WHAT A WORLD WE MAKE THE OPPRESSOR AND THE OPPRESSED: GEORGE CRUIKSHANK, PERCY SHELLEY, AND THE GENDERING

OF REVOLUTION IN 1819
BY ASHLEY J. CROSS

One of the most memorable and most reproduced of the many responses to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, 16 August 1819, was George Cruikshanks Massacre at St. Peters, or Britons Strike Home (figure 1). The cartoons central image came to be one of the dominant representations of the event. Cruikshank portrays as uniformed butchers the British yeomanry who descended on the 60,000 workers who had gathered to demonstrate peacefully. Waving the banner Be bloody, bold and resolute and wielding meat cleavers as weapons, 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 of mangled, tangled, bleeding bodies at the bottom of the cartoons frame. Several of these victims are recognizably women, although they are largely indistinguishable. At the center of the cartoon cowers the most distinct figure, a mother clasping her child (supposedly the first two victims of the actual battle), pleading for her life as she is trampled. Cruikshank uses this image to embody the title: to strike home is to attack the mother with child; the yeomanry literally strike their own. The cartoon is neither subtle nor ambiguous; it makes clear the violence of the government officials and their transgression of a basic trust.1 The cartoons ability to strike home in its message of outrage depends, significantly, on its gender imagery; it produces its effect precisely because the image of armed men attacking a passive mother epitomizes violation and inhumanity. In another cartoon very similar to this one, ironically entitled Manchester Heroes, Cruikshank similarly foregrounds the image of a woman.2 Her young son calls out, O pray, Sir, dont kill my mammy, shes only come to see Mr. Hunt. Here, the horror of the situation is made legible by the combined irony of the title and the innocent figure of the mother Ashley ELH 71 (2004) J. Cross 167207 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 167

Figure 1. George Cruikshank, Massacre at St. Peters, or Britons Strike Home!!!, August 1819, The British Museum.

who came merely to see Henry Hunt, the famous orator and meetings leader. Such representations efface the very real presence at the meeting of women engaged in the radical reform cause, who had come with more political interest than just seeing Hunt. Reframing political conflict as an abusive domestic drama, these cartoons return women to their traditional roles as mothers and nave spectators by presenting them as victims of male violence. After Peterloo, relations of dominance and submission, oppressor and oppressed, were frequently portrayed in such gendered terms by those on competing political sides. Not unlike French Revolutionary times, political threat was figured as sexual threat and, in particular, as violent male aggression against a passive female, or at least feminized, victim.3 The most overt examples (and thus the most seemingly transparent in their meaning) figured political threat as sexual violation or rape. This gendering of dominance seemingly constructs and reinforces difference as a simplistic opposition between masculine power and feminine passivity. The viewer is asked to identify with the feminized victim and reject the blatant abuse of power, but only to affirm his position as heroic rescuer. Despite (and 168 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

perhaps because of ) womens active participation in the Reform movement, forming their own societies and even leading contingents to the Manchester Reform meeting, the image of the helpless woman victimized by the tyrannous oppressor was a consistent figure in the mythology of reform discourse, a sign which both sides fought to deploy against the other.4 This article examines the figure of the victimized woman in selected works of two important artists who employed a similar iconography to grapple with the increasing violence of the Reform conflict: George Cruikshank and Percy Bysshe Shelley. My goal is to show, first, how the prevalence of the image of the victimized woman beginning with Peterloo signals an attempt to delimit power relations in the reform conflict and limit womens political activity. In this social context, juxtaposing Cruikshanks cartoons with Shelleys poems illustrates the gendered ground upon which the conflicts of 1819 were worked out and highlights the different valences of their shared iconography: whereas Cruikshanks cartoons use the victimized woman as stable ground, Shelleys portrayal complicates these gender relations. This juxtaposition reveals how Shelley attempts to challenge the status quo, including the representation of women, by calling into question 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 Cruikshank and Shelley; their utmost skill was required to address conflicting political audiences. Both Cruikshank and Shelley aligned themselves with reform, but their relationships to the movement were not straightforward. Cruikshank, in fact, produced cartoons for both the reformist and loyalist causes; scholars have been unsuccessful in pinning down his politics further than to say he was a moderate concerned about the possible violence of radical reform.5 The year culminated in his collaboration with William Hone on the radical pamphlet The Political House that Jack Built, a poem indicting the current government through the writing of the childrens nursery rhyme The House That Jack Built. This pamphlet, the engravings of which included the image of mother and child to signify the oppressiveness of the current regime, was extremely popular and had more than 100,000 buyers, giving Cruikshanks caricatures wide circulation.6 In the same year, however, Cruikshank also drew two important cartoons for the conservative printseller George Humphrey, one of which was Death or Liberty! Or Britannia & the Virtues of the Constitution in Danger of Violation from the Great Political LiberAshley J. Cross 169

tine, Radical Reform (1 December 1819), the cartoon on which I will focus here.7 Like Cruikshank, Shelley drafted some of his most important work in 1819. Though he was also concerned about the increasing violence of the reform conflict, his allegiance to reform was clearer. Away in Italy, however, Shelley increasingly felt his own outsider status in relation to political events in England.8 One of his main concerns was how to reach a popular audience. If poets are the influence which is moved not, but moves . . . the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as he was to write in his A Defence of Poetry in 1821, how does the poet animate others to act and, in particular, to resist their oppressors? 9 How could Shelley speak to a class of which he was not a part? According to P. M. S. Dawson, Shelleys response to the Reform crisis manifested itself in two different forms in his literary productions of 1819: first, in an unpublished volume and, second, in the publication of Prometheus Unbound. A Lyrical Drama in four acts with Other Poems (1820). The second was a more aesthetically focused volume of verse addressed to the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers.10 The first, a little volume of popular songs wholly political, was meant for a more popular audience.11 These volumes clearly separate Shelleys work into two categories, political and aesthetic, a pattern which, until recently, Shelley criticism has followed. Despite this division, however, much of Shelleys work at this time wrestles with the relationship of the two. In this article, I concentrate on two of Shelleys 1819 poems that explore how the political and aesthetic interconnect and present 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 painting in which the central figure is the decapitated head of Medusa, a conservative symbol of revolutionary violenceas Shelley would surely have known.12 As several critics have suggested recently, one motivational method Shelley tried was that of radical caricature, and Cruikshanks in particular.13 Shelley saw that the strategies and images in radical cartoons communicated effectively with diverse audiences and used them in Mask and, as I will argue, On the Medusa. Despite the obvious generic differences in print and poetry, Shelleys 1819 writings demonstrate his interest in creating a verbal iconography with the impact of contemporary caricature. When he reproduced the figure of the victimized woman, a common image in that 170 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

caricature, to represent political conflict in much of his 1819 poetry, Shelley was hardly unique. However, while political cartoonists and other reform writers saw gender as transparent, Shelley set out to draw attention to the oppressive relations of gender by highlighting the problematic nature of such representation. Both Cruikshanks cartoons and Shelleys poems employ the figure of woman as victim to articulate, explicitly and implicitly, the artists horror at the events surrounding and including the Peterloo Massacre. They also share the iconography of the reform discourse and its recycling of French revolutionary imagery.14 However, the gendered opposition of oppressor to oppressed created political and aesthetic problems for Shelley. On the one hand, because of its currency, the figure of the victimized woman vividly conveyed the reality of oppression in British society; its political resonance made it hard to avoid. On the other hand, the image also locked its employers into a binary opposition which reinforced its own oppressive structure. To use the image was, in a sense, to repeat the oppression and to risk the possibility of reifying those oppressive relations. Moreover, Shelley recognized that the opposition of male power to passive female object was not only entrenched in representations of political conflict but also inherent in the artists 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 represent the oppressed so as to create social change. For Shelley, the female victim, like Beatrice Cenci, signified abusive patriarchal authority, but that signification also masked her power, and it was that power he wanted to reclaim. To use the victim to reclaim her power, however, created the dangerous possibility of either reinforcing the oppresseds victim status or inverting the opposition and turning the oppressed into violent oppressors. The political dilemma also entailed a complicated aesthetic one: how to identify with, without speaking for, the oppressed; how to represent without appropriating the other. Read in light of the fixed gender politics of Cruikshanks cartoons, Mask and On the Medusa reveal that the gendered ground upon which political conflicts and aesthetic desires are articulated is itself at stake in Shelleys work.16
I. ENGENDERING VIOLENCE: WOMEN AND REPRESENTATION IN 1819

