in designing his identity as an atlas of intertwining itineraries rather than one of bounded sites.

Yet, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, rightly I believe, “one thinks of identity whenever one is not sure where one belongs; that is one is not sure how to place oneself among the evident variety of behavioural styles and patterns […] Identity is a name given to the escape sought from that uncertainty” (19; emphasis added). In the rise of a modern problematic world full of uncertainty and disillusionment, Byron does seek to map an identity

– though in an unorthodox way – not so much by the classical return to “roots”, but by a coming to terms with his “routes”. His identity is the names he gives to the different ways he positions himself within the narratives of the past and present, but it is also the way he is positioned by these narratives. Byron’s cultural identity stitches together two (or more) places, cultures, languages, and traditions in coercive and creative ways. His politics of hybridity is conjunctural and disjunctural, and vacillates wildly on the hyphen of his double nomination. According to Stuart Hall,

cultural identity […] is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside

us […] It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can

make some final and absolute Return. Of course, it is not a mere

phantasm either. It is something – […] It has its histories – and histories

have their real, material and symbolic effects. (“Cultural Identity …” 226)

The occupation of two subject positions in one identity grants the latter a hyphenated quality. The hyphen explores synthesis and expansiveness but also marks the bounds. With

Byron, the metaphor of boundary inhabiting Anglo-Italianness revels in ambiguity. Namely, in his discourse, this hybrid identity, with the conscious, nominal juxtaposition of two separate cultural traditions and histories, comes to suggest boundary setting, boundary crossing, as well as boundary mingling. Therefore, the Anglo-Italian is constituted in the 187

interstices of stasis and mobility, of home and travel, of same and other, and is conditioned by both stories and histories.

Byron’s two identities – one native, one adopted – complement or compete with each other when they meet on poetic ground. In “To the Po. June 2nd 1819”, a lyric written for

Teresa Guiccioli, the persona denies his northern identity for the sake of love and succumbs to the lure of his southern seductress: the lady – or the land. The alliteration in the first line reinforces the aestheticisation of the land through its association with the feminine:

A Stranger loves a lady of the land,

Born far beyond the mountains, but his blood

Is all Meridian, as if never fanned

By the bleak wind that chills the Polar flood.

My heart is all meridian, were it not

I had not suffered now, nor should I be –

Despite of tortures ne’er to be forgot –

The Slave again, Oh Love! at least of thee!

(BP IV, 212, ll. 41-48)

Byron in his letters and poems often brought the two mentalities into comparison, exalting the spontaneity and simplicity of the southerners while denouncing the hypocrisy and arrogance of his compatriots. Byron had been deeply influenced by Mme de Staël’s geopolitical dichotomy of the North and South, her discussion of climate18 and by her simultaneous literary attempts to explore cultural boundaries and prejudices between the two cultural areas. In “To the Po”, a poem which strongly echoes de Staël’s ideas, the persona reluctantly admits to the existence of differences and goes on to worry about the cultural distances that divide an Englishman and an Italian woman: “But that which keepeth us apart, 188

is not / Distance, nor depth of wave, nor space of earth, / But the distractions of a various lot,

/ Ah! Various as the climates of our birth!” (BP IV, 211-212, ll. 37-40).

The North/South dichotomy is very conspicuous in the poem – the river standing between the two lovers serves as a border: a point of division (“River! That rollest by the antient walls / Where dwells the Lady of my Love”), a meeting point (“She will look on thee,

– I have looked on thee”) but also a mirror on which the two mind-sets of the north and the south confront each other through self-reflection. The persona wishes for a reconciliation of this contrariety through the consummation of the long-desired encounter. The “congenial” river is the dejected persona’s confidant, or even an extension of himself, as he projects on it all his fears, worries, and desires, looking at it as an emblem of his mind. As the following lines suggest, the persona parallels his fate with the ebb and flow of the river. The figure of mobility is once again present:

What do I say? ‘a mirror of my heart’?

Are not thy waters sweeping, dark, and strong,

Such as my feelings were and are, thou art,

And such as thou art were my passions long.

Time may have somewhat tamed them, not forever

Thou overflow’st thy banks, and not for aye

The bosom overboils, congenial River!

Thy floods subside, and mine have sunk away,

But left long wrecks behind us, yet again

Borne on our old career unchanged we move,

Thou tendest wildly to the wilder main

And I to loving one I should not love.

(BP IV, 210-11, ll.16-20) 189

Indeed, for Byron, human hopes and human creations, man, society, civilisation, are always subject to an overarching tragic destiny and though they may rise and fall they move ultimately towards oblivion, chaos and death. But every terminus is simultaneously a starting point, a site for recreation, and mobility to go on (“unchanged we move”) and create is what matters: in Byron’s own words, “Tis to create, and in creating live”. The realisation of human limitation is a state which generates both skepticism and enthusiasm, a philosophical stance known as Romantic irony.

Byron’s resolution of the “various lot” is to imagine his blood as belonging not to the country of his nativity, but to the South. Even though he is a “Stranger”, the hidden marks of nationality, as Stephen Cheeke aptly suggests, are manifested in his “hot-bloodedness”, and in his servitude, that is, “his serventismo, an all-meridian arrangement” (Byron and Place

124). The persona is painfully aware of borders and national differences, and the poem reflects the emotional tension caused by these circumstances. Built on a series of geographical concepts and metaphors, “To the Po” is a small epitome of Byron’s concern with mobility and of his ability to adapt to the demands of different physical, social, and cultural environments. The poem, however, does not render clear how the persona’s adoption of the Italian culture and Meridian sensibility is realised and if it is met with success. In addition, it curiously figures identity as an adopted role, rather than as an essential quality.

Byron’s engagement with issues of acculturation, identity, and mobility was often the outcome of his literary dialogue with Madame de Staël. Similar issues were tackled in

Corinne or Italy, the focus of which is a cross-cultural love affair albeit with a tragic end.

Interestingly enough, when Byron read Corinne he noted about the author: “I knew Madame de Staël well – better than She knew Italy; – but I little thought that one day I should think with her thoughts in the country where she has laid the scene of her most attractive production. – She is sometimes right and often wrong about Italy and England – but almost 190

always true in delineating the heart, which is of but one nation, and of no country or rather of all” (qtd. in Cheeke, Byron and Place 220). Byron’s landscape of cultural relativism, deriving from his cosmopolitan attitude, transcends national and cultural boundaries and maps human experiences and identities as contingent and intersecting. This outlook has several implications. On the one hand, it foregrounds the ideal of different cultures coexisting and benefiting mutually from each other, through comparative knowledge. On the other hand, it raises the issue of “how far there exist in human beings universal ‘dispositions’” which allow them to respond to “circumstances”, irrespective of people’s national and social milieux

(Wilkes 145). In the comment cited above, “the heart” is a universal disposition which, when stirred by the same circumstances, will bring out similar responses, no matter if one is British or Italian. Byron seems to deny the specificity and the particularity of the social interactions which pertain to a place.

The themes of expatriation, acculturation, place, and mobility converge in the Fourth

Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. In this poem, which is a palimpsest of stories and histories, the expatriate Englishman “interprets” Italy past and present for his compatriots, and employs the country’s cultural and geographical setting to ruminate on history and the human condition. Rome, in particular, in its multifarious ruins, evokes the collapse of temporality and monumentality, the impermanence of earthly glory, and the “one page” of human history: “First freedom, and then Glory – when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption, – barbarism at last” (BP II, 160, st. 108). For all its laments over the futility and deludedness of human endeavour, the Fourth Canto identifies as viable alternatives to despair and anguish the endorsement of the legacy of the past, exemplified in Italy’s thinkers, artists, and writers, the “structure of aesthetic redemption” (Janowitz 41), epitomised in the beauty of the Italian landscape, and the power of the artist’s creative imagination: “The beings of the mind are not 191

of clay; / Essentially immortal, they create / And multiply in us a brighter ray /And more beloved existence” (BP II, 126, st. 5).

Nonetheless, both in its structure and content, Byron’s poem also points to mobility and versatility as ramparts against the demoralising threat of history and the ills of the modern world. Thus, even though the Fourth Canto has a specifically geographical focal point, Rome, its scope is not static. On the one hand it is centrifugal, as it traverses Italy’s and

Europe’s political and cultural history since 1789 via its spatial landmarks: Venice, France,

Austria, Britain. On the other hand it is centripetal, as it accumulates all these impressions into one place (Rome), and into one individual consciousness (Harold/Byron). In the compelling stanza that follows, the cosmopolitan speaker flaunts his contact with other people and nations apart from his homeland, as well as his facility in creating temporary homes elsewhere and in adjusting to other environments. In the end, however, the speaker declares his love for Britain and his hopes of regaining his homeland after death, through his spirit and his poetry:

I’ve taught me other tongues – and in strange eyes

Have made me not a stranger; to the mind

Which is itself, no changes bring surprise;

Nor is it harsh to make, nor hard to find

A country with – ay, or without mankind;

Yet was I born where men are proud to be,

Not without cause; and should I leave behind

The inviolate island of the sage and free,

And seek me out a home by a remoter sea,

Perhaps I loved it well: and should I lay 192

My ashes in a soil which is not mine

My spirit shall resume it –

(BP II, 127, st. 8, 9)

The poem’s specified concern with Italian culture and history invokes, at times, uneven transitions between the mental landscapes of England and Italy. This enables the speaker to engage mentally and creatively, though not unambiguously, with both cultures. In the course of his pilgrimage, the speaker identifies with, and/or detaches himself from his surroundings, mapping, in this way, his routes in ruined Rome as an intricate process of identity (de)construction. Thus, the figure who had identified himself as a Briton early in the poem, “supplements” his native identity, casts it off, or loses hold of it. On the one hand, in his meditations on Venice, the speaker recognises that his strong emotional attachment to the city has derived from his readings in literature (“And Otway, Radcliffe, Schiller,

Shakespeare’s art, / Had stamp’d her image in me” [BP II, 130, st.18] ), as much as from his first-hand experience of the city, which has stipulated his attachment with the place:

And of the happiest moments which were wrought

Within the web of my existence, some

From thee, fair Venice! have their colours caught:

There are some feelings Time can not benumb,

Nor Torture shake, or mine would now be cold and dumb.

(BP II, 130, st. 19)

Shortly afterwards, the speaker characterises himself as a tannen tree “Rooted in barrenness, where nought below/ Of soil supports them ’gainst the Alpine shocks / Of eddying storms ” (BP II, 131, st. 20), an image which suggests a fragile and ailing attachment to place. Seeking filial bonds, the speaker wishes to appropriate the city of his pilgrimage when he exclaims “Oh Rome! my country! City of the soul! / The orphans of the heart must 193

turn to thee / Lone mother of dead empires” (BP II, 150, st. 78). He even questions mobility as a source of hope, strength, and identity, and thus repudiates the realm of “space” as he faces its imminent threats. The speaker is cut off from his British heritage and Italian affiliations and, ironically, seems incapable of creating a new home in another country. All he has is a Rome in ruins:

And from the planks, far shattered o’er the rocks,

Built me a little bark of hope, once more

To battle with the ocean and the shocks

Of the loud breakers, and the ceaseless roar

Which rushes on the solitary shore

Where all lies foundered that was ever dear:

But could I gather from the wave-worn store

Enough for my rude boat, where should I steer?

There woos no home, nor hope, nor life, save what is here.

(BP II, 159, st. 105; emphasis added)

The Canto ends with a positive note on the value of mobility and openness to different cultures. As Joanne Wilkes rightly argues, “Byron’s stanzas on the sea picture him both relishing this powerful element and linking his Italian and British experiences” (117). As with the river Po, the ocean is now the source of life, the confidant, and the connecting link between native and foreign place, while at the same time it symbolises the vastness of a world out there, and the real possibilities of the human mind’s imaginings:

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean – roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

(BP II, 184, st. 179)

And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy 194

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers – they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror – ’twas a pleasing fear,

For I was as it were a child of thee,

And trusted to thy billows far and near,

And laid my hand upon thy mane – as I do here.

(BP II, 186, st. 184)

The Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage has been called Byron’s “Italian canto” but neither its manner, nor its subject matter are particularly qualitative or innovative in reflecting his change of society and emotional condition as an Anglo-Italian. Beppo (1818) was an experiment in transmuting into English the Italian burlesque style and the ottava rima measure, grafted chiefly on the models of the sixteenth-century Italian writers Casti, Berni and Pulci. Not only did the project prove successful, but it marked a break away from

Byron’s immediate literary past, paving the way for Don Juan. Beppo, as a jeu d’esprit, has nothing of the downcast mood and solemnity of the Fourth Canto or the felt tension and agonising cries for liberty of the political odes. In its colloquial zest, playfulness, garrulousness and serio-comic tone, Beppo is undeniably more congenial to Byron’s acquired

Italianate temperament. Italy is (re)presented in high spirits, in a carnival mood and also in all those sensual aspects which Byron described so freely and humorously in his letters:

“[Venice] is very agreeable for Gentlemen of desultory habits ? women ? wine ? and wassail being all extremely fair & reasonable” (BLJ VI, 44). At the time Beppo was published, Byron referred to the poem as one “where I have said all the good I know or do not know of them, and none of the harm” (BLJ VI, 15). 195

Beppo is liberating as a new form of poetic expression for Byron and it also discharges impressions of Italy that had not been released in previous poems. In its digressions, it could very well serve as a guide to Venetian mores, at least as experienced by

Byron. Dissipation and loose morality are not looked down upon by the Puritan English but are treated with humour, light-heartedness and gusto. According to Andrew Rutherford,

“Byron himself is fully aware of the corruptedness of Venetian society, but instead of being disgusted by its vanity, frivolity and immorality, he accepts them with amused delight; and he writes about the trivialities of daily life there with a zest and a vitality which had been lacking in his set-piece meditations on great subjects in Childe Harold ” (114). He also indulges in the absurdities of the Italian habits of living, like the Italian Lent which he satirises in the first stanzas. Byron admits in wit that “With all its sinful doings, I must say, / That Italy is a pleasant place to me” (BP IV, 141, st. 41) and continues with a playful but caustic nine- stanza contrast between Italy and England.

Beppo vaunts a cosmopolitan flair in both content and form. The juxtaposition of cultures and identities is explicitly portrayed in this poem, itself a product of acculturation in terms of style according to McGann, as it combines English and Italian verse manners (Don

Juan in Context 56). The narrator, before unfolding the story of Beppo, Laura, and the Count, bestows personal praise on Italy with his reasons for admiring it. He relishes the Venetian luxuriance, exuberance and indulgence with dissipation, its women, climate, landscape, carnival, food and language. The worldly wise, sophisticated English narrator poses as a comparative cultural critic, offering commentary on English and Italian society. Once more, the narrator betrays his sense of “lack” in his own native identity by expressing, on numerous counts, his preference for Italy over England. He emphasises England’s inadequacy to provide a sense of pleasure and plenitude to the once more “starving” English adventurer. 196

The superior quality of Italian life is all the more emphasised through the explicit or implicit ironic commendation of English life:

I like on Autumn evenings to ride out,

Without being forc’d to bid my groom be sure

My cloak is round his middle strapp’d about

Because the skies are not the most secure;

I know too that, if stopp’d upon my route,

Where the green alleys windingly allure,

Reeling with grapes red waggons choke the way, ?

In England ’twould be dung, dust, or a dray.

I also like to dine on becaficas,

To see the Sun set, sure he’ll rise to-morrow,

Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as

A drunken man’s dead eye in maudlin sorrow,

But with all Heaven t’ himself; that day will break as

Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forc’d to borrow

That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers

Where reeking London’s smoky cauldron simmers

(BP IV, 142, st. 42, 43).

The contrast is developed more subtly in the story of Beppo, a scandalous story of marital infidelity in modern Venice, based on an anecdote which had amused Byron. In the story proper, Laura, when her merchant husband Beppo disappears abroad, takes a nobleman as her cavalier servente; at the Carnival, Beppo reappears in Turkish guise and sees the pair together. Surprisingly, the three reach some accommodation, as the narrator in a beautifully 197

understated ending reassures his readers that “I’ve heard the Count and he were always friends”. Byron’s amusement at the general acceptance of adultery as a regular code of conduct implies a criticism of English moral values, and, more particularly, of the prudish moralistic approach characteristic of the English. Although, in Byron’s view, the same habits obtain in both countries, the Italians are far less hypocritical in facing up to them with easy charm and social grace.

When talking of England more directly (stanzas 47-49), the speaker is being ironical again since every statement of affection he puts forward is immediately qualified or subverted. England’s “good” qualities – listed in an audaciously incongruous and speeded-up manner, from the Habeas Corpus to beef steak, and from seacoal fire to the King – are followed by flagrantly undercutting comments:

I like the taxes, when they're not too many;

I like a seacoal fire, when not too near;

I like a beef-steak, too, as well as any;

Have no objection to a pot of beer;

I like the weather, when it is not rainy,

That is I like two months of every year.

And so God save the Regent, Church, and King!

Which means that I like all and every thing.

Our standing army, and disbanded seamen,

Poor’s rate, Reform, my own, the nation’s debt,

Our little riots just to show we are free men,

Our trifling bankruptcies in the Gazette,

Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women, 198

All these I can forgive, and those forget,

And greatly venerate our recent glories,

And wish they were not owing to the Tories.

(BP IV, 144, st. 48, 49)

As we read on, however, we see that the narrator does not dwell on the deficiencies and faults of his native country but decides to compromise with them, demonstrating humour and leniency when he confesses that “All these I can forgive, and those forget” (st. 49, l. 390) and exclaims “England! with all thy faults I love thee still” (st. 47, l. 369). Notably, Byron adopts the Venetian/Southern example of adaptability, receptivity, and tolerance for different social and moral codes in his own treatment of England. Byron counterbalances his serio- comic praise of Italy against his sharply qualified and conditional praise of England. In my opinion, rather than a moralising lesson, the final result of this comparative look is a mosaic of northern and southern virtues and vices. What is indeed of note in this whimsical juxtaposition of mores is the way in which Byron plays one nation’s standards off against another’s, and pits one culture against another in order to establish a relative scale of values, a blurred cultural and geographical landscape. Living in Venice as an exile, Byron viewed both

English and Italian society with the eyes at once of a “native” and an outsider. In fact, as

Rutherford argues, it is precisely the author’s experience of both cultures, but total commitment to neither, that makes possible the satiric modes of Beppo (116).

The poem revolves around the idea of elusiveness and volatility: social roles, identities, and meanings can not be “fixed”, while the story itself “slips” through the narrator’s fingers:

“To turn, – and to return; – the devil take it! / This story slips forever through my fingers” (st.

63, ll. 497, 498). The fundamental polarisation between cultural categories – English or

Italian, lover or husband, pagan or Christian – is replaced by their peaceable co-presence. As

Tonny Tanner correctly observes, “identity becomes a matter of continuous improvisation 199

amid ongoing contingency” (39). In other words, the making of identity resembles the labyrinth makeup of Beppo, which is a mingling of digressions, haphazardness, contrasts, incongruities and an enthusiastic encompassing of difference.

The theme of cultural and geographical mobilité is reinforced, but at the same time complicated, by the carnival setting in the poem which the narrator convincingly establishes as an essential component of the city’s character: “Of all the places where the Carnival / Was most facetious in the days of yore, / For dance, and song, and serenade, and ball, / And masque, and mime, and mystery, and more / …/ Venice the bell from every city bore” (BP

IV, 132, st. 10). Carnival releases inhibitions and hides intentions and thus it may prove to be a highly liberating experience. Beppo’s carnival world becomes meaningful in the context of

Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of carnival in Rabelais and his World. In his examination of popular humour and folk culture in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as depicted in the novels of François Rabelais, the Russian literary theorist focuses on carnival festivities and their place in the history of European cultural development. Speaking of its non-artistic origins, Bakhtin observes that “[c]arnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. […] During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom” (7). Of the temporary suspension of hierarchical precedence created during carnival time, Bakhtin notes that

“carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.

[…] The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind”

(10).

Carnival involves masking, that is, a temporary concealment of the face and an adoption of another, a metamorphosis. In her study of masquerade and the carnivalesque in eighteenth century England, Terry Castle argues that “the result [of masquerade costume] 200

was a material devaluation of unitary notions of the self […] The pleasure of the masquerade attended on the experience of doubleness, […] a fantasy of two bodies simultaneously and thrillingly present, self and other together, the two-in-one” (4-5). In relation to the ideological structure that underlay the society of the time, Castle adds that the masquerade “was a meditation on cultural classification and the organizing dialectical schema […] It served as a kind of exemplary disorder”(6). Appropriately, Bakhtin observes at this point that although the Romantic mask retains something of its popular carnival nature, “it hides something, keeps a secret, deceives. […] The Romantic mask loses almost entirely its regenerating and renewing element and acquires a somber hue” (40). Carnival and masquerade necessarily raise questions of identity on all levels. To some degree, they exemplify a destabilisation or a suspension of habitual taxonomies, and a confluence of dualities and categories, exposing, in a stylised manner, their provisionality and fictionality.

In Beppo, the “switching” of cultures as part of the Venetian Carnival is treated as a jocular exchange of roles and a voluptuous release from categories:

And there are dresses splendid, but fantastical,

Masks of all times and nations, Turks and Jews,

And harlequins and clowns, with feats gymnastical,

Greeks, Romans, Yankee-doodles, and Hindoos;

All kinds of dress, except the ecclesiastical,

All people, as their fancies hit, may choose, […]

(BP IV, 130, st. 3)

It is only natural that the poem be set against a medley of categories “of all times and nations”. In particular, the experience of doubleness and mirroring that pervades it, engendered by the coexistence of self and other(s), of English and Italian (and Turk), underpins the makeup of Beppo. Byron’s “Venetian Story” as he calls it, emerges as a 201

cultural hybrid – in a city where acculturation thrives – which gathers up dissimilar traits and synthesises temperaments in a tolerant and even-handed way, forming a new one that is neither precisely northern, nor southern, nor oriental. This spatial and cultural incongruity accentuates the Romantic need to create a new coalition with the world.

