SOURCE: “‘The Dark Idolatry of Self’: The Dialectic of Imagination in Shelley's Revolt of Islam,” in Keats-Shelley Journal, Vol. XL, 1991, pp. 73-98.

[In the following essay, Richardson characterizes The Revolt of Islam as “a profoundly dialectical treatment of heroism and imagination.”]

The Revolt of Islam is, paradoxically, both Shelley's longest and least anthologized poem. It has numerous aesthetic infelicities that partly explain this neglect, notably Shelley's choice of Southeyan romance as a genre. But the most frequent and serious criticism levelled at the poem is that it contains a fundamental thematic weakness. Although in recent years interpreters of the poem have demonstrated that its structure is much more subtle and unified than had previously been thought,¹ many readers still dismiss the poem on the grounds that the education of the near-perfect hero and heroine provides no satisfactory model for the revolutionary regeneration of humanity the heroes attempt to bring about.

Several interpreters recognize that Laon and Cythna are less than perfect at the outset of the poem; the two go through a process of initiation in which they discover their own susceptibility to evil, when Cythna is abducted and Laon violates his belief in nonviolence trying to save her. However, these interpreters also suggest that once the Hermit teaches Laon the destructiveness of all violence, and once Cythna has learned to accept her vulnerability to evil, the two are never again implicated in error or evildoing. Yet the nonviolent revolution they subsequently initiate is a failure, and their imparting of the hard lessons they have learned seems to have no lasting effect on the populace, much less on the tyrant Othman, his hired mercenaries, or the Iberian priest. The poem would seem to be a blueprint only for the achievement of an individual excellence that manifests itself politically in futile self-sacrifice.²

In fact, as one interpreter has pointed out, such a disjunction between the heroes' education and their ability to educate others undermines the basic philosophical assumption of the poem, the dialectic of good and evil presented in Canto I by the image of serpent and eagle as inextricably intertwined. The use of this originally Manichaean image seems to imply that there is no good or understanding of good in human experience without some admixture of evil, and vice versa. Yet if Laon and Cythna have so little effect on social evils, it seems that good and evil are polarized opposites and that the process of education Shelley sets forth can only affect the chosen, relatively sinless few.³

The first point open to question in this assessment is the philosophical meaning of the snake and the eagle. Virtually all interpretations of the Revolt assume that serpent and eagle represent absolute moral categories, either traditional or inverted, and that the characters' mistake is simply to identify incorrectly which principle truly represents the good.⁴ On the most primary philosophical level, however, the dialectic Shelley describes is not moral at all. The initial account of the terms in the dialectic calls them morally neutral “equal Gods,” not symbolized by eagle and snake but by “A blood-red Comet and the Morning Star.”⁵ More literally, these principles are selfhood, with its will to self-preservation and self-esteem, and the larger context of self, the whole or Necessity in which all individual wills interrelate with loves and hatreds. Since for Shelley both principles are necessary categories of human experience, but the full realization of one implies the negation of the other, they are unresolvable contraries rather than morally distinct categories representing good and evil.

In this poem, Shelley is less concerned with defining the metaphysical dimensions of this dialectic than with exploring how the two principles interrelate in human experience, particularly in the foreseeable future when the successes and failures of the French Revolution will produce more revolts such as that of the Greeks against the Turks. Since Comet and Morning Star, self and whole, are constitutive but antithetical categories of human experience, the only possible, if imperfect, definition of the good is the common ground between individual will and the larger context within which it operates. But the imperfections of both self and whole lead individuals to see the two principles as utterly separate, warring opposites rather than co-ruling contraries, and to make a false moral distinction between them. People reject the whole as evil and entirely other because it imposes limits on the self, and they worship purely egocentric, unreal idols, a worship that Cythna eventually describes as a “dark idolatry of self” (line 3390). Symbolically, the Comet of self transforms his rival into an image of evil, a “dire snake” (line 369), and himself into a symbol of potency and aspiration, an eagle. Ironically, when the self claims to be absolutely good, it makes itself the source of evil by isolating itself from its inextricable involvement with the whole. Because of the way humans ethically polarize self and whole, the moral dimension of the dialectic becomes the struggle between the human tendency toward a dark idolatry of self and the attempt to understand how much of individual desire is intertwined with the natural universe, historical processes, and the needs of others.

This dialectic is difficult enough to understand from the more general, transhistorical perspective presented in Canto I. The story of Laon and Cythna illustrates how much more difficult it is for those enmeshed in a particular historical situation to untangle self-idolatry from those desires of the ego that are entwined with the larger context of human experience. This untangling turns out to be a potentially endless process of creating, destroying, and reformulating conceptions, because self-idolatry is originally incorporated even in the most apparently ideal conceptions; the moral dimension of the dialectic is intrinsic to imagination itself. Only Cythna fully understands this lesson, and only at the very end. But her understanding does make it possible for her to begin the education of others and to make some progress—however small—toward improving society.

I. THE CREATION OF GOOD AND EVIL: THE COMET AND THE STAR

Although much energy has been expended on explicating the meaning of the eagle and serpent and their mythographic origins, surprisingly little attention has been given to their true identities as Comet and Morning Star, and to Shelley's claim that these identities are very different from the characterizations of eagle and serpent humans have historically ascribed to them. According to Canto I, “when life and thought / Sprang forth,” “Two Powers,” “Twin Genii, equal Gods,” sprang forth to hold dominion “o’er mortal things” (lines 347, 350-351). These forces are not described as essentially good and evil; they are simply distinct from each other, “Ruling the world with a divided lot” (line 348), identified neutrally as “A blood-red Comet and the Morning Star” (line 356). Furthermore, human interpretations of these principles—of the Morning Star as an evil snake, and of the Comet as a good eagle—are not simply misinformed reversals of normative metaphysical categories, because when the Morning Star sheds his serpentine appearance in his Temple, he does not become an eagle.

Each principle, however, is a primary source of either good or evil in human experience, though people misidentify which is which. When “The earliest dweller of the world, alone” (line 352) first became aware of Comet and Star, he perceived them as in combat and his own thoughts “waged mutual war, / In dreadful sympathy” (lines 358-359). As the first man looked on, the Comet cast his foe out of heaven, and the man “turned and shed his brother's blood” (line 360). From then on, the Comet makes his foe seem to be “a dire Snake, with man and beast unreconciled” (line 369). But the Comet is really “the Spirit of evil” whereas the Snake is really “the Spirit of Good” (lines 361, 398). Although the twin forces in the universe are originally morally neutral, humans ascribe normative values to them and mistake which force is the primary source of good.

It is very difficult to give an initial account of what Comet and Morning Star represent, because the use of these two metaphors in this manner is unique to the Revolt.⁶ The experiences of the main characters, which will be followed in the second half of this essay, develop the identity of these terms from within the psychological and historical context of human experience. But one can also attempt to explain these terms by comparing the account in Canto I with the major poems that precede and follow the Revolt, as well as with the characters' philosophical statements elsewhere in the Revolt.

