More than ever can be spoken": Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley's Jane Williams Poems

Frosch, Thomas R. ""More than ever can be spoken": Unconscious Fantasy in Shelley's Jane Williams Poems"
Studies in Philology - Volume 102, Number 3, Summer 2005, pp. 378-413
The University of North Carolina Press


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` More than ever can be spoken'':
PHILOLOGY
IN
Unconscious Fantasy in
Shelley's Jane Williams Poems
7334 STUDIES
by Thomas R. Frosch
INJune1822,livingontheshoreoftheBayofLerici,Shelleywrote
to John Gisborne of sailing with Jane Williams and her husband,
Edward:
Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind,
under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her
guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would
content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, ` Remain,
thou, thou art so beautiful.' 1
That Shelley's life at Lerici was marked by tensions and crises has been
well noted. His estrangement from Mary was becoming increasingly
severe; she herself had almost died in a miscarriage two days before
this letter; the daughter of Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont, Allegra,
had recently died; rumors of an affair between Shelley and Clairmont
persisted. In the same letter, Shelley wrote that he detested almost all
company, that Byron was ``the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome
in it,' and that he himself was too unhappy about the past and the future
to give much attention to writing.2 During this period he was beset by
hallucinations: he saw his own figure strangling Mary in her bed; he
also saw ``the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the ter-
race & said to him--`How long do you mean to be content?'' 3 In this
1 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1964), 2:435­36.
2 Ibid., 2:434, 436.
3 Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed.
Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1:245.
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© 2005 The University of North Carolina Press