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COPYRIGHT 2007 Boston University
MARY SHELLEY'S VALPERGA, PUBLISHED IN 1823, OFFERS A REVISION OF fourteenth-century Italian political history by inserting two fictional characters into "The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca," as the subtitle reads. Careful examination of the rhetoric of bargain, promise, and exchange in the novel reveals a persistent concern with contract not yet addressed in the critical literature. Specifically, the novel exposes how contractual relations between the characters lead to inequities that require coveting up, in the form of "care" for others, in order to validate the economic and moral aspects of contract. Given this concern, the novel may be read as a displacement of Shelley's nineteenth-century present that offers a sustained critique of the role of contract in prevailing economic thought.
Valperga tells the story of childhood friends Euthanasia, Countess of Valperga, and Castruccio, the future prince of Lucca. (1) Euthanasia, educated in history and classics by her father, rules benevolently over her ancestral estate. Castruccio, on the other hand, is exiled with his Ghibelline family from his homeland as a child, and schooled in the arts of war and political intrigue. He returns to Italy intent on accumulating political power, and his increasing ambition, corruption, and cruelty estrange him from Euthanasia. Even after conquering Florence and capturing Euthanasia's palace, Castruccio continues to insist that she be his. In the course of securing political allies in the Church, Castruccio seduces and abandons a young girl, Beatrice, who is convinced until her fall that she is the chosen prophet of God. Neither woman survives the machinations of Castruccio. Beatrice succumbs to madness and death after a severe, self-inflicted atonement, and Euthanasia dies in a shipwreck after being exiled from Italy for her participation in an assassination plot against Castruccio.
Reading Euthanasia, the Countess of Valperga, as representative of a feminine Romantic ideology, critics have argued for and against her triumph over the masculine Romantic ideology of Castruccio. (2) Kari Lokke maintains that "[w]ith the ... female characters ... Shelley sets women ... in radical opposition to male power and privilege and to the values which represent and sustain them." Joseph Lew argues that the novel illustrates the failure of "female Romantic ideology" to overcome the "threat" of male Romantic ideology because "its ideological bases (at least in Euthanasia's enunciation of them) might themselves be tainted." Most recently, Daniel White's analysis of "the correspondence between Romantic aesthetic categories and visions of social and political order" presents Euthanasia's "externally directed ideology of domesticity and enlightened bourgeois politics" as an alternative to Castruccio's "egotistical emptiness Shelley identifies as the end of masculine Romantic desire--empty because unable to accept the humanist or domestic values of an alternative ideology on their own terms, those offered by Euthanasia." (3) Rather than investigating the novel along these oppositional lines, I theorize a structural relation that operates as a contract, one that at times incorporates and at others excludes the characters' ideological values as each attempts to negotiate within it. Elements of both feminine and masculine Romantic ideology are implicated in the functioning of contractual relations in a manner that begins to blur this gendered designation. What may look like an ethic of care from the perspective of gendered oppositions begins to resemble a necessary component in the economic and moral underpinnings of nationalism when considered in a contractual light.
Whereas critics emphasize the oppositional nature of Euthanasia and Castruccio's worldviews, they posit the complementary nature of Euthanasia and Beatrice's character. (4) The implicit assumption of such characterizations is that some unspoken promise or potential has been left unfulfilled. The promise of a peaceful republic is lost because Euthanasia cannot convert Castruccio from tyrant to benevolent ruler, and thus change the national political scene from oppressive regime to republic. And the potential of a romantic relationship, with its possibility of influencing Castruccio, fails. In addition, Euthanasia's and Beatrice's encounters do not temper their respective overly-rational and overly-imaginative worldviews. Such approaches reveal an investment in the success of contract--the very concept that the novel critiques--in its expectation that Euthanasia and Beatrice could or should have changed Castruccio or "the world of the novel." In following these oppositions to the novel's end, some critics have understandably concluded that the novel offers little or no possibility for effective intervention by Euthanasia or Beatrice, given their fates. Lokke comments, "Given this tragedy [of Euthanasia's death] and that of her other female characters, Mary Shelley seems to be suggesting that this death with moral and spiritual integrity is the most a woman can hope for in a world run by men like Tripalda and Castruccio" (169). Even more pessimistic is Jane Blumberg's reading, which maintains that the women of the novel represent an alternative to Castruccio's politics: "Both women, formerly powerful and beloved, die without leaving any accomplishment....
