Abstract
ABSTRACT Julian and Maddalo is a poem about how the mind structures reality. Shelley’s focus lies in exploring what constitutes the conditions of knowledge. The first part of the essay discusses Shelley’s philosophy of mind as set forth in ‘A Treatise on Morality’. With the ‘Treatise’ as backdrop, I read the poem as Shelley’s vehicle for exploring consciousness. Each figure in the poem, not merely the Maniac, embodies a different aspect of consciousness. Each is a madman; each bends reality to prop up his view of life. The second part of the essay examines the poem in light of Shelley’s theory of mind in A Defence of Poetry. Here Shelley explores the mind’s capacity to envision alternative worlds. The tragedy of the Maniac is that he cannot do what Shelley calls for in the Defence: He cannot imagine any other life than the tortured one he is living in his mind. Maddalo’s daughter asserts a new pathway to knowledge, one that acknowledges the boundlessness of the mind and offers a new hermeneutics of the self. My argument owes a debt to Sartre’s theory of the ‘unreal object’, Freud’s notions of the preconscious and ‘the uncanny’, and Galen Strawson’s ideas on narrativity.
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