[In the following essay, Wall focuses on the dynamics of narrative suppression in Shelley's poem Julian and Maddalo.]

I

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo
Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow
Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand
Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand …
Is this …

(ll. 1-4, 7)

Thus begins Shelley's Julian and Maddalo. The dichotomy between Julian's simultaneous freedom of movement—on horseback with his powerful Byronic friend the count—and his situation at a point of interruption—on ‘the bank of land which breaks the flow / Of Adria towards Venice’—prefigures the poem's shifting narrative sands.

The poem's subtitle, ‘A Conversation,’ appears to refer to that held between Maddalo and Julian as they ride on the Lido. The ride and the conversation share a certain freedom of movement: ‘So, as we rode, we talked; and the swift thought, / Winging itself with laughter, lingered not, / But flew from brain to brain’ (ll. 28-30). The men speak ‘Of all that earth has been or yet may be, / All that vain men imagine or believe, / Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve’ (ll. 43-5). Julian, the narrator, argues for the boundless potential of the human spirit, finding evidence in the sublime expanses of the landscape and the sky. In this mood, he sings the Lido, yet his words contain within themselves a counter-argument, a suggestion that desire projects infinity onto what is in fact a narrow, abandoned space of wreckage and stunted growth; the Lido is

… an uninhabited sea-side,
Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,
Abandons; and no other object breaks
The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes
Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes
A narrow space of level sand thereon …
                                                                                          I love all waste
And solitary places; where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.

(ll. 7-12, 14-17)

The sunset sends Julian into further raptures, for in it he witnesses the apocalyptic marriage of heaven and earth ‘dissolved into one lake of fire’ (l. 81). At this point, Maddalo, countering Julian's Shelleyan idealism with Byronic gloom,¹ points out a madhouse—‘a windowless, deformed and dreary pile’ (l. 101)—silhouetted against the setting sun. Human thoughts and desires, argues Maddalo, are like madmen clustering in mindless prayer around a ‘rent heart,’ and the soul is like a madhouse vesper-bell. Next morning, Julian renews the debate by pointing to Maddalo's daughter, an untrammelled infant, not self-enchained by ‘sick thoughts’ (l. 169). Their debate still undecided, they travel to the madhouse to observe one final exhibit, a maniac whom Maddalo is lodging there at his own expense. They enter the apartment of the Maniac (who never becomes aware of their presence) and eavesdrop as he launches into a possessed monologue.

Thus far, the narrative is structured as a series of gazes. Maddalo and Julian objectify and transform the world around them into a series of exempla in the service of a debate whose terms—idealism versus cynicism—appear to represent the poem's conceptual poles. This kind of scopic mastery—the mastery of the gaze—is of course an issue in feminist theory. Maddalo and Julian occupy the ‘masculine’ position of masterful subject—a stance duplicated in Julian's first-person narrative control²—while the daughter and the madhouse inmates (Maddalo's protége specifically) are allotted the ‘feminine’ position of object. The infant daughter does not speak,³ and the Maniac, although he speaks, cannot return the gaze, being unaware of his visitors' presence; neither daughter nor Maniac has any name beyond the generic one.

The style of this opening section is of a piece with the masterful stance of the protagonists: it is controlled, though informal, and marked by class affiliations. Shelley claimed to be attempting in this poem something ‘in a different style … a sermo pedestris way of treating human nature,’ employing ‘a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other whom education and a certain refinement of sentiment have placed above the use of vulgar idioms’ (Letters 2:196; 2:108). It is marked by ‘the easy familiarity of two articulate and literary men of aristocratic families’ (Brewer 128), with all the ‘gentlemanly’ virtues of politeness and urbanity that this implies. Kelvin Everest observes that ‘the style is interestingly problematic for a radical poet, for it involves the danger of acceding to the ideological implications of that familiar idiom. And there is a strong possibility that Shelley was fully alert to this problem in Julian and Maddalo, where the single most striking rhetorical effect of the poem is the violently contrasting idiom of the maniac's soliloquy, which is set against the gentlemanly discourse of Maddalo and Julian’ (79).

