Bringing the Author Forward: "Frankenstein" Through Mary Shelley's Letters
Author(s): JAMES P. CARSON and James B. Carson
Source: Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 4 (fall, 1988), pp. 431-453
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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JAMES
P. CARSON
Bringing the Author Forward:
Frankenstein Through
Mary Shelley's
Letters
In 1829 Mary Shelley described her own character at length in or
der to justify to Trelawny her refusal of his request for anecdotes of
the life of Percy Shelley:
You know me—or you do not, in which case I will tell you
what I am—a silly goose—who
far from wishing to stand
forward to assert myself in any way, now than [sic] I am
alone in the world, have but the desire to wrap night and the
obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness—but
I cannot help it—to be in print—the subject of men's observa
tions—of the bitter hard world's commentaries,
to be at
ill becomes one who knows how
tacked or defended!—this
whose
little she possesses
worthy to attract attention—and
chief merit—if it be one—is a love of that privacy which no
life must
woman can emerge from without regret—Shelley's
be written—I hope one day to do it myself, but it must not be
published now—1
Trelawny refused to believe this "mawkish cant" from his correspon
dent, finding it "as different from her real character and sentiments
as Hell is from Helicon."2 What I find most interesting in this fear of
publicity is not whether Shelley is telling the truth or whether she
strategically evokes a conventional ideal of femininity in order to jus
tify a refusal that seems inconsistent with friendship and professional
generosity. Rather, I am struck by the hope which Mary Shelley ex
presses in the final sentence, a hope to write Percy Shelley's life her
self, a hope which reflects a belief in her own authorial talents that is
not wholly consistent with her fear of appearing before the public in
writing.
A similar tension
between the self-effacement of the lady or
and the hopes and desires of the woman or the author
pears in the letters that Mary Shelley wrote when she came to
the knowledge
and the documents she had denied to Trelawny
scholar
years earlier. While
preparing
her editions
Criticism, Fall, 1988, Vol. XXX, No. 4, pp. 431-453.
© 1988 Wayne State University Press, Detroit,
Copyright
of her husband's
Michigan
48202
431
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the
ap
use
ten
poems
432
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
and essays in 1838-1839,
Shelley explored the interplay between an
assertion of the editorial I and the potential "mutilation"
of the au
thor's
works.
She
was
slow
on the editorial excisions
to determine,
and
anxious
to seek
advice,
that would
provide ammunition for the bi
bitter hard world" of posterity—who
ographers and critics—"the
have regretted the decline of the author of Frankenstein into conven
tionality. Trelawny, a major early exponent of this view, insists that
Mary Shelley drew whatever literary power she had by submitting to,
not struggling with, her husband's
influence: "Her capacity can be
she wrote after Shelley's death, more than ordi
and conventional.
Whilst overshadowed
narily commonplace
by
her
faculties
but when she had lost
Shelley's greatness
expanded;
him they shrank into their natural littleness."3 Without denying a
productive tension between husband and wife, I believe that Mary
judged
by the novels
Shelley's authorial response to Percy Shelley was neither precisely
one of expanding beneath a protective shadow nor of an egotistical
struggle to bring the self into the light. I would suggest that traces of
a tendency to denigrate Mary Shelley for her conventionality linger
even in some of the best and most sophisticated
recent criticism of
her works: hence Sandra Gilbert views Shelley as an "acquiescent"
stage on the road to Emily Bronte's "radically corrective 'misreading'
of Milton,"4 while Mary Poovey finds that Shelley, once she accepts
the doctrine of the proper lady, retreats from both her mother's femi
nism and her husband's ideal of originality, though traces of unortho
dox
desire
and
aggression
remain
even
in
her
late
novels.5
What
I
propose to question in this essay is the belief Poovey attributes to
the self
Vlary Shelley that there is a necessary conflict "between
denial demanded
domestic
and
the
self-assertiveness
es
by
activity
sential to artistic creation" (p. 138). Precisely by putting into question
both "creation" and the self, Shelley denies that the artist need en
gage in self-assertion.
