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        In the preface to his closet drama, The Cenci, Shelly tells us that the play depicts the struggle of a daughter and her father. The father, Count Francesco Cenci, was an old man who “having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived at length an implacable hatred against his children which shewed itself toward one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion, aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence" (Reiman, 238) <1>.  This daughter, Beatrice, failing to escape from “what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and of mind, at length plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common tyrant.”  The crime was discovered and the perpetrators put to death.  The drama portrays the manner in which this "most gentle and amiable being..." was "violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance and opinion” and “urged to this tremendous deed by an impulse which overpowered its horror.”  My essay will consider the similarities of the Count and his daughter and how, finally, the daughter was transformed into a tyrant like her father. Starting with a moral scheme adapted from Nietzsche’s discussion of absurdity in The Birth of Tragedy and the prerogatives of aristocrats in part nine of Beyond Good and Evil, "What is Noble," I will extend this Nietzschean argument  with some observations on the ethical and aesthetic properties of monstrosity made by Kant in the Third Critique's "Analytic of the Sublime." The notion of monstrosity, will, in turn, be considered relative to the concept of tyranny as well as with regard to the representation of magnitude in the aesthetic of Kant's mathematical sublime.

          Cenci would find in  monstrous crimes such as rape and incest the possibility of exceeding the limitations of nature. Or, more precisely, he wishes to surpass the sensibility by which humans are "naturalized" within the systematic definitions of good and evil proper to the Christian morality of the play's Italian Catholicism. Yet he is dependent upon the very concepts that structure such moralities--nature, evil and good--as the possibility of his exaltation of himself beyond the definition and limits that obtain through these concepts. Thus, he needs nature to overcome nature, and he needs laws which he can violate in order to exalt himself as the law. Consequently, nature remains the ground upon which he can put his monstrosity into practice. He also requires victims for whom the normative appearances of nature and morality continue to have value as such. After the fact of her violation, Beatrice too wishes to preserve the appearances, merely as such,  of the natural and moral cosmos apart from whatever grounding they might have in the Christian ideals of faith, hope and charity. She believes that she has been made a monster by her father's monstrous acts and is unwilling to accept the humiliation of this defilement. Since, to her, identity is a construction of the uncompromized  appearances and values of her  social and cultural norms, she wishes, at all costs, to preserve the appearance of her own inviolate adhesion to these norms.
 

        Throughout the drama, Cenci is termed a tyrant by members of his family (1) . The charge is just in that he regards others simply as the means to his own ends. Thus he denies any claim that they may possess as subjects who have ends and purposes independent of his. Cenci finds in his victims the means to satisfy his arbitrary pleasure. To him the only value that they have is their utility toward this gratification. In this case, the compliance of the victims is achieved through acts of extreme violence and humiliation. This too is not unusual. Tyrants who seek to subjugate their people may, as in terrorist states, use trauma as a form of social control. Arbitrary violence generates fear and, thus, secures the compliance of the populace. In this very utilitarian sense, such tyrants employ the affects of their victims, their fear, pity and hope, as ethical material through which their subjection is possible.

         Yet if this matter of arbitrary violence is the typical fare of tyrants, Cenci's tyranny is especially refined. His pleasure does not simply require that his subjects be available as human instruments, as the monstrous means whose compliance secures for him some otherwise mundane version of happiness. There is no banality in his evil. Cenci is interested in cruelty not merely as means through which he can command the compliance of his victims in pursuit of some end to which they would, otherwise, be incidental. Cenci seeks in the ethical substance of his victims not only the means to his pleasure, but the matter as well. His pleasure and his purpose are to work in, on and at the moral or ethical subjectivity of his victims in order to destroy them. In this, Cenci is not indifferent to the ethical claims of his subjects, rather he cultivates a very subtle understanding of the moral and emotional psychologies at work in the ethical material of these claims. Cenci's art is to find in the ethical particularity of his victims contingencies through which their moral and emotional destruction is possible. Consider the subtle theological and psychological stakes in his pursuit of Beatrice. His ultimate aim is to disinherit her from the moral possibilities of the Christian universe. But her damnation is something that he can only secure with her consent. He must destroy her emotionally in order for her to destroy herself spiritually. He aims for a humiliation so total that she will lose faith in her eternal reward:
 

She shall become (for what she most abhors

Shall have fascination to entrap

Her loathing will), to her own conscious self

All she appears to others; and when dead,

As she shall die unshrived and unforgiven,

A rebel to her father and her God (IV, I, 85-90)

        Let's now consider this deformation of Beatrice's Self-esteem, or moral identity, more particularly in terms of the emotional causes of her ethical subjectivity. Cenci resolves to rape his daughter because such an act would utterly transgress the grounds, limits and possibilities of filial love, including, significantly, her ability to situate herself within the genealogical structures of her society's patriarchal world view, and, therefore, within the vision of natural and sacred order built around such paradigms. If Beatrice takes to heart the worst judgments of Rome's shame morality and its suppositions about the place of one so dishonored, she will be vulnerable on these grounds. Her moral definition, "her own conscious self," will degenerate to the status of an illusion and, as such, become susceptible to the efforts of Cenci (2) . So humiliated, she could no longer think herself as belonging to either the natural or the moral cosmoi that are unified in the Christian world picture. Thus her social and physical degradation is to be Cenci's means to her eternal damnation. Here the bond between father and daughter is no longer to serve as a condition within in which filial love is to be developed and sustained in a natural and moral existence. Rather, it is to become the means to annihilate the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, or the Shelleyan virtues of love, hope and Self-esteem.