The use of a Diotima-like character other than the narrator to tell the story of Comet and Morning Star may signal the fact that Shelley is being tentative about his cosmology because he is describing principles he does not believe he himself fully understands. If one compares this symbolism with that of Shelley's preceding and succeeding long poems, Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound, it appears that the Morning Star represents an intermediate stage in Shelley's attempt to describe what principle of order may inform the universe. It would take a separate essay to consider adequately the relation of the Morning Star to the Necessitarian Spirit of Nature in Queen Mab and to Demogorgon. But they share a number of characteristics that imply that they all represent some impartial principle of order exceeding individual human consciousness. All three figures are enthroned, usually in temples, and appear to have existence independent of the individual minds that visit them. Each is the object of the main characters' quests for knowledge; each provides a place of perspective from which the characters can hear this knowledge told to them.

Cythna's final speech in Canto IX refines the identity of this principle as much as Shelley explicitly articulates it at this point in his career. For the first time in his poetry since Queen Mab and its revisions, this principle is called Necessity—albeit by Cythna rather than by Shelley. Cythna implicitly identifies Necessity with the Morning Star because she describes Necessity as the primary source, if not the essence, of human good. It is the force that will separate out and make clear which causes and effects are sources of good and evil:

                                        … One comes behind
          Who aye the future to the past will bind—
Necessity, whose sightless strength for ever
          Evil with evil, good with good must wind
          In bands of union, which no power may sever:
They must bring forth their kind, and be divided never!

(3706-11)

But Necessity has changed dramatically since its characterization in Queen Mab as an absolute determinism operating automatically in mind and matter alike.⁷ Although it may still be a binding, compelling force, Necessity is no longer fully deterministic. In the same speech, Cythna, like Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, refers to “chance” and “change” (line 3639). She even directly questions the absolute connection of cause and effect when she says that “some envious shades may interlope / Between the effect and it [One/Necessity]” (3705-6). Necessity has also lost any hint of materialism, and even as a more tentative, immaterial principle it may no longer be present in mountains and atoms (see Queen Mab, IV. 138-166) as well as in human consciousness.⁸ Cythna restricts its application to human history; in the same language she uses to describe Necessity, she describes the agents of Necessity as the people of the future “who come / Behind” (lines 3726-7; compare line 3706).

Cythna's invoking of Necessity only when she is finally able to accept, even die for, a goal not realizable during her lifetime suggests that the dialectic is between Necessity and the individual consciousness. The identity of Comet as selfhood can be further confirmed by comparing the Canto I description of the Comet-Eagle as the underlying prototype of human gods (lines 250-252) with Cythna's later claim that such gods are a projection of self into the “world's vast mirror” (line 3248). As described in the poem and in Shelley's prose, this relation between self and Necessity (variously characterized below as self and whole, self and other, or self and universe) is antithetical in the Hegelian sense, a relation of mutual interdependency as well as of opposition. To exist at all the individual must oppose death and the tendency of the whole toward undifferentiated unity. As Shelley says in “On Life,” the “character of all life and being,” of every individual, is to have a “spirit within him at enmity with nothingness and dissolution” and to be “incapable of imagining to himself annihilation” (Poetry and Prose, p. 476). But an individual is also part of the whole and can fulfill itself only in and through its relation to otherness. Shelley contends in his prose that there is no essential difference between individual and collective mind except the inability of the individual to experience itself intuitively as one with other minds.⁹ Perhaps the symbolic associations of Comet and Morning Star sum up most effectively the distinctions as well as the points of identity between self and Necessity. A “blood-red Comet” suggests the transience of individual life, as opposed to the traditional association of Venus with the retention of a constant identity underlying multiple, changing manifestations. “Blood-red” also evokes the physical essence and emotional passion of individual existence. Cythna uses these associations several times in her last speech to emphasize the brevity of her own life (the unknown after death is where “The blood is still” and where “this blood, seems … / To fade in hideous ruin,” lines 3724, 3752-3). Yet the larger process is as integral to the individual as it is inimical. The symbolism of Necessity as apparently a serpent but as also the planet Venus implies that restriction on individual desires is often experienced as a suffocating, poisoning, or binding of desire, but may also be necessary to mutual identification and love, as suggested by the many images in which binding involves clasping the hand of or embracing another.¹⁰

Far from being an innovation in Shelley's thought, this dialectic of self and whole has evolved directly from Shelley's earliest philosophical synthesis, in Queen Mab. Underlying the heavily-annotated philosophical borrowings and Godwinian politics, the poem teaches one lesson over and over. This lesson is figured by the contrast between two perceptual experiences in Canto I: Ianthe's visionary dream of feeling herself “a free, a disembodied soul” (I. 165) separate from her mortal body, and the narrator's initial failure to perceive anything about her soul by empirically observing her outward physical appearance. The consequent message is always the same, whether exhibited in the ruins of tyrants' monuments, the misery of kings' lives, the selfish fears which lead to the wealth of nations, or the fear and pride that lead to the creation of anthropomorphic gods. Humans can either fulfill the alien will of the isolated, individual, mortal physical body, with its material lusts and fears of mortality, or fulfill the will of the human spirit, which “claims / Its kindred with eternity” (Queen Mab, II, 209-210) and which is part of a larger “will of strong necessity” (VI. 234; see also IV. 154-167).

One can see from Cythna's speech and Canto I how much this dialectic has evolved since Queen Mab. The greater status of individual will as an “equal god,” the moral complexity implied by the Manichaean image, and the unresolvable nature of the conflict imply that the process of education has become far more problematic. In the case of the heroine, instead of being granted an all-encompassing dream that answers all questions and makes her will permanently resolute, Cythna cannot embrace what the Morning Star represents except at the end of a long, painful process of learning that the Morning Star is not an evil serpent, a purely repressive limitation upon her desires. In terms of one of Shelley's favorite paradoxical image-patterns, Cythna has only seen “chains” or serpentine coils as limits upon her freedom until she “embraces” the “binding” of a larger power, and even describes her acceptance as the prophetic “weav[ing]” of “A chain I cannot break” (lines 3763-4). Her difficulties reflect Shelley's retreat, after Queen Mab, from the belief that Necessity or the whole is sufficiently knowable and benevolent to satisfy fully the needs of the superior individual will. For example, the “Alastor” Poet's unrealizable desire for his “veiled maid” represents some of the highest, noblest needs of the human spirit, needs for “Knowledge and truth and virtue … / And lofty hopes of divine liberty” (lines 158-159). If such qualities cannot be known to inhere in the whole, much less be experienced directly by the individual, the human spirit cannot help but feel itself at war with a larger whole that contains, by any human definition of the word, evil.