Historians and literary critics agree that 1819 was a watershed year in England. Radical working class organization was at its height (by Ashley J. Cross 171

the early 1820s, most of the leaders were in prison), and the governments anxiety about the massive demonstrations of the Radical reformers produced a crisis atmosphere that led to the violent confrontation at Peterloo and finally to the repressive Six Acts, 30 December 1819.17 Many felt that it was the closest England had come to revolution since 1640. At stake was the central question of adequate political representation in Parliament, and the battle was fought primarily between the radical journalists and the government censors. It was a time in which the working class, including women, saw a real opportunity for change, and the means to that change was the press. The battles for political representation were primarily fought symbolically as discursive battles, but such discursive conflict often had material repercussions. As James Chandler writes, government repression led only to increased journalistic representation, producing a cycle of representation, prosecution and accelerated representation.18 One of the complicating factors in these skirmishes was the fact that both sides deployed the same imagery. The arsenals were wellstocked following the French revolutionary conflict, and reformists and 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 shared and loaded symbolic language for articulating anxieties about reform. As Steven Jones argues in Shelleys Satire, reform meetings . . . were already symbolic events with their own mythologies: The exchange of such signs was necessarily an exchange of power, part of a competition to establish the value and to define meaning of political struggles. . . . In discourse, appropriating or parodying a sign became a means of engaging in (coded) ideological dispute and exchange.19 Since players on both sides often used the same overdetermined signs, such parodyingby caricaturists and writers alikeprovided a subtle but risky means of social critique. For example, the liberty cap, historically a sign of the French values of liberty, equality, fraternity as well as the revolutionary violence of the Terror, also signified to early nineteenth-century Brits republican Rome as well as ancient British constitutional freedoms. Each side of the reform debate sought to deploy and define the cap for its own purposes. Depending on the context, the presence of the liberty cap in a cartoon could indicate a righteous struggle for governmental reform or a violent and anticonstitutional threat, but context did not always clarify which signification was meant. Moreover, because such parodies repeated 172 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

the images and language of what they were critiquingwhat Jones has called the mimetic violence of parodic satirethey always threatened to become the very thing they mocked.20 In other words, cartoonists and writers like Cruikshank and Shelley had to tread a careful line between critique and capitulation. Potentially, a viewers misinterpretation of a symbolic parody could lead to confusion of the political sides. While French Revolutionary imagery seems to undermine the political sides because of its multivalence, the symbolic representation of women in British political discourse seems remarkably constant; though equally employed by both sides, the image of the victimized woman provided a seemingly secure ground upon which to articulate the conflict at the end of that year. Since the discursive battles over reform intended to affect political representation, the relationship between womens discursive representation and their struggle for political representation becomes a critical question. Though women were fighting for universal suffrage and forming their own union societies, gender, defined as male power and female weakness, provided a stable metaphor for signifying power relations and political conflicts. It had the added benefit of effacing womens political activity and putting them in their traditional places. The politicized woman, the woman who demanded so-called equal representation, transgressed social codes; hence her threat needed to be contained. Earlier images of womens equal participation in organizing were thus replaced by images of patriarchal oppression. Significantly, the image of the victimized woman had a dual political function: it at once shored up political differences among radicals and conservatives and it reconfirmed womens subordinate status. In addition to its continued challenge to governmental repression and underrepresentation, the Radical Reform movement brought another powerful threat to the social order: equal representation for women.21 In Passages in the Life of a Radical, Samuel Bamford recalls a Lydgate meeting in March prior to Peterloo, in which he had
insisted on the right, and the propriety also of females who were present at such assemblages, voting by show of hand and for or against the resolutions. This was a new idea; and the women, who attended numerously on that bleak ridge, were mightily pleased with it,and the men being nothing dissentient,when the resolution was put the women held up their hands, amid much laughter; and ever from that time, females voted with the men at the Radical meetings.22

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After this time, Bamford tells the reader matter of factly that female voting became common practice. The decision led to the rapid and increased formation of female political unions with chairwomen and committees 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 The Blackburn Female Reform Society called women to instill into the minds of our children, a deep and rooted hatred of our corrupt and tyrannical Rulers.24 They also organized to assist the male population of this country to obtain their rights and liberties.25 This organizing was a new form of political protest for women and it engaged large numbers of them. For example, about a month later, the Manchester Female Reform Society formed and reported 1000 members within a week. The petticoat reformers, as they were called, were extremely active and were a large part of the gathering of working class individuals in Manchester.26 They marched in their own large groups, demanding equal representation, universal suffrage, and vote by ballot. Their importance, and the potential impact of their demands, is made clear by the reporters emphasis on their unusual presence at the gathering. One writer for The Chronicle italicizes all his references to the women participants when describing the parties marching in to the main gathering: Another party followed from the same street, with women in single files, and men on each side in double files, with a flag inscribed with a motto, and Union Female Society of Royton.. . . Another party marched in . . . with a band of music and a flag, accompanied with a cart for the hustings, in which women were riding. Another newspaperman, John Tyas, a reporter sent to cover the event for The Times and a radical sympathizer, continually emphasizes the number of women present and describes in great detail their contingents:
A club of Female Reformers, amounting in numbers, according to our calculation to 150, came from Oldham; and another not quite so numerous from Royton. The first bore a white silk banner, by far the most elegant displayed during the day, inscribed Major Cartwrights Bill, annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and Vote by Ballot. . . . The latter (i.e. the females of Royton) bore two red flags, the one inscribed Let us [that is, women] die like men, and not be sold like slaves; the other Annual Parliament and Universal Suffrage.27

Clearly, the women reformers were intent not only on having the vote, but also on fighting to change their social positions so as to die 174 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

like men and not be sold like slaves. The fact that such women were also the educators of children made their challenge even greater. Until the violence broke out these women could be represented more as a curiosity, and the tension caused by their noticeable presence could be displaced if not repressed. In several of the narratives, womens positions are defined more aesthetically and romantically than politically, but their sheer numbers are telling. Bamford, again, provides a good example. On the March to Manchester, he writes: At our head were a hundred or two of young women, mostly young wives, and mine own amongst them. A hundred or two of our handsomest girls,sweethearts to the lads who were with us,danced to the music.28 Whereas Bamfords narrative makes the events sound like a celebration, Tyass description a bit later in his report reveals the more general anxiety around the women reformers behavior. However, he displaces his own discomfort onto other working class women. He describes:
While we stood counting the members of the Oldham Female Reform Club in their procession by us, and whilst we were internally pitying the delusion which led them to a scene so ill-suited to their usual habits, a group of the women of Manchester, attracted by the crowd, came to the corner of the street where we had taken our post. They viewed these Female Reformers for some time with a look in which compassion and disgust were equally blended, and at last burst out into an indignant exclamationGo home to your families, and leave sike-like as these to your husbands and sons, who better understand them. The women who thus addressed them were of the lower order of life.29

While fervently counting the number of women, Tyas and his cohorts are internally pitying the womens delusions that took them away from their usual habits of tending their homes. Speaking as the universal we, he normalizes his critique of the womens behavior even as he tells us he only does so internally. But his critique is immediately confirmed by the arrival of a group of Manchester women who utter his sentiments that the women reformers should go home to their families. By having his internal thoughts externalized by these working-class women, Tyas gets to critique them without speaking against the radical cause. The last sentence of the passage is purposely ambivalent; because the women are of the lower order of life, either the reader can recognize their impoliteness in contrast to Tyass reserve or the reader can perceive the Ashley J. Cross 175

obvious fault of the women reformers, a fault which even the lower ordersupposedly the very individuals on whose behalf they are fighting for reformrecognize. In either case, the conflict becomes a struggle 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 status as victims of male violence and power. When the actual massacre ensued, women were needed to fight a different battle, and such images of womens political strength were not only insufficient but also potentially dangerous for both sides. Physical violence, in which eleven people were killed, including two women, and 500 were wounded, altered the nature of the discursive battle. There was much more to lose for both sides in presenting their version of events, and the ground upon which this struggle was played out was that of the female body. Bamfords later description of the massacre continues his earlier aestheticizing of the women present, but now they symbolize the extreme violation committed by the government, much as in Cruikshanks Massacre at St. Peters and Manchester Heroes:
On the breaking of the crowd, the yeomanry wheeled; and dashing wherever there was an opening, they followed, pressing and wounding, many females appeared as the crowd opened; and striplings or mere youths were found. Their cries were piteous and heart-rending; and would, one might have supposed, have disarmed any human resentment: but here their cries were vain. Women, white-vested maids, and tender youths were indiscriminately trampled or sabred; and we have reason to believe that few were the instances in which that forbearance was vouchsafed, which they so earnestly implored.30

In Bamfords description, the women, white-vested maids, and tender youths are beaten down and stabbed, their pleas ignored. Whatever their reasons for being at the Manchester gathering, the women are here represented as victims of brutal male aggression. Any normal human would respond to their piteous and heartrending cries; the failure to forbear and the indiscriminate violence reveal the monstrosity of the yeomanry. In contrast, the womens innocence, highlighted by their placement next to the white-vested maids and tender youths, renders the violence more devastating and the radical cause more virtuous. The Examiner (10 March 1833) presents another example of how the victimized woman is deployed as a sign for the radical cause. In 176 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

arguing for the difficulty of representing the horror of the massacre accurately at trial, the journal warns against the possibility of laughter by relating the response of one of the magistrates:
A Reverend Magistrate, who was promoted for his services on this occasion to one of the best livings in the country, was an eye-witness of the scene, and doubtless took the aristocratic view of it, in which there is no pity for unwashed; and having in his evidence deposed that he saw a wounded woman sitting by the road-side, he was asked what her condition was, or whether he could recognize her? His reply was that he did not take any particular notice, for (laughing as he spoke) she was not very attractive.31

The Reverend Magistrate is represented here as giving the aristocratic view, a view which looks at a wounded woman and ignores her for classist aesthetic reasons (she was not very attractive). As in the passage from Bamfords narrative, this passage serves to highlight the inhumanity of the violence committed. While the radicals are clearly concerned with the wounded womans pain, nonetheless they also choose to tell a story that has as its centerpiece a wounded woman because of the political and emotional value of that image. The reason for relaying the story is to discredit the conservative representation of events, based on the failure to notice the victim. Again, the womans politics are unimportant; what is important is what she signifies as victim. The Magistrates emphasis on the aesthetic reveals his crass hardness and shows how the aesthetic here reinforces his political position. Moreover, he appears to be the one turning humanitarian and political concerns into sexual trivialities. By the same token, however, it is the narrators aesthetic choice of the wounded woman that reinforces his own politicaland given the representation, clearly superiorposition. If the status of womens political representation was clearly at stake in the reform debates, by the end of 1819 their symbolic representation as victims undercut their political struggle. Though this was not the end of womens involvement in the Reform movement, the Radical representation of Peterloo, like those above, came to dominate interpretations of the events in Manchester, and its images were used constantly.32 The victimized woman became a central sign in the struggle to control how Peterloo would be represented. Radicals and conservatives alike wielded her as a powerful sign of their cause. The figure of the passive or victimized woman was used not only to signify power relations but also to Ashley J. Cross 177

stabilize them. Her appearance functioned to make the political relations transparent and thus reinforced the binary logic of political debate. In this process of engendering violence, however, the opposition of mens and womens social positions became further reified. The disjunction between womens political and discursive representation thus functions as a means of controlling women (one has only to think of what happened to the activist French Revolutionary women); it also points to a recurring connection between the two. It is in this context that Cruikshank and Shelley took up the image of victimized woman in their 1819 work.
II. TAKING LIBERTIES: THE VICTIMIZED WOMAN IN CRUIKSHANKS CARTOONS