        The conflict between Beatrice and Cenci has been a moral one from the outset. For all his depravity, Cenci was, initially at least, cowed by Beatrice's ability to resist him. Consider how her stepmother, Lucretia, speaks to Beatrice about her resolution:

 
 

. . .you alone stood up, and with strong words

Checked his unnatural pride: and I could see

Until this hour thus thou have ever stood

Between us and your father's moody wrath

Like a protecting presence: your firm mind

Has been our only refuge and defense. (II, I, 43-49)

If, as Lucretia says, Cenci is proud beyond nature, Beatrice quells his pride when she compels his deference. Thus she limits the extent that the exercise of his will can be said to be "unnatural." We can now understand Cenci's desire to get beyond such moral limitations when we realize that the qualms that he still possesses are in some sense linked to the autonomy of Beatrice. To overcome this last obstacle to his depraved ambitions, Cenci resolves to rape Beatrice both to humiliate her beyond the possibility of her moral autonomy and to take his final step beyond the morality that he despises. Until the humiliation of Beatrice has been accomplished, his Bildung will remain incomplete. This is evident in the steps he has to take to overcome his hesitation prior to this act. Cenci must steel himself against what nature remains in him, so he calls for wine:

Fill up this goblet with Greek wine. I said

I would not drink this evening; but I must;

For, strange to say, I feel my spirits fail

With thinking what I have decreed to do.--

                [Drinking the wine.


Be thou the resolution of quick youth

Within my veins, and manhood's purpose stern,

And age's firm, cold, subtle villainy;

As if thou wert indeed my children's blood

Which I did thirst to drink! The charm works well;

It must be done; it shall be done, I swear! (I, iii, 169-78)

    Cenci affirms his commitment to rape and incest through allusions to murder and cannibalism, all in a parody of the Eucharist (3) . Yet, figured even as such, these perverse comparisons merely amplify the distorted theological imagination of the play. Cenci does not see himself as acting simply on his own behalf:

 
 

I do not feel as if I were a man,

But like a fiend appointed to chastise

The offenses of some unremembered world (IV, I, 160-62).
 

This is more apparent to closer scrutiny of Cenci's sense of mission which is, again, to punish Beatrice as "a rebel to her father and her God" (IV, I, 90). Thus, if Lucretia sees Cenci's behavior as immoral and unnatural, Cenci regards it as supra-moral and supernatural. He is merely executing God's wrath. Cenci's God, however, is created in his own image; both are beyond all canons of morality (4) . In the context of his repeated inversions of the Eucharist, including the example just cited, and his comparison of himself to the fiend, Cenci may believe himself to be an agent of God's damnation in a manner that parallels and inverts Christ's role as redeemer. If Christ accepts his humanity in order to redeem humanity, Cenci would exceed his humanity in order to effect the damnation of his victim who is to die "unshrived and unforgiven" (IV, I, 89). Yet, if Cenci is a sort of Anti-Christ let loose on Earth to facilitate the more extreme acts of Providence (5) , Beatrice, "our only refuge and defense" becomes in this contest somewhat of a Christ figure, one who strives to save the appearances of the Christian universe (6) . In this, one can understand the contest between Beatrice and Cenci within a time frame that encompasses the events of sacred history from the life and Crucifixion of Christ down through the Apocalypse.

        I would like to expand this analysis with the observation that the moral and eschatological resonances of The Cenci are apparent in what this drama borrows from the Shakespearean tragedies that Shelley cites as exemplary in his "Preface" to The Cenci and in the "Defense" (7) . Like Hamlet and Lear, the moral enormities of the Cenci play out within a theological discourse in which the consequences of human crimes and divine retribution exceed both the natural possibilities of experience and ordinary ethical subjectivity. Consider the case of Beatrice's reaction to Cenci's extraordinary crimes. Beatrice begins to lose hold of her identity and expresses this loss symbolically through metaphors which indicate the cessation of nature's law:
 

        How comes this hair undone?

Its wandering strings must be what blind me so,

And yet I tied it fast.--O, horrible!

The pavement spins under my feet! The walls

Spin round! I see a woman weeping there,

And standing motionless, whilst I

Slide giddily as the world reels. . . . My God!

The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!

The sunshine on the floor is black! The air

Is changed to vapors such as the dead breathe

In charnel pits! Pah! I am choked! There creeps

A clinging, black contaminating mist

About me. . . . 'tis substantial, heavy, thick,

I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues

My fingers and my limbs to one another,

And eats into my sinews, and dissolves

My flesh to a pollution, poisoning

The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!