The Maniac's monologue is reproduced in the centre of the narrative. It retains the rhyming couplets of Julian's narrative but lapses completely from the ‘urbane’ style, consisting instead of short, broken paragraphs in which thought succeeds thought according to no clear logic.⁴ The Maniac is reputed to have gone mad after being abandoned by his lover; in the monologue he appears to address a number of absent women, or a number of aspects of the woman who has betrayed him. His manner shifts from moment to moment: he spoke, recalls Julian,

…—sometimes as one who wrote, and thought
His words might move some heart that heeded not,
If sent to distant lands: and then as one
Reproaching deeds never to be undone
With wondering self-compassion; then his speech
Was lost in grief, and then his words came each
Unmodulated, cold, expressionless,—
But that from one jarred accent you might guess
It was despair made them so uniform.

(ll. 286-94)

When the Maniac's monologue ends, his unannounced ‘guests’ return to Maddalo's palace, their debate forgotten; Julian soon leaves for London, and the Maniac appears no more.

A brief epilogue concludes the poem: Julian returns to Venice years later; and Maddalo is in Armenia, so that Julian is received by Maddalo's daughter, now grown up. Julian questions her about the Maniac; he learns that the lover returned, and the Maniac grew better, but that then the lover left again; the daughter is reluctant to tell more than that of his subsequent history. The conclusion of their interview, and of the poem, is this:

‘Ask me no more [says the daughter], but let the silent
years
Be closed and cered over their memory
As yon mute marble where their corpses lie.’
I urged and questioned still [resumes Julian], she told me how
All happened—but the cold world shall not know.

(ll. 613-17)

So the narrative culminates in a suppression of narrative. In his act of withholding, Julian aims, apparently, to protect the Maniac—the gossip will go no further; and yet there is something unsettling in the gesture, both in the violence of its rejection of the reader, and in the suggestion of hypocrisy in Julian's discretion, given that he has coerced the daughter, the original reticent narrator, into revealing the Maniac's history in the first place. It has been suggested that the poem's conclusion de-emphasizes the Maniac's story, chastening the over-curious reader.⁵ Yet the epilogue explicitly foregrounds the Maniac's story as an object of gossip. If the particulars of the Maniac's subsequent life and death are unimportant, the fact of his persistence as an object of scandal, rumour, and inquiry is not. By suppressing the Maniac's history, Julian in fact impresses the Maniac's curious power all the more firmly on the reader's awareness; his act of closure leaves the poem, at its ‘conclusion,’ radically open.

This gesture which doubles back upon itself, and the unsettling nature of the narrative's abrupt suspension, point to larger divisions opened up in the course of the poem's unfolding. Julian and Maddalo consists of two separate discourses inhabiting the same title: Julian's narrative, and the Maniac's monologue. By various strategies (including the co-optive power of first-person narration and the machinations of the Preface, to be described below), the poem invites the reader to accept Julian's as the primary discourse and to regard the Maniac's monologue as a kind of exemplary accessory, embedded in the host discourse simply to help the narrative along. By the same token, Maddalo and Julian—the titular, and the only named, characters—become the poem's protagonists, and the Maniac, even when he emerges as more than one of the legion of the emblematic mad, is officially granted no more than a supporting role.