I shall argue against the view that Shelley is conventional
or con
how
she
the
and
servative, by showing
questions
priority
authenticity
of the authorial and female self in the context of a profound aware
ness
of woman's
position under patriarchy. This interrogation ap
in
pears
Mary Shelley's resistance to biography; in her relations of in
fluence with other authors, especially her father, mother, and hus
band; and in her emphasis on the shifting tensions between duty and
desire, male and female, within the supposed
unity of the first per
son. Both her relations with other authors and her refusal of self
assertion suggest that Harold Bloom's model of literary influence may
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James
433
P. Carson
be inapplicable
to a woman Romantic writer. I intend to proceed in
this essay by initially situating the problem of self-assertion in Mary
poems and essays,
Shelley's letters on the editing of her husband's
of
and then proceeding to an examination
Frankenstein, especially the
Introduction
of 1831, in the light of Mary Shelley's views on the rela
tion of the female self to the patriarchal authority of father and hus
band, as these views appear both in her letters and other early
novels.
The criticism of Mary Shelley's orthodoxy has been based as much
on her editorial work as on her later novels. Yet before she omitted
the Dedication to Harriet Shelley and the notes to Queen Mab, as well
as the "Essay on the Devil and Devils/' Mary Shelley betrayed in a
number of letters a considerable
struggle as she wavered between
self-assertion and self-denial as the guardian of Percy Shelley's works
and will. In one of these letters, she underlines the word I precisely
in order to deny that personal feelings enter into her editorial deci
sions: "Except that I do not like the idea of a mutilated edition, I have
no scruple of conscience in leaving out the expressions which Shelley
would never have printed in after <life Life> I have a great love for
Queen Mab . . ." (2: 305, 14 Dec. 1838). Similarly, she emphasizes
the pronoun me in explaining that it was Percy Shelley's intention to
exclude
to Harriet Shelley: "when Clarke's edition
appeared,
Shelley rejoiced that it was omitted—&
expressed great
satisfaction thereon. It could be nothing to me but matter of pleasure
to publish it" (2: 309, 11 Feb. 1839). The omission of the Dedication
is based on Mary Shelley's knowledge
of the author's sentiments,
which permits her to speak for her husband after his death.
But
the Dedication
when
she
speaks,
it is more
as
a professional
writer
than
a ro
mantic rebel. Her desire that Percy Shelley's works obtain the popu
larity they deserve may conflict with her duty: "Remember I do not
enter into the question at all. It is my duty to publish every thing of
I want these two volumes to be popular—"
(2: 326, 6
Shelley—but
Oct. 1839). Mary Shelley underlines the pronouns I and my in order
to emphasize
her own self-effacement, but her desire
paradoxically
if
in
as
the final unstressed "I want." Her desire
in,
slips
unperceived,
for Percy Shelley's popularity justifies an editorial decision that she
herself repeatedly characterizes as "mutilation": "I don't like Atheism
—nor does he now. Yet I hate mutilation . . ." (2: 304, 12 Dec. 1838).
But my reading will not show that radicalism or subversion lie firmly
in the realm of desire and adamantly opposed to what Mary Shelley
conceives of as duty. For the I which is the subject of desire expresses
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434
Frankenstein
Through
Letters
Shelley's
a wish for what is in some sense socially conventional, whereas the
self which is dutifully effaced would permit the printing of atheistical
expressions.
Mary Shelley's editorial desire for her husband's
popularity pro
longs a dispute carried on between husband and wife during Percy
Shelley's life. Her stressed and unstressed personal pronouns help to
gloss the passive construction that concludes her laudatory note on
The Cenci: "often after he was earnestly entreated to write again in a
style that commanded
popular favour, while it was not less instinct
with truth and genius."6 The unexpressed
agent here—she who en
treated Percy Shelley to depict human passions instead of the "fan
tastic creations of his fancy" ("Note on the Cenci," 2: 366)—is
evi
dently the same person who "want[s] these two volumes to be popu
lar." Mary Shelley denies the elitist Romantic contention that truth
and genius are inalterably opposed
to popularity. The popular suc
cess of Frankenstein provides evidence for her position, and, indeed,
her novel criticizes elitist claims to the truth, while drawing upon the
The kind of popularity
sympathetic response of a broad audience.
that Mary Shelley seeks for her husband should not be confused with
for her critique of individualism
and the
bourgeois conventionality,
autonomous
creative self is, at the very least, in tension with bour
geois ideology. Indeed, the problem of the self is forcefully revealed
in the unusual kind of desire we are examining—"I
want these two
volumes to be popular"—the
desire to bring another author forward.
Yet
that
worked
other
on
the
is
two
not
wholly
volumes
other,
of her
since
Mary
husband's
prose
herself
has
Shelley
works,
negotiat
ing as any editor or critic must, between a real respect for the au
thor's will, as she interprets it, and the demands of publisher and
audience.