My God! I never knew what the mad felt

Before; for I am mad beyond a doubt!

(More wildly.) No, I am dead! These putrefying limbs


Which would burst forth into the wandering air! (III, I, 7-28)

Note the suspension of the normal objective ordering of experience. The pavement sinks, the walls spin round. Experience loses its coherence on its fundamental grounds of sensibility--the apprehension of space and time cease to have value for praxis of the technical sort. Natural events, the large structures of the world edifice by which we think the stability of nature as an idea, are now purely symbolic. As in the Biblical account of the Apocalypse, "The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood!/ The sunshine on the floor is black" (8) . To the extent that we can regard sun and sky as parts of the world edifice, they no longer signify the idea of an intelligible nature but rather the inability of the subject to think herself in conformity with the social and religious values that are exhibited through such an idea. The purely symbolic functions of heaven and sun are evident in that, in their employment as symbols or metaphors, we would not think of comprehending them within an empirical judgment about the consistency of experience within nature (9) .

        Given her belief in her own monstrosity, Beatrice finds herself on the verge of madness. Sanity is a great effort, a pathos rather than a spontaneous activity of consciousness. Since she is now beyond the pale of both the Christian and the Shelleyan virtues, she must be resolute on her principles of honor and shame. The mere continuation of life within the limits of a personality organized under the form of a social identity becomes a great effort.

        The passage from The Cenci just quoted continues with the response of Beatrice's stepmother, Lucretia:
 

    Her spirit apprehends the sense of pain,

    But not its cause; suffering has dried away

    The source from which it sprung (III, I, 34-37).

                    Like parricide

    Misery has killed its father: yet its father

    Never like mine. . .O, God! What thing am I?

        This recalls Hamlet's madness and then some. After her encounter with a father who might well be the devil loose from Hell (10) Beatrice has been transformed. Or, rather, she has been deformed. She is now a "thing," an entity of indeterminate ontological quantity. She believes that she has lost definition in a world order where definition obtains only through the patriarchal grounds of genealogy. As a consequence of her humiliation by her merely human father, she cannot, in proper Christian terms, see that God remains her father and, that, as such, she remains an undefiled participant in the divine plan. Thus, in his pursuit of Beatrice, Cenci has committed the one act that could dishonor her. He has reduced her to an agent who can no longer take the phenomenon of her inclusion within the world order for granted as could any Christian with sufficient stock in the Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity. Hence, until she regains her composure, she resembles not only Hamlet but old Hamlet's Ghost as well--an indeterminate thing. Until she can stand on her own principles, she will remain an alien to nature returned from a place of unnatural sufferings. Thus, in his attempt to realize himself as more than human and more than natural, Cenci has brought both of them beyond the natural limits of human experience.

        Let's give this discussion of uncanny appearances and apparitions fuller attention to the text of the Shakespearean reference. In Hamlet, the consistency of experience gives way along with the possibility of reconciling appearances with an intelligible nature. The Ghost scenes of the first act present a dissolution of the cosmic edifice in which it becomes increasingly impossible to distinguish the actual from the fantastic. The ghost manifests itself first to the watch, then to Horatio and, finally, to young Hamlet. It has multiple apparitions, and its apparitions have a certain predictability and empirical reality. They are not simply an indication of Hamlet's melancholy. But what can we actually say about the status of the Ghost? If it cannot be dismissed immediately as diabolical or psychological (11) , why is it walking the night of a Christian universe where the spirits of the dead do not return to nature?

        Moreover, if the multiple apparitions of the ghost give its event a certain regularity or value within an intersubjectively verifiable and, hence, predictable experience, what do we make of the temporal disjuncture of that obtains during Hamlet's encounter with the apparition. In terms of the words exchanged between Hamlet and the ghost, very little time seems to have elapsed. Yet, in terms of natural time, this encounter has extended from midnight to cock's crow. The brief period of this interview seems to have expanded to fill the intervening hours. How do we distinguish between subjective and objective, between the apparent and the real?

        Again, in moral terms, if Hamlet fears that the apparition might be the devil loosed from Hell to tempt his melancholy, what is the point of making distinctions based upon whether or not his uncle is, in fact, guilty, as charged, of murdering his father? The scripture forbids vengeance in any case. Then, if Hamlet fears that the apparition may be the devil, why, after cock's crow, when the ghost becomes chthonic spirit, a pioner, does Hamlet protest the urgency of his appeal for silence of his friends by naming the saint that drove the serpents out of Ireland? And if the apparition is, in fact, the devil, how is it that the devil can enjoin Hamlet and his fellow Christians to swear by the sword which is, in this case, the equivalent of the Cross? Again, to establish that the apparition is not the devil. But if the spirit is not the devil or a proper purgatorial visitation, what is it doing walking the night calling for vengeance in a Christian universe?

