His George Cruikshank, Percy

167Ashley J. CrossELH 71 (2004) 167–207 © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

“WHAT A WORLD WE MAKE THE OPPRESSOR ANDTHE OPPRESSED”: GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, PERCYSHELLEY, AND THE GENDERING OF REVOLUTIONIN 1819

BY ASHLEY J. CROSS

One of the most memorable and most reproduced of the manyresponses to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, 16 August 1819,was George Cruikshank’s Massacre at St. Peter’s, or “Britons StrikeHome” (figure 1). The cartoon’s central image came to be one of thedominant representations of the event. Cruikshank portrays as uni-formed butchers the British yeomanry who descended on the 60,000workers who had gathered to demonstrate peacefully. Waving thebanner “Be bloody, bold and resolute” and wielding meat cleavers asweapons, they are urged on by their commander, who tells them to“chop ’em down” and to show their “courage and loyalty” so as to pay“less poor rates.” Their horses ride over the poor, leaving a mass ofmangled, tangled, bleeding bodies at the bottom of the cartoon’sframe. Several of these victims are recognizably women, althoughthey are largely indistinguishable. At the center of the cartoon cowersthe most distinct figure, a mother clasping her child (supposedly thefirst two victims of the actual battle), pleading for her life as she istrampled. Cruikshank uses this image to embody the title: to “strikehome” is to attack the mother with child; the yeomanry literally striketheir own. The cartoon is neither subtle nor ambiguous; it makesclear the violence of the government officials and their transgressionof a basic trust.1

The cartoon’s ability to strike home in its message of outragedepends, significantly, on its gender imagery; it produces its effectprecisely because the image of armed men attacking a passive motherepitomizes violation and inhumanity. In another cartoon very similarto this one, ironically entitled “Manchester Heroes,” Cruikshanksimilarly foregrounds the image of a woman.2 Her young son callsout, “O pray, Sir, don’t kill my mammy, shes only come to see Mr.Hunt.” Here, the horror of the situation is made legible by thecombined irony of the title and the innocent figure of the mother

Li Zhou

168 “What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed”

who came merely to “see” Henry Hunt, the famous orator andmeeting’s leader. Such representations efface the very real presenceat the meeting of women engaged in the radical reform cause, whohad come with more political interest than just seeing Hunt. Reframingpolitical conflict as an abusive domestic drama, these cartoons returnwomen to their traditional roles as mothers and naïve spectators bypresenting them as victims of male violence.

After Peterloo, relations of dominance and submission, oppressorand oppressed, were frequently portrayed in such gendered terms bythose on competing political sides. Not unlike French Revolutionarytimes, political threat was figured as sexual threat and, in particular,as violent male aggression against a passive female, or at leastfeminized, victim.3 The most overt examples (and thus the mostseemingly transparent in their meaning) figured political threat assexual violation or rape. This gendering of dominance seeminglyconstructs and reinforces difference as a simplistic opposition be-tween masculine power and feminine passivity. The viewer is asked toidentify with the feminized victim and reject the blatant abuse ofpower, but only to affirm his position as heroic rescuer. Despite (and

Figure 1. George Cruikshank, Massacre at St. Peter’s, or “Britons Strike Home”!!!,August 1819, © The British Museum.

169Ashley J. Cross

perhaps because of ) women’s active participation in the Reformmovement, forming their own societies and even leading contingentsto the Manchester Reform meeting, the image of the helpless womanvictimized by the tyrannous oppressor was a consistent figure in themythology of reform discourse, a sign which both sides fought todeploy against the other.4

This article examines the figure of the victimized woman inselected works of two important artists who employed a similariconography to grapple with the increasing violence of the Reformconflict: George Cruikshank and Percy Bysshe Shelley. My goal is toshow, first, how the prevalence of the image of the victimized womanbeginning with Peterloo signals an attempt to delimit power relationsin the reform conflict and limit women’s political activity. In thissocial context, juxtaposing Cruikshank’s cartoons with Shelley’s po-ems illustrates the gendered ground upon which the conflicts of 1819were worked out and highlights the different valences of their sharediconography: whereas Cruikshank’s cartoons use the victimized womanas stable ground, Shelley’s portrayal complicates these gender rela-tions. This juxtaposition reveals how Shelley attempts to challengethe status quo, including the representation of women, by calling intoquestion the binary structures of oppressor and oppressed and,ultimately, his own act of representation.

The year 1819 was a prolific and important one for both Cruikshankand Shelley; their utmost skill was required to address conflictingpolitical audiences. Both Cruikshank and Shelley aligned themselveswith reform, but their relationships to the movement were notstraightforward. Cruikshank, in fact, produced cartoons for both thereformist and loyalist causes; scholars have been unsuccessful inpinning down his politics further than to say he was a moderateconcerned about the possible violence of radical reform.5 The yearculminated in his collaboration with William Hone on the radicalpamphlet The Political House that Jack Built, a poem indicting thecurrent government through the writing of the children’s nurseryrhyme “The House That Jack Built.” This pamphlet, the engravingsof which included the image of mother and child to signify theoppressiveness of the current regime, was extremely popular and hadmore than 100,000 buyers, giving Cruikshank’s caricatures widecirculation.6 In the same year, however, Cruikshank also drew twoimportant cartoons for the conservative printseller George Humphrey,one of which was Death or Liberty! Or Britannia & the Virtues of theConstitution in Danger of Violation from the Great Political Liber-


tine, Radical Reform (1 December 1819), the cartoon on which I willfocus here.7

Like Cruikshank, Shelley drafted some of his most important workin 1819. Though he was also concerned about the increasing violenceof the reform conflict, his allegiance to reform was clearer. Away inItaly, however, Shelley increasingly felt his own outsider status inrelation to political events in England.8 One of his main concerns washow to reach a popular audience. If poets are “the influence which ismoved not, but moves . . . the unacknowledged legislators of theworld,” as he was to write in his A Defence of Poetry in 1821, howdoes the poet animate others to act and, in particular, to resist theiroppressors? 9 How could Shelley speak to a class of which he was nota part? According to P. M. S. Dawson, Shelley’s response to theReform crisis manifested itself in two different forms in his literaryproductions of 1819: first, in an unpublished volume and, second, inthe publication of Prometheus Unbound. A Lyrical Drama in fouracts with Other Poems (1820). The second was a more aestheticallyfocused volume of verse addressed to “the highly refined imaginationof the more select classes of poetical readers.”10 The first, “a littlevolume of popular songs wholly political,” was meant for a morepopular audience.11 These volumes clearly separate Shelley’s workinto two categories, political and aesthetic, a pattern which, untilrecently, Shelley criticism has followed. Despite this division, how-ever, much of Shelley’s work at this time wrestles with the relation-ship of the two. In this article, I concentrate on two of Shelley’s 1819poems that explore how the political and aesthetic interconnect andpresent the image of the victimized woman as a site of contention:The Mask of Anarchy, the occasional poem he wrote about Peterloo,and “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” a poem about a paintingin which the central figure is the decapitated head of Medusa, aconservative symbol of revolutionary violence—as Shelley wouldsurely have known.12

As several critics have suggested recently, one motivational methodShelley tried was that of radical caricature, and Cruikshank’s inparticular.13 Shelley saw that the strategies and images in radicalcartoons communicated effectively with diverse audiences and usedthem in Mask and, as I will argue, “On the Medusa.” Despite theobvious generic differences in print and poetry, Shelley’s 1819writings demonstrate his interest in creating a verbal iconographywith the impact of contemporary caricature. When he reproducedthe figure of the victimized woman, a common image in that

171Ashley J. Cross

caricature, to represent political conflict in much of his 1819 poetry,Shelley was hardly unique. However, while political cartoonists andother reform writers saw gender as transparent, Shelley set out todraw attention to the oppressive relations of gender by highlightingthe problematic nature of such representation.

Both Cruikshank’s cartoons and Shelley’s poems employ the figureof woman as victim to articulate, explicitly and implicitly, the artists’horror at the events surrounding and including the Peterloo Massa-cre. They also share the iconography of the reform discourse and itsrecycling of French revolutionary imagery.14 However, the genderedopposition of oppressor to oppressed created political and aestheticproblems for Shelley. On the one hand, because of its currency, thefigure of the victimized woman vividly conveyed the reality ofoppression in British society; its political resonance made it hard toavoid. On the other hand, the image also locked its employers into abinary opposition which reinforced its own oppressive structure. Touse the image was, in a sense, to repeat the oppression and to risk thepossibility of reifying those oppressive relations. Moreover, Shelleyrecognized that the opposition of male power to passive femaleobject was not only entrenched in representations of political conflictbut also inherent in the artist’s relationship to his object.15

Writing poetry that used the figure of the victimized woman, then,required a careful balance, if, like Shelley, one wanted to representthe oppressed so as to create social change. For Shelley, the femalevictim, like Beatrice Cenci, signified abusive patriarchal authority, butthat signification also masked her power, and it was that power he wantedto reclaim. To use the victim to reclaim her power, however, created thedangerous possibility of either reinforcing the oppressed’s victim statusor inverting the opposition and turning the oppressed into violentoppressors. The political dilemma also entailed a complicated aestheticone: how to identify with, without speaking for, the oppressed; how torepresent without appropriating the other. Read in light of the fixedgender politics of Cruikshank’s cartoons, Mask and “On the Medusa”reveal that the gendered ground upon which political conflicts andaesthetic desires are articulated is itself at stake in Shelley’s work.16

I. ENGENDERING VIOLENCE:WOMEN AND REPRESENTATION IN 1819

Historians and literary critics agree that 1819 was a watershed yearin England. Radical working class organization was at its height (by


the early 1820s, most of the leaders were in prison), and thegovernment’s anxiety about the massive demonstrations of the Radi-cal reformers produced a crisis atmosphere that led to the violentconfrontation at Peterloo and finally to the repressive Six Acts, 30December 1819.17 Many felt that it was the closest England hadcome to revolution since 1640. At stake was the central question ofadequate political representation in Parliament, and the battle wasfought primarily between the radical journalists and the governmentcensors. It was a time in which the working class, including women,saw a real opportunity for change, and the means to that change wasthe press. The battles for political representation were primarilyfought symbolically as discursive battles, but such discursive conflictoften had material repercussions. As James Chandler writes, govern-ment repression led only to increased journalistic representation,producing a cycle of “representation, prosecution and acceleratedrepresentation.”18

One of the complicating factors in these skirmishes was the factthat both sides deployed the same imagery. The arsenals were well-stocked following the French revolutionary conflict, and reformistsand antireformists alike recycled that imagery in a British context.Liberty caps, images of Marianne, guillotines, skulls, Medusan women,and other French iconography provided political satire with a sharedand loaded symbolic language for articulating anxieties about reform.As Steven Jones argues in Shelley’s Satire, “reform meetings . . . werealready symbolic events” with their own mythologies: “The exchangeof such signs was necessarily an exchange of power, part of acompetition to establish the value and to define meaning of politicalstruggles. . . . In discourse, appropriating or parodying a sign becamea means of engaging in (coded) ideological dispute and exchange.”19

Since players on both sides often used the same overdeterminedsigns, such parodying—by caricaturists and writers alike—provided asubtle but risky means of social critique. For example, the liberty cap,historically a sign of the French values of liberty, equality, fraternityas well as the revolutionary violence of the Terror, also signified toearly nineteenth-century Brits “republican Rome as well as ancientBritish constitutional freedoms.” Each side of the reform debatesought to deploy and define the cap for its own purposes. Dependingon the context, the presence of the liberty cap in a cartoon couldindicate a righteous struggle for governmental reform or a violentand anticonstitutional threat, but context did not always clarify whichsignification was meant. Moreover, because such parodies repeated

173Ashley J. Cross

the images and language of what they were critiquing—what Joneshas called the “mimetic violence of parodic satire”—they alwaysthreatened to become the very thing they mocked.20 In other words,cartoonists and writers like Cruikshank and Shelley had to tread acareful line between critique and capitulation. Potentially, a viewer’smisinterpretation of a symbolic parody could lead to confusion of thepolitical sides.