George Cruikshanks political cartoon Death or Liberty! (figure 2) presents a complex example of these issues. Because Cruikshank played both sides, he offers a dual perspective on the debate. Moreover, his cartoons reveal the multivalence of current iconography. One of his favorite methods, according to Marcus Wood, was to create a text that would ridicule what it is supposed to be celebrating.33 Printed after Shelleys Mask and On the Medusa were written, Death or Liberty! appears to be a conservative interpretation of radical reform and frames the conflict in gendered terms; however, Cruikshank uses French Revolutionary icons and images from his other proradical cartoons to represent both sides of the issue and thus troubles the cartoons conservative surface. Since it can be read from at least two perspectives, the cartoon runs the risk of being on neither side and underscores the danger of parody. But while it undermines its own political stance, where it remains fixed is in its attitudes about gender. Cruikshank depends on the figure of the victimized woman to signify the opposing sides tyranny. Where the other signs produce an indeterminacy of meaning, the female figures stabilize the cartoons politics. The seeming transparency of the gendered power dynamic affirms male power, and, in so doing, it suggests that the real threat is the transgressive woman. The contradictions of Cruikshanks work in 1819 embody the complexity of producing political satire around the Peterloo Massacre. Between 1816 and 1822, the period of his collaboration with William Hone, Cruikshank produced work for both the radical and loyalist causes.34 Aligned with the Whigs, Cruikshank was a good friend, a defender, and colleague of Hone, who was put on trial in 178 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

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

1817 on charges of libel for publishing satires on the government. In addition to their presentation in The Political House That Jack Built, Cruikshanks cartoons appeared regularly in The Scourge, a satirical journal invested in mocking Regency government. These cartoons satirize by turning the Regency figures into buffoons or lecherous abusers of women. In 1819 and 1820, however, at the same time he published cartoons mocking the persecutions of the Regency government, Cruikshank continued to do caricatures for the loyalists that attacked the extreme radical Reformers as subverters of British tradition. The two cartoons to which he signs his name are of this sort; they reveal a nervousness, even fear, about the potential horror of revolution, and they overtly frame this horror in terms of gender. Political women become monstrous; proper womens chastity is threatened. As one of these signed cartoons, Death or Liberty! thus has an ambivalent political status.35 In its transposition of the reformers slogan, Equal Representation or death, Death or Liberty! conveys a conservative message. If the cartoon claims in its title a choice of death or liberty, in its images Ashley J. Cross 179

it equates death, an exaggerated, castrated masculine figure, with the radical reformers fighting for liberty, and liberty with the traditional values of the Regency government, represented by Britannia. It presents the threat posed to conservative British rule by radical reform as sexual violation. The cartoon emphasizes the need to protect Britains subjects, here figured as a woman, from politics and reformist movements portrayed not just as revolutionary violence but as rape. The female victim thus signifies reforms violation of the social order. The punning on the word liberty allows a slippage from radical liberty as a fight against oppression, to the taking of social liberties as a transgression of social boundaries, and, finally, to sexual liberties. In the cartoon, Radical Reform is a barely masked, sinewy, and skull-headed figure, with genitals in the form of an arrow tied to an hourglass. He wears a liberty bonnet on his head and another waves from a pole overhead. He tries to take liberties with a buxom and brave Britannia, who is backed up against the stone of religion and holds the sword of the laws in her uplifted hand. While Reform asserts his aggressive masculinity, he clearly has already been castrated. Instead of the calm deportment expected of Britannia, however, she is clearly a maiden in distress. She is well armed but seems unable to defend her honor. In fact, Radical Reform is poised, literally, to take Liberty; he grasps her right breast and grins lasciviously. Between Britannias legs rests a shield bearing the British flag, but pressed by Deaths knee it implies his penetration even as it protects her from it. Britannias attire further underscores the extent of his violation. She wears armor decorated by a belt that, translated from the French, reads God and my right. In the distance, a lion, wearing the collar loyalty, rages to her defense, his arrival symbolizing British protection of its country and its women. Threatened and attractive, Britannia demands the observers attention, in contrast to the wounded woman in The Examiner passage and to the figures on Reforms side. By transforming political threat into a sexual threat, as in representations of Peterloo, the cartoon plays on its viewers sympathy for the distressed maiden. It is not so much that Britannia feminizes authority, but that her distress calls out for protection by a male viewer. Thus, the maidens very weakness functions as a sign of conservative power. The cartoon reinforces the binary opposition of male aggressor and female victim through its portrayal of Reforms cohorts. Whereas Britannia stands alone, Radical Reform is backed up by a mob 180 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

literally a chain gangof deformed and skeletal grotesques. Instead of the banners for universal suffrage that radicals actually carried at Peterloo, these figures wave banners which align Parliamentary reform with murder, starvation, robbery, slavery, blasphemy, and immorality. Significantly, many of these crimes were the very ones of which the Regency was accused. The cartoon gains its effect in part by displacing the very claims radicals had made against conservatives onto the radicals. Like Radical Reform, his followers are half-dressed and their faces are contorted into a range of menacing and lewd grimaces. To emphasize the sexual crudity of the reform side, the cartoonist has given most of these characters pronounced body parts to indicate their sex. Their bodies are meant to match their banners. For example, Murder holds a knife with his banner as if ready to stab Robbery. Robbery looks as if he is ready to grab Starvation; an undefined phallic object hanging between his legs reappears between the legs of Starvation, who is bone-thin. The character holding the banner Slavery is not even human; instead, it is a chain-link figure sporting a liberty bonnet. As the most complex of Radical Reforms followers, a Medusa figure waves Thomas Paines Age of Reason in addition to a flag saying Blasphemy. Her gender is specified only by her pendulous, naked breasts. The cartoon clearly wants to link monstrous, aggressive women with reform, again turning political threat into sexual threat. The multiple snakes on Medusas head echo the single snake at the top of Radical Reforms staff, linking the two. The connection is important because it reiterates Reforms castration and compensates for the conservatives feminized position. By confirming the radicals castration, surely caused by hanging out with Medusan women, the cartoon confirms the masculinity of conservatives.36 It also implies that Radical Reforms aggression is an attempt to prove his manhood. On one level, Radical Reform appears as a powerful male aggressor taking advantage of a woman; on another, he is revealed as emasculated and desperate. In Cruikshanks cartoon, then, the phallic power of conservative authority is displaced onto the radicals, even while it denies them any real authority. Given Cruikshanks political duplicity and the resonance of the cartoons 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 its politics, the allusions to the French Revolution and other radical images, combined with the exaggeration of the cartoons images, blur Ashley J. Cross 181

the sides of the debate. The instability of the signs suggests that Cruikshank might be mocking the very thing he is supporting. In fact, it is quite possible to read the cartoon as a parody of antiradical attitudes and as another commentary on the violence of Peterloo.37 Significantly, the French Revolutionary imagery appears on both sides.38 The most obvious image, the liberty cap, appears several times on the reform side of the cartoon; however, the most prominent example, held up on the pole in the center of the cartoon, actually appears between Radical Reform and Britannia. It is not clear whether this is Deaths staff or Britannias. This ambiguous sign reveals Cruikshanks ambivalence about the battle. Not only does it imply that the struggle is over who gets to carry the liberty cap, but it also symbolically represents the battle as a discursive contest to control representation. In addition, Britannias opposition to Medusa recalls a 1793 cartoon by Thomas Rowlandson on the French Revolution called The Contrast, which opposes French Liberty to British Liberty through the opposition of the monstrous Medusa and a proper Britannia. Here, however, the hair on Britannias head has a similar serpentine quality to Medusas and the sword she wields has become a flowing banner, a miniature of Radical Reforms cape. Perhaps this underscores the threat of Reform to the laws, but it also connects the two opposing sides. Moreover, Britannia strangely recalls Marianne, the revolutionary goddess of liberty. Her scaled bodice with the words dieu et mon droi on the belt makes this connection explicit, thus also aligning the conservative side with liberty and revolution. The image is more complicated still because Britannias serpent-like bodice also calls up the image of the hydra killed by Hercules, another symbol of Revolutionary power that viewers would have known. Hercules, in fact, replaced Marianne as the symbol of revolution under the Terror. This potentially associates Death with the Terror, but it also has the effect of undermining the conservative side: how does one distinguish the true representation of liberty and revolution if the symbols do not take distinct sides? Radical Reforms mask provides another Revolutionary image that further reveals the cartoons ambivalent politics. The ancient regime was associated with masks and masques, and the mask became a symbol of corruption; the Revolutionaries saw themselves as unmasking the corruption.39 Shelley, in fact, situates his Mask in this tradition of masking by punning on mask and masque.40 The cartoon, though, associates the values of the French Revolutionaries with the conservative side by implying that they unmask Death, and it aligns 182 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