The “earliest dweller's” response to this combat implies, however, that the limitations of self are a greater source of evil than the limitations of the larger whole. Although the combat of Comet and Star may represent some inevitable conflict between self and whole in human experience, the Luciferian fall of the Morning Star symbolizes the first man's egocentric interpretation of this combat. Both the Morning Star's fall and the first man's consequent sin of Cain can be understood as the inevitable human insistence that one combatant—selfhood—represents the good and any conflict with the desires of that self is evil. But although the Comet seems to have triumphed, it is a Pyrrhic victory that begets the opposite of the intended result. In Canto I, privileging the self makes it a “Spirit of evil” and the source of endless woes. In lines 379-384, the list of evils caused by the Comet include both those people inflict on each other out of selfish pride and those natural evils, like death and earthquake, that are aggravated by self-absorption.

Shelley's later essays illustrate in more explicitly psychological terms that the dialectic of self and whole is impossible to resolve completely because it is intrinsic to the activity of imagination itself. In the paradoxical imagery of binding, “On Love” describes love as “the sanction and the bond” that connects all things (Poetry and Prose, p. 473), a sanction that at once restricts and permits. The distinguishing quality of love is, to paraphrase the famous lines of the “Defense of Poetry,” an exercise of the imagination in which we successfully go out of the self and identify with what is not our own. To do so, human will must direct itself both at itself and at its object. “On Love” maintains that love is a human necessity because we experience our selfhood as the “chasm of an insufficient void” and therefore seek to “awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves” (Poetry and Prose, p. 473). But this description also reveals the essentially self-centered origin and aim of this imaginative projection. So does the description of “the character of all life and being” in “On Life”; each individual “is the centre and circumference; the point to which all things are referred, and the line in which all things are contained” (Poetry and Prose, p. 476). Such egocentrism, or “self-esteem” as Shelley calls it to distinguish it from love in the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” is more than the essence of identity and self-preservation. It is a necessary precondition for love of the other. “On Love” says that the individual first perceives by introspection “an ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely” in ourselves and in human nature generally, and love consists of seeking the “antitype” of this prototype in others (Poetry and Prose, 473-474). One must, in other words, first love oneself and create an image based on self-esteem in order to love and identify with the good in another. But the limitations on human perception and sympathy, and the insufficiency of the universe to fulfill human desires, can result in the ego's worshipping its own projections when it can find no sufficiently satisfying antitype to them. People can experience, as they do frequently in the Revolt, a light of mingled feeling for self and other that kindles similar lights in others and gathers strength from multiplied mutual reflections. But as in the case of the “moon-struck sophist” whom Cythna describes as worshipping his own shadow projected onto the “world's vast mirror” (lines 3244-8), the circumferences of one's understanding and sympathy may only be an extension of purely egotistic desires and fears rather than an intermingling of self and other—in which case self-esteem has resulted not in light and love but in dark, deceptive idolatry of self. As Cythna says after her learning experience in the cave, “We live in our own world … / Aye we are darkened with [the] floating shade [of our thoughts and ideal fantasies] / Or cast a lustre on them” (lines 3091-4).¹¹

The real meaning of the snake-eagle conflict, in sum, is that the two terms, self and whole, are neither essentially distinct nor morally polarized until humans make them distinct sources of good and evil by trying unsuccessfully to separate and polarize them. Because there is evil, or inadequacy to basic human desires, in both the self and the whole, there is an unresolvable dialectic between the two principles. To resolve the dialectic partly, people can discover which desires of the ego are consonant with the whole and accept that consonance as a best approximate definition of human good. As in one of the images on Cythna's throne in Canto V, people must nurse “from one breast / A human babe and a young basilisk” (lines 2162-3) because both self-esteem and the need to relate the self to something greater are essential to human existence—particularly to social progress. But while such understanding is the source of all good, the source of evil is the tendency of self-love to insist there is absolute good and evil in the order of the universe, to claim that such moral order is comprehensible to humans, and to identify the good with unlimited fulfillment of egocentric desire. By this very act of ethical polarizing, the human mind ironically achieves the opposite of its desire; the idealization of self becomes the greatest source of evil, while every recognition of some evil in the self and some good in the limits placed on the self is a corrective good restoring the balanced interrelation between self and whole.

II. THE SERPENT AND THE EAGLE IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

It is one thing to understand the relation of selfhood to Necessity from the detached, philosophical perspective given to us in Canto I. It is quite another thing to unravel, when immersed in personal experience of an extremely imperfect particular historical era, what portion of one's personal aspirations is consonant with Necessity and what portion is purely egocentric and destructive. Canto I foreshadows how difficult this process will be for Laon and Cythna by suggesting the ambiguity, moral and otherwise, of the eagle imagery in relation to the specific historical context of the French Revolution. One critic has identified the eagle with Napoleon and the struggle of eagle and serpent with the French Revolution.¹² This identification suggests the complex moral nature of the eagle; for Shelley as for Byron, Napoleon was an ambiguous figure who was both destructive and great. In “Feelings of a Republican on the Fall of Bonaparte,” Shelley suggests that Napoleon is a “fallen tyrant” (line 1) but that he had the greatness to be more, and that his successors are far worse than he. This ambivalent attitude toward Napoleon suggests that it is very difficult psychologically to separate, either in oneself or in the actions of others, the purely egocentric and destructive aspects of self-esteem from the positive and even heroic ones consonant with Necessity, especially given the inevitable imperfections of all human beings. Indeed, elsewhere in the poem there are many purely positive references to eagles, as in Laon's reference to America as an eagle (line 4423) and Cythna's description of Earth springing like an eagle from the sunrise of the future (lines 3688-3693). These images of political and natural youth suggest that self-esteem is not only both good and evil but also actually the initial motive to all action.

To make the moral ambiguity of the eagle more complex, its historical identity is ambiguous in the first canto. An even better candidate for the eagle than Napoleon is Napoleon's royal successors, since the eagle was the symbol for many of the restored royal houses and the eagle is the final victor in this particular confrontation. Both Napoleon and those who defeated him had the ambiguous moral characteristics of an eagle, inspired energy and destructive pride; both, in Shelley's view, were destroyers of liberty, though both also thought they were acting in the name of liberty (as, to some extent, they were). The ambiguous historical identity of the eagle also suggests, rather in the manner of Blake's Orc cycle, that resistance to tyranny is very likely to corrupt a revolutionary movement into becoming like the tyranny it dethrones. A revolutionary movement must believe in its goodness and purity in order to have the will to act, but this belief conceals and makes even harder to accept the imperfections in its idealisms, especially in ideal conceptions of its own motives and accomplished actions. Self-esteem unmixed with love for others and with an acute awareness of the limits of one's own goodness can easily become self-idolatry.