While French Revolutionary imagery seems to undermine thepolitical sides because of its multivalence, the symbolic representa-tion of women in British political discourse seems remarkably con-stant; though equally employed by both sides, the image of thevictimized woman provided a seemingly secure ground upon whichto articulate the conflict at the end of that year. Since the discursivebattles over reform intended to affect political representation, therelationship between women’s discursive representation and theirstruggle for political representation becomes a critical question.Though women were fighting for universal suffrage and forming theirown union societies, gender, defined as male power and femaleweakness, provided a stable metaphor for signifying power relationsand political conflicts. It had the added benefit of effacing women’spolitical activity and putting them in their traditional places. Thepoliticized woman, the woman who demanded so-called equal repre-sentation, transgressed social codes; hence her threat needed to becontained. Earlier images of women’s equal participation in organiz-ing were thus replaced by images of patriarchal oppression. Signifi-cantly, the image of the victimized woman had a dual politicalfunction: it at once shored up political differences among radicals andconservatives and it reconfirmed women’s subordinate status.

In addition to its continued challenge to governmental repressionand underrepresentation, the Radical Reform movement broughtanother powerful threat to the social order: equal representation forwomen.21 In Passages in the Life of a Radical, Samuel Bamfordrecalls a Lydgate meeting in March prior to Peterloo, in which he had

insisted on the right, and the propriety also of females who werepresent at such assemblages, voting by show of hand and for oragainst the resolutions. This was a new idea; and the women, whoattended numerously on that bleak ridge, were mightily pleased withit,—and the men being nothing dissentient,—when the resolutionwas put the women held up their hands, amid much laughter; andever from that time, females voted with the men at the Radicalmeetings.22


After this time, Bamford tells the reader matter of factly that femalevoting became common practice. The decision led to the rapid andincreased formation of female political unions with chairwomen andcommittees and all the political trappings of the male union societies.Their main purpose, according to Donald Read, was “instructional:their aim was to indoctrinate the children with radical ideas.”23 TheBlackburn Female Reform Society called women “to instill into theminds of our children, a deep and rooted hatred of our corrupt andtyrannical Rulers.”24 They also organized “to assist the male popula-tion of this country to obtain their rights and liberties.”25 Thisorganizing was a new form of political protest for women and itengaged large numbers of them. For example, about a month later,the Manchester Female Reform Society formed and reported 1000members within a week.

The petticoat reformers, as they were called, were extremely activeand were a large part of the gathering of working class individuals inManchester.26 They marched in their own large groups, demandingequal representation, universal suffrage, and vote by ballot. Theirimportance, and the potential impact of their demands, is made clear bythe reporters’ emphasis on their unusual presence at the gathering. Onewriter for The Chronicle italicizes all his references to the womenparticipants when describing the parties marching in to the maingathering: “Another party followed from the same street, with womenin single files, and men on each side in double files, with a flag inscribedwith a motto, and ‘Union Female Society of Royton.’. . . Another partymarched in . . . with a band of music and a flag, accompanied with acart for the hustings, in which women were riding.” Another newspa-perman, John Tyas, a reporter sent to cover the event for The Timesand a radical sympathizer, continually emphasizes the number ofwomen present and describes in great detail their contingents:

A club of Female Reformers, amounting in numbers, according toour calculation to 150, came from Oldham; and another not quite sonumerous from Royton. The first bore a white silk banner, by far themost elegant displayed during the day, inscribed Major Cartwright’sBill, annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and Vote by Ballot. . . .The latter (i.e. the females of Royton) bore two red flags, the oneinscribed Let us [that is, women] die like men, and not be sold likeslaves; the other Annual Parliament and Universal Suffrage.27

Clearly, the women reformers were intent not only on having thevote, but also on fighting to change their social positions so as to “die

175Ashley J. Cross

like men and not be sold like slaves.” The fact that such women werealso the educators of children made their challenge even greater.

Until the violence broke out these women could be representedmore as a curiosity, and the tension caused by their noticeablepresence could be displaced if not repressed. In several of thenarratives, women’s positions are defined more aesthetically andromantically than politically, but their sheer numbers are telling.Bamford, again, provides a good example. On the March to Manches-ter, he writes: “At our head were a hundred or two of young women,mostly young wives, and mine own amongst them. A hundred or twoof our handsomest girls,—sweethearts to the lads who were withus,—danced to the music.”28 Whereas Bamford’s narrative makes theevents sound like a celebration, Tyas’s description a bit later in hisreport reveals the more general anxiety around the women reform-ers’ behavior. However, he displaces his own discomfort onto otherworking class women. He describes:

While we stood counting the members of the Oldham FemaleReform Club in their procession by us, and whilst we were internallypitying the delusion which led them to a scene so ill-suited to theirusual habits, a group of the women of Manchester, attracted by thecrowd, came to the corner of the street where we had taken our post.They viewed these Female Reformers for some time with a look inwhich compassion and disgust were equally blended, and at lastburst out into an indignant exclamation—“Go home to your families,and leave sike-like as these to your husbands and sons, who betterunderstand them.” The women who thus addressed them were of thelower order of life.29

While fervently counting the number of women, Tyas and his cohortsare “internally pitying” the women’s “delusions” that took them awayfrom their “usual habits” of tending their homes. Speaking as theuniversal “we,” he normalizes his critique of the women’s behavioreven as he tells us he only does so “internally.” But his critique isimmediately confirmed by the arrival of “a group of Manchesterwomen” who utter his sentiments that the women reformers should“go home” to their families. By having his internal thoughts external-ized by these working-class women, Tyas gets to critique themwithout speaking against the radical cause. The last sentence of thepassage is purposely ambivalent; because the women are of “thelower order of life,” either the reader can recognize their impolite-ness in contrast to Tyas’s reserve or the reader can perceive the


obvious fault of the women reformers, a fault which even the “lowerorder”—supposedly the very individuals on whose behalf they arefighting for reform—recognize. In either case, the conflict becomes astruggle over propriety between only the women and displaces Tyas.

If some women went to Manchester seeking equal representation,however, they came out of Peterloo with a reiteration of their statusas victims of male violence and power. When the actual massacreensued, women were needed to fight a different battle, and suchimages of women’s political strength were not only insufficient butalso potentially dangerous for both sides. Physical violence, in whicheleven people were killed, including two women, and 500 werewounded, altered the nature of the discursive battle. There was muchmore to lose for both sides in presenting their version of events, andthe ground upon which this struggle was played out was that of thefemale body. Bamford’s later description of the massacre continueshis earlier aestheticizing of the women present, but now theysymbolize the extreme violation committed by the government,much as in Cruikshank’s Massacre at St. Peter’s and ManchesterHeroes:

On the breaking of the crowd, the yeomanry wheeled; and dashingwherever there was an opening, they followed, pressing and wounding,many females appeared as the crowd opened; and striplings or mereyouths were found. Their cries were piteous and heart-rending; andwould, one might have supposed, have disarmed any humanresentment: but here their cries were vain. Women, white-vestedmaids, and tender youths were indiscriminately trampled or sabred;and we have reason to believe that few were the instances in whichthat forbearance was vouchsafed, which they so earnestly implored.30

In Bamford’s description, the “women, white-vested maids, andtender youths” are beaten down and stabbed, their pleas ignored.Whatever their reasons for being at the Manchester gathering, thewomen are here represented as victims of brutal male aggression.Any normal human would respond to their “piteous and heart-rending” cries; the failure to forbear and the “indiscriminate” vio-lence reveal the monstrosity of the yeomanry. In contrast, thewomen’s innocence, highlighted by their placement next to the“white-vested maids” and “tender youths,” renders the violence moredevastating and the radical cause more virtuous.

The Examiner (10 March 1833) presents another example of howthe victimized woman is deployed as a sign for the radical cause. In

177Ashley J. Cross

arguing for the difficulty of representing the horror of the massacreaccurately at trial, the journal warns against the possibility of laughterby relating the response of one of the magistrates:

A Reverend Magistrate, who was promoted for his services on thisoccasion to one of the best livings in the country, was an eye-witnessof the scene, and doubtless took the aristocratic view of it, in whichthere is no pity for unwashed; and having in his evidence deposedthat he saw a wounded woman sitting by the road-side, he was askedwhat her condition was, or whether he could recognize her? Hisreply was that he “did not take any particular notice, for (laughing ashe spoke) she was not very attractive.”31

The Reverend Magistrate is represented here as giving the “aristo-cratic view,” a view which looks at “a wounded woman” and ignoresher for classist aesthetic reasons (“she was not very attractive”). As inthe passage from Bamford’s narrative, this passage serves to highlightthe inhumanity of the violence committed. While the radicals areclearly concerned with the wounded woman’s pain, nonetheless theyalso choose to tell a story that has as its centerpiece a woundedwoman because of the political and emotional value of that image.The reason for relaying the story is to discredit the conservativerepresentation of events, based on the failure to notice the victim.Again, the woman’s politics are unimportant; what is important iswhat she signifies as victim. The Magistrate’s emphasis on theaesthetic reveals his crass hardness and shows how the aesthetic herereinforces his political position. Moreover, he appears to be the oneturning humanitarian and political concerns into sexual trivialities. Bythe same token, however, it is the narrator’s aesthetic choice of thewounded woman that reinforces his own political—and given therepresentation, clearly superior—position.

If the status of women’s political representation was clearly atstake in the reform debates, by the end of 1819 their symbolicrepresentation as victims undercut their political struggle. Thoughthis was not the end of women’s involvement in the Reform move-ment, the Radical representation of Peterloo, like those above, cameto dominate interpretations of the events in Manchester, and itsimages were used constantly.32 The victimized woman became acentral sign in the struggle to control how Peterloo would berepresented. Radicals and conservatives alike wielded her as apowerful sign of their cause. The figure of the passive or victimizedwoman was used not only to signify power relations but also to


stabilize them. Her appearance functioned to make the politicalrelations transparent and thus reinforced the binary logic of politicaldebate. In this process of engendering violence, however, the opposi-tion of men’s and women’s social positions became further reified.The disjunction between women’s political and discursive representa-tion thus functions as a means of controlling women (one has only tothink of what happened to the activist French Revolutionary women);it also points to a recurring connection between the two. It is in thiscontext that Cruikshank and Shelley took up the image of victimizedwoman in their 1819 work.

