‘Bound in Amity to All’: Euthanasia’s Cosmopolitan Ethic of Caring

ABSTRACT

In Mary Shelley’s Valperga, the conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the gradual corruption of Castruccio, reveal the destructive effects of ‘party spirit’ on human benevolence and the progress to political justice. By contrast, Euthanasia, fictional ruler of Valperga, embodies a cosmopolitan ideal that animated radical politics in the early 1790s whereby the principle of universal benevolence extended human rights across national borders. This article contends that, in her portrait of Euthanasia, Shelley builds on the ethical framework of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works represented love of humankind as integral to her democratic convictions. Euthanasia personifies a cosmopolitan ethic of caring, considering herself ‘bound in amity to all’ by principle as well as sentiment, but she also wrestles with the ingrained allegiances and personal desires typical of human psychology. I argue that, through her resulting dilemmas and eventual fate, Shelley interrogates the viability of the cosmopolitan ideal in a world riven by party spirit.

KEYWORDS:

• cosmopolitanism
• democratic republicanism
• ethic of caring
• Italian Risorgimento
• Mary Shelley
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• tyranny

In Mary Shelley’s Valperga, the historical conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and the gradual corruption of Castruccio, reveal the destructive effects of ‘party spirit’ on human benevolence and, by extension, the progress to political justice. When Shelley lived in Italy in the early nineteenth century, it was not yet a unified nation-state. Occupied by Napoleon, it was subsequently divided up at the Congress of Vienna between reactionary monarchies, Papal States, and the Austrian Empire. By 1821, when Shelley was writing Valperga, failed insurrections in Piedmont, Naples and the Two Sicilies had ignited the flame of the Risorgimento, a movement Shelley and other radical second-generation Romantics hoped would unify the Italian states against the imperial ambitions of the dominant European powers and provide fresh opportunities for political liberty.¹ Castruccio’s ‘Life and Adventures’ offered Shelley a historical narrative through which to comment on the bleak geopolitics of Europe in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, where party spirit was manifest in the aggressive, expansionist nationalism of the victors. Through the fictional character of Euthanasia, ruler of Valperga, she reflects on her faltering hopes for a democratic and republican future. For Michael Rossington, Euthanasia’s death plays out ‘the vulnerability of the republican ideal of self-governing communes based on principles of civic liberty and the eschewal of self-interest to corruption and abuse.’² This article will demonstrate that Euthanasia also embodies the cosmopolitan ideal that animated democratic and republican politics before the Terror and the Revolutionary Wars, whereby the principle of universal benevolence extended certain inalienable rights across national borders to the entire human family.

Broadly speaking, a ‘cosmopolitan’ worldview embraces experiences and imagined communities beyond the home nation. The term evokes transnational movement and connections, but in political philosophy, it also has an ethical dimension. Originating in the Stoic idea of the ‘world citizen’ (kosmou politês), it describes, in the words of Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘a politics, or a moral approach to politics, that focuses on the humanity we share rather than the marks of local origin, status, class, and gender that divide us’.³ From this sense of commonality comes the conviction that ‘there are moral obligations owed to all human beings based solely on our humanity alone’.⁴ As a self-defined Anglo-Italian, Shelley shared with her Romantic expatriate circle a ‘bicultural sensibility’ that Maria Schoina identifies with a ‘cosmopolitan perspective’.⁵ Both the literary critic Andrea Haslanger and the political philosopher Eileen M. Hunt have also identified a cosmopolitan ethical strain in The Last Man (1826) characterized by planetary consciousness and – in Hunt’s words – a commitment to ‘care for and protect the life and independence of oneself and others, especially the weak and vulnerable, across artificial borders of nation, culture, and species’.⁶ Haslanger connects these values with Shelley’s reading of Kant, while Hunt establishes the influence of Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations (1758). I contend, however, that the cosmopolitanism of Valperga reflects the influence of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose works she ‘obsessively read and reread’, and who imagined Italy in her final novel as a place of freedom from the oppressive laws and customs of her homeland.⁷

Several works of recent criticism have identified the cosmopolitan strain in Wollstonecraft’s thought.⁸ She was a multi-lingual translator and reviewer of European literature, an extensive traveller, an expatriate in Revolutionary France, and a would-be emigrant to America. Crucially, she also represented universal love of humankind as integral to her democratic politics and reflected persistently on the moral obligations of our shared human condition.⁹ In her portrait of Euthanasia, Shelley builds on Wollstonecraft’s ethical framework, constructing a woman of highly developed reason who rejects the hostility and partisanship of ‘party spirit’.¹⁰ To this principled impartiality, she brings ‘sensibility’ and ‘enthusiasm’, which make her receptive to ‘the sublime feeling of universal love’.¹¹ Considering herself ‘bound in amity to all’, by principle as well as sentiment,¹² Euthanasia espouses what Stan van Hooft calls an ‘ethic of caring’, a humanitarian commitment to the wellbeing of others that stems from sentiment but can be reconciled with the principles of justice. This ethic of caring ‘embraces all those actions that we perform for the benefit of others out of feelings such as love, affection, concern, sympathy, loyalty or compassion’ and, for Van Hooft, because it also ‘advocates a willingness to assist others in need simply because they are human beings’, it has cosmopolitan moral potential.¹³ Euthanasia often personifies this cosmopolitan ethic of caring, but she also wrestles with the ingrained allegiances (loyalty to Florence) and personal desires (love for Castruccio) typical of human psychology. Through this revealing duality in her characterization, and her eventual tragic death, Shelley depicts a cosmopolitan ideal that transcends localized political structures whilst also questioning its viability in a world riven by apparently inexhaustible party spirit.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Anglo-Italian and Cosmopolitan