radical reform with corruption and deception. But, again, the image is ambiguous: what does it mean to have Death wear a mask in such an obvious way? Given that the mask itself is the central image of the cartoon, it is possible that, in a self-referential move, it draws attention to the masquerade of the cartoon itself: the masquerade of the Regency government as female victim. The duplicity of the French Revolutionary iconography is reinforced by the cartoons allusions to other radical representations, including Cruikshanks own work at that time. The cartoon depends on its viewers knowledge of images of Peterloo and other reform issues. In addition to its reworking of the reform slogan, Equal Representation or Death, the opposition of violent male and victimized female recalls the many images of the Peterloo massacre and points 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 figures evoke Cruikshanks later representation of a chained and gagged John Bull in A Free Born Englishman! The Admiration of the World!!! And the Envy of Surrounding Nations!!! (15 December 1819).42 The Medusa figure, who waves Paines Age of Reason and a flag claiming Blasphemy, is clearly a reference to the 1812 blasphemy trial of Daniel Isaac Eaton for publishing the last part of Paines work.43 In addition, the image of Death with his hand on Britannias breast was apt to summon lewd images of the Prince Regent and, in particular, one of Cruikshanks own entitled Royal Embarkation or Bearing Britannias Hope from a Bathing Machine to the Royal Barge (19 August 1819), in which the Regent grips the breasts of two buxom women conveying him to his yacht.44 While these images suggest the uncertainty of the cartoons politics, the exaggerated figures, like so many of Cruikshanks other cartoons, produce a satire that undermines itself. A glance at another Cruikshank cartoon will help reveal the contradictoriness and political duplicity of Death or Liberty! On the same piece of paper on which he designed Massacre at St. Peters and which was printed by the same printseller, T. Tegg, Cruikshank created A Radical Reformer, i.e. a Neck or Nothing Man! Dedicated to the Heads of the Nation (17 September 1819) (figure 3), a cartoon which makes clear the danger of parody.45 On one level, this cartoon seems to deride radical reformers by linking them to the violence of the Terror; on another, it seems to be a mockery of the governments response to radical reform. On the left of the cartoon is a huge, fire-breathing, Ashley J. Cross 183

animated guillotine monster. The guillotine wears a liberty cap and wields a dagger. Flames erupt from its belly below the blade, and peeping through the hole at its crotch, through which pours blood like urine, is a skull. On the right of the cartoon appears a fleeing group of governmental officials, including Lord Liverpool, who falls over bags of gold; Lord Castlereagh; Lord Chancellor Eldon, telling the regent not to mind losing his wig so long as your heads on; and the legs of the King. As John Wardroper suggests, it is hard to know whether to take the guillotine monster seriously; both sides seem equally absurd and worthy of mockery.46 Returning to Death or Liberty! we might say the same thing. The images are so absurd that they threaten to mean the opposite. If it is possible to read the cartoon as mocking reforms sexual perversity, it is equally possible to read the cartoon as satirizing conservatives for representing themselves as victimized, especially given the increasing oppressiveness of governmental authority. That is, viewers would unmistakably see that the victimized woman is just a mask for patriarchal power; from this perspective, the true victims are the women of Peterloo. The real castration anxiety is that of the government that feels threatened enough to represent reform in this way. Or, to say this in the cartoons sexualized terms, if Britannia is in this state, she asked for it. Evidently, Cruikshanks Death or Liberty! delivers an ambiguous political message. Despite its indeterminacy, however, its position regarding gender remains stable. The victimized woman provides a seemingly transparent sign of male power. Her meaning is not in question because, as a victim, she represents the proper model of femininity and the Virtues of the Constitution in Danger of Violation. The real fear, then, is not the Political Libertine, Radical Reform, but the transgressive woman who blurs the lines between masculine and feminine, here figured as Medusa, holding up Paines treatise.47 While the books title, Age of Reason, is supposed to mock Radical Reform, it also implies that women reading such political books are anything but reasonable. Moreover, Blasphemy (Medusas banner), the cartoon indicates, is not about religion at all, but rather about women who become monstrous and transgress their social roles. The danger of the monstrous woman, who appears to be a marginal figure, is emphasized in the dominant metaphor of the cartoon, rape, which connects the two female figures. For Medusa became a threat to men because she was raped by Neptune. Out of 184 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

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

jealousy, Minerva transformed Medusas beautiful hair into serpents, whom, when looked upon, would turn the gazer into stone. While Britannias rape calls for a male protector, in its connection to Medusas experience it suggests another potential threat to male authority: if Medusa is the model of the monstrous radical woman, Britannias rape by the radicals might make her monstrous. This connection between Medusa and Britannia is reinforced by their similar snake-like hairdos and by a repetition of the flame of Medusas breath in Britannias sword. Thus, in the cartoon, patriarchal violence against a woman (rape) is transformed into the need to control a monstrous woman who threatens male power. If the cartoons overt opposition is aggressive male and victimized woman, its subtext is aggressive woman and threatened male. The image of the victimized woman affirms the male power, which is disrupted by Medusas difference. What is most at stake, then, is male power that depends on a female victim for its authority. Indeed, in light of the womens reform effort, where this cartoon takes and takes away liberties is in its representation of women. A cartoon that Cruikshank produced right before the Peterloo MassaAshley J. Cross 185

cre, The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers of Blackburn!!! (12 August 1819) (figure 4), also for Humphrey, illuminates this anxiety about women gaining power.48 This cartoon is overt in using symbolic representation to stifle womens political action. More specifically, it transforms the political threat posed by organized Female Union Societies into a sexual threat by aggressive women. Refiguring a report by The Black Dwarf, the cartoon mocks the women reformers gift of a cap of liberty by turning it into a sexual act: one woman places the cap on the end of a pole that is held upright between a mans legs. She asks every man in England to stand up and come forward and join the general union, that by a determined constitutional resistance to our oppressors we may attain the great end!!! The sexual innuendo here is meant to reduce the women to literal petticoat reformers. The men in the audience below the platform ogle and paw the women; the women, obese pantaloon-clad grotesques, 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 the woman on top.49 This sexually derogatory cartoon, then, underscores anxiety about womens equality and reduces it by turning it into a sexual joke.50 Together the two cartoons reduce female liberty to sexual license. Printed several months after The Belle Alliance and Peterloo, Death or Liberty! purports to be about radical reform, but its secondary message is to define femininity and reiterate womens status as victims. By using the victimized woman to stabilize its politics, Cruikshanks cartoon effaces the fact that gender politics were also in flux in 1819. The effect of this appropriation is to reify the oppressive binary opposition between man and woman. Whereas one can deploy the liberty cap arbitrarily, the female face and body maintain their sexual reference, no matter the cause. Like Cruikshanks Britannia and like Medusas head held up by Perseus to ward off his enemies, the face functions apotropaically and props up the one who wields it (that is, radicals, conservatives, the artist). But what was the effect on the victim, the one who owned the face, the one dissevered from her body? Was it even possible to use gender differently as a sign in the specific context of 1819 political representations? That is, given the dominant metaphor of victim and victimizer, was it possible to make use of the figure of the victimized woman in a way that was not reifying, not apotropaic, and not affirming the victim as victim? Was it possible to represent victimization without appropriating the 186 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

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

victim?51 These are the very questions that Shelley was exploring in 1819 and feared he could not answer.
III. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE: SHELLEYS FEMALE MASKS

Exiled in Italy at the time of the Peterloo Massacre, Shelley responded in outrage, writing to Charles Ollier: The torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. . . . I wait anxiously [to] hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. Something must be done. . . . What yet I know not, he wrote on 6 September 1819. In writing to Thomas Love Peacock shortly thereafter on 21 September, he again declared vehemently: What an infernal business this is of Manchester. What is to be done? Something assuredly.52 These words stress Shelleys increased sense of urgency about reform as well as his horror at the bloody murderous oppression and the alarming state of 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 only underscores Shelleys desire for action and his sympathy, even Ashley J. Cross 187

identification, with the victims, but also reveals Shelleys consciousness of the power of the female victims voice. Both of these responses echo the words of Beatrice Cenci, the psychologically and physically brutalized heroine of Shelleys The Cenci, the dramatic poem he sent to Peacock on 9 September in the hopes of an anonymous production in London.53 The allusion is significant because it provides a specifically gendered context for understanding Shelleys work in 1819: raped by her father, Beatrice embodies the violence of oppression. In using her words, Shelley frames his response to Peterloo with a domestic drama that positions the oppressed, here figured as a woman, as the victim of patriarchal and familial violence. Despite the difference of genre, the allusion works much as Cruikshanks Massacre at St. Peters does: Beatrices gender reaffirms the depth of the violation of the political protestors at Manchester and forecasts the potential violent uprising of the oppressed. In this act of ventriloquism, however, Shelley recognizes the necessity and danger of retaliation and articulates it through the agency of her voice. In contrast to Cruikshanks reifying representation of woman as victim, Shelleys words underscore her power. Moreover, Shelleys repetition of Beatrices words foregrounds a crisis of representationthe very issue at stake in the reform movementthat is both political 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 a shadow / In the dread lightening that avenges it, we are confronted with the profundity of her crisis: she is unable to represent the crime against 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 mind Of that which has transformed me. I, whose thought Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up In its own formless horror. Of all words, ......................................... Which wouldst though hear? For there is none to tell My misery. 55

