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Dissidence 177the aristocracy and the working class, an instance of class dominationwhich her bourgeois feminism represses.This pressure in the translation to expose forms of ideologicalmystification also makes itself felt in deletions which remove theOrientalism from Shelley’s tale. Tarchetti omits Winzy’s response toBertha’s coquettish behavior: “I was jealous as a Turk” (221). Becauseany particularly violent or aggressive show of jealousy would becomically inconsistent with Winzy’s submissiveness, his assertion canbe seen as contributing to the satire of male power built into hischaracterization. Yet once the feminist significance of the joke isappreciated, the reader is positioned in an another ideology, EuropeanOrientalism: the satire becomes intelligible only when the readerthinks that Winzy’s jealousy could never possibly be as excessive as aTurk’s, i.e., only when the reader assumes the truth of the cliché andthus accepts an ethnic slur, drawing a racist distinction between theWest as rational and the East as irrational. Shelley’s use of the cliché tosupport the feminist satire ridicules a gender hierarchy by introducingone based on race.The absence of this racial ideology from the Italian version mightseem insignificant, were it not that Tarchetti omits another, much morecomplicated Orientalist reference in the English text: an allusion to TheHistory of Nourjahad, an Eastern tale written by the eighteenth-centurynovelist and playwright Frances Sheridan. Near the beginning ofShelley’s text, Winzy wistfully cites “fabled” instances of longevitywhich proved much more tolerable than his:I have heard of enchantments, in which the victims were plungedinto a deep sleep to wake, after a hundred years, as fresh as ever: Ihave heard of the Seven Sleepers—thus to be immortal would not beso burthensome; but, oh! the weight of never-ending time—thetedious passage of the still-succeeding hours! How happy was thefabled Nourjahad!(Shelley 1976:219)The extremely elliptical quality of this allusion, especially comparedto the explanatory statement that precedes the Seven Sleepers,indicates the enormous popularity of Sheridan’s character, even aslate as 1833, when Shelley was writing her own tale. Published in1767, a year after Sheridan’s death, The History of Nourjahad wentthrough at least eleven British editions by 1830, including anillustrated abridgement for children, and it was twice adapted for the