        Time is profoundly out of joint as is apparent, perhaps, even in event of its dilation during the ghost's apparition to Hamlet. Let's consider the quandaries raised by the ghost in terms of the most fundamental structures of the cosmic edifice: the temporal limits of human life. The boundary between this world and the imponderable next world has apparently broken down, and either Hell, Purgatory or one of the least canny reaches of the imagination is releasing its prodigies against the conceptual structures of discursive reason if not against objective nature itself and reason's implication in it. But no final distinction can be made among these possibilities. We are confronted by the unnatural and even the supernatural, and we have no way of knowing where, among things ultimate or strange, such appearances have their source. The allegorical structures that should keep the eternal realities of anagogy from intruding directly into the time of nature and human life are giving way and there is no way of saying exactly how this is the case. The distinction between world and soul, macrocosm and microcosm is lost, and the subject of the drama is transported into a radically tropological space in which appearances do not conform to the forms of allegory.

         Does Hamlet present a situation of the apocalypse breaking forth into a world that has been divested of its normative allegorical direction, a world of appearances that are maimed even as are the rites of Ophelia's funeral? If the allegorical ordination of appearances were to give way and history were no longer intelligible in terms of the ultimate purposes promulgated in doctrine, scripture and allegory, what would become of the status of the subject? The structures of time, experience and mundane expectation would give way before appearances and experiences that could not make sense in the limited discourses by which the mind is bound to interpret its reality.

        Hamlet appears to present a disjuncture in the moral and epistemological possibilities of action which Shelley finds incompatible with his own idealism. As in Birth of Tragedy, the situation of Hamlet appears to be approaching that of "Dionysian man" (12) . Dionysian man discovers that the causes of the world do not include anything so assuring as the possibilities of action. Rather, all possibilities of morality and resoluteness have been foreclosed before a recognition of a more fundamental absurdity. Such an approach appears to have value in explaining the aporetic biases of the Shakespearean drama, but less in common with Shelley's more resolute moralism. We can still bring our discussion of The Cenci's morality into a Nietzschean argument, but this argument must come from an examination of what Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, considers to be the more exalted possibilities of action rather than from a discussion of its Dionysian futility (13) . Perhaps the Shelleyan drama has appropriated the world of Shakespearean sensibility in order to stage a psychomachia, and this, in turn, as a way of presenting certain more extreme sorts of action. Nietzschean aristocrats are called upon to make their desire the measure of all things. For Nietzsche there is a sublimity in those who can make their particular reasons the law . But according to more conventional moralities, such actions make the tyrant. Thus Beatrice and Cenci might be viewed as the ultimate tyrants in that either would appropriate nature's system of appearances, the symbolic possibilities of the law's formulation, as the material of their self-presentation. I will lead into this Nietzschean argument with a discussion, drawn from Kant's Critique of Judgment, of sublimity and monstrosity, problems that magnitude generates for sensible and moral presentations. I will move from here to the role of magnitude, so considered, in the presentation of the exalted character states preferred by Nietzsche.

        Here I will consider in more transcendental terms the relation between the ethical and the aesthetic grounds of morality and the monstrous conditions that arise in the default of this relationship. Monstrosity involves conflicts between the demands of a morality and the system of natural signifiers through which the ideas of this morality are exhibited in the sensible forms of the possibility of discourse: space and time. When we speak of monstrosities, we speak of them in terms of their magnitude, enormity, terrible excess and so forth. Thus it is apparent that our concept of magnitude does not allow us to exhibit merely the actual size of objective events as they appear to us in space and time. Since, as quantifications, value judgments involve processes that operate through cognitive mechanisms similar to those employed in the exhibition of physical events in space and time, the concept of magnitude also allows us to quantify ideas that exist for us only abstractly (15) . Thus we can see how moral discourse's attempts to quantify monstrosity would use spatial metaphors.

        Encounters with extreme magnitudes are disorienting in that in the apprehension of such quantities the imagination, or power of sensible magnitudes, is pushed to the limits of its compatibility with the more restricted requirements of the understanding or power of concepts. In yet another sense, the apprehension of extreme magnitudes presents problems for the condition of our temporal subject as well. The time that the imagination takes to accommodate itself to an extreme magnitude is, in the event of that apprehension, lost to the subject's ability to exhibit the natural concepts required for determinate discourse. Thus encounters with the sensible magnitudes that give rise to an awareness of sublimity interrupt the subject's sense of inclusion into nature as a condition in which appearances of limited magnitudes serve to exhibit natural concepts (16) . In such an event, the subject momentarily loses its place in nature considered as an intelligible, ordered and continuous system of magnitudes. As in the case of things sensible, so too in encounters with concepts that we evaluate in terms of their magnitude. The intuitions of monstrous events may take up too much of our subjective sense of space and time for easy inclusion within the normal order of a discourse that uses this natural system of ordered magnitudes for the purposes of exhibiting its ideas. If we encounter an event whose concept we find excessive, the intuition that we would have to supply to think it would exceed our intuition of nature even as in the case of the indeterminate magnitudes that give rise to sublimity.
 