In medieval Italy, many city states were democratic ‘communes’ or republics. The rivalries between them and the unwieldiness of their governmental structures left them unstable and vulnerable to the competing imperial powers of the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy, and political tensions were further complicated by the longstanding factional conflict between the Guelphs (aligned with the Catholic Church) and the Ghibellines (aligned with the Empire). Rightly fearful of foreign invaders, the citizens of many city states put their liberty in the hands of a single authoritative ruler or ‘consul’, who paid lip service to republican values only so long as it took him to consolidate his grip on the region. Castruccio was just such a signore, or petty tyrant. The parallels with Napoleon are hard to overlook as he successively assumes the roles of soldier, consul, and finally tyrant-prince. At the same time, his Ghibelline allegiance aligns him with the Holy Roman Emperor, so that he might represent any hegemonic power injurious to political liberty. As the title suggests, however, Valperga is not simply an historical novel chronicling Castruccio’s will and rise to power; Shelley gives equal prominence to Euthanasia, a republican by conviction who rules ‘as a queen’ in Valperga by necessity.¹⁴ Castruccio and Euthanasia’s romance symbolically bridges the divide between Guelph and Ghibelline, republican and imperialist, but ultimately it cannot survive Castruccio’s imperialist ambitions, which eventually threaten Euthanasia’s native Florence. The daughter of a fervent Guelph mother, Euthanasia is a Florentine patriot devoted to the cause of liberty and habituated to ‘expressions of public feeling’.¹⁵ As Rachael Isom observes, however, Euthanasia’s Godwinian father, Adimari, ‘steers her mother’s zealous Guelph politics into a more ecumenical view’.¹⁶ This broader outlook brings a cosmopolitan dimension to Euthanasia’s republicanism.

Cosmopolitanism has the status of an ideal because the moral duty to practise benevolence impartially often conflicts with human psychological imperatives, deep-seated attachments and aversions. A common criticism of cosmopolitan philosophy is that it naively pits the abstract idea of a united humanity against the emotional appeal of intimacy and belonging, the stuff of blood ties, romantic love, regional pride, or patriotic fervour. While Nussbaum can envisage ‘rare human beings’ capable of constant ‘awareness of the equal worth and the equal needs of all’, she concedes that ‘the passions’ are ‘not stably supportive of these ends’, for they ‘take their nourishment from the soil of intense particular attachments, and in most people they wither in the absence of such attachments.’¹⁷ The dark side of intense attachment is, of course, intense antipathy. In her account of the Ghibelline exile from Lucca, Shelley establishes that Guelphs and Ghibellines alike imbibe ‘party spirit’ almost from their cradles:

Our exiles found many of their townsmen on the same road, on the same sad errand of seeking protection from a foreign state. Little Castruccio saw many of his dearest friends among them; and his young heart, moved by their tears and complaints, became inflamed with rage and desire of vengeance. It was by scenes such as these, that party spirit was generated, and became so strong in Italy. Children, while they were yet too young to feel their own disgrace, saw the misery of their parents, and took early vows of implacable hatred against their persecutors: these were remembered in after times; the wounds were never seared, but the fresh blood ever streaming kept alive the feelings of passion and anger which had given rise to the first blow.¹⁸

Depicted as an affectionate child, Castruccio receives a virtual education in ‘party spirit’. His imperial ambitions stem at least in part from ‘rage and desire of vengeance’ against his family’s Guelph adversaries. Shelley also emphasizes, however, that his staunch loyalty to the Ghibellines is fundamentally self-interested. Like Napoleon, he glosses his will to power with republican rhetoric, but his alliances serve only to further his ambition for conquest. Shelley thus depicts party spirit as ego-driven, the acceptance of others only as extensions of the self. For Wollstonecraft, this self-interested phenomenon fuelled interminable disputes in the French National Assembly and the blinkered nationalism of the Revolutionary Wars. For Shelley, party spirit drove the collapse of French republicanism into imperial tyranny.

If Castruccio exemplifies the party spirit writ large across public histories, Euthanasia is his cosmopolitan anti-type. She is a republican patriot in the 1790s radical mould, one whose loyalty to Florence manifests in efforts to preserve the liberty of its citizens but stems from attachment to the principles of political justice. As these principles are founded on the universality of human rights, it follows that Euthanasia develops a cosmopolitan desire to extend political liberty beyond the bounds of the city state. When Shelley emphasizes that ‘love of their country was a characteristic of all Florentines’,¹⁹ she invokes not jingoistic applause for insularity and imperial aggression, but a longstanding patriotic tradition rooted in opposition and Dissent and engaged in self-reflexive, critical scrutiny of the moral health of the nation and its relationship to the wider world.²⁰ Wollstonecraft’s works participate in the apotheosis of this cosmopolitan patriotic tradition, when British radicals and Dissenters, envisioning ‘a more inclusive and globally defined notion of civil liberties’, interpreted the French Revolution ‘as a harbinger of a new, comprehensive model of citizenship that would be achieved through reform and universal enlightenment’.²¹ One text that epitomizes this outlook is A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), the transcript of a speech delivered to the Revolution Society by Richard Price, the rationalist minister of the Unitarian meeting-house at Newington Green where Wollstonecraft worshipped. Price argues that ‘our first concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’, hence ethical patriots should demand that their country extend human rights to all disenfranchised subjects within the nation and beyond it.²² The second-generation Romantics inherited this understanding that love of country and world citizenship could be ‘mutually constitutive’, a point of view still present in modern cosmopolitan theory.²³ As Nussbaum explains, ‘[i]f one imagines the nation as itself striving towards justice and human rights, and built on a commitment to human dignity, this way of loving the country is easy to extend outward’ – albeit, she admits, with ‘conflict and tension’.²⁴