II. TAKING LIBERTIES:THE VICTIMIZED WOMAN IN CRUIKSHANK’S CARTOONS

George Cruikshank’s political cartoon Death or Liberty! (figure 2)presents a complex example of these issues. Because Cruikshankplayed both sides, he offers a dual perspective on the debate.Moreover, his cartoons reveal the multivalence of current iconogra-phy. One of his favorite methods, according to Marcus Wood, was tocreate a text that would “ridicule what it is supposed to be celebrat-ing.”33 Printed after Shelley’s Mask and “On the Medusa” werewritten, Death or Liberty! appears to be a conservative interpretationof radical reform and frames the conflict in gendered terms; however,Cruikshank uses French Revolutionary icons and images from hisother proradical cartoons to represent both sides of the issue and thustroubles the cartoon’s conservative surface. Since it can be read fromat least two perspectives, the cartoon runs the risk of being on neitherside and underscores the danger of parody. But while it underminesits own political stance, where it remains fixed is in its attitudes aboutgender. Cruikshank depends on the figure of the victimized womanto signify the opposing side’s tyranny. Where the other signs producean indeterminacy of meaning, the female figures stabilize the cartoon’spolitics. The seeming transparency of the gendered power dynamicaffirms male power, and, in so doing, it suggests that the real threat isthe transgressive woman.

The contradictions of Cruikshank’s work in 1819 embody thecomplexity of producing political satire around the Peterloo Massa-cre. Between 1816 and 1822, the period of his collaboration withWilliam Hone, Cruikshank produced work for both the radical andloyalist causes.34 Aligned with the Whigs, Cruikshank was a goodfriend, a defender, and colleague of Hone, who was put on trial in

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1817 on charges of libel for publishing satires on the government. Inaddition to their presentation in The Political House That Jack Built,Cruikshank’s cartoons appeared regularly in The Scourge, a satiricaljournal invested in mocking Regency government. These cartoonssatirize by turning the Regency figures into buffoons or lecherousabusers of women. In 1819 and 1820, however, at the same time hepublished cartoons mocking the persecutions of the Regency govern-ment, Cruikshank continued to do caricatures for the loyalists thatattacked the extreme radical Reformers as subverters of Britishtradition. The two cartoons to which he signs his name are of thissort; they reveal a nervousness, even fear, about the potential horrorof revolution, and they overtly frame this horror in terms of gender.Political women become monstrous; proper women’s chastity isthreatened. As one of these signed cartoons, Death or Liberty! thushas an ambivalent political status.35

In its transposition of the reformers’ slogan, “Equal Representa-tion or death,” Death or Liberty! conveys a conservative message. Ifthe cartoon claims in its title a choice of death or liberty, in its images

Figure 2. George Cruikshank, Death or Liberty! Or Britiannia & the Virtues of theConstitution in Danger of Violation from the Great Political Libertine, RadicalReform!, 1 December 1819, © The British Museum.


it equates death, an exaggerated, castrated masculine figure, with theradical reformers fighting for liberty, and liberty with the traditionalvalues of the Regency government, represented by Britannia. Itpresents the threat posed to conservative British rule by radicalreform as sexual violation. The cartoon emphasizes the need toprotect Britain’s subjects, here figured as a woman, from politics andreformist movements portrayed not just as revolutionary violence butas rape. The female victim thus signifies reform’s violation of thesocial order. The punning on the word “liberty” allows a slippagefrom radical liberty as a fight against oppression, to the taking ofsocial liberties as a transgression of social boundaries, and, finally, tosexual liberties.

In the cartoon, Radical Reform is a barely masked, sinewy, andskull-headed figure, with genitals in the form of an arrow tied to anhourglass. He wears a liberty bonnet on his head and another wavesfrom a pole overhead. He tries “to take liberties” with a buxom andbrave Britannia, who is backed up against the stone of religion andholds the sword of the laws in her uplifted hand. While Reformasserts his aggressive masculinity, he clearly has already been cas-trated. Instead of the calm deportment expected of Britannia,however, she is clearly a maiden in distress. She is well armed butseems unable to defend her honor. In fact, Radical Reform is poised,literally, to take Liberty; he grasps her right breast and grinslasciviously. Between Britannia’s legs rests a shield bearing the Britishflag, but pressed by Death’s knee it implies his penetration even as itprotects her from it. Britannia’s attire further underscores the extentof his violation. She wears armor decorated by a belt that, translatedfrom the French, reads “God and my right.” In the distance, a lion,wearing the collar “loyalty,” rages to her defense, his arrival symboliz-ing British protection of its country and its women. Threatened andattractive, Britannia demands the observer’s attention, in contrast tothe wounded woman in The Examiner passage and to the figures onReform’s side. By transforming political threat into a sexual threat, asin representations of Peterloo, the cartoon plays on its viewer’ssympathy for the distressed maiden. It is not so much that Britanniafeminizes authority, but that her distress calls out for protection by amale viewer. Thus, the maiden’s very weakness functions as a sign ofconservative power.

The cartoon reinforces the binary opposition of male aggressorand female victim through its portrayal of Reform’s cohorts. WhereasBritannia stands alone, Radical Reform is backed up by a mob—

181Ashley J. Cross

literally a chain gang—of deformed and skeletal grotesques. Insteadof the banners for universal suffrage that radicals actually carried atPeterloo, these figures wave banners which align Parliamentaryreform with murder, starvation, robbery, slavery, blasphemy, andimmorality. Significantly, many of these crimes were the very ones ofwhich the Regency was accused. The cartoon gains its effect in partby displacing the very claims radicals had made against conservativesonto the radicals. Like Radical Reform, his followers are half-dressedand their faces are contorted into a range of menacing and lewdgrimaces. To emphasize the sexual crudity of the reform side, thecartoonist has given most of these characters pronounced body partsto indicate their sex. Their bodies are meant to match their banners.For example, Murder holds a knife with his banner as if ready to stabRobbery. Robbery looks as if he is ready to grab Starvation; anundefined phallic object hanging between his legs reappears betweenthe legs of Starvation, who is bone-thin. The character holding thebanner “Slavery” is not even human; instead, it is a chain-link figuresporting a liberty bonnet.

As the most complex of Radical Reform’s followers, a Medusafigure waves Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason in addition to a flag saying“Blasphemy.” Her gender is specified only by her pendulous, nakedbreasts. The cartoon clearly wants to link monstrous, aggressivewomen with reform, again turning political threat into sexual threat.The multiple snakes on Medusa’s head echo the single snake at thetop of Radical Reform’s staff, linking the two. The connection isimportant because it reiterates Reform’s castration and compensatesfor the conservatives’ feminized position. By confirming the radicals’castration, surely caused by hanging out with Medusan women, thecartoon confirms the masculinity of conservatives.36 It also impliesthat Radical Reform’s aggression is an attempt to prove his manhood.On one level, Radical Reform appears as a powerful male aggressortaking advantage of a woman; on another, he is revealed as emascu-lated and desperate. In Cruikshank’s cartoon, then, the phallic powerof conservative authority is displaced onto the radicals, even while itdenies them any real authority.

Given Cruikshank’s political duplicity and the resonance of thecartoon’s imagery with other radical representations at the time,however, the conservative reading is only one possible interpretation.While the conservative reading relies on gender to stabilize itspolitics, the allusions to the French Revolution and other radicalimages, combined with the exaggeration of the cartoon’s images, blur


the sides of the debate. The instability of the signs suggests thatCruikshank might be mocking the very thing he is supporting. In fact,it is quite possible to read the cartoon as a parody of antiradicalattitudes and as another commentary on the violence of Peterloo.37

Significantly, the French Revolutionary imagery appears on bothsides.38 The most obvious image, the liberty cap, appears severaltimes on the reform side of the cartoon; however, the most promi-nent example, held up on the pole in the center of the cartoon,actually appears between Radical Reform and Britannia. It is notclear whether this is Death’s staff or Britannia’s. This ambiguous signreveals Cruikshank’s ambivalence about the battle. Not only does itimply that the struggle is over who gets to carry the liberty cap, but italso symbolically represents the battle as a discursive contest tocontrol representation. In addition, Britannia’s opposition to Medusarecalls a 1793 cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson on the FrenchRevolution called The Contrast, which opposes French Liberty toBritish Liberty through the opposition of the monstrous Medusa anda proper Britannia. Here, however, the hair on Britannia’s head has asimilar serpentine quality to Medusa’s and the sword she wields hasbecome a flowing banner, a miniature of Radical Reform’s cape.Perhaps this underscores the threat of Reform to the laws, but it alsoconnects the two opposing sides. Moreover, Britannia strangelyrecalls Marianne, the revolutionary goddess of liberty. Her scaledbodice with the words “dieu et mon droi” on the belt makes thisconnection explicit, thus also aligning the conservative side withliberty and revolution. The image is more complicated still becauseBritannia’s serpent-like bodice also calls up the image of the hydrakilled by Hercules, another symbol of Revolutionary power thatviewers would have known. Hercules, in fact, replaced Marianne asthe symbol of revolution under the Terror. This potentially associatesDeath with the Terror, but it also has the effect of undermining theconservative side: how does one distinguish the true representationof liberty and revolution if the symbols do not take distinct sides?

Radical Reform’s mask provides another Revolutionary image thatfurther reveals the cartoon’s ambivalent politics. The ancient regimewas associated with masks and masques, and the mask became asymbol of corruption; the Revolutionaries saw themselves as unmask-ing the corruption.39 Shelley, in fact, situates his Mask in this traditionof masking by punning on “mask” and “masque.”40 The cartoon,though, associates the values of the French Revolutionaries with theconservative side by implying that they unmask Death, and it aligns

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radical reform with corruption and deception. But, again, the imageis ambiguous: what does it mean to have Death wear a mask in suchan obvious way? Given that the mask itself is the central image of thecartoon, it is possible that, in a self-referential move, it drawsattention to the masquerade of the cartoon itself: the masquerade ofthe Regency government as female victim.

