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174 The Translator’s Invisibilitychallenges the patriarchal assumption that gender identity isbiologically fixed by indicating that Bertha’s transformation into acoquette is socially determined, an effect of her upward mobility.Bertha’s class position is evidently bourgeois: “her parents, like mine,”states Winzy, “were of humble life, yet respectable” (220). This “life”should be seen as bourgeois even though “humble,” not only becauseit is labelled “respectable,” but because it enables Winzy to beapprenticed to an alchemist with whom he earns “no insignificantsum of money” (221). Bertha and Winzy are “humble” in relation toher protectress, who is an aristocrat, a “lady” living in a feudal“castle.” Shelley’s tale thus begins by associating patriarchy witharistocractic domination, sexual equality with the bourgeois family.This is most clear in a striking passage which alludes explicitly toWollstonecraft’s treatise. When Bertha finally leaves her aristocraticprotectress and returns to Winzy’s parents, he asserts that she“escaped from a gilt cage to nature and liberty” (224), echoing one ofWollstonecraft’s metaphors for the self-oppression to whichpatriarchal ideology subjects women: “Taught from their infancy thatbeauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, androaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison”(Wollstonecraft 1975:131).As the narrative unfolds, however, the class logic of Shelley’sfeminist critique is undone. Although Winzy’s attack on thearistocratic protectress implicitly equates the bourgeois family with anatural state free of patriarchal gender representations, his ownmarriage to Bertha compels her to live them out in an even moreobsessive way. They continue to be financially independent: Winzyrefers to “my farm” (Shelley 1976:227), and although at one point“poverty had made itself felt” because his perpetual youthfulnesscaused them to be “universally shunned,” they are nonetheless ableto sell off their “property” and emigrate to France, having “realiseda sum sufficient, at least, to maintain us while Bertha lived”(ibid.:228). Thus, whether living with their parents or on their own,after they are married, they continue to lead a “humble life, yetrespectable.” But their relationship can hardly be considered “natureand liberty” for either of them. Bertha becomes the passive object ofWinzy’s desire:We had no children; we were all in all to each other; and though, asshe grew older, her vivacious spirit became a little allied to illtemper,and her beauty sadly diminished, I cherished her in my