2025/09/03 by Merrilees Roberts · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Rousseau and Enlightenment Thought
paper · doi:10.14712/2571452x.2025.69.9
openalex publication_date 2025/09/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/06
This article argues that Shelley’s Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude dramatizes the fictional Poet’s physical decline and death as a psychosomatic response to philosophical overreaching, where the pursuit of Ideal beauty produces a state akin to inflammatory processes and a sustained condition of shock fatigue. I demonstrate how Shelley’s depiction of illness is shaped by contemporary medical theories, particularly John Brown’s Elements of Medicine (1780) and John Hunter’s A Treatise on the Blood, Inflammation, and Gun-shot Wounds (1794). These works inform Shelley’s portrayal of the Poet’s flushed but wasting body and his over-excited sensory system, offering a physiological substrate for the poem’s metaphysical and erotic tensions. Rather than signalling the Poet’s moral or spiritual failure, his decline expresses a complex convergence of somatic and Ideal desires. The “veiled maid” whom he attempts to pursue beyond the grave is both an erotic object and a Neo-Platonic figure of perfected self-knowledge. By aligning erotic longing with the naturally ambiguous semiotics of inflammatory response, subjectivity emerges as an ecologically entangled phenomenon, responsive to both the shocks of material nature and the lure of Ideal forms.