        Here I wish to develop my argument through a more explicit comparison with Kant's mathematical sublime:
 

If a thing is excessive for the imagination (and the imagination is driven to [such excess] that it apprehends [the thing] in intuition), then [the thing] is, as it were, an abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself. Yet, at the same time, for reason's idea of the supersensible [this same thing] is not excessive but conforms to reasons's law to give rise to such striving by the imagination. Hence [the thing] is now attractive to the same degree to which [formerly] it was repulsive to mere sensibility. The judgment itself, however, always remains only aesthetic here. For it is not based on a determinate concept of the object and presents merely the subjective play of the mental powers themselves (imagination and reason) as harmonious by virtue of their contrast. (Ak. 258)

Sublimity involves the impossible attempt by the imagination to exhibit what is too large for exhibition, namely the ideas of reason. These ideas are large absolutely, and, as a consequence, exceed the merely sensible limits of our cognitive process. In the case of mathematical sublimity, the imagination is cast into the abyss of the thing, the apeiron of unlimited perception. Nevertheless, this provides the opportunity to discover that such an expansion of the imagination is ordained by a law that is distinct from our need to contain the play of our imagination within the limits of natural sensibility.

        Thus we can understand how the experience of sublimity involves a pleasure that is "produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger" (CJ  23, Ak 245).characterized by a momentary sense of the inhibition of life followed immediately by an even greater sense of its process. We lose, momentarily, our intuition and concept of nature. Hence, for the duration of this loss, we experience a diminution in the sensation that attends our awareness that nature is itself the possibility of action and, consequently, life . In this, we can see a sort of affinity between the Kantian aesthetic and the Dionysian recognition that nature itself is only an illusion, the mere appearance that reality is commensurate with the merely human requirements of action. But, in Kant, this awareness does not have time to develop into an aporetic realization. Rather, this expansion of the imagination is, in the next moment of sublimity, as attractive to reason as it was repulsive to sensibility because it affirms that there are supersensible or unconditioned grounds of action in the rational possibilities of morality. The expansion of the imagination beyond the sensible limits and possibilities of nature gives way to a rational or moral awareness that the limits of sensibility, and even what exceeds sensibility, are contained within the larger, supersensible grounds of action.

        Sublimity is characterized by a certain pleasure. It involves an apprehension of the commensurableness of what we can all understand, that is, what we should expect of ourselves in moral terms, with what we could never grasp in any sensible discourse, that is, the ideas of reason (17) . Thus, if Kant describes the sensation of sublimity as containing an element of wonderment and confusion, this may be because sublimity involves a rather direct intimation of the ineffable causes of the rather mundane demands of morality. In this way, sublimity exalts the demands that morality makes of us without threatening the appearances of the merely technical possibilities of action with the absolute magnitude of these causes in their ineffability. Consequently, the phenomenal mechanisms of sublimity do not threaten the discursive articulation of morality through the universal structures such as those the categorical imperative or of allegorical discourse. Like allegory, sublimity involves mechanisms that mediate between the finite, discursive possibilities of human moral and sensible consciousness and the possible, if not the actual, demands of what is absolutely large or powerful. Allegory preserves the appearances, where sublimity restores them. And, in as much as the sublime experience concludes with a more powerful sensation of life's process, we might say that the appearances are reaffirmed by an attendant conviction that we are not unduly confined by the merely sensible limits of action. This sense of revitalization that accompanies the moral realization is, in this way, a sign--like the rainbow after the flood (18) .

        Monstrosity involves considerations of magnitude that present similar problems for discourse. But there are differences, at least in non-Nietzschean moralities where the appearances of natural order are to be conserved for the exhibition of the natural and moral or divine laws. In the case of monstrosity, we are not dealing with the ineffable, but rather the unspeakable. Monstrosity threatens the appearances, period. The imagination is not rescued by any subsequent intimation of the law. Nor is its event accompanied by any enhanced sense of life following the initial sense of life's inhibition. In this case, there are no laws to compensate us for what is repulsive to sensibility

        Here we can distinguish further the difference between these two states of ethical awareness. The event that occasions a sense of monstrosity might be said to expand our imagination beyond the possibilities of the appearances and concepts of nature without any corresponding idea or reason or morality to pull us back. Thus the "abyss" of the thing in this case corresponds to a negation of morality and the natural intuitions through which we would attempt to express it. And it is not the case, as it is in Hamlet, that the causes of our ill ease involve thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. In the case of monstrosity, the object of our revulsion retains its logical definition as a concept. It is just that the exhibition of such an event goes contrary to the intuition of nature through whose concepts and appearances we exhibit the possibilities of life and its action. Part of the struggle, labor or pathos of reason that we encounter in such a case belongs to a desperate attempt to save the appearances for their rational function in exhibiting morality. Thus, in the case of monstrosity, as opposed sublimity, the ideas of reason in their ineffability and recalcitrance to sensible exhibition are replaced by what is merely unspeakable. In this, monstrosity might generate an abyss in which the imagination is more justified in its fear of losing itself than would be the case in sublimity. What is repugnant to sensibility remains so and is repugnant to morality as well.

