157- ] English Literature
Literary themes and styles
Mary
Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by
composing letters, and her favourite occupation as a child was writing stories.
Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in
1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before
that year. Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer
Nongtongpaw, comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library when she was
ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most
recent authoritative collection of her works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically
encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very
anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on
the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary
reputation."
Novels
Autobiographical elements
Certain
sections of Mary Shelley's novels are often interpreted as masked rewritings of
her life. Critics have pointed to the recurrence of the father–daughter motif
in particular as evidence of this autobiographical style. For example,
commentators frequently read Mathilda (1820) autobiographically, identifying
the three central characters as versions of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and
Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley herself confided that she modelled the central
characters of The Last Man on her Italian circle. Lord Raymond, who leaves
England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord
Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in
search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a
fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, as she wrote in her review
of Godwin's novel Cloudesley (1830), she did not believe that authors
"were merely copying from our own hearts". William Godwin regarded
his daughter's characters as types rather than portraits from real life. Some
modern critics, such as Patricia Clemit and Jane Blumberg, have taken the same
view, resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley's works.
Novelistic genres
Mary
Shelley employed the techniques of many different novelistic genres, most
vividly the Godwinian novel, Walter Scott's new historical novel, and the
Gothic novel. The Godwinian novel, made popular during the 1790s with works
such as Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), "employed a Rousseauvian
confessional form to explore the contradictory relations between the self and
society", and Frankenstein exhibits many of the same themes and literary
devices as Godwin's novel. However, Shelley critiques those Enlightenment
ideals that Godwin promotes in his works. In The Last Man, she uses the
philosophical form of the Godwinian novel to demonstrate the ultimate
meaninglessness of the world. While earlier Godwinian novels had shown how
rational individuals could slowly improve society, The Last Man and
Frankenstein demonstrate the individual's lack of control over history.
Shelley
uses the historical novel to comment on gender relations; for example, Valperga
is a feminist version of Scott's masculinist genre. Introducing women into the
story who are not part of the historical record, Shelley uses their narratives
to question established theological and political institutions. Shelley sets
the male protagonist's compulsive greed for conquest in opposition to a female
alternative: reason and sensibility. In Perkin Warbeck, Shelley's other
historical novel, Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity,
and equality. Through her, Shelley offers a feminine alternative to the
masculine power politics that destroy the male characters. The novel provides a
more inclusive historical narrative to challenge the one which usually relates
only masculine events.
Gender
With
the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, Mary Shelley's works,
particularly Frankenstein, began to attract much more attention from scholars.
Feminist and psychoanalytic critics were largely responsible for the recovery
from neglect of Shelley as a writer. Ellen Moers was one of the first to claim
that Shelley's loss of a baby was a crucial influence on the writing of
Frankenstein. She argues that the novel is a "birth myth" in which
Shelley comes to terms with her guilt for causing her mother's death as well as
for failing as a parent. Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that, from a
feminist viewpoint, it is a story "about what happens when a man tries to
have a baby without a woman ... [Frankenstein] is profoundly concerned with
natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction".
Victor Frankenstein's failure as a "parent" in the novel has been
read as an expression of the anxieties which accompany pregnancy, giving birth,
and particularly maternity.
Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in their seminal book The Madwoman in the Attic
(1979) that in Frankenstein in particular, Shelley responded to the masculine
literary tradition represented by John Milton's Paradise Lost. In their
interpretation, Shelley reaffirms this masculine tradition, including the
misogyny inherent in it, but at the same time "conceal [s] fantasies of
equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage". Mary Poovey
reads the first edition of Frankenstein as part of a larger pattern in
Shelley's writing, which begins with literary self-assertion and ends with
conventional femininity. Poovey suggests that Frankenstein's multiple
narratives enable Shelley to split her artistic persona: she can "express
and efface herself at the same time". Shelley's fear of self-assertion is
reflected in the fate of Frankenstein, who is punished for his egotism by
losing all his domestic ties.
Feminist
critics often focus on how authorship itself, particularly female authorship, is
represented in and through Shelley's novels. As Mellor explains, Shelley uses
the Gothic style not only to explore repressed female sexual desire but also as
way to "censor her own speech in Frankenstein". According to Poovey
and Mellor, Shelley did not want to promote her own authorial persona and felt
deeply inadequate as a writer, and "this shame contributed to the
generation of her fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and
destruction".
Shelley's
writings focus on the role of the family in society and women's role within
that family. She celebrates the "feminine affections and compassion"
associated with the family and suggests that civil society will fail without
them. Shelley was "profoundly committed to an ethic of cooperation, mutual
dependence, and self-sacrifice". In Lodore, for example, the central story
follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord
Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail
of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to
negotiate. The novel is engaged with political and ideological issues,
particularly the education and social role of women. It dissects a patriarchal
culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men. In
the view of Shelley scholar Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes
egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social
justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the
challenges life invariably brings". However, Falkner is the only one of
Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs. The novel's
resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and
destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion,
sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.