This symbolic evaluation of the French Revolution suggests that Shelley has a very complex conception of the task he announces in the preface to the Revolt, the restoration of hope to those generous spirits who most hailed the Revolution and were most discouraged by its failures. Shelley may have attempted to kindle “a virtuous enthusiasm for … doctrines of liberty and justice”¹³ by portraying characters and actions more ideal than those of the sad reality of the actual French Revolution. But more subtly, Shelley also attempts to mitigate despair over the French Revolution by implying that the “generous” spirits most disappointed by the Revolution expected “such a degree of unmingled good … as it was impossible to realize” in a world of inextricably intermingled good and evil. The reality is that substantial change will require, as Cythna alone realizes at the end, “the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.” It is impossible for a trampled slave to become liberal and free the next day, as the population of the Golden City graphically demonstrates by immolating their liberators. The most imaginative and nobly-intentioned historical figures, like Napoleon, partake as much of the eagle as of the serpent—as do the most ideal possible characters in Shelley's vision of the nineteenth century.

III. THE SNAKE AND THE BIRD IN THE REVOLT AGAINST ISLAM

The subsequent story of Laon and Cythna illustrates how difficult it is, not only to accept Necessity, but also to comprehend the true nature of human good and evil in relation to Necessity and act on it politically. Cythna's education in the true nature of good and evil, which is more complete than Laon's while they are both alive, can best be traced in her three successive speeches—one the evening before she is abducted, one to the sailors who rescue her, and one after her revolution has failed. The changes in her use of serpent-bird imagery in these speeches reveal that each time she has radically reformulated her past conceptions about good and evil, in herself and society, due to her experiences since the last speech. She finally identifies Necessity and the serpent with the good, but these speeches show why it is so difficult to do so and why Necessity and self-esteem will always be ultimately unreconciled for mortals. Even when she sees a providential process in human history that gradually disentangles good from evil, she understands that to accept the will of Necessity involves terrible personal suffering and loss—in her case, death, the failure of the revolution she has personally instigated, and the death of her beloved as well.

But she also learns an even more complex lesson about the “fair bird” of human desires and aspirations, one with profound implications for humans trying to better their own and society's condition. There is a “dark idolatry of self” even in the most ideal and apparently selfless idealisms humans can conceive, because of the way imagination itself works. Imagination permits identification with the beautiful not our own, but it does so by comparing all conceptions with a “prototype” fundamentally rooted in self-esteem. Imagination, the source of all new conceptions, creates the categories of good and evil to begin with. But more subtly, imagination also creates good and evil in the sense that even its most apparently selfless, innocent conceptions always include both the good Necessity makes possible and impossible illusions prompted by the ego's boundless desires. Since they are entwined with idealistic and selfless motives, these illusions are actually the primary source of evil because they prevent people from seeing and accepting the good made possible by Necessity. Individual human aspirations as represented even by the best of idealisms are thus morally ambiguous eagles, rather than “fair birds” that can completely be freed from evil by experience, knowledge, and love as suggested in Cythna's second speech.

As other interpreters have noted, Cythna's original beliefs are a major source of her madness and suffering.¹⁴ In her first speech she indicates that she and Laon can effect instant revolution without becoming implicated in any evil themselves, a belief that Laon's murders and her own abduction the very next day quickly prove false. But the speech is not just innocently immature; it is a conflation of selfless idealism with egocentrism. She believes she and Laon together are capable of bringing about instant revolution by speaking the truth (“All shall relent / Who hear me,” lines 1032-3); that she can give others what she already has, a “will omnipotent” (line 1035); and that she can accomplish these goals without being touched by the evil she and Laon will overcome (“no ill may harm / Thy Cythna ever—truth its radiant stamp / Has fixed, as an invulnerable charm / Upon her children's brow, dark Falsehood to disarm,” lines 1059-62). Her initial conception of revolution, which pictures her invulnerably reforming others “as the charmed bird that haunts the serpent's den” (line 1080), is at once the most ideal conception she can envision and a consummate piece of self-idolatry. This image of herself as an innocently good bird untouched by the serpent of evil contrasts forebodingly with the entanglement and moral ambiguity of serpent and eagle in Canto I.

After Cythna's abduction and rape and Laon's enchainment to a pillar for murdering three of her abductors, the two experience states of madness that reveal the cause of their moral errors.¹⁵ In both cases, these errors are the result of the self-protective self-idolatry manifested in Cythna's first speech. The content of their hallucinations implies that their insanity is caused, not primarily by physical suffering or by concern for anyone else's fate, but by an obsessive, self-absorbed shame over their inability to achieve the vision of invulnerability to evil reflected in Cythna's speech. Their madness is thus an effect, as well as a further expression, of self-idolatry.

Laon's initial error, his killing three men to save Cythna, is obviously self-serving; it is also at least partly caused by the self-idolatry in his original concept of himself as a pure reformer untouched by evil (Cythna's speech, as Laon says, is a reflection of his own ideas). If he had been more humble about his own potential for doing evil, he might have been more prepared to resist temptation. But the true depth and destructive power of his self-idolatry is revealed by the totally egocentric content of his hallucinations. His madness consists of obsessively dwelling on the presence of evil in his own soul; as he later says, he saw the whole world as serpentine “entangling evils” that were images of the evil in his own soul:

          The forms which peopled this terrific trance
                    I well remember—like a choir of devils …
          Foul, ceaseless shadows:—thought could not
divide
                    The actual world from these entangling evils
                    Which so bemocked themselves, that I descried
All shapes like mine own self, hideously multiplied.

(lines 1306-14)

Seeing one's own limitations and errors as evidence of one's being totally evil and seeing the nature of the universe only as a projection of that evil is just as self-centered, even self-justifying, as imagining one is completely invulnerable to evil. In both states of mind, Laon focuses on himself rather than on the effects of his actions, on his past deeds rather than on his potential capacity for doing both good and evil actions. Furthermore, Laon's hallucination reflects another insidious, Byronic form of self-idolatrous egotism. Punishing oneself with remorse implies rather contradictorily that one is still the best and purest tribunal for judging one's own moral failures. If one believes one can control and even compensate for one's imperfections or sins by self-punishment, one need not admit ultimately to limitations one cannot control, face their consequences for others, or ask and accept help from others.

Such self-involvement is graphically imaged as being destructive to others as well as to oneself. Laon's hallucination of eating Cythna's corpse reflects his guilt over his failure to save Cythna and his violation of their ideals by killing others. It also hints darkly at the implications for their sexual relations of his potential for violence. But it suggests most profoundly that his state of madness and shame is a perverse self-idolatry that transforms sympathy for others (and even for oneself) into a solipsistic hell. No longer able to distinguish “day and night … false and true” (line 1315), Laon cannibalizes reality into a subjective vision of his own guilt as the measure of everything, and in doing so he becomes unable to feel sympathy or act positively toward anything outside himself.

