venuti

Dissidence 175heart as the mistress I had idolized, the wife I had sought with suchperfect love.(ibid.:227)And when Bertha’s vanity drives her to ridiculous, alienatingextremes, Winzy helplessly acknowledges the gender hierarchyestablished by his physical superiority: “this mincing, simpering,jealous old woman. I should have revered her gray locks and witheredcheeks; but thus!—It was my work, I knew; but I did not the lessdeplore this type of human weakness” (ibid.:228). Bertha’s return tothe bourgeoisie ultimately contradicts Winzy’s attack on theprotectress: their marriage shows that the bourgeois family is not anegalitarian refuge from aristocratic patriarchy, but a continuation ofmale dominance.This ideological contradiction lies at the center of Shelley’sfeminism. As Anne Mellor has argued,Mary Shelley was a feminist in the sense that her mother was, in thatshe advocated an egalitarian marriage and the education of women.But insofar as she endorsed the continued reproduction of thebourgeois family, her feminism is qualified by the ways in which heraffirmation of the bourgeois family entails an acceptance of itsintrinsic hierarchy, a hierarchy historically manifested in the doctrineof separate spheres [and] in the domination of the male gender.(Mellor 1988:217)Shelley’s characteristic valorization of marriage emerges in “TheMortal Immortal” primarily because Winzy is the narrator: he makeshis love for Bertha and their marriage the positions from which theiractions are intelligible, and hence the bourgeois family, with itspatriarchal construction of gender, is established as the standard bywhich they are judged. What the text imposes as true or obvious is thatWinzy is the devoted lover and husband, attending to their materialneeds, controlling their destiny in the public sphere, whereas Berthacontrols their private life, compelled by her vanity to trifle with hisaffection, envy his youthfulness, even threaten their lives. Reasoningthat Winzy’s unchanging appearance could get them executed “as adealer in the black art” and his “accomplice[,] at last she insinuatedthat I must share my secret with her, and bestow on her like benefits tothose I myself enjoyed, or she would denounce me—and then sheburst into tears” (Shelley 1976:227).