Nevertheless, and to come back to an earlier point, much as identity in Beppo defies arrest, it appears to be finally gathered (or conjured) up as “the story ends” “at the bottom of a page” (st. 99, l. 789), after the masquerade is over, after the masks fall and the “secrets” behind them are revealed without worry. In my opinion, all these circuitous journeys and improvised routes taken by the narrator, Beppo, and the struggling reader, eventually synthesise a series of identifications, rather than a fixed identity. They produce conditional constructions “lodged in contingency” (Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 3), aptly illustrated in

Beppo’s re-assimilation process into Venetian society: “His wife received, the patriarch rebaptized him, / (He made the church a present by the way) / He then threw off the garments which disguised him, / And borrowed the Count’s small-clothes for a day” (st. 98, ll. 777-

780).

Similar to Beppo, The Prophecy of Dante was another “metrical experiment”, this time in terza rima. Byron used Dante’s measure in order to ventriloquise in English the outlook of

“the great Poet-Sire of Italy” not only on the current political state of his adopted country, but on more general issues that concerned him: political freedom, the role of the poets, poetry, and politics. Most critics agree that the persona in the poem resembles the poet closely:

McGann contends that with The Prophecy of Dante, “Byron’s poetry of analytic self- projection reaches its culminating form” (Don Juan in Context 47), while Francesco Bruni and Loretta Innocenti maintain that in the persona of Dante intersect three “models” – the exile, the poet-prophet, and the revolutionary – which constitute the points of identification between Byron and Dante (13-14). Byron, in effect, creates a palimpsest of historical 202

moments, with Dante looking back to the classical time and forward to that of post-

Napoleonic Italy. According to Beverly Taylor, “Byron assumes a pose similar to that taken by Dante in the Commedia, manipulating time so that descriptions of historical events appear to be prophetic glimpses into the future” (107). Dante’s/Byron’s prophecy on Italy’s inevitable decline and subjugation by foreign rule, condensed in the sombre address “Thou must wither to each tyrant’s will”, is followed by his strong exhortation to the Italians to unite and rise against oppressors:

Are you not brave? Yes, yet the Ausonian soil

Hath hearts, and hands, and arms, and hosts to bring

Against Oppression; but how vain the toil,

While still Division sows the seeds of woe

And weakness, till the stranger reaps the spoil.

Oh! my beauteous land! So long laid low,

So long the grave of thy own children’s hopes,

When there is but required a single blow

To break the chain, yet – yet the Avenger stops,

And Doubt and Discord step ’twixt thine and thee,

And join their strength to that which with thee copes;

What is there wanting then to set thee free,

And show thy beauty in its fullest light?

To make the Alps impassable; and we,

Her sons, may do this with one deed – Unite!

( BP IV, 226, canto II, ll. 142-145).

The theme of exile is dominant, and Dante, alienated from his native city and embittered by his compatriots who drove him cruelly into exile, cries out: “Alas! how bitter is 203

his country’s curse / To him who for that country would expire, / But did not merit to expire by her, / And loves her, loves her even in her ire” (BP IV, 218, canto I, ll. 69-72). In the same spirit, Dante declares in view of coming doom:

Hast thou not bled? And hast thou still to bleed,

Italia? Ah! to me such things, foreshown

With dim sepulchral light, bid me forget

In thine irreparable wrongs my own;

We can have but one country, and even yet

Thou’rt mine – my bones shall be within thy breast,

My soul within thy language ...

(BP IV, 222, canto II, ll. 15-21)

For the Italians, Dante was not merely an exemplary poet in terms of language and versification, but he was lionised for his indisputable political role as an artist. In The

Prophecy of Dante, Byron strongly identifies with this aspect of the Florentine poet because his philosophical view of the Poet emphasises the writer’s role as an ethical spokesman and as a man of the world, as it is revealed in the extracts that follow. Moreover, in Canto IV, as

Bruni and Innocenti point out, Dante presages the discoveries of new worlds, grand poetry, and the beauty of art, but is also on the alert because adulation of power and blind obedience to it exploit and enslave artists (26). Thus, Dante evokes the ethical and political function of poetry, which must sing liberty and serve the welfare of the common people, not of the despot (26).

Many are poets but without the name,

For what is poesy but to create

From overfeeling good or ill; and aim

At an external life beyond our fate, 204

And be the new Prometheus of new men …

……………………………………………

Who toils for nations may be poor indeed

But free; who sweats for monarchs is no more

Than the gilt chamberlain, who, clothed and fee’d,

Stands sleek and slavish, bowing at his door.

(BP IV, canto IV, 234 ll. 10-14, 237 ll. 91-94)

Unsurprisingly, there are many self-referential echoes in the poem which project

Byron’s complex feelings of alienation from his country, as well as his ambiguous positioning within the Italian society. Byron was resentful of his compatriots because his exile meant the end of a desired political career (McGann, Don Juan in Context 47). Many a time he declared his aversion and sullenness towards “the tight little Island” and deride the

English on tour, once he had settled in Venice and Ravenna as a “legitimate” resident, as an

Anglo-Italian. Conversely, his engagement with Italy’s revolutionary politics was multifarious and ranged from his impassioned involvement in the Carbonari movement, to the production of propaganda works like The Prophecy of Dante, with which he wanted to inspire support for the Italian revolution. 19 However, for all his desire to distance himself from England, “a country where I neither like nor am liked” (BLJ VI, 256) and for all his desire to be “inoculated” in Italian life, Byron necessarily remained, in part at least, a detached recorder and a critic of another culture. The explicit aim of The Prophecy of Dante, that is, to goad the contemporary (English) reader to action, is complicated and, in my view, debilitated by Byron’s ambiguous representation of Italians, particularly in the poem’s

Preface, as I am going to argue.

Byron devoted much poetry to presenting Italy for his British readership and much letter-writing to explaining to his friends the peculiarities of “a people who are at once 205

temperate and profligate – serious in their character and buffoons in their amusements – capable of impressions and passions which are at once sudden and durable (what you find in no other nation)” (BLJ VII, 43). In the preface to the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage, Byron sketches a favourable portrait of modern Italians, not only by exalting the qualities which were considered inherently “theirs” and were reiterated in literature at the time (“the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty”), but by introducing evidence of a vital contemporary culture which could bear comparison with any in Europe: “Italy has great names still – Canova, Monti, Ugo Foscolo, Pindemonti, Visconti,

Morelli, Cicognara, Albrizzi, Mezzophanti, Mai, Mustoxidi, Aglietti, and Vacca, will secure to the present generation an honourable place in most of the departments of Art, Science, and

Belles Lettres” (BP II, 123). Notably, in an illustration of involvement and personal interest,

Byron takes a (discreet) stance in the famous debate between Romanticism and Classicism in

Italian literary society. 20 This point is raised again in the Preface to The Prophecy of Dante, only this time the current debate in Italian literary circles is believed to predispose Italians unfavourably against a “foreigner’s” attempt to imitate a national poet: 21

I am not quite sure that he [the Italian reader] would be pleased with

my success, since the Italians, with a pardonable nationality, are

particularly jealous of all that is left them as a nation – their literature;

and in the present bitterness of the classic and romantic war, are but

ill-disposed to permit a foreigner ever to approve or imitate them

without finding some fault with his ultramontane presumption. […]

But I perceive that I am deviating into an address to the Italian reader,

when my business is with the English one. (BP IV, 215; emphasis added)

As in the poem (canto III), Byron argues that the Italians’ literature and language is the sole direct link to their political freedom, as it can inspire them to see themselves as a 206

nation, to unite, and fight for their liberty. On the other hand, though, he sees in the Italians’ zest for things “national” a growing skepticism towards things foreign – the allusion to himself is clear. In this respect, he acknowledges that his literary venture could be interpreted as a kind of appropriation and encroachment. Byron is critical of contemporary Italians, whom he indirectly accuses of bias and narrow-mindedness. The comparative subtext of this

Preface, though less explicit than that of Beppo or “To the Po”, showcases Byron’s alien outlook on Italian society, and thus qualifies once more Byron’s endorsement and understanding of Italianness. His brief but wry and detached observations on Italian nationalism make the comparison with England unavoidable and unmistakable.

Byron’s choice of Dante as his spokesman adds a very specific political edge to the poem, for as Peter Vassallo asserts, for Italians in the early Risorgimento, Dante symbolised

“the indomitable spirit of Italy which survived the oppression of foreign powers” (30). On the one hand, the adroit manipulation of this symbol’s nuances in order to represent the Italian cause to an English audience is an act of literary commitment and involvement in the cause.

What is more, by adopting the voice of the fourteenth-century “Poet-Sire of Italy”, Byron sets out to speak as an Anglo-Italian to the English, and as an Italian to the Italians (through the poem’s translation into Italian), aspiring, in this way, to a higher degree of identification. This is comparable to the way Byron fashions himself through the meaning of place, through geographical routes; here, however, he sutures through Italianness by identifying with a material, collective historical memory.

On the other hand though, the slippery nature of Byron’s mediation between the

English and the Italian is not only a formal but a thematic aspect of The Prophecy of Dante.

As Cheeke rightly observes, the poem “dares to build one within another [Anglo-Italian,

North-South, Byron-Dante] and wonders whether these superimpositions might offer a certain kind of liberty, an escape […] to an inter-space opened up by translation” (Byron and 207

Place 132-133). Yet, a question that keeps returning in the poem is the extent to which a foreign writer may actually intervene through acts of acculturation, translation and imitation

(“I dare to build the imitative rhyme” as Byron writes in the dedication) in the national struggles of an adopted country. Byron’s endeavour is indeed problematic, as what emerges in the Preface is not a constructive look at Italy’s degeneracy, but a critical and condescending one. To take it further, the look of the even-handed cultural critic is transformed into the cool gaze of the conservative nationalist Briton, who sees little scope in the prospect of a free and united Italy. The letters of this period confirm his pessimism and alienation, fuelled, on the one hand, by the emotional instability caused by his turbulent relationship with Teresa and her family at the time, and on the other, by the slow progress of the Italian revolution. Thus, in a letter to Teresa in January 1820, originally written in Italian,

Byron attributes his indecisiveness about the future of their relationship to his “non-meridian” heart: all of a sudden, Byron realises that the more he enters into Italianness, the more of a foreigner he feels:

What does he [Alessandro Guiccioli] want? That I, a foreigner, far

from my own country and from the manners and customs and

ways of thought and behaviour of my fellow-country-men – that I

should decide things for the people of another land! […] If I see

my country in danger of destruction – some of my friends arrested –

others on the point of being involved in civil war – my family without

support – much of my property none too safe – in the conditions

prevalent under this insecure government – if in such a moment it

seems to you or to others that I am upset – does this deserve the name

of indecision? (BLJ VII, 21) 208

Byron’s Ravenna Journal that he kept at the time (January 4 – February 27, 1821) contains an interesting record of information on the preparations for the insurgence and his own involvement in it. At the same time, it registers Byron’s growing unease and bewilderment at the Carbonari tactics:

I wonder what figure these Italians will make in a regular row. I

sometimes think that […] they will only do for “shooting round a

corner;” at least, this sort of shooting has been the late tenor of their

exploits. And yet, there are materials in these people, and a noble

energy, if well directed. But who is to direct them? (BLJ VIII, 19)

In this context, Byron’s reaction to the failure of the Neapolitan risings in 1821 invites attention. His response is a very clear illustration of detachment, of how Byron casts off his adopted identity and reasserts the role of the foreigner and the detached observer.

Disenchanted, he writes in his journal:

But the Neapolitans have betrayed themselves & all the World –

& those who would have given their blood for Italy can now only

give her their tears. –

Some day or other – if dust holds together – I have been enough

in the Secret […] to cast perhaps some light upon the atrocious

treachery which has replunged Italy into Barbarism. – At present

I have neither the time nor the temper.- However – the real Italians

are not to blame – merely the Scoundrels at the Heel of the Boot –

(BLJ VIII, 106)

In a letter to Thomas Moore on the same topic, Byron sees the failure “as much a work of treachery as of cowardice”. He also regrets having taken so much personal risk and wryly comments: 209

As a very pretty woman said to me a few nights ago … “Alas! The

Italians must now return to making operas.” I fear that and maccaroni

are their forte, and “motley their only wear.” (BLJ VIII, 105)

Byron’s pungent remarks reveal his bitter disillusionment with his own incurable

Romantic idealism, rather than his anger towards the insurgents. Yet, at the same time, he recasts Italy as the combative and threatening “other” and re-erects the differences and the boundaries between him, a Briton in Europe, a colonial administrator, and them, squabbling and cowardly Italians. Byron’s famous claim “I am a citizen of the world”, often related to his cosmopolitanism and supra-nationalism, marks a rupture with the Italian part of his identity, if read within the specific context of its enunciation:

As to the Government I appeal to the whole of my conduct since

I came here to prove whether I meddle or make with their politics. –

I defy them to misinterpret my motive – and as to leaving their

states – I am a citizen of the World – content to where I am now –

but able to find a country elsewhere. (BLJ IX, 78)

The letter is to another member of the Pisan circle, John Taaffe, and concerns the group’s efforts to save a prisoner from the stake at Lucca. Byron declares his intention to act decisively, out of compassion for a victim of oppression, despite his tense relations with the

Tuscan authorities. Byron’s claim on world citizenship is partly an act of self-defence and an illustration of acrimony, when his motives are questioned and when he feels less accepted in

Ravenna and especially in Pisa. His letters reveal his slow realisation that his meridian self has exhausted its exciting otherness and has betrayed him. Byron firmly proclaims his ability and intention “to find a country elsewhere”, and indeed, he does, when he redirects his liberal nationalist energies to Greece. 210

Byron’s ambivalent identity politics as revealed in The Prophecy of Dante, but also in his personal involvement in the revolution, suggest that the conceptualisation of identity as a positioning between or beyond is often problematic, because identity cannot escape the impingements of the discourses of history and culture. Therefore, contradictions abound in the way Byron envisages Italy and its aspired liberation, as his imperialist anxieties and nationalist dilemmas often dictate a situated, ideological understanding of the Italian cause; an understanding which, in effect, undermines his proclaimed intention to re-establish Italy in the Western political consciousness.

It is indeed no easy task to chart or measure the space of Italianness and the South in

Byron’s map of cultural identity. As the spatial metaphor suggests, place and space, undoubtedly, formed and informed his identity more than any other British Romantic of the period, while the ambivalent and multifarious appropriation of the “familiar other”, as it has been argued, attests to the fact that the construction of identity is indeed a construction, subject to a complex of signs and practices that organise social existence. Byron’s Anglo-

Italian identity is an identity constructed and deconstructed in the spaces of an ambiguous hyphen, marking the Romantic search for the creative “becoming” in the static “being”.

211

N o t e s

1 It is worth mentioning that on-the-spot experience and the discovery of the genius loci of places was also valued by earlier travellers to Italy, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. For instance, Joseph Addison and Rev. John Chetwode Eustace in their popular and influential travelogues on Italy which became minor “classics” in this genre

(1705 and 1813 respectively) attached great importance to a thorough familiarisation with their surroundings, as they believed that an all-pervading concentration on the past would heighten the enjoyment of the Classics. Even though the evocation of the classical past was never far from a traveller’s consciousness, after the Napoleonic Wars, reality comes to largely disrupt classical reverie and disenchant the mythological view of Italian landscape.

Thus, the disheartening background of the French revolution, Bonaparte’s fall and the restoration of the ancien régime are events which made the classical attitude to Italy look partly out-of-date. Set against a different historical context, the meditation on ruins, for instance, – as a signifying act – is vested with different values. However, some values and styles from earlier traditions persist (stylistic continuity) and together create a palimpsestic vision. This mixed sensibility is pointedly depicted in the travel accounts and other literature of the early nineteenth century. According to Peter Nisbet, “the coherent vision [of the previous century] had been lost, splintered into separate attitudes, transformed from something erudite and aristocratic into something bourgeois and educational” (15).

2 In contrast to Phipps’ The English in Italy, Beste’s book received an unfavourable review by

Mary Shelley in Westminster Review 11 ( July 1829: 127-140) which is discussed in detail in chapter two.

3 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie Marchand, 12 vols. (London: John Murray, 1973-

1982), VIII, 186. All subsequent references to Byron’s letters and journals are to this edition, cited parenthetically as BLJ and followed by volume number and page number. 212

4 The use of rhetorical effects which promised the “real” Italy, France, etc. and thus a vicarious experience of places abroad had become at the time a common editorial practice in

England because of profitable business. John Murray, Byron’s editor, is said to have asked the latter to write a poem, “a good Venetian tale describing manners … and call it Marianna”

(qtd. in Beaty 85). Byron defied demands on style, of course, but he came up with Beppo which became an instant success.

5 “That extraordinary passion for Italy, which would flow into British Romanticism, after

Napoleon’s fall, and would remain alive, violent and multiform, during the 1820s and 1830s”

(my translation).

6 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederic Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1964), II, 85. All subsequent references to Shelley’s letters are to this edition, quoted as PBSL, followed by volume number and page number.

7 For an incisive examination of how Byron drew on Forsyth’s guidebook on Italy, see Keith

Crook’s “Truth and Sense on Italy: Byron’s Guidebook,” Immaginando l’Italia: itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese, a cura di Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002)

155-165.

8 Byron’s principal works employing Italian themes are Childe Harold IV, Beppo, The

Prophecy of Dante, The Lament of Tasso, and two historical tragedies with a Venetian setting, Marino Faliero and The Two Foscari. In The Lament of Tasso (1817), as in The

Prophecy, Byron turns to a literary hero as inspirational exemplar. Tasso’s legendary life as a lone poet with an unrequited love for beautiful Leonora exercised an attraction on Byron’s imagination, who saw Tasso as a symbol for the “man of passion” who is, however, subject, to oppressive socio-political forces. It is noteworthy that Tasso’s figure charmed Shelley, too, as it inspired him in the creation of the maniac in Julian and Maddalo. The two historical tragedies, on the other hand, have an explicit political content, but neither is concerned with 213

the establishment of a modern Italian state. As Wilkes observes, Byron “deploy[s] Venetian political history partly as a means of displacing his own concern over the stance he should adopt towards British politics, as a Whig lord who opposes the Tory government but is loath to align himself with men he considers ungentlemanly demagogues” (178).

9 “For all his faults, Byron is, to a great extent, ours” (my translation).

10 From a report in The State Archives in Florence. See Origo p. 498, note 12.

11 “At that time the rumour spread in Pisa that an extraordinary man had arrived there, of whom people told a hundred different tales, all contradictory and many absurd. They said that he was of royal blood, of very great wealth, of sanguine temperament, of fierce habits, masterly in knightly exercises, possessing an evil genius, but a more than human intellect. He was said to wander through the world like Job’s Satan … It was George Byron. I wished to see him; he appeared to me like the Vatican Apollo” (Origo’s translation, 292).

12 In his seminal study Orientalism, Edward Said points out that the issue of representation is crucial to understanding discourses within which knowledge is constructed. If all representations are, as Said says, “embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer […] then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, interwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides ‘the truth’ which is itself a representation” (272).

Despite the theoretical limitations of Said’s argument and the critiques of his monolithic, coherent notion of orientalism, it is difficult to deny the crucial, even if ambivalent, link between representation and domination, knowledge and power.

13 Unless otherwise mentioned, references to the Prefaces and Notes to Byron’s poems come from the edition used for his poems, Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J.

McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-1993). 214

14 “The universe is a kind of book of which you have read but one page when you have seen only your country. I have leafed through a sufficient number to have found them equally bad.

This study has not been unprofitable to me. I hated my country. All the peculiarities of the different people among whom I have lived have reconciled me to it. Even if I should have gained no other benefit from my voyages than that one, I should never regret the pains, and the fatigues” (1026-1027; Notes to Lord Byron: The Major Works, ed. J.J. McGann)

15 The quotes come from a letter to John Taaffe (12 Dec.1821), from “Venice. An Ode” l.5 and “To the Po. June 2nd 1819” l. 45 respectively.

16 See Michel Foucault’s article “Of Other Spaces”: “We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (22).

17 There is a large and diverse literature distinguishing space from place. For instance, J.D.

Sime in “Creating Spaces or Designing Spaces?” [Journal of Environmental Psychology 6

(1986) 49-63] argues that “place, as opposed to space, implies a strong emotional tie […] between a person and a particular physical location” (50). Moving along the lines of Tuan, humanist geographer E. Relph in Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Ltd.,1976) speaks of “places” as “important sources of individual and communal identity” and “placelessness” as “a pervasive and perhaps irreversible alienation from places as the homes of men” (141,

143). Philosophical and psychological questions of place and space have been counteracted by social geographers who have sought to foreground the social experience of space. Thus,

David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell 1989) notes that “[t]he capacity of most social movements to command place better than space puts a strong emphasis upon the potential connection between place and social identity” but also creates a new kind of pressure on social movements (302). Harvey stresses that in a postmodern capitalist world, “[t]he construction of […] places, the fashioning of some 215

localized aesthetic image, allows the construction of some limited and limiting sense of identity in the midst of a collage of imploding spatialities” (303-304).

18 Climate is a key notion in de Staël’s discourse in De la Littérature (1800). She contended that, because of its influence on human disposition and behaviour, climate played a part along with religious and political institutions in the formation of national character. Italy’s sunny climate, for instance, is presented as a catalyst for tolerance of social lapses, relaxed social decorum and flexible attitudes. On the contrary, the cold and rainy northern climate causes melancholy, uneasiness and taciturnity.

19 The Prophecy of Dante was written in 1819, and was published in 1821 by John Murray. In the same year came out in Paris an anonymous translation of the work in Italian entitled La

Profezia di Dante Alighieri. Historical sources agree that the translator was Michele Leoni, the one who had translated Childe Harold in 1819. Unsurprisingly, the circulation of the work was prohibited in Italy, as the poem seemed “designed to augment popular agitation, which is already sufficiently aroused. Lord Byron makes Dante foresee democracy and independence, as the true goods of this country” (from a letter to the Buongoverno, qtd. in

Origo 303).

