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Euthanasia's handkerchief; or, Theobject at the end of historySonia Hofkosh aa Department of English , Tufts University , Medford, MA, USAPublished online: 21 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Sonia Hofkosh (2009) Euthanasia's handkerchief; or, The object at the end ofhistory, European Romantic Review, 20:5, 689-697, DOI: 10.1080/10509580903407845

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European Romantic ReviewVol. 20, No. 5, December 2009, 689–697

ISSN 1050-9585 print/ISSN 1740-4657 online© 2009 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/10509580903407845http://www.informaworld.com

Euthanasia’s handkerchief; or, The object at the end of history

Sonia Hofkosh*

Department of English, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USATaylor and FrancisGERR_A_440962.sgm10.1080/10509580903407845European Romantic Review1050-9585 (print)/1740-4657 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis2050000002009SoniaHofkoshsonia.hofkosh@tufts.edu

This paper focuses on the white silk handkerchief that washes up after a stormwith the wreckage of the ship that was taking Euthanasia to her exile at the end ofMary Shelley’s historical romance, Valperga. Thinking about the representationof history as a history of representation, I explore the persistence and the opacityof objects, images, and visual phenomena as agents of historical understanding.With a few golden hairs still in its knot, the handkerchief is a relic of an individualbody, but it also remembers other pasts as well, as its allusion to the famoushandkerchief in Othello suggests. At once an ontological fact and a spectral sign,the handkerchief marks the turn in Shelley’s conclusion from “private chronicles”(subjectivity, fantasy) to “public histories” (objectivity, the actual), or, rather, itmarks the incompleteness of that turn. As residue, an extraneous yet tangible tracein the text, Euthanasia’s handkerchief cannot by definition be assimilated into alogic of identity, but neither does it provide unobstructed access to a communalmeaning or reality beyond or in opposition to such a logic. At the unstableboundary between presence and the past, memory and forgetting, this transitionalobject gestures towards history as an aesthetics of the uncanny.

In the final chapter of Mary Shelley’s war-torn historical romance, Valperga; or, TheLife and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), the ship that is takingEuthanasia to her exile in Sicily goes down in a storm at sea. Or so we are to under-stand, for the event is represented only indirectly, after the fact.

Nothing more was ever known of the Sicilian vessel which bore Euthanasia. It neverreached its destined port, nor were any of those on board ever after seen. The centinelswho watched near Vado, a tower on the sea beach of the Maremma, found the followingday, that the waves had washed on shore some of the wrecks of a vessel; they picked upa few planks and a broken mast, round which, tangled with some of its cordage, was awhite silk handkerchief, such a one as had bound the tresses of Euthanasia the night thatshe had embarked, and in its knot were a few golden hairs. (437)

The white silk handkerchief entangled among the broken bits of the ship attracts theattention of the sentinels on the sea beach of the Maremma. Like them, we find it anevocative object and, encouraged by the accretive cadence of the sentence in which itappears, may want to pick it up to look at it for another moment, more closely, notic-ing the golden hairs still in its knot. I will be looking at this evocative object here asa way to think about the representation of history in Shelley’s novel, which will meanthinking about the history of representation, for, as Stephen Bann contends, issues ofhistorical method involving the boundary line between verifiable fact and fiction

*Email: sonia.hofkosh@tufts.edu

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inevitably touch on the problem of representation (16).1 In other words, in focusingon the handkerchief among the wreckage of planks and mast where it both marks thedeath of Euthanasia and signals the conclusion of the novel, I am less concerned withthe object as documentary evidence offering access to a pre-existing reality, than I amin attending to the efficacy of objects, images, or visual phenomena as such, what wemight call the resonant inflections of materiality itself. The history of representationcan thus be understood in terms of Arjun Appadurai’s well-known formulation of the“the social life of things,” whereby, as he says, “their meanings are inscribed on theirforms, their uses, their trajectories” (5). I will be proposing that the object situated asit is, at or as the end – of the individual subject and of the narrative – lives a double,transitional life in Shelley’s text. As a remnant, a relic of a particular body, the whitesilk handkerchief with the golden hairs still in its knot is at once a matter of incontro-vertible substance or facticity and ravaged, spectral, unreadable.