And yet he exceeds this role, both within the represented world where Maddalo and Julian converse and at the level of narrative. Before their visit to the madhouse, the friends' talk is full of the semi-scientific language of demonstration and proof: the Maniac's ‘wild talk will show / How vain are [Julian's] aspiring theories,’ claims Maddalo, while Julian ‘hope[s] to prove the induction otherwise’ (ll. 200-1, 202). When the mad monologue draws to a close, however, the friends ‘we[ep] without shame,’ their argument ‘quite forgot’ (ll. 516, 520). And just as the spectacle of the Maniac disarms the debate and renders meaningless the language of logical argument, so the reproduction of his disconnected monologue within the poem breaks the urbane narrative's trajectory and seems to hasten the poem to its end. The narrated conversation leading up to the visit is protracted: 299 lines cover one evening and one day; after the visit, 106 lines cover a span of ‘many years’; the poem speeds to its truncated conclusion with a sort of desperation. Two distinct but corresponding ‘moments’ inform the poem: the fictional past in which the conversation and monologue take place, and the fictional present in which an older Julian recalls past events and reproduces the Maniac's words. If Julian finds it impossible, in his first encounter with the Maniac, to fit him to his own argument, he finds it equally impossible to assimilate the Maniac upon ‘revisiting’ him in recollection to write down his words. The Maniac consistently baffles attempts to ‘contain’ him, to reduce him to the status of objectified exhibit or reified speech.

The issue that concerns me in this paper is not Maddalo and Julian's debate between idealism and cynicism, but, rather, the subject position that this debate allots the Maniac, and the issues raised thereby of objectification, and of the use that ratiocentrism and androcentrism make of their professed others, madness and the feminine.⁶ In other words, what are the implications of Julian's masterful narrative stance, and what is it about the Maniac that seems to baffle this mastery?

II

Maddalo and Julian inhabit a world of connections. Shelley's Preface alerts us to their irreproachable family connections: ‘Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune’; ‘Julian is an Englishman of good family’ (Preface, pp. 189, 190). They never fail to make their travel connections, either; they move freely from sight to sight assisted by inconspicuous attendants, and the sheer frequency of these instances is worth noting. Here are just a few:

Just where we had dismounted, the Count's men
Were waiting for us with the gondola
                                                                                          As thus I spoke
Servants announced the gondola, and we
Through the fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea
Sailed to the island where the madhouse stands
                                                                                          Having said
These words we called the keeper, and he led
To an apartment opening on the sea
                                                  … then we lingered not,
Although our argument was quite forgot,
But calling the attendants, went to dine
At Maddalo's …

(ll. 61-2, 211-14, 270-2, 519-22)

Temporal progression is signalled just as obsessively as spatial progression: the progress from the first evening, through sunset, to the next morning is meticulously marked, and of course there are temporal markers in the lines quoted above, in the referencing of movement to moments in the conversation.

The poem's Preface, too, is important in connecting the reader to the world of the poem: it is presented as the utterance of a fictional persona, corresponding neither to Shelley nor to Julian but bearing a class resemblance to both. The Preface consists of three paragraphs describing the poem's dramatis personae; these paragraphs decrease in length and specificity from Maddalo, to Julian, to the Maniac. The Preface-writer addresses the reader as a member of his own ‘relatively small class of the refined and educated’ capable of understanding Maddalo and Julian and their philosophical concerns (Brewer 129); he provides a quantity of physical and psychological information about the title characters and invites the reader to participate in his mild ironies. From the start, by means of the Preface, Maddalo and Julian's section of the poem appears to be a fairly ‘closed’ text, to adopt a term from reader-response theory; our understanding of their world and their debate operates within the defined set of social and philosophical meanings laid out by this initial guide.

The Maniac, by contrast, presents a scandalously open text; he inhabits a country for which no maps exist. Whereas the Preface-writer is acquainted with information about Maddalo and Julian beyond that available in Julian's narrative, concerning the Maniac he is as dependent as the reader on the information given in the poem—by Julian (on the basis of observation) and by Maddalo (on the basis of rumour). The Preface releases the Maniac to the reader's care with no guarantees. This is all it says:

Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart. (Preface, p. 190)

Thus, even before the poem begins, we have an intimation of the Maniac's potency. That he is cast as unconscious ‘commentator’ relegates him to a literally marginal role; at the same time, however, commentary's power to transform the text it glosses can be immense.

