Changing historical and cultural circumstances inevitably reshape how writers and filmmakers portray the artist’s function within society. This essay examines the proposition by comparing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Romantic-era arguments with those advanced by Saudi filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour. Shelley’s essay positions the poet as an unacknowledged legislator of the world, while al-Mansour’s films present the artist as a quiet catalyst for incremental social reform. Through analysis of these contrasting constructions it will be shown that, although the underlying idea of artistic influence persists, the narratives produced about that influence alter significantly in response to differing political, religious and technological contexts.
Shelley’s Romantic Vision of the Artist
In A Defence of Poetry (1840), Shelley constructs the artist as an inspired yet marginal figure whose moral and imaginative insight precedes and ultimately shapes public opinion. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution and amid British political repression, Shelley argues that poets “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” because they enlarge the human capacity for sympathy (Shelley, 2002, p. 535). The artist therefore occupies a prophetic role: by creating new myths and metaphors, the poet indirectly reforms institutions. This narrative is idealistic and largely detached from immediate institutional power; Shelley presents artistic influence as indirect, operating through language and imagination rather than direct political action. The limitation of this account, however, lies in its Romantic individualism: Shelley offers little indication of how marginalised voices might access such legislative power.
Al-Mansour’s Construction of the Artist under Constraint
Haifaa al-Mansour’s feature films, most notably Wadjda (2012), present the artist operating within a far more restrictive contemporary setting. As the first female Saudi director to make a feature inside the Kingdom, al-Mansour depicts the artist as a pragmatic negotiator who must work inside existing cultural and religious frameworks. In Wadjda the young protagonist’s desire for a bicycle functions as a metonym for individual autonomy; the film itself becomes an act of measured dissent rather than overt legislation. Where Shelley imagines the poet speaking from a privileged imaginative sphere, al-Mansour’s artist works through commercially viable storytelling and gradual audience education. This shift reflects the practical pressures of Saudi censorship, gender segregation and international funding requirements. Consequently, al-Mansour’s narrative stresses resilience and compromise over prophetic authority.
Contextual Differences and Revised Narratives
The distance between Shelley’s England and al-Mansour’s Saudi Arabia illustrates how context modifies the same core idea. Shelley could assume a reading public schooled in classical and Enlightenment thought; al-Mansour must address both local audiences operating under Wahhabi norms and global viewers attuned to human-rights discourse. Technology further alters the narrative: Shelley’s medium is print poetry distributed among an educated elite, whereas al-Mansour employs digital cinema and international festivals to reach dispersed audiences. These material changes do not erase the belief that art can influence society; rather, they produce new inflections of that belief—prophetic legislator becomes cautious cultural broker. Critical perspectives note that al-Mansour’s approach risks diluting radical critique in order to secure distribution; yet such compromise can also be read as an adaptive strategy unavailable to Shelley’s more abstract model (Khalil, 2016).
Implications for Understanding Artistic Agency
The comparison demonstrates that narratives about the artist’s social role remain coherent at an abstract level while their concrete expression shifts with political freedom, gender expectations and media technologies. Shelley’s idealism supplies a historical benchmark, yet al-Mansour’s pragmatism reveals the constraints that any artist must negotiate when working inside authoritarian or patriarchal structures. Both accounts therefore affirm artistic influence, but the stories told about how that influence operates are demonstrably context-dependent.
Conclusion
Changing contexts clearly generate revised narratives about the artist’s societal function. Shelley’s unacknowledged legislator and al-Mansour’s negotiated reformer articulate the same underlying conviction—that imaginative work possesses transformative potential—yet they do so through forms dictated by their respective eras. Recognition of this variability encourages a more historically attentive criticism that neither dismisses earlier ideals nor treats contemporary compromises as failures of nerve.
References
- Khalil, A. (2016) ‘Women’s cinema in the Gulf: negotiating visibility’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 12(2), pp. 231–237.
- Shelley, P. B. (2002) ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Reiman, D. H. and Fraistat, N. (eds.) Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. 2nd edn. New York: Norton, pp. 510–535.
