Valperga : History and Romance

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  • 『ヴァルパーガ』 : 歴史とロマンス
  • ヴァルパーガ : レキシ ト ロマンス

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The object of this essay is to consider the characteristics of fictionality and its meaning in a romance, Mary Shelley's Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca(1823). After the revolutionary years following 1789-1815, and thereafter the oppressive dominion under the reactionary Hapsburg Emperors of Austria, people in Europe during this turbulent period recognized that their sense of history had basically changed. William Godwin in his essay, "Of History and Romance" (1797), which explored the relationship between history and romance, introduced his idea of the technique of the engraftment, with which the fictional romance is adequately blended with history. Valperga is a novel based on the life of Castruccio, an actual Ghibelline tyrannical ruler in fourteenth-century Tuscany. The locale of the novel is Valperga, an imaginary fortress-like castle, the last heiress of which is liberal Euthanasia, the Guelph, the Ghibelline's enemy. The relic of the medieval chivalry, exhibited there, shows us that Valperga inherits the romance tradition as a literary genre. Shelley, using the exploits of Castruccio recorded in 'public histories' almost diachronically, is trying to describe the respectively different ways of life of two women protagonists, for Castruccio, Euthanasia and Beatrice. There Shelley, relying on 'the private chronicles' in her own times, pictures their self-conscious feelings with imaginative metaphors. The medieval Holy Roman Empire imposed its authority on Italian city-states, just as a political Austrian sovereignty threatened Italian civic republicanism after 1818. Clearly Shelley in her romance, as Stuart Curran suggests, not only views real lives in the medieval past but through them, from the standpoint of a woman, contemplates the unrewarding actualities of people, living in obscurity on the periphery of the society in her own times and also in the future. Just as in Godwin's essay, Deidre Lynch compares such a design of Shelley's in the anachronistic fiction to the technique of the 'graft onto' the historical record. In the last scene depicting Euthanasia's death, Shelley impressively combines both historical fact and fictional realism. Here we find the 'virtuality' that Tilottama Rajan mentions as the site for the imagination.

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