Bilingualism and Transnational Identity in Mary Shelley’s Letters from Italy

Italianism, intended as the combined influence of Italian literature and first-hand experience of Italy, has long been acknowledged as a fundamental element in Mary Shelley’s oeuvre. A complementary, still unexplored aspect of what Jean de Palacio termed her «Italian vocation» is the use of Italian and Italianisms in her private writings, particularly her letters of the Italian period. Mary Shelley’s Italian is rich in colloquialisms and regional variants, revealing an awareness of the complex sociolinguistic situation of pre-unification Italy as well as an attention to foreign popular culture and its linguistic manifestations. Taking as its point of departure the new interest in Romantic letter writing and recent studies of Byron’s use of Italian, this article examines the bilingualism in Mary Shelley’s correspondence, to which I apply Gianfranco Folena’s influential concept of eteroglossia. Italian emerges not only as Mary Shelley’s language of affection and the medium of her everyday communication, but also as a secret code she used to establish an exclusive, intimate relationship with her recipients and thus reduce the communicative distance from them. At the same time, her effortless, spontaneous code-switching indicates that she turned the experience of exile into one of linguistic and cultural immersion, not unlike that of her fellow expatriate, Byron. As I contend, Mary Shelley’s bilingualism signals her embracing Italianness, which, incidentally, is what enabled her to celebrate Italy, its culture, and its inhabitants in the works following her emigration. The adoption of the Italian language for her private communication thus contributed to the construction of her transnational identity of «Anglo-Italian», as she herself later defined the cultural hybrid represented by the members of the Pisan circle.