The Maniac's is a world of missed connections, disconnections. The madhouse stands on an island, its physical isolation emblematic of the segregation of madness beyond the mainland of reason. The Maniac is singing in an upper cell as Maddalo and Julian enter the madhouse courtyard; ‘fragments of most touching melody’ float down to them (l. 221). He occupies a present disconnected from the past; to Julian's inquiries about the Maniac's origins, Maddalo replies:

                                                            Of his sad history
I know but this: … he came
To Venice a dejected man, and fame
Said he was wealthy, or he had been so. …
… he was always talking in such sort
As you do—far more sadly—he seemed hurt,
Even as a man with his peculiar wrong,
To hear but of the oppression of the strong …
A lady came with him from France, and when
She left him and returned, he wandered then
About yon lonely isles of desert sand
Till he grew wild—he had no cash or land
Remaining …

(ll. 231-4, 236-9, 246-50)

Discussing their impressions of him later, the friends decide that ‘he had store / Of friends and fortune once … These were now lost’ (ll. 534-5, 537).

The Maniac's speech, too, is divorced from the familiar connectives of sequential utterance. Published versions of the poem, following Shelley's instructions,⁷ break the text of the monologue into sections separated by rows of dots—indicating breaks in the train of thought, and perhaps suggesting temporal pauses in the monologue's delivery. The community of speakers implied in conversation is also gone: the Maniac's interlocutors are absent phantoms, at times even the dead (ll. 384, 395, 445-6). Finally, the monologue is self-consuming; the Maniac complains of both an uncontrollable urge to expression and an equally powerful drive towards the silence and oblivion of death; his discourse seeks a point of self-annihilation:

                                                                                                    How vain
Are words! [he exclaims] I thought never to speak again,
Not even in secret,—not to my own heart—
But from my lips the unwilling accents start,
And from my pen the words flow as I write,
Dazzling my eyes with scalding tears … my sight
Is dim to see that charactered in vain
On this unfeeling leaf which burns the brain
And eats into it … blotting all things fair
And wise and good which time had written there.

(ll. 473-81)

In the overdetermined language of this passage, speech and writing are one; breath and ink become scalding tears; tears in turn become the acid in a corrosive writing that engraves itself on the brain—a destructive script that overwrites the benevolent inscriptions of memory. Commentators have seen the Maniac as representing ‘the poet’;⁸ Maddalo suggests that ‘Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong, / They learn in suffering what they teach in song’ (ll. 544-6); and the monologue's radical mode of presentation—overheard by an unseen audience—is that conventionally associated with lyric. But if the Maniac represents a poet, he is a poet in whom the self-unbuilding properties of language come to the fore. If he resembles Prometheus—and this has also been suggested⁹—then he is a Beckettian Prometheus, subverting the structure of narrative authority only by virtue of the unspeakable impossibility of his situation. We might conceive of the Maniac's utterance in terms of a negative series of imbricated Chinese boxes—a sequence of negation within negation, as in his concluding words:

                                                                                                    I do but hide
Under these words, like embers, every spark
Of that which has consumed me—quick and dark
The grave is yawning … as its roof shall cover
My limbs with dust and worms under and over
So let Oblivion hide this grief … the air
Closes upon my accents, as despair
Upon my heart—let death upon despair!

(ll. 503-10)

Thus words function as instruments of obliteration and concealment, rather than providing the illumination Maddalo and Julian sought in first proposing to visit the madhouse. The conversational ideal confronts, in the speech of the Maniac, its demonic other. Rather than resembling dialogue, in which idea kindles idea in an intersubjective act of creative exchange, the Maniac's speech implodes upon itself. The Maniac feels the air ‘close … upon [his] accents,’ as if air baffled speech, rather than being the very breath and medium in which it lives.