The duplicity of the French Revolutionary iconography is rein-forced by the cartoon’s allusions to other radical representations,including Cruikshank’s own work at that time. The cartoon dependson its viewers’ knowledge of images of Peterloo and other reformissues. In addition to its reworking of the reform slogan, “EqualRepresentation or Death,” the opposition of violent male and victim-ized female recalls the many images of the Peterloo massacre andpoints toward conservative attempts to capitalize on that imagery.41

The cartoon thus brings to mind the very politics it wants to question.At the very least, the cartoon mocks the censors. The skeletal figuresevoke Cruikshank’s later representation of a chained and gagged JohnBull in A Free Born Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! Andthe Envy of Surrounding Nations!!! (15 December 1819).42 TheMedusa figure, who waves Paine’s Age of Reason and a flag claiming“Blasphemy,” is clearly a reference to the 1812 blasphemy trial ofDaniel Isaac Eaton for publishing the last part of Paine’s work.43 Inaddition, the image of Death with his hand on Britannia’s breast wasapt to summon lewd images of the Prince Regent and, in particular,one of Cruikshank’s own entitled Royal Embarkation or BearingBritannia’s Hope from a Bathing Machine to the Royal Barge (19August 1819), in which the Regent grips the breasts of two buxomwomen conveying him to his yacht.44

While these images suggest the uncertainty of the cartoon’spolitics, the exaggerated figures, like so many of Cruikshank’s othercartoons, produce a satire that undermines itself. A glance at anotherCruikshank cartoon will help reveal the contradictoriness and politi-cal duplicity of Death or Liberty! On the same piece of paper onwhich he designed Massacre at St. Peter’s and which was printed bythe same printseller, T. Tegg, Cruikshank created A Radical Re-former, i.e. a Neck or Nothing Man! Dedicated to the Heads of theNation (17 September 1819) (figure 3), a cartoon which makes clearthe danger of parody.45 On one level, this cartoon seems to derideradical reformers by linking them to the violence of the Terror; onanother, it seems to be a mockery of the government’s response toradical reform. On the left of the cartoon is a huge, fire-breathing,


animated guillotine monster. The guillotine wears a liberty cap andwields a dagger. Flames erupt from its belly below the blade, andpeeping through the hole at its crotch, through which pours bloodlike urine, is a skull. On the right of the cartoon appears a fleeinggroup of governmental officials, including Lord Liverpool, who fallsover bags of gold; Lord Castlereagh; Lord Chancellor Eldon, tellingthe regent not to mind losing his wig “so long as your head’s on”; andthe legs of the King. As John Wardroper suggests, it is hard to knowwhether to take the guillotine monster seriously; both sides seemequally absurd and worthy of mockery.46

Returning to Death or Liberty! we might say the same thing. Theimages are so absurd that they threaten to mean the opposite. If it ispossible to read the cartoon as mocking reform’s sexual perversity, itis equally possible to read the cartoon as satirizing conservatives forrepresenting themselves as victimized, especially given the increasingoppressiveness of governmental authority. That is, viewers wouldunmistakably see that the victimized woman is just a mask forpatriarchal power; from this perspective, the true victims are thewomen of Peterloo. The real castration anxiety is that of the govern-ment that feels threatened enough to represent reform in this way.Or, to say this in the cartoon’s sexualized terms, if Britannia is in thisstate, she asked for it.

Evidently, Cruikshank’s Death or Liberty! delivers an ambiguouspolitical message. Despite its indeterminacy, however, its positionregarding gender remains stable. The victimized woman provides aseemingly transparent sign of male power. Her meaning is not inquestion because, as a victim, she represents the proper model offemininity and the “Virtues of the Constitution in Danger of Viola-tion.” The real fear, then, is not the “Political Libertine, RadicalReform,” but the transgressive woman who blurs the lines betweenmasculine and feminine, here figured as Medusa, holding up Paine’streatise.47 While the book’s title, Age of Reason, is supposed to mockRadical Reform, it also implies that women reading such politicalbooks are anything but reasonable. Moreover, “Blasphemy” (Medusa’sbanner), the cartoon indicates, is not about religion at all, but ratherabout women who become monstrous and transgress their socialroles.

The danger of the monstrous woman, who appears to be amarginal figure, is emphasized in the dominant metaphor of thecartoon, rape, which connects the two female figures. For Medusabecame a threat to men because she was raped by Neptune. Out of

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jealousy, Minerva transformed Medusa’s beautiful hair into serpents,whom, when looked upon, would turn the gazer into stone. WhileBritannia’s rape calls for a male protector, in its connection toMedusa’s experience it suggests another potential threat to maleauthority: if Medusa is the model of the monstrous radical woman,Britannia’s rape by the radicals might make her monstrous. Thisconnection between Medusa and Britannia is reinforced by theirsimilar snake-like hairdos and by a repetition of the flame ofMedusa’s breath in Britannia’s sword. Thus, in the cartoon, patriar-chal violence against a woman (rape) is transformed into the need tocontrol a monstrous woman who threatens male power. If thecartoon’s overt opposition is aggressive male and victimized woman,its subtext is aggressive woman and threatened male. The image ofthe victimized woman affirms the male power, which is disrupted byMedusa’s difference. What is most at stake, then, is male power thatdepends on a female victim for its authority.

Indeed, in light of the women’s reform effort, where this cartoontakes and takes away liberties is in its representation of women. Acartoon that Cruikshank produced right before the Peterloo Massa-

Figure 3. George Cruikshank, A Radical Reformer, i.e. a Neck or Nothing Man!, 17September 1819, © The British Museum.


cre, The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers of Blackburn!!! (12August 1819) (figure 4), also for Humphrey, illuminates this anxietyabout women gaining power.48 This cartoon is overt in using symbolicrepresentation to stifle women’s political action. More specifically, ittransforms the political threat posed by organized Female UnionSocieties into a sexual threat by aggressive women. Refiguring areport by The Black Dwarf, the cartoon mocks the women reformers’gift of a cap of liberty by turning it into a sexual act: one womanplaces the cap on the end of a pole that is held upright between aman’s legs. She asks “every man in England to stand up and comeforward and join the general union, that by a determined constitu-tional resistance to our oppressors we may attain the great end!!!”The sexual innuendo here is meant to reduce the women to literalpetticoat reformers. The men in the audience below the platformogle and paw the women; the women, obese pantaloon-clad gro-tesques, wave a petticoat banner on which appears a female St.George overcoming the monster corruption, a crude allusion to“riding St George,” a slang phrase for sexual intercourse with thewoman on top.49 This sexually derogatory cartoon, then, underscoresanxiety about women’s equality and reduces it by turning it into asexual joke.50 Together the two cartoons reduce female liberty tosexual license.

Printed several months after The Belle Alliance and Peterloo,Death or Liberty! purports to be about radical reform, but itssecondary message is to define femininity and reiterate women’sstatus as victims. By using the victimized woman to stabilize itspolitics, Cruikshank’s cartoon effaces the fact that gender politicswere also in flux in 1819. The effect of this appropriation is to reifythe oppressive binary opposition between man and woman. Whereasone can deploy the liberty cap arbitrarily, the female face and bodymaintain their sexual reference, no matter the cause. Like Cruikshank’sBritannia and like Medusa’s head held up by Perseus to ward off hisenemies, the face functions apotropaically and props up the one whowields it (that is, radicals, conservatives, the artist). But what was theeffect on the victim, the one who owned the face, the one disseveredfrom her body? Was it even possible to use gender differently as asign in the specific context of 1819 political representations? That is,given the dominant metaphor of victim and victimizer, was it possibleto make use of the figure of the victimized woman in a way that wasnot reifying, not apotropaic, and not affirming the victim as victim?Was it possible to represent victimization without appropriating the

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victim?51 These are the very questions that Shelley was exploring in1819 and feared he could not answer.

III. “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE”: SHELLEY’S FEMALE MASKS

Exiled in Italy at the time of the Peterloo Massacre, Shelleyresponded in outrage, writing to Charles Ollier: “The torrent of myindignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. . . . I wait anxiously[to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloodymurderous oppression of its destroyers. ‘Something must be done.’ . . .What yet I know not,” he wrote on 6 September 1819. In writing toThomas Love Peacock shortly thereafter on 21 September, he againdeclared vehemently: “What an infernal business this is of Manches-ter. What is to be done? Something assuredly.”52 These words stressShelley’s increased sense of urgency about reform as well as hishorror at the “bloody murderous oppression” and the alarming stateof England in general, which he would go on to describe in his sonnet“England in 1819” at the end of the year. The repetition not onlyunderscores Shelley’s desire for action and his sympathy, even

Figure 4. George Cruikshank, The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers ofBlackburn!!!, 12 August 1819, © The British Museum.


identification, with the victims, but also reveals Shelley’s conscious-ness of the power of the female victim’s voice. Both of theseresponses echo the words of Beatrice Cenci, the psychologically andphysically brutalized heroine of Shelley’s The Cenci, the dramaticpoem he sent to Peacock on 9 September in the hopes of ananonymous production in London.53 The allusion is significant be-cause it provides a specifically gendered context for understandingShelley’s work in 1819: raped by her father, Beatrice embodies theviolence of oppression. In using her words, Shelley frames hisresponse to Peterloo with a domestic drama that positions theoppressed, here figured as a woman, as the victim of patriarchal andfamilial violence.

Despite the difference of genre, the allusion works much asCruikshank’s Massacre at St. Peter’s does: Beatrice’s gender reaffirmsthe depth of the violation of the political protestors at Manchesterand forecasts the potential violent uprising of the oppressed. In thisact of ventriloquism, however, Shelley recognizes the necessity anddanger of retaliation and articulates it through the agency of hervoice. In contrast to Cruikshank’s reifying representation of woman asvictim, Shelley’s words underscore her power. Moreover, Shelley’srepetition of Beatrice’s words foregrounds a crisis of representa-tion—the very issue at stake in the reform movement—that is bothpolitical and aesthetic. Immediately after Beatrice tells her mother,Lucretia, “something must be done; / what yet I know not . . .something which shall make / The thing that I have suffered but ashadow / In the dread lightening that avenges it,” we are confrontedwith the profundity of her crisis: she is unable to represent the crimeagainst her.54 As she says to her mother in act 3, scene 1,

What are the words which you would have me speak?I, who can feign no image in my mindOf that which has transformed me. I, whose thoughtIs like a ghost shrouded and folded upIn its own formless horror. Of all words,. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Which wouldst though hear? For there is none to tellMy misery. 55

In a sense, Beatrice’s inability to represent the crime of patriarchalabuse leads to her violent retaliation against her father (she has himstrangled) and eventually to the death of her family under the equallyoppressive law. In light of Peterloo, Shelley does not want a repeti-

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tion of Beatrice’s “pernicious mistakes,” as he calls them in thepreface to the play, but he also does not want to objectify the victimaesthetically to make a political point, as does Cruikshank’s cartoon.56

Nor, finally, can he claim to be in Beatrice’s or the protestors’ exactposition. In speaking Beatrice’s words, then, Shelley foregrounds hisown crisis after Peterloo: how to represent the oppressed (womenand the working class), so as to animate them to act in their owndefense without repeating the very oppression he wants to challenge.If in 1819 Shelley is especially concerned with how to “resist thepatriarchal establishment,” as Stephen Behrendt suggests, his use ofthe figure of the victimized woman, a figure that he turns tofrequently in that year, enacts this struggle to represent the op-pressed without taking away their agency.57 In Shelley’s eyes, it was nolonger enough to unmask power; instead, “something must be done”to animate the oppressed into action. But could poetry do it?

