The Politics of Reception [The Cenci] 1

In Shelleyan Eros (1990), William Ulmer combines various critical approaches especially deconstruction, reception theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis in order to probe Shelley's poetic treatment of desire. As the negation of Shelley's Promethean myth, The Cenci both reflects and disfigures the metaphorical idealism of Prometheus Unbound. In The Cenci, regrettably, this genealogical fantasy is an exemplary act of imagination. Beatrice's imagined infant will image 'what she most abhors', her father, by memorializing the violence that impregnated her. Shelley's treatment of ideological appropriation reflects his psychological argument. The reversible mirrorings that leave meaning socially constructed and ultimately indeterminate, the opportunity for misreading presented by such indeterminacy, the metaphorical structure of ideology all recur in Beatrice's public addresses in Acts IV and V. The Cenci makes the poet a cooperative participant in the reconsolidation of oppression a possibility Shelley may deny elsewhere but finally cannot deny here.