Wollstonecraft shared Price’s belief that ‘Universal Benevolence’ was ‘an unspeakably nobler principle than any partial affections’; not simply an impulse to alleviate suffering in a particular context, but a principle of action predicated on the equality of all human subjects.²⁵ Political and moral progress depended on the moral sentiment she defined by turns as ‘Goodwill to all the human race’, ‘a more enlightened moral love of mankind’, and ‘(ardent) affection for the (whole) human race’.²⁶ Having invested in this ideal, Wollstonecraft considered how political and pedagogical reforms might combat self-interest and party spirit, enabling us to practise benevolence across the boundaries of race, nation, and culture. As Hunt has demonstrated, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argued that our early bonds of affection could inculcate concern for the wellbeing of others, an altruistic reflex which, harnessed by principle, could broaden its purview from kith and kin to compatriots and, finally, to humanity as a whole.²⁷ She believed that, by developing our God-given gifts of reason, imagination, and passion, we could learn not only to discipline but also to expand our ‘partial affections’, embracing a borderless community. Our reason enables us to comprehend the principle of universal benevolence, but it is through our capacity imaginatively to share in others’ emotional experience that we grasp the value of acting benevolently. Nussbaum similarly emphasizes the importance of reason and feeling working together when she claims that, ‘since compassion contains thought, it can be educated.’²⁸ Building on Nussbaum’s work, Van Hooft argues that, because we can ‘extend our strong emotions and our ability to imagine the situation of others’, the concept of caring – benevolent action born of sympathetic emotion – can offer an ethical framework for world citizenship that complements the framework of justice.

Wollstonecraft was acutely aware, however, that systemic inequalities create conditions that inhibit or warp affective bonds and stunt the developing reason and imagination that can help us refine them. As Nussbaum observes, most people ‘learn compassion under circumstances that divide and rank-order human beings’, and the ‘emotional factors that produce such divisions are too deep-seated to be easily eradicated’.²⁹ A defining tension in Wollstonecraft’s work arises from her recognition that imaginative sympathy gives us the potential for caring requisite to realize the cosmopolitan ideal, even as it also predisposes us to conflict and partisanship. Shelley’s Euthanasia embodies this tension, depicted by turns as the cosmopolitan ideal incarnate and as a psychologically plausible woman enmeshed in conflicts anathema to her moral vision and torn by irreconcilable loyalties.

Euthanasia: Wollstonecraftian Cosmopolitan

Euthanasia’s father, Adimari, is ‘a fervent advocate for the freedom of his fellow citizens’, allied to the Guelphs because he sees in the Florentine commitment to political liberty ‘the germ of future independence for Italy’.³⁰ Under his influence, Euthanasia reads the history, philosophy, and poetry of the Roman republics and, as a result, becomes ‘deeply penetrated by the acts and thoughts of those men, who despised the spirit of party, and grasped the universe in their hopes of virtue and independence’.³¹ Unsurprisingly given her allegiance to Florence, she engages closely with Cicero, whose republican philosophy inspired the American Founding Fathers as well as prominent actors in the French Revolution. Cicero regarded the republic as the highest form of fellowship and a worthy object of self-sacrifice, but, as Nussbaum demonstrates, the ‘duties of justice’ he sets out in De Officiis (44 BCE) are ‘fully global’ to the extent that ‘[n]ational boundaries are morally irrelevant’.³² Michael Scrivener calls Euthanasia’s education ‘cosmopolitan’ because it teaches her to establish ‘some distance from her own society’, recognizing that ‘the present moment and its norms are the consequence of historical process’.³³ Crucially, in her ‘wild dreams’ she imagines ‘freedom for Italy’ as part of a Godwinian perfectibilist narrative culminating in ‘revived learning and the reign of peace for all the world’.³⁴ She also has a much broader perspective on ‘the pygmy acts of a petty state’ than her Guelph mother, for whom ‘the whole globe of the earth was merely an appendage to the county of Valperga’.³⁵ By contrast, Euthanasia is ‘no narrow partizan’.³⁶ She never seeks to convert Castruccio to the Guelph party, but ‘to shew how futile that distinction and enmity were, if one love of peace and good animated all hearts’.³⁷ She is happiest when she believes that their marriage will secure peace between Florence and Lucca, promoting the spread of political justice.