In a sense, Beatrices inability to represent the crime of patriarchal abuse leads to her violent retaliation against her father (she has him strangled) and eventually to the death of her family under the equally oppressive law. In light of Peterloo, Shelley does not want a repeti188 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

tion of Beatrices pernicious mistakes, as he calls them in the preface to the play, but he also does not want to objectify the victim aesthetically to make a political point, as does Cruikshanks cartoon.56 Nor, finally, can he claim to be in Beatrices or the protestors exact position. In speaking Beatrices words, then, Shelley foregrounds his own crisis after Peterloo: how to represent the oppressed (women and the working class), so as to animate them to act in their own defense without repeating the very oppression he wants to challenge. If in 1819 Shelley is especially concerned with how to resist the patriarchal establishment, as Stephen Behrendt suggests, his use of the figure of the victimized woman, a figure that he turns to frequently in that year, enacts this struggle to represent the oppressed without taking away their agency.57 In Shelleys eyes, it was no longer enough to unmask power; instead, something must be done to animate the oppressed into action. But could poetry do it? Shelleys repetition of Beatrices words seems problematic, another example of a man using the victimized woman to signify his own righteous position. Moreover, Beatrices violent retaliation against her father inverts and thus reaffirms the gendered opposition between oppressor and oppressed. Mask and On the Medusa attempt to create other relations to the victimized woman; they challenge a world split into oppressor and oppressed. Together, they reveal Shelleys awareness of the way in which gender is used to signify power. In these poems, in contrast to Cruikshanks cartoon, Shelley takes on the binary opposition of male aggressor/female victim to question its adequacy as a metaphor and to undermine the gendered ground of political conflict and aesthetic desire. In Mask, Shelley does this by multiplying the female figure and creating contradictory images that underscore the difficulty of representing oppression. While these multiplications and contradictions show his own ambivalent position, they also unmask the violence of male authority and fracture it. Shelley similarly disrupts patriarchal power in On the Medusa by combining in one figure the two female figures of Cruikshanks cartoon, one threatening male power and the other restoring it. Rather than wielding Medusas head for his own power, he wants the reader to view the victimized woman differently, to see the process by which she becomes the fragment of an uncreated creature.58 Because of the imagery they share with each other and with Cruikshanks cartoons, Mask and On the Medusa provide an interesting, if unusual, pair of Shelley texts to read together. While Ashley J. Cross 189

many critics have commented on the connections of Shelleys On the Medusa to other 1819 poems, especially Prometheus Unbound, Ode to the West Wind, and Sonnet: England in 1819, its connection to Mask has gone unremarked.59 Addressing the problem of violence, one aesthetically and one politically, both poems share an ekphrastic element: they verbally express a response to a visual text and, in so doing, emphasize the transforming power of poetry.60 Reading On the Medusa in relation to Mask also illuminates their shared imagery: the gendered portrayal of the relation between oppressor and oppressed, as well as the animating vapor that is the breath of both poetry and revolution (the thrilling vapour [M, 5.36] of Medusas breath and the revolutionary force in Mask, the mist, a light, an image that rises between the maniac maid and Anarchy).61 Through the interweaving of these two patterns of imagery, each poem reveals Shelleys ambivalence about the way the female victim works in the political discourse of 1819. Shelley wrote Mask to express his outrage over the brutality of Peterloo, hoping to add his words to the battles and motivate those violently mown down to continue their struggle. But the poet/ narrators position in this poem is complicated by his literal and figurative distance from the scene. His vision of political resistance depends upon three key elements: the mist/light/image that slays Anarchy, a series of connected female figures, and the passive Men of England (MA, 147) in the second half of the poem. Each of these elements functions differently to disrupt the patriarchal authority that creates and relies on the female victim. They provide contradictory, even mystifying, images of revolution because of their ambiguous connections to the violence of the poem, even as they rely on traditional understandings of gender.62 Shelleys Mask frames the Peterloo conflict much as does Cruikshanks Death or Liberty!, although Shelley changes the sides so that Death symbolizes the corruption and violence of established power. Anarchy, the Skeleton (MA, 74), pale even to the lips, / Like Death in the Apocalypse (MA, 3233), with his brow marked I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW! (MA, 37), rides in on a horse with his accomplices: Murder, who wears a mask like Castlereagh (MA, 6); Fraud, Like Eldon (MA, 15) whose tears turn to millstones and brain children; and Hypocrisy, like Sidmouth . . . / On a crocodile rode by. / And many more Destructions played / In this ghastly masquerade (MA, 2427). They are joined by a mighty troop (MA, 42), and together they ride to London trampling to a 190 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

mire of blood / The adoring multitude (MA, 4041). In London, Anarchy revels in his glory because everyone, including the priests, lawyers, and kings, has allegiance to him. Suddenly, however, his procession is disrupted by a maniac maid, who runs past crying Misery, oh, Misery! and claiming her name is Hope, But she looked more like Despair (MA, 86, 87, 88). Unlike Britannia, she is unarmed, but she also prepares for her victimization by prostrating herself: Then she lay down in the street, / Right before the horses feet, / Expecting, with a patient eye, / Murder, Fraud and Anarchy (MA, 98101). The word Expecting, after her own comments about father Time having child after child (MA, 94) implies her impending victimization as both waiting and potential birth. Instead of the expected violation, however, Shelley disrupts the dynamic with an abstract revolutionary force, a mist, a light, an image (MA, 103), which rises inexplicably like the vapour of the vale (MA, 105) between the maniac maid and Anarchy. Clearly connected to the west wind and other inspiring Romantic breezes, this nebulous vapor becomes a shape arrayed in mail / Brighter than the vipers scale (MA, 11011). Perhaps the trumpet of a prophecy to unawakened Earth in another form, its building force slays Anarchy and calms the maniac maid.63 Moreover, the step[s] (MA, 118) of this mist/light/image give Thoughts (MA, 125) of resistance to the multitude and make them see Hope unmasked: Thoughts sprung whereer that step did fall. / And the prostrate multitude / Lookedand ankle deep in blood, / Hope that maiden most serene / Was walking with a quiet mien (MA, 12529). Revealing the maniac maid in her true light, these thoughts create a sense awakening (MA, 136) of their own oppression and provoke Shelley to imagine a call to resist established power As if spoken by mother Earth to the Men of England. To say Shelley is mixing metaphors here is an understatement; the mixed metaphors, however, create a complicated and abstract trajectory that suggests the difficulty of picturing the conflict. Although the fact that this shape is genderless may lead one to conclude, as Morton Paley does, that the force that brings about radical transformation is beyond sexuality, Shelleys reference to the presence (MA, 120) as her in the manuscript seems significant in a poem in which the figures of Hope and resistance are primarily female.64 In breaking the opposition between Anarchy and maid with the mist, Shelley transforms the maniac maid from potential victim to figure of hope.65 More importantly, the mist links the revolutionary force to poetry; it Ashley J. Cross 191

is poetry, in a sense, that leaves the maniac maid calm and reveals her as Hope and not Despair. The maniac maid not only plays the role of passive femininity in lying down in the street before Anarchy, but her maniac status clearly is related to Anarchys procession. That is, it is Anarchy who causes her to flee shrieking and then to lie down in the street. In contrast, the revolutionary shape causes her to appear as she really is: as Hope. Thus while the revolutionary force may seem like an abstraction of the violence (we dont know the source of all the blood around the maniac maids feet), in fact it disrupts the opposition that would produce the victimized woman. And, in so doing, the revolutionary force reveals the false link between revolution and oppressive violence, femaleness and oppressed passivity. Furthermore, while the maniac maid recalls Cruikshanks Liberty in her distress, she is not the only female figure. Another way in which Shelley undermines the static binary is to identify himself with the female figures. The poets reliance on female masks appears from the very first lines of the poem, with their suggestions of Eves awakening in book 4 of Paradise Lost. In these lines, the poet establishes his own position as feminine, as an awakening to which he is passively led: As I lay asleep in Italy / There came a voice from over the Sea, / And with great power it forth led me / To walk in the visions of Poesy (MA, 14). In the body of the poem, the poets actual vision, this identification is articulated through another contradictory female figure, the voice of mother Earth, who calls the Men of England to rise like Lions after slumber (MA, 151). This voice parallels the voice that wakens the poet and leads him to the poetic vision of the Mask, even as it embodies in a simile the poets own attempt to give voice to revolution. The simile reveals that Earth functions as a mask for the poet. These are not really Earths words, but a rushing light of clouds and splendour, / A sense awakening (MA, 13536) is felt and causes words of joy and fear [to arise] / As if spoken by their own indignant Earth (MA, 13839). Moreover, the light imagery connects Earths 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 maid serves as a model for their behavior in the second half of the poem. These active female roles seem especially significant if we recall the historical context of womens organizing before Peterloo. It is women here who inspire political action and try to animate the victims. Giving voice to their story, Earth interprets for the Men of England, 192 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

telling them about the depths of their slavery and the reality of freedom. She both advocates for passive resistance and reveals its danger by depicting the brutality of the tyrant rulers, who will slash, and stab, and maim, and hew, (MA, 342) in an image that seems to repeat the violence of the Peterloo Massacre. Significantly, however, Shelley here has changed the victim. He makes this a conflict between men, but, whereas the victimized woman confirms male power, the nonviolent man disrupts that model. Instead, the Men of Englands passive looks disarm the violence of other men: With folded arms and steady eyes, / And little fear, and less surprise / Look upon them as they slay / Till their rage has died away (MA, 34447). Finally, the poem affirms that disruption by valorizing women as the final judges of mens actions: when those in power again plow down the passive resisters, every woman in the land / Will point at them as they stand (MA, 35253). In a sense returning the women to their active role in the reform movement, Shelleys text does not finally affirm 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 Shelleys exhortation to the Men of England through the female mask of Earth. As the female voice of revolution dominates the poem, the Men of England are reduced to silently watching. What should be a process of animating the masses seemingly becomes a process of their silencing. In line 260 deeds are the means to resistance. By 299, these have become strong and simple words / Keen to wound as sharpened swords (MA, 299300) and finally are merely looks: Stand ye calm and resolute / Like a forest close and mute, / With folded arms and looks which are / Weapons of unvanquished war (MA, 31922). In this process, slaughter (MA, 360) becomes inspiration (MA, 361) that is eloquent and oracular (MA, 362), another voice which will make the poets words like oppressions thundered doom (MA, 365). As Shelley attempts to embody the force of revolution and to mobilize the oppressed other, he draws attention to his own problematic act of representation: the only means he has to overcome the disabling force of oppression are words, but these words, oppressions thundered doom, seem to produce their own violence, to make their own victims. Whereas Mask disrupts patriarchal power by altering the roles of the players, On the Medusa destabilizes the victimized womans signification and unmasks how her image was used to shore up male authority. Portraying Medusa, the monstrous woman, as victim, Ashley J. Cross 193