It is no wonder, then, that curious disjunctions and elisions occur at the points where these worlds of ‘connection’ and ‘disconnection’ intersect, or, rather, approach each other and then fail to intersect. The Maniac's implosive world does not open out towards his observers; Maddalo and Julian's world defines itself by the exclusion of this ‘incoherent’ alterity. Julian, for example, claims to dream of ‘reclaiming’ the Maniac—

… I imagined that if day by day
I watched him, and but seldom went away,
And studied all the beatings of his heart
With zeal, as men study some stubborn art
For their own good, and could by patience find
An entrance to the caverns of his mind,
I might reclaim him from his dark estate

(ll. 568-74)

—yet this vaguely imperialistic dream of penetration remains curiously self-seeking—the study is for the student's ‘own good’; it maintains the Maniac in the position of object; it retains the dynamics of the gaze. Julian's plans, moreover, carry this proviso: ‘If I had been an unconnected man,’ he writes, ‘I, from this moment, should have formed some plan / Never to leave sweet Venice’ (ll. 547-9); ‘urged by [his] affairs,’ however, he returns to London (l. 582). Thus it is Julian's very connectedness that prevents his ‘connecting’ with the Maniac.

An interesting figure of connection arises in Maddalo and Julian's suggestion, quoted above, that the madman had ‘had store / Of friends and fortune once’ (ll. 534-5). The phrase ‘had store’ is significant in that it indicates the negative economy of madness: connectedness is a commodity; the onset of the Maniac's madness coincides with the disappearance, not only of his lover and of his store of relatives, but also of his ‘cash [and] land’ (l. 249). Maddalo and Julian commodify the destitute Maniac in making a literal ‘conversation piece’ out of his situation and his utterance. Although Maddalo might be said to have given something in exchange in providing for the Maniac's maintenance, nevertheless his and Julian's activity in listening to the monologue is described in terms of theft: ‘we stood behind / Stealing his accents from the envious wind / Unseen’ (ll. 296-8). Their eavesdropping, their voyeurism, are figured, moreover, as tangible theft—a physicality suggested also in the likening of the Maniac's speech to letter-writing, in Julian's observation that he speaks ‘sometimes as one who wrote, and thought / his words might move some heart that heeded not, / If sent to distant lands’ (ll. 286-9). In eavesdropping as they do, Maddalo and Julian effectively intercept and open the Maniac's mail, an epistolary discourse which, like Poe's purloined letter, has black-market value. In purveying the Maniac's speech as part of his own narrative, Julian packages and sells the reader something that is not really his to give.

III

The poem raises this question: how to deal with such a disconnected person, severed from lover, family, property, and, above all, bankrupt in the economy of reason? It is impossible that the scandal of his madness should be left at large. Maddalo recounts the story of the Maniac's incarceration: when his lover left him

… he wandered then
About yon lonely isles of desert sand
Till he grew wild—he had no cash or land
Remaining,—the police had brought him here—
Some fancy took him and he would not bear
Removal; so I fitted up for him
Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim,
And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers,
Which had adorned his life in happier hours,
And instruments of music.

(ll. 247-56)

Note the rapid elision, in this account, of the role of ‘the police.’¹⁰ The Maniac immediately learns to love his captivity; then Maddalo domesticates the situation by providing aesthetic amenities, and thus what begins as an episode of police discipline concludes in a genteel household scene. This movement towards domestication reflects a movement within the poem to align the Maniac—and his threatening irrationality—with the feminine. As Alice Jardine notes, ‘The space “outside of” the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in the history of Western thought—and any movement into alterity is a movement into that female space’ (114-15). The Maniac in Shelley's poem is male yet occupies a number of subject positions coded as female. Maddalo implies that an overly acute sense of political injustice initially made the Maniac ‘a dejected man’ poised on the verge of insanity; in this way, he fits the type of male melancholia; but his madness has sexual origins as well—an attribute of female hysteria. Like the knight in Keats's ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci,’ the Maniac is placed in a traditionally female subject position by being seduced, betrayed, and then abandoned. In adopting epistolary strategies (‘sp[eaking] as one who wr[ites]’ [l. 286]), the Maniac joins a line of letter-writing heroines—from those of Ovid's Heroides to Abelard's Eloisa—who have been, in the words of a theorist of epistolary genres, ‘literally exiled or imprisoned or metaphorically “shut up”—confined, cloistered, silenced,’ their ‘discourses of desire … repressed’ (Kauffman 20). He is further feminized when Maddalo ‘espouses’ his cause and turns his madhouse cell into a pleasant home which, nevertheless, he cannot leave. Thus the Maniac's confinement by police is quickly assimilated to culturally acceptable images of female domestication and confinement. In this way his incarceration is ‘naturalized’—that is, its strangeness is made to seem unremarkable, and therefore escapes questioning.¹¹

