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168 The Translator’s Invisibilitymale physical superiority by setting up the assistant as the unstableposition from which the action becomes intelligible. There is doubtabout whether he is in fact physically superior. His “story” is framedby the fundamental question, “Am I immortal?” (Shelley 1976:219,229), and interrupted by several inconclusive meditations on theauthenticity and effectiveness of Cornelius’s elixir. The value of malephysical superiority is unsettled by the assistant’s contradictoryrepresentation of the alchemical science that may have made himimmortal. At first, alchemy is stigmatized as unnatural and heretical.We hear the “report” of the “accident” involving Cornelius’s “scholar,who, unawares, raised the foul fiend during his master’s absence andwas destroyed,” with the result that “all his scholars at once desertedhim,” and “the dark spirits laughed at him for not being able to retaina single mortal in his service” (ibid.:219–220). The assistant seems toaccept this association of alchemy with witchcraft: “when Corneliuscame and offered me a purse of gold if I would remain under his roof,I felt as if Satan himself tempted me” (ibid.:220). In the midst of thispassage, however, he drops the suggestion that the “report” may be“true or false” (ibid.:219); and later in the narrative, after Corneliusdies, this skepticism reappears to exculpate the alchemist—andreinforce the doubt concerning the assistant’s immortality:I derided the notion that he could command the powers ofdarkness, and laughed at the superstitious fears with which hewas regarded by the vulgar. He was a wise philosopher, but hadno acquaintance with any spirits but those clad in flesh andblood.(ibid.:226)The uncertainty which Shelley’s text generates about male physicalsuperiority is maintained by the characterization of the assistant. He isa weak, vacillating figure, dominated by the woman he loves, at timesridiculous, a most unlikely candidate for immortality. His name is“Winzy,” which, as Charles Robinson observes, is related to “winze,”the Scottish word for curse, but which also “might suggest that theprotagonist of this story is a comic character” (Shelley 1976:390). Afterlistening to his friends’ “dire tale” of the “accident,” Winzy’s reactionto Cornelius’s offer of employment is sheer slapstick: “My teethchattered—my hair stood on end:—I ran off as fast as my tremblingknees would permit” (ibid.:220). Winzy’s characterization satirizes theideological basis of patriarchy in biological determinism because his