I take up the handkerchief in Shelley’s Valperga as part of a larger considerationof the power and complexity of mundane materials in romantic-era writing morebroadly, what William Hazlitt, conjurer of the spirit of the age, embraced as “thebrilliancy or the variety” of “the most trifling objects,” such as the letter bell that atonce announces the daily mail and tolls him back to a long-forgotten self in the finalof his many meditations on the past (17: 376–7).2 Ordinary objects, like a letter bellor a handkerchief, are “shining fragments” to Hazlitt, but as Mary Shelley’s novel alsosuggests, they do not function simply or only as repositories of individual experienceor imaginative investment, as catalysts for nostalgia or personal fantasy, as fetish, butalso with compelling reality effects, that is, as significant agents in the creation oftranspersonal or communal value, public memory, or what Bann, following Foucault,calls not history exactly, but “historical consciousness,” the culture’s collective“desire for history” (9–10).

Fragment I: Ocular proof

Washed up on the sea beach of the Maremma, a tangible trace of an existence, proofthat something was, that something happened to someone, the white silk handkerchiefwith the golden hairs in its knot is an ontological fact: the sentinels can see it, pick itup, hold it in their hands and feel its textures, smooth or knotted. But as WilliamGodwin would assert, “nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more unsatis-factory then the evidence of facts” (367).3 Like “the broken fragments and the scat-tered ruins of evidence” which are, according to Godwin, the historian’s onlymaterials, the white silk handkerchief is at once referentially overdetermined andreferentially opaque.4 Identified as “such a one as had bound the tresses of Euthana-sia,” it gestures towards specific reference and yet also deflects specificity, pointinginstead to an array of referential possibilities. It gestures towards specific referenceand thus towards a model of history as archeological or archival recovery by persistingthrough the storm, emerging out of the ocean Shelley figures as death itself, the“grave” that haunts even those on land who hear “the hoarse and constant murmurs ofthe far-off sea” (437) during the stormy night. The handkerchief with those hairs thatare among the “the most precious of all keepsakes,” according to Leigh Hunt (18), iswhat survives of the person Euthanasia and her “sylph-like form” (71); its appearanceamong the wreckage attests to her bodily presence even as it confirms that she mustbe gone, like the past itself, like history, nothing besides remains.5 In its metonymiccondensation of Euthanasia as a particular body – she is more than once characterized

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in the text by reference to “her golden hair … clustered round her neck as white asmarble” (176) – the white silk handkerchief with the golden hairs in its knot simulta-neously represents her and enacts her displacement, into and as an object. In this itoperates not unlike the “small silver plate” that Beatrice, Shelley’s other heroine,wears “bound by a white riband on her forehead” (200), a potent signifier of both herpower (it names her Ancilla Dei: “the chosen vessel into which God has poured aportion of his spirit” [212]) and her fragility (she unties it to offer herself to Castruccioand is thus “fallen, and for ever lost” [231]).

Indeed, Euthanasia is described early in the novel as an object, an aestheticartifact, “the richest ornament” among the luxurious furnishings of the rooms atValperga:

A small tripod of white marble curiously carved, stood in the middle of the room,supporting a bronze censor in which incense was burning; several antique vases andtripods adorned the room; the tables were of the finest stone, or of glass mosaic; theseats or couches were covered with scarlet cloth inwoven with gold. Within this wasEuthanasia’s own apartment; it was hung with blue silk, and the pavement was mosaic,the couches were richly embroidered, and a small table of verde antique stood in themiddle of the room. In the recesses were several stands for books, writing materials,&c.; and in the embrasures of the windows were bronze stands, on which were placedfinely embossed gold vases, filled with such flowers as the season afforded. But,amidst all this luxury, the richest ornament of the room was the lovely possessorherself. (141)