Although Cythna's madness is concerned with shame over rape—“all things were / Transformed into the agony which I wore” (lines 2962-3)—like Laon, she is oppressed by her vulnerability to evil. If she had not believed herself invulnerable to evil, Othman's raping her despite her “words of flame / And mightier looks” (lines 2871-2) might not have been such a devastating shock. Also like Laon, she has cannibalistic hallucinations in her madness; a sea-eagle seems to bring her Laon's “mangled limbs for food” (line 2962). Although she has killed no one, she has a cannibalism fantasy similar to Laon's because both of them have responded to evil in an egocentric way—by mental self-absorption and self-flagellation, rather than by thinking objectively and sympathetically about each other or about the benighted people they planned to liberate. Such a reaction is an attempt to maintain belief in their power and superiority to events—the very belief that was egocentric and false in their original idealisms, but to which they cling most stubbornly.¹⁶

However, perhaps because she is less morally culpable than Laon, her vision is also a more subtle and explicit comment on the moral ambiguity of their original idealistic vision. Laon's vision shows the effects of excessive idealism on the idealist, particularly his vulnerability to unanticipated evil in himself and his subsequent indulgence in despair as a defensive reaction against facing the complex moral ambiguities of his condition. Cythna's hallucination, on the other hand, suggests some subconscious recognition that their original idealism was not simply innocently excessive. The eagle bringing her Laon's “mangled limbs” suggests that her previous conception of herself as a “charmed bird” (line 1080) is actually the source of her madness. That conviction symbolically flies in bringing her the self-involved madness that cuts her off from sympathetic thoughts of Laon, consumes her concern for him, and makes her agony the only reality. She only truly regains her sanity when she saves a nautilus from the eagle, figuratively reaching beyond the concept that caused her madness of self-absorbed shame to help another being. Only then can she think sympathetically of Laon and their mission—just as Laon only thinks sympathetically of her and others after seven years of madness and much care by the Hermit.

In both cases, then, the snake-eagle imagery and hallucinations of cannibalism suggest that the root of both Laon's and Cythna's madness is their own excessive idealism and the self-idolatry entangled in that idealism. The substance of their madness is a refusal to face the imperfections in their images of themselves as charmed birds incapable of doing or suffering evil—a refusal that is itself a further expression of self-idolatry. The two have engaged in the very “wilful exaggeration of its own despair” (p. 33) that Shelley describes in the preface as the mental state of the reformers discouraged by the outcome of the French Revolution—the mental state that, according to the preface, the Revolt is intended to criticized and correct.

The speech Cythna gives the sailors who pick her up after an earthquake frees her from her cave shows that her experiences have taught her that her most cherished ideals have been entangled in self-idolatry. Drawing on her own experience of madness and shame, she suggests that such self-hatred springs from a “dark idolatry of self.” As she herself did, people will necessarily experience “Stains of inevitable crime” (line 3364), do or suffer evil. But they will react with “Enmity” or “Shame” (line 3371), rather than forgive themselves or others, because they hold a false, self-protective conception of themselves as at least potentially able to avoid all implication in evil:

Reproach not thine own soul, but know thyself,
          Nor hate another's crime, nor loathe thine own.
It is the dark idolatry of self,
          Which, when our thoughts and actions once are gone,
          Demands that man should weep, and bleed, and groan;
O vacant expiation! Be at rest.—
          The past is Death's, the future is thine own.

(lines 3388-3394)

Cythna makes clear her revised understanding of the relation between self-hatred and self-love by altering her previous image of bird and serpent. Before, good and evil were separate; good was her own pure self, a charmed bird secure against the serpent evil. Now, she realizes the error of this image, because if the bird dares to confront the serpent in the illusion that it is charmed, the serpent “Hate” will ensnare and kill the charmed bird in its den (lines 3379-87). The irony latent in the image of a charmed bird is now clear; in believing itself invulnerable, as Cythna did when she made her first speech, the bird is charmed in the way usually associated with the effects of a snake on its prey, mesmerized and unaware of impending destruction. The self-idolatry in believing one has a charmed invulnerability to evil thus actually causes one to be vulnerable to self-hatred and to the hatred of others. Entering the den and experiencing “Stains of inevitable crime” seem to be unavoidable. But the way out of both self-love and self-hate is to scorn to make one's heart the serpent's den (line 3378). According to Cythna, you must recognize, then reject self-idolatry; you must “Know yourselves thus,” full of “blood” and “guile,” but you must also accept this implication in evil by forgiving yourself and others and then becoming “pure as dew” in future acts (lines 3352-60).

Not only have Cythna's concept of moral reform and her self-awareness matured because of her suffering. It is precisely her admission that crime is universal and her tacit admission of her own humanity in saying, “Disguise it not—we have one human heart— / All mortal thoughts confess a common home” (lines 3361-2) that touch the sailors' hearts as well as their minds. Appropriately enough, the sailors are on the same mission that caused her own suffering—they are gathering maidens for Othman. But this time she has the right Promethean “words of flame” to stop them. Her analysis of the “dark idolatry of self” implicit in her own past beliefs not only causes a reversal of her previous beliefs about her role but also makes her better able to implement that part of her past beliefs that has held true—the generous, less self-defensive and self-glorifying part.

But even Cythna's reformulated image of herself is not adequate to sustain hope and action, hers or others’, because it still is egocentric in the sense that it still presumes the self-aware individual can automatically free others by speaking the truth to them. The image ignores the further implications of her own experience and is ironically contradicted by the revolution she and Laon foment. If such superlative spirits as she and Laon cannot avoid doing or being overcome by evil, it is even less likely that whole populations of abused slaves can be perfected simply by the words of even the best of revolutionaries. Laon and Cythna are sufficiently perfected by their suffering so that they do not significantly distort the idea of freedom in speech or action. Above all, their hard-won self-knowledge leads them to correct the abuses of the French Revolution by being nonviolent and by exhorting people to forgive rather than to hate. But it is not surprising that foreign mercenaries, disease, starvation, and religious fear undermine the will of the masses and cause them to blame and sacrifice their leaders.

The failure of her revolution underlines the irony still present in Cythna's concept of the snake and eagle. Although in her speech to the sailors she recognized her own involvement with evil, she still identified evil with the serpent, with internal as well as external limitations that can be separated from her imaginative aspirations. She still saw herself as a “fair bird” that, though entangled, can become “pure as dew” by recognizing and rejecting her self-idolatry and then overcoming problems external to herself. However, she cannot now simply scorn the serpent's den. Severe limitations on her revolutionary aspirations exist beyond her knowledge and her control, in other human beings and in nature (for example, the plague). In fact, she is still internally entangled in self-idolatry, albeit to a lesser extent than before. Despite admitting to past imperfections, she believes that she can personally understand and control the human limitations of others, and that she can bring about a successful revolution in her own lifetime. Instead, her revolution causes the people to suffer more than before, and to engage in evil themselves by sacrificing Laon and Cythna. Ironically, when her revolution seemed initially successful, she referred to the populace as “new-fledged Eagles” (line 2183) freed by her and Laon. And in their subsequent actions, the people do indeed turn out to be eagles rather than “fair birds.” Because of the radical limitations in society, other individuals, and the universe itself, some of the most basic and even noble of human aspirations are impossible to fulfill; the bird can never escape from the serpent entirely. Even more disturbing, since human aspiration necessarily involves the needs of the ego, and some of these needs will never be met, the bird cannot ever be a completely “fair bird.” Most ideals and human desires will always be significantly predatory and selfish as well as beautiful.