    A monstrous event may be repugnant to sensibility in that it does not compensate us for the damage the enormity of its exhibition does to our apprehension of the sensible reality of nature and our awareness of our lives' situation within it. Beyond this, on the ethical level of its representation, the excess of monstrosity, the size of the intuition it requires for its expression, must owe, to a significant extent, to the effort of thinking what is not commensurable with the demands of a morality. And, to the extent that we are made aware of this incompatibility, we are aware of it immediately through our attention to the difficulties involved in such an exhibition. So, in a sense, as in the case of sublimity, the moral awareness entailed in the perception of a monstrous event can occur as a sensation. We might describe this sensation as a sense of life's diminishment that accompanies a subjective awareness that the intuition and conceptual possibility of thinking nature has been suspended or abridged. It follows that the difficulty involved in exhibition would be a use that morality makes of space, time, the intuition of nature, our feeling of displeasure and our sensation of life. What we do not want to exhibit in merely sensible terms is perfectly congruent with what offends morality intellectually. In this sense, psychic events such as the diminution of life energy experienced in neurosis, the dynamics of repression and so forth may owe as much to this subjective consideration of magnitude and its exhibition as to any classic psychoanalytic model.

        Here I will consider the forgoing argument directly in terms of the crimes of Cenci and Beatrice. In a logical sense, a set of concepts through which a morality, its nature and actions are organized offers to its subjects the opportunity to undo themselves as moral agents. In privileging concepts such as "father," "paternity" and "filial piety," for instance, the moral scheme operant in the Cenci, does, in a logical and semantic, if not moral sense, entail the possibility of these concepts' violation through actions such as incest and patricide. Thus the terms of the original morality's concepts may be employed in the definition of actions that negate the ideal by which they are defined, "father." .

        If "father" and "daughter" are mutually defining, the possibility of thinking the complicated terms of their mutual definition is radically abridged by crimes such as Cenci's. Think about what is involved in Beatrice's difficulty in referring to Cenci as her father. Any reference to these concepts in the context of what has transpired between these two agents at once repeats for Beatrice her father's crime. And this awareness is intensified, perhaps, because the articulation of such concepts in these new conditions violates the linguistic use of concepts and metaphors in accordance with natural concepts and their intuitions or appearances. If Beatrice is even to think of herself in terms of a natural existence, she must avoid the biological facts of her paternity. Consequently, she must divorce the symbolic order of the appearances and concepts of nature from the material real of biology.

        But this compounds the problem. Spoken language loses its easy systemic correlation within the discourse of appearances taken as the sensible ground of epistemic and symbolic interrelatedness. The appearances of father and daughter persist, but they are now empty signifiers. Or, rather, they are not entirely empty. They now mark the point at which the historical reality of Cenci's action confronts the biological reality of Beatrice's genealogy, her status as monstrous progeny if, no longer, as "daughter." Thus, even as such, they can no longer be applied within a discourse of nature. The specific concepts of father and daughter have now at best a troubled relation to the real order of individuals's particularity. Speech that attempts to articulate itself in terms of concepts now forbidden to it, "father" and "daughter," seems unnatural. It may disintegrate into a species of utterance in which singular experiences are articulated only haltingly. Beatrice finds concepts such as "father" insufficient to her construction as a natural subject. Hence she must ask "what thing am I?"

        Yet Beatrice is mad only momentarily. She can speak, even if, like Hamlet's ghost, she is forbidden to communicate the extremes of her suffering. The next phase of the contest is about to begin. To overcome the disfigurement entailed by her loss of definition within the sensible exhibition of her morality, Beatrice must follow Cenci in an attempt to regenerate the intuitions of nature at the level of a new morality. Barring the appropriate Shelleyan recognition that she cannot be dishonored by the act of another, she must reconstitute the relation between the symbolic order of appearances and the biological reality of who she is. Thus her new identity will derive from a definition of herself that she creates for herself. To accomplish this extreme act of self-fashioning, she must seize appearances and create her own morality. As with Cenci, her moral autonomy will involve the generation of values that follow the principles of revenge, retaliation and atonement rather than submission to the Christian values that are already in place. She will plot against her father to save the lives and honor of herself and her family. But, because Cenci is, to Beatrice, no longer her father, and in order to maintain her reputation and that of her family, she will address, as such, neither his violation of her nor her complicity in patricide.

        Thus these characters are very similar. Cenci finds in nature and the morality exhibited through it the possibility of transgression and his own exaltation. Beatrice would appropriate the appearances of a natural and sacred cosmos as the ground for her own Self-esteem independent of the proper, unmaimed expression of love, hope and Self-esteem or faith, hope and charity. Yet, triumphant, she would offer the world edifice, so secured, as the ground of love and hope in which to shelter her family (19) . It would seem that Beatrice and Cenci, so alike despite their absolute differences, are like angels of light and darkness, the good and bad daimones, or even furies, of a shame morality fighting for control of appearances in which a culture of revenge, retaliation and atonement rages undiminished. Both are, in this sense, rather Nietzschean figures whose particular actions and particular desires are to be regarded as the springs of the moral cosmos in which they would live. Morality, so conceived, would stand apart from the universal truths of Christian doctrine and universalizing maxims such as those of Kant's imperative.

