Riassunto analitico
“But we are all Cassandras, and we are so blind that we do not give heed to the silent voice that makes itself heard within our soul. We then know the truth when the prophecies are fulfilled,” writes Mary Shelley in a letter to Teresa Guiccioli, in the event of Lord Byron’s death. This is the inescapable fate of the women she writes about, herself included, despite the agency she allows them in her novels. This thesis analyses the female characters and their spaces in Shelley’s Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), highlighting the differences between her historical novels and Walter Scott’s. By creating a canon divergent from Scott’s own, Shelley challenges the patriarchal constraints of historical fiction and reimagines women’s spaces within it.
Drawing on theories on space and gender, this thesis explores how Shelley constructs and problematises female spaces: Euthanasia’s castle as a contested site of power and loss, Beatrice’s imagination as both a source of agency and self-destruction, Monina’s ship as a rare space of female autonomy, and the courts of Katherine and Elizabeth as potential sites of influence and solidarity. Through these spaces, Shelley engages with the Cassandra paradox: Shelley’s application of the paradox to her female characters both hinders and brings light to the position of women in patriarchal societies. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that Shelley’s historical novels expose the tensions between confinement and autonomy, vision and silencing, and space and power.
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