20 The Classicist – Romanticist polemic began in Italy with the publication of an article by

Madame de Staël in Biblioteca Italiana entitled “Sull’utilità delle traduzioni” (1816) [On the

Usefulness of Translations]. The French author contended that the Italians should be more receptive to the literatures of the countries of modern Europe, study them in depth, and use this knowledge in order to fight the sectarianism and provincialism which blights their own culture. Vincenzo Monti, Ludovico Di Breme and Silvio Pelico, whom Byron had met in

Milan, were prominent contributors to the Romantic periodical Il Conciliatore. Aesthetically avant garde, this periodical championed Romanticism in art, linking it with burgeoning nationalism in politics, in opposition to the neo-classicism now associated with the 216

Napoleonic regime. The opponents of the Milanese group were led by Antonio Cesari, who felt a united Italy needed to repudiate local oral dialects in favour of Tuscan to achieve purismo, a pedantic purity of written and spoken language. He believed the Tuscan poetry of

Dante, Petarch and Boccaccio should form the canon of the united nation, whereas Monti championed the local Lombard School. The whole Romanticism versus classicism debate raging in Italy at the time involved this complex patterning of cultural and linguistic loyalties.

For further information on the famous polemic, see Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia della letteratura italiana (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1985; 1996) 398-409.

21 In her incisive essay “ ‘An infernal triangle’: Foscolo, Hobhouse, Di Breme and the Italian

Context of the Essay on the Present Literature of Italy” [Immaginando I’Italia: itinerari letterari del Romanticismo inglese, a cura di Lilla Maria Crisafulli (Bologna: CLUEB, 2002)

251-285] Lilla Maria Crisafulli highlights a less well-known aspect of the Italian historical context which had an impact on the writing of The Prophecy of Dante, and in particular, of

Byron’s apologies in its preface. Crisafulli persuasively argues that Foscolo’s 1815 divisive essay on the current state of literature in Italy, which caused a heated debate among Italian literary groups for its controversial contents, involved J. Hobhouse, and, less directly,

Byron’s name. She also contends that the dispute helped Byron to sell Childe Harold and gave him direct material for his later compositions, including The Prophecy of Dante.

217

217

CHAPTER 4

“Rooting” the Anglo-Italian: Place and Identity in Percy Shelley’s Pisan Group

Our roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa and the transplanted tree flourishes not. P. B. Shelley, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley

So Pisa you see has become a little nest of singing birds – Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

4.1 The Cultural Geography of the Pisan Circle: A Revisionist Reading

It is of importance, and a noteworthy coincidence in the annals of British literary history, that in the early nineteenth century Italy should become not only the abode of many

British poets and writers of the second generation Romantics, but also a point of brief juncture in their lives and careers. Significantly, it was on Italian ground that some of these expatriate poets’ tracks converged, determining not only each other’s ensuing course and destination, but, to a considerable extent, the identity of the place in question per se. Among the numerous little communities that the British established in Italy in the period after the

Napoleonic Wars, the Shelleys’ circle in Pisa remains the most famous, but also the most controversial: famous because of the names associated with it – Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley,

Byron, Thomas Medwin, Edward Trelawny, Claire Clairmont, Leigh Hunt, Alexandros

Mavrokordatos, Francesco Pacchiani, Tommaso Sgricci, Emilia Viviani, to quote but a few – controversial because the kind of project this highly heterogeneous group of expatriates and natives embodied still remains largely undefined, complex, and equivocal.

Critical opinions divide as to who were the “rightful” members of the Shelleys’ circle.

C.L. Cline in his classic study Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle (1952) talks about a first group of acquaintances, which comprised mainly Pacchiani, Sgricci, Mavrocordatos, Emilia

Viviani and John Taaffe, and of the “real Pisan circle”, which superseded the short-lived one composed of Italians and expatriates and included Byron, Medwin, Trelawny, the Williamses 218 and Taaffe (14-15). Helen Rossetti Angeli in Shelley and his Friends in Italy (1911) devotes a chapter on Shelley’s Pisan friends, namely Pacchiani, Sgricci, Rosini, Mavrocordatos and the

Irish Taaffe, but later argues that “Byron was, naturally enough, the centre of the social circle in Pisa, which included the Shelleys, Trelawny, the Williamses, the Gamba family, Medwin,

Taaffe and Captain Hay” (241). In the same way, Mario Curreli and Anthony Johnson in

Paradise of Exiles: Shelley and Byron in Pisa (1988) suggest that the circle was not effectively formed until Byron’s arrival at Pisa (xv). Finally, Jeffrey Cox in Poetry and

Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (1998) does not cite any

Italians among the circle’s adherents, while he mentions Mavrokordatos. Undoubtedly, the circle entertained many temporary members, while a number of names were associated with it as potential or even reputed recruits, such as Horace Smith or William Hazlitt. Towards the end, however, the circle was identified with the founding members of The Liberal, that is,

Shelley, Byron and Leigh Hunt, or, as Blackwood’s journal labelled them, the “Pisan triumvirate” (qtd. in Cox, Poetry and Politics 216).

The extensive biographical data on the people concerned and the various incidents that marked their sojourn in Pisa, which have been made the object of considerable scholarship,1 have proved essential to our understanding of the letters, journal entries, and literary production of the British Romantics of this period. This scholarship, however, can have even more significant implications for the interpretation of the Pisan circle if considered within the context of the cultural-geographical approach, namely, a field of enquiry which brings into focus locality, spatiality, and historical subjectivity and which, by consequence, construes the

Pisan circle as a spatially- and temporally-situated episode in Romantic literary history. As a result, such an approach can elucidate and stimulate new interpretative directions in the study of the literary texts that were produced at the time by disengaging them from traditional

“transcendental notions of ‘nature’ and the sublime” (Cheeke, “Geo-History: Byron’s 219

Beginnings” 133), which seem to deny the idea of a culture-specific geography. For instance, an awareness of the geo-political conditions which underpinned Shelley’s sojourn at Pisa, as well as an alertness to his ambivalent position(ing) between his native and his adopted culture, offers valuable insight into the reading experience of works like Adonais, Hellas and

A Defence of Poetry.

Although what has been written so far about the Pisan circle is history rather than criticism, a number of comments which are often indiscriminately mixed with the (largely idealised) narration of facts, point to two basic interpretative directions. On the one hand, they suggest that the Pisan circle was an isolated colony of British exiles, who attended to their own literary projects and paid little heed to their Italian surroundings. On the other hand, they argue that it was only in this little Tuscan town that the Shelleys finally contemplated a settled home and a circle of friends – hence Shelley’s famous pronouncement that “our roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa and the transplanted tree flourishes not” – and behaved as residents rather than passing visitors, since they mixed with Italian families and engaged in local affairs.

Shelley’s “Italian” works, that is, works that are most frequently cited in connection with Italy, fall into two categories. In the first there are compositions which deal explicitly with Italian life, be it the landscape, culture, history or people. This group includes Lines

Written among the Euganean Hills, Julian and Maddalo, and The Cenci. The second category contains poems which are indebted to, or allude to Italian sources, which may be geographical, aesthetic, or literary, like Epipsychidion (based on Dante’s Vita Nuova and

Convivio), Adonais (influenced by Rome and Dante) and The Triumph of Life (deriving from

Petrarch and Dante’s visionary poems). Additionally, there are a number of smaller or fragmented poems which draw explicitly on Italian subjects or settings, such as “The Tower of Famine”, “Evening: Ponte al Mare, Pisa”, “Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples” and 220 two works which refer to the political independence of Italy, Ode to Naples and Ode to

Liberty. Most poems written in Italy bear some trace of Italian influence, but the latter is not always easy to isolate as the links with Italian literary sources can be intriguing (for example,

The Witch of Atlas draws on several Italian comic writers).

Speaking of Shelley’s Italian experience, the majority of Shelley scholars seem to agree that the best word to describe the poet’s response to Italian landscape and literature is

“absorption”. 2 Alan Weinberg explains that Shelley’s “artistry lies in an extraordinary capacity for assimilation of literature or art not his own, and of aspects of the physical environment in which he lived. […] His accounts of landscape or allusions to an Italian writer are seldom if ever superimposed upon the content of his vision but seem rather to rise out of the vision, as if they were called forth from some deep reservoir of thought” (243). At the same time, though, critics stress Shelley’s disdain for the Italians and the country’s present decline, an attitude which is soberly and often caustically recorded in his poetry and letters.3

His ambiguous praise “Thou Paradise of Exiles, Italy” and, in a more dramatic and critical way, the famous passage on the division of Italy into “Two Italies” – Italian nature and the rich cultural heritage of the past on the one hand, and the sordid and oppressive contemporary reality on the other – reflect this fracture, which was painfully evident to Shelley. Unlike

Byron, who managed, at some point, not only to reconcile, but also to celebrate this discrepancy in the Italian cultural character, Shelley for the most part adhered to the dominant

British tradition, which held that the current condition of the country was incompatible with the idealised vision of classical antiquity. His contempt for modern Italians, “a miserable people – without sensibility or imagination or understanding” (PBSL II, 22) and his belief that their degenerated character would not allow them to sustain a constitutional government, kept him largely aloof from their society and their burgeoning revolutionary movements. Thus,

Shelley’s italianità is, at best, characterised by ambivalence. Alternatively, it is (pejoratively) 221 construed as sheer italianismo, a term which in the early nineteenth century connoted, according to the OED, “Italian quality, spirit, or taste; attachment to Italian ideas or principles; sympathy with Italy”.

It is my contention, however, that Shelley’s divided attitude towards Italy is too often interpreted as a neat division between the “poetic” and the “political”, ignoring the fact that the two notions tend to be mutually informing, rather than mutually exclusive. Such a reading is limiting, and may distort our sense of Shelley’s association with his “adopted” country. In my view, Shelley’s relation to Italy during his four-year sojourn is an issue that opens up the voluminous literature on the politics of identity and place-making. However, this field of theoretical enquiry may rely too heavily on the surmise that national identity is a territorialising concept which implies a primordial, essentialist connection with place. An interesting case in point is Toni Cerutti’s thesis, which I will briefly consider. Adopting a rather polemical stance, Cerutti alerts us to the limits and modalities of the process of

“absorption” attributed to Shelley with regard to his response to Italy. More specifically, he argues:

Parlare della italianità di Shelley impone inevitabilmente una diversa

misura rispetto a un discorso sulle caratteristiche nazionali laddove,

origine patria e tradizioni culturali coincidono. […] Shelley è pur sempre

lo straniero adulto che giunge esule in altra terra. La sua anglicità, fortemente

e nazionalisticamente connotata, lo accompagnerà tutta la vita. Per Shelley

[…] l’Italia fu sopratutto il luogo dove il passato si fa presente e a mala pena

esisteva come entità culturale contemporanea. […] [L’] elemento italiano

non viene assorbito ma esibito come marca della diversità. (301, 302)4

Admittedly, Cerutti is right to claim that Shelley, because of his native identity, cannot easily disentangle himself from an “ideological” understanding of modern Italy as a 222 problematic national and political entity. However, his interpretation is partly reductive for two reasons. The first is that it overlooks locality and the social and material experience of space. Much as it acknowledges the general influence of the Italian cultural context on

Shelley’s experience, Cerutti’s reading barely addresses the highly specific political, geographical and discursive coordinates which attended his experience of the actual places in

Italy where he and Mary Shelley sojourned, such as Rome, Naples or Pisa. In other words, by failing to register geographical specificity in Shelley’s Italian routes, Cerutti’s interpretation tackles only in part the interplay between (the inscribed, overwritten) place and (the inscribing) subject. By consequence, any conclusions about Shelley’s engagement with

Italian society are arguable and incomplete, unless considered in relation to specific times and places – unless, in more theoretical terms, they adhere to a method which “reconceive[s] spaces as places, literally the sites of an infiltration of historical and cultural intimations into a specific geographic terrain” (Saglia, “Introduction” 125). The second reason Cerutti’s argument appears partly unfocused is because he fails to recognise, to say the least, Shelley’s atypical attempts, while at Pisa, to “naturalise” his relationship to his surrounding environment and configure an alternative coalition with the local community, a point I will argue in the course of this chapter.

More recently, and within a climate of Romantic studies currently attuned to historical and political readings of the period, Jeffrey Cox, in his compelling study Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School, attempts to read the Pisan circle as Shelley’s (failed) effort to reconstruct the London Hunt circle at Pisa, placing it, therefore, in the realm of a community of liberal writers who aspired, through communal work, to cultural and social reform.

Interestingly, Cox’s study of a Cockney group of associates gathered around Leigh Hunt dismantles tenacious myths about Romantic isolation, and purports that second generation

English Romantics should be seen in the context of a rich network of writers, editors, 223 dilettantes, associations and friends that published, read, and reviewed each other’s work. The author argues that in 1821, Shelley was keen to reassemble the Hunt circle in Tuscany and to direct its political-literary energies into The Liberal magazine. Linked to his hopes for transforming the world, Pisa becomes for Shelley, after the Hunt circle, the embodiment of

“an ideal circle of liberal writers” (Cox, Poetry and Politics 217) and “a model of a world remade” (221).

Espousing Cox’s suggestion that the Pisan circle formed part of a wider political, and largely utopian project which sought to implement the ideals and aspirations of a group of liberal writers, this chapter also assumes the inescapability of a topographical mode of explanation of the group’s identity, and attempts to examine the Pisan project in full recognition of its historical specificity and of the ideological conflicts which are inherent in the encounter of two cultures. Therefore, by attempting to reconstruct the bicultural setting which existed in Pisa at the time, and by examining the degree of identification of the British expatriates with Italianness and the “other” place, my aim is to individuate the extension of an

Anglo-Italian cultural geography, in all its referential and material implications, but at the same time highlight the contradictions, modalities, and oscillations in this geography and delimit its boundaries.

Considering the culture-specific, discursive content of imaginative topoi, I argue that the construction of this alternative community by the British liberals is deeply embedded in the politics of its age. The “sweet abode” of Pisa, as mapped out primarily by Percy Shelley,

Mary Shelley, Byron and Leigh Hunt, offers the British intellectuals a space for the configuration and enactment of a hybrid identity, the Anglo-Italian, namely, a selective assemblage of elements from both cultures. In particular, by focusing on Percy Shelley, the central figure in this “imagined community” of Anglo-Italians, my aim is to demonstrate that while the way Shelley positions himself within the Pisan reality/locality partly reflects what 224 most critics call a “divided” attitude towards Italian history, culture, and politics, at the same time it significantly problematises it. More explicitly, I wish to illustrate how Shelley’s real and imaginative geo-graphies, relayed through his poems, letters, and prose of the Pisan period configure the identity of place and figure Italianness as an ambiguous site. In this respect, the inscription of a “healing paradise” on Pisa’s historical identity marks an act of resignification and reterritorialisation, reinforcing the current theoretical notion that imaginative, cultural, or poetic geography is “much more than a literal quantity and much more than a backdrop” and that it is more properly addressed as “a complex and dynamic imaginative quantity” (Gillies qtd. in Saglia, “Introduction” 125).

This is a point I will also attempt to exemplify in connection to Leigh Hunt and the publication of The Liberal. Although this chapter is largely organised around Shelley, its secondary aim is to locate Romantic Anglo-Italian culture in the group formed around Pisa and in the communal creative efforts which marked its brief existence. To fully appreciate the implications of the Anglo-Italian as a historically specific self-fashioned identity, one needs to consider that its major propagators – Shelley and Byron – were attached to Leigh Hunt’s

Cockney School in various ways that also led to the experiment of The Liberal. More specifically, I will focus on Leigh Hunt’s epistolary travelogue Letters from Abroad. It is my contention that this curious publication, which has hardly attracted any sustained critical attention on account of its dubious literary merit, is another record of the intricate character of

Anglo-Italian politics. More explicitly, while Hunt seeks to legitimate, through a series of topographies, his professed “liberal” affiliation with Italianness, he parochially configures the latter into a zone of contention, contradiction, and suspicion. Nonetheless, what I ultimately wish to suggest is that the historical importance of the Pisan circle and the related periodical work lies not only in its symbolic significance as an act of communal sensibility and 225

Romantic contestation, but also in its attempt to give ground to a highly ambivalent bicultural social space, identity, and literacy.

4.2 “Elective Affinities”: The Pisan Lyrics and the Review of Sgricci’s Improvisation

Shelley, Byron and the other expatriates of the Pisan circle belonged to that group which Mary Shelley defined as “Anglo-Italian” in the article she published in Westminster

Review in 1826 entitled “The English in Italy”, which was discussed in previous chapters. As it has already been pointed out, her qualification not only points to a sect of persons of

English origin who live temporarily elsewhere, nor does it hint merely at an emotional attachment the British entertained towards the country of settlement. Instead, it designates a conditional and complex identification with Italy and Italianness, which results in the conscious adoption of a self-styled, double identity – the Anglo-Italian – a hyphenated structure that grants its bearer a set of distinctive traits and a new self-image. The following lines, cited from Mary Shelley’s resonant excerpt, describe – and ultimately prescribe – the

Anglo-Italian’s course of acculturation in their non-native environment, as well as their engagement with Italian society, two major issues this chapter addresses:

Your Anglo-Italian ceases to visit the churches and palaces guide book

in hand; […] Without attempting to adopt the customs of the natives, he

attaches himself to some of the most refined among them, and appreciates

their native talent and simple manners. He has lost the critical mania in a

real taste for the beautiful, acquired by a frequent sight of the best models

of ancient and modern art. Upon the whole, the Anglo-Italians may be

pronounced a well-informed, clever and active race; they pity greatly

those of their un-Italianized countrymen [ …] and in compassion of

their narrow experience have erected a literature calculated to disseminate 226

among them a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the

Peninsula. (EI 343; emphasis added)

My contention is that Mary Shelley’s observations on the Anglo-Italians can retrospectively offer some insight into the identity and spatial politics of the Pisan circle and cast, in (re)turn, further light on the discursive nature of the British expatriates’ eccentric self- representation. For the Anglo-Italian, Italianisation does not connote a passing attachment to

Italian ideas or spirit, but becomes a synonym for the continuous enrichment and refinement of one’s education, culture, and taste. In contradistinction to the “un-Italianized” visitor or vulgar tourist, the Anglo-Italian, first and foremost, seeks an unadulterated communion with the Italian aesthetic and cultural experience, which, according to Lilla Maria Crisafulli is “a holistic and organic one” (“Il viaggio olistico” 168), and then imbibes its universal laws.

Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Italian is reported to seek among native Italians the companion of minds contingent to his/her own – sophisticated, refined, and cultured – so as to fully realise his/her Italianisation.

A further point stressed in the excerpt, but still linked to the idea of aesthetic education echoed above, concerns the task or mission of these privileged emigrants, namely, to impart the precious knowledge they have acquired in the South to the “less fortunate ones” at home. In other words, the Anglo-Italian takes up a civilising, or humanising mission, to italianise – in the broad sense of the word given above – his/her “un-Italianized countrymen”

(EI 343). In addition, Mary Shelley’s apt use of the word “race”, (in her suggestive phrase “a new race or sect among our countrymen […] [the] Anglo-Italians”) to denote a set or class of persons 5 with common interests, points to the conscious formation of a group of literati with a unified sensibility and a shared vision: a group which embodies an educational project and aspires to lead society to cultural and political reform. Appropriately, the term “race” in this 227 context underscores the Anglo-Italians’ awareness of their mission as a communal, and not as an individual undertaking.

At this point, it is important to remember that the political concerns of the Romantics were shaped by their particular roles as poets. These writers saw themselves not merely as citizens with a heightened perception, but also as legislators of the world, who could transform it through cultural acts and through the power of the imagination. Although these acts have been recurrently interpreted as forms of displacement which resituate actual human issues “in a variety of idealised localities” (McGann, The Romantic Ideology 1), they are a shift or an escape, as Cox argues, “only if one believes cultural acts stand wholly apart from politics” (Poetry and Politics 61). The Romantics purported that their visions were (ideal) potentialities, grounded in actual human issues; they thus advocated social change by means of poetical and political instruction. A case in point is that when Shelley finished the composition of the Preface to Hellas in 1821, his close friend and member of the Pisan circle

Edward Williams wrote in his journal that “if such a poem becomes popular, we may flatter ourselves with having advanced a step toward improvement and perfection in all things, moral and political” (25). The comment illustrates the Romantic belief in the ability of art to be both a-temporal and engaged, as well as the intrinsic connection between poetry and politics.

The identity of this “exemplary group of enlightened people” is another issue raised in

Mary Shelley’s meaningful definition. In fact, it is suggested that the British expatriate italianises him/herself by choosing for his/her associates “the most refined” Italians. In other words, the Anglo-Italian’s relation to native Italians is described as one of selective mixing, because it is the refined, talented and illuminated Italians who can enhance the aesthetic education of the English emigrants and, in this way, contribute to the civilising project discussed above. As argued in detail in earlier chapters, the dominant English tradition from 228 the Grand Tour to nineteenth-century tourism considered modern bourgeois Italians a degenerate race and treated them dismissively. Mary Shelley seems to settle in this tradition, too, along with the majority of emigrants. Interestingly enough, although the author exalts here and elsewhere in the essay what she believes to be the Italians’ strongest quality, that is, their native genius and simplicity of manners, she understatedly adds that their “rich stores of talent” are “useless” because “no superstructure is thereto added” (EI 351, 346). Mary

Shelley’s suggestive definition, provided by one who considered herself an Anglo-Italian,6 outlines the contours of a reconfigured map of social relations, and thus a new geography of power, as far as the English in Italy are concerned. More specifically, it outlines the intricacies, ambivalences, modalities and tensions of the Pisan group and its project.

Despite his occasional reservations,7 Percy Shelley was keenly disposed towards the idea of collaboration and communal undertakings on the political and intellectual terrain.