NOTES

<1>All Quotes from The Cenci are taken from the Norton Critical Edition. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, (New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1977).

(1) Earl Wasserman gives an extensive account of Cenci's tyranny. His study focusses especially upon varying ways in which the institutions of tyranny, domestic, political and religious, reflect each other. Tyrants do not merely "model themselves upon a vengeful God but that God is fabricated in the image of the human tyrant and that established theologies are only self-projections by which oppressors invent authority and justification for their power" (89). Wasserman, Earl R., Shelley: a Critical Reading [by] Earl R. Wasserman, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press 1971) 85-94.
 

(2) Jerrold Hogle gives a Sartrean reading of Beatrice's abjection. Beatrice and the Count are engaged in a battle to control appearances in order that each might preserve him or herself from the gaze of the other. The subject who succeeds at this game becomes maintains the other subject's alterity to his or herself. In this the abject subject is powerless Hogle, Jerrold E. Shelley's Process : Radical Transference and the Development of his Major Works (New York : Oxford University Press, 1988) 147-66.
 

(3)Bryan Shelley makes the stronger case. "The Cenci itself can be seen as an inversion of the Mass presided over by a priest who is both a spiritual and a physical father." Shelley, Bryan, Shelley and Scripture: the Interpreting Angel, (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Oxford English Monographs) 83.
 

(4)Wasserman provides a formulation that sounds as Aristotelian as it does Nietzschean. Cenci:
 

performs his monstrous deeds without apparent dramatic motivation. Like God, he is the fatherless father, the uncaused cause, the point behind which succession cannot be palpably traced. In Shelley's Manichean system, in which evil is an autonomous and pressing potentiality, evil enters into human reality and begins its causal sequence simply because the Count permits it to enter by assuming man is necessarily evil. The relation of Beatrice to her father, then, is not only filial but also temporal and causal (87).

(6)Bryan Shelley gives a thorough account of the biblical allusions and inferences.

Incarnate Christ-Child or the self-humbling Messiah of St Paul's kenosis (phil. 2: 5-8), she is perceived in terms of the human perfections embodied in Jesus. And she is furthermore described by her mother as a mediatrix, standing between Cenci's paternal wrath and the other members of her family (II. I. 46-8), just as Christ stands between God and man as a mediator (I Tim. 2: 5). She is the Johannine Logos though only initially; for Shelley's play is an inversion of the idea that "the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" (John 1: 5)... Unlike her New Testament model, she is, by a reverse form of conversion, spiritually seduced by the lord of that world, who in the governing scene of Act I diabolically institutes the sacrament of death. For Cenci is an inversion of the Christ who, according to St Paul, was "appointed" to "judge the world in righteousness" (Acts 17: 31). He likens himself to "a fiend appointed to chastise/ the offenses of some unremembered world" (IV. I. 161-2). Shelley, 83.

        Ralph Pite finds a comparison of Beatrice Cenci with Dante's Beatrice in which the latter shames Dante for his own sins "in deserting the memory of Beatrice for other women" (180). He relates a passage in the Purgatorio to scene two of act two of the Cenci.

Orsino in The Cenci suggests that Shelley perceived this quality in Dante's encounter: "even I,/ Since Beatrice unveiled me to myself,/ And made me shrink from what I cannot shun, / Shew a poor figure to my own esteem, / To which I grow half reconciled" (II. ii. 114-18),180 n.

Beatrice is for Dante, a manifestation of Christ. . Pite, Ralph, The Circle of our Vision : Dante's Presence in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1994).
 

(7) Curran has given an extensive account of the influence of Shakespeare on The Cenci, especially the four main tragedies. In a footnote he provides a table of references he has culled . Curran, Stuart, Shelley's Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) 38.
 

(8) Curran finds, also, allusions to the apocalyptic confrontation between Ahriman and Ormazd in act four (IV. I. 183-89) and in lines 16-23 of the passage just quoted. Curran, Stuart, Shelley's Annus Mirabilis: the Maturing of an Epic Vision, (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1975) 182.

(9) Might we compare this to the Apocalypse of The Book of Revelations? Presumably the distinction between the historical and symbolic realities are lost in the Apocalypse. Presumably, in such a case, the anagogic reality literally is what is signified. In non-apocalyptic history, the symbolic mode of allegorical signifiers would not, as such, totalize the historical phenomena of the litterae. When all anagogy breaks loose, it is manifest as the material reality of its litterae. The beast as such will be cast into the abyss as such.

        Does Kant's dynamic sublime approach this extreme of reification?

(10)There are certainly many references to Cenci's diabolical nature, some of which I've already cited. This allusion, which I make tentatively, is, specifically, to Hamlet's suspicion that the ghost may be the devil, rather than the spirit of his dead father (Hamlet, II. ii. 610-15).

