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Dissidence 167some of his other fiction explicitly addressed male domination ofwomen and the social construction of gender, whether in thegraphic depiction of Paolina’s oppression or in the genderdislocations of his fantastic experiments (Caesar 1987). Mostimportantly, the tale he chose to plagiarize interrogates patriarchalimages of male power and female weakness. Grounded in anantifeminist suppression of Shelley’s authorship, Tarchetti’splagiarism nonetheless circulated her feminist fictional project inItalian culture. This ideological contradiction is furthercomplicated by the fact that Tarchetti’s text is a translation. In orderfor Shelley’s tale to perform its political function in a differentculture, it underwent a radical transformation that wassimultaneously faithful and abusive, that both reproduced andsupplemented the English text. The clearest indication of thisuneven relationship appears in the subtle differences introduced bythe Italian version: they questioned the class and racial ideologieswhich informed Shelley’s tale.IIIShelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” is a first-person narrative in which anassistant to the sixteenth-century alchemist Cornelius Agrippa lamentsdrinking the elixir of immortality. The opening sentence provokes thedistinctive hesitation of the fantastic by citing a date that glanced at theEnglish reader’s reality before suddenly establishing an unrealchronology: “July 16, 1833.—This is a memorable anniversary for me;on it I complete my three hundred and twenty-third year!” (Shelley1976:219). The text aims to suspend the reader between the tworegisters of fantastic discourse, the mimetic and the marvelous, byrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the assistant’s fatefulaction, particularly his relationship with the woman he loves andultimately marries. The fantastic premise of immortality leads to anumber of satirical exaggerations by which patriarchal genderrepresentations are thrown into confusion.By assigning the immortality to a male narrator, Shelley’s text turnsit into a fantastic trope for male power, initiating a critique ofpatriarchy which resembles Mary Wollstonecraft’s. In A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that the “bodilystrength [which] seems to give man a natural superiority over woman[…] is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can bebuilt” (Wollstonecraft 1975:124). Shelley’s fantastic narrative questions