Cythna's final speech expressing her idea of her role indicates that she has learned from the failure of the revolution the depths of self-idolatry in both her weaker fellow-revolutionaries and in herself, and consequently has learned to identify the good with something beyond them all. In the last cantos, Laon continues to identify the serpent with evil and the eagle with good; he uses snake-metaphors to describe the plague, the Iberian priest, the people, and his own sufferings, and he has a final false hope that he can persuade the people to sacrifice him in exchange for letting Cythna escape to the young “Eagle” of America. But although Cythna now recognizes that her own personal aspirations can never be completely fulfilled, she has found sufficient harmony in Necessity to identify with it rather than with the “fair bird” of her purely personal desires. She identifies the good qualities of the eagle with the rebirth of individual seasons and eras (she and Laon are now in a “winter” of tyranny, but there will be a new Spring of freedom in the future, which she compares with “Earth like an eagle” punningly “spring[ing]” anew each year in lines 3671-93). But she cannot see herself as part of that particular eventual soaring forth of liberty (“Spring comes, though we must pass, who made / The promise of its birth,” (lines 3688-9). Instead, she tells Laon that “We are [the] chosen slaves” of “Virtue, and Hope, and Love” (lines 3667-8). She now identifies with the “good and mighty of departed ages” (line 3712) and with future generations who “come / Behind” (lines 3726-7). She has sufficiently identified her own desires with Necessity to sort out, as she says Necessity does, the good and the evil in her own experience—and to accept the need for sacrificing herself and Laon in the name of a greater cause, even if she can never see the results of her sacrifice.

And it is her sacrifice, more than Laon's, that impresses the masses most and permits the first real change in them. Her sacrifice is made purely for the people, perhaps with some recognition that she and Laon really are to some extent responsible for their fellow-revolutionaries' plight, both physical and moral; her self-sacrifice will show the demoralized masses the falsity of the Iberian Priest's contention that she and Laon are “the spawn / Of Satan” (lines 4121-2) and that their revolt against God and king is the cause of the mob's sufferings.¹⁷ But Laon flees from her vision of ultimate love (lines 4225-80) and ironically “betrays” himself to the people because he implies to them that he is sacrificing himself only to save Cythna (lines 4437-40). Most of the former revolutionaries are glad to sacrifice Laon, but they are filled with horror and doubt by Cythna's more unselfish sacrifice (lines 4568-70). Although they can interpret Laon's sacrifice as self-interested, they certainly cannot interpret Cythna's as in any way consistent with the Iberian Priest's view of the two heroes (in fact, the populace thinks she is an angel of their vengeful god when she appears, lines 4522-3).

Laon's and Cythna's subtle and difficult education does apply as well to the masses, who only really begin their own education when Cythna acts on her final awareness and makes the ultimate sacrifice. The people have recapitulated the sufferings Laon and Cythna underwent when their first ideals were shattered; many have gone mad and see “Their own lean image everywhere” (line 3983), have literally eaten human flesh (lines 3956, 4210), and have engaged in self-defensive violence (lines 2443-51). They are now self-idolatrously searching for some way to rationalize and relieve their suffering, for some knowable order in the universe to which they can appeal, and for scapegoats so they themselves will not have to accept any irremediable responsibility for involvement in evil. An Iberian Priest convinces them that their guilt and sufferings can be relieved by sacrificing their leaders to the vengeful, authoritarian god who has been mocked by the revolution and who demands atonement (lines 4072—4143). But when Laon and Cythna die, the populace unexpectedly experiences guilt rather than righteous satisfaction (lines 4681-3). One member of the crowd articulates the implications of this guilt; because the mob will now “sadly turn away” (line 4706) in recognition of their error, the “memory [of this hour], ever burning, / [will] Fill this dark night of things with an eternal morning” (4709-10). The “murmur from the crowd, to tell / Of deep and mighty change” (lines 4718-19), which is the last thing Laon hears, confirms what the man has said. The people's guilt, like the heroes' recognition of their errors, triggers the first real change; the memory of guilt will punningly turn eternal mourning into “eternal morning.”

The Revolt of Islam is, in sum, a profoundly dialectical treatment of heroism and imagination. The heroes' “growth of individual mind aspiring after excellence” suggests that imaginative conceptions of “excellence” are the source of all error as well as the source of all good. Paradoxically, the untangling of the real good in such conceptions, what Cythna called the binding of evil to evil and good to good, involves understanding that the good always lies in an intertwining of individual desire and Necessity rather than in some illusory idolizing of individual aspirations as an ultimate good separable from any limitation placed on the individual by the rest of reality. In one sense, revolting against Islam means legitimately overthrowing a tyrannous foreign domination. But at the same time the imagination is always trying to revolt against “submission” to any power other than the self, a self-defeating revolution that compromises all individual attempts to understand the good and effect social reform. Consequently, the Revolt is anything but a glorification of individual imagination or heroism at the expense of realistic solutions to social problems. When set beside the reactions of other English Romantics to the French Revolution, Shelley's social vision seems the only one that is at once both realistic and positive. When one's conceptions of social reform fail, the response need not be to despair, to retreat within one's own private visions, or to hold oneself up in despairing Byronic superiority over the “herd.” Shelley's answer is to confront human limitations, especially including the falsity and egoism in idealisms that are all the more destructive for their apparently perfect ideality; to confront one's own deep implications in those limitations; and to keep working for that good that may be affirmed by those who come behind.

Notes

1. Richard Haswell, in “Shelley's The Revolt of Islam: ‘The Connexion of its Parts,’” Keats-Shelley Journal, 25 (1976), 81-102, sums up the prevailing consensus that the poem has a loosely-plotted narrative and a poor connection between the realistic and mythic sections (p. 81). He then goes on to demonstrate the symmetry of the narrative, particularly the moral symmetry of the two heroes' falls and redemptions. He also provides the only systematic analysis of how the symbols presented in the framing mythological cantos—the Temple, the eagle, the serpent, the Morning Star, the Comet, and the moon—are worked into the realistic portion of the narrative. Stuart Curran, in Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1975), notes many of the same structural balances Haswell does (p. 28).

