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

In June 1822, living on the shore of the Bay of Lerici, Shelley wrote 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 sowell 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 terrace & said to him—'How long do you mean to be content?"'³ In this "circle of tempests," he wrote to Gisborne, Jane Williams was a "spirit of embodied peace."⁴ And yet G. M. Matthews suggests that Shelley's relationship with Williams was "the most profoundly disturbing personal experience of [his] whole maturity."⁵

Together, Shelley's lyrics to and about Jane Williams form a rich and subtly dramatic story of Romantic love, the richness and the drama appearing not in large-scale characters, gestures, plots, and passions but in the portrayal in a conversational style of complex, changing emotions in an intricate human situation. Judith Chernaik, in writing of the poems' description of "complicated adult relationships" and their analytical introspection, has, in effect, called attention to an under-appreciated side of Shelley, his subtlety as a psychological poet.⁶ William Keach has studied the ways in which style in the poems is "enmeshed" in "biographical pressures."⁷ Constance Walker, saying that the poems "sound like nothing that had been written in English up to that point," has stressed their depiction of "the fluid, individual nature" of emotions, their obliqueness, and their evocation of "an uncharted realm of feeling." ⁸ Susan Wolfson has seen in their formal workings strategies by which Shelley writes a script for himself and others to play, and Brian Weller, in discussing the relations with Shakespeare that appear in the sequence, has studied Shelley's treatment of the function of art.⁹ I would like to continue the exploration of all these themes—the engagement of poetic imaginings with complex actualities, the flow and nuances of subjectivity, the sense of indirectly expressed and missing things, the role of art, the efforts to manage and manipulate the self and others, the relations with Shakespearean and other texts, and the coherence of a distinctive story of Romantic eros—froma psychoanalytic perspective.

In two valuable psychoanalytically influenced studies of Shelley in general, Stuart Sperry has observed that the most provocative element in Shelley's work is its strong regressive impulse, and Barbara Gelpi has studied the erotic relationship of the infant to the nursing mother at the center of his poetic imaginings.¹⁰ Paul Vatalaro has analyzed the theme of the mother in the poems to Jane Williams, using the categories of Julia Kristeva to point out a conflict between an impulse towards the bliss of the nursing relationship embodied by Jane and her music and a contrary need to keep that bliss and its attendant dissolution of subjectivity and autonomy at a safe distance.¹¹ Vatalaro helps us see the outlines of a fundamental conflict, but we need to return those outlines and abstract categories to the fluidity and complexity...