Erotic affect: the sticky bodies of Shelley’s lyrics to Jane Williams

Abstract

ABSTRACT I explore how P.B. Shelley’s love-lyrics to Jane Williams generate and invite specifically erotic forms of affect. This, I argue can be helpfully understood through Sara Ahmed’s theory that affects make their direct objects ‘sticky’ with emotion by transforming them into a surface receptive to the impact of feeling. Focusing on ‘A Magnetic Lady to her Patient’, I show how Shelley’s poet-speakers create an erotic fantasy of becoming an inert erotic object which can be possessed, redescribed and made affectively ‘sticky’ by Jane’s hypnotic ministrations. However, Jane is also objectified by Shelley when it is made to appear as though it is Jane who desires elicit erotic connection with the Shelley personae, rather than the other way around. This produces further erotic frissons which anticipate the current insight from affect theory that affects can force us into being responsive to the feelings of others. I also suggest that a theory of affective stickiness can challenge Roland Barthes’ influential notion that erotic textual pleasure is defined by inference and suggestion, rather than by the representation or presence of ‘erogenous zones’. These lyrics show how any aspect of the body can be made into an erogenous zone when it becomes an object receptive to the workings of affect.