In common with Wollstonecraft, Euthanasia derives her ethic of caring partly from religious conviction. She tells Castruccio that, ‘as [she] worshipped wisdom as the pure emanation of the Deity, the divine light of the world, so did [she] adore liberty as its parent, its sister, the half of its being’.³⁸ If Shelley depicts wisdom as coextensive with liberty, through Euthanasia’s characterization she also suggests that the other ‘half of its being’ is the altruistic love that informs her ethic of caring. Giving Euthanasia ‘the very soul of open-hearted Charity’,³⁹ Shelley invokes a martyred Christian saint – one of three daughters of Sophia (wisdom) – whose name describes the theological virtue of caritas, which incorporates both love of God and love of one’s neighbour. Wollstonecraft also deploys the term ‘charity’ as a synonym for ‘divine love’ and ‘philanthropy’, the latter applied in its etymological sense to mean ‘love of humankind’.⁴⁰ As Hunt has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft cultivates through her Christian faith a cosmopolitan psychology, in which caritas inspires universal benevolence, the cornerstone principle for her inclusive democratic-egalitarian politics: ‘love of God inspires love of His creation. Love of God’s creation, in turn, inspires a radically egalitarian sympathy with His other creatures – not just one’s own kind, class, country, or species, but all of God’s family’.⁴¹ It follows that benevolence should be a principle of action because we are morally obligated to extend ‘love and charity’ beyond our nearest and dearest to ‘all the human race’.⁴² From this point of view, it is significant that Euthanasia’s relationship with Castruccio never distracts her from ‘virtuous action’.⁴³ Known for her ‘judgement and abounding benevolence’, she rules over ‘a contented peasantry, who adored their countess, and knew her power only by the benefits she conferred on them’.⁴⁴ Within the enclosed realm of Valperga, ‘raised on the peaks of mountains, and rendered almost inaccessible by nature as well as art’, she can implement her ethic of caring.⁴⁵ As the peasantry sicken and starve during Castruccio’s military campaign, she strives to palliate their suffering, willing to ‘perform offices that even wives and mothers shrunk from with disgust and fear’.⁴⁶ She thus embodies an all-embracing ethic of caring that is stronger even than the claims of intimacy and kinship. Significantly, however, Shelley does not represent Euthanasia’s extraordinary altruism as the imagined endpoint of a human moral teleology. On the contrary, she repeatedly figures her as supernatural, ‘above humanity’.⁴⁷ She feels ‘that pity which angels are said to feel’ and her ‘soul’ is ‘clothed in garments of heavenly texture’.⁴⁸ Even as Shelley gives human shape to the cosmopolitan ethic of caring, then, she foregrounds its ideality.

And yet Euthanasia is a flesh-and-blood woman in her relationship with Castruccio. Critics often connect her with Wollstonecraft because of her commitment to reason but, as we shall see, one of the most Wollstonecraftian aspects of her characterization is the link Shelley makes between her ethic of caring and her capacity to love passionately.⁴⁹ One might easily regard the erotic and the cosmopolitan as mutually exclusive, for ‘intense attachments to particular individuals, especially when they are of an erotic or romantic sort, call attention away from the world of general concern’.⁵⁰ As Barbara Taylor has demonstrated, however, Wollstonecraft draws on Milton and Christian Platonism to imbue ‘erotic attachments’ with ‘transcendent significance’ as part of the ‘epistemic impulse’ towards God, the divine standard for a cosmopolitan love of humankind.⁵¹ This apprehension of divine love depends on the imagination, which – as Wollstonecraft puts it in one of her Letters to Imlay (1798) – can transform our baser instincts into ‘all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture’.⁵² In the same letter, she invokes the Prometheus myth to figure the imagination as ‘fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay’.⁵³ Kindled by love, this creative imagination can ‘render[-] men social by expanding their hearts’, promoting the sympathies that inspire benevolent action.⁵⁴

In her Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), Wollstonecraft invests her passion for her wayward lover, Gilbert Imlay, with cosmopolitan ethical potential. As her epistolary persona, ‘Mary’, travels through the Scandinavian fjords, she ‘frames […] a dynamic in which mind and world are interdependent’, and this symbiotic aesthetic experience takes on moral significance as it inspires her to connect imaginatively with lost or distant objects of love and, simultaneously, with a divinity immanent in the natural world.⁵⁵ Describing nature as the ‘nurse of sentiment’, Wollstonecraft represents her ‘responsive sympathy’ as an aesthetic apprehension of moral perfection, manifest in the natural sublime and the beautiful. As she travels through Scandinavia, this same capacity for sympathy connects her with a borderless community of strangers, from unmarried mothers and survivors of the Revolution, whose experiences mirror her own, to distant historical figures such as Ugolino della Gherardesca, the Guelph leader imprisoned and left to starve with his sons and grandsons.⁵⁶ Wollstonecraft’s ‘sentiments’ often cause her pain, but she finds them ‘difficult to eradicate […] when an affection for mankind, a passion for an individual, is but the unfolding of that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful’.⁵⁷ Here, the syntax equates two forms of love: the philanthropic ‘affection for mankind’ and the erotic ‘passion for an individual’. In Wollstonecraft’s eyes, these sentiments represent different but related expressions of the divine element in human nature, ‘that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful’.⁵⁸

Like Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona, or the Shelleyan poet-prophet, Euthanasia has ‘creative fire in her heart and brain’, a Promethean imagination that conjures a delusive image of Castruccio’s virtues even as it also gives her love for him an ethical dimension. Believing him capable of ‘an oblivion of self, and heroic sacrifice of personal felicity for the public cause’, she finds her ‘master-passions’ – her lifelong attachment to ideas of liberty and benevolence – ‘heightened by love’.⁵⁹ This misguided vision initially enables Euthanasia to conceive of her love for Castruccio as compatible with the selflessness of Florentine patriotism. Shelley represents the relationship as a function of Euthanasia’s desire for ethical concord in the fellowship of the republic, and significantly, she invokes an ideal reader inclined rather to identify with her emotions than fear their consequences. The ‘deep sympathy of united affections’, the narrator observes, ‘opens a spring of feeling which those have never known, whose hearts have not been warmed by public feeling, or who have not entered with interest into the hopes and fears of a band struggling for liberty’.⁶⁰ Just as erotic love participates in public feeling, so it participates in Euthanasia’s sense of connection with a wider world:

She loved, and was beloved: – her eyes beamed with a quicker fire; and her whole soul, perfectly alive, seemed to feel with a vividness and truth she had never before experienced. Nature was invested for her with new appearances; and there was a beauty, a soul, in the breeze of evening, the starry sky, and uprising sun, which filled her with emotions she had never before so vividly felt. Love seemed to have made her heart its chosen temple; and he linked all its beatings to that universal beauty which is his mother and his nurse.⁶¹

In the ‘quicker fire’ of Euthanasia’s eyes, one glimpses once again the spark of Promethean creativity. Fuelled by reciprocal love, her imagination intensifies her sensual and sentimental responses to a natural world ‘never before so vividly felt’. Like Wollstonecraft, Shelley grants eros moral potential, figuring it both as a sanctifying force that makes Euthanasia’s heart a ‘chosen temple’ and as the nursling of a sublime and beautiful natural world. Erotic attachment thus becomes the means to apprehend ‘universal beauty’, the aesthetic manifestation of ‘that love which embraces all that is great and beautiful’.⁶²

When Castruccio’s imperial ambitions compel Euthanasia to break with him, reason proves an infallible guide and cold comfort. Just as Wollstonecraft has her autofictional heroine, Maria, declare that ‘wisdom’ is ‘too often, but the owl of the goddess, who sits moping in a desolated heart’,⁶³ so Shelley invokes the symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom, to describe Euthanasia’s dejected state: ‘one steady hopeless blank was before her; the very energies of her mind were palsied; her imagination furled its wings, and the owlet, reason, was the only dweller that found sustenance and being in her benighted soul’.⁶⁴ In Short Residence, the solitary letter-writer also struggles with ‘melancholy and even mysanthropy’.⁶⁵ As an unmarried mother and an eyewitness to the Terror, she finds her personal solitude compounded by her embattled position as a radical still clinging to her democratic hopes. Imagining herself as ‘a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind’,⁶⁶ she attributes her sense of alienation to the conflict between her political and moral ideals and her lived experiences of systemic injustice: ‘How illusive, perhaps the most so, are the plans of happiness founded on virtue and principle; what inlets of misery do they not open in a half civilized society?’⁶⁷ In such moments, ‘imperious sympathies’, often actuated by memories of her lover or affection for their child, drag her back from the brink of despair: ‘I was alone, till some involuntary sympathetic emotion, like the attraction of adhesion, made me feel that I was still part of a mighty whole, from which I could not sever myself–’.⁶⁸ For Nussbaum, the decisive factor for judging the ethical status of any erotic attachment is whether it ‘can find a way back to compassion, or whether its absorption in the particular is so deep that it must simply depart from the world.’⁶⁹ With her image of atomic ‘adhesion’, Wollstonecraft’s letter-writer depicts herself tied to the ‘mighty whole’ by an erotic sensibility that is also conducive to caritas, that love of God and neighbour manifest in her compassion for strangers encountered on the road.

Similarly, Euthanasia finds solace in a natural world that revivifies her ethic of caring. Communing with the Italian landscape and its elements, she reconnects with a cosmopolitan love for the planet and its inhabitants:

To look on the hues of sunset, to see the softened tints of the olive woods, the purple tinge of the distant mountains, whose outline was softly, yet distinctly marked in the orange sky; to feel the western breeze steal across her cheek, like words of love from one most dear; to see the first star of evening penetrate from out the glowing western firmament, and whisper the secret of distant worlds to us in our narrow prison; to behold the heaven-pointing cypress with unbent spire sleep in the stirless air; these were sights and feelings which softened and exalted her thoughts; she felt as if she were a part of the great whole; she felt bound in amity to all; doubly, immeasurably loving those dear to her, feeling an humanizing charity even to the evil.⁷⁰

Shelley’s language eroticizes Euthanasia’s wonder at the natural world: the ‘western breeze’ is ‘like words of love from one most dear’, while images of penetration and whispering evoke the ‘first star of evening’. The focus of the passage then expands outwards to ‘distant worlds’, accessible both through human intimacy and through our sentimental responses to the natural sublime and the beautiful. Like Wollstonecraft’s epistolary persona, Euthanasia feels ‘part of a great whole’, sublimating her love for Castruccio into ‘amity for all’, a feeling of universal benevolence sharpened but not delimited by particular affections. As Nussbaum observes, some emotions, including erotic love, ‘expand the boundaries of the self’.⁷¹ Euthanasia’s sense of connectedness with distant others arises because ‘immeasurably loving’ Castruccio inspires her creative imagination to transmute erotic love to caritas, or ‘humanizing charity’, the philanthropic virtue that perceives others not as objects of desire or judgement but as the recipients of our altruistic love. Euthanasia thus sustains, at her darkest hour, the ethic of caring that motivates her ‘benevolence and self-sacrifice’ as ruler of her suffering people and informs her therapeutic friendship with Beatrice.⁷²

