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170 The Translator’s Invisibilitywrong. She would drive me mad with anger, and then force me tobeg her pardon. Sometimes she fancied that I was not sufficientlysubmissive, and then she had some story of a rival, favoured by herprotectress.(Shelley 1976:221)As this catalogue of abuse suggests, Shelley’s tale satirizes thepatriarchal image of woman that shapes Bertha’s characterization bytransforming it into caricature. The fantastic premise of immortalityresults in an exaggeration of her vanity: as Winzy remains twenty yearsold and she becomes a “faded beauty” of fifty, “she sought to decreasethe apparent disparity of our ages by a thousand feminine arts—rouge,youthful dress, and assumed juvenility of manner” (ibid.:226, 228). Theconstant concern with beauty that patriarchy forces on women inWollstonecraft’s critique is magnified into Bertha’s ludicrous,maddening obsession: “Her jealousy never slept,” Winzy relates,Her chief occupation was to discover that, in spite of outwardappearances, I was myself growing old. […] She would discernwrinkles in my face and decrepitude in my walk, while I boundedalong in youthful vigour, the youngest looking of twenty youths. Inever dared address another woman: on one occasion, fancying thatthe belle of the village regarded me with favouring eyes, she boughtme a gray wig.(ibid.:228)Unable to maintain her attractive appearance, Bertha even goes so faras to disparage youth and beauty:she described how much more comely gray hairs were than mychestnut locks; she descanted on the reverence and respect due toage—how preferable to the slight regard paid to children: could Iimagine that the despicable gifts of youth and good looksoutweighed disgrace, hatred, and scorn?(ibid.:227)Tarchetti’s “L’elixir dell’immortalità” is a rather close translationwhich perfectly catches the humor of Shelley’s feminist satire, but healso made revisions which go beyond the English text. Some of therevisions suggest a strategy of amplification designed to increase theepistemological confusion of the fantastic for the Italian reader (the