A certain post-Freudian
cri
perspective, the object of Foucault's
in
The
liter
has
social
and
tique
History of Sexuality/
prompted many
ary critics to associate desire with subversion and the liberation of de
sire with political freedom; whereas,
for liberal reformers in the
school of Godwin, self-denying duty and not self-expressive desire
tended to be viewed as the mechanism of social change. It may be
that, because
Mary Shelley's
particular kind of radical liberalism
came
to differ from that of her husband
and mother, she has been
as merely conventional.
The work of E. P. Thompson
will help us to explain such misunderstandings:
has
Thompson
argued that many reformers of Mary Shelley's generation adopted "a
misunderstood
general
moral
primness,"
in
part
because
the
attacks
on
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them
auto
James
435
P. Carson
matically associated radicalism with sexual licence. The duty of self
effacement, which Mary Shelley indicates through her pronominal
play, might recall a sentence from the most notorious passage of her
father's most important work. When considering, in the Enquiry Con
cerning Political Justice (1793), a case of conscience in which only one
of Fenelon or his chambermaid, who might have "been my wife, my
mother," can be saved from a fire, Godwin asks, "What magic is
there in the pronoun 'my,' that should justify us in overturning the
decisions of impartial truth?"9 For Godwin, as for his daughter, duty
and once again
requires the elimination of personal considerations,
for him the avoidance of the personal is signalled by an emphasis on
personal
pronouns.
In editing her husband's works, Mary Shelley is only returning the
assistance that Percy offered her prior to the publication of Franken
stein. If mutilation is the female editorial mode, then the male mode
may be called ventriloquism. Female editorial work brings recrimina
tions (perhaps deriving from the dread of castration),10 whereas male
editorial work elicits praise. As we shall see, there is evidence of such
mutilation
in Mary Shelley's novels, when the blinding of fathers
permits daughters, monstrous sons, and their doctrine of sympathy to
be heard. My quarrel is less with the explanatory power of the male
fear of mutilation, at least once it has been situated in a social con
text, than it is with a tradition of literary history which has com
and overestimated
mended,
of
project
voices
in
Frankenstein,
of three
male
figures
the power
which
(two
the
men
and
an extended commentary on the problem
the voice of the conventionally
passive
strategy
not
may
serve
to
create
an
of, male
female
ventriloquism.
author
a monster),
assumes
may
be
The
the
seen
as
of the male expropriation of
female.11 Yet even such a
authorial
free
space
from
the
au
thority of the great Romantic poet. Percy Shelley's marginal annota
tions in the surviving fragments of the manuscript seem to have had
the force of law, since virtually all his suggestions were adopted by
his wife. These additions by Percy Shelley, as well as his corrections
of grammar, spelling, and style in both manuscript
and proofs,
the
modern
editor
of
the
1818
Frankenstein,
James
prompt
Rieger, to
accord him "a measure of 'final authority'" for the text.12
In recent years critics have paid increasing attention to the problem
of female authority for Mary Shelley. Ellen Moers, who interprets
Frankenstein as a birth myth with sources in the author's life, exposes
the prejudices
first
novel
have
on which previous
been
based:
"Her
studies
extreme
of the sources
youth,
as
well
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of Shelley's
as
her
sex,
436
Frankenstein
Through
Letters
Shelley's
have contributed to the generally held opinion that she was not so
much an author in her own right as a transparent medium through
which passed the ideas of those around her."13 Critics such as Moers
have made effective use of biographical evidence, but the recent ap
pearance of an excellent, much expanded collection of Mary Shelley's
letters provides new resources for the reader of Frankenstein. Mary
and gender should
Shelley's
epistolary statements on authorship
prompt us to change the terms of a recent debate in which the author
of Frankenstein has been viewed as either a failure or a success in a
Bloomian struggle to affirm her
cessors and contemporaries.14
through her letters, I shall show
mary goal at which she aimed.
female self against her male prede
novel
By reading Mary Shelley's
that self-affirmation was not the pri
But her refusal to assert her female
make Shelley a less powerful woman
self would
not necessarily
writer, for, according to Peggy Kamuf, "the cult of the individual and
the temptation which results to explain to ourselves artistic and intel
lectual productions as expressions, simple and direct, of individual
experience" must be included among "the fundamental assumptions
of patriarchy."15 Mary Shelley does not so much compete in a Ro
mantic struggle to assert her creative self as offer an incipient critique
of the individualistic notion of originary creativity.
