Shelley and androgyny

This thesis explores Percy Bysshe Shelley's uses of androgyny alongside his readings and translations of Plato, with particular attention to the Phaedo and the Symposium. Taking its cue from Diane Long Hoeveler's analysis of the failed quality of the canonical male Romantics' uses of androgyny, this study takes up Hoeveler's exception of 'Platonic metaphysics' to demonstrate the ways in which Shelley's uses of androgyny are subtly combined with his Platonism. Aside from in his translation of the Symposium, the word 'androgyny' does not appear within Shelley's works, but the idea underpins his poetic thoughts and is extant throughout his compositions from 1811 until his accidental death in 1822. Shelley's corpus expands the meaning of androgyny from its traditional conception of the reunion of the masculine and the feminine to encompass the 'psychic union' of the poet and the reader, and this mental mingling includes the poet's own identification as reader through acts of intertextuality and allusivity. 'Shelley became Shelley through his immersion in Plato', Michael O'Neill writes, and Shelley's 'poetic self-awareness…is always bound up with awareness of otherness'. Ultimately, Shelley tests the bounds of selfhood between reader and poet, where for Plato the reader is implicated as an interlocutor, by imagining and imaging the reconciliation of self and Other through androgyny's idealisation of mental union. Working chronologically, this thesis analyses androgyny in five of Shelley's major works: Alastor, Laon and Cythna, Prometheus Unbound, The Witch of Atlas, and Epipsychidion. The introduction directs attention to androgyny in three less canonical poems, 'The Sunset', 'Love's Philosophy', and '…sweet flower that I had sung…', and the conclusion considers Shelley's final lyrics to Jane Williams. The mingling of the masculine and the feminine and the harmonising of self and Other pervade Shelley's works, and this thesis demonstrates how Shelley self-consciously implements androgyny with Platonic subtlety.