The Web of Human Things: Narrative and Identity in Alastor

Abstract

Labyrinths, weavings and related figures are ubiquitous in Shelley’s texts, whether they are used to characterise language or other ways of grasping the world, such as thought, vision or emotion. Thus in Prometheus Unbound language ‘rules with Daedal harmony a throng/Of thoughts and forms’ whose complexity it does not so much eliminate as contain within its own labyrinthine structure (IV.416–17). In an essay on imagery, Shelley describes the mind as ‘a wilderness of intricate paths … a world within a world’ (Shelley, 1911, II, p. 102). Perhaps the most famous of such images occurs in The Revolt of Islam, where Cythna describes the tracing of signs on the sand to range

These woofs, as they were woven of my thought:

Clear elemental shapes, whose smallest change

A subtler language within languge wrought

(VII.xxxii)