Shelley’s Gone Girl: Morbid Cherishing in Ginevra

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ginevra is one of Shelley’s most overlooked poems, possibly because of its status as fragment. The present study aims to interpret the poem as a manifestation of Shelley’s consciousness. To that end, I analyse Ginevra through two frames – that of the biographical and that of the intrapsychic, focusing particularly on the mechanisms of shame, revenge, and desire. My discussion argues that what is at stake in interpreting Ginevra is Shelley’s severed relationship with Emilia Viviani whom he had elevated to a status of sanctity in Epipsychidion. The method of the paper is to trace the double structure of Shelley’s consciousness – his awareness of Emilia’s marriage and imagined inconstancy, his private state of despair and public state of disgrace. How these aspects of Shelley’s experience were transformed into art is the paper’s subject. Freud’s theory of fetishism, Kernberg’s theory of narcissism and Christopher Bollas’s ideas of transitional objects inform my argument.