Given the Maniac's feminized subject position, it is surprising that similarities between the Maniac and Maddalo's model daughter have not been more often remarked. At least three separate moments of speech are represented in the poem subtitled ‘A Conversation’: the initial ‘urbane’ conversation; the anti-conversation, in which the Maniac addresses phantom interlocutors and the invisible Maddalo and Julian ‘steal’ his words from the sidelines; and Julian's conversation with Maddalo's daughter in the epilogue. In this last conversation, both parties speak—Julian truly ‘visits’ with the daughter, as he did not in his so-called ‘visit’ to the Maniac; and yet this conversation does not replicate the free exchange represented in the initial scene between Maddalo and Julian, where ‘swift thought[s]’ fly ‘from brain to brain’ (ll. 28, 30). Julian's final visit, like his visit to the Maniac, devolves into a one-way flow of goods, replicating the economy of voyeurism. The daughter gives up the secret she has in keeping from the Maniac and his lover, and Julian absorbs it like an unreflective surface.

The Maniac and the daughter are initially introduced to the reader as competing examples, the ridiculous and the sublime; while the Maniac lives in a state of bondage and blindness, the daughter is ‘a wonder of this earth, / Where there is little of transcendent worth,— / Like one of Shakespeare's women’ (ll. 590-2). Yet Maniac and daughter become allies, even doubles; they share at first the role of nameless object; later, the daughter becomes custodian of the Maniac's story. Her plea to ‘let the silent years / Be closed and cered over their memory / As yon mute marble where their corpses lie’ (ll. 613-15) seems to imply, in her curious use of the word ‘yon,’ that she lives within view of the lovers' tombs. Hers is figured as a world separate from the ‘real’ world of her father and his acquaintance—it is the world of literary representations, as Julian's reference to Shakespeare implies. As the woman who remains constant and stationary in the home while men like her father and Julian travel the globe, she represents the ideal of female confinement which the Maniac's domestication mimics.

IV

Julian's is the ‘host’ discourse, in which the Maniac's discourse is embedded as an exemplary object. In becoming ‘guests’ of the Maniac, however—in making him their unwitting ‘host’—Maddalo and Julian perform an act of reversal that lays them open to subversion. In attempting to consume madness (as a conversation piece) without becoming infected by a kind of madness themselves—in attempting to represent the alterity of mad discourse without altering the terms of rational narrative—Maddalo and Julian manifest what Foucault calls ‘that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbours, and communicate and recognize each other through the merciless language of non-madness … that “other form” which relegates Reason and Madness to one side or the other of its action as things henceforth external, deaf to all exchange, and as though dead to one another’ (ix).

The madhouse visit is supposed to answer the questions raised in Maddalo and Julian's conversation; instead, it puts into question the very terms on which the initial argument is erected.¹² Even before the friends enter the madhouse, we know that they will not find what they are looking for. Here is Maddalo's initial ‘reading’ of the madhouse when it appears against the sunset:

‘… such … is our mortality,
And this must be the emblem and the sign
Of what should be eternal and divine!—
And like that black and dreary bell, the soul,
Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll
Our thoughts and our desires to meet below
Round the rent heart and pray—as madmen do
For what? they know not,—till the night of death
As sunset that strange vision, severeth
Our memory from itself, and us from all
We sought and yet were baffled.’