Enlightenment
and Romanticism
Frankenstein,
like much Gothic fiction of the period, mixes a visceral and alienating subject
matter with speculative and thought-provoking themes. Rather than focusing on
the twists and turns of the plot, however, the novel foregrounds the mental and
moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and Shelley imbues the
text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism, one that criticised the
individualism and egotism of traditional Romanticism. Victor Frankenstein is
like Satan in Paradise Lost, and Prometheus: he rebels against tradition; he
creates life; and he shapes his own destiny. These traits are not portrayed
positively; as Blumberg writes, "his relentless ambition is a
self-delusion, clothed as quest for truth". He must abandon his family to
fulfill his ambition.
Mary
Shelley believed in the Enlightenment idea that people could improve society
through the responsible exercise of political power, but she feared that the
irresponsible exercise of power would lead to chaos. In practice, her works
largely criticise the way 18th-century thinkers such as her parents believed
such change could be brought about. The creature in Frankenstein, for example,
reads books associated with radical ideals but the education he gains from them
is ultimately useless. Shelley's works reveal her as less optimistic than
Godwin and Wollstonecraft; she lacks faith in Godwin's theory that humanity
could eventually be perfected.
As
literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, The Last Man, more so than Frankenstein,
"in its refusal to place humanity at the centre of the universe, its
questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a
profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism." Specifically, Mary
Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France
and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge
"Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective
efforts". As in Frankenstein, Shelley "offers a profoundly
disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution, which ends in a total
rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation". Not only does
she reject these Enlightenment political ideals, but she also rejects the
Romantic notion that the poetic or literary imagination can offer an
alternative.
Politics
There
is a new scholarly emphasis on Shelley as a lifelong reformer, deeply engaged
in the liberal and feminist concerns of her day. In 1820, she was thrilled by
the Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution. In
1823, she wrote articles for Leigh Hunt's periodical The Liberal and played an
active role in the formulation of its outlook. She was delighted when the Whigs
came back to power in 1830 and at the prospect of the 1832 Reform Act. Critics
have until recently cited Lodore and Falkner as evidence of increasing
conservatism in Mary Shelley's later works. In 1984, Mary Poovey influentially
identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the
"separate sphere" of the domestic. Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley
wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of
libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum. Mellor largely
agreed, arguing that "Mary Shelley grounded her alternative political
ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois family. She thereby
implicitly endorsed a conservative vision of gradual evolutionary reform."
This vision allowed women to participate in the public sphere but it inherited
the inequalities inherent in the bourgeois family.
However,
in the last decade or so this view has been challenged. For example, Bennett
claims that Mary Shelley's works reveal a consistent commitment to Romantic
idealism and political reform and Jane Blumberg's study of Shelley's early
novels argues that her career cannot be easily divided into radical and
conservative halves. She contends that "Shelley was never a passionate
radical like her husband and her later lifestyle was not abruptly assumed nor
was it a betrayal. She was in fact challenging the political and literary
influences of her circle in her first work." In this reading, Shelley's
early works are interpreted as a challenge to Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley's
radicalism. Victor Frankenstein's "thoughtless rejection of family",
for example, is seen as evidence of Shelley's constant concern for the
domestic.
Short
stories
In
the 1820s and 1830s, Mary Shelley frequently wrote short stories for gift books
or annuals, including sixteen for The Keepsake, which was aimed at middle-class
women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages. Mary Shelley's work in this
genre has been described as that of a "hack writer" and "wordy
and pedestrian". However, critic Charlotte Sussman points out that other
leading writers of the day, such as the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took advantage of this profitable market. She
explains that "the annuals were a major mode of literary production in the
1820s and 1830s", with The Keepsake the most successful.
Many
of Shelley's stories are set in places or times far removed from early
19th-century Britain, such as Greece and the reign of Henry IV of France.
Shelley was particularly interested in "the fragility of individual
identity" and often depicted "the way a person's role in the world
can be cataclysmically altered either by an internal emotional upheaval, or by
some supernatural occurrence that mirrors an internal schism". In her
stories, female identity is tied to a woman's short-lived value in the marriage
market while male identity can be sustained and transformed through the use of
money. Although Mary Shelley wrote twenty-one short stories for the annuals
between 1823 and 1839, she always saw herself, above all, as a novelist. She
wrote to Leigh Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me
miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water
will wash off the mud of the magazines."
Travelogues
When
they ran off to France in the summer of 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley
began a joint journal, which they published in 1817 under the title History of
a Six Weeks' Tour, adding four letters, two by each of them, based on their
visit to Geneva in 1816, along with Percy Shelley's poem "Mont
Blanc". The work celebrates youthful love and political idealism and
consciously follows the example of Mary Wollstonecraft and others who had
combined travelling with writing. The perspective of the History is philosophical
and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it
addresses the effects of politics and war on France. The letters the couple
wrote on the second journey confront the "great and extraordinary
events" of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo after his
"Hundred Days" return in 1815. They also explore the sublimity of
Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc as well as the revolutionary legacy of the
philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Mary
Shelley's last full-length book, written in the form of letters and published
in 1844, was Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, which
recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends. In
Rambles, Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written
in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour in
mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of
sensibility and sympathy. For Shelley, building sympathetic connections between
people is the way to build civil society and to increase knowledge:
"knowledge, to enlighten and free the mind from clinging deadening
prejudices—a wider circle of sympathy with our fellow-creatures;—these are the
uses of travel". Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the
people, especially in a political point of view", she uses the travelogue
form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary
nationalism in Italy. She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes
associated with Percy Shelley. According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's
adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives Rambles the unity of a
prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes". At the same
time, Shelley makes an egalitarian case against monarchy, class distinctions,
slavery, and war.