While her unwillingness
to bring herself forward is certainly re
lated
to specifically female anxieties of authorship, Mary Shelley's
is not a passive gesture but rather both an assertion of eth
self-denial
ical
value
structed
and
an
of
out
of
indication
unstable
social
the
and
way
gender
in
which
roles.
the
The
self
year
is
con
before
Shelley expressed her fear of publicity to Trelawny, she justified a re
fusal to become the subject of biography as a legitimate response to a
society which confines women to the domestic sphere: "As to a
Memoir, as my sex has precluded all idea of my fulfilling public em
ployments, I do not see what the public have to do with me" (Letters
2: 22, 5 Jan. 1828). However,
the popular success of Frankenstein,
combined with the growing interest, in the Romantic period, in bio
graphical interpretation, brought Shelley into public notice, a position
she exploited in order to emphasize
the lack of unity in the female
authorial
self.
The dangers of slipping into either the vanity of authorship and
intrusiveness or the guilt of parental negligence would
biographical
be especially threatening for a woman writing in her own name the
genetic account of a novel published anonymously thirteen years ear
lier. In the 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein, Shelley seeks to over
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James
437
P. Carson
come
the danger of forwardness by insisting on a division between
the private and public selves, between what is personal and what
pertains to her as an author: "It is true that I am very averse to bring
ing myself forward in print; but as my account will only appear as an
to a former production, and as it will be confined to such
appendage
topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can scarcely
accuse myself of a personal intrusion."16 It is questionable,
however,
whether a mere declaration of her aversion to literary forwardness
would
suffice to exclude
Shelley from the egotistical, masculine
for glory exemplified in Walton, Frankenstein, and Clerval.
But unlike her creator-hero, the maternal author willingly assumes
parental responsibility: "And now, once again, I bid my hideous pro
geny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the
search
offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words,
which found no true echo in my heart. . . . But this is for myself; my
readers have nothing to do with these associations"
(p. 10). The po
tential vanity of authorship is cancelled by declaring what is "my
own" to be "hideous"
and, as we shall see, by proposing a theory of
invention which denies absolute origination, thereby draining the
my of most of its possessive force.
Although Mary Shelley did not apparently value female self-asser
or
tion, she should not therefore be regarded as simply conventional
as embodying, in advance, a Victorian ideal of self-denying woman
adjective
hood.
The ostentacious
self-effacement with which Mary Poovey has
recently charged Mary Shelley seems never to have clearly entailed,
for Shelley, the belief "that women's behavior must significantly dif
fer from that of men," a belief which characterizes the ideology of the
"proper lady" (Proper Lady, xvii, 4). Mary Shelley advocates duty and
self-denial not just as feminine but as human ideals. In a letter she
wrote to Robert Dale Owen, the son of the author of A New View of
Society (1813), prior to the departure of both father and son for the
model American community of Nashoba,
Shelley participates in the
endeavor, promoted by sentimentalism, to create a new, sympathetic
male subject.17 She commends the self-reliant social reformer Frances
care. She advises him to be very attentive to
Wright to Owen's
if Wright does not communicate her problems
for
situation,
Wright's
and her need for assistance
it will be less on account of secretiveness
than of the existing social relations between the sexes:
we must all be sure of sympathy before we confide at all—&
a woman
must
very
highly
esteem
&
love
a
man
before
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she
438
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
can tell any of her heart's secrets to him. We have no very
excessive opinion of men's sympathetic and self-sacrificing
qualities—make
yourself an exception.
(2: 17, 9 Nov. 1827)
Mary Shelley clearly recognized not only that women more fully em
bodied the qualities of sympathy and self-denial, but that their very
success in attaining these ideals would very likely operate to their
in the current state of society. Hence,
disadvantage
Frances Wright, she tempers her praise with a warning:
in writing to
You
do honour to our species & what perhaps is dearer to
me, to the feminine part of it.—and that thought, while it
makes me doubly interested in you, makes me tremble for
are so per[pet}ually the victims of their gener
you—women
osity—& their purer, & more sensitive feelings render them
so much less than men capable of battling the selfishness,
hardness & ingratitude w^ is so often the return made, for
the noblest efforts to benefit others.
(2: 4, 12 Sep. 1827)
The greater purity of women's than men's efforts to efface the self in
doing their duty to humanity and in making those around them
happy, as well as the deprivation endured by women because of such
self-sacrifice, forms one of the subjects of Mary Shelley's first novel.