While he was still a student at Oxford in 1811, he wrote a fervent letter to Leigh Hunt, whom at the time he knew only as the editor of the weekly liberal paper, The Examiner, expressing his solidarity and amity “as a common friend of Liberty” (PBSL I, 54). In his young radical style, Shelley proposed the formation of a society whose ultimate aim would be to combat the enemies of liberty (monarchy, religion and aristocracy) or, what he called, the “empire of terror” (PBSL I, 126):

The ultimate intention of my aim is to induce a meeting of such

enlightened unprejudiced members of the community, whose

independent principles expose them to the evils which might thus

become alleviated, and to form a methodical society which should

be organized so as to resist the coalition of enemies of liberty which

at present renders any expression of opinion on matters of policy

dangerous to individuals. It has been for want of societies of this 229

nature that corruption has attained the height at which we now

behold it. (PBSL I, 54)

In his 1812 essay Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists, and while he laid out his plans for a thorough and immediate political and social reform in Ireland, Shelley made a case for the advantages of freely associating groups (“…because I think that individuals acting singly with whatever energy can never effect so much as a society”)8 and saw them as apposite agents of this reform. Despite the context-bound character of the proposed scheme, Shelley’s ideas for an association “actively interesting itself in whatever occasions may arise for benefiting mankind” (Prose 63) seem to have a much wider scope and anticipate related ventures in the future:

When I mention Ireland, I do not mean to confine the influence of the

association to this, or to any other country, but for the time being.

Moreover, I would recommend that this association should attempt to

form others and to actuate them with a similar spirit; and I am thus

indeterminate in my description of the association which I propose,

because I conceive that an assembly of men meeting to do all the good

that opportunity will permit them to do must be in its nature as indefinite

and varying as the instances of human vice and misery that precede,

occasion, and call for its institution. (Prose 63)

Shelley was not the only British Romantic poet whose optimism for the benevolence of human nature – when the latter is not forced to live under repressive regimes – and deep belief in social reform stirred plans for utopian communities of like-minded spirits. Almost twenty years earlier, in 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were the leading spirits of a group of learned Jacobins whose plan was to emigrate to America to start a community free from the pressures and prejudices of the British milieu. The name given to 230 the utopian society was “pantisocracy”, meaning “all of equal power”. Southey’s description of the objectives of the scheme to his brother, whom he wanted to include in the plan, is explicit: “we [Coleridge and himself] preached Pantisocracy and Aspheterism every where

[…] the first signifying the equal government of all – and the other – the generalization of individual property, words well understood now in the city of Bristol” (qtd. in Ashton 54).

Owing chiefly to the absence of funds, the scheme was abandoned before any firm arrangement could be made. Although its own propagators later came to look back on the

Pantisocratic utopia “with amused superiority” (Ashton 52), the significance of this ambitious project lies in its social implications for the state of affairs in Britain at the time, particularly the country’s economic depression. As Rosemary Ashton observes, “[w]hen we think of conditions at home in 1794, we should not be surprised at the desperation felt by many for whom the ‘land of liberty’ had become a country of starvation and repression” (52).

Even though Shelley’s proposed plans for a reformed society were based on precepts akin to those of the Pantisocratic system Coleridge and Southey envisioned, the two parties came to view themselves as rivals in the cultural and political debates of the early years of the nineteenth century. Ironically, when the Shelleys, Byron and their circle were out of Britain advocating liberalism, freethinking, and a non-conformist lifestyle, Southey and Coleridge, representing the British literary establishment, expressed their scepticism and concern with regard to the “aberrant” practices of the young Romantics. This antagonism ultimately led to what is known in the cultural history of British Romanticism as the “war” between the

“Lakers” and the “Cockneys”. As Cox points out, “for the younger writers the Lake Poets came to be reidentified as a group not because of their early poetic revolution but because of their current reactionary politics” (“Leigh Hunt’s Cockney School” 5).

After his enthusiastic proposals for utopian societies and communal undertakings in his early prose texts, Shelley returns to the ideal of an intellectual community of friends a few 231 years later while living abroad, this time in his poetry. A less impulsive, yet equally idealist and inspired plan for collaboration and society is articulated in a poem Shelley writes at Este,

Italy, in 1818, entitled Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills. Shelley’s desire for the establishment of a community of chosen spirits is rekindled and symbolically expressed in this topographical lyric; this time, however, the urge does not stem from philanthropic feelings only, but also from personal despair. Shelley’s wish to retire “to some calm and blooming cove …/… far from passion, pain and guilt” can be read in the context of the despair and disillusionment the poet was facing at the time, not only because of domestic misfortunes and depression, but due to the poor or even hostile reception of his writings, and the absence of an intellectually accomplished community with which he could associate. The speaker/poet, overcome with suffering and tired of wandering, expresses his need to settle at a far-away place which will provide him with a sense of security, tranquillity, belonging and aesthetic/intellectual satisfaction. Thus, the poem records at one level what Shelley in the

Advertisement calls “a state of deep despondency”, which is temporarily soothed, however, by the glorious Italian sunrise, hopes for a political renewal in Italy and a wish-fulfilling vision of a “windless bower”, where the poet and those close to him might take refuge.

Although the poem revels in abstractions, and natural description serves as a basis for allegory – namely, that of life as an uncharted, perilous voyage – Lines Written Among the

Euganean Hills is also engaged with the contemporary condition of Italy, though in an ambivalent manner. As Michael O’Neill argues, the poem “reflects and yet complicates

[Shelley’s] keen if partial interest in Italian affairs” (72). Notably, the visions of Venice and

Padua in the central sections of the poem yield to an awareness of present reality which shifts the speaker’s perspective onto an historical plane. Shelley laments that the two cities, former sites of glory and learning, have fallen into decline, and that freedom has been supplanted by servitude and tyranny. Yet his detached and dispassionate attitude towards their sufferings 232 reinforces the general impression that Venice and Padua are treated as ideas, rather than as time-bound realities, and are ultimately used as symbols, which suggest that “green isle[s]” and earthly paradises are only temporary and get lost in time. As Shelley applies the law of nature’s regenerative cycle to the rise and fall of nations, the survival of the two cities is desirable, only if there is to be a resurgence of freedom that would restore the entire country to life. Disquietingly, it is suggested that the possible agents of Italy’s regeneration are

“Freedom”, “Liberty”, “learning”, “reason”, and “love,” rather then its present inhabitants, who are contemptuously dismissed as “pollution-nourished worms” (147):

But if Freedom should awake

In her omnipotence, and shake

From the Celtic Anarch’s hold

All the keys of dungeons cold,

Where a hundred cities lie

Chained like thee, ingloriously,

Thou and all thy sister band

Might adorn this sunny land

Twining memories of old time

With new virtues more sublime;

If not, perish thou and they! –

(Poems 150-160)

The final section of the poem marks a transition from images of unbreachable solitude and isolation to a vision of community, rendered first in the poet’s soul merging with the natural surroundings in a quasi-mystical moment of total peace and harmony, and second in the ideal image of nonviolent reform, in which a community of kindred spirits has the power, through example, to change the world: 233

In a dell mid lawny hills,

Which the wild sea-murmur fills,

And soft sunshine, and the sound

Of old forests echoing round,

And the light and smell divine

Of all flowers that breathe and shine:

We may live so happy there,

That the spirits of the Air,

Envying us, may even entice

To our healing Paradise

The polluting multitude;

But their rage would be subdued

By that clime divine and calm,

…………………………………

And the love which heals all strife

Circling, like the breath of life,

All things in that sweet abode

With its own mild brotherhood:

They, not it, would change; and

soon

Every sprite beneath the moon

Would repent its envy vain,

And the earth grow young again.

(Poems 346-358, 366-373) 234

We note that, in contrast to the green isles described at the beginning of the poem and which offer temporary relief from despondency, the topos mapped in the end is an enduring one. Being a mixture of the imaginative and the referential, of the Italian (“the light and smell divine”) and the English (“a dell mid lawny hills”), this place is pictured as a small, safe, healing shelter (cove, bower, dell), as well as fertile and alluring. Shelley’s “sweet abode” endures because it is sustained by love, happiness, brotherhood, and communal spirit, qualities that can subdue the rage of “the polluting multitude”, and can even bring about the regeneration of other individuals. Significantly, the final part of the poem anchors its hope for the rebirth and amelioration of humanity to the nurture and cultivation of the above mentioned qualities by a dedicated community. Shelley reiterates his belief that a group provides the best vehicle for cultural and political reform, and can resist such institutionalised associations as state, church, and class (Cox, Poetry and Politics 4). Thus, despite its escapist tendencies, the poem closes not by proposing a retreat from history, but by offering the possibility that “the good spirits of a beneficent and harmonious natural world, in alliance with the powers of poetry and love, can effect a reversal of historical process” (Chernaik 73).

Therefore, the poem projects the need for the establishment of a harmonious intellectual society of kindred minds, a “mild brotherhood”, to use Shelley’s term, committed to the project of changing the world through the exercise of love and reason.

Two years later, and while taking temporary residence at Leghorn (Livorno), Shelley wrote the poem Letter to Maria Gisborne. Composed of conversational couplets, this poem was written while the Gisbornes, friends of the Shelleys in Italy, were visiting London in the summer of 1820. Shelley held Maria Gisborne’s learning and culture in high esteem, and enjoyed her own and her husband’s friendship, a mutual commitment accentuated by the two couples’ “expatriate closeness” (O’Neill 126). The epistle is built on a contrast between

London and Leghorn. In the course of the poem, Shelley’s preference for Italy over England 235 is exemplified through the enthusiastic celebration of nature, tranquillity, and the freely expressive setting of rustic Leghorn. In the following lines which describe a nocturnal scene,

Shelley draws attention to what Weinberg aptly calls, “the vital powers of growth and abundance” (10):

I see a chaos of green leaves and fruit

Built round dark caverns, even to the root

Of the living stems that feed them – in whose bowers

There sleep in their dark dew the folded flowers;

…………………………………………………….

Afar the Contadino’s song is heard,

Rude, but made sweet by distance – and a bird

Which cannot be the Nightingale, and yet

I know none else that sings so sweet as it

At this late hour ; – and then all is still –

(Poems 274-277, 286-290)

Shelley raises the value of the Italian setting even more by repudiating the modern social conditions of London life, which are uncongenial and dismal: “a shabby stand / of

Hackney coaches – a brick house or wall / Fencing some lonely court, white with the scrawl /

Of our unhappy politics; – or worse – / A wretched woman reeling by …” (265-269). He also laments the fact that natural forces in London asphyxiate under the curbs imposed by a growing industrial and urban world. In its compelling connotative force, the city imagery evokes a repulsive mix of saturation and insatiability:

You are now

In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore 236

Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more

Yet on its depths what treasures!

(Poems 192-196)

Nonetheless, in the last line the perspective alters, and Shelley in his address to Maria halfheartedly admits that “Wit and sense / Virtue and human knowledge; all that might /

Make this dull world a business of delight, / … are all / You and I know in London” (247-

249, 252-253). What follows in the poem is a series of portraits of literary figures of the day, that the Gisbornes would have the opportunity to encounter in England: Godwin, Coleridge,

Hunt, Hogg, Peacock and Smith. However, beneath Shelley’s shrewd and generous judgements of contemporary British thinkers and writers, most of whom were his close friends, lies his “career-long need to believe in a community of like-minded spirits, a need arising out of his severely limited experience of any such community” (O’Neill 127). Shelley wishes that this community of intellectuals move to Italy, and alleviate the burden of his solitude. It is noteworthy though that what is most emphasised about this long-desired group is its Englishness, its distinct cultural identity, whose qualities – conviviality, temperance, studiousness, urbanity – are contemplated with nostalgia and are called upon in Italy to give the country “an added dimension” (Weinberg 12). Despite the poem’s light-hearted, bantering tone, the conclusion of the Letter to Maria Gisborne artfully maps out a little London in the heart of Italy. Shelley’s cultural geography re-structures Italian space by colonising it and by

“inoculating” it with English values, habits, and images. It therefore charts an anglicised world, and a group whose members are bound by filiative relations (“our blood”). The soothing Italian natural setting is now nothing more than a silent witness:

Oh! That Hunt, Hogg, Peacock, and Smith were there,

With everything belonging to them fair! –

We will have books, Spanish, Italian, Greek; 237

………………………………………………

Though we eat little fish and drink no wine,

Yet let’s be merry: we’ll have tea and toast;

Custards for supper, and an endless host

Of syllabubs and jellies and mince-pies,

And other such lady-like luxuries, –

Feasting on which we will philosophize!

And we’ll have fires out of the Grand Duke’s woods,

To thaw the six weeks’ winter in our blood.

(Poems 296-298, 302-309)

Shelley’s fervent adherence to the ideal of a group of intellectuals and joint literary activities should not be examined only in relation to his philosophical idealism, or to the trying isolation he experienced in exile. Significant though as both factors may be, it must as well be pointed out that groups, parties, and coteries formed a vital part of Romantic culture, particularly in the post-Napoleonic era. According to Cox, “these writers were, at the time, not known as Romantic poets but as members of groups, schools, circles” (“Leigh Hunt’s

Foliage” 58). In the British literary world, there were publicly identified groups of poets – the

Bluestockings, the Della Cruscans, the Lake School, the Cockney School, and the Satanic

School (59). There were numerous other less visible circles which centred around important literary figures of the day, while, at the same time, similar groups could be traced on the

Continent. Shelley was already attached to the Cockney group on account of his association with Leigh Hunt, and to the Satanic School – an epithet coined by Robert Southey – due to his close relation to Byron. Thus, the creation of a circle of expatriates in Italy per se was not that utopian after all; on the contrary, it was in accord with the cultural climate of the age.

Utopianism lay in the circle’s plans for reform, as these were outlined in his poems. 238

Coteries of British writers in Italy were not an unusual phenomenon either. The Pisan circle’s best known predecessor was the Della Cruscans, a group of English Italophiles who in the 1780s settled in Florence, joined forces with Italian aristoctratic patriot poets and pooled their poetic talents into reciprocal verse-making. The most important product of this communal activity was The Florence Miscellany (1785), a book of poetry on Italian themes.

Though its contributors vowed that their purpose was to defend the transmission of the medieval Italian cultural heritage, the publication was largely an act of defiance against the

Austrian interference (Franklin 89). In terms of the group’s literary impact, McGann persuasively argues that the Della Cruscan movement came to dominate the cultural scene of the 1790s and that its poetic style “pursued a vigorous life well into the 1830s” influencing the second generation Romantics (The Poetics of Sensibility 81).

More or less explicitly, both Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills and Letter to

Maria Gisborne seem to anticipate and envision Shelley’s settling in Pisa in 1821 and the group of intellectuals which was to be gathered there. During his first years in Italy, Shelley was constantly on the move and, thus, his arrival at Pisa in January 1820 marked an important change in his hitherto nomadic life. His residence there, which was to last for well over two years, decisively disrupted this pattern of movement. Among the city’s attractions for Shelley were the ancient Italian university, its proximity to the river Arno, and the mild, moderate government of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, compared to other restoration regimes in Italy.

Notably, Shelley described it as “a nominal tyranny, administered according to the philosophic laws of Leopold, & the mild opinions which are the fashion here” (PBSL II, 177).

Pisa was also chosen for its relative tranquillity, being a less popular travel destination for the flows of English tourists. Shelley, in fact, wrote no architectural and artistic notes on Pisa’s great monuments as he had done while in Rome, Naples and Milan, thus distancing himself 239 from the role of the tourist. Instead, he wrote several poems about the city, in which he sought to catch the atmosphere of the place “at certain times and in certain lights” (Holmes 574).

The city’s highly distinctive architectural style added to Pisa’s peculiar, other-worldly character at the time, a result of the steady decline in its population and eminence since the seventeenth century. Interestingly, this is how John Murray had described Pisa in Sketches of

Italy, published in London in 1820: “ The magnificence of its palaces – the hospitality of its nobles – its fame in arms – its reputation in literature – its wealth – its power and its glory – have all fled with its free constitution. From the rival of mighty nations, it has sunk into a powerless and unimportant city. Its former splendour is now seen only in the deserted mansions that line its grass-grown and desolate streets” (qtd. in Coppini 223). On his first visit there in 1818, Shelley had found it “a large disagreeable city almost without inhabitants”

(PBSL II, 18). This disconcerting aspect of the city persisted even when the poet returned to

Pisa in 1820 and decided to settle there. The presence of the Pisan setting is immediately, though distressingly, felt in “The Tower of Famine” (1820), one of the first poems Shelley composed at Pisa, inspired by the Ugolino canto in Dante’s Inferno. The tower, described in all its spectral gloom, had reputedly imprisoned the notorious thirteenth-century nobleman

Ugolino, who devoured his children in order to survive.9

Amid the desolation of a city,

Which was the cradle, and is now the grave

Of an extinguished people, – so that Pity

Weeps o’er the shipwrecks of Oblivion’s wave,

There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built

Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave

For bread, and gold, and blood: Pain, linked to Guilt, 240

...... ….

The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

Of solitary wealth, – the tempest-proof

Pavilions of the dark Italian air, –

Are by its presence dimmed – they stand aloof,

And are withdrawn – so that the world is bare;

(Poems 1-7, 12-16)

The theme of cannibalism fills the poem with gothic resonances, and the city figures as an abode of haunting memories and ghosts. Yet, Shelley recovers the horrendous story of

Ugolino in order to uncover the troubling social and political context which beset the city in the thirteenth century, a period during which its “dwellers rave[d] / For bread, and gold, and blood”. According to historical information, Pisa, at the time, was plagued by power struggles between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, by political intrigue, treachery, vengeance, and bloodshed. By attributing the city’s moral decay and bareness to “the bowers / Of solitary wealth”, Shelley attacks the avariciousness and materialism of his own day, evils that, as he states in A Defence of Poetry, “flow from the unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty” and supplant the poetical faculty (Prose 292-293). Infernal, gloomy and corrupt, Pisa has been reduced to a waste land (“bare”) which, despite its former glory, must now bear the weight of “Oblivion’s wave”. Curiously, the city is doomed to “stand”: having accomplished its purpose in history, it now rests faded and still in time and space, without progress or retreat.

Shelley’s “egocentric structuring of space” (Relph 50) not only concerns social space but geographical space, too. After “The Tower of Famine”, “Evening: Ponte al Mare, 241

242

Pisa” written in 1821, is a lyric which further complicates Shelley’s attitude towards the city.

Pisa is once more presented as unpopulated, uncanny and grim, haunted by Dantesque ghosts, a city of fleeting appearances and apparitions. It comes as no surprise that, in stanza III, the poet meditates not on what is real (Pisa) but on a reflection of the real (the reflection of the city in the waters of the river Arno). The city’s countenance is “wrinkled”, a result of the river ripples breaking and “reforming” the old city like a mirage. Although the overall impression is that of immobility and near-death suspension, the reflection never rests completely still.

“Immovably unquiet”, a typical Shelleyan paradox about the passage of time, comes to suggest here that the slight but constant trembling betrays uneasiness and alertness, thus marking Pisa as a fading but not a faded city:

III Within the surface of the fleeting river

The wrinkled image of the city lay,

Immovably unquiet, and forever

It trembles, but it never fades away;

Go to the …

You, being changed, will find it then as now.

IV The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud,

Like mountain over mountain huddled – but

Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,

And over it a space of watery blue,

Which the keen evening star is shining through.

(Poems 13-24) 243

The city is doomed to bear the weight of an unchanging destiny in the midst of a fast- changing world. Consequently, the use of the imperative to urge the traveller to set off on his journey, is followed by the reassuring comment that, upon his return, he will find Pisa unaltered and unaffected by time. It is noteworthy that line 17 in the relevant Bodleian manuscript reads “Go to the Indies”, pointing to Shelley’s dreams of his Eastern scheme, as revealed in his letters to Peacock and Hogg, at the time when the Pisan plan was being materialised.10 The suspension of time creates an illusion of spatial immobility – and therefore of security and stability – and Pisa is mapped as an a-historical entity, by means of which, however, the mobile subject establishes for himself/herself a sense of continuity of time (“You, being changed, will find it then as now), a linking of one instance to the next between “then” and “now”. Interestingly, it is only near the end of the poem that, with the succession of natural phenomena, a sense of movement is underway, reminding us of Byron’s figures of mobility. “Growing” and “moving” are verbs which connote change and development, but the actions are directed outside or rather beyond (“upwards”) the realm of the city, to the “space of watery blue”, the wide deep sea into which the river turns and flows after the Ponte al Mare. Appropriately, the gaze is no more static on a reflection, but follows the course of the river to the liminal point where the sky and the sea merge. The human eye attempts to see through the watery vastness and glimpse beyond the meeting of the elements.

The mental flight suggests that the desired place of action is no longer the circumscribed place, but the boundless space that lies further than the “darkest barriers of cinereous clouds” which cover Pisa; as mentioned earlier, for Shelley, this space is territorially grounded in the

East.

Although the first impression the city had made on him was largely disagreeable,

Shelley, with time, developed a liking for Pisa, and the “desolate” city became, according to

Richard Holmes, the nearest thing he ever had to a home anywhere since leaving Field Place 244

(575). His intention of remaining more or less permanently at Pisa, as he confided it to his friend John Gisborne in October 1821, was indicated by his decision to furnish their lodgings, something he and Mary had never done before in Italy. Shelley’s wish to put an end to his nomadic existence and settle down is expressed through an arresting metaphor: “We have furnished a house in Pisa, & mean to make it our headquarters. – I shall get all my books out

& intrench myself – like a spider in a web” (PBSL II, 363; emphasis added).

The arachnidan simile invites commentary, as it evokes a number of associations regarding Shelley’s attachment to Pisa, which reflect the multiplicity and multidimensionality of processes that pertain to the relation between identity and place. First of all, the image of a spider in a web suggests the most intimate linkage between a subject and its home. This is because of the natural, organic relation that exists between them, as the spider uses fluid from its own body to create its web. On the other hand, a spider spinning its web connotes a strategic, calculated action, which in Shelley’s case can be identified with his efforts to ground himself in a foreign place, a point on which I will elaborate later. Finally, this last observation is reinforced but also enriched by Shelley’s use of the verb “intrench myself”, which apart from signifying firm establishment, indicates the adoption of a well-defended position, one “surrounded with trenches”. Shelley’s intention to fortify himself becomes clear, if we consider that during his exile in Italy he had to bear the brunt of destructive criticism, directed against his way of life, ideas, and works. The fact that Shelley composed

Adonais in 1821 at Pisa – a poem that takes issue with the hostility of reviewers and supports the myth of Keats’s death at the hand of his critics – is evidence that Shelley felt sufficiently secure and rooted at the time publicly to defend Keats and himself before his compatriots.11

Shelley’s decision to put an end to his family’s nomadic life, aptly expressed through the image of the spider, was shared by Mary Shelley, who agreed with the idea to settle in

Pisa. As their circle began to form,12 and shortly after Byron’s long-awaited arrival, Mary 245

Shelley described the city as “a little nest of singing birds”, in a letter to Maria Gisborne in

London (MWSL 209). The metaphor is used in a slightly bantering way to suggest the transformation of a sleepy, dull town into a lively hub, owing to the circle of Anglo-Italians.