Shelley rescues her from conservative rhetoric and loads the victimized woman with a revolutionary power she does not have in Cruikshanks cartoon. This conflation of the two female figures in Cruikshanks cartoon transforms Medusa into a victim with a legitimate cause, no longer a threat to be warded off, but a complex and potentially radical force for reform.66 Although this poem reveals Shelleys identification with Medusa, it also shows how volatile her image ishow the image of the victimized woman could work against Shelleys cause by turning him into another Perseus who merely wields her head for his own benefit. Thus, On the Medusa simultaneously shows how the patriarchal logic of the victimized woman works and disrupts that logic. In light of Masks cartoon-like images, Medusas decapitated form is startlingly abstract. On first glance, Shelleys Medusa is neither threatening nor revolutionary, but dead: a painting made into a poem. On closer examination, however, the artistic context provides Shelley with the means to intertwine his aesthetic and political concerns. The victimized woman here functions as both a poetic and revolutionary figure.67 In addition to her radical significance in the reform movement (two radical journals even called themselves Medusa and the Gorgon, in part because of her revolutionary meaning during the French Revolution), Medusa embodies a myth about oppressor and oppressed in which the violence of oppression is continually acted out on the female body. From her rape by Neptune to her beheading by Perseus, Medusa models the victimized woman put to use for patriarchal power. For Shelley, her tragedy corresponds to that of the Men of England, feminized by oppression and enchained while asleep. Her agonies of anguish and of death (M, 1.8) recall his representations of the working class as corpses and abortions, weaving their own winding sheets. More significantly, out of Medusas dead body came Pegasus, symbol of poetry. Lest this become another male poet constructing poetry on the death of a beautiful woman, Shelley underscores Medusas latent power by portraying her dying breath as a thrilling vapour (M, 5.36), bringing into play the Romantic 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 a double figure.68 On the one hand, she suggests failed revolution and death, 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 194 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

suggests life and the human spirit, in spite of her victimization by the tyranny of established power.69 As Shelley writes in the additional stanza to the poem, in the figure of Medusa, Death has met life, but there is life in death (M, 6.46). In the process of embodying the revolutionary vapour (the mist/light/image of Mask), Shelley arrives at a parallel crisis: how to animate the victimin Mask, the masses of people stand, like the maniac maid, in their own blood, and here the decapitated Medusa lies on the wet, bloody rock. The poem foregrounds the double-edged nature of Shelleys project from the opening lines: his Medusa threatens to align him with the same conservative power he wants to call into question. On one level, the poem works as a revelation of Medusas gendered identity. The poem reveals that the It that lieth (M, 1.1) in the opening lines actually has a womans countenance (M, 6.39). What It lieth about is Medusas femaleness, her humanity. This revelation is disturbing not because it is surprising that Medusa is a womanany reader should know this from the mythbut because Shelley delays mentioning her female countenance until the very end of the poem, and it is then that we find out she is dead. The maniac maid who lies down passively in the streets in Mask has been transformed into a trunkless female head, a womans countenance, with serpent locks, / Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks (M, 6.3940). This change reveals the actual body at stake: not only does the mirror of Medusas breath suggest her own complicity in her death, but the poems significance also depends on her dead body. By giving It a female face, by making It a woman, the poem seemingly restores masculine authority and contains that terrible beauty in recognizable female form. If this process helps us to see Medusa as a victimized woman, it also resolves her threat on the viewer by making her lifeless. At the very moment in the poem when Medusa takes on human form, when she becomes a sympathetic figure, she also is most clearly a corpse, wielded by the poet to gain support for his cause. From this perspective, the revelation of the womans countenance on the decapitated head functions similarly to Cruikshanks cartoon; it assures the viewer that the threatened woman is merely a victim of male violence who needs rescue. Shelleys use of the victimized woman here threatens to be the same old story. But is it? What kind of lie is this if the poem claims overtly that it lies? Within the first five lines, the repeated and contradictory use of lies (It lieth and it seems to lie [M, 1.5]) makes the reader selfAshley J. Cross 195

consciously aware of the objects lie, of its position. This punning suggests that this victimized woman is not what she first seems. Critically, Shelley never transforms Medusa into a woman; it is never she, but a womans countenance, a mask. Much as Radical Reform wears a mask over his death-like face in Cruikshanks cartoon, much as Murder wears a mask like Castlereagh, and as the maniac maid wears the mask of despair, Medusa wears a womans countenance to cover all the beauty and the terror there (M, 5.38). Her mask reveals her misuse as a symbol to stabilize conservative male authority. Shelleys ability to recover Medusas radical power depends not only on being able to read this womans countenance, but also on reading behind it, unmasking the image of patriarchal authority. The critical moment in this revision of the victimized woman occurs in stanza 2, a turning point in the poem in which Medusas viewer is offered a choice of transformation or reification, of reading her image so as to disrupt patriarchal power or to stabilize it. If, as many critics have argued, this is a poem about the poet/viewers transformation, that transformation is hard-won and it involves a revolution in the poets view of his poetic object, the monstrous and victimized woman.70 As Grant Scott argues, stanza 2 provides the point of conversion, the danger of the ekphrastic moment, in which the 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 breaks down; historically, however, such moments have affirmed male power. What matters is not so much the moment of dissolution when thought no more can trace (M, 2.13), but how the viewer responds after that moment, what he does with that experience. For Cruikshanks cartoon also lures the viewer to suspend critical reflection through its image of the victimized woman, but only to reinforce male authority. In Shelleys poem, lines 1416, which humanize and harmonize the strain (M, 2.16), seem to function similarly; they extricate the viewer from the threatened dissolution of lines 913 and reaffirm his difference from Medusa. However we interpret the lines directly following, the moment of threatened dissolution is pivotal as it radically disrupts the viewers subjectivity. In the opening lines of the second stanza, the poets gaze and Medusa become confused as the poet contemplates the moment of being turned to stone. Initially depicted as a relation between viewer and object, the agency of the relationship reverses as Medusas gaze petrifies the poets spirit. Critically, the process of turning the 196 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

spirit into stone is a process of writing, of engraving, that simultaneously takes away and produces identity. Medusa becomes a writer, either etching him with her dead face (M, 2.11) or carving so deeply as to erase the characters (M, 2.12) of his dead face. Poet and victimized woman blend in a figure that not only disrupts the subject/object opposition but also simultaneously displaces it. Their characters grow into one another, represented by the single word itself (M, 2.13). The ending lines of the stanza retreat immediately from this moment of melding, however. If the viewer contemplates being turned to stone by her grace (M, 2.9), the melodious hues of beauty thrown / Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain (M, 2.1415) allow him to refigure her, to humanize and harmonize her as a poetic object, a symbol of human suffering. In addition, the word strain (M, 2.16), following humanize and harmonize, draws attention to the poets 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, the double verb here stresses the change in the viewers relation to Medusa. But to what effect? How are we to take this drastic shift in the middle 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 a focus on the spiritual (grace as both ease of movement and unmerited divine assistance) to the external (appearance described synaesthetically). Do the opening lines of stanza 2 offer a potential regenerative moment in which the blending of Medusa and viewer brings understanding, or do they offer that Freudian moment in which the viewers spirit (M, 2.10) is scared stiff (hes no longer writing her, shes writing him), only to reassure him of his poetic authority, his ability to represent her? In this light lines 1416, the viewers response, seem less certain despite their declarative tone: do they represent a radically transformed viewer who now identifies with and recognizes the monstrous woman as human, or do they allow the viewer to escape that dangerous dissolution, to escape recognizing Medusas otherness, her real threat, by humanizing her? The poem, I believe, does not resolve these questions. What happens in stanza 2 is not so much the breakdown of masculine discourse as it is Shelleys questioning of male power grounded on the image of the victimized woman. The transformative moment in which the poet becomes an object written on allows him to show both the radical Ashley J. Cross 197

potential of her image and its dangerous fixity in the gendered opposition of oppressor and oppressed. Significantly, after the claim to humanize and harmonize the strain, the poets attention is deflected away from Medusas dead face to the activity of her serpentine hair; in fact, though the poet claims her beauty to be humanizing, Medusa is least human in the third stanza. This diversion suggests Shelleys resistance to the humanizing impulse and his desire to imagine Medusa outside of patriarchal logic. The poets reflections now become caught up in the energy and unending involutions (M, 3.21) of the serpents. These snakes that curl and flow (M, 3.19) with life, as it were to mock / The torture and the death within (M, 3.2223), are less interesting for their phallic power than for their involutions. Rather than reinforcing the image of the threatening and monstrous woman, the involutions signify complexity and entanglement. Their intricate activity denies the Persean viewers desire to feel affirmed. Moreover, the similar interplay between images in the last three stanzas of On the Medusa and Mask suggests a building revolutionary force. The vipers that are Medusas 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 of stanza 2 allowed us to see Medusas pain, the rest of the poem asks us not to forget her revolutionary potential. Shelleys poem resists the mastery of Persean decapitation by continually calling attention to his relation to the image.72 In stanza 4, Shelley presents two ways of seeing the victimized woman that he rejects: while the eft, who peeps idly (M, 4.26) from a distance, is completely unaware and without sensitivity, the bat is bereft / Of sense (M, 4.2728), 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, the latter is the hysterical male, threatened by Medusas image. This might seem to leave the viewer in the position of the reassured patriarchal male, Perseus, who beheads Medusa by looking at her reflection and then uses her head to ward off his enemies. But neither is the poets position identical with Perseuss: Percy is not Perseus, a pun Im sure Shelley was playing with. The only mirror Shelley wields is the mirror of poetry that makes beautiful that which is distorted.73 The poets perspective, in Shelleys view, can be articulated only through language, the very character of which is to transform what it represents. While the pun makes clear how near 198 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