(ll. 120-9)

In a perverse way, the failure of Maddalo and Julian's quest attests to the success of Maddalo's interpretation. In his emblematic reading, the madhouse they appeal to stands at the point where searches are defeated, the very sign of bafflement. The Maniac literally inhabits this sign; he signals the fragmented self, self-unseeing; what illumination, then, can be hoped for from him?

Julian and Maddalo can be, and has been, read as a critique of Julian as narrator, with the implication that he represents certain aspects of Shelley himself. This critique is focused at one level on Julian as a dramatic character who lacks self-awareness, who does not learn anything in the course of the poem, whose theories fail to coincide with his actions. At another level, as Kelvin Everest has noted, the critique is directed at Julian, not only as an individual, but as a member of Shelley's own social class—a class whose hegemony Shelley repudiated, and yet certain of whose values had formed him, and inform his poetry.¹³

This aspect of Shelley's critique extends, I would suggest, to the very ideology of framing that has seen the Maniac's soliloquy embedded in the urbane frame of Maddalo and Julian's gentlemanly conversation. Julian's narrative re-enacts, at the level of discourse, the confinement of the Maniac. Just as the police arrest the wandering Maniac and place him within walls, so Julian attempts to contain the Maniac's ‘unconnected exclamations’ within the reasonable limits of his own narrative. Conversely, the Maniac's speech enacts, at the level of discourse, a thwarting of narrative that corresponds to the emotional and intellectual confusion he evokes in Maddalo and Julian; this mock-lyric, mock-epistolary monologue, that is, refuses assimilation into the genre of urbane conversation in which it appears.

The Maniac represents the disenfranchised ‘others’ who inhabit Maddalo and Julian's world. He is to them as unreason is to reason, as feminine is to masculine, as vagrancy is to established institutions—the first term subjected to definition by the second term, yet exercising a dangerous power of subversion. The Maniac and his utterance represent the negation of the terms on which Maddalo and Julian's conversation depends for its very existence; Julian's ultimate suppression of the Maniac's history, although represented as both a protective and a tediumsaving gesture, is at the same time a second narrative attempt to ‘confine’ the Maniac, he and his discourse having once already exceeded the container that was prepared to receive them. And yet this act of closure merely opens the poem up more radically than ever; the Maniac and his story are consigned to the oblivion and silence of the tomb, to use one of the daughter's final figures, but they are also, by the same gesture, all the more deeply engraved.

Notes

1. For a discussion of biographical explications of the poem prior to 1963, see G. M. Matthews 57-61.

2. That is, Julian's is the primary ‘point of view.’ Beth Newman notes the pervasive presence of ‘visual metaphors’ in narratology. She writes: ‘Such terms implicitly invoke a gaze: a look that the subject(s) whose perceptions organize the story direct at the characters and acts represented.’ Newman cites E. Ann Kaplan's statement that ‘the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconscious, is to be in the “masculine” position,’ and notes that ‘this gaze in turn raises issues important for feminist criticism’ (1029).

3. She does, however, have eyes full of ‘deep meaning’ (l. 149)—a gaze of her own, prefiguring her emergence in the epilogue as a narrator in her own right (a right granted and then denied).

4. Which is not to say that the Maniac's monologue is ‘incoherent,’ but, rather, that it deviates from standards of ‘coherence’ implied in the narrative that frames it.

5. For example, James L. Hill reads the poem's conclusion as ‘an admonition to make us consider the poem as more than a mere story’; ‘a clue to direct the attention of the serious reader toward finding the conceptual kernel embodied in the narrative’ (84).

6. For ‘post-biographical’ readings of the poem, see: G. M. Matthews, ‘“Julian and Maddalo”: The Draft and the Meaning’; James L. Hill, ‘Dramatic Structure in Shelley's “Julian and Maddalo”’; Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading; Bernard A. Hirsch, ‘“A Want of That True Theory”: “Julian and Maddalo” as Dramatic Monologue’; Vincent Newey, ‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: “Julian and Maddalo”’; Kelvin Everest, ‘Shelley's Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo’; Ronald Tetrault, The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form; Tracy Ware, ‘Problems of Interpretation and Humanism in “Julian and Maddalo”’; William D. Brewer, ‘Questions without Answers: The Conversational Style of “Julian and Maddalo.”’