However, the image of the inhabited nest is telling in its connotations, and makes an interesting parallel with Percy Shelley’s arachnidan and botanical metaphors. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space examines, from a phenomenological perspective, the kinds of space that attract the poetic imagination. In his discussion of bird nests, Bachelard argues that their images, apart from being associated with rest and cosiness, always bear the sign of return, “for not only do we come back to it [the nest], but we dream of coming back to it” (99). He continues:

[a] nest […] is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of

security. […] And so, when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at

the origin of confidence in the world […] Would a bird build its nest

if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world? […] The nest,

quite as much as the oneiric house, […] knows nothing of the hostility

of the world. (102, 103)

These observations reflect, to a certain extent, the Shelleys’ expectations and hopes with regard to their new place of settlement. The nest (of Pisa) designates a space of redemption for the nomads, but also of creativity and inspiration (“singing birds”).

Significantly, this space also initiates a relation of confidence and trust in place, one which will help them to face “the hostility of the world”, a phrase which reflects Percy Shelley’s fear of the “polluting multitude” as expressed in Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills.

Shelley’s decision to settle, however, and to make Pisa his “headquarters” is also strongly related to his long-standing plans for the formation of a visionary community. Once 246 he had struck roots and given up on further routes, Shelley’s next bid would be to gather to

Pisa some “chosen companions” and construct a liberal coterie:

The other side of the alternative […] is to form for ourselves a

society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in

feelings :& to connect ourselves with the interests of that society. –

Our roots were never struck so deeply as at Pisa & the transplanted

tree flourishes not. (PBSL II, 339; emphasis added)

Similar to the animalistic image discussed above, Shelley’s naturalising, botanical metaphor about the striking up of roots, marks a performative act of identification. As recent anthropological studies inform us, the powerful metaphoric practices that so commonly link people to places, as well as the widely held common assumptions about countries and roots, or nations and national identities “are not simply territorializing, but deeply metaphysical”

(Malkki 56, 54). Accordingly, people are often thought of, and think of themselves, as being rooted in place and as deriving their identity from that rootedness – hence the metaphysics raised by Malkki. The metaphorical concept of having roots induces intimate linkages between people and place, and this is why cultural and national identities, for instance, are conceived in territorialised terms. In more than one cases, both the idea of nation and that of culture carry with them “an expectation of roots, of a stable, territorialised existence”

(Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 338). Place or home, therefore, seem to act as a sort of symbolic guarantee of cultural belongingness, while displacement or homelessness are often seen as pathological states, precisely because of the purposeful naturalisation of the links between people and place.

As Liisa Malkki argues, of all metaphors of community, the tree most closely reveals the territorialisation of identity (73). Significantly, the roots mentioned by Shelley are specifically arborescent in form, the tree evoking, apart from natural ties, origins, ancestries, 247 the past and a genealogical form of thought. The notion of transplantation that Shelley also uses falls within the same category of botanical analogies. Although the term usually suggests live, viable roots – especially in connection to those expatriates who pick up their roots from the mother country and set about their acclimatisation on foreign soil (Malkki 62) – Shelley sees in the act of transplantation an act of violation and uprootedness that results in an ailing tree (“the transplanted tree flourishes not”). The implied assumption of all this is that Pisa, at that particular moment, provides not only a vital link with Italy’s glorious past but also fertile ground – a concrete locality and a social context – on which Shelley and his circle can sow the seeds of liberty and reform – for Italy, for England, and for the whole world – and watch them grow, flourish, and bear fruit.

Postmodern notions of identity have sought to shun cultural and national essentialisms and have challenged root-thinking and the intimate relation between people and place, suggesting instead, that identity is “a mobile, often unstable relation of difference” (Gupta and Ferguson 13) or, to attempt to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, that identities can not be grounded by any roots, because roots themselves are in a state of constant change, and do not stay in any place. In view of this, Deleuze and Guattari prefer the term “rhizomatic” 13 to that of “rooted”, and state:

To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be

roots […] but put them to strange new uses. We are tired of trees. We

should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. […] A rhizome has no

beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing,

intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely

alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is

the conjunction, “and … and … and…” . (15, 25; emphasis added) 248

Much as the notions of displacement, difference, and “traveling cultures” have come to inform postmodernist versions of identity formation, we should remember that in the

Romantic period, dislocation and rootlessness were symptomatic of the identity crisis and the troubled spirit of the age, as well as of the Romantic poet’s predicament in an increasingly alienating world. Hence the significance of a local sense of place, of what William

Wordsworth calls a “deep abiding place” in The Excursion, and the corrupting force of the alien outer world: “Ambition reigns / In the waste wilderness: the Soul ascends / Drawn towards her native firmament of / heaven” (393-396). As Malcolm Kelsall observes, “the feeling of place at this time […] is provoked in British literature by those fundamental challenges to local tradition, custom, memory and community which historically we call […]

‘the French Revolution’, or, philosophically, ‘the Enlightenment’. [These terms] relate to a pan-European movement […] which is international, cosmopolitan, ultimately imperial, and rationally hegemonic” (28). Moreover, Roger Cardinal remarks that in Romantic travel literature the notion of home, or the journey home, is used to counteract the (inevitable) disillusionment felt by the encounter with an alien environment (151). He adds that for the

Romantics, “[h]ome-coming […] finds its place in Romantic ideology as a touching, restorative experience which offsets travail and trauma” (151). In my opinion, the expatriate

Romantics sought to reconceptualise the established idea of home and place outside national borders, or in the realms of their border-less imaginative geographies. However, much as they flaunted dislocation and rootlessness as an asset, and either created a lively cosmopolitanism, or plotted degrees of nativeness by attaching themselves to other lands, the agonising question of “Who I am” in relation to “Where I am” rose as a major preoccupation in their works.

Shelley’s wish to root himself at Pisa was partly manifested in his seeking to create links and bonds with the local social context and township, something he had never ventured 249 before while in Italy. Various episodes that marked the circle’s sojourn at Pisa – the Masi affair, the sacrilege at Lucca,14 the Viviani case – attest to the fact that Shelley, at least in the beginning, aspired to a form of assimilation and involvement. Furthermore, the fact that he negotiated with local printing houses for the publication of his poetry – Adonais was first printed at Pisa15 – reinforces the assumption that he purposefully enquired about alternatives, as far as the promotion of his work was concerned. This last venture was intimately related to his plans to make Pisa a hub of intellectual activity and literary projects, consolidated in his effort to gather in situ personalities as different as Byron, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Horace

Smith and Thomas Love Peacock.

Shelley’s assumed attachment to Pisa, vividly rendered through the metaphors discussed above, discloses an attempt to position himself within a set of shared meanings and practices, within a culture other than his own, and attain a sense of identity with it. This positioning, however, is not unconditional or without contradiction. Although I am not suggesting that it is purely situational, it is my contention that Shelley’s attachment to place maps an ambivalent conceptualisation of the notion of identity, engendered by the complex dynamics of his Anglo-Italianness which enable him to seek ways of carefully assimilating the non-native identity, through, what one could call, a politics of alliance. Shelley’s self- fashioned identity, in other words, allows him to integrate aspects of “Italianness” on a conditional basis. More explicitly, I would argue that Shelley naturalises his links with Pisa by attempting to territorialise his relation to it. At the same time though, he relinquishes these roots by deterritorialising the historical specificity and geopolitical reality of Pisa, a case I am trying to make in relation to his Pisan lyrics which I have included in my discussion. To return to botanical metaphors, and to Deleuze and Guattari, Shelley oscillates between tree and rhizome, between “filiation” with place and mere “alliance” to it. As I will argue in the rest of this chapter, Shelley’s complex relations and varied response to the cultured Pisan 250 community, specifically in connection to his plans for a liberal society, are a showcase of his

Anglo-Italian identity politics and thus of his context-informed association with Italianness.

Humanistic geographers have argued that a primary function of place is to engender a sense of belonging and identity, but they also observe that the notion of rootedness is intrinsically related to an active and natural participation in the life of the community (Relph

38). As a matter of fact, the recognition of a place as a home may have less to do with its physical environment and more with the interaction with its people, particularly with those of similar interests. In the cases of nomadism and mobility, the development of ties with the indigenous community of a place may ease the progress of acculturation, and strengthen the emotional attachment with place. While at Pisa, Shelley’s contacts with local people were almost non-existent except for a few, rather idiosyncratic figures: namely, Andrea Vaccà, his renowned physician, Francesco Pacchiani, the notorious University Professor, Tommaso

Sgricci, the most famous improvvisatore 16 of the period and, of course, Emilia Viviani, the

Pisan governor’s pretty daughter held in a convent, whom Mary Shelley wryly called

Shelley’s “Italian Platonics”. These people enchanted the poet for different reasons and formed part of his famous circle.

Professor Pacchiani, known in Pisa as il Diavolo Pacchiani, was a favourite of the

Shelleys. His brilliant conversation exercised such charm upon Percy Shelley that in a letter to John Gisborne the poet admitted to being “in love with Pacchiani” (PBSL II, 250) and according to Thomas Medwin, “[he] listened with rapt attention to his eloquence, which he compared to that of Coleridge” (Cline 12). It was actually through him that the Shelleys’ circle of acquaintances widened, as he introduced them to Emilia Viviani, Sgricci, Taaffe, and the Greeks Mavrocordatos and Argiropoli. The oblique professor, however, did not remain long in the Shelleys’ favour. This also happened with the improvvisatore Sgricci, whom

Shelley initially admired and attended his popular accademie but ultimately dismissed from 251 his company. Apart from Sgricci’s acknowledged influence, the acquaintances which left behind the most enduring results – and inspired two of Shelley’s most important works,

Epipsychidion and Hellas – were Viviani and Mavrocordatos, although as regards the Greek expatriate, there is evidence that Shelley simply tolerated him for his wife’s sake.17

Therefore, while the first circle of acquaintance formed by the Shelleys in Pisa consists of Italians and expatriates from England or elsewhere, the group gradually shrinks to a few chosen companions. The city’s attractions, as Shelley’s letters testify, are all the more enhanced by the prospect that his friends could join him at Pisa (Curreli and Johnson xiii).

His proposition for the creation of a community of persons similar in terms of education, outlook and taste, is more conditional and qualified than it appears in the well-known excerpt on roots cited before (“to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in feelings: & to connect ourselves with the interests of that society”). These resonant lines read more like an apposition or elucidation of what Shelley had argued earlier in the letter, regarding the composition of the intended group. The poet addresses his wife:

What think you of remaining at Pisa? The Williams’s would probably

be induced to stay there if we did; Hunt would certainly stay at least

this winter near us, should he emigrate at all; Lord Byron and his Italian

friends would remain quietly there, & Lord Byron has certainly a great

regard for us – the regard of such a man is worth – some of the tribute

we must pay to the base passions of humanity in any intercourse

with those within its circle – he is better worth it, than those on

whom we bestow it from mere custom. – The Masons are there –

& as far as solid affairs are concerned are my friends. (PBSL II, 338-339)

Therefore, a reading of the whole letter reveals that the desired members of the Pisan circle are limited to Byron, Hunt, the Williamses, Mr and Mrs Mason, as well as Horace 252

Smith and Peacock whom Shelley had repeatedly invited to join him, while the few elect

Italians have already been dismissed. In addition, it is of note that Shelley comes to speak of roots and the formation of a group only after he has secured Byron’s acceptance to join them, while his words reveal that, within a society of their own, he would be less vulnerable to the calumnies and critical attacks that had been plaguing him. As for the wider social purpose of the group Shelley aims to gather in Pisa in 1821, this remains largely unspecified in this unofficial manifesto, as opposed to his elaborate planning of other utopian associations we encounter in his previous writings.

Shelley’s soured elitism expressed in both extracts and epitomised in the phrase “to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible, in intellect or in feelings” raises the wider issue of Shelley’s political identity, a rather problematic and controversial issue for literary scholars. Donald Reiman has persuasively argued that Shelley, “benevolent and generous though he was and possessing a highly sensitive social conscience though he did – he was not himself exempt from being unconsciously swayed in his social, economic and political theories by inbred class prejudices” (Romantic Texts 269). As his contemporaries Hunt and Peacock benignly noted, Shelley never quite outgrew his predisposition to think of social, economic, and moral questions from the point of view of a landed aristocrat (Reiman 262-263). Nevertheless, and as P.M.S Dawson points out, it is fair to recognise that Shelley’s “consciousness of class is not to be identified with class consciousness” (“Shelley and Class” 38), meaning that Shelley’s allegiance was not to the interests of any existing class, but to certain potent abstractions – Justice, Reason, Love,

Equality, Liberty. These universal values would be articulated by the enlightened and creative minds, by the poets (as Shelley uses the term in A Defence of Poetry), the only “class”

Shelley committed himself to because of the powerful role he felt it would play in the transformation of society, in “The World’s great age”. 253

On the other hand, however, the letter excerpt illustrates that much as he advocated the constitution of an intellectual community, formed, that is, on the basis of education, refinement, erudition and libertarian views stemming from an Enlightenment universalism,

Shelley could not always escape the entanglements of class affiliation. In the case of the Pisan circle, I would add the entanglements of his national and cultural affiliations, which seem to condition his choices. The paradox in this issue of community forming is that, although

Sgricci and Pacchani, as well as some Pisan University professors with whom the Shelleys occasionally socialised, answer the category of “refined” and “freethinking”, they, too, are ultimately dismissed from the circle. Even though Shelley enunciates his community of intellectuals as living through divisions of rank, class interest and nationality, seeking relations of “intellect or feeling”, that is, affiliative, rather than filiative ones, his tactical considerations as regards the composition of the group problematise even further his already equivocal political identity. At this point I should note that I am using the terms filiative and affiliative in the context of Said’s theory of “filiation” and “affiliation”. In The World, the

Text and the Critic, Said claims that while filiation refers to heritage and lines of descent in nature, affiliation refers to a process of identification through culture. The critic suggests that the move from traditional society to modern civilisation brought about the replacement of the filiative scheme by the affiliative one, and thus the passing from nature to culture, from generation to identification (20). The crucial ambiguity that attends Shelley’s alliance to the non-native community is a result of the “mediation” his self-fashioned, bicultural identity purportedly enacts.

To further the issue of local politics, the Pisa to which Shelley’s lyrics and letters alluded was far from the real one. Though its population had decreased and the city was in a state of decadence compared to its past glories, Pisa, at that time, was certainly not “the grave of an extinguished people” as Shelley conceptualised it, and although “the lava had not yet 254 reached Tuscany”, as he had worriedly remarked in a letter to Peacock in March 1821, the city was in a state of ferment and unrest. The circle of students – many of them exiled from other Italian Universities – and professors were the major proponents of revolutionary action and struggle for freedom, influenced by the growth of secret societies and subversive movements which thrived in the South. 18 Italian historians of this period point out the oxymoronic stance of the British expatiates at Pisa with regard to local politics. Although at some point during their Italian sojourn they all became involved in the cause of Italian nationalism, more through their discourse and less through active participation, oddly enough, they seemed to ignore or sidestep the strongly felt commotion and agitation around them.

Marco Marchini and Alessandro Panajia cite the example of a famous literary café in

Pisa, “L’Ussero” (its name meaning “soldier of light cavalry”) which in the 1820s had become the meeting point of numerous young Italian liberals and literati, some of whom developed into key-figures for the nationalist struggle, and whose ideas laid the foundations of the Risorgimento. The account that follows is, I think, noteworthy because, beneath

Marchini’s biting irony, and despite slight inaccuracies in historical facts, the piece underscores once more the problematic notion of alliance and community, both of which contribute to the formation of identity. In addition, it is suggested that the Anglo-Italians’ selective mixing was far more selective and interested than proclaimed:

In quei tempi c’erano anche due elegantoni inglesi, due specie

di milordi, che passavano sui lungarni […] Eran due gran poeti,

gia celebri in Europa, Giorgio Byron e Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ma

i due nobiloni inglesi preferivano esplorare i monasteri e gli

educandati pisani anziche frequantare il caffè dei lungarni

formicolante di studenti, che doveva apparire a loro alquanto

volgaruccio e senza interesse. I due aristocratici poeti non potevano 255

sapere che lì c’erano già in nuce alcune tra le piu belle speranze

della gloria letteraria italiana. Certo è che in nessuna delle lettere

dei due poeti inglesi riguardanti il periodo pisano si è trovato

un accenno qualsiasi all’Ussero. (593-594) 19

It is of interest that Shelley’s imaginative geography of the city reflects his actual relation to it, for his reconstruction of Pisa through certain meanings, memories, and histories in his lyrics relies to a great extent on the careful de-construction and exclusion of others.

Shelley fashions his identity through the meanings of place he chooses to integrate, but he inevitably refashions the topography of place by transcribing his Anglo-Italianness on it.

Contemporary cultural theorists contend that the constitution of identity always involves a construction, rather than a discovery, of difference, through what Gillian Rose calls “the process of Othering” (116). On this subject, and to remember Shelley’s disconnection with the refined Pisans, Gupta and Ferguson aptly observe that “[c]ommunity is never simply the recognition of cultural similarity or social contiguity, but a categorical identity that is premised on various forms of exclusion and constructions of otherness” (13).

In this respect, Shelley’s relation to the societal, economic, and political space of Pisa evidences a selective, processual and conditional alliance and defies simple categorisation under the headings of insideness or outsideness. Shelley defines himself by identifying with and in opposition to his adopted place, a process which is related with social power relations.

Affiliations to a place are ways of claiming insideness, but the politics of claiming to be an insider are also often the politics of claiming power (Rose 116). Shelley’s claiming and disclaiming insideness describes, ultimately, a place-based, rather than place-bound identity position.

Nevertheless, much as Shelley’s fascination with the refined Italians of Pisa was short- lived and passing, the Italian who exercised probably the most lasting and thorough influence 256 on his later work was Tommaso Sgricci. As it has been convincingly argued by P.M.S.

Dawson and other critics, Shelley’s Hellas and “Orpheus” can be seen as attempts to imitate

Sgricci in the art of improvisation, while, at the time when Shelley was preparing to write A

Defence of Poetry, Sgricci influenced “if only by timely reinforcement, the way in which

Shelley conceived of the process of poetic creation […] [He] reinforced in Shelley a tendency to conceive of poetry as the product of quasi-divine inspiration” (20, 21). Thomas Medwin records that Shelley thought Sgricci to be “the greatest genius […] that perhaps Italy ever produced” in the art of improvisation, while Byron’s view was equally favourable (qtd. in

Forman 115).

It is worth pointing out that Sgricci’s improvising was enthusiastically received by the

English emigrates in Pisa, particularly Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Claire Clairmont. In fact, it impressed Shelley so profoundly that it prompted him to respond to his celebrated Pisa performance, a tragedy on the death of Hector (“La morte d’Ettore”), with a review written in

Italian (dated 22nd Jan.1821). The review was probably intended for a local periodical

(Dawson, “Shelley and the Improvvisatore” 20). Although it was never published, this unfinished piece is significant because it contains some seeds of the genesis of A Defence of

Poetry, and, by extension, because it contributed to the formation of Shelley’s aesthetic and cultural education. Yet, I believe that if this document is seen in its historical and material context, it marks another instance of Shelley’s ambivalent positioning within the adopted culture: first through the employment of Italian language, and second through Shelley’s use of the first person plural to associate himself with the Pisan audience.20

An obvious and immediate consequence of the French Revolution seems to have been the reinforcement and development of nationalist tendencies. Such distinctions were reinforced by a strong sense of linguistic difference: each nation seemed to be characterised and defined by the specific and local nature of its own language which expressed and defined 257 national identity in a compressed and vivid fashion. Thus, in the development of nationalism in the nineteenth century, language itself would become “a political issue and a driving social force” (Kipperman 51). Italian, however, was exercised by many travellers, travel writers and creative artists in the Romantic period, its fascination being a result not only of the energy and dramatic force with which it was often enunciated, but also of the general belief that it gave expression to an identity which was quintessentially and recognisably “Italian”.

It is a case in point that many British travellers, or temporary residents in Italy at the time, considered their knowledge of Italian a substantial indication of their authentic, unique

Italian experience and acculturation. Mary Shelley takes knowledge of the Italian language as the main distinction between the tourist and the traveller. In her definition of the Anglo-

Italian, knowledge of the language is ranked first in the list of qualities: “First, he understands

Italian, and thus rescues himself from a thousand ludicrous mishaps which occur to those who fancy that a little Anglo-French will suffice to convey intelligence of their wants and wishes to the natives of Italy” (EI 343). Mary Shelley repeats this argument when she talks of Byron, whom she considered the Anglo-Italian par excellence, and of his exemplary familiarity with

Italian, but also when she talks about herself in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843.

Stuart Hall argues that cultures are systems of meanings, specifying that “cultures consist of different systems which produce meaning, which classify the world meaningfully”

(“New Cultures for Old” 179). Among these structures, he acknowledges language, religion, tradition, and place. Language is a fundamental cultural system, whose import is testified historically through its linkage with struggles for national independence on the one hand, and its use as a powerful symbol of cultural subjugation on the other (179-180). In addition, a shared language shows, to say the least, familiarity with the values of other language-users. In this way, it reinforces a person’s feeling of belongingness and bonding with the language 258 community. Shelley, who was a polyglot, was influenced by foreign literary models and was fascinated by the art of translation – from and into Italian, ancient Greek, Spanish and

German. The case of the Italian review, however, proves that Shelley’s linguistic affiliations are not always driven by a purely personal or scholarly interest. The employment of Italian to communicate his responses to Sgricci’s tragedy to a wider public marks a distinctly social act.

Shelley’s code switching intimates culture switching – or, at least, culture blending. A reading of the text reveals Shelley’s uncontained enthusiasm and admiration, not only for the improviser’s performance, but for the city’s miraculous “transformation” into a house of inspiration and creativity:

Sul il Sgr. Sgricci dava una academia di poesia

estemporanea a Pisa, l’effetto della quale forse sovrastava tutto

cio ch’Italia mai conobbe in quel genere.[...] Ognuno presente a

accademia predetta fu testimoni di quanto suo cuore fu commosso,

quanto imaginazione inalzata, quanto l’intelleto pago. La udienza

fra la quale era S.A. La duchessa de Chablais, la di cui benignita

ed amore per le belle arte e ben conosciuto, fu digna di quanto Pisa

sola potrebbe. L’udienza fu, tutto cio che Pisa di gentile e di dotto

Fra egli Inglesi soggiornanti in quella

città quali le afford. Inglesi in quali

and subsequently cancelled> (qtd. in Dawson 27).21

In contrast to the lyrics previously discussed, where Pisa figures as desolate and decadent, the city is presented here as the hub of an unsurpassed cultural event, where “the very theatre was transformed to that which he [the poet] was representing, [and] the highest style of tragic poetry […] electrified the theatre” (qtd. in Dawson 28; emphasis added).

Sgricci’s art of improvisation seemed at the time a living proof of Shelley’s idea of poetry, 259 and the review extract voices a most fundamental premise of Shelleyan theory, namely, the power of poetry/the poet to transform and reform the world. The impact the Italian poet leaves upon his audience is likened to the passing of electric current, a metaphor which strongly alludes to Shelley’s fascination with the scientific world, and to his own alarming electrical experiments while he was a student at Oxford. The space where these “re-actions” take place is nurtured, it is implied, by the hidden presence of the sacred. Shelley maps on this locatable event the contours of a Romantic “elsewhere”. The vision for a reconfigured space, identity and literacy is momentarily grounded, and Pisa suddenly becomes the center, the One, “the abode where the Eternal are”. This sort of exemplary microcosm, which seems to enact a perfect world, as this was envisaged in the last part of Lines Written Among the

Euganean Hills, finds in Pisa a temporary but grounded referent, a local habitation and a name. Shelley’s review, in hailing the Pisa performance as an exemplification of what poetry can do, but also in hailing the event per se as the time- and space-bound embodiment of an ideal geography, marks a cultural, social, and political act in the wider context of the Pisan project. Sgricci’s performance, a local, isolated event, acquires through Shelley’s discourse the dimensions of a universal event, and symbolises poetry’s power to change the world.

More specifically, in the vocabulary of spatial metaphors, the theatre of Pisa constitutes a heterotopia, meaning, literally, a place of different order, an actual place conceived as being otherwise. In Michel Foucault’s conceptual frame, heterotopias, contrary to utopias, are real places and function as “counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted” (24). In the same article the French philosopher observes that the heterotopia “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (25). Hence he identifies the theatre as a kind of heterotopia, because the theatre is a place where many different spaces 260 converge and become entangled: “Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another” (25).

Accordingly, in his enraptured description of Sgricci’s improvisation, Shelley intertwines real space (the theatre, the audience) and performed space (the scenes of the tragedy) with imagined space. In this respect, the narrative of place itself exposes its hetero-topias.

To return to Foucault’s definition, in Shelley’s heterotopic discourse, the Pisan theatre performs a double function as “counter-site” to Pisan geography. On the one hand it is an

“enacted utopia” which confirms and stabilises the city’s socio-political reality by mirroring its actual structures of meaning. On the other hand, this “other space” suspects and contests the set of relations it represents, by bringing out the contradictions and oscillations within it.

The theatrical event juxtaposes the illusory cultural sublimity and communal harmony with the tensions which beset the relations between the society of expatriates and the local community. Shelley’s heterotopology designates the “electrified” theatre as a space which reflects and deflects the set of relations that constitute it.

The element of heterotopia in this context will become clearer, if considered in relation to Shelley’s indirect statement of affilation through the use of the first person plural in the review to associate himself with his Italian audience. Unlike Byron, who often boasted to his compatriots of his facility in Italian cultural modes and his intimacy with the Italians,

Shelley generally disliked mixing with local people and took little interest in community life and everyday Italian reality, with the sole exception of Pisa. On no occasion did he attempt to

“go native” in the ostensible way many of his fellow expatriates tried to do, but preferred a detached viewpoint with regard to modern Italy, amply illustrated in his letters. In the review, however, Shelley’s identification process is indeed surprising, particularly when he unites with the theatre audience in the experience of the momentous event. Shelley is indiscriminately synchronised with the people around him: “l’imaginazione fa, fra di noi, in 261 un momento l’opra che l’intelletto consomma fra gli altri in lungo tempo, o dopo molte tentative, e questo dono e il pregio del nostro presente destino, ed il pegno del futuro”

[“among us the imagination performs in an instant the work which the reason accomplishes among others in a long period of time, or after many attempts, and this gift is the glory of our present destiny, and the pledge of our future”] (29; Dawson’s translation). His conclusions imply that those who attended Sgricci’s improvisation are a privileged group of people because of the unique effects this incident will have on their sensibility.

Nonetheless, Shelley abstracts the audience, much as he tends to abstract and idealise the performance itself. The poet’s association with Italians is admittedly atypical and convincing, but partly justifiable in its context, if one considers Shelley’s awareness of who the review would be read by. I believe, in other words, that even though the piece is written in

Italian and discusses a purely Italian form of art, it is not necessarily addressed to an Italian but to an Italianised, or, better still, Anglo-Italian audience. Interestingly, the review ends not merely with a brief report on the spectators of the event, but with a pointed qualification of their national, cultural, and class status: “The audience consisted of all that Pisa in the way of nobility and learning […] Among them English people dwelling in that city”. The unfinished piece with its obscure and ambiguous ending stops, sadly, at a crucial point, and leaves much to be inferred. Shelley’s discourse finally complicates the role of the review, and inscribes the theatre’s heterotopic space as one that stabilises and unsettles the ideologies it contains. The case considered illustrates that through a discriminatory attachment to Italian systems of meaning, Percy Shelley claims to being an insider, while at the same time his self-fashioned identity helps him to blur any sharp division between inside and outside and enables him to pass from one zone to another, to integrate and be integrated, reinventing himself as an

Anglo-Italian. 262

The intricacies and modalities which underpin Shelley’s Anglo-Italianness, illustrated in the ways of his attachment to Italian place, community, and language can be further elucidated if examined parallel to Mary Shelley’s activities at the time. Although their attitudes towards Italy differ in many respects, largely due to cultural coordinates not tackled in this chapter, the instances discussed below suggest that their Pisan geographies, though mapped in different ways, at some point intersect. First of all, it is worth mentioning that

Mary Shelley responds to Sgricci’s art with enthusiasm, equal if not greater than that of her husband’s. In fact, she includes a brief but vivid account of La Morte d’Ettore in a letter to

Claire Clairmont in which she also uses the language of divine inspiration to describe the performance: “S. was in excellent inspiration, his poetry was brilliant flowing & divine […] music eloquence & poetry were combined in this wonderful effort of the imagination – or rather shall I say of the inspiration of some wondrous deity” (MWSL 182).

Also, in a letter to Leigh Hunt written a little earlier (29th Dec. 1820), she rapturously elaborates on another one of Sgricci’s celebrated performances: “The ideas and verses & scenes flowing in rich succession like the perpetual gush of a fast falling cataract. The ideas poetic and just; the words the most beautiful, scelte [select] and grand that his excellent

Italian afforded” (MWSL 171).

Nevertheless, Mary Shelley’s tone changes completely when, through the use of acerbic analogies, she expresses her strong discontent that the improvvisatore’s “divine” talent should be wasted before an ignorant audience such as the Pisans’, who “are noted for their want of love and of course entire ignorance of the fine arts” (MWSL 171):

If however his auditors were refined – and as the oak or the rock

to the lightning – feeling in their inmost souls the penetrative fire

of his poetry – […] But to Improvise to a Pisan audience is to scatter

otto of roses among the overweighing stench of a charnel house: – 263

pearls to swine were oeconomy in comparison. As Shelley told him

[Sgricci] the other night He appeared in Pisa as Dante among the

ghosts – Pisa is a city of the dead and they shrunk from his living

presence. (MWSL 171-72)

Mary Shelley’s antipathy for Pisa and its “dull inhabitants” was well-noted, and pertains to the complications of her Anglo-Italianness, an issue I have tried to tackle in an earlier chapter. Paradoxically, though, among her revealing letters which aptly document the tension and distress of the Pisan years, we find a long letter to Leigh Hunt written exclusively in Italian. It has been suggested by Miranda Seymour that it was perhaps under Pacchiani’s spell that Mary decided for the first time to write a letter entirely in Italian (262). Considering the addressee, it has also been proposed that Mary Shelley’s conscious choice to transform herself into a cultural “other”, to express herself in a language other than her own without any obvious reason, might be partly justified by her wish to assert her intellectual and her female self, both to Leigh Hunt and among a circle of English and Italian (male) intellectuals that gradually begins to form around her.22 Although I concur with both views, I would also like to suggest that the deliberate switching of codes, in connection with the content and style of the letter, figure Italianness in a compelling way, turning it into a vehicle for specific meanings and imaginings.

Mary wholeheartedly shared Percy’s early enthusiasm for their “refined” Italian friends. More specifically, in the course of the letter, she comments on Sgricci, Pacchiani and

Viviani and even flaunts her acquaintance, or her “attachment”, to use her own term, to the first two, because they form part of the elect Italian society, very different to the low-class

Pisans of which she often speaks with disdain. Of Pacchiani she writes in spirited Italian:

“Lui è davero il solo Italiano che ha cuore ed anima. Ha un spirito altissimo, un ingegno profondo, e un’ elequequenza che trasporta. […] Parla una belissima lingua Italiana, tutto 264 differente della idioma di oggi, che ci fa credere d’udire il Boccaccio o il Macchiavelli parlando come scrissono. […] I poveri Pisani lo credano matto; […] Ogni sera viene ala nostra casa e sempre fa le nostre delizie colle di sue idee originale” (MWSL 163).23 With regard to Sgricci she notes: “un Improvisatore – un uomo di gran’ talento – e molto forte nel

Greco, e con genio poetico incomparabile” (MWSL 163).24 Mary Shelley’s admiration for

Pacchiani and Sgricci stems from her genuine appreciation, as an Anglo-Italian, for the native genius of the Italians, of which these two men are exemplary representatives. Her laudatory comments suggest that Sgricci and Pacchiani were proper society for the English emigrants who wished to refine their taste and improve their cultural knowledge of their host country.

From the rest of the letter, the dominating impression is that Mary invents an authoritative identity, as commentator on Italian politics, culture and mores. As she would do in her writings on Italy later in England, she wishes very explicitly to valorise her voice and authority. Thus, she claims an insider’s understanding of Italian public reaction concerning

Queen Caroline. In lively Italian Mary Shelley writes:

Pero credo che voi in Inghilterra son piu duri ed aspri che noi, quando

vedo che cosi pochi di tutti i nobili defendevano la disgraziata Regina,

chi davero credo sia innocentissima. […] Si sa bene che era i espioni

che feciono il sentimento contra di lei, che esiste in Italia. Ma non

ostante questo sentimento forte tutti i Italiani dicono che per certo la

evidenza no era assai per condannarla – e davero mi pare che hanno

un oppinione molto piu favorevole per lei dopo codesto processo che

avante. Tutti son inorridito dalla indecenza del processo infame per

sempre. (MWSL 162)25

Furthermore, Mary Shelley flaunts her incontestable knowledge of Italian ethics and marital codes, apropos of Emilia Viviani’s case: “Vi diro, amico mio come si maritono in questo 265 paese. E posso assicuravi della verita perche al momento che scrivo, ho davante i di miei occhi una proposizione per una ragazza Pisana” (MWSL 163).26 The episode, in effect, is narrated as a curiosity, from an almost journalistic point of view. Mary Shelley’s gaze on contemporary Italian society, in other words, is that of a knowledgeable but ultimately detached observer. Bearing in mind to whom the letter is addressed, my further suggestion is that Mary’s interest in contributing pieces on Italy to literary journals is imminent, especially if we consider that at the time, “Italy” as a subject for novels, travel journals, poems and diaries had developed into a kind of (profitable) fashion. Finally, apart from the temporal and spatial coincidence of Mary Shelley’s letter and Percy Shelley’s review, the fact that the

Italian language “figures” simultaneously in two different genres, a private document and in a public text respectively, offers a suggestive contrast and carries significant overtones about the relation women writers had to Italy in comparison to their male counterparts.

4.3 Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad and the Anglo-Italian Discourse of The Liberal

The circle of British expatriates at Pisa – which formed part of what Mary Shelley called “the well-informed, clever and active race” of Anglo-Italians – was a group which openly claimed a distinctive role in the construction of cultural and political models for society in general, and for British society in particular. To this end, it used its varied cultural practices and non-conformist lifestyle to challenge the dominant ideology and to call into question institutional power. The Shelleys’ circle envisaged an educational project that would ultimately lead to cultural and political reform. Appropriately, Shelley, Byron, and Hunt’s plans for a joint journal work, The Liberal, epitomised the group’s reformative tendencies.

The new publication was lodged as a manifesto of “liberal knowledge”, 27 seeking to embody in literary form the ideas, opinions, and imaginings of the young British Romantics who espoused its cause. As Hunt pointed out in his compelling Preface to the first issue, the 266 intention of the magazine’s instigators was to contribute their “liberalities in the shape of

Poetry, Essays, Tales, Translations, and other amenities, of which kings themselves may read and profit, if they are not afraid of seeing their own faces in every species of inkstand” (L I, vii).

As important recent studies have demonstrated,28 Leigh Hunt was the intellectual and political leader of “the Cockney School of Poetry”, a phrase coined by conservative reviewing journals of the time to designate the circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals – or, what we call second generation Romantics – loosely organised around the provocative editor of the Examiner.29 The group included a large number of members and many ephemeral participants. Among the best known ones were John Keats, William Hazlitt, Horace Smith,

John Hamilton Reynolds, Cornelius Webb, and Benjamin Robert Haydon. John Keats, due to his close association with Hunt, was the immediate object of Blackwood’s indictments, and went furthest among the other poets in adapting the “insolent” Cockney politics of style.

Despite the “pronounced tensions, different aesthetic investments and shifting alliances among its members”, the Cockney School, in its various print forms and social locations, provided, according to Greg Kucich, “one of the most important cultural environments, if not a kind of central training ground, for the artistic development of second-generation

Romanticism” (264). With the Examiner as their chief print vehicle, these poets and writers shared Hunt’s defiance towards authority, and committed themselves vigorously to social reform. As Peter L. Thorslev, Jr. argues, what this disparate group of Romantic liberals had in common were their politics, meaning “a hearty contempt for the establishment of church and state, and especially for the chief ministers, Wellington and Castlereagh […]; an equivocal attitude toward Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars; a respect for the principles at least of the

Revolution, […] and an Enlightenment faith in an age of (romantic) reaction” (446). 267

Percy and Mary Shelley were closely connected with Hunt, whereas Byron was attached to the School in various ways that led to the experiment of The Liberal,30 and, some would contend, to its failure. In his important study Poetry and Politics in the Cockney

School, Jeffrey Cox attempts to read the Pisan circle as Shelley’s (failed) effort to reconstruct the London Hunt circle at Pisa, placing it, therefore in the context of a wider community of liberal writers who aspired, through communal work, to cultural and social reform. The critic argues that in 1821, Shelley was keen to reassemble the Hunt circle in Tuscany (John Keats,

Horace Smith, and Hunt himself) and to direct its political-literary energies into The Liberal magazine. Linked to his hopes for transforming the world, Pisa becomes for Shelley, in Cox’s words, the embodiment of “an ideal circle of liberal writers” (Cox, Poetry and Politics 217) and “a model of a world remade” (221). In a similar tone, Kucich claims that “the Pisa setting where the group eventually reconvened to produce the Liberal” was an “offshoot” of Hunt’s

Hampstead group (266).

Although I concur with Cox’s and Kucich’s suggestion that the Pisan circle was ideologically allied to the Cockney School, and that, hence, the groups should be considered contrapuntally, I believe it is equally important to confront the British expatriates’ “situated nature of experience” (Gilroy 3), meaning, on the one hand, their geographical displacement and claims to a cosmopolitan Weltanschauung, and on the other hand, the group’s varied attempts to reinvent their identity through the meanings of place, and through the appropriation of Italy’s cultural systems. More specifically, it is my contention that the current historical perspective on The Liberal can be further enriched if the circle’s major collaborative literary project is seen not merely as a showcase of second generation Romantic politics, but as an integral part of its instigators’ Anglo-Italian identity politics, evinced in the varying degrees of their identification with Italianness and in their professed in-betweenness.

In other words, I propose that The Liberal be contextualised within the specific cultural- 268 geographical coordinates that formed and informed its emergence. The periodical’s connection with Italy – as the geographical base and as the adopted country of its Anglo-

Italians founders and contributors – is an inevitable part of its short but turbulent story. First of all, Anglo-Italianness largely valorised and legitimised the role of these Romantic cultural revolutionaries as reformers of their native land. Furthermore, for these expatriates,

Italianness becomes a site: a reconfigured social space, a new literary discourse, and an alternative form of cultural production. Finally, from the moment The Liberal is proclaimed a product of acculturation – its full title being The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South – with its main contributors claiming for themselves the vestiture of Anglo-Italianness, the question that arises is how this project records and maps bicultural sensibility.

In this part of the chapter, I will focus on Leigh Hunt’s Letters from Abroad, which, to my mind, is a telling record of the intricate character of Anglo-Italian politics. Even though the periodical contains a number of mediocre translations from Italian poets such as Alfieri and Ariosto, as well as two short stories with Italian themes, Hunt’s epistolary travelogue on

Italy is the only sizeable effort of this publication to directly acquaint its British audience with the “adopted” land, and therefore, italianise compatriots at home – to remember Mary

Shelley’s definition – and “to disseminate among them a portion of that taste and knowledge acquired in the Peninsula” (EI 343). As I argue, Hunt’s accounts, while they profess a comparative look, invariably confirm English omniscience and superiority. The author of the

Letters, in order to talk about liberalism, seems to rely more on the emotive connotations evoked by Italy and less on the country’s current dynamics. Moreover, I contend that Hunt’s travelogue figures Italianness as an attractive and alternative spatiality, identity and literacy, only to undermine it in the end, by configuring it into a zone of contention, contradiction and suspicion. 269

The Liberal, of course, cannot be considered a complete, consistent project either on the basis of its political direction, or in terms of its contributions. Shelley’s death in 1822, which clearly marked the end of the Pisan circle, ensued a series of complications. Thus, the transference of the group to Genoa, the open conflict between Byron and Hunt, and Byron’s withdrawal from the scheme, presaged the dissolution of The Liberal while still in its infancy.

Indeed, the conditions, bound together as they came to be, were so adverse even from the beginning, that, as William Marshall claims, “the real question does not concern the causes of the failure of The Liberal but the reason that any of the participants thought that it could succeed” (212). Sketched by the majority of literary historians as a utopian, rather than as a realistic project, The Liberal has not attracted much critical attention, mainly because it has been seen as an isolated effort of little merit.

Nonetheless, the Anglo-Italian periodical figured the work of some of the most influential second generation Romantics: Leigh Hunt, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley,

William Hazlitt, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Charles Brown and Horace Smith. The association of literary figures which the magazine’s existence brought about, is in itself an indisputable accomplishment, and even overshadows interest in its contents. Out of the four issues, the probably best remembered items are Byron’s satire The Vision of Judgement (for which the magazine’s publisher John Hunt received an indictment), and Hazlitt’s essay “My First

Acquaintance with Poets”. Having announced Italian, German, and Spanish literature as a

“favourite subject” of the contributors, the magazine featured a considerable number of translations (such as Shelley’s “May-day Night” from Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s translation of the first canto of Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore, and Hunt’s translations of various minor pieces, mainly by Alfieri and Ariosto) or short stories with an Italian theme (Mary Shelley’s “A Tale of the Passions” and “Giovanni Villani”). The Liberal also vaunted an extraordinary miscellany of genres and styles – poetry, essays, short stories, essays, travelogues, epigrams. 270

As for its political conception of liberalism, although in the Preface Hunt had tried to reconcile it with a liberalism that embraced intellectual freedom, 31 and he also denied the magazine’s direct relation to politics, some of its works were meant as anti-Establishment writing and carried direct political significance (The Vision of Judgement, “Epigrams on Lord

Castlereagh”, “The Dogs”) while others propagated political freedom (“The Suliotes”, “On the Spirit of Monarchy”).

Speaking of the “generation of the dislocated”, Stuart Curran argues that the liberal expatriates of the post-Napoleonic era were well aware of belonging to a privileged group with similar interests, whose cultural activity promoted their political vision, as “collectively, they might know themselves to be in the liberal vanguard, able to speak across countries and between cultures, and thus to constitute for the first time a world intellectual community”

(“The Birth of a World Intelligentsia” 94). These expatriate intellectuals, however, took a close interest in the social, economic, cultural, and political developments which underpinned the situation in their home country. Much as they “lay asleep in Italy”, to paraphrase

Shelley’s famous opening line from The Mask of Anarchy, the Shelleys’ group felt the reverberations caused by the cultural war in London, waged among various literary groups which professed different opinions, manners, and sentiments, and which reflected the social tensions and revolutionary threats which pervaded imperialist, reactionary post-war England.

