In the preface to Alastor Shelley says that the poem represents a youth (himself) of uncorrupted feelings led forth to the contemplation of the universe. “But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length awakened, and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to himself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves.” This image unites all of wonderful or wise or beautiful which the poet could depict. Shelley sought this ideal all through life, and when he thought he found it went into raptures. Disillusionment, however, soon followed, and Alastor is the expression of his despair at not finding an embodiment of his ideal.
If we keep in mind that Shelley was a platonist, we shall be able to form a more intelligent estimate of his love lyrics and his relations with women. In his first wife, Harriet, he saw courage, a desire for freedom, and a willingness to learn his doctrines.
Thou art sincere and good, of resolute mind
Free from heart-withering customs’ cold control,
Of passion lofty, pure and subdued.
As soon as she ceased to take interest in his studies, his love for her began to wane. “Every one must know,” he tells Peacock, “that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy.” A month or two after his first marriage he tells Elizabeth Hitchener that he loves her. Seeing that she possessed high intelligence, great love of mankind, and a tendency to oppose existing institutions, he straightway calls her the “sister of his soul.”
Later on he meets a beautiful, sentimental Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, imagines she is the perfect ideal which he had formed in his youth, and writes the Epipsychidion. “Emilia,” says Professor Dowden, “beautiful, spiritual, sorrowing, became for him a type and symbol of all that is most radiant and divine in nature, all that is most remote and unattainable, yet ever to be pursued—the ideal of beauty, truth, and love.”[71] Epipsychidion is the poetic embodiment of the feelings awakened in Shelley by this supposed discovery of the incarnation of the ideal. Emilia turned out to be an ordinary human creature, and then Shelley wished to blot out the memory of her entirely. In a letter to Mr. Gisborne, June, 1822, Shelley says: “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps eternal.” “Such illusions,” says Dowden, “may be of service in keeping alive within us the aspiration for the highest things, but assuredly they have a tendency to draw away from real persons some of those founts of feeling which are needed to keep fresh and bright the common ways and days of our life.”[72]
Some of Shelley’s views on women and the family were derived from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. “According to the prevailing opinion,” says Mrs. Wollstonecraft, “women were made for men.” All their cares and anxieties are directed towards getting husbands. They deck themselves out with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short lived tyranny. “Love in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to look fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character.”[73] Women then should not depend on their charms alone, because these have little effect on their husband’s heart “when they are seen every day when the summer is past and gone.” Her first care should be to improve her mind, to exercise her God-given faculties, assert her individuality. This can never be, though, as long as she is the plaything of man. If one may contest the divine right of kings one may also contest the divine right of husbands. Women should bow only to reason and cease being the modest slaves of opinion. It is a violation of the sacred rights of humanity to exact blind obedience and meek submission of women. “The being who patiently endures injustice will soon become unjust.”
In The Revolt of Islam, Cythna says:
Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives and breathes this boundless air,
To the corruption of a closed grave!
Can they whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn, heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors?
According to Pope “every woman is at heart a rake.” “Rendered gay and giddy by the whole tenor of their lives, the very aspect of wisdom or the severe graces of virtue must have a lugubrious appearance to them.” “Till women are led to exercise their understandings they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes.”[74]
Shelley’s opinion of women is even less complimentary: