Lana E. Deist
ENGL. 411.01
Dr. C. Dilgard
4/28/99
Percy Shelley: Male Feminist or Grand Gigolo?

If there is one statement that could be made about Percy Shelley it is that he had a special place in his heart for women. He, like his friend Lord Byron, was the embodiment of the Romantic ideal in body and philosophy. Shelley's works cried for the rights of women, their need for equality and the power of love to overcome all the obstacles.  But beneath this exterior of ideal male feminist rhetoric, Shelley was driven by the desire not only to free women but to mold them into his own ideal woman. This paper will attempt to show Percy Shelley's "double life" of women's social advocate and male chauvinist manipulator of women in both his life and work.
	 Shelley was a man who lived outside of the traditional bounds of his societal guidelines. With his titled upbringing, classical education and drive to break with tradition, he was the James Dean of the 19th Century. This "rebel with a cause" attitude flowed in everything he did. This is especially true when matters turned toward the female gender. Shelley's life seemed to revolve around women and the conditions that surround their very being.
	Shelley's attraction and sympathy towards women was molded at an early age. The Shelley home was a picture out of a William Faulkner/ Ernest Hemingway novel. His father, Sir Timothy Shelley, was the older, aloof father figure who was the least possibly active in his son's rearing as any good 19th century father could be. He took little interest in his son's life and even more little interest in the lives of his four daughters. Percy had expectations to fulfill as the eldest son in the long line of his lineage (Brown 165).
	Shelley was a very effeminate looking boy physically. He was "meek-looking, narrow-chested, beardless, small-featured, long-haired, shrill-voiced and expressive eyed" (Brown 166). His portraits show this representation. His personality traits also lent toward his feminine side, possibly the reason why his friends would accentuate his masculine features of physical and moral courage, intellectual nonconformity, social independence and love of learning and intellectual debate (Brown 166).
	For the most part, Shelley grew up in a house full of women. He lived with his four sisters until his brother arrived while Shelley was a teenager (Brown 165). Of the women of the house, two had a profound effect on the types of women Shelley would come to model and later become romantically entangled with in his personal life. His mother was his first love. Significantly younger than Shelley's father, the Lady Shelley was admired by her son for her affection, her cleverness and her beauty. Shelley, it seems was the stereotypical "mama's boy"; coming to her aid whenever she desired his support (Brown 165). His sister Elizabeth was his second love. Shelley considered her his intellectual and spiritual equal. She was his social companion, his mentor, and his partner in crime.
	From these two women Shelley created his personal archetype of love. To Shelley, the perfect woman combined the intellectual, imaginative and the sensory elements of human nature (Brown 45). The search for this perfect match was incomplete for Shelley. No human could fill all the requirements, something that would haunt him later in life. However, Shelley knew that some of these elements could be taught while others where inborn. His campaign for equal education made him a forward thinker in the patriarchal society, but also turned him into a manipulator with a God complex. 
	Shelley's feminist rhetoric encouraged women's rising above the patriarchal tyranny they had suffered under for centuries. Women should be free in every way; sexually, socially, intellectually, morally and spiritually (Brown 180). In each of the women in his life, Shelley attempted to find this free spirit or free the spirit from the cage of society.
	His first experiment was his sister, Elizabeth. She collaborated with him on his first literary publication, Original Poetry. In his youth, Elizabeth was Shelley's rock; he counted on her support when he felt his first pangs of rebellion against religious and social tyranny (Brown 166). She seemed to follow his views like a nun follows the words at mass, causing Shelley to plan a match between her and his only male friend at school, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley believed that their union would only further the cause for intellectuality and sexual emancipation (Brown 166). When Shelley was expelled from Oxford he returned home only to find his sister had defected from his cause, losing her liberated views, spurning Hogg's attentions and becoming the thing Shelley despised the most, the stereotypical woman of her class (Brown 167).  Shelley attempted to save his sister from the fate of her class, but she would not recant and he turned his eyes elsewhere.