Shelleys task is to the patriarchal one, it also creates a critical difference. Unlike the poet, neither bat nor eft nor Perseus risks being turned to stone. And, in light of stanza 2, it is this moment of transformation that reveals the possible choice of reifying or transforming ones view of the victimized woman. The poetic mirror that Shelley uses is not reflective but refractive. Its transforming powers enable him to see the thrilling vapour, and it reveals the womans countenance athwart this revolutionary force as a patriarchal mask to contain radical reform. The difference of Shelleys poetic mirror is underscored in stanza 5, as the poem reveals the danger of the patriarchal self-reflective mirror which takes the mask as substance. The stanza traces out a tangled trajectory in which the inextricable error (M, 5.35) gives rise to the brazen glare (light) of the serpents (M, 5.34), which turn a thrilling vapour of the air (mist) into a mirror. Recalling the language and images of Mont Blanc, this vapor, no longer of the vale but of the mountaintop, becomes the mirror of breath, in which Medusas countenance is reflected back to her. This self-reflection is dangerous; it threatens to fix Medusa as victim, to leave her a trunkless head. Though every-shifting (M, 5.37), the mirror contains her revolutionary potential, revealing merely a womans countenance, with serpent-locks / Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks (M, 5.3940). To be caught in this brazen glare is to stay in the dynamic of oppressor/oppressed. While the brazen glare of the serpents asserts their defiance of the beholder and recalls the initial rape that led to Medusas transformation, the meaning of this stanza rests on an interpretation of the inextricable error. The phrase recalls two important references in the preface to The Cenci. In criticizing Beatrice, Shelley writes, revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better.74 In the very next paragraph he claims, [I] have sought to avoid the error of making [my characters] actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true. Beatrices mistake is revenge; the only option she sees is to retaliate violently against her oppressor. Shelleys mistake is to impose his views on his characters, to appropriate their speaking voices and speak for them. Both of these are mistakes that Shelley wanted to avoid. Given this context, the inextricable error is not, as McGann claims, Medusas sin, which puts the blame on her, but the violence of patriarchal oppression. This oppression kindles the serpents brazen glare and locks Ashley J. Cross 199

the oppressed into the position of victimized woman, in which her only options seem violent retaliation or complicity in her own victimization. In the intricate windings of this poem, the poet attempts to save himself, the reader, and the victimized woman from that inextricable error that turns the revolutionary vapor into a mirror of death. If stanza 5 seems to return Medusa to her state as victim, it does so only as she is reflected in the mirror. However, in its continuing attempts to unmask and define the victimized woman as both a symbol of radical power and a legitimate victim, the additional stanza suggests Shelleys refusal to rest by affirming male power with the fifth stanzas image of the victimized woman. In lines 4144, that image is reiterated and revised, increasing her power. Her countenance is divine (M, 6.41); her everlasting beauty breathing (M, 6.42); and the mirror has been replaced by nights trembling air (M, 6.44). Even this image is not sufficiently unmasked for Shelley, however. In the final lines of the poem, she becomes for the first time a literal trunkless head (M, 6.45), but this representation also brings recognition that there is life in death and unconquered Nature / Seems struggling to the last (M, 6.47, 4748). Defaced of her female countenance, her latent power becomes apparent, but it seems fleeting. Instead, the final stanza exposes the victimized woman as a fragment of an uncreated creature (M, 6.49). This ninth and final line in a poem of eight-line stanzas not only emphasizes Medusas fragmentation and struggle but also shows how she exceeds the poetic container and, perhaps, the poets control. The poet 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 his power a failure to inhabit the position of male authority. While Shelleys texts do not, finally, entirely escape the gendered opposition of oppressor and oppressed, they do revise the position of the victimized woman; they attempt to give her agency and to undermine male power that depends upon her image for authority. Medusa is both a fragment and uncreated because she has been victimized by the anxiety of established power as well as unmasked by the poets reflections. But she is also uncreated because she has not yet achieved her potential; she is not yet a fully imagined, politically active female reformer. Trapped within reform discourse, within the gendered opposition of oppressor and oppressed, she remains a victim. However, as the fragment of an uncreated creature, she breaks both the form and content of the poem to imply the 200 What a World We Make the Oppressor and the Oppressed

inadequacy of that discourse. Shelleys final image thus underscores his limitations, his inability to imagine something outside the binary of male aggressor and female victim. But in calling attention to his own failed act of representation, he creates the possibility for another metaphor, even if he cannot fully articulate it. In this rewriting of the victimized woman, as in Mask, Shelley reveals the violence involved not only in the gendering of oppression, but also in the representation of any victimized subject. Manhattan College
NOTES This article has benefited from the input of many readers, including Nina Mahasan Greenberg, William Keach, John Lowney, Jean Marie Lutes, Susannah Mintz, Susan B. Taylor, and Jennifer Travis. 1 English Cartoons and Satirical Prints, 13201832, microfilm reel 17, British Museum 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 Collection of 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 Catalogue of the Works of George Cruikshank, 2 vols. (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871). The word strike is, of course, a loaded word to choose about such a massive organized meeting 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. See English Cartoons, 13266. 3 One thinks not only of Edmund Burkes hysterical portrayals of the beleaguered Marie Antoinette and the Revolutionary furies of hell, but also of Marianne, the initial figure for liberty, who was replaced by Hercules, as the National Assembly limited womens participation in Revolutionary activity. During the French Revolution, according to Neil Hertz (Medusas Head: Male Hysteria Under Political Pressure, Representations 4 [Fall 1983]: 2754), images of women were used to emblematize revolutionary violence, figuring political threatthe fear of revolution and threat to the throneas sexual threatthe fear of castration and/or decapitation. In this context, the figure of woman as demon or Medusa functions as a form of social control; it masks, and therefore naturalizes, political conflict by turning it into sexual threat. While Hertz focuses on the threatening women, I am interested here in the opposite image, the threatened woman. The mechanism, however, is similar. 4 See Steven Jones, Shelleys Satire: Violence, Exhortation, and Authority (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1994), on the use of mythology in reform discourse. 5 See Wardroper, 1619; Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshanks Life, Times and Art, 2 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992), 1:15070; and Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 17901822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 259. 6 Wardroper, 15. 7 English Cartoons, 13279.

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8 P. M. S. Dawson, The Unacknowledged Legislator: Shelley and Politics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), 19697. 9 Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1977), 508. 10 See Shelleys preface to Prometheus Unbound, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 135. 11 Cited in Dawson, 196. The first volume includes The Mask of Anarchy, Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration, Sonnet: England in 1819, and Song to the Men of England. The second includes the high Romantic poems Ode to the West Wind, The Sensitive Plant, and To a Skylark. It is unclear where Shelley placed On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci, though it seems aesthetically more aligned with the second. 12 There are, of course, other texts I could have chosen here, in particular Prometheus Unbound, The Sensitive Plant, England in 1819, Julian and Maddalo, and The Cenci. While The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound address similar issues through the metaphor of rape, another manifestation of the victimized woman in Shelleys work, they do not share as explicitly the imagery of Cruikshanks cartoon. 13 Recent criticism has begun to explore more fully the connections between George Cruikshanks caricatures and Percy Bysshe Shelleys political poetry. See Stephen Behrendt, Shelley and His Audiences (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), esp. 187226; Stuart Curran, Shelleys Annus Mirabilis: The Maturing of an Epic Vision (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1975), 181205, 238 n. 3; Richard Hendrix, The Necessity of Response: How Shelleys Radical Poetry Works, KeatsShelley Journal 27 (1978): 4569; Michael Henry Scrivener, Radical Shelley: The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 20010; and esp. Wood, 138, 26369. Scholars of Cruikshanks 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 Cruikshanks Death or Liberty! and Shelleys Mask (98100). Though I agree that there is no argument to be made for influence, I want to suggest that the connections between these works go much deeper. 15 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Ekphrasis and the Other, in Picture Theory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994): 15181. Mitchell writes, ekphrasis [is] a suturing of dominant gender stereotypes into the semiotic structure of imagetext, the image identified as feminine, the speaking/seeing subject of the text identified as masculine (18081). 16 Recent scholarship situating Shelleys poetry within the cultural and political milieu of early-nineteenth-century England and radical politics has been less concerned with the issue of gender, whereas scholarship focused on the question of gender in Shelleys work has often shied away from the more political poems, like the Mask. There has been excellent scholarship from both perspectives; my goal is to try to 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, Shelleys Mirrors of Love: Narcissism, Sacrifice, and Sorority (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1999); Nathaniel Brown, Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979); Laura Claridge, Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992); and Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi,