Shelley’s repetition of Beatrice’s words seems problematic, an-other example of a man using the victimized woman to signify hisown righteous position. Moreover, Beatrice’s violent retaliation againsther father inverts and thus reaffirms the gendered opposition be-tween oppressor and oppressed. Mask and “On the Medusa” attemptto create other relations to the victimized woman; they challenge aworld split into oppressor and oppressed. Together, they revealShelley’s awareness of the way in which gender is used to signifypower. In these poems, in contrast to Cruikshank’s cartoon, Shelleytakes on the binary opposition of male aggressor/female victim toquestion its adequacy as a metaphor and to undermine the genderedground of political conflict and aesthetic desire. In Mask, Shelleydoes this by multiplying the female figure and creating contradictoryimages that underscore the difficulty of representing oppression.While these multiplications and contradictions show his own ambiva-lent position, they also unmask the violence of male authority andfracture it. Shelley similarly disrupts patriarchal power in “On theMedusa” by combining in one figure the two female figures ofCruikshank’s cartoon, one threatening male power and the otherrestoring it. Rather than wielding Medusa’s head for his own power,he wants the reader to view the victimized woman differently, to seethe process by which she becomes “the fragment of an uncreatedcreature.”58

Because of the imagery they share with each other and withCruikshank’s cartoons, Mask and “On the Medusa” provide aninteresting, if unusual, pair of Shelley texts to read together. While


many critics have commented on the connections of Shelley’s “On theMedusa” to other 1819 poems, especially Prometheus Unbound,“Ode to the West Wind,” and “Sonnet: England in 1819,” itsconnection to Mask has gone unremarked.59 Addressing the problemof violence, one aesthetically and one politically, both poems share anekphrastic element: they verbally express a response to a visual textand, in so doing, emphasize the transforming power of poetry.60

Reading “On the Medusa” in relation to Mask also illuminates theirshared imagery: the gendered portrayal of the relation betweenoppressor and oppressed, as well as the animating vapor that is thebreath of both poetry and revolution (the “thrilling vapour” [“M,”5.36] of Medusa’s breath and the revolutionary force in Mask, the“mist, a light, an image” that rises between the maniac maid andAnarchy).61 Through the interweaving of these two patterns ofimagery, each poem reveals Shelley’s ambivalence about the way thefemale victim works in the political discourse of 1819.

Shelley wrote Mask to express his outrage over the brutality ofPeterloo, hoping to add his words to the battles and motivate thoseviolently mown down to continue their struggle. But the poet/narrator’s position in this poem is complicated by his literal andfigurative distance from the scene. His vision of political resistancedepends upon three key elements: the mist/light/image that slaysAnarchy, a series of connected female figures, and the passive “Menof England” (MA, 147) in the second half of the poem. Each of theseelements functions differently to disrupt the patriarchal authoritythat creates and relies on the female victim. They provide contradic-tory, even mystifying, images of revolution because of their ambigu-ous connections to the violence of the poem, even as they rely ontraditional understandings of gender.62

Shelley’s Mask frames the Peterloo conflict much as doesCruikshank’s Death or Liberty!, although Shelley changes the sides sothat Death symbolizes the corruption and violence of establishedpower. “Anarchy, the Skeleton” (MA, 74), “pale even to the lips, /Like Death in the Apocalypse” (MA, 32–33), with his brow marked “IAM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!” (MA, 37), rides in on a horsewith his accomplices: Murder, who wears “a mask like Castlereagh”(MA, 6); Fraud, “Like Eldon” (MA, 15) whose tears turn to millstonesand brain children; and Hypocrisy, “like Sidmouth . . . / On acrocodile rode by. / And many more Destructions played / In thisghastly masquerade” (MA, 24–27). They are joined by a “mightytroop” (MA, 42), and together they ride to London “trampling to a

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mire of blood / The adoring multitude” (MA, 40–41). In London,Anarchy revels in his glory because everyone, including the priests,lawyers, and kings, has allegiance to him. Suddenly, however, hisprocession is disrupted by “a maniac maid,” who runs past crying“Misery, oh, Misery!” and claiming her name is Hope, “But shelooked more like Despair” (MA, 86, 87, 88). Unlike Britannia, she isunarmed, but she also prepares for her victimization by prostratingherself: “Then she lay down in the street, / Right before the horses’feet, / Expecting, with a patient eye, / Murder, Fraud and Anarchy”(MA, 98–101). The word “Expecting,” after her own comments aboutfather Time having “child after child” (MA, 94) implies her impend-ing victimization as both waiting and potential birth.

Instead of the expected violation, however, Shelley disrupts thedynamic with an abstract revolutionary force, “a mist, a light, animage” (MA, 103), which rises inexplicably “like the vapour of thevale” (MA, 105) between the “maniac maid” and Anarchy. Clearlyconnected to the west wind and other inspiring Romantic breezes,this nebulous vapor becomes “a shape arrayed in mail / Brighter thanthe viper’s scale” (MA, 110–11). Perhaps “the trumpet of a prophecy”to “unawakened Earth” in another form, its building force slaysAnarchy and calms the maniac maid.63 Moreover, the “step[s]” (MA,118) of this mist/light/image give “Thoughts” (MA, 125) of resistanceto the multitude and make them see Hope unmasked: “Thoughtssprung where’er that step did fall. / And the prostrate multitude /Looked—and ankle deep in blood, / Hope that maiden most serene /Was walking with a quiet mien” (MA, 125–29). Revealing the maniacmaid in her true light, these thoughts create a “sense awakening”(MA, 136) of their own oppression and provoke Shelley to imagine acall to resist established power “As if ” spoken by mother Earth to theMen of England.

To say Shelley is mixing metaphors here is an understatement; themixed metaphors, however, create a complicated and abstract trajec-tory that suggests the difficulty of picturing the conflict. Although thefact that this shape is genderless may lead one to conclude, as MortonPaley does, that the force that brings about radical transformation is“beyond sexuality,” Shelley’s reference to the “presence” (MA, 120) as“her” in the manuscript seems significant in a poem in which thefigures of Hope and resistance are primarily female.64 In breaking theopposition between Anarchy and maid with the mist, Shelley trans-forms the maniac maid from potential victim to figure of hope.65

More importantly, the mist links the revolutionary force to poetry; it


is poetry, in a sense, that leaves the maniac maid calm and reveals heras Hope and not Despair. The maniac maid not only plays the role ofpassive femininity in lying down in the street before Anarchy, but hermaniac status clearly is related to Anarchy’s procession. That is, it isAnarchy who causes her to flee shrieking and then to lie down in thestreet. In contrast, the revolutionary shape causes her to appear asshe really is: as Hope. Thus while the revolutionary force may seemlike an abstraction of the violence (we don’t know the source of all theblood around the maniac maid’s feet), in fact it disrupts the opposi-tion that would produce the victimized woman. And, in so doing, therevolutionary force reveals the false link between revolution andoppressive violence, femaleness and oppressed passivity.

Furthermore, while the maniac maid recalls Cruikshank’s Libertyin her distress, she is not the only female figure. Another way inwhich Shelley undermines the static binary is to identify himself withthe female figures. The poet’s reliance on female masks appears fromthe very first lines of the poem, with their suggestions of Eve’sawakening in book 4 of Paradise Lost. In these lines, the poetestablishes his own position as feminine, as an awakening to which heis passively led: “As I lay asleep in Italy / There came a voice fromover the Sea, / And with great power it forth led me / To walk in thevisions of Poesy” (MA, 1–4). In the body of the poem, the poet’sactual vision, this identification is articulated through another contra-dictory female figure, the voice of mother Earth, who calls the “Menof England” to “rise like Lions after slumber” (MA, 151). This voiceparallels the voice that wakens the poet and leads him to the poeticvision of the Mask, even as it embodies in a simile the poet’s ownattempt to give voice to revolution. The simile reveals that Earthfunctions as a mask for the poet. These are not really Earth’s words,but “a rushing light of clouds and splendour, / A sense awakening”(MA, 135–36) is felt and causes “words of joy and fear [to arise] / Asif ” spoken by “their own indignant Earth” (MA, 138–39). Moreover,the light imagery connects Earth’s words to the revolutionary mist/light/image earlier.

Through the voice of Earth, Shelley inverts the gender roles,presenting the Men of England as the victims; the maniac maidserves as a model for their behavior in the second half of the poem.These active female roles seem especially significant if we recall thehistorical context of women’s organizing before Peterloo. It is womenhere who inspire political action and try to animate the victims.Giving voice to their story, Earth interprets for the Men of England,

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telling them about the depths of their slavery and the reality offreedom. She both advocates for passive resistance and reveals itsdanger by depicting the brutality of the tyrant rulers, who “will slash,and stab, and maim, and hew,” (MA, 342) in an image that seems torepeat the violence of the Peterloo Massacre. Significantly, however,Shelley here has changed the victim. He makes this a conflictbetween men, but, whereas the victimized woman confirms malepower, the nonviolent man disrupts that model. Instead, the Men ofEngland’s passive looks disarm the violence of other men: “Withfolded arms and steady eyes, / And little fear, and less surprise / Lookupon them as they slay / Till their rage has died away” (MA, 344–47).Finally, the poem affirms that disruption by valorizing women as thefinal judges of men’s actions: when those in power again plow downthe passive resisters, “every woman in the land / Will point at them asthey stand” (MA, 352–53). In a sense returning the women to theiractive role in the reform movement, Shelley’s text does not finallyaffirm its political position on the bodies of women. It is the women,those who most threaten patriarchal power, who will have the last word.

In fact, the poem problematizes Shelley’s exhortation to the Menof England through the female mask of Earth. As the female voice ofrevolution dominates the poem, the Men of England are reduced tosilently watching. What should be a process of animating the massesseemingly becomes a process of their silencing. In line 260 deeds arethe means to resistance. By 299, these have become “strong andsimple words / Keen to wound as sharpened swords” (MA, 299–300)and finally are merely “looks”: “Stand ye calm and resolute / Like aforest close and mute, / With folded arms and looks which are /Weapons of unvanquished war” (MA, 319–22). In this process,“slaughter” (MA, 360) becomes “inspiration” (MA, 361) that is“eloquent and oracular” (MA, 362), another voice which will makethe poet’s words “like oppression’s thundered doom” (MA, 365). AsShelley attempts to embody the force of revolution and to mobilizethe oppressed other, he draws attention to his own problematic act ofrepresentation: the only means he has to overcome the disablingforce of oppression are words, but these words, “oppression’s thun-dered doom,” seem to produce their own violence, to make their ownvictims.

Whereas Mask disrupts patriarchal power by altering the roles ofthe players, “On the Medusa” destabilizes the victimized woman’ssignification and unmasks how her image was used to shore up maleauthority. Portraying Medusa, the monstrous woman, as victim,


Shelley rescues her from conservative rhetoric and loads the victim-ized woman with a revolutionary power she does not have inCruikshank’s cartoon. This conflation of the two female figures inCruikshank’s cartoon transforms Medusa into a victim with a legiti-mate cause, no longer a threat to be warded off, but a complex andpotentially radical force for reform.66 Although this poem revealsShelley’s identification with Medusa, it also shows how volatile herimage is—how the image of the victimized woman could work againstShelley’s cause by turning him into another Perseus who merelywields her head for his own benefit. Thus, “On the Medusa”simultaneously shows how the patriarchal logic of the victimizedwoman works and disrupts that logic.