Situated as the culmination of a passage striking in its excess of material description,Euthanasia blends into even as she stands out from such a lavish display of interiordecoration. “Her form was light, and every limb was shaped according to those rulesby which the exquisite statues of the ancients have been modelled [sic]” (141). If thehandkerchief functions as an image or a symbol of Euthanasia, then, it appears to doso not only symbolically, that is, by substitution of object for subject, but as embodi-ment or incarnation, as the very material out of which the subject is made. Yet ifEuthanasia is in more than a figural sense already an object, we should note that thisobject paradoxically becomes most evocative, most resonant as an image, when itwashes up on the sea beach of the Maremma as remains. For Mary Shelley, as JulieCarlson has recently noted, remains can be vital, efficacious, “challenging the dead-ness of the dead” (10) even in rendering the subject in object form. The handkerchiefis initially mentioned in the text in passing, the kind of insignificant or extraneousnarrative detail that may contribute generally to the atmosphere of realism in the novelbut to which no other meaning is attached – “the wind gathered from the west, andscattered her hair, which, as she quitted her prison, she had slightly bound with ahandkerchief” (436). When it returns as a fragment, the mere residue of a body, theapparitional detail becomes emphatic, the trifling object a monument.

But this tangled piece of white silk is not only a monument to Euthanasia as aparticular individual or to the ideals she is seen to represent in the novel (for example,“democratic governance and universal love,” in Betty Bennett’s reading [148]). As afragment, the handkerchief cannot by definition be fully assimilated into a logic ofidentity, even one that posits death as its confirming event, the site both of its emer-gence and its end. The object exceeds the specificity of its memorial function; itrecalls other pasts as well, and thus gestures towards an account of history as uncanny– familiar and yet unremembered, strange in being recognized. In its status as visualevidence, “ocular proof” (Othello 3.3.360) that Euthanasia existed and has perished,

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fulfilling the fate predicted by her name, the handkerchief invokes a complex, sharedpast through its reference to Othello.

The allusion to the white handkerchief embroidered with strawberries in Shakes-peare’s tragedy also registers the object’s opacity, its resistance to its role as a memorialto subjectivity – to individual memory or desire – or to what Othello calls “that recog-nizance and pledge of love” (5.2.214). As a symbol of a woman’s purity or virtue, itselfthe abstract signature of a corporeal vulnerability, the handkerchief has long beenregarded as a crucial element in the play’s unfolding violence. But as Harry Bergerproposes, “too much attention has been paid to the symbolic meanings of the famoushandkerchief and too little to … the odd circumstances of its appearance and removal”(235) as a visual artifact in the drama. Andrew Sofer would concur, arguing that “thehandkerchief is not merely a sign but a performer in the play’s action, and its physicalmovements and shifting emotional impact deserve as much attention as its symbolism”(“Felt” 368).6 We should consider, then, that the handkerchief is “a thing,” though “atrifle” as it is called (3.3.301, 5.2.228), with a “social life.” It is an object with its ownform, uses, and trajectories, its own occulted history, which is a history, as the W.J.T.Mitchell of What Do Pictures Want? might want to claim, of its own intentions anddesires; no mere prop, its status as personal property being precisely what is at issuein the play, the handkerchief circulates through Othello, acquiring multiple meaningsas it moves from hand to hand, lost and found, determining human affect and actionand the outcome of the play.7

The history of the handkerchief is not definitive, but is repeatedly subject torevision. When Othello, newly jealous, first demands Desdemona show it to him, herecounts its elaborate, fantastic genealogy,

… That handkerchiefDid an Egyptian to my mother give;She was a charmer, and could almost readThe thoughts of people. She told her, while she kept it,‘Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father to her love …‘Tis true; there’s magic in the web of it.A sibyl, that had numb’red in the worldThe sun to course two hundred compasses,In her prophetic fury sew’d the work;The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk,And it was dy’d in mummy which the skillfulConserv’d of maidens’ hearts. (3.4.55–75)

Later, Desdemona now dead, Othello argues rather less extravagantly to justify hermurder, “I saw it in his hand; / It was a handkerchief, an antique token / My fathergave my mother” (5.2.216–7). Whether apotropaic, prophetic, or more mundanely aprecious family keepsake, the revision of the handkerchief’s history suggests not onlythat Othello deploys the object to suit his own narrative ends, but also that the objectrefuses consistent explanation or incorporation into a coherent story. It acts instead asa kind of aporia, an impasse to singular or absolute truth. In Berger’s reading, itbecomes a nexus of misrecognitions and what he calls disrememberings, rather than asymbol with a particular referent – fidelity or infidelity, for instance, or the body of awoman whose skin is whiter “than snow / And smooth as monumental alabaster”(5.2.4–5), a Desdemona or a Euthanasia. The handkerchief, Berger maintains, is at thecenter “of a complex motivational conflict” wherein characters “alienate their agencyfrom themselves to it as to a scapegoat, a pharmakon, a fetish” (244). If there is “some

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wonder in this handkerchief” (3.4.101), as Berger’s amassing of figures might itselfintimate, it may be that it consolidates and enacts the uncanny effects of representa-tion: manifestation and erasure, memory and forgetting, the capacity of the objectsimultaneously to render transparent and to obscure the actual.

