Rousseau's Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self by Monika Lee (review)

412 letters in canada 1999 transport in the poet's use of the sublime. The two concluding essays, one comparing symptom and scene in Freud and Wordsworth, the other, an essay on Geoffrey Hartman's critical contribution to literary interpretation, are both valuable. The latter does provide an illuminating discussion of the classical motif of parole e sange, the theme of the speaking, bleeding tree. Nevertheless, these two chapters do not further the argument of the book as much as one might want. Since the classical tradition was to return so much more strongly in the poetry of Byron, P.B. Shelley, and Keats, Kneale might have sought to extend his focus in this direction. I hope he will do so at some point. For readers interested in understanding more fully the process by which the idea of a conversational style emerged in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Romantic Aversions is a valuable resource. (ALAN BEWELL) Monika Lee. Rousseau's Impact on Shelley: Figuring the Written Self Edwin Mellen. vi, 198. US $89.95 In a letter of 1816, Shelley referred to Rousseau as `the greatest man the world has produced since Milton.' This study sets out both to qualify and explicate the poet's obsession with his French precursor. Noting that no previous study exists that directly focuses on Shelley's relation to Rousseau, Monika Lee seeks to establish a locus for Shelley's literary and psychological development: following Kristeva, she labels her framework an `intertextual hermeneutics,' one that seeks to engage with various plays on subjectivity. As Lee explains, `it is largely because of Shelley's interest in writing, creating and understanding the self that he was attracted to Rousseau.' That self, however, was deeply vexed, and Lee seeks to flesh out its complexities by reading the changing fortunes of its identification with Rousseau. Shelley's temperament shares much in common with that of Rousseau, which makes the intertextual dialogism all the more compelling. But first Shelley had much to relearn of what he thought he knew about the eccentric Frenchman and his work. Chapter 1 describes the climate in England in which Rousseau was first received, and shows that Shelley really did imbibe a somewhat falsified and sentimentalized portrait of the Frenchman who was popularly taken as scapegoat for various political fall-outs. The early Shelley looked to Rousseau primarily in his aspect as political writer and rationalist, but such roles did not preclude an appreciation of the role of language itself in inflecting political aspiration and agitation. Chapter 2 of this book examines those language debates with vigour, and so serves an immensely useful function in summarizing a complicated history . In Queen Mab, the focus of Lee's third chapter, Shelley's participation in the language debates is seen in relation to Rousseau's take on `the para- humanities 413 dox of linguistic expression,' its dual nature as both organic and conventional . Here Lee finds relevance in the Discours sur l'inégalité parmi les hommes, for in this text Rousseau, like Shelley in Queen Mab, `constructs a tenuous binary opposition between the law of nature and the law of civilization .' Chapter 4 takes Rousseau's Rêveries du promeneur solitaire as a model for Alastor's visionary, which Lee understands as opening up into Shelley's reflections on the potential for nihilism inherent in his idealism. Though this is a somewhat tired subject in Shelley studies, it receives here an interesting rehearsing. Chapter 5 plays La Nouvelle Héloïse against Julian and Maddalo and The Sensitive Plant, arguing that in these later works Shelley finally comes to a fuller appreciation of the subtleties of Rousseau, ones that indeed reflect the poet's own self-divisions and irresolvable paradoxes. In this period of his development, claims Lee, `the idealism and the search for an utterance that transcends the boundaries of the linguistic medium dominates and subsumes much of his earlier empirical mistrust of poetic language.' It is in this context that Shelley's regard for La Nouvelle Héloïse reaches almost ecstatic heights. The sixth and final chapter examines The Triumph of Life, that monument to Shelley's enduring and conflicted relationship to...