Biographies
Between
1832 and 1839, Mary Shelley wrote many biographies of notable Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, and French men and a few women for Dionysius Lardner's Lives of the
Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men. These formed part of Lardner's
Cabinet Cyclopaedia, one of the best of many such series produced in the 1820s
and 1830s in response to growing middle-class demand for self-education. Until
the republication of these essays in 2002, their significance within her body
of work was not appreciated. In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich, they
reveal Mary Shelley's "prodigious research across several centuries and in
multiple languages", her gift for biographical narrative, and her interest
in the "emerging forms of feminist historiography". Shelley wrote in
a biographical style popularised by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in
his Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), combining secondary sources, memoir and
anecdote, and authorial evaluation. She records details of each writer's life
and character, quotes their writing in the original as well as in translation,
and ends with a critical assessment of their achievement.
For
Shelley, biographical writing was supposed to, in her words, "form as it
were a school in which to study the philosophy of history", and to teach
"lessons". Most frequently and importantly, these lessons consisted
of criticisms of male-dominated institutions such as primogeniture. Shelley
emphasises domesticity, romance, family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives
of her subjects. Her conviction that such forces could improve society connects
her biographical approach with that of other early feminist historians such as
Mary Hays and Anna Jameson. Unlike her novels, most of which had an original
print run of several hundred copies, the Lives had a print run of about 4,000
for each volume: thus, according to Kucich, Mary Shelley's "use of
biography to forward the social agenda of women's historiography became one of
her most influential political interventions".
Editorial work
Soon
after Percy Shelley's death, Mary Shelley determined to write his biography. In
a letter of 17 November 1822, she announced: "I shall write his life—&
thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive
consolation." However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, effectively
banned her from doing so. Mary began her fostering of Percy's poetic reputation
in 1824 with the publication of his Posthumous Poems. In 1839, while she was
working on the Lives, she prepared a new edition of his poetry, which became,
in the words of literary scholar Susan J. Wolfson, "the canonizing
event" in the history of her husband's reputation. The following year,
Mary Shelley edited a volume of her husband's essays, letters, translations,
and fragments, and throughout the 1830s, she introduced his poetry to a wider
audience by publishing assorted works in the annual The Keepsake.
Evading
Sir Timothy's ban on a biography, Mary Shelley often included in these editions
her own annotations and reflections on her husband's life and work. "I am
to justify his ways," she had declared in 1824; "I am to make him
beloved to all posterity." It was this goal, argues Blumberg, that led her
to present Percy's work to the public in the "most popular form
possible". To tailor his works for a Victorian audience, she cast Percy
Shelley as a lyrical rather than a political poet. As Mary Favret writes,
"the disembodied Percy identifies the spirit of poetry itself". Mary
glossed Percy's political radicalism as a form of sentimentalism, arguing that
his republicanism arose from sympathy for those who were suffering. She
inserted romantic anecdotes of his benevolence, domesticity, and love of the
natural world. Portraying herself as Percy's "practical muse", she
also noted how she had suggested revisions as he wrote.
Despite
the emotions stirred by this task, Mary Shelley arguably proved herself in many
respects a professional and scholarly editor. Working from Percy's messy,
sometimes indecipherable, notebooks, she attempted to form a chronology for his
writings, and she included poems, such as Epipsychidion, addressed to Emilia
Viviani, which she would rather have left out. She was forced, however, into
several compromises, and, as Blumberg notes, "modern critics have found
fault with the edition and claim variously that she miscopied, misinterpreted,
purposely obscured, and attempted to turn the poet into something he was
not". According to Wolfson, Donald Reiman, a modern editor of Percy Bysshe
Shelley's works, still refers to Mary Shelley's editions, while acknowledging
that her editing style belongs "to an age of editing when the aim was not
to establish accurate texts and scholarly apparatus but to present a full
record of a writer's career for the general reader". In principle, Mary
Shelley believed in publishing every last word of her husband's work; but she
found herself obliged to omit certain passages, either by pressure from her
publisher, Edward Moxon, or in deference to public propriety. For example, she
removed the atheistic passages from Queen Mab for the first edition. After she
restored them in the second edition, Moxon was prosecuted and convicted of
blasphemous libel, though the prosecution was brought out of principle by the
Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington, and no punishment was sought. Mary
Shelley's omissions provoked criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy
Shelley's former circle, and reviewers accused her of, among other things,
indiscriminate inclusions. Her notes have nevertheless remained an essential
source for the study of Percy Shelley's work. As Bennett explains,
"biographers and critics agree that Mary Shelley's commitment to bring
Shelley the notice she believed his works merited was the single, major force
that established Shelley's reputation during a period when he almost certainly
would have faded from public view".
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