Critics have tended to place Euthanasia and Beatrice at opposite poles, the one representing reason and self-control, and the other a victim of her own vivid imagination and unruly passions.⁷³ While a thorough challenge to this binary is beyond the scope of this article, it should be clear by now that Euthanasia is not immune to passion. From a cosmopolitan philosophical perspective, however, we can identify a crucial distinction between the two women in the fact that Euthanasia never allows love to elevate Castruccio in her eyes to the detriment of others. When Euthanasia claims that her attachment to him could not survive his corruption, Beatrice rejects this correlation of erotic attachment with moral worth. By contrast, she declares that it would ‘please [her]’ if he ‘should cast off all humanity, and be a reprobate, an outcast of his species’:

Oh! then how deeply and tenderly I should love him; soiled with crimes, his hands dripping blood, I would shade him as the flowering shrub invests the ruin; I would cover him with a spotless veil; – my intensity of love would annihilate his wickedness; – everyone would hate him; – but, if all adored him, it would not come near the sum of my single affection. I should be every thing to him, life, and hope; he would die in his remorse; but he would live again and again in the light of my love; I would invest him as a silvery mist, so that none should see how evil he was; I would pour out before him large draughts of love, that he should become drunk with it, until he grew good and kind.⁷⁴

Beatrice imagines her love as a purifying force capable of redeeming Castruccio. The appeal of this fantasy lies in his dependency, which grants her power through sheer devotion to him, but it also depends on his inhumanity to others, whose ‘dripping blood’ stains his hands. Indeed, the more sufferers the better, for if ‘remorse’ kills Castruccio, Beatrice can play the all-powerful deity who resurrects him ‘in the light of [her] love’. Careless of his victims, she wishes only for ‘a spotless veil’ to shield him from the shame that could incite genuine repentance. This is the moral nadir of erotic love, the ego-driven desire to ‘push back the boundaries of the self’ only to admit a single loved object whose perceived value bears no relation to their moral worth and whose intoxicating presence closes the subject off from the rest of the world.

Euthanasia, too, dreams of rescuing Castruccio from his ‘insatiable enemies’, but in this fantasy his moral redemption depends on atonement.⁷⁵ Like Napoleon, he is confined to an island-prison, to which Euthanasia also retreats:

Thence he would survey the land where the philosophers of past ages lived; he would study their lessons; and their wisest love would descend into his soul, like the dews of heaven upon the parched frame of the wanderer in the Arabian desarts. By degrees he would love obscurity. They would behold together the wondrous glories of the heavens, and the beauty of that transparent sea, whose floor of pebbles, shells and weeds, is as a diamond-paved palace of romance, shone on and illustrated as it is by the sun’s rays.⁷⁶

In Euthanasia’s fantasy, Castruccio’s redemption depends both on her love for him, imagined as unstintingly compassionate, and on his removal from the world of party spirit. Only when detached from the events of history, the arena of factional conflict, can he embrace the principles of benevolence (‘wisest love’). These principles develop, not only from reading ‘the philosophers of past ages’, but also from the mutual awe of the two lovers as they contemplate the natural world, from ‘the wondrous glories of the heavens’ to the ‘beauty’ of the ocean that separates them from the rest of humanity. That Castruccio grows to ‘love obscurity’ emphasizes that Euthanasia can reaffirm her erotic attachment to him only on condition that he renounce his ego-driven pursuits. Still more significantly, however, the cosmopolitan moral ideal she imagines as key to his salvation depends on their total retreat from the human society that makes it impossible to realize. In this way, Euthanasia’s fantasy of erotic-love-as-altruism threatens to collapse into the straightforwardly erotic, as the two lovers’ mutual enthralment excludes other members of the human family from their circle of practical concern. From their philosophical perspective, the natural world represented by the sea appears ‘transparent’, at once knowable and able to reflect its divine origins. Even this transparency generates wish-fulfilling illusion, however, as the ocean floor becomes ‘a diamond-paved palace of romance’. Euthanasia thus enacts through her fantasy the risks of the cosmopolitan ethic of caring which, for all its compatibility with rational principles of benevolence, also rests on unstable affective foundations.

The Good Death of the Cosmopolitan Ideal

What future, then, does Shelley see for Euthanasia’s cosmopolitan ideal in a world where self-interest and party spirit prove inextinguishable? Given Euthanasia’s fate, it is easy to read the ending of the novel as irretrievably pessimistic. When she eventually opposes Castruccio, she is betrayed, imprisoned, and exiled to Sicily. As she embarks on her journey, her guide, a Florentine peasant, offers this benediction, a tribute to her benevolence: ‘“Heaven preserve you long upon earth […] and make you as happy as you deserve, as happy as you have made others!”’⁷⁷ Shelley refuses us this poetic justice and ends the novel with Euthanasia drowning at sea:

She was never heard of more; even her name perished. She slept in the oozy cavern of the ocean; the sea-weed was tangled with her shining hair; and the spirits of the deep wondered that the earth had trusted so lovely a creature to the barren bosom of the sea, which, as an evil step-mother, deceives and betrays all committed to her care.Earth felt no change when she died; and men forgot her.⁷⁸

