The Cottage in P.B. Shelley’s Gothic Works

Résumé En

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is best known for his poetical idealisms, yet the young Romantic started with two Gothic novels, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne (1810). Of all the visual arts, architecture is the only field that stayed with Shelley throughout his career, due to his early interest in Gothic space. This presentation will focus on cottages, a prominent topos of the Gothic, from Radcliffe to Dacre, although we usually think of castles and churches. The cottage, like the inn, is a place where characters can find shelter or, on the contrary, be trapped. When it is picturesquely situated at the foot of an eminence or embosomed by trees, it enables characters to return to nature, but the more artificial cottage orné[e] may subject them to human nature too, like lust and violence. Less symbolically, cottages can be stages on which characters look through casements, escape through doors or rush down narrow steps. A comparison between Radcliffe’s labyrinthine abbey in The Romance of the Forest (1791)1 and Shelley’s cottages will stress the importance of Gothic space, while showing the merits of the first and shortcomings of the second. Connections will also be made with other types of Gothic space in Shelley’s works, like castles and churches, in order to show whether those different sorts of edifices are described in the same way, as is often the case with Radcliffe.