But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,
And catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold.
I’ll lie beside thee on a bank, and view their wanton play.
In Shelley’s poetry there is no such excessive and entirely masculine picture of unrestricted indulgence, nor is there any expression of the male efferent desires. When Shelley speaks on this subject he speaks as a woman might.
Then that sweet bondage which is Freedom’s self
And rivets with sensation’s softest tie
The kindred sympathies of human souls,
Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:
Those delicate and timid impulses
In Nature’s primal modesty arose,
And with undoubted confidence disclosed
The growing longings of its dawning love.
(Queen Mab.)
Love, in Shelley’s mind (as in a woman’s mind) meant sympathy and the passive experience of emotions and sensations. That is why he could understand the woman’s demand for freedom, and cry
Can Man be free if Woman be a slave?
II
IT will doubtless seem, to many readers, that the question of Shelley’s inversion is at once answered in the negative by the simple fact of his marriage. This, however, is a superficial view. Many quite inverted men have married, either without themselves realising the nature of their own abnormality, or for purely conventional and social reasons, or even with the hope of thus curing themselves of their inversion. We have to remember that Shelley was not conscious of having homosexual impulses; he had never admitted them to himself. He married twice, and all through his life women influenced him. Yet his relations with them were strangely troubled, and his most intimate “affairs” were erotic failures. His calf-love for Miss Grove had no concrete basis of physical attraction, and it soon died out. Then came his marriage with Harriet Westbrook. He was not in love with her, however. It is certain, though not always recognised, that he married her from quixotic motives, and that the element of erotic attraction was almost entirely absent. Harriet appealed to him to save her from petty tyranny and misery at home and at school, and Shelley, feeling himself called upon to play the hero, rescued her. Doubtless he imagined that he would soon love her in the proper romantic way, but Dowden makes it clear that Harriet never at any time held the first place in his affections.
This place was held, as a matter of fact, by a young man, Thomas Hogg, to whom Shelley, a supposedly joyful groom on the eve of his romantic marriage, writes thus: “Your noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engage my impassioned interest. This (i.e. his approaching marriage) more resembles exerted action than inspired passion.”
In another letter he says: “The late perplexing occurrence which called me to Town occupies my time, engrosses my thoughts. I shall tell you more of it when we meet, which I hope will be soon. It does not, however, so wholly occupy my thoughts, but that you and your interests still are predominant.”
This letter is quoted in Hogg’s Life of Shelley, with the date of August 16, 1811, the same month in which Shelley married.