As Cox argues, “[t]his was not primarily a debate over aesthetics; it was a struggle over the definition of post-Napoleonic culture and society” (Poetry and Politics 35). More specifically, he observes that for the circle around Hunt, the work of the Lake poets published in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat “marked a conservative effort to demarcate the shape of culture for the post-Napoleonic age” (“The Lakers’ Other” 5). Because of its links with the

Cockneys, the Pisan group was inevitably and variedly involved in this struggle. William

Wordsworth’s comment in anticipation of The Liberal in April 1822 is an illuminating 271 illustration of the tense literary climate – marking the widening gap between the Lake poets and the younger Romantics – and of the fact that the general attitude of contempt for the project was mixed with apprehension and suspicion. Wordsworth reported that he had heard

that Byron, Shelley, Moore, Leigh Hunt [… ] are to lay their heads

together in some Town of Italy, for the purpose of conducting a

Journal to be directed against everything in religion, in morals

and probably in government and literature, which our Forefathers

have been accustomed to reverence. (qtd. in Marshall 48)

The exaggeratedly hostile reaction to these expatriates’ cultural activities, best depicted in the heated polemics their plans for the periodical generated in the reactionary circles of England, uncovers arenas of ideological conflict. Out of the numerous invectives and abusive comments the joint project received, it is worth noting those which evoke Pisa

(Italianness) as a site of vice, atheism and sedition, and which point to a synecdochic method of fashioning the place – and in our case tainting the place – through the political identities of its temporary inhabitants. Thus, Shelley, Byron and Hunt were identified as “The Pisan

Triumvirate” (Blackwood’s qtd. in Cox, Poetry and Politics 216), “the grand Pisan conspiracy” (The London Literary Gazette qtd. in Hogg 67), “the Unholy Alliance of Pisa”

(Thomas Moore qtd. in Tillett 29), while The Liberal is labelled the “Italianised Cockney

Magazine” (John Bull qtd. in Cox, Poetry and Politics 35), “The Manifesto of the Pisan

Conspirators” (The New European Magazine qtd. in Marshall 108), and the work of

“translated cockneys” (St. James’s Chronicle qtd. in Marshall 98). Obviously, the reviewers extend their abusive attacks on the Cockneys to the Pisan group, but they also activate a discourse of alterity and intrigue, admittedly inventive, which distances the geopolitical reality of Pisa even more and re-casts Italianness into a hermeneutics of suspicion. 272

Subsequently, the Anglo-Italian identity that the founding members of the scheme carry is strongly politicised and becomes a sign for aesthetic and political divergence.

A similar degree of animus, alarm and anxiety for the intentions and principles of the

Pisan alliance was aroused in Italian governmental circles. After the 1815 restoration of the monarchs, Italy was tacitly accepted as a sphere of Austrian influence while chancellor

Metternich was determined to suppress any liberal movement in the peninsula, whether it was under Austrian rule or not. Therefore, the great number of spies employed by the Buon- governo in order to keep liberals under constant surveillance – the British expatriates included and Byron in particular – as well as the numerous police reports that were sent off daily from

Pisa, attest to the fact that the suspicions of the Tuscan government were thoroughly awakened, particularly after Byron’s settlement in Pisa, and on account of his involvement in the Carbonari movement in Ravenna. The following account given by Luigi Torelli, a police spy who corresponded directly with Metternich, illustrates that the literary pursuits of the forestieri seemed anything but innocent to the Italian police:

Byron no longer talks of leaving. On the contrary, he is expecting

another English poet, a certain Smith, [Hunt] and they intend to

start a newspaper against the Italian Government, which is to be

printed in England, and bring them in much money. This will be

something far worse than Lady Morgan’s book – a weekly satire

directed chiefly against Austria, whom they call the usurper of Italian

freedom. (qtd. in Ross 763)

Although Hunt had never visited Italy before joining the circle at Pisa, he was deeply italianised in the sense of education: apart from his classical readings, he had studied Italian literature and greatly admired Dante, Boccaccio and Ariosto. In fact, in his Foliage of 1818,

Hunt envisaged a new school of British poets to arise by turning to classical Greece and 273

Renaissance Italy, rather than to Latin literature, thus linking “three cultures dedicated to imaginative poetry and political liberty” (Cox, “Leigh Hunt’s Foliage” 66). To him, Italy was a readerly experience and an imaginative topography, rather than a topographical reality, and that was the “version” he wished to retain even after his brief sojourn in Tuscany, as he retrospectively admitted in his autobiography: “In short (saving, alas! a finer sky and a drier atmosphere, great ingredients in good spirits), we have the best part of Italy in books; and this we can enjoy in England. […] To me Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth. Its mountains were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in the grassy balm of my native fields” (Autobiography

376). In this extract Hunt calls on all five senses to emphasise the disturbing effect Italy’s landscape has on him and contrasts it with the soothing home setting.

The circle’s plans for the implementation of a joint literary project began to look feasible after Byron’s proposal to Shelley to start a periodical at Pisa.32 Leigh Hunt was called up from London in 1821 to join in the enterprise and finally agreed to move to Italy with his family, enthused with the idea of becoming a member of such a promising literary alliance.

Hunt’s letters to Byron and Shelley in that period, if read together, reveal how readily he engaged with the practicalities of the publication and how sanguine he was of its success. To

Byron he writes:

Suppose, for instance, we made a monthly or two-monthly publication,

entirely of Pisan origin, that is to say, written by ourselves and friends

there […] we might have essays, stories, poetry, poetical translation,

especially from the Italian, – in short, anything we chose to blurt out

or to be inspired with. (qtd. in Marshall 52; emphasis added)

In this excerpt, Hunt’s suggestion, namely that the periodical should be “entirely of

Pisan origin”, builds on the connotative power of place, as well as on the emotive effect of the 274 word “origin” and its associations with classical culture. At the same time, his clarification

(“that is to say, written by ourselves and friends there”) decouples place from its previous associations and reinvests its meanings in the concerns of the Pisan circle. In the manner of many nineteenth-century English travellers, Hunt transforms place “into something that resembled England, while still retaining a distinctiveness that [he] could pleasurably cultivate as ‘Italian’” (O’Connor 40).

On the other hand, in the letter he wrote to the Shelleys accepting the invitation to

Pisa, Hunt’s extreme optimism and confidence in the plan invites some comment. This time his self-assurance appears to emanate not only from the proposed place of action, but from his faith in the potential of the extraordinary party, when he envisions it in action:

With regard to the proposed publication of Lord B. about which

you talk so modestly […] I agree to his proposal with the less scruple

because I have had a good deal of experience in periodical writing

[…] You see I am not so modest as you are by a great deal, and do

not mean to let you be so either. What? Are there not three of us?

And ought we not to have as much strength and variety as possible?

We will divide the world between us, like the Triumvirate.

(172-173; emphasis added).

Hunt’s reference to the triumvirate in his letter to Shelley, with its strong connotations of the ancient Roman empire, occurs at a historical moment when the English national image was being formed and conflated into a cumulative British identity, a period during which the English were keen to imagine themselves as “heirs not only of the republican virtues but also of the imperial glories of ancient Rome” (Praz 20). Accordingly, the “appropriation” of Italy and Greece, viewed as the original homes of European civilisation, consists in the careful interweaving of the meanings of these places in English 275 national, cultural, and political narratives. Likewise, Hunt’s discourse suspends historical divides and hails the group’s current literary project as a worthy, heroic continuation of the venerable past.

Letters from Abroad, a travel writing in epistle form published as four independent letters in each of the four numbers of The Liberal offers, I believe, valuable insight into Leigh

Hunt’s attitude to Italy, but at the same time, into the ways the “Italianised Cockney magazine” records and problematises its purported country of origin in terms of physical, social, and political space.33 Marshall reports that the piece appears to have been the indirect result of Hunt’s earlier proposal to Byron that the periodical could open with an account of a land journey to Italy (76-77). Hunt’s descriptions for the Letters were based upon a journal he kept – and from which he admittedly took the account of his arrival at Genoa that forms a major part of the second of his Letters – and were included in his later autobiographical works, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) and The Autobiography of Leigh

Hunt (1850). The first of the Letters, a rambling essay on Pisa, is concerned with many of the points of historical, cultural, and literary significance in the town, while near the end it indulges in curiosities and anecdotes which relate to the Italian character and mores. The interesting thing about his narrative – personal, digressive, uneven, and sometimes laborious

– is that Hunt resorts to the familiar in order to describe what appears different. In other words, he translates otherness whenever encountered in terms of his own and his English readers’ familiar spaces, recuperating the specificity of the foreign site to a series of sites in

England. His accounts are full of analogies to the London experience, while his appeals to the reader to relate Pisa to something already known at home are not usually aimed towards a comparative approach to cultures, but towards a confirmation of English omniscience. Thus, in his effort to describe the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he notes:

Let the reader imagine the Monument of London sheathed in an open 276

work of eight stories of little columns, and leaning in a fine open situation,

and he will have some idea of this noble cylinder of marble. […] With

regard to the company in which it stands, let the reader suppose the new

square at Westminster Abbey, converted into a broad grass walk, and

standing in a much more solitary part of the town. (L I, 105)

Obviously, Hunt’s mental cartography of Pisa draws largely on the London topography, an idiosyncrasy which made a reviewer of The Liberal protest that Letters from

Abroad featured “a description of Pisa, every line of which Mr. Leigh Hunt could have written as well at Hampstead as in Italy” (qtd. in Marshall 101). In the same piece, although

Hunt admits that the city’s “desolate aspect is much exaggerated” (L I, 116), he fails to register its modern political and cultural milieu. Notably, he seems to rely more on the emotive connotations evoked by the city’s medieval history and art, and less on its present dynamics. Thus, “Liberal Opinion” is cited in relation to Galileo and not in relation to Italy’s current struggle for freedom, which at the time had already ushered a state of ferment and unrest in Tuscany:

Pisa is a tranquil, an imposing, and even now a beautiful and stately

city. It looks like the residence of an university: many parts of it seem

made up of colleges; and we feel as if we ought to walk gowned. It

possesses the Campo Santo, rich above earthly treasure; its river is

the river of Tuscan poetry […] and it disputes with Florence the birth

of Galileo. Here at all events he studied and he taught: here his mind was

born and another great impulse given to the progress of philosophy and

Liberal Opinion. (L I, 120)

The second of the Letters, which is mainly on Genoa, records a more personal response to Italian reality. It begins with an account of his arrival in Italy (Genoa) in 1822 in 277 which he vividly describes the profound culture shock he and his family experienced in their first encounter with foreignness and the “familiar otherness” of Italy. Italian and, more particularly, Genoese looks, physique, character, manners, customs, language, and city architecture are discussed tout court in this miscellany of impressions. Hunt capitalises on his mixed feelings at the sight of modern Italy and on the ill-assorted co-existence of past and present, glory and decadence. Italy “read” and Italy “experienced” are two conflicting, irreconcilable entities in his mind. Thus, the Anglo-Italian is repelled and shocked by the

Italians’ extreme preoccupation with money, which he claims to find both in Pisa and Genoa, and wryly comments: “But a stranger, full of the Italian poets and romances, is surprised to find the southern sunshine overgrown with this vile scurf” (L III, 54). Like most Romantic travel writers, Hunt records what he sees with intensity and emotion, and represents the foreign as dramatically different from the familiar, a rhetorical figure that Chloe Chard calls the trope of hyperbole (4). The following extract records the Hunts’ arrival in the harbour of

Genoa:

The boat contained, I think, as ugly a set of faces as could well be

brought together. It was a very neat boat, and the pilots were singularly

neat and clean in their persons; but their faces! My wife looked at me as

much as to say, “are these our fine Southern heads.” The children looked

at me: we all looked at one another: and what was very inhospitable, the

Pilots all looked at us […] We had scarcely got rid of our ugly men when

we were assailed with a much worse sight, a gang of ugly boys. […] Never

did we see a more striking look of something removed from humanity.

(L II, 270, 272)

The awkward exchange of looks among the members of the family and the increasing discomfort at the pilots’ “return” of the gaze suggest the shock and confusion the Hunts 278 experience. Hunt draws his discussion of physiognomy to an unexpectedly great length in this

Letter, not always with the most complimentary of terms for Italians. To ease the reader’s distress regarding Genoese society, he soon points out that “I afterwards found that as you ascended among the more educated classes, the faces improved […] In Italy, gentlemen do not look so much like gentlemen as in England, but there are greater number of women who look like ladies” (L II, 273). Hunt’s “ranking” is based on aesthetic grounds and mental ability, and stems from a belief in environmental determinism which informed the discourses of anthropology and sociology of the time. As the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age informs us, from the end of the eighteenth century until Darwinistic modes of thought revolutionised anthropological discourse, explanations of racial difference in terms of environmental modification of human physiology and intellect commanded the assent of most educated Britons (557). Speaking of the difference between English and Italian mores, Hunt recognises that “something, in the progress of such customs, is to be allowed for difference of climate” (L II, 272). The following amusing episode is indicative of Hunt’s ill-at-ease confrontation with cultural difference: “One night I went to the opera […] My northern faculties were scandalized at seeing men in the pit with fans! Effeminacy is not always incompatible with courage, but it is a very dangerous help towards it” (L II, 283-284).

Yet, his extraordinary insistence on countenance, and his mixing of looks with character, class, and mental sophistication can be, I think, better judged if read in conjunction with an essay entitled “Negro Civilization” which Hunt had published in The Examiner in

1811.34 In this article, although he attributes physical and customary differences to environmental conditions, he tries to reconcile this view with a version of cultural relativism.

His clarification of beauty as “a spirit of face in general” significantly qualifies the use of the term in his account of the Genoese. Hunt remarks that

with every allowance for what is called accident and for the stupidity or 279

the genius that particular individuals are suppose to possess from their

cradle, it is education, civilization, refinement, opportunity of national

fame and virtue, that make the difference in this respect, and fix the

character of countenance as well as mind. I do not speak of beauty,

because mere beauty, that is to say, regularity and colour, is not a

necessary announcement of mind. I mean spirit of face in general,

something intelligent and dignified, something which contradicts

ignorance, meanness, and brutal appetite. (189; emphasis added)

Hunt proceeds to say that peoples can become degraded by “their long political wretchedness” (190) – a point he will mention repeatedly with regard to the Italians – and speaks of “a national character of face”, exalting the countenance of the “free-looking”

English, whose aspect shows “fearlessness and independence” in comparison to the French and the Spanish (190).

In the third of the Letters from Abroad Hunt attempts to substantiate his case on the

Italians’ “extraordinary degeneracy” by recording further instances of this decadence in

Italian character, customs, appearance, and culture. He claims, however, that what has chiefly led to this degeneracy is “the extraordinary blight that has been thrown in the course of time over all the manlier part of the Italian character by the notorious ill example, chicanery, worldliness, and petty feeling of all sorts, exhibited by the Court of Rome” (L III, 55). Hunt’s invective against Roman Catholicism is the only direct political statement he makes about the modern Italian state, and probably the only instance in the Letters where he tries to look at the country’s degeneracy critically and not with disapproval. Hunt does not engage in discussions of Italy’s political map after Napoleon’s defeat, nor does he refer to the developments in the field of Italy’s struggle for freedom, for example, the revolutionary movements of 1820 and

1821. The author of the Letters disserts on the issue of degeneracy, but, surprisingly, offers no 280 comment on the prospect of the independence of Italians from foreign rule, on political unification, and socio-economic progress. In fact, the only place where he does tackle these issues is a ten-line post-scriptum to the third Letter. The appended paragraph is a vague reference to current Italian politics, and aims to restore “those finer characters” among the

Italians who are committed to the cause of freedom:

P.S. Nothing which has here been said upon the faults of the Italians,

can of course prejudice those finer characters among them, who, by

the very excess of the corruptions and foreign oppression they see on

all sides, are daily excited more and more to a patriotic wish to get rid

of them. You may rest satisfied, that the multitude of these characters

is daily increasing. (L III, 64)

If the spatial fields of a text are indicators of importance, then Hunt’s discussion of

Italian politics in what Gerard Génette calls “paratext” places this post-scriptum in “an undecided zone” (262), and thus problematises its function and its relation to the discourse of the text. The contraction of a “liberal” issue par excellence into an addendum belittles its significance and casts it into textual and extra-textual marginality. This aberration reinforces the ambivalence which typifies Hunt’s topographies of Italy in these Letters. More explicitly, while Hunt seeks to legitimate, through this series of topographies, his professed “liberal” affiliation with Italianness, he parochially configures it into “an undecided zone”. At the same time, Hunt’s travelogue draws attention to the contradictions, fluctuations and modalities which underpin the inscription of Italy in The Liberal as a whole.

In the spirit of the postwar, left-wing “battle” in defence of Mediterranean cultures, the journal’s appeal to Italianness and Southernness served as a subtle form of literary and political radicalism. The qualification needed at this point, though, is that the discourse of

Letters from Abroad recasts Italianness as an ambiguous sign of difference and similarity, 281 despite claims to liberalism, acculturation, and authoritative knowledge. Its troubled and brief history notwithstanding, “the Italianised Cockney Magazine” underscores some of the ambivalences of Cockney cultural politics and exposes the cartographic tools and mapping techniques of the “well-informed, clever and active race” of Anglo-Italians.

282

Notes

1 See in particular C.L. Cline’s Byron, Shelley and their Pisan Circle, William H. Marshall’s,

Byron, Shelley, Hunt and the Liberal and, on the part of Italian scholarship, Helen Rossetti

Angeli’s, Shelley and his Friends in Italy and Mario Curreli and Anthony Johnson ed.

Paradise of Exiles: Shelley and Byron in Pisa.

2 Alan Weinberg points out that the word “absorption” is used by both Timothy Webb and

Neville Rogers. See Neville Rogers, Shelley at Work: A Critical Inquiry (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1956) and Timothy Webb, The Violet in the Crucible: Shelley and Translation

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

3 On this issue, see Stuart Curran’s “The Birth of a World Intelligentsia” in L’esilio

Romantico: forme di un conflitto, a cura di Joseph Cheyne and Lilla Maria Crisafulli Jones,

(Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1990) 85-99. Speaking of the British expatriates in Italy, Curran pointedly argues that “exiles purchased a clear vision on events in their native land by resolutely keeping their eyes blinkered from, or shut to, the abuses that surrounded them in what was considered a merely temporary home” (94).

4 “Shelley’s Italianness inevitably imposes a different way of judging when it comes to a discourse of nationalism, where origins, home, and cultural traditions coincide. […] Shelley is (notwithstanding) the adult foreigner who arrives at another land as an exile. His

Englishness, which is strongly and nationalistically felt, will accompany him throughout all his life. For Shelley […] Italy was, above all, the place where the past becomes present, and hardly existed as a modern cultural entity. […] The Italian element is not absorbed but is exhibited as a mark of distinction.” (my translation)

5 The OED confirms that this meaning for the word “race” was in use in the early nineteenth century. This argument is elaborated in the Introduction to this thesis. 283

6 Although when reading the review it is not clear whether she speaks as one of the Anglo-

Italians or simply speaks for them, in her short story “A Visit to Brighton” she writes: “I am not at all sure that I do not figure in the ‘English in Italy’. At least, I can bear testimony to the truth of the description contained in the volumes thus entitled” (emphasis added).

7 Out of the numerous instances of Shelley’s ill-disposition towards society, see his letter to

Mary Shelley (15 August 1821) where he notes: “ If I dared trust my imagination it would tell me that there were two or three chosen companions beside yourself whom I should desire.

But to this I would not listen. Where two or three gather together the devil is among them …”

(PBSL II, 339).

8 Shelley’s Prose or the Trumpet of a Prophesy, ed. David Lee Clark (Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press, 1954) 62. All subsequent references to Shelley’s prose are to this edition, cited as Prose in the text itself.

9 Ugolino della Gherardesca was a Pisan nobleman deeply involved in power struggles and political intrigue. In 1288 he conspired with several prominent Ghibelline families to oust from Pisan politics Ugolino’s grandson and rival, Nino Visconti. The archbishop then betrayed Ugolino in turn, and imprisoned him with his two young sons and two grandsons in a tower, and eventually starved them to death. For this information, see The Inferno of Dante, trans. Robert Pinsky (London: J.M. Dent, 1996) 424-425.

10 I am grateful to Professor Michael O’Neill for bringing the Bodleian reference to my attention. (E-mail to the author. 31 July 2003).

11 In July 1820 the already sick Keats in London received Shelley’s warm invitation from

Pisa to join him in Italy. Keats had already made plans to spend the winter in Italy accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, in hopes of recovering his health. However, he refused Shelley’s offer, and perhaps thinking of his probable death, wrote to him that he had to “either voyage or journey to Italy as a soldier marches up to a battery” (PBSL II, 222). 284

After a brief and distressing sojourn in Naples, Keats moved to Rome in order to receive treatment from the famous English physician James Clark; yet his condition declined and on

23 February 1821 Keats died. Although there are Italian influences on Keats’s poetry

(particularly by Ariosto and Tasso) critics agree that his experience of Italy was too short and fragile to inspire poetry. As Roderick Cavaliero notes, to Keats, who was at the time haunted by the image of Fanny Brawne, “Italy was […] not the consummated visit of a poet to that land which was poetry itself, but a place of separation, exile, disappointment and death” (50).

See Cavaliero’s article “A Swoon to Death: Keats’s Debt to Italy,” Keats-Shelley Review 11

(1997): 41-51. For an informative account of Keats’ last months in Naples and Rome, see

Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber and Faber, 1997) 544-578.

12 The name “Pisan Circle” was given by Edward Trelawny, a Cornish retired naval man who arrived at Pisa in 1822 after Edward Williams’s urging and joined the group.

13 A rhizome is an underground rootlike stem bearing both roots and shoots.

14 In December 1821 there was a rumour that a citizen of Lucca (then a separate state, independent of the “mild politics” of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany) had been condemned to be burnt alive for sacrilege. This news aroused the indignation of the Pisan circle. Shelley proposed that they arm themselves and attempt a last-minute rescue, and Byron suggested that they appeal to Ferninand III who was then visiting Pisa. Eventually, the Luccan authorities handed the man over to Tuscan authorities and he was condemned to the galleys.