(11)There is a similarity between the Kantian dialectic and the allegorical organization of the universe in that both systems speak of the possibility of experience in terms of the ideas of world, soul and God. These ideas organize the cosmologies and theologies of myth and religion generally. The dialectic that Kant elaborates in the "Transcendental Dialectic" of the Critique of Pure Reason is specifically a desiderative, and, we might add, a mythopoetic, orientation of the powers of reason. Here we might note the pathos of reason in that it is no longer to distinguish the terms of a proper application of these ideas. Thus we might say that the indeterminacy has expanded to preclude the possibility of any such system. Andrew Welburn says of Kant's dialectic, "What for Kant was an argument for faith in the Beyond was for the Romantics, a call for the self-transformation of man, a summons to further development." Welburn, Andrew J., Power and Self-consciousness in the Poetry of Shelley, (New York : St. Martin's Press, 1986), 221 n.

(12)
 

 In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion...true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, The Birth of Tragedy, and The Case of Wagner, translated, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage Books, 1967) 60.

(14)Nietzschean sublimity involves the sublimation of the ethos itself, the subject of technical actions. Thus it does not merely involve an exalted awareness, as in Kant, that one possesses a pure and independent power of reason that provides the categorical and universal moral bases for action apart from the sensible conditions and limitations in which action could have meaning for the particular needs of a specific individual's merely historical life. As Kant puts it, sublimity involves the intimation that one has, within oneself, a supersensible cognitive power that exceeds the power estimating sensible magnitudes: this power of estimating sensible magnitudes being itself unlimited in its own media of space and time. Yet such Kantian statements about the relative limitlessness of this merely sensible power of cognition may, from a more Nietzschean perspective, be seen to deflect attention from the role and the necessity of this "merely sensible" power for our lives as individuals. Apart from the moral obligations communicated through the material particulars of experience, the subject of the historical life is a contingency or accident of nature, as it were, a necessary perturbation of the transcendental subjectivity as the possibility of experience and moral Bildung.

(15)In  25 (Ak 249) of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that we can use the standard of magnitude to measure practical concerns such as "the civil liberty and justice in a country" and the "magnitude [or degree] of the correctness or incorrectness of some observation or measurement that has been made." Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, Including the First Introduction, translated, with an introduction, by Werner S. Pluhar ; with a foreword by Mary J. Gregor, (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1987) Ak 249.

(16) Kant, (CJ 27, Ak 258). "Imagination and reason here give rise to such a purposiveness by their conflict, namely, to a feeling that we have a pure and independent reason, or a power for estimating magnitude, whose superiority cannot be made intuitable by anything other than the inadequacy of that power which in exhibiting magnitudes (of sensible objects) is itself unbounded." Reason's ideas are large absolutely and surpass any standard of sensible measurement. Yet, though the power of exhibiting sensible magnitudes is itself unlimited, its function may be lost momentarily, in which case this aporia becomes purposive for making intuitable reason which does not concern itself with the magnitudes, no matter how large, of merely sensible objects.

(17)Welburn tells us:

"sublimity" overcomes the disintegration of consciousness in the terror of the Ahrimanic by means of a powerful unifying power in the soul, strong enough to assert the unity of the psyche in the face of a world of alienation. Yet it is at the same time a factor in the human soul-life which evades rather than concentrates self-awareness. The influential theories of the movement Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), explains: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other" (p.57). Self-consciousness, together with the powers of reasoning, judgment and so on, is swallowed up in the overwhelming impression of sublime amazement. The mind's powers are entirely concentrated upon the object, leaving virtually no resources for self-definition which are "suspended" in the encounter with a degree of terror essential to the experience of the sublime (130-31).

Burke and Welburn are going one step beyond the more ideal Kantian aesthetics. There is an experience of a oneness of affect and sensation in the purely subjective apprehension of the unity of the object. The subject discovers its unity in the "abyss in which the imagination is afraid to lose itself," perhaps. We have here a sort of purposive unity apart from any formulation of this unity's lawfulness. But for Kant purposiveness is the lawfulness of the contingent. Here we have what might be considered the power of unifying the subject's awareness of itself merely through its perception of an object apart from both that object's inclusion within some further way of thinking nature or cosmos: and apart from further consideration of the rational applications of this object's counter-purposiveness, so considered, from exhibiting anything so ideal as the possibility of a supersensible cosmos of moral laws. The unity of the subject under these conditions might be described as the state of a pure pathos, a [bereaving] of the subject's will, and, consequently, capacity for discursive and deliberative thought and action. Perhaps this describes the pathos of the tragic aesthetic: profoundly physical, but experienced unexpectedly in one's incapacity to pursue life as action. This pathos is experienced only as a fundamental incapacity and singularity without reference to the normal rational, moral and cosmological grounds of identity. Thus, this pathos involves a stripping away of the dialectical and discursive powers of reasoning, practical and theoretical.

(18) Compare, once more, Burke. In this restoration of appearances, we would not be engrossed so much in any object as in the restoration of this object to the technical and practicable solidity of the possibility of happiness.

(19) Tetreault sees this as the difference between the tragic and monstrous figures. Tetreault, Ronald, The poetry of life : Shelley and literary form, (Toronto ; Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, c1987) 137.