The natural world that once inspired Euthanasia to benevolence proves amoral, even spiteful, ‘an evil-stepmother’ intent on her destruction. Through this anthropomorphic image, Shelley equates the destructive powers of nature with human nature, apparently abandoning hope that any human society could nurture the cosmopolitan ideal Euthanasia embodies. As Patricia A. Matthew puts it, Euthanasia ‘simply cannot live in the world as it is currently designed.’⁷⁹ Her grave is the ‘oozy cavern of the ocean’, a dark, viscous antithesis to the ‘transparent sea’ in her earlier fantasy of Castruccio’s redemption, manifesting the inscrutability of a world indifferent to the principles she lived by. For some critics, therefore, her death constitutes a dark reimagining of Godwin’s ‘euthanasia of government’, the benign anarchy that concludes his perfectibilist teleology.⁸⁰ But the literal translation of Euthanasia’s name – ‘good death’ – suggests to Rossington ‘not only that her nobility is consummated in death but also that her death is not a moment of closure or finality’.⁸¹ Instead, he claims, one is left with a ‘sense of a moral truth surviving beyond an actuality’.⁸² If Euthanasia embodies the cosmopolitan ideal, her death would suggest that Shelley saw party spirit as perpetually triumphant over an ethic of caring compatible with world citizenship. Even so, Euthanasia’s cosmopolitan perspective, her belief that she is ‘bound in amity to all’, provides her with a model for living well. In a world where party spirit relentlessly stymies political justice, to embrace a cosmopolitan ethic of caring is not naivety but rebellious hope. A ‘good death’ is therefore one that follows a life lived according to the principle of universal benevolence in a divided world.

Picking up on Shelley’s allusion to the Cumaean Sibyl in The Last Man, Orianne Smith argues that she considered Wollstonecraft’s works ‘a version of the sibylline leaves – prophecies to be carefully saved and preserved until they found a receptive audience’.⁸³ Yet in Valperga, the narrator insists at the start of both her final paragraphs that Euthanasia’s cosmopolitan values die with her: ‘She was never heard of more; even her name perished’; ‘Earth felt no change when she died; and men forgot her’. These are unequivocal statements, and yet the very structure of the novel belies them. Purportedly drawn from ‘private chronicles’, Euthanasia’s life-story is not a matter of public record; but Shelley’s literary conceit implies that it has indeed survived for her to convey to new readers. When the narrator claims that ‘men forgot her’, then, the collective noun can only refer to the male authors of public histories. The place of ‘euthanasia’ in Godwinian philosophy also undermines the narrator’s claim that Euthanasia’s ‘name perished’. On the contrary, it survives conceptually, denoting a radical faith in human perfectibility found in the republican and cosmopolitan philosophical traditions which, if they have never yet overcome ‘party spirt’, have never fully succumbed to it either. From this perspective, the image of Euthanasia sleeping in her ‘oozy cavern’ implies the possibility of some future awakening.

The language of resistive energies roused from sleep echoes through the works of 1790s radicals, including Wollstonecraft. Celebrating the fall of the Bastille in her polemical ‘history’ of the Revolution, she writes that ‘freedom, like a lion roused from his lair, rose with dignity, and calmly shook herself.’⁸⁴ The juxtaposition of differently gendered conceptions of liberty – a serenely feminine personification compared to a male lion – gives indeterminate shape to its violent and pacific potentialities. Wollstonecraft goes on to depict liberty thwarted and driven to ferocity by agents of Terror and conflict also figured as wild animals: ‘the tiger, who thirsts for blood’, ‘the whole brutal herd’, ‘the dogs of war’.⁸⁵ Crucially, however, she closes the passage insisting that their violence will burn itself out, and that ‘the improvement of the times’ heralds ‘a change of government, gradually taking place to meliorate the fate of man’.⁸⁶ Wollstonecraft’s determined refrain throughout the text is that, if liberty could rise with dignity once, it can do so again. While the lion’s lair shelters a revolutionary energy quickly roused, however, Euthanasia’s ‘oozy cavern’ represents a profounder retreat for her dormant cosmopolitan ideal. Writing from a perspective of decades-long radical disenchantment that Wollstonecraft never experienced, Shelley struggles to conceive of the conditions for Euthanasia’s reawakening. This ambivalence is reflected in the two distinct impulses at work in her description of Euthanasia in death: one insists on her irreversible destruction and barren gravesite, while the other can imagine her renaissance. For most of the novel, the supernatural is mere artifice or delusion, but in the final paragraphs, Shelley’s allusion to ‘spirits of the deep’ removes Euthanasia from the pages of political history and relocates her to the realm of myth, granting her an afterlife in collective imagination and memory. Significantly, the spirits watching over her do not partake of the malignancy of the ocean but recognize her loveliness. The cruel manner of Euthanasia’s death emphasizes that there is no reward for her commitment to universal benevolence in her lifetime or even in the living memory of her compatriots. Yet Shelley also suggests that, if her cosmopolitan ideal is incompatible with the current state of political injustice, it is nonetheless valuable for its own sake. For this reason, like all enduring myths, it compels successive generations to return to it, which raises hopes that it might yet resurface in a time and place ready to embrace it.

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Notes on contributors

Laura Kirkley

Laura Kirkley is a Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature at Newcastle University. A comparatist specialising in British and European women’s writing and translation in the Revolutionary and Romantic eras, she has particular expertise in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. Her monograph Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022 and she is currently editing Wollstonecraft’s extant translations for Oxford University Press. As a co-founder of The Gothic Women Project, she is also co-editing The Routledge Companion to Gothic Women Writers with Deborah Russell and Daniel Cook.

Notes

¹ See Patricia Cove, Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 30.

² Michael Rossington, ‘Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga,’ in Mary Shelley in Her Times, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 103–118 (p. 103).

³ Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble But Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 1–2.

⁴ Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held, ‘Editors’ Introduction,’ in The Cosmopolitanism Reader, ed., Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 1–14 (p. 1).