They are completely annihilated, the failure of their lives extending into eternity." (5) I suggest instead that the novel lays bare the imaginary nature of the relations that the contract demands, and that consequently the failure to fulfill these relations represents a challenge to prevailing ideology. (6)
As a displacement of Shelley's nineteenth--century British present to fourteenth--century Italy, her counterfactual history offers a sustained critique of the economic and moral claims contracts make on women. My reading contends that the women in the novel embody a challenge to the redemptive contract, a contract derived from economic and moral criteria found in early nineteenth-century political economy.
The language of contract governs the major relationships in the novel. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concept of freedom of contract arose, which shifted the focus of contract from a matter of equity to one of consent. John Joseph Powell, in his 1790 Essay upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements states that "it is the consent of the parties alone that fixes the just price of anything, without reference to the nature of things themselves, or to their intrinsic value." (7) In Valperga, this flexible construct accurately describes the interpersonal mechanics of the novel's key relationships, as characters form and reformulate both legal and corrupt contracts. When faced with contracts that would deny their emotional and moral integrity, Shelley's characters consciously and actively resist them or, in their desire to fulfill them, acknowledge their complicity in their own destruction.
Shelley's critique includes a rejection of the economic and moral claims contracts make on women. In the specific context of the novel, the redemptive contract recasts the costs of war, such as death, corruption, and murder, as a moral debt. Castruccio relies on Euthanasia's moral authority to compensate for and hide these costs, but to do so she must sacrifice her own ideals and independence. Furthermore, Castruccio tries to effect his own redemption and that of his bloody conquest by shifting and substituting moral and material terms in his proposed bargains to Euthanasia. She refuses to accept this interchangeability of terms that would naturalize social injustice.
By investigating Euthanasia and Castruccio's relationship through this lens, I will show that Castruccio relies upon Euthanasia's participation in contract in order to cover up the dirty costs of war and state-building. In a comparison of Euthanasia's ultimate resistance to these demands to Beatrice's complicity with them, this study further highlights the nature of the economic and moral costs of Castruccio's contracts through Beatrice's desire to hide his crimes from the world.
Euthanasia and Castruccio's friendship is based on a promise that, according to William Blackstone, is one of the three kinds of express contracts. Blackstone defines contract as "an agreement upon sufficient consideration, to do or not to do a particular thing." Consideration, "the reason which moves the contracting party to enter into the contract," must be mutual or reciprocal and may include "blood or natural affection between near relations." (8) It reflects the historical trend in which mutuality of promise constituted the chief feature of a simple contract. (9) Euthanasia frames the terms of this contract when she promises, "Castruccio, I know that you will never dishonour yourself: and, remember, if in any hard struggle you want a friend who will console you by sympathy and confidence, and help you as far as her power will permit, I will always be that friend to you." (10) Castruccio reciprocates, claiming "not the less will I fulfill my promise, if our fortunes change, of being your friend, your knight, your rock, on whom you may build your hope and trust in every misfortune" (20/73). This contract hinges upon the specific terms of Euthanasia's promise, the condition of honor, which Euthanasia insists upon but which Castruccio willfully ignores. Regardless of this condition, this promise conforms to both the modern sense of contract in its mutuality, and to an older sense of contract based on the notion of consideration. That is, each would incur an agreed-upon benefit from the other--consolation, aid, support--and each would potentially incur a detriment in fulfilling their respective promises by exposing themselves to the "taint" of "calumny" under which their friend suffered.
This initial promise comes into conflict with another, corrupted contract that takes shape when Castruccio offers his accumulated wealth and power to Euthanasia in exchange for accepting her guidance in his future endeavors. Relying on the earlier promise of loyalty, Castruccio expects Euthanasia to cover up and compensate for the violence and destruction generated by the economic and moral strategies he employs to build a new state. The superficial exchange (of wealth for guidance) is meant to hide the underlying compensatory work Castruccio requires of Euthanasia. What
Castruccio fails to recognize, and what Euthanasia persistently objects to, is this underlying economic and moral structure that has at its center a compensatory function, or in this case a compensatory figure, meant to hide and ameliorate the negative aspects of these systems. In spite of these objections, Euthanasia's desire to fulfill her own political ideals, as well as her love for Castruccio, at times compels her complicity in this contract. Castruccio's rhetoric confuses the terms of the superficial and of the underlying bargains to which he would have Euthanasia's assent. According to Castruccio, his warfare and Euthanasia's approval of it will yield an outcome of power, wealth, and a kind of eventual peace for each. After he overthrows Florence, he tells her, "Triumph, my sweet girl ... all my laurels are spoils for you. Nay, turn not away as if you disdained them; they are the assurances of the peace that you desire. Do not doubt me ... This sword has made me master of peace and war; and need I say, that my wise and gentle Euthanasia shall direct my counsels, her love...
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