In light of Mask’s cartoon-like images, Medusa’s decapitated formis startlingly abstract. On first glance, Shelley’s Medusa is neitherthreatening nor revolutionary, but dead: a painting made into a poem.On closer examination, however, the artistic context provides Shelleywith the means to intertwine his aesthetic and political concerns. Thevictimized woman here functions as both a poetic and revolutionaryfigure.67 In addition to her radical significance in the reform move-ment (two radical journals even called themselves Medusa and theGorgon, in part because of her revolutionary meaning during theFrench Revolution), Medusa embodies a myth about oppressor andoppressed in which the violence of oppression is continually actedout on the female body. From her rape by Neptune to her beheadingby Perseus, Medusa models the victimized woman put to use forpatriarchal power. For Shelley, her tragedy corresponds to that of theMen of England, feminized by oppression and enchained whileasleep. Her “agonies of anguish and of death” (“M,” 1.8) recall hisrepresentations of the working class as corpses and abortions, weav-ing their own winding sheets. More significantly, out of Medusa’sdead body came Pegasus, symbol of poetry. Lest this become anothermale poet constructing poetry on the death of a beautiful woman,Shelley underscores Medusa’s latent power by portraying her dyingbreath as a “thrilling vapour” (“M,” 5.36), bringing into play theRomantic breeze trope, the creative breath of inspiration and life.Like the West wind that is both “Destroyer and Preserver,” like the“graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst,” Medusa is adouble figure.68 On the one hand, she suggests failed revolution anddeath, her own breath forming an “ever-shifting mirror” (“M,” 5.37)that freezes her on the mountaintop. On the other hand, the“thrilling vapour” of her breath, as Jerome McGann argues, also

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suggests life and the human spirit, in spite of her “victimization by thetyranny of established power.”69 As Shelley writes in the additionalstanza to the poem, in the figure of Medusa, “Death has met life, butthere is life in death” (“M,” 6.46). In the process of embodying therevolutionary vapour (the mist/light/image of Mask), Shelley arrivesat a parallel crisis: how to animate the victim—in Mask, the masses ofpeople stand, like the maniac maid, in their own blood, and here thedecapitated Medusa lies on the wet, bloody rock.

The poem foregrounds the double-edged nature of Shelley’sproject from the opening lines: his Medusa threatens to align himwith the same conservative power he wants to call into question. Onone level, the poem works as a revelation of Medusa’s genderedidentity. The poem reveals that the “It” that “lieth” (“M,” 1.1) in theopening lines actually has a “woman’s countenance” (“M,” 6.39).What “It lieth” about is Medusa’s femaleness, her humanity. Thisrevelation is disturbing not because it is surprising that Medusa is awoman—any reader should know this from the myth—but becauseShelley delays mentioning her female countenance until the very endof the poem, and it is then that we find out she is dead. The maniacmaid who lies down passively in the streets in Mask has beentransformed into a trunkless female head, “a woman’s countenance,with serpent locks, / Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks”(“M,” 6.39–40). This change reveals the actual body at stake: not onlydoes the mirror of Medusa’s breath suggest her own complicity in herdeath, but the poem’s significance also depends on her dead body. Bygiving “It” a female face, by making “It” a woman, the poemseemingly restores masculine authority and contains that terriblebeauty in recognizable female form. If this process helps us to seeMedusa as a victimized woman, it also resolves her threat on theviewer by making her lifeless. At the very moment in the poem whenMedusa takes on human form, when she becomes a sympatheticfigure, she also is most clearly a corpse, wielded by the poet to gainsupport for his cause. From this perspective, the revelation of the“woman’s countenance” on the decapitated head functions similarlyto Cruikshank’s cartoon; it assures the viewer that the threatenedwoman is merely a victim of male violence who needs rescue.Shelley’s use of the victimized woman here threatens to be the sameold story.

But is it? What kind of lie is this if the poem claims overtly that itlies? Within the first five lines, the repeated and contradictory use oflies (“It lieth” and “it seems to lie” [“M,” 1.5]) makes the reader self-


consciously aware of the object’s lie, of its position. This punningsuggests that this victimized woman is not what she first seems.Critically, Shelley never transforms Medusa into a woman; it is never“she,” but a “woman’s countenance,” a mask. Much as RadicalReform wears a mask over his death-like face in Cruikshank’s cartoon,much as Murder wears a mask like Castlereagh, and as the maniacmaid wears the mask of despair, Medusa wears a “woman’s counte-nance” to cover “all the beauty and the terror there” (“M,” 5.38). Hermask reveals her misuse as a symbol to stabilize conservative maleauthority. Shelley’s ability to recover Medusa’s radical power dependsnot only on being able to read this “woman’s countenance,” but alsoon reading behind it, unmasking the image of patriarchal authority.

The critical moment in this revision of the victimized womanoccurs in stanza 2, a turning point in the poem in which Medusa’sviewer is offered a choice of transformation or reification, of readingher image so as to disrupt patriarchal power or to stabilize it. If, asmany critics have argued, this is a poem about the poet/viewer’stransformation, that transformation is hard-won and it involves arevolution in the poet’s view of his poetic object, the monstrous andvictimized woman.70 As Grant Scott argues, stanza 2 provides thepoint of conversion, the danger of the ekphrastic moment, in whichthe artwork makes the viewer “suspend critical reflection to lure[him] into a half-conscious liaison he can neither control nor resist.”71

For Scott, this is the moment when masculine discourse breaksdown; historically, however, such moments have affirmed malepower. What matters is not so much the moment of dissolution when“thought no more can trace” (“M,” 2.13), but how the viewerresponds after that moment, what he does with that experience. ForCruikshank’s cartoon also lures the viewer “to suspend criticalreflection” through its image of the victimized woman, but only toreinforce male authority. In Shelley’s poem, lines 14–16, which“humanize and harmonize the strain” (“M,” 2.16), seem to functionsimilarly; they extricate the viewer from the threatened dissolution oflines 9–13 and reaffirm his difference from Medusa.

However we interpret the lines directly following, the moment ofthreatened dissolution is pivotal as it radically disrupts the viewer’ssubjectivity. In the opening lines of the second stanza, the poet’s gazeand Medusa become confused as the poet contemplates the momentof being turned to stone. Initially depicted as a relation betweenviewer and object, the agency of the relationship reverses as Medusa’sgaze petrifies the poet’s spirit. Critically, the process of turning the

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spirit into stone is a process of writing, of engraving, that simulta-neously takes away and produces identity. Medusa becomes a writer,either etching him with her “dead face” (“M,” 2.11) or carving sodeeply as to erase the “characters” (“M,” 2.12) of his “dead face.”Poet and victimized woman blend in a figure that not only disruptsthe subject/object opposition but also simultaneously displaces it.Their “characters” grow into one another, represented by the singleword “itself ” (“M,” 2.13). The ending lines of the stanza retreatimmediately from this moment of melding, however. If the viewercontemplates being turned to stone by her “grace” (“M,” 2.9), “themelodious hues of beauty thrown / Athwart the darkness and theglare of pain” (“M,” 2.14–15) allow him to refigure her, “to humanizeand harmonize” her as a poetic object, a symbol of human suffering.In addition, the word “strain” (“M,” 2.16), following “humanize andharmonize,” draws attention to the poet’s act of representation.Though we cannot be sure whether it is his poetic “strain” or the“strain” of her struggle that is being humanized and harmonized, thedouble verb here stresses the change in the viewer’s relation toMedusa.

But to what effect? How are we to take this drastic shift in themiddle of stanza 2, a shift marked only by the conjunctive semicolon?The semicolon provides parallel structure, but the movement from“grace” to “melodious hue of beauty” suggests a critical shift from afocus on the spiritual (“grace” as both ease of movement andunmerited divine assistance) to the external (appearance describedsynaesthetically). Do the opening lines of stanza 2 offer a potentialregenerative moment in which the blending of Medusa and viewerbrings understanding, or do they offer that Freudian moment inwhich the viewer’s “spirit” (“M,” 2.10) is scared stiff (he’s no longerwriting her, she’s writing him), only to reassure him of his poeticauthority, his ability to represent her? In this light lines 14–16, theviewer’s response, seem less certain despite their declarative tone: dothey represent a radically transformed viewer who now identifieswith and recognizes the monstrous woman as human, or do theyallow the viewer to escape that dangerous dissolution, to escaperecognizing Medusa’s otherness, her real threat, by humanizing her?The poem, I believe, does not resolve these questions. What happensin stanza 2 is not so much the breakdown of masculine discourse as itis Shelley’s questioning of male power grounded on the image of thevictimized woman. The transformative moment in which the poetbecomes an object written on allows him to show both the radical


potential of her image and its dangerous fixity in the genderedopposition of oppressor and oppressed.

Significantly, after the claim to humanize and harmonize thestrain, the poet’s attention is deflected away from Medusa’s “deadface” to the activity of her serpentine hair; in fact, though the poetclaims her beauty to be humanizing, Medusa is least human in thethird stanza. This diversion suggests Shelley’s resistance to thehumanizing impulse and his desire to imagine Medusa outside ofpatriarchal logic. The poet’s reflections now become caught up in theenergy and “unending involutions” (“M,” 3.21) of the serpents. Thesesnakes that “curl and flow” (“M,” 3.19) with life, “as it were to mock /The torture and the death within” (“M,” 3.22–23), are less interestingfor their phallic power than for their involutions. Rather thanreinforcing the image of the threatening and monstrous woman, the“involutions” signify complexity and entanglement. Their intricateactivity denies the Persean viewer’s desire to feel affirmed. Moreover,the similar interplay between images in the last three stanzas of “Onthe Medusa” and Mask suggests a building revolutionary force. Thevipers that are Medusa’s hair have a “mailed radiance” (“M,” 3.22)that becomes in the next stanza “a light more dread than obscurity”(“M,” 4.32) and in the last stanza a “thrilling vapour.” If the end ofstanza 2 allowed us to see Medusa’s pain, the rest of the poem asks usnot to forget her revolutionary potential.

Shelley’s poem resists the mastery of Persean decapitation bycontinually calling attention to his relation to the image.72 In stanza 4,Shelley presents two ways of seeing the victimized woman that herejects: while the eft, who “peeps idly” (“M,” 4.26) from a distance, iscompletely unaware and without sensitivity, the bat is “bereft / Ofsense” (“M,” 4.27–28), even “mad” (“M,” 4.28), as self-destructively“he comes hastening like a moth that hies / After a taper” (“M,” 4.30–31). Whereas the former remains securely aloof from danger, thelatter is the hysterical male, threatened by Medusa’s image. Thismight seem to leave the viewer in the position of the reassuredpatriarchal male, Perseus, who beheads Medusa by looking at herreflection and then uses her head to ward off his enemies. Butneither is the poet’s position identical with Perseus’s: Percy is notPerseus, a pun I’m sure Shelley was playing with. The only mirrorShelley wields is the mirror of poetry “that makes beautiful thatwhich is distorted.”73 The poet’s perspective, in Shelley’s view, can bearticulated only through language, the very character of which is totransform what it represents. While the pun makes clear how near

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Shelley’s task is to the patriarchal one, it also creates a criticaldifference. Unlike the poet, neither bat nor eft nor Perseus risksbeing turned to stone. And, in light of stanza 2, it is this moment oftransformation that reveals the possible choice of reifying or trans-forming one’s view of the victimized woman. The poetic mirror thatShelley uses is not reflective but refractive. Its transforming powersenable him to see the “thrilling vapour,” and it reveals the “woman’scountenance” athwart this revolutionary force as a patriarchal maskto contain radical reform.

