The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor

Author:Elizabeth Kantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Mary’s step-sister Jane (“Claire”) Clairmont, was also living with them. Claire’s own involvement with Shelley may explain why Mary complained, years later, that Claire had “poisoned my life when young.” But in the spring of 1816 Claire was obsessed with Lord Byron, who had slept with and abandoned her. Apparently this was an experience that literally hundreds of other human beings, including his own half-sister and a number of male lovers, eventually shared. Byron’s approach to sexual relationships was half-heartedly guilty, increasingly disgusted, and wholly cynical, while Shelley’s was passionately idealistic—and even principled, in its way. Shelley wasn’t afraid of making commitments, of a sort. He contracted marriages pretty much as early and often as he had the opportunity to, given the strictures of nineteenth-century family law: he married Mary Godwin in December of 1816, less than three weeks after his first wife drowned herself. But his ideas about fidelity were unlikely to make any woman happy. As he explained in Epipsychidion in 1821—when he was still living with Mary but now infatuated with an Italian girl named Emilia Viviani: I never was attached to that great sect

Whose doctrine is that each one should select

Out of the world a mistress or a friend,

And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

To cold oblivion,—though it is the code

Of modern morals, and the beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,

Who travel to their home among the dead

By the broad highway of the world—and so

With one sad friend, perhaps a jealous foe,

The dreariest and the longest journey go.

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