⁵ Maria Schoina, Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’: Configurations of Identity in Byron, the Shelleys, and the Pisan Circle [2009] (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 5, 72. See also Antonella Braida ed., Mary Shelley and Europe: Essays in Honour of Jean de Palacio (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020).

⁶ Eileen M. Hunt, ‘Mary Shelley’s The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel,’ Review of International Studies (2022), 12. See also Andrea Haslanger, ‘The Last Animal: Cosmopolitanism in The Last Man,’ European Romantic Review 27, no. 5 (2016): 659–78.

⁷ Orianne Smith, Romantic Women Writers, Revolution and Prophecy: Rebellious Daughters, 1786–1826 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 193; see Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), I, 165.

⁸ See: Richard Vernon, Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where We Belong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Michael Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007); Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); Eileen Hunt Botting, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Sylvana Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Enit Karafili Steiner, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,’ Studies in Romanticism, no. 58 (Spring, 2019): 3–26; and Laura Kirkley, Mary Wollstonecraft: Cosmopolitan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

⁹ See Kirkley, 1–2.

¹⁰ In The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, Stuart Curran argues that Euthanasia ‘represents the ideal to which Mary Wollstonecraft subscribed throughout her writings’, and that, by making Euthanasia the ‘moral center’ of Valperga, Shelley effectively ‘dedicates her second novel to her mother’. Curran identifies Euthanasia’s devotion to liberty as a defining feature of this Wollstonecraftian ideal, but he does not consider its cosmopolitan aspect, focusing instead on Euthanasia’s ‘refusal to sacrifice her noble ideal for a conventional marriage’ and her feminist solidarity with the lovelorn Beatrice of Ferrara. See Stuart Curran, ‘Valperga,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 113–4.

¹¹ Mary Shelley, Valperga [1823], ed. Tilottama Rajan (Ontario: Broadview, 1998), 142, 144.

¹² Shelley, Valperga, 265.

¹³ Stan Van Hooft, Cosmopolitanism: A Philosophy for Global Ethics [2009] (London: Routledge, 2014), 92–3.

¹⁴ Shelley, Valperga, 134.

¹⁵ Ibid., 152.

¹⁶ Rachel Isom, ‘Prophetic Poetics and Enthusiasm in Mary Shelley’s Valperga,’ Studies in Romanticism 58 (Spring 2019): 60.

¹⁷ Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 93.

¹⁸ Shelley, Valperga, 61–2.

¹⁹ Ibid., 152.

²⁰ See Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

²¹ Smith, Romantic Women Writers, 21.

²² Richard Price, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country [1789],’, in Richard Price: Political Writings, ed. D.O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 181.

²³ Esther Wohlgemut, Romantic Cosmopolitanism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.

²⁴ Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 211.

²⁵ Price, “A discourse on the love,” 180.

²⁶ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, IV, 44; VI, 21; V, 65; VI, 346.

²⁷ See Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, 147.

²⁸ Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Introduction: Cosmopolitan Emotions?’ in For Love of Country? [1996], ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002), ix-xiv (xiii).

²⁹ Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 386–7.

³⁰ Shelley, Valperga, 70.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition, 29.

³³ Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution, 213.

³⁴ Shelley, Valperga, 70–1.

³⁵ Ibid., 148.

³⁶ Ibid., 142.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., 147.

³⁹ Ibid., 142.

⁴⁰ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, IV, 24.

⁴¹ Hunt Botting, Family Feuds, 147.

⁴² Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, IV, 44.

⁴³ Shelley, Valperga, 168.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 168–9.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 68.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 400.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 400.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 402.

⁴⁹ William D. Brewer, ‘Mary Shelley’s Valperga: The Triumph of Euthanasia’s Mind,’ European Romantic Review 5, no. 2 (1995): 133–148 (p. 133).

⁵⁰ Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 461.

⁵¹ Barbara Taylor, ‘The religious foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 99–118 (113); and Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108.

⁵² Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, VI, 388.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ibid.

⁵⁵ Karen Hust, ‘Facing the Maternal Sublime: Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden,’ in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Journey to Scandinavia: Essays, ed. Anka Ryall and Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2003), 139–63 (p. 156).

⁵⁶ Beatrice also refers to Ugolino’s fate to justify her despair at the terrible suffering in the world. See Shelley, 342.

⁵⁷ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, VI, 271.

⁵⁸ For a more thorough analysis of this aspect of Short Residence, see Kirkley, ch.6.

⁵⁹ Shelley, Valperga, 165, 144.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 165.

⁶¹ Ibid., 168.

⁶² Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, VI, 271.

⁶³ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, I, 123.

⁶⁴ Shelley, Valperga, 279.

⁶⁵ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, VI, 248.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 249.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 298.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 249.

⁶⁹ Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 593.

⁷⁰ Shelley, Valperga, 265.

⁷¹ Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 300.

⁷² Shelley, Valperga, 402.

⁷³ See Brewer, “Mary Shelley’s Valperga,”141.

⁷⁴ Shelley, Valperga, 350.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 412.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 412–13.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 435.

⁷⁸ Ibid., 437–8.

⁷⁹ Patricia A. Matthew, ‘Biography and Mary Wollstonecraft in Adeline Mowbray and Valperga,’ Women’s Writing 14, no. 3 (2007): 382–398 (p. 392).

⁸⁰ See Rajan, ‘Introduction,’ in Valperga, ed. Rajan, 17; and Cove, 53.

⁸¹ Rossington, “Future Uncertain,”118.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Smith, Romantic Women Writers, 193.

⁸⁴ Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, VI, 106.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Ibid.