‘Bound in Amity to All’: Euthanasia’s Cosmopolitan Ethic of Caring

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Mary Shelley’s Valperga, the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the gradual corruption of Castruccio, reveal the destructive effects of ‘party spirit’ on human benevolence and the progress to political justice. By contrast, Euthanasia, fictional ruler of Valperga, embodies a cosmopolitan ideal that animated radical politics in the early 1790s whereby the principle of universal benevolence extended human rights across national borders. This article contends that, in her portrait of Euthanasia, Shelley builds on the ethical framework of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works represented love of humankind as integral to her democratic convictions. Euthanasia personifies a cosmopolitan ethic of caring, considering herself ‘bound in amity to all’ by principle as well as sentiment, but she also wrestles with the ingrained allegiances and personal desires typical of human psychology. I argue that, through her resulting dilemmas and eventual fate, Shelley interrogates the viability of the cosmopolitan ideal in a world riven by party spirit.