	Harriet Westbrook was Shelley's next attempt in his Titan struggle to create the perfect woman. Shelley saw Harriet as a little girl lost whom he could save from the same plight that stole his sister. The two had a passing acquaintance through Shelley's sisters, he knew her through their discussions. Harriet was known for her physical beauty, but Shelley didn't really notice her at first (Crompton 27). She was the daughter of a wealthy merchant, sheltered by her conservative upbringing. Harriet was easily guided by those who were stronger in personality and especially by the whims of men. Like women of her class, Harriet sought to marry well. In Shelley, she saw opportunity for a good match (Crompton 28). When her father threatened to send her away to school, the lackluster student Harriet cried on Shelley's shoulder. In light of this damsel in distress, Shelley did the only thing he knew how in order to save her, he married her (Stovall 75-76). 
	Shelley saw Harriet as the next disciple to follow his doctrine. He believed that he could mold this woman, who exhibited the physical beauty of his archetype, into the intellectual and imaginative equal he once had in his sister. But this was not to be. Harriet wanted from Shelley what he could not give her: a stable, normal life of the titled gentry. Shelley became attracted toe other women soon after his marriage, many of them middle-aged and intellectually superior to his wife and sometimes Shelley. Shelley saw his begin to turn foul. The trouble brewing between he and Sir Timothy didn't and anything good to his life. Shelley had given up just about everything for his new wife. He clung to the hope that he could one day find his ideal woman (Brown 34).
	Shelley would later come under the influence of another male feminist. The philosopher William Godwin, whose wife had been the late Mary Wollstonecraft, had adopted the beliefs of his wife that women should be equals with men in all things intellectual, sexual and social. Shelley found a mentor at last and began to correspond and later meet with Godwin. Shelley and Godwin became friends and upon a visit to Godwin's home, Shelley found Godwin and Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary, very interesting (Crompton 96). She seemed to fill the void in the archetype that Harriet could not fill.
	Many critics cite his relationship with Mary as the source of his feminist ideas. Mary was his ideal partner mentally. But for all of Shelley's forward thinking thoughts, his behavior suggests the opposite. He began to push the point of free love to the point he was even trying to convince Harriet that she should have an affair with Hogg (Crompton 88). Shelley became romantically involved with Mary while still married to Harriet. When he confronted Godwin on his love for Mary, Godwin was furious over the married man's interest in his daughter. Shelley sent for Harriet, whom he had left in Bath with child, so he could tell her he was leaving her for Mary Godwin (Crompton 108). Shelley had found his ideal love. Everyone else thought of him as a cad.
	Shelley claimed equality for the sexes claimed he believed in a love that transcended the physical world, but for all his rhetoric Shelley could see women only in the most carnal of ways. He equated love to a thirst, a thirst that was a fundamental impulse, a drive that was purely instinctive. This force could not be separated from man, despite education and civilization (Brown 34). For Shelley the only visible link of this reconciliation of the archetype and the thirst was within the act of sexual intercourse (Brown 45).
	No where in Shelley's works can this be more evident than in Prometheus Unbound. The entire conclusion is nothing more than a 19th century "porno flick" that equates the Earth's volcanic rebirth with male orgasm (Crompton 61-62). Even the mighty Prometheus, who is married to Asia, is in lust with the beautiful Panthea, whose actions of concern are misinterpreted as a pick-up line (Crompton 63). Even in verse Shelley couldn't avoid using his own life experiences with women to spin a plot.  Shelley's unresolved feminist/misogynist duality is mired in his literal and literary love triangle, one of ideal love and one of benevolent love (Stovall 294).
	Shelley was perhaps the poster boy for the modern gigolo. He saw the attraction women had for his sensitive, intellectual rebel and used his talents for nothing but a string of unhappy and unhealthy relationships that caused hardship for all parties. For all of his faults, I feel as if I can't pick on him too much. Everyone knows a Shelley; some of the females in this world have even dated him. Even for all his misguided beliefs the reason we women can't get angry is because he so firmly believed the ideas himself. A true manipulator uses women with intent. I believe that Shelley's intent wasn't to harm, only to achieve a unified peace where he didn't feel as if he was using women's affections. Maybe he was trying to give all women a better hope for life that that of his mother or sisters. Then again, maybe he just liked a good roll in the hay. 

Works Cited
Brown, Nathaniel. Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley. Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1979.
Crompton, Margaret. Shelley's Dream Women. South Brunswick; A.S. Barnes & Company, 1967.
Stovall, Floyd H.  Desire and Restraint in Shelley. Durham; Duke University Press, 1931.


Deist Shelley paper 1