For this and for a detailed account of the Masi affair, see Mario Curreli and Anthony

Johnson’s article “Shelley and Byron in Pisa” in Paradise of Exiles: Shelley and Byron in

Pisa, eds. Mario Curreli and Anthony Johnson.

15 Shelley had arranged to have a small edition of Adonais especially printed in Pisa in 1821 using the fine Didot typeface, so that he could correct it himself before sending it to his publisher Charles Ollier in London. He used several of the Pisan bound up copies for personal 285

distribution to members of his circle. Adonais was printed at “Niccola Capurro Printer”, one of the major printing houses in Pisa at the time. Its owner and editor Giovanni Rosini would, a few years later (1830), collaborate with Isabel and Margaret Mason (the latter a close friend of Shelley’s and a resident of Pisa) for the publication of a monthly magazine of Italian literature in English, intended for the English residents of Italy. The journal was called “The

Ausonian, or Monthly Journal of Italian Literature” and figured the first English translation of some parts of Leopardi’s Operette Morali. For an informative presentation of The Ausonian, see Roberto Pertici, “Il mensile anglo-pisano ‘The Ausonian’ (1830) e la prima traduzione inglese di un’opera leopardiana,” Leopardi a Pisa, a cura di Fiorenza Ceragioli (Milano:

Electa, 1997) 262-271.

16 Tommaso Sgricci was a practitioner of poesia espontanea (a mixture of poet, stage medium and theatrical impresario) the art of improvising passages of verse and even whole tragedies on subjects furnished by his audience. His performances or accademie consisted of three parts: a passage in blank verse, a passage in terza rima and a complete tragedy. It was the ability to improvise a full-scale tragedy that was really original. His inexhaustible creative faculties fascinated Shelley and Byron, though they sensed his staginess.

17 Alexandros Mavrocordatos, an exile from Turkish rule in Greece who was to return and play an important part in the struggle for Greek independence, was Mary’s favourite among their acquaintances. Mary thus began learning Greek while she gave English lessons to the

Greek Prince. C.L. Cline argues that Shelley tolerated Mavrocordato for Mary’s sake (13), a fact which is made clear by reading his letters of June 1821: “The Greek Prince comes sometimes, & I reproach my own savage disposition that so agreable [sic] accomplished and aimiable [sic] person is not more agreable to me” (PBSL II, 292), “A vessel has arrived to take the Greek Prince & his suite to join the army in the Morea. He is a great loss to Mary, and therefore to me – but not otherwise” (PBSL II, 296-297). 286

18 For important information on Pisa’s state of ferment after the restoration of the monarchies, see: Ersilio Michel, Maestri e scolari dell’ università di Pisa nel Risorgimento Nazionale

1815-1870 (Firenze: G.C. Sansoni, 1949), A. Baretta, Le società segrete in Toscana 1814-

1824 (Torino: Torinese, 1912, ristampa Arnaldo Forni, 1978) and Mario Curreli (a cura di),

L’Ussero: un caffè universitario nella vita di Pisa: note fra cronaca, storia e letteratura,

(Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2000).

19 “In those days there were two English dandies, two lords who took their walk along the

Arno […] They were two grand poets, famous in Europe, George Byron and Percy Bysshe

Shelley. But the two English noblemen preferred to explore the monasteries and the Pisan boarding-houses rather than frequent the café on the side of the river, which was crowded with students, but which probably looked vulgar and uninteresting to them. The two aristocratic poets were not aware of the fact that in that place were to be found some of the most promising young people of the glory of Italian literature. It is certain that in none of the two poets’ letters which regard the Pisan period do we find a hint about the Ussero café.” (my translation)

20 This is a rare case indeed: in contrast to Byron, Shelley would not identify with Italians except here and in a letter to Medwin in July 1820, in which, explaining an aspect of The

Cenci, he speaks, ironically though, of “We Catholics” (PBSL II, 219).

21 “On [date left blank] Signor Sgricci gave an accademia of extemporary poetry at Pisa, the effect of which surpassed perhaps all that Italy has ever known in this kind. […] Anyone who was present at the accademia […] was a witness of the extent to which his heart was moved, his imagination exalted, and his reason satisfied. The audience, among whom was Her

Highness the Duchess of Chablais, whose generosity towards and love of the fine arts is well known, was a worthy representative of what Pisa unaided could furnish. The audience consisted of all that Pisa in the way of nobility and learning 287

Among them English people dwelling in that city which ”(Translated by Dawson 27-29; emphasis added; the editor’s comments are given in angle brackets ).

22 This suggestion was put forward by Professors Timothy Webb and Michael O’Neill in a discussion we had on March 1st 2003.

23 “He is really the only Italian that has a heart and a soul. He has the highest mind, a profound genius and an eloquence that transports. […] He speaks the most beautiful Italian tongue, completely different from today’s idiom, which makes one believe that he might be hearing Boccaccio or Machiavelli speaking as he wrote. […] The poor Pisans believe him to be mad; … He comes to our house every evening and always delights us with his original ideas.” (MWSL 165; editor’s translation)

24 “ …an Improvvisatore – a man of great talent – and very strong in Greek, with an incomparable poetic genius.” (MWSL 165; editor’s translation)

25 “However, I believe for sure that you in England are harder and more severe than we, when

I see that so few of all the noblemen have defended the disgraced Queen, who I really believe to be the most innocent. […] It is well known that it was the spies who created the feelings against her, who exist in Italy. But in spite of this strong feeling, all the Italians say the evidence was certainly not enough to condemn her – and really it seems to me that they have a much more favorable opinion of her since the trial than before. All are horrified by the indecency of this forever infamous proceeding.” (MWSL 164-165; editor’s translation)

26 “I will tell you, my friend, how they marry in this country. And I can assure you it is true, because at the moment I am writing, I have in front of my eyes a proposal for a Pisan girl.”

(MWSL 166; editor’s translation)

27 The Liberal: Verse and Prose from the South, 2 vols., 4 issues (London: John Hunt, 1822-

1823. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur Universität Salzburg, 1978), I, ix. 288

All quotes from The Liberal come from the 1978 reprinted volumes. Henceforth quoted as TL followed by issue number and page number.

28 See Jeffrey Cox, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their

Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Nicholas Roe, Keats and the Circle of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Nicholas Roe, ed., Leigh Hunt: Life, Poetics,

Politics (London: Routledge, 2003), Greg Kucich, “Keats, Shelley, Byron, and the Hunt

Circle,” The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830, eds. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 263-279.

29 The Hunt circle was designated “Cockney School of Poetry” by John Gibson Lockhart in the Blackwood’s Magazine in 1817.

30 William Marshall’s treatment of the episode in Byron, Shelley, Hunt and the Liberal

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960) is considered definitive from a historical point of view. Although the journal’s reception in England has been dealt with extensively, literary criticism on its contents in total has not been seriously undertaken. Most established biographies of Shelley and Byron make references to the project but treat it as an erratic attempt which signalled the finale of the circle’s utopian undertakings.

31 See Hunt’s Preface: “… we are advocates of every species of liberal knowledge, and […] we go to the full length in matters of opinion with large bodies of men who are called

LIBERALS. […] Whenever, in short, we see the mind of man exhibiting powers of its own, and at the same time helping to carry on the best interests of human nature […] there we recognise the demigods of liberal worship” (TL I, ix, xii)

32 Both Shelley and Byron had contemplated the idea of producing a periodical before. During

1814-1815 Shelley had liaised with the freethinker George Cannon in launching a philosophical journal. In 1819 he tried to persuade Peacock that a new periodical could succeed if “a band of staunch reformers, resolute yet skilful infidels were united in so close & 289

constant a league as that in which interest & fanaticism have joined the members of that

[Quarterly Review’s ] literary coalition!” (PBSL II, 81). Byron, on the other hand, made repeated efforts in 1820-1821 to persuade Moore to collaborate in setting up a periodical:

“The project, then is for you and me to set up jointly a newspaper […] which we will edite

[sic] in due form, and nevertheless with some attention” (BLJ VII 254). See also the informative chapter on Byron and The Liberal in Caroline Franklin, Byron: A Literary Life

(London: Macmillan, 2000) 152-176.

33 For the purposes of this study I will consider only the first three out of the four Letters from

Abroad. Letter Four – which appeared in the fourth and last number of The Liberal – is shorter and less focused than those of the series that preceded it. Specifically, it is a rambling description of the natural phenomena and vegetation of Italy and of the dialect of Genoese people.

34 The Examiner, Aug. 4, 1811. No. 188. All citations from this article are taken from R.

Brimley Johnson, ed., Shelley – Leigh Hunt: How Friendship Made History (London: Ingpen and Grant 1928) 185-191.

290

290

EPILOGUE

“To engraft ourselves on foreign stocks”: (Post)Romantic Reflections on Acculturation

There is no selfhood apart from the collaborative practice of its figuration. The ‘self’ is a representational economy. Debborra Battaglia, The Rhetoric of Self-Making

In the examination of the works addressed in the course of this study, I have argued that the leading members of the Pisan circle used several acculturating practices in order to

“engraft” themselves on Italian “stocks”, to paraphrase Mary Shelley’s botanical metaphor from “The English in Italy”. Living through an age of failed revolutions, imperial reaction, and struggling nations, the expatriate British Romantics sensed a crisis in politics and culture and faced the emergence of a world of new class and market relations. For Shelley and his circle this new situation was an opportunity for new definitions, as well as a challenge to their own position-ing as participants/observers in a culture other than their own. The figure of the

Anglo-Italian proved an extremely useful cultural-critical tool in order to “ground” themselves in a foreign land, both literally and figuratively, and to speak for an-other, and hence, for oneself.

Considering its bearing and topicality to the group’s reformative tendencies, it seems to me that the Anglo-Italian did ultimately stem from a “collaborative practice of […] figuration” as cited in the epigraph. My evidence and arguments suggest that a close, geo- politically informed, and parallel investigation of Byron’s, Percy Shelley’s, Mary Shelley’s and Leigh Hunt’s conceptualisation of Anglo-Italianness, examined in the light of the latter’s ideological antecedents or contemporaries, can render further insight into post-Napoleonic

British cultural politics. By revealing both affinities and divergences, a simultaneous consideration of the Romantic expatriates’ conflictive integration of Italianness, on the one hand incites more in-depth cross-readings of literary texts and historical contexts, and on the other hand registers the Anglo-Italian as a cartography of intersecting and interacting identity 291 positionings, which conditions, to a large extent, the map of post-Waterloo British Romantic

Italy.

The “Italianized” Romantics considered in this study related to Italy in different ways, which have been charted along the lines of the individual chapters. Thus, for instance, Shelley was the one who responded more readily to Italian landscape and literature, seeking to infuse his sense impressions and intellectual interests in his poems and prose. Moreover, his alliance to Italianness was intrinsically related to, and conditioned by, his long-standing plans for the formation of a community of (British) intellectuals. Conversely, Byron was fully attuned to the Italian way of life, was involved in local politics, and maintained an “eroticised” relation to Italian language and culture. However, he figured/paraded Anglo-Italianness as an illustration of his cosmopolitanism and of his general adaptability and receptivity to different temperaments. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, was deeply interested in Italy’s cultural heritage and remained fascinated by the country’s natural attractions. Nonetheless, she moderated her alien outlook on modern Italian society several years after her Italian sojourn.

Most importantly, she prescribed a distinct standard of Anglo-Italian taste for her compatriots modelled on her own acculturation and on that of other “Italianized” British. Subsequently,

Mary Shelley’s Italy was configured into a mark of reconnaisance, keyed to contemporary

British concerns about education, national identity, and relations with other cultures. A similar case can be made for Leigh Hunt’s presumed “liberal” affiliation with Italianness. The

Cockney essayist and poet coercively transposed Italy to an English context, infusing his readerly experience of Italy in its topographical reality.

Upon closer scrutiny, however, the Romantic Anglo-Italians’ diverse acculturating processes converge in terms of their methods and logistics. A case in point is that Byron,

Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley use natural metaphors and figures of filiation (in Said’s use of the term) to ground their relationship to Italy conceptually. Thus, Byron defends his 292 authenticity of experience by describing his immersion into the Italian element as an act of

“inoculation”, a term which originally denotes the insertion of a bud into a plant. Moreover, the dejected persona of “To the Po. June 2nd 1819” claims that “his blood / Is all Meridian”

(BP IV, 212, ll. 42-43) despite his northern origin. On the other hand, Shelley’s metaphor of roots and transplantation, as well as his picturing himself as a spider in a web suggest in both cases an organic, vital relation between people and place. The purposeful naturalisation of this relation, captured in these arresting metaphors, is couched in slightly different but equally effective terms by Mary Shelley’s portrayal of Pisa as “a nest of singing birds”, a figure which further enhances the purportedly innate linkage between place and subject, and with the coterminous notions of home, settlement, and community.

According to Marjorie Levinson, a Romantic work “figures [a] critical command in its many resorts, retreats and elevations” (48), meaning that it produces and projects its critique.

Accordingly, much as the Anglo-Italians sought to practise acculturation and translation in the broadest sense of the word, their writings are consistently sensitive to questions which revolve around the impossibility or discontents of acculturation. As I have tried to show, the acculturating strategies of the “Italianized” Romantics frequently intimate their unfeasibility as well as the risks and pitfalls the practice of these strategies entails. Thus, in “The English in

Italy” Mary Shelley mentions in passing: “We can none of us attempt, with impunity, to engraft ourselves on foreign stocks; the habits of our childhood cling to us, and we seek in vain for sympathy from those who have travelled life quite on a different road from that which we have followed” (EI 344). Paradoxically, the author subverts the tone of the review and challenges in part her own thesis. In seeking to further qualify the Anglo-Italian’s identification process with the non-native culture, she draws a critical line between passing from one culture to another without losing one’s distinct characteristics, and passing further into the interior of the other culture, becoming acclimatised or going native. 293

However, this line is barely distinguishable or consistent in Mary Shelley’s later writings. Even if we read these obscure thoughts as an apposition to the Anglo-Italian’s selective and conditional attachment to Italians as prescribed in the definition (“without attempting to adopt the customs of the natives, he attaches himself to some of the most refined among them”), Mary Shelley’s defence of Byron’s identification processes elsewhere, as well as her own acculturating strategies, complicate her initial position as regards

“betweenness”. Nonetheless, it is mostly in Byron and Mary Shelley that issues of acculturation gain resonance precisely because they are posed in a self-reflexive, even self- canceling manner. For instance, it is interesting that Byron would gradually come to realise that although his “inoculation” into the Italian milieu had been successful, he had still remained a foreign body into the target organism. Furthermore, Mary Shelley admitted to the difficulty of sustaining cultural authority and of speaking for an-other in Rambles. The pairing of these two Anglo-Italians is not accidental: Mary Shelley’s figure of the Anglo-Italian identified with and against Byron’s paradigm, counting on it both as model and as anti-model.

In my opinion, their multifaceted connection apropos of the “race” of Anglo-Italians opens a new chapter in the history of their tense but productive relationship.

The rest of the epilogue to this study is less a conclusion than a critical reflection on my project. This introspection is born out of a “Romantic” attitude: one where self-reflection and self-criticism are paramount. With this assumption in mind, in the closing lines of my thesis I will briefly reflect on this work’s likely tensions, on the questions that have arisen during its research and writing, and on the reasons for my recovery of a Romantic discourse on acculturation and identity in a post-Romantic, postmodernist era.

My decision to work in the area of cultural studies has challenged me to cross disciplinary boundaries and to engage with various fields of study – human geography, 294 history, art history, anthropology, sociology – in order to construct a methodological frame for the reading of Romantic literature. The difficulties attendant upon combining insights from several disciplines are centred, on the one hand, on the “conflicts” and contradictions that may arise in their application, and on the other hand, on a literary critic’s fear – including my own – that the literary text will serve the disciplines and make a case for them, rather than the other way round. To minimise these risks, I have tried to attend systematically to historical thinking and to rely on it for making choices and for keeping a clear perspective regarding the weight assigned to each one of these informing areas. Furthermore, the theoretical paradigms brought to bear on my recurrent discussion of identity are informed primarily by those poststructuralist approaches which retain a concern with power and politics.

Even though a comparative approach to English and Italian culture exceeds the scope of this study, I have made use of a variety of Italian sources and documents in order to support the cultural-geographical method adopted, and my proposed recovery of the Anglo-

Italians’ “situation” in the Italian society of the 1820s. Despite the fact that the “Italian” part of the research has informed, rather than formed my argument, it has considerably helped me to locate the Romantic Anglo-Italians in Italy’s places and to re-examine their relationship to them. However, it has been difficult to pin down this relationship to a singular model or to couch it in simple terms. My occasional use of the term “ambivalent” to describe it offers, as I see it, a convenient way of describing conflictive and shifting attitudes; yet, I am aware of the pitfalls this and similar qualifications entail if adopted as a way to neutralise and “deactivate” the complexities of the power-laden concepts involved.

The connection of culture and geography on the local and global scale in contemporary studies of cultural theorists opens up a series of new ways of thinking about the world and our position in it. The geography of culture, as Elaine Baldwin observes, “is not 295 simply about locating cultures, but about understanding the connections between people and places which transcend the borders that so often define our ‘maps’ of culture” (179). Thus, although thinking in terms of spatial metaphors, locations, and borders might allow us to represent the differences of culture more adequately, we should also investigate these terms for what they can tell us about the ways in which meanings and power are tied together in different situations. Additionally, a contextualised approach to identity in cultural studies commands recognition of the historical contingency and plurality of personae, as well as the necessity of not abstracting the properties of particular forms of subjectivity from the specific cultural milieu in which they are formed.

Interestingly, the questions and concerns which underpinned the configuration of the

Anglo-Italian bear on many of these postmodernist issues. Bound with the notion of representation, metaphors, as cultural theory informs us, create new angles on the world

(Barnes and Duncan 11). Seen in its entirety, the metaphor of the Anglo-Italian not only creates a new code of intercultural perception but is methodically involved in the production of a version of Englishness, and one of Italianness, through their representation. Moreover, the reconceptualisation of cultural, national, and linguistic borders in the environs of

Romantic identity formation is particularly resonant today, in an age when old borders collapse and new maps of the world are created. Ultimately, the presence of the hyphen that splits and unites the two subject positions conditionally, porously and provisionally (Anglo-

Italian) proves meaningful in the context of anthropologist James Clifford’s pivotal definition of cultural/political identity as “a processual configuration of historically given elements – including race, culture, class, gender, and sexuality – different combinations of which may be featured in different conjectures” (Routes 46).

Finally, the notions of acculturation and translation seem to have made the notion of culture obsolete as a holistic entity, and to have gained resonance in theoretical discussions. 296

“Betweenness” and hybridity inform many subject positions today, yet the Romantics’ claim to authenticity and truth when speaking for “others” is no longer a standard concern. As the terms “rootlessness”, “displacement”, “nomadology”, “mobility”, and “travel” acquire more and more currency in the vocabulary of the postmodern world, issues of identity formation require studying in the light of changing historical circumstances.

This last proviso becomes more meaningful if we consider as an example the Anglo-

Italian’s acclimatisation in the Victorian world. Writing of Italy’s agitated national politics in

1865 – only four years after the country’s unification – the anonymous author of “Notes and

Notions from Italy” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine envisages, in passing, an amalgamation of English and Italian elements into one character:

The Italians have been considered the moral antipodes of the Anglo-

Saxons; yet there are strong points of resemblance between the races; […]

It is much to be desired that a strong English influence, political and

social, should counteract the insidious French tendencies which daily

grow more evident, and are much deplored by right-minded Italians

themselves. An English education engrafted upon the Italian character

produces an admirable combination. (668; emphases added)

Although the rhetoric used is strongly reminiscent of the structures that typified the Romantic

Anglo-Italian, upon closer scrutiny we notice that the roles of the “agent” and the

“beneficiary” appear reversed. Of course, and as it has been argued in chapter one, the political, economic, and social experiences of England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were hailed as models even by many Italians, and had great importance in stimulating and shaping Italian reform movements. Nevertheless, while the Anglo-Italian paradigm specifically purported that the British should get “Italianized”, that is, imbued with the Italian aesthetic, cultural, and social experience, the 1865 text acknowledges the British as 297 the “rightful” educators of the Italians, as those who implant (“engraft”) their national

“culture” (social, political, or literary) in Italian “nature”. Although the British identify once more with their civilising mission, this time their aim is not to Italianise their (less refined) countrymen, but to anglicise the Italians.

The reason for this shift can be traced to the changing circumstances of the mid- nineteenth century in both Italy and Britain. Thus, while Victorian travellers and enthusiasts continued to construct Italy as a romanticised “other”, their sense of their own moral obligation towards a nascent nation, and their Protestant commitment to freeing Italy from the worst of Catholic superstitious practices imbued them with a great deal of self-confidence and moral guardianship.1 As Maura O’Connor observes, the Victorians were no longer

“preoccupied with what the Italians could teach them about art, painting and the aesthetic, as well as about empires lost and won, but what they as cultivated English middle-class men and women could teach the Italians, even about civilization” (4). Considered in relation to earlier forms of Anglo-Italianness discussed in this thesis, the journal excerpt further illustrates how

Italy as a signifier was reconstructed in the British consciousness according to specific value signs which were historically conditioned. In addition, it exemplifies another intriguing mosaic of English and Italian qualities, duly configured at a time when British aesthetics and politics were in need of redefinition or redemption.

298

Notes

1 Interestingly, in the writings of many Victorian travellers to Italy, Italians are compared to children and as such are appreciated for their innocence and capacity for joy, while at the same time they are scorned for their immaturity and developmental inferiority. For instance, in Pictures from Italy (1846) Charles Dickens notes that during the Roman Carnival, “there seems to prevail, […] a feeling of general, almost childish simplicity and confidence” (129).

For a detailed and perceptive look at the history of writing engendered by travels to Italy in the Victorian period, see John Pemble’s The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and

Edwardians in the South (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). Pemble’s book provides access to a rich field of documents and explores the experiences the leisured and educated classes of

English travellers sought in the South of Europe, revealing characteristic contradictions in

Victorian attitudes to Italy. 299

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