The difference of Shelley’s poetic mirror is underscored in stanza5, as the poem reveals the danger of the patriarchal self-reflectivemirror which takes the mask as substance. The stanza traces out atangled trajectory in which the “inextricable error” (“M,” 5.35) givesrise to the “brazen glare” (light) of the serpents (“M,” 5.34), whichturn a “thrilling vapour of the air” (mist) into a mirror. Recalling thelanguage and images of “Mont Blanc,” this vapor, no longer of thevale but of the mountaintop, becomes the mirror of breath, in whichMedusa’s countenance is reflected back to her. This self-reflection isdangerous; it threatens to fix Medusa as victim, to leave her atrunkless head. Though “every-shifting” (“M,” 5.37), the mirrorcontains her revolutionary potential, revealing merely “a woman’scountenance, with serpent-locks / Gazing in death on heaven fromthose wet rocks” (“M,” 5.39–40). To be caught in this brazen glare isto stay in the dynamic of oppressor/oppressed.

While the “brazen glare” of the serpents asserts their defiance ofthe beholder and recalls the initial rape that led to Medusa’stransformation, the meaning of this stanza rests on an interpretationof “the inextricable error.” The phrase recalls two important refer-ences in the preface to The Cenci. In criticizing Beatrice, Shelleywrites, “revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. IfBeatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser andbetter.”74 In the very next paragraph he claims, “[I] have sought toavoid the error of making [my characters] actuated by my ownconceptions of right or wrong, false or true.” Beatrice’s mistake isrevenge; the only option she sees is to retaliate violently against heroppressor. Shelley’s mistake is to impose his views on his characters,to appropriate their speaking voices and speak for them. Both ofthese are mistakes that Shelley wanted to avoid. Given this context,“the inextricable error” is not, as McGann claims, Medusa’s sin,which puts the blame on her, but the violence of patriarchal oppres-sion. This oppression kindles the serpents’ “brazen glare” and locks


the oppressed into the position of victimized woman, in which heronly options seem violent retaliation or complicity in her ownvictimization. In the intricate windings of this poem, the poetattempts to save himself, the reader, and the victimized woman fromthat “inextricable error” that turns the revolutionary vapor into amirror of death.

If stanza 5 seems to return Medusa to her state as victim, it does soonly as she is reflected in the mirror. However, in its continuingattempts to unmask and define the victimized woman as both asymbol of radical power and a legitimate victim, the additional stanzasuggests Shelley’s refusal to rest by affirming male power with thefifth stanza’s image of the victimized woman. In lines 41–44, thatimage is reiterated and revised, increasing her power. Her counte-nance is “divine” (“M,” 6.41); her “everlasting beauty” “breathing”(“M,” 6.42); and the mirror has been replaced by “night’s tremblingair” (“M,” 6.44). Even this image is not sufficiently unmasked forShelley, however. In the final lines of the poem, she becomes for thefirst time a literal “trunkless head” (“M,” 6.45), but this representa-tion also brings recognition that “there is life in death” and “uncon-quered Nature / Seems struggling to the last” (“M,” 6.47, 47–48).Defaced of her female countenance, her latent power becomesapparent, but it seems fleeting. Instead, the final stanza exposes thevictimized woman as “a fragment of an uncreated creature” (“M,”6.49). This ninth and final line in a poem of eight-line stanzas not onlyemphasizes Medusa’s fragmentation and struggle but also shows howshe exceeds the poetic container and, perhaps, the poet’s control. Thepoet cannot give her the “breath” she needs and she remains a victim.But we also see in his failure to rescue her or to wield her head for hispower a failure to inhabit the position of male authority.

While Shelley’s texts do not, finally, entirely escape the genderedopposition of oppressor and oppressed, they do revise the position ofthe victimized woman; they attempt to give her agency and toundermine male power that depends upon her image for authority.Medusa is both a “fragment” and “uncreated” because she has beenvictimized by the anxiety of established power as well as unmasked bythe poet’s reflections. But she is also uncreated because she has notyet achieved her potential; she is not yet a fully imagined, politicallyactive female reformer. Trapped within reform discourse, within thegendered opposition of oppressor and oppressed, she remains avictim. However, as the “fragment of an uncreated creature,” shebreaks both the form and content of the poem to imply the

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inadequacy of that discourse. Shelley’s final image thus underscoreshis limitations, his inability to imagine something outside the binaryof male aggressor and female victim. But in calling attention to hisown failed act of representation, he creates the possibility for anothermetaphor, even if he cannot fully articulate it. In this rewriting of thevictimized woman, as in Mask, Shelley reveals the violence involvednot only in the gendering of oppression, but also in the representa-tion of any victimized subject.

Manhattan College

NOTES

This article has benefited from the input of many readers, including NinaMahasan Greenberg, William Keach, John Lowney, Jean Marie Lutes, SusannahMintz, Susan B. Taylor, and Jennifer Travis.

1 English Cartoons and Satirical Prints, 1320–1832, microfilm reel 17, BritishMuseum Department of Prints and Drawings (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healy, Ltds.,1978), 13258. See also John Wardroper, The Caricatures of George Cruikshank(Boston: David R. Godine, 1978), 79. R. J. H. Douglas, Catalogue of the Collectionof the Works of George Cruikshank, Formed by Captain R. J. H. Douglas, R. N.(London: J. Davy & Sons, 1910); and George William Reid, A Descriptive Catalogueof the Works of George Cruikshank, 2 vols. (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871). Theword “strike” is, of course, a loaded word to choose about such a massive organizedmeeting for reform and in light of the growth of union societies at this time.

2 This cartoon originally appeared 19 September 1819, printed by S. W. Fores. SeeEnglish Cartoons, 13266.

3 One thinks not only of Edmund Burke’s hysterical portrayals of the beleagueredMarie Antoinette and the Revolutionary furies of hell, but also of Marianne, theinitial figure for liberty, who was replaced by Hercules, as the National Assemblylimited women’s participation in Revolutionary activity. During the French Revolu-tion, according to Neil Hertz (“Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria Under PoliticalPressure,” Representations 4 [Fall 1983]: 27–54), images of women were used toemblematize revolutionary violence, figuring political threat—the fear of revolutionand threat to the throne—as sexual threat—the fear of castration and/or decapita-tion. In this context, the figure of woman as demon or Medusa functions as a form ofsocial control; it masks, and therefore naturalizes, political conflict by turning it intosexual threat. While Hertz focuses on the threatening women, I am interested herein the opposite image, the threatened woman. The mechanism, however, is similar.

4 See Steven Jones, Shelley’s Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb:Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994), on the use of mythology in reform discourse.

5 See Wardroper, 16–19; Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times andArt, 2 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), 1:150–70; and MarcusWood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1994), 259.

6 Wardroper, 15.7 English Cartoons, 13279.


8 P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 196–97.

9 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed.Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,1977), 508.

10 See Shelley’s preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose,135.

11 Cited in Dawson, 196. The first volume includes The Mask of Anarchy, “LinesWritten During the Castlereagh Administration,” “Sonnet: England in 1819,” and“Song to the Men of England.” The second includes the high Romantic poems “Odeto the West Wind,” “The Sensitive Plant,” and “To a Skylark.” It is unclear whereShelley placed “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” though it seems aestheticallymore aligned with the second.

12 There are, of course, other texts I could have chosen here, in particularPrometheus Unbound, “The Sensitive Plant,” “England in 1819,” Julian and Maddalo,and The Cenci. While The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound address similar issuesthrough the metaphor of rape, another manifestation of the victimized woman inShelley’s work, they do not share as explicitly the imagery of Cruikshank’s cartoon.

13 Recent criticism has begun to explore more fully the connections betweenGeorge Cruikshank’s caricatures and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s political poetry. SeeStephen Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press,1989), esp. 187–226; Stuart Curran, Shelley’s Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of anEpic Vision (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1975), 181–205, 238 n. 3; RichardHendrix, “The Necessity of Response: How Shelley’s Radical Poetry Works,” Keats-Shelley Journal 27 (1978): 45–69; Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: ThePhilosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 200–10; and esp. Wood, 138, 263–69. Scholars ofCruikshank’s work have also noticed the connections. See especially Wardroper, 84;and Patten, 149.

14 S. Jones has commented more generally on the shared language of Cruikshank’sDeath or Liberty! and Shelley’s Mask (98–100). Though I agree that there is noargument to be made for influence, I want to suggest that the connections betweenthese works go much deeper.

15 See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory (Chicago:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994): 151–81. Mitchell writes, “ekphrasis [is] a suturing ofdominant gender stereotypes into the semiotic structure of imagetext, the imageidentified as feminine, the speaking/seeing subject of the text identified as mascu-line” (180–81).

16 Recent scholarship situating Shelley’s poetry within the cultural and politicalmilieu of early-nineteenth-century England and radical politics has been lessconcerned with the issue of gender, whereas scholarship focused on the question ofgender in Shelley’s work has often shied away from the more political poems, like theMask. There has been excellent scholarship from both perspectives; my goal is to tryto bridge the two. In terms of politics, see for example work by Hendrix, S. Jones,and Scrivener. In terms of gender, see for example, Teddi Chicester Bonca, Shelley’sMirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority (Albany: State Univ. of NewYork Press, 1999); Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1979); Laura Claridge, Romantic Potency: The Paradox ofDesire (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi,

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Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 1992). The works of Susan Wolfson, Gary Kelley, Barbara Judson, AnnetteWheeler Cafarelli, and William Keach are exceptions to this claim. See Wolfson,“‘Something Must Be Done’: The Dilemma of Feminine Violence in Shelley andHemans” (presented at the MLA convention, San Diego, CA, December 1994);Judson, “The Politics of Medusa: Shelley’s Physiognomy of Revolution,” ELH 68(2001):135–54; Kelley, “From Avant-Garde to Vanguardism: The Shelley’s RomanticFeminism in Laon and Cyntha and Frankenstein,” in Shelley: Poet and Legislator ofthe World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 73–87; Cafarelli, “TheTransgressive Double Standard: Shelleyan Utopianism and Feminist Social History,”in Shelley: Poet and Legislator, 88–104; and Keach, Arbitrary Power, forthcomingfrom Princeton. Wolfson’s essay has been critical to my thinking on these issues, asshe is interested in similar image patterns in Shelley’s work. Judson’s analysis of thepolitics of Medusa, whom Shelley attempts to “reclaim . . . from the degenerategender iconography of republican and establishment circles” (150), parallels myexamination of the victimized woman.

17 E. P. Thompson claims that 1819 was the “heroic age of Popular Radicalism,” aperiod in which England was as close to revolution as possible (The Making of theEnglish Working Class [New York: Vintage, 1963], 603). More recently, JamesChandler writes: “Some historians have doubted the validity of [Thompson’s view]on the grounds that it exaggerates the depth of the radical movement that stirredBritain in these months. What is not a matter of speculation is the view of the crisisexpressed by contemporary intellectuals. The more one reads in either public orprivate commentary by intellectuals across the political spectrum of England in1819, the more one sees of revolutionary hopes and fears” (Chandler, England in1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism[Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998], 21). In addition to responses by intellectu-als like Shelley, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott, see also first person accounts bySamuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (London: Simpkin, Marshall andCo., 1859); Francis Archibald Bruton, Three Accounts of Peterloo by Eye-witnesses:Bishop Stanley, Lord Hylton, John Benjamin Smith (Manchester: Manchester Univ.Press, 1921); and Peterloo, 1819: A Portfolio of Contemporary Documents (Manches-ter: Manchester Public Libraries, 1969). For more on Peterloo and its controversialhistory, see also J. R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850(London: Hambledon Press, 1992); Philip Lawson, “Reassessing Peterloo,” HistoryToday 38 (March 1988): 24–29; Donald Read, Peterloo: The Massacre and ItsBackground (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1958); Robert Reid, The PeterlooMassacre (London: Heinemann, 1989); and Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The CaseReopened (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1969).

