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Dissidence 181that Tarchetti knew it. His deletion of any reference to Nourjahadfrom his translation may have been merely due to his ignorance ofSheridan’s tale. He certainly did not remove it because he wasaware of and opposed Orientalist stereotypes, since the same racialideology surfaces elsewhere in his writing, even when he tries toformulate a democratic cultural politics for Italian fiction.Whatever Tarchetti’s motive may have been, his deletionnecessarily affects both the English text and the Italian translation.The mere absence of the allusion at once isolates a node ofideological contradiction in Shelley’s text and erases it, allowingthe translation to address class and gender domination in Italywithout the burden of racism and despotic monarchy. Yet theabsence also points to an antifeminist effect in the translationbecause of the cultural and social functions that every allusionperforms. As Susan Stewart has argued,the allusive act always bears reference to and creates tradition,[but] it also always bears reference to and creates the situation athand, articulating the relation between that situation andtradition, and articulating the varying degrees of access availableto tradition[,] levels of readership, levels of accessibility toknowledge.(Stewart 1980:1146, 1151)Shelley’s allusion to Sheridan’s tale not only announces her ownproject as a feminist critique of patriarchy, but implicitly constructs atradition of female authorship and feminist ideological critique, evenas the revelation of that tradition conceals its contradictory ideologicalconditions in both writers’ texts. Shelley’s allusion, furthermore, makesthe tradition available to the socially prominent women who read TheKeepsake and were singled out by Wollstonecraft as most oppressed bypatriarchy. Tarchetti’s deletion quashes this act of feministtraditionalization, entirely blocking the Italian reader’s access to thetradition it constructs.IVTarchetti’s translation sets up two discontinuous relationships, onewith Shelley’s tale, the other with Italian culture, which can bestbe understood with Philip Lewis’s concept of abusive fidelity. Inthis son of translation, Lewis states, the translator focuses on the