2. Most interpreters of the poem seem to find the heroes excessively perfect all the way through. Several have noted that Laon has to go through a process of purgation and atonement as a result of his lapse into violence (Alicia Martinez, The Hero and Heroine of Shelley's The Revolt of Islam [Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprach und Literatur, 1972], p. 34; E. B. Murray, “‘Elective Affinity’ in The Revolt of Islam,” Journal of English and German Philology, 67 [1968], 573-574). But they seem to think Cythna is entirely blameless throughout the poem, a victim of purely external evil. James Ruff, in Shelley's The Revolt of Islam (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprach und Literatur, 1972), does describe the hero and heroine as going through successive stages of growth in their understanding of their revolutionary roles. The initial “fall” of the heroes is, however, merely a temporary failure of imagination due to their separation by outside forces (p. 69). Ruff thinks that “the characters morally are black and white” and that the poem suffers because “Shelley completely polarizes the opponents: one is entirely good and the other entirely evil” (p. 115). Haswell alone notes that Cythna's moral development parallels Laon's in that she too is guilty of “immaturity of character” and moral weakness (“Shelley's The Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 25 [1975], 86), and his description of her weakness as an inability to suffer evil is particularly acute. But it is unclear how Cythna's “transcend[ing] through passive acceptance Othman's rape” (p. 86) is compatible with her actively bringing about a revolution.

3. Curran, Shelley's Annus Mirabilis, pp. 30-32.

4. Haswell claims that “Shelley does not propose a reversal of traditional values in the Revolt; for him the Snake still symbolizes evil and the eagle good” (“Shelley's The Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 25 [1975], 95). By contrast, Curran says that the philosophy of the poem is a “new Calvinism, which is simply the old Calvinism turned on end and morally rearmed” (Shelley's Annus Mirabilis, p. 30), a reversal of traditional moral categories like that often attributed to Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Both reflect a general consensus about what snake and eagle represent, identifying them as love and hatred (Haswell, p. 96; Curran, p. 28). Ruff, Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, 17-26, includes a comprehensive summary of efforts to interpret the meaning of serpent and eagle.

5. The Revolt of Islam, in Shelley's Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1905; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), lines 350; 356. All subsequent citations from the Revolt are taken from this edition, since the more standard texts either omit the Revolt or include it in its original form as Laon and Cythna. This edition also numbers the lines of verse sequentially from beginning to end, no small consideration in efficient citation and location of material in this poem. Citations from any prose except “On Life,” “On Love,” and “Defense of Poetry” are taken from The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, 10 vol. (New York: Scribner, 1928), hereafter referred to as “Julian.” All other references to Shelley's work are taken from the most recent and carefully edited edition of Shelley's work, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), hereafter Poetry and Prose.

6. Shelley uses the Morning Star as a symbol elsewhere, notably in Epipsychidion, “To a Skylark,” Adonais, and “On the Devil and Devils,” but not together with any reference to the comet as an antithetical principle. Such symbology is also not present in the Manichaean material Shelley derived from Peacock and Newton. For what is perhaps still the most complete summary of Shelley's sources for Manichaean material in the Revolt, see Carlos Baker, Shelley's Major Poetry: The Fabric of a Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), pp. 64-70.

7. My analysis of Necessity is in general agreement with Stuart Sperry's contention that some permutation of Necessity persists in Shelley's poetry at least through Prometheus Unbound, and that this Necessity probably involves a force greater than individual, even collective, human consciousness, a force informing, as Shelley says, “operations in the whole of nature” (“Necessity and the Role of the Hero in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, PMLA 96 [1981], 242-254). I also agree with Sperry that Shelley's idea of Necessity evolved from a more confirmed belief, expressed in Queen Mab, in the automatic if impartial munificience of this force to a view of Necessity as immaterial, conditional, and in crucial respects unknowable (Sperry, pp. 247-248). But although Necessity has become a conditional and even more impartial force, Cythna's submission to it in Canto IX implies that it still involves sufficient harmony to evoke human identification with and submission to its “bands” (line 3710). More important, as this paper argues, the depths of human error and self-involvement are such that individual weakness is a greater source of evil and enchainment than the imperfections in the larger Necessity.

8. Necessity more than likely does operate in other sentient beings, however far Shelley is now willing to extend the definition of sentience. It extends, at least, to horses. Right after Cythna's speech Laon says of his horse,

   Was there a human spirit in the steed,
             That thus with his proud voice, ere night was gone,
   He broke our linkèd rest? or do indeed
             All living things a common nature own,
             And thought erect an universal throne,
   Where many shapes one tribute ever bear?

   (3793-8)

   This statement has the tentativeness of all metaphysical claims in the Revolt; it is articulated through a character whose perspective is less than complete, and it is in the form of a question. But significantly, the alternatives in the question are between two forms of sentience: anthropomorphism and a more objective attribution of some consciousness to many non-human beings, many shapes bearing tribute to “one universal thought” (which—on a throne, no less—may therefore be equivalent to Necessity/the Morning Star).

9. In “On Life” Shelley says that as children, before we acquire the habit of making distinctions, we find self and universe almost indistinguishable, and philosophically we cannot distinguish individual mind either from the collective “one mind” or from so-called external objects (Poetry and Prose, pp. 477-478). But we do not experience such unity directly or intuitively; according to “Speculations on Metaphysics,” experience of separation and isolation even seems to be necessary for the existence of individual consciousness and thought (Julian VII, 59).

10. One very important form taken by this dialectic is the relationship of two lovers to each other, as argued by Stuart Sperry in Shelley's Major Verse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 46ff. Sperry demonstrates in detail that the overcoming of false interpersonal ideals, such as Laon's initial concept of masculinity, is a major form taken by the dialectic of good and evil. But the Morning Star is not only “an androgynous ideal, a perfect union of the male and female sexes,” as Sperry claims (46-47). This dialectic takes a variety of other forms in the poem as well.