Fragment II: Beatrice’s dream

In Freud’s taxonomy of uncanny effects, the one that he proposes “deserves specialemphasis” is “when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, aswhen something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears to us in reality,or when a symbol takes over the full function of the thing it symbolizes” (244).Several episodes in Valperga not only illustrate this convergence of the imaginarywith the real, but in addition transpose the effects of the uncanny from the individualpsyche to the collective consciousness. If the handkerchief can be construed as asymbol that “takes over the full function of the thing it symbolizes” by materializingthe particular body it displaces, these episodes extend and subsume private into publicfantasy by staging imaginary events which exert the determinative force of the real.

The first such episode occurs early in the novel. One morning when he isfourteen, Castruccio disappears from his father’s house and goes alone to Florence,lured by “a strange and tremendous spectacle,” an “exhibition” of Hell based onDante’s poem to be performed there (65). As he approaches the city, he experiences“a peculiar sensation”:

he felt free; there was no one near him to control his motions, to order him to stay or go;his own will guided his progress, swift or slow, as the various thoughts that arose in hismind impelled him. He felt as if the air that quickly glided over him, was part of his ownnature … his imagination … luxuriate[d] in dreams of power and distinction. (65–6)

Once at his journey’s end, however, these dreams of autonomous agency are, like thestreets of Florence, “blocked,” and he finds “he had better follow the multitude, thanseek a way of his own.” He is “driven along by the crowd” to the Arno. The river isset up as a vast theatre, “covered by boats, on which scaffoldings were erected, hungwith black cloth” among which “moved legions of ghastly and distorted shapes, somewith horns of fire, and hoofs, and horrible wings; others the naked representatives ofthe souls in torment; mimic shrieks burst on the air, screams and demonic laughter.”Castruccio’s fantasy here merges with communal nightmare – “the terrible effect ofsuch a scene was enhanced by the circumstance of its being no more than an actualrepresentation of what then existed in the imagination of the spectators.” Indeed, the“infernal drama was acted to the life” and thus seems to Castruccio, now absorbed intothe crowd, “for a moment as a reality, rather than a representation” (66). The very nextmoment, moreover, the “mimic shrieks” actually become real, including his own("with a sudden shriek he stretched out his arms"), when the bridge upon which “acountless multitude” stands collapses into the river, “accompanied by fearful screams,and voices that called on the names of those whom they were never more to behold”(66). What had been a “terrible effect,” becomes in fact “beyond description terrible.”When Castruccio runs from the scene, “the first idea that struck him, as he recoveredhis breath, was – ‘I am escaped from Hell!’” (67).

The second such episode, Beatrice’s Judgement of God [sic] in Volume 2,replays in Ferrara some of the crucial features of the spectacle in Florence, though itassigns a somewhat different valence to the constitutive force of representation. As

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he had “hastened” as a boy to the “scene” in Florence, Castruccio now “hurried tothe scene” of Beatrice’s trial as an “imposter” (214). In an uncanny repetition of hisearlier absorption by the crowd and into the theatrical event, he finds “every avenuechoked up by the multitude” (217) and, joining the “eager spectators, whose fury ofhope and fear approached madness,” he feels with them, “sick with dread” (218) ashe watches the trial. Though the reality this elaborate exhibition ultimately appearsto confirm is, as the narrative has already revealed, “a lying and blasphemous mock-ery” (216) rather than a divinely sanctioned truth, the representation is no lesscompelling even for those who, like Castruccio, know that it has been staged. “Everyheart beat fast; Castruccio overcome by uncontrollable pity, would have darted toforward to save her, but some one held him back” (219). The productive crux of thiscommunal absorption is Beatrice and her own “extravagant dreams” (214). Whenshe preaches, “every eye was fixed on her, – every countenance changed as herschanged” (213); the crowd internalizes the “images” of her imagination, “vivid asreality” (230), in an affective consensus articulated collectively as “a sigh of manyhearts” or “a groan of horror through the multitude” (219). Thus, although at thispoint in the story Shelley has already made it very clear that Beatrice is to be under-stood as “deluded,” “ever the dupe” of the “forgery of her imagination” (234), thenovel ultimately perplexes our judgment along with that of the crowd on thequestion of whether Beatrice is pathological or indeed prophetic, like the sibyl whosewed the handkerchief in Othello. For, as we hear later in Beatrice’s own narrative,when she finally awakens from “the wild dreams of her imagination” (211), she, likeAdam, finds them truth.

