It will doubtless seem, to many readers, that the question of Shelley’s
inversion is at once answered in the negative by the simple fact of his
marriage. This, however, is a superficial view. Many quite inverted men
have married, either without themselves realising the nature of their
own abnormality, or for purely conventional and social reasons, or even
with the hope of thus curing themselves of their inversion. We have to
remember that Shelley was not conscious of having homosexual impulses;
he had never admitted them to himself. He married twice, and all through
his life women influenced him. Yet his relations with them were
strangely troubled, and his most intimate “affairs” were erotic
failures. His calf-love for Miss Grove had no concrete basis of
physical attraction, and it soon died out. Then came his marriage with
Harriet Westbrook. He was not in love with her, however. It is certain,
though not always recognised, that he married her from quixotic motives,
and that the element of erotic attraction was almost entirely absent.
Harriet appealed to him to save her from petty tyranny and misery at
home and at school, and Shelley, feeling himself called upon to play the
hero, rescued her. Doubtless he imagined that he would soon love her in
the proper romantic way, but Dowden makes it clear that Harriet never at
any time held the first place in his affections.
This place was held, as a matter of fact, by a young man, Thomas Hogg,
to whom Shelley, a supposedly joyful groom on the eve of his romantic
marriage, writes thus: “Your noble and exalted friendship, the
prosecution of your happiness, can alone engage my impassioned interest.
This (i.e. his approaching marriage) more resembles exerted action than
inspired passion.”
In another letter he says: “The late perplexing occurrence which called
me to Town occupies my time, engrosses my thoughts. I shall tell you
more of it when we meet, which I hope will be soon. It does not,
however, so wholly occupy my thoughts, but that you and your interests
still are predominant.”
This letter is quoted in Hogg’s _Life of Shelley_, with the date of
August 16, 1811, _the same month in which Shelley married_.
The story of the failure of this absurd and tragic marriage is well
enough known. Mary Godwin, who, like her mother, had a noticeable strain
of the masculine in her, roused Shelley to a genuine romantic passion,
which supplanted the remnants of his spurious chivalry for Harriet. He
saw that his union with the latter was a mere mockery, founded on
self-deception, and he did not hesitate to break it up. He had never
been in love with Harriet; always he was in love with Love. His
subsequent marriage with Mary was in many ways happy, and on the
surface it seemed successful, for she had more than the ordinary
intellect and was devoted to him. Yet it was not truly successful from
the erotic point of view, as is obvious from the tone of sadness and
melancholy in his later poetry. To the last he was the victim of
melancholy, and in conflict with himself, for his love-impulses remained
unsatisfied. As long as he did not acknowledge the inverted component in
these impulses, he was forced to seek ideal love in the guise of a
woman; and the same force which kept up this repression also made him
idealise Woman so extravagantly. All through his poetry we find the same
quest for an unreal ideal woman, who is at once a sister, a friend, a
leader of men, and a sexual mate. It is the theme of _Alastor_ and _The
Revolt of Islam_; and in _Epipsychidion_ he relates how his whole life
has been spent in seeking:
The shadow of that idol of my thought.
It would seem that at last he had found the ideal, for _Epipsychidion_
is a rhapsody of love for Emilia Viviani. But scarcely had the ink
dried on the paper than he realised that Emilia, like Harriet, Mary, and
Jane, was no Cythna, but a quite ordinary woman.
In spite of the views of romantic persons, the truth is that Shelley was
not very susceptible to the _physical_ charms of real women. He was
wholly influenced by his own conception of the ideal Heroine; and this
conception was a curious mixture of sexual qualities. It is worth while
contrasting Blake again with Shelley, in order to illustrate this point.
Blake was unusually masculine. All his characters and his figures are
strongly polarised--that is to say, he emphasised and exaggerated their
typical sexual characteristics. His men all represent energy, passion,
intellect, and muscular strength; his women are sweetness and tenderness
incarnate. Women attracted him by reason of their specifically feminine
qualities; but he did not idealise them, either collectively as a sex,
or individually. Indeed, he thought they were entirely negative and
passive in character: “In Heaven, there is no such thing as a female
will.” Yet his married life was placid and very happy.
Now Shelley, on the other hand, loved to create androgynous types. He
loved the feminine qualities when they were in men, and the masculine
qualities in women. It would seem as if he were continually striving to
create an ideal _bisexual_ character. For example, consider the
sensitive, graceful Prince Athanase or Laon; or, by contrast, the rebel
Cythna, whose chief qualities are her vigorous intellect, her
will-power, and her Amazonian heroism. And Shelley idealised women, both
collectively and individually, in spite of the fact that his experience
always contradicted him. His married life, to say the least, was not
conspicuously successful. In this connexion it is interesting to note
how constantly Shelley introduced a third party into his household, as
if he were quite without the ordinary domestic jealousy of those who are
“attached to that great sect whose doctrine is, that each one should
select out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, and all the rest, though
fair and wise, commend to cold oblivion.”
When he married Harriet he quickly took her to York, to live there with
Hogg. After this plan had broken down he induced Miss Hitchener to share
his home; and when she departed, Elizabeth, Harriet’s sister, came in.
Even when he eloped with Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont accompanied the
pair to the continent. Finally at Pisa, and at Casa Magni, he shared his
house with Edward and Jane Williams.