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Shelleys Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). The works of Susan Wolfson, Gary Kelley, Barbara Judson, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, and William Keach are exceptions to this claim. See Wolfson, Something Must Be Done: The Dilemma of Feminine Violence in Shelley and Hemans (presented at the MLA convention, San Diego, CA, December 1994); Judson, The Politics of Medusa: Shelleys Physiognomy of Revolution, ELH 68 (2001):13554; Kelley, From Avant-Garde to Vanguardism: The Shelleys Romantic Feminism in Laon and Cyntha and Frankenstein, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 7387; Cafarelli, The Transgressive Double Standard: Shelleyan Utopianism and Feminist Social History, in Shelley: Poet and Legislator, 88104; and Keach, Arbitrary Power, forthcoming from Princeton. Wolfsons essay has been critical to my thinking on these issues, as she is interested in similar image patterns in Shelleys work. Judsons analysis of the politics of Medusa, whom Shelley attempts to reclaim . . . from the degenerate gender iconography of republican and establishment circles (150), parallels my examination of the victimized woman. 17 E. P. Thompson claims that 1819 was the heroic age of Popular Radicalism, a period in which England was as close to revolution as possible (The Making of the English Working Class [New York: Vintage, 1963], 603). More recently, James Chandler writes: Some historians have doubted the validity of [Thompsons view] on the grounds that it exaggerates the depth of the radical movement that stirred Britain in these months. What is not a matter of speculation is the view of the crisis expressed by contemporary intellectuals. The more one reads in either public or private commentary by intellectuals across the political spectrum of England in 1819, the more one sees of revolutionary hopes and fears (Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998], 21). In addition to responses by intellectuals like Shelley, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott, see also first person accounts by Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 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 (Manchester: Manchester Public Libraries, 1969). For more on Peterloo and its controversial history, see also J. R. Dinwiddy, Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 17801850 (London: Hambledon Press, 1992); Philip Lawson, Reassessing Peterloo, History Today 38 (March 1988): 2429; Donald Read, Peterloo: The Massacre and Its Background (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1958); Robert Reid, The Peterloo Massacre (London: Heinemann, 1989); and Robert Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Reopened (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1969). 18 Chandler, 83. 19 S. Jones, 9698. 20 S. Jones, 97, 98. Behrendt labels this ability of revolutionary signs to signify simultaneously to different audiences multistability, a late eighteenth-century phenomenon of visual art (2). Both S. Jones and Behrendt use the same figure to explain their concepts: a Janus-like image with two opposing profiles on it. 21 Certainly not all the radicals wanted womens suffrage. For example, John Wade, founder of The Gorgon, one of the more reputable and intellectual of the radical penny magazines, and author of The Black Book, rejected the claim to natural rights on the grounds that it did not allow for the exclusion of women (and lunatics

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and workhouse inmates) who were denied the vote for reasons of social utility. See Thompson, 77071. 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), 2:29596, on Shelleys ambivalence about womens suffrage. 22 Bamford, 13536. 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), 9293. 26 See Thomis and Grimmett, Petticoat Reformers, in Women, 88110; Lillian Lewis Shiman, Women and Leadership in Nineteenth-Century England (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1992), 3839; Thompson, 41417, 67982; and Walmsley, 15059. On British womens political activity in the early nineteenth century, see also Equal or Different: Womens Politics 18001914, ed. Jane Rendall (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); Political Women, 18001850, ed. Ruth and Edmund Frow (London: Pluto Press, 1989); Women and Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mike Sanders, 4 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2001); Women in British Politics, 17601860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (New York: St. Martins Press, 2000). Thomis and Grimmett look at several of the same passages I do, but for a different purpose. 27 Quoted in Walmsley, 15051, 15152. 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 Cruikshanks 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, 17931832 (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: Princeton Univ. Library, 1974), 3560; Patten, George Cruikshanks Life, Times and Art; and Harry Thornber, The Early Work of George Cruikshank (Manchester: J. Heywood, 1887). 35 On 19 June 1820, Cruikshank signed a receipt agreeing not to caricature his Majesty in any immoral situation (Wardroper, 16), but this did not preclude him from ridiculing royal behavior. This mockery aside, at the end of 1820, Cruikshank did a series of caricatures for The Loyalists Magazine. This change in his politics put a strain on his friendship with Hone. Wardroper cites Cruikshanks 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 affirm male potency. See Medusas Head, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 21213. Hertz has shown how the figure of Medusa had already been used successfully by antirevolutionaries in the French Revolution to produce just such effects. See also Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of the Medusa (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), 126. 37 Wardroper, 83.

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38 On French Revolutionary iconography, see Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 17891880, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984). 39 Hunt, 6667. 40 See Lisa Vargo, Unmasking Shelleys Mask of Anarchy, English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 4864. 41 Bamford, 164. See also S. Jones, 98. 42 English Cartoons, 13287, 13287A. In this cartoon, probably Cruikshanks most famous, John Bull appears in rags that barely cover his skeletal, emaciated frame. He is tied, shackled, and his lips are padlocked (with no grumbling written on the padlock). He stands on the Magna Carta with pen and paper in his tied hands. Shortly after the publication of Cruikshanks Death or Liberty!, Parliament passed the 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 of particular affront to writers and artists. 43 This is another example of the interconnected iconography of Cruikshanks and Shelleys work. Shelley wrote and printed A Letter to Lord Ellenborough in response to Eatons trial arguing for the right to religious opinion. See Wood on the trial of Eaton (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 Cruikshanks Radical Arms, printed 13 November 1819 for George Humphrey (English Cartoons, 13275). This cartoon similarly links the radical cause with womens sexual license; its central images are a drunken, masculine woman and a housebreaker, trampling on the symbols of government and religion. 51 I am not suggesting, as does Hlne Cixouss idealistic model, that we only have to look at Medusa head-on to see that she is laughing; the dominance of rape imagery in political iconography in 1819 makes this a difficult argument for me to pursue. However, others have made this argument. See Jay Clayton, Concealed Circuits: Frankensteins Monster, the Medusa and the Cyborg, Raritan (Spring 1996): 62 64; and Grant Scott, Shelley, Medusa, and the Perils of Ekphrasis, in The Poetics of Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jrgen 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 Beatrices words in a letter to Peacock on 9 September. He writes, These are as it were the thunders of the terrible storm which is approaching. The tyrants here as in the French Revolution have first shed blood may their execrable lessons not be learnt with equal docility: I still think that there will be no coming to close quarters until financial affairs decidedly bring the oppressors and oppressed together. Shelley and His Circle, 17721822, ed. Reiman, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 19612002), 6:89596. 54 Shelley, The Cenci, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 3.1.86109.

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Shelley, The Cenci, 3.1.10714. See Shelleys 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), 35657. Hereafter abbreviated M and cited parenthetically by stanza and line number. The sixth stanza, which was not originally published with the poem, is quoted in Neville Rogers, Shelley and the Visual Arts, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 12 (1961): 10. 59 Jerome McGann notes its connection to Ode to the West Wind, Sonnet: England in 1819, Prometheus Unbound, and other nineteenth-century representations of Medusa in The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology, Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 325. Judson links the poem to The Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, and Julian and Maddalo. For more on the poems literary, artistic, and critical contexts, see also Daniel Hughes, Shelley, Leonardo, and the Monsters of Thought, Criticism 12 (1970): 195212; Carol Jacobs, On Looking at Shelleys Medusa, Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 16379; and Rogers, 817. See also Nigel Leask on Shelleys Medusan effect (Shelleys Magnetic Ladies: Romantic Mesmerism and the Politics of the Body, in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts, 17801832, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale [New York: Routledge, 1992], 5378). 60 While On the Medusa is the only Shelley poem in the tradition of ekphrasis (another poem in that tradition is Keatss Ode on a Grecian Urn), it seems to me that, given the number of visual representations of the Peterloo massacre, Mask might be read similarly. On the ekphrastic aspect of Shelleys Medusa poem, see James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Politics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), 11924, and John Hollander, Gazers Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1995), 14246. 61 Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 103; hereafter abbreviated MA and cited parenthetically by line number. 62 The most recent criticism of Mask has focused on its political intent. See Hendrix for an analysis of how Mask reveals the tension between Shelleys exalted poetics and his practical politics (47). S. Jones has read the poem as a satire of succession, in which the shifts in the poem from figure to figure work to question the ground of representation itself (120); Scrivener evaluates the poems radical political bent in the context of contemporary iconography (198210); Vargo shows how Shelley breaks the form of the masque to show the power of popular rule; and Wolfson analyzes how Shelley uses gender in Mask to articulate an impasse in [his] political thinking between tragically futile and phantasmatically visionary courses of action (2). 63 Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 69, 68. 64 Cited in Morton D. Paley, Apocapolitics: Allusion and Structure in Shelleys Mask of Anarchy, Huntington Library Quarterly 54 (1991): 100. 65 The maniac maid appears in several of Shelleys poems. See Prometheus Unbound and Ode to Liberty. Though I can find no linguistic connection between the words maniac and maenad, the maniac maid and the maenad share a frenzied state, and the sounds of the phrase maniac maid suggest the word maenad or bacchante. Maniac maids, maenads, and Medusas are all of a piece: women out of
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patriarchal control and, therefore, threatening to the patriarchal order. See Judson for 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 Shelleys Medusa poem, including Mitchell, S. Jones, Judson, and Scott. For readings of this poem more interested in the aesthetic angle, see William Hildebrand, Self, Beauty and Horror: Shelleys Medusa Moment, in The New Shelley: Later Twentieth-Century Views, ed. G. Kim Blank (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 15065; Hughes; and Vernon Hyles, Medusa and the Romantic Concept of Beauty, in The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the 7th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 143 47. The latter reiterates Mario Prazs argument in Romantic Agony (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970). 68 Shelley, Ode to the West Wind, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 14; Sonnet: England in 1819, in Shelleys Poetry and Prose, 1314. 69 McGann, 7. 70 See Jacobs, McGann, and Scott. 71 Scott, 329. 72 In her brilliant deconstructive reading, Jacobs argues that Shelleys poem denies the mastery of Persean decapitation (171), of subject over object, and instead conflates 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.

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