Beatrice tells her tale in Volume 3. Although Euthanasia urges her to “letmemory go to its grave,” to forget, Beatrice insists on remembering her “wretchedhistory” (352). As a history of “the fearful change from dream to reality” (347),which is also how Euthanasia describes her own awakening from the illusions ofyouth, Beatrice’s narrative is a kind of ghost story, in which dreams that we hadhitherto regarded as imaginary return as real (“dreams haunted my sleep; and theirrecollected images strayed among my day-thoughts, as thin and grim ghosts” [357])and Beatrice herself becomes a wraith, emerging from a cave dug under the side of amountain (363) or from a dungeon – “yellow, meager, – a shadow of what [she] hadbeen” (357). “What was it? there was something said, something done, a scenepourtrayed [sic]” (358). Beatrice describes her recurrent dream of a flooded plain, adeserted town, a ruinous house, and then, she says, “something happened” that shecannot explain – a sight to dream of not to tell. She wakes up to find herself impris-oned in the house she had imagined and she is tortured there, traumatized. Yet thisvery brutal physical experience remains unexplained and inexplicable in the novel, asin Beatrice’s own narration – “it was the carnival of devils, when we miserablevictims, were dragged out to – Enough, enough” (360); she interrupts her own story,leaving it incomplete, unreadable, what happened, “who was the author of these ills”we never really know.8 And though “wrenched in tortures” in this “infernal house”so that she is substantially transformed (“I came out grey, old, and withered” [359]),her description of the “carnival of devils” (360), again recalls the phantasmagoria atFlorence, casting the real in the metaphorical register of representation. That “some-thing happened” is all we know, and perhaps all we need to or can know: the event,not unlike the one to which Paul de Man refers in “Shelley Disfigured,” “is no longersimply imaginary or symbolic” (67), for the distinction between imagination andreality is here effaced.9

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Fragment III: Critical turns

Critical readings of Shelley’s work have pointed to the distinctive approach that shetakes to history and to the genre of historical fiction, especially as it was practised byGodwin and by Walter Scott, and also in response to her own earlier writing and thewriting of Percy Shelley. When she takes what Deidre Lynch characterizes as “herhistorical turn,” Shelley “writes against the grain of official historiography’s defini-tions about the truth of the past” (143). Stuart Curran notes that Valperga appropriatesmany characteristics of Scott’s Ivanhoe “and turns them to radically divergent ends”(“Introduction” xvii). For Tilottama Rajan, Valperga is “Shelley’s attempt to turn[the] radical negativity” of Mathilda “in a more creative direction” (“Introduction” 15)by drawing on the theory of possibility outlined in Godwin’s “Of History andRomance.” Daniel White finds that “Valperga turns to an Italian historical narrativeto critique the idealism we associate with Prometheus Unbound” (91). These areexcellent readings. What I want to highlight in them is that in one way or another, theyforeground Shelley’s turning. In Valperga, it appears, Shelley turns and turns again,most explicitly, perhaps, at the end of the novel, where in the conclusion of only a fewpages that follow the death of Euthanasia, she dispatches the final years ofCastruccio’s life and adventures.

The private chronicles, from which the foregoing relation has been collected, end withthe death of Euthanasia. It is therefore in public histories alone that we find an accountof the last years of the life of Castruccio. We can know nothing of his grief, when hefound that she whom he had once tenderly loved, and whom he had ever revered as thebest and wisest among his friends, had died. We know, however that, during the twoyears that he survived this event, his glory and power arose not only higher than theyever had before done, but they surpassed those of any former Italian prince.

