SOURCE: “Out of the Veil of Ignorance: Agency and the Mirror of Disillusionment,” in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXV, No. 1, Winter, 1991, pp. 1-21.

In the following essay, Dunn examines Alastor as “a study in moral agency.”

Following Shelley's lead in his preface to the poem, I propose to read Alastor as a study in moral agency. This may sound surprising since the poem is often criticized for its solipsism or, worse, for displaying the symptoms of pathological narcissism. However, the apparent pathology of Alastor's narrator and of the visionary poet he describes stems from a moral dilemma which Shelley inherits from moral philosophers like his mentor Godwin and from the poetry of Wordsworth. As the poem illustrates, the dilemma is precipitated by the way in which both empiricist and rationalist systems of morality fail to mediate the particularity of individual desire, by their inability to universalize the...