That Shelley
awareness
should
of its
maintain
threat
to
Gilbert and
her
the human
sex,
suggests
ideal of self-sacrifice, in full
that
we
ought
to
reassess
Gubar's unfavorable
of Mary Shelley with
comparison
is based on the thesis that self
Emily Bronte; for their evaluation
discovery or affirmation of the female self is the telos of nineteenth
century women's
writing. Mary Shelley, on the contrary, found it
or merely tiresome to have the self brought
morally reprehensible
forward in writing: "I have tried to read Mme de Genlis' memoirs,
but they are one large capital I from beginning to end . .
(2: 48, 20
June 1828).18 Although Mary Shelley values self-sacrifice over self
affirmation, she does so with a complex awareness of the social im
of her position.
its connection
Through
plications
with authorship,
self
Mary Shelley's
effacement raises simultaneously
a question of ethics and of the na
ture of subjectivity in narrative. Shelley's dissatisfaction with the in
sistence of the first person appears again in her description in the
1831 Introduction to Frankenstein of her youthful imaginative flights:
"I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me
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James
P. Carson
439
too common-place
an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to
myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot;
but I was not confined to my own identity" (p. 6). In fact, Shelley's
claim that she has escaped from her own identity alludes to one of
her mother's statements of intention as an autobiographical
author.
In the Advertisement prefacing her Letters Written during a Short Resi
dence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Mary Wollstonecraft
remarks that she "could not avoid being the first person—'the
little
hero of each tale.'"19 It is as if Shelley's escape from her own identity
is assisted by literary borrowing, especially a borrowing that alludes
to the preoedipal inseparability of mother and child, an inseparability
that Shelley can only imagine given her mother's death twelve days
after having given birth to her. But while this instance of literary in
fluence appears to depart from the Bloomian model, Mary Shelley
does not borrow from her mother simply in order to identify with
her. Instead her rejection of the role of heroine in her juvenile tales
contradicts her mother's description of her authorial practice.
But this opposition between mother and daughter would not be
sustained by a reading of the Letters from Sweden themselves, for
within Wollstonecraft's work the 1 as hero of the tale is threatened by
something very like Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny." In St. Mary's
church in Tonsberg, Norway, Wollstonecraft is appalled by a recess
full of embalmed
corpses, of which the teeth, nails, and skin have
been wholly preserved: "The grandeur of the active principle is never
more strongly felt than at such a sight; for nothing is so ugly as the
human form when deprived of life, and thus dried into stone, merely
to preserve the most disgusting image of death" (p. 71). These hid
eous products of an attempt to deny mortality raise the question, for
Wollstonecraft, of the ultimate fate of the I: "Where goes this breath?
this I, so much alive?" (p. 71). Wollstonecraft's italics imply what her
daughter explicitly states, that the 1 may not preserve its own iden
tity, irrespective of whether sympathetic identification permits a true
escape from the self.
In Frankenstein the integrity of the self is threatened by the artificial
manufacture of a creature capable of saying I. Mary Shelley identifies
with the monster, not least by employing him as one of her first
person narrators. The confinement of the self to an identity is ques
tioned by the female author's identification with the male hero of the
tale. Like Shelley, the monster is reluctant to bring himself forward.
He requires a linguistic apprenticeship
before he introduces himself
to the idealized De Lacey family: "although I eagerly longed to dis
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440
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
cover myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attempt until I
had first become master of their language; which knowledge
might
enable me to make them overlook the deformity of my figure" (pp.
113-14). While the fear that Shelley expresses in her Introduction is
that of bringing herself forward in print, the fear in the novel is that
of bringing oneself forward in person without the linguistic supple
ment.
That the monster is unwilling to bring his person forward derives
from a correct understanding
of his own nature, an understanding
that he is capable of receiving only vicarious sympathy. No one who
sees the monster in person can sympathize with him; he has been far
more successful in obtaining the sympathy of those who encounter
him only through the medium of print. The monster engages in a
peculiar kind of self-denial, applying his whole mind to the acquisi
tion of language,
The conventional
precisely in order to efface himself as visible object.
hierarchical scheme of signification—in which writ
is
less
than speech, which is in turn less immediate
immediate
ing
than visible objects or conceptions—is
disrupted by this attempt at
self-effacement. The monster believes that verbal language may com
pensate for his incapacity for engaging in the language of the counte
nance, his inability to reply sympathetically to anyone with his "dull
yellow eye" (p. 57). But verbal language sometimes serves as another
instrument for blinding rather than as an alternