“Something to say upon Women’s Inconstancy”: Fickleness and Fleeting Infatuation in the Shelleys and Beyond

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay draws on new research into the notion of the “inconstant” lover, a label that is (mis)applied to women by male authors or male characters in literature, to suggest that when women writers choose to depict wayward, fickle women in amorous affairs, this representation becomes subversive. This argument is illustrated with a reading of Mary Shelley’s “The Bride of Modern Italy” and Valperga. My contention is that the criticism directed at Clorinda and Beatrice respectively presents a distorted view of reality controlled by a patriarchal system in which male figures are judged differently. The fates of these protagonists foreshadow twentieth-century women writers’ exploration of the hapless woman’s feminine power. The Shelleys’ collaborative literary relationship indicates their discourse on this topic; we can examine the wilful male poet-figure in verse but also the severe misfortune of Beatrice Cenci and Mary Shelley’s appreciation of her story. The essay takes as its departure point a passage in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (“songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness”), and two art exhibitions on display in 2022. The argument concludes by connecting the Shelleys’ representation of the inconstant woman with the treatment of the theme in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, prose, and film.