11. As other critics have noted, Shelley in part owes his analysis of love and self-esteem to Rousseau's Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondemens de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes. Primarily in a footnote to the essay, Rousseau names three terms that bear close relation, respectively, to Shelley's love, self-esteem, and self-idolatry: the instinct of compassion, the individual self-respect or amour de soi-même which causes every being to seek self-preservation, and egotism or amour propre. The “dark idolatry of self,” the worship of the Eagle or that good that is purely individual as opposed to mutual, is not unlike Rousseau's description of amour propre as a feeling that “originates in society,” “leads each individual to make more of himself than of any other,” and “inspires all the mutual evils men inflict upon each other.” Rousseau contrasts amour propre with amour de soi-même, “a natural feeling which leads every animal to look after its own preservation and which, guided in man by reason and modified by compassion, produces humanity and virtue” (Oeuvres Complètes [Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964], III, 219; my translation). This description of self-respect parallels Shelley's suggestion that the Comet or selfhood is intrinsically neutral morally and that the ground of compromise between self and whole, between self-preservation and compassion, is the locus of the good. Rousseau differs from Shelley in that he describes compassion and amour de soi-même as separate feelings, with compassion as a primordial source of goodness and amour de soi-même as a neutral feeling that, in a state of society, reason perverts away from compassion toward an abstracted egotism (III, 219-220). Shelley, on the other hand, implicitly denies the noble savage by denying the existence of an independent and purely disinterested moral instinct such as Rousseau's compassion. If self and whole are inextricably intertwined, no motive is either purely disinterested or free from some egotism. Much, if not all, of love in the Revolt involves self-preservation, especially the self-esteem necessary to keep oneself from despair and suicide. Even the “earliest human dweller of the world” perceives some conflict of his desires and need for self-preservation with the claims of nature and other humans. Shelley's description of primordial man may well even be a direct rewriting of Rousseau's claim that amour propre does not exist in a primitive state, since the language he uses is strikingly similar to Rousseau's.

12. Ruff, Shelley's The Revolt of Islam, p. 89.

13. The citations in this paragraph are all from the preface to The Revolt of Islam, in Shelley's Poetical Works, pp. 33-37.

14. Haswell says Cythna's “madness, like Laon's, is a form of punishment in which she suffers from the consciousness of the irrationality of her old values,” presumably including her conviction of invulnerability, because “her major flaw was a lack of intellectual patience, a refusal to give herself as prey to the evils of the world” (“Shelley's The Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 25 [1975], 86). But Haswell does not discuss her use of serpent-bird imagery and its relation to her hallucination. He also does not analyze the relation between her past values and her madness any more than indicated in the quotation above. Most important, he describes her error in terms of “immaturity” and “blindness,” rather than as error essentially linked to the positive aspects of her idealism.

15. These errors are not fundamentally different ones due to differences in sexual temperament, as Haswell suggests. There is no reason to identify Cythna's error as one of passion, as “a lack of intellectual patience” and Laon's as one of reason or “lack of compassion” (“Shelley's The Revolt of Islam,” Keats-Shelley Journal, 25 [1975], 86-87). If anything, Laon's crime of vengeance smacks at least as much of passion and “lack of intellectual patience” as Cythna's error of retreating into self-obsessed shame, particularly since she explicitly exhorts him to bear her affliction but he turns an “unheeding ear” to her and slays three men (lines 1180-92). There is a good historical reason for the superficial differences in their errors; men have had more opportunity to commit acts of violence, whereas women have been more likely to react negatively as victims of violence, as Cythna's first and second speeches suggest (lines 1045-53, 3325-33). Shelley is not perpetuating the cliche of fundamental sexual differences in faculties or temperaments. He simply reflects historical reality and, if anything, gives Cythna more rational behavior and more of the rational arguments to deliver than Laon. The similarities in their hallucinations and the snake-eagle imagery suggest that their apparently different moral errors spring from a single, more fundamental error.

16. Shelley's profoundly disturbing analysis of the heroes’ appetite for one another is connected to his equally insightful and disturbing use of incest in the original version of the Revolt, Laon and Cythna. Recent critics, especially Nathaniel Brown, have justly championed Shelley's use of incest in the poem as an extension of this common Romantic metaphor for sympathetic identification to include an egalitarian, feminist ideal of love and an androgynous ideal of gender (Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979], 203-212). But Brown begs the question and gives Shelley less than sufficient credit when he answers charges that Shelley's incest-metaphors are narcissistic by claiming that “the sympathetic love tradition was a priori narcissistic” (p. 210). In accord with his dialectic of self and whole, Shelley exposes a fundamental ambiguity involved in sympathetic identification by using two extremely intimate relations between self and other—incest and eating—in themselves morally ambiguous. Shelley uses both behaviors literally and metaphorically to imply that the positive side of love, mutual caring and identification, is not limited by social and natural definitions. People can truly love one another despite natural and social taboos, and, conversely, despite whether or not their love is sanctioned by society and nature (Cythna's child is also Laon's, not because of biological paternity, but because he loves them both and their spirits are in harmony). Similarly, the female image on Cythna's throne nurses “from one breast / A human babe and a young basilisk” (2162-3), an even more radical challenge to social and natural norms by love. On the other hand, identifying with and desiring nurture from the other are not absolute goods, and if understood in an excessive, self-idolatrous way become the opposite of love. In the poem, people often feed each other, or feed metaphorically on looks and words, or nourish each other in ways imaged as like a mother nursing her child (an image prominent in the bloodless feast of the temporarily triumphant revolutionaries, lines 2299-2301). But they also incorporate each other in more dominating and destructive ways, as Laon and Cythna do in their madness. In terms of a different metaphor, the relation between two people who identify with each other can be a form of mutual, equal respect and desire—or a source of terrible domination and incorporation of one personality by the more powerful, as in The Cenci (a title that, unlike Laon and Cythna, makes no distinction of individual identities). Perhaps this explains why sibling incest is a positive metaphor in Shelley's work, while incest between parent and child is a metaphor for evil.

17. Laon's and Cythna's responsibility, however unavoidable and unintentional, for the people's suffering is a fascinating and complex subject that deserves more explication than space allows here. Their own inevitable involvement in and responsibility for these events is most directly evoked when, after escaping the holocaust and consummating their love, Laon has to go find food, and he meets a madwoman deprived of her two children. Although she once fed two babes, a girl and a boy, from one breast, she identifies herself now as Pestilence seeking to “slay and smother,” identifies Laon with Death (lines 2773-5), and when Laon says “I seek for food” (line 2780), she leads him to a hideous ring of children's corpses surrounding a stack of loaves, saying “Eat! / Share the great feast—to-morrow we must die!” (lines 295-6). The woman is a grotesque reversal of the image of a woman feeding both human aspiration and Necessity, “a human babe and a young basilisk,” on Cythna's throne, suggesting that her plight is the direct consequence of Laon's and Cythna's revolutionary conceptions. Her children's fate further suggests the inevitable fate of the two heroes, who in the original version of the poem were, of course, brother and sister. Moreover, partly because they are responsible for the revolution and its consequences, Laon and Cythna must deliberately and willingly sacrifice themselves to bring about any positive change in the people's conception of what the revolution meant. They cannot either physically or mentally escape and live in a secluded paradise for two; their continued existence, as the metaphor above suggests, is “fed” by the death they have helped to bring about, and the metaphors describing the consummation of their love suggest waning life and unfulfilled hunger. As Cythna realizes, they have a further responsibility to the people, not just to themselves; their deaths are much more than a futile gesture or testament, as in Romeo and Juliet, to an inability to live without each other. However, Shelley's depiction of their terrible responsibility suggests why, in later poems, characters like Prometheus may resist passively but never again lead an actual uprising.