States of Possession: Shelley’s Versions of Pastoral

Abstract

Abstract To begin, two homages—only one of them deliberate—to Shelley and his pastoral. InMr.s. Dalluway (1925) Virginia Woolfs eponymous heroine is contemplating the moving fields of human life within her London landscape: “[S)omehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home.” Thereafter, temporarily distracted from the present moment, Clarissa Dalloway thinks about the question of falling in love with women; her adolescent infatuation with Sally Seton fills her reverie. The bohemian Sally, with a beauty Clarissa herself lacks, possessed “a sort of abandonment … a quality much commoner in foreigners than in Englishwomen,” the kind that inspires an erotic involvement at once deeply sexual and almost purely pre- or asexual, a love based on the sharing of time, experiences, and ideas. It is a love associated with the secrecy and evasiveness of adolescence, and with radical political gestures that must also be kept secret.