7. Shelley writes to Charles Ollier, 14 May 1820: ‘If you print “Julian and Maddalo,” I wish it to be printed in some unostentatious form … and exactly in the manner in which I send it’ (Letters 2:196).

8. For example, G.M. Matthews asserts that the Maniac ‘must typify the situation of the poet’ (75). Bernard A. Hirsch, too, sees the Maniac as consistent with a conception of the poet expressed throughout Shelley's work (24). Kelvin Everest relates the issue of the poet to social critique, suggesting that the poem presents ‘Julian's creative, “poetic” potential as frozen within his quiescent commitment to the manner of a repressive and repressed dominant social group. The figure of the maniac may then emerge in the poem as the externalized representation of this buried poetic potential in Julian, a potential tragically unmediated for any audience and thus possessing the aspect of a tragic incoherence’ (80). Tracy Ware has seen the Maniac more recently as representing a misguided conception of poetry ‘obviously at odds with Shelley's own theory, as expressed in “A Defense of Poetry” and elsewhere’ (120).

9. ‘[T]he Maniac is a sermo pedestris kind of Prometheus, written down to the domestic level’ (Matthews 74).

10. ‘In the draft of lines 249-50, the Maniac is brought to the madhouse first by “soldiers,” next by “watchmen,” and ultimately by “the police”’ (Matthews 82).

11. His speech is naturalized as well. Julian not only frames it as an element in his own narrative; he also fits it to the rhyme and metre of the host discourse, although he claims that the Maniac's words were not ‘in measure’ (l. 542), and that he has reproduced the monologue verbatim (ll. 298-9).

12. We might refer here to Julia Kristeva's assertion that ‘in a culture where the speaking subjects are conceived of as masters of their speech, they have what is called a “phallic” position. The fragmentation of language in a text calls into question the very posture of this mastery’ (165).

13. Julian is one of ‘Shelley's poetic doubles’ who ‘characteristically represent conditions of limited or misdirected social awareness’ (Everest 68).

All references are to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G.M. Matthews (1970; London: Oxford UP, 1975), and to The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964).

Works Cited

Brewer, William D. ‘Questions without Answers: The Conversational Style of “Julian and Maddalo.”’ Keats-Shelley Journal 38 (1989): 127-44.

Everest, Kelvin. ‘Shelley's Doubles: An Approach to Julian and Maddalo.’ Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregynog Conference. Ed. Kelvin Everest. Leicester: Leicester UP, 1983. 63-88.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Random House, 1965.

Hill, James L. ‘Dramatic Structure in Shelley's “Julian and Maddalo.”’ ELH 35 (1968): 84-93.

Hirsch, Bernard A. ‘“A Want of That True Theory”: “Julian and Maddalo” as Dramatic Monologue.’ Studies in Romanticism 17 (1978): 13-34.

Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1985.

Kauffman, Linda S. Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Kristeva, Julia. ‘Oscillation between Power and Denial.’ New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981. 165-7.

Matthews, G.M. ‘“Julian and Maddalo”: The Draft and the Meaning.’ Studia Neophilologica 35 (1963): 57-84.

Newey, Vincent. ‘The Shelleyan Psycho-Drama: “Julian and Maddalo.”’ Essays on Shelley. Ed. Miriam Allott. Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1982. 71-104.

Newman, Beth. ‘“The Situation of the Looker-On”: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights.’ PMLA 105 (1990): 1029-41.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Ed. Frederick L. Jones. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1964.

———Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews. 1970. London: Oxford UP, 1975.

Tetrault, Ronald. The Poetry of Life: Shelley and Literary Form. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.

Ware, Tracy. ‘Problems of Interpretation and Humanism in “Julian and Maddalo.”’ Philological Quarterly 66.1 (1987): 109-25.

Wasserman, Earl R. Shelley: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.