18 Chandler, 83.19 S. Jones, 96–98.20 S. Jones, 97, 98. Behrendt labels this ability of revolutionary signs to signify

simultaneously to different audiences “multistability,” a late eighteenth-centuryphenomenon of visual art (2). Both S. Jones and Behrendt use the same figure toexplain their concepts: a Janus-like image with two opposing profiles on it.

21 Certainly not all the radicals wanted women’s suffrage. For example, JohnWade, founder of The Gorgon, one of the more reputable and intellectual of theradical penny magazines, and author of The Black Book, rejected the claim to naturalrights on the grounds that it did not allow for the exclusion of women (and lunatics


and workhouse inmates) who were denied the vote for reasons of social utility. SeeThompson, 770–71. Shelley was also ambivalent about this issue. See Chandler, 111;and Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul,Trench & Co., 1886), 2:295–96, on Shelley’s ambivalence about women’s suffrage.

22 Bamford, 135–36.23 Read, 53.24 Quoted in Read, 53.25 Quoted in Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800–

1850 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 92–93.26 See Thomis and Grimmett, “Petticoat Reformers,” in Women, 88–110; Lillian

Lewis Shiman, Women and Leadership in Nineteenth-Century England (Houndmills:Macmillan, 1992), 38–39; Thompson, 414–17, 679–82; and Walmsley, 150–59. OnBritish women’s political activity in the early nineteenth century, see also Equal orDifferent: Women’s Politics 1800–1914, ed. Jane Rendall (New York: Basil Blackwell,1987); Political Women, 1800–1850, ed. Ruth and Edmund Frow (London: PlutoPress, 1989); Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mike Sanders,4 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2001); Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: ThePower of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 2000). Thomis and Grimmett look at several of the same passages Ido, but for a different purpose.

27 Quoted in Walmsley, 150–51, 151–52.28 Bamford, 162.29 Quoted in Walmsley, 153.30 Bamford, 168.31 Quoted in Walmsley, “Prologue,” xx.32 The Queen Caroline affair in 1820 is another example of a public controversy

centered around the victimized woman. See Thomis and Grimmett, 102.33 Wood, 207.34 On Cruikshank’s background and art, see Blanchard Jerrold, The Life of George

Cruikshank, in Two Epochs (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1882); Dorothy M.George, English Political Caricature, 1793–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959);Ronald Paulson, “The Tradition of Comic Illustration from Hogarth to Cruikshank,”in George Cruikshank: A Revaluation, ed. Robert L. Patten (Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Library, 1974), 35–60; Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art; andHarry Thornber, The Early Work of George Cruikshank (Manchester: J. Heywood,1887).

35 On 19 June 1820, Cruikshank signed a receipt agreeing not “to caricature hisMajesty in any immoral situation” (Wardroper, 16), but this did not preclude himfrom ridiculing royal behavior. This mockery aside, at the end of 1820, Cruikshankdid a series of caricatures for The Loyalist’s Magazine. This change in his politics puta strain on his friendship with Hone. Wardroper cites Cruikshank’s addition of invt.et fect. to his usual signature on this cartoon as proof of his personal design.

36 Medusa, according to Sigmund Freud, provokes castration anxiety to affirmmale potency. See “Medusa’s Head,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (NewYork: Macmillan, 1963), 212–13. Hertz has shown how the figure of Medusa hadalready been used successfully by antirevolutionaries in the French Revolution toproduce just such effects. See also Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of the Medusa(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), 1–26.

37 Wardroper, 83.

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38 On French Revolutionary iconography, see Maurice Agulhon, Marianne intoBattle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, trans. Janet Lloyd(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, andClass in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984).

39 Hunt, 66–67.40 See Lisa Vargo, “Unmasking Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy,” English Studies in

Canada 13 (1987): 48–64.41 Bamford, 164. See also S. Jones, 98.42 English Cartoons, 13287, 13287A. In this cartoon, probably Cruikshank’s most

famous, John Bull appears in rags that barely cover his skeletal, emaciated frame. Heis tied, shackled, and his lips are padlocked (with “no grumbling” written on thepadlock). He stands on the Magna Carta with pen and paper in his tied hands.Shortly after the publication of Cruikshank’s Death or Liberty!, Parliament passedthe Six Acts, which included the Libels Act or gagging bill and the Publications Act,which attempted to make cheap publications liable to stamp duties, both acts ofparticular affront to writers and artists.

43 This is another example of the interconnected iconography of Cruikshank’s andShelley’s work. Shelley wrote and printed A Letter to Lord Ellenborough in responseto Eaton’s trial arguing for the right to religious opinion. See Wood on the trial ofEaton (138).

44 English Cartoons, 13259.45 English Cartoons, 13271.46 Wardroper, 80.47 English Cartoons, 13279.48 English Cartoons, 13257. On anxiety about women reformers, see Thompson,

417.49 Wardroper, 72.50 See also Cruikshank’s Radical Arms, printed 13 November 1819 for George

Humphrey (English Cartoons, 13275). This cartoon similarly links the radical causewith women’s sexual license; its central images are a drunken, masculine woman anda housebreaker, trampling on the symbols of government and religion.

51 I am not suggesting, as does Hélène Cixous’s idealistic model, that we only haveto look at Medusa head-on to see that she is laughing; the dominance of rape imageryin political iconography in 1819 makes this a difficult argument for me to pursue.However, others have made this argument. See Jay Clayton, “Concealed Circuits:Frankenstein’s Monster, the Medusa and the Cyborg,” Raritan (Spring 1996): 62–64; and Grant Scott, “Shelley, Medusa, and the Perils of Ekphrasis,” in The Poetics ofImagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwickand Jürgen Klein (Amsterdam: Rodopi, B.V. 1996), 330.

52 The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford:Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 2:117, 120.

53 Shelley also uses Beatrice’s words in a letter to Peacock on 9 September. Hewrites, “These are as it were the thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. Thetyrants here as in the French Revolution have first shed blood may their execrablelessons not be learnt with equal docility: I still think that there will be no coming toclose quarters until financial affairs decidedly bring the oppressors and oppressedtogether.” Shelley and His Circle, 1772–1822, ed. Reiman, 10 vols. (Cambridge:Harvard Univ. Press, 1961–2002), 6:895–96.

54 Shelley, The Cenci, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 3.1.86–109.


55 Shelley, The Cenci, 3.1.107–14.56 See Shelley’s preface to The Cenci, 240.57 Behrendt, 198.58 Shelley, “On the Medusa of the Leonardo da Vinci,” in vol. 2 of The Poetical

Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Mary Shelley (New York: James Miller, 1939),356–57. Hereafter abbreviated “M” and cited parenthetically by stanza and linenumber. The sixth stanza, which was not originally published with the poem, isquoted in Neville Rogers, “Shelley and the Visual Arts,” Keats-Shelley MemorialBulletin 1–2 (1961): 10.

59 Jerome McGann notes its connection to “Ode to the West Wind,” “Sonnet:England in 1819,” Prometheus Unbound, and other nineteenth-century representa-tions of Medusa in “The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic LiteraryIconology,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 3–25. Judson links the poem to TheCenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Julian and Maddalo. For more on the poem’sliterary, artistic, and critical contexts, see also Daniel Hughes, “Shelley, Leonardo,and the Monsters of Thought,” Criticism 12 (1970): 195–212; Carol Jacobs, “OnLooking at Shelley’s Medusa,” Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 163–79; and Rogers,8–17. See also Nigel Leask on Shelley’s Medusan effect (“Shelley’s ‘MagneticLadies’: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body,” in Beyond Romanti-cism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 1780–1832, ed. Stephen Copley andJohn Whale [New York: Routledge, 1992], 53–78).

60 While “On the Medusa” is the only Shelley poem in the tradition of ekphrasis(another poem in that tradition is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”), it seems to methat, given the number of visual representations of the Peterloo massacre, Maskmight be read similarly. On the ekphrastic aspect of Shelley’s Medusa poem, seeJames Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Politics of Ekphrasis from Homer toAshbery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 119–24, and John Hollander,Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: Chicago Univ.Press, 1995), 142–46.

61 Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 103; hereafterabbreviated MA and cited parenthetically by line number.

62 The most recent criticism of Mask has focused on its political intent. SeeHendrix for an analysis of how Mask reveals the tension between Shelley’s “exaltedpoetics and his practical politics” (47). S. Jones has read the poem as a satire ofsuccession, in which the shifts in the poem from figure to figure “work to questionthe ground of representation itself ” (120); Scrivener evaluates the poem’s radicalpolitical bent in the context of contemporary iconography (198–210); Vargo showshow Shelley breaks the form of the masque to show the power of popular rule; andWolfson analyzes how Shelley uses gender in Mask to articulate an “impasse in [his]political thinking between tragically futile and phantasmatically visionary courses ofaction” (2).

63 Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 69, 68.64 Cited in Morton D. Paley, “Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelley’s

Mask of Anarchy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 100.65 The “maniac maid” appears in several of Shelley’s poems. See Prometheus

Unbound and “Ode to Liberty.” Though I can find no linguistic connection betweenthe words “maniac” and “maenad,” the maniac maid and the maenad share a frenziedstate, and the sounds of the phrase “maniac maid” suggest the word “maenad” orbacchante. Maniac maids, maenads, and Medusas are all of a piece: women out of

207Ashley J. Cross

patriarchal control and, therefore, threatening to the patriarchal order. See Judsonfor another take on this.

66 Scott claims Shelley makes her “a radical with a legitimate cause” (332).67 Several recent critics have argued persuasively for the revolutionary import of

Shelley’s Medusa poem, including Mitchell, S. Jones, Judson, and Scott. Forreadings of this poem more interested in the aesthetic angle, see William Hildebrand,“Self, Beauty and Horror: Shelley’s Medusa Moment,” in The New Shelley: LaterTwentieth-Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 150–65;Hughes; and Vernon Hyles, “Medusa and the Romantic Concept of Beauty,” in TheShape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the 7th International Conference on theFantastic in the Arts, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 143–47. The latter reiterates Mario Praz’s argument in Romantic Agony (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).

68 Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 14; “Sonnet:England in 1819,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 13–14.

69 McGann, 7.70 See Jacobs, McGann, and Scott.71 Scott, 329.72 In her brilliant deconstructive reading, Jacobs argues that Shelley’s poem denies

the mastery of “Persean decapitation” (171), of subject over object, and insteadconflates artist, art object, and beholder as well as poet, poem, and reader.

73 Shelley, The Defence of Poetry, 485.74 Shelley, The Cenci, 240, my emphasis.