Here the novel, in “suddenly shifting its mode,” according to Curran, “almost jolts thereader” (“Valperga” 107). In Michael Rossington’s view, “these sentences have adisconcerting effect” (106). To Lynch, the change is “unsettling” (145). Turning from“private chronicles” to “public history,” from character development to chronology,individual affect (such as grief or love) to structures of power, the romance of possi-bility to the logic of necessity, feminine to masculine, or even, we might venture tosay, in Jerome Christensen’s terms, from history to posthistory, such turning and re-turning might well induce a kind of critical vertigo. But it does so, I want to suggestin ending, precisely by making that turn only incompletely, or, we might say, by mark-ing it as a turn, a trope for history itself. This may partly explain why some of Shel-ley’s best readers posit a resurrection or at least a spectral return at the book’s end.Despite the evidence of the handkerchief entangled in the broken mast on the seabeach of the Maremma, or, perhaps, because of it, because Shelley, like Hazlitt, findsthat “the past is alive and stirring with objects” (8: 25), because, as Carlson explains,Shelley’s project as a writer is to “find life in non-feeling things” (10), that readers canassert, as Rossington does, that “the death of Euthanasia is not a moment of closure orfinality” (118), or as Rajan puts it, “she does not die … becoming [instead] a phantasmin the political unconscious” (“Introduction” 38), or as Kari Lokke remarks, “Shelleyfinds a means of keeping [her] alive to haunt the historical imagination” (513). Whatthe critical tendency to read the novel past its conclusion demonstrates is how muchwe need to forget in order to remember. If it reminds us of anything, Euthanasia’swhite silk handkerchief with a few golden hairs in its knot reminds us of our amnesiaand of our desire for a history that will not come to an end.

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Notes1. On the question of fiction’s contribution to historiography, see also Rigney. Where Rigney

associates the limits of historical representability with the aesthetics of the sublime (andthus with a trajectory of power), I will be more interested in thinking through the lessclearly or fully recuperative dynamics of the uncanny.

2. Hazlitt is cited from The Complete Works by volume and page number. I discuss theaesthetics of “the most trifling objects” in Hazlitt, which includes his evocation of Othelloand his account of history as uncanny, in “Broken Images.”

3. On Shelley’s debt to Godwin’s unpublished “Of History and Romance,” see Rajan,“Between Romance and History.” Also see Lynch on Shelley as historical novelist.

4. Euthanasia’s handkerchief also appears to literalize Michel de Certeau’s metaphoricalcharacterization of historical documents as the debris that “the historian has been able tosee on the sands from which a presence has since been washed away” in The Writing ofHistory (3).

5. My sense of the function of the handkerchief as “physical relic” here is indebted to but doesnot wholly agree with Susan Stewart’s observations in On Longing: Narratives of theMiniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection: “If the function of the souvenirproper is to create a continuous and personal narrative of the past, the function of suchsouvenirs of death is to disrupt and disclaim that continuity. Souvenirs of the mortal bodyare not so much a nostalgic celebration of the past as they are an erasure of the significanceof history” (140). I am suggesting that it may be precisely in representing disruption orerasure (what I am calling “the end”) that the object makes its historical claims.

6. See also Frances Teague, “Objects in Othello” and, for the theatrical and symbolic pre-history of the handkerchief, Sofer’s The Stage Life of Props.

7. See Sofer, “Felt Absences”: “It is as if Shakespeare has left it up to the handkerchief itselfto choreograph the action” (390).

8. Several other incompletely explained or inexplicable elements in the novel – notably thepresence of Bindo, the albino dwarf, and the motivations of the witch Fior di Mandragola– suggest that in Valperga Shelley is interested in registering the effects of such narrativeperplexity rather than in resolving it into a coherent logic, whether construed in terms ofhistory or fiction.

9. The “event that is no longer simply imaginary or symbolic” in de Man’s essay is “the actualdeath [by drowning] and subsequent disfigurement of Shelley’s body” (66) which, for deMan, constitutes the challenge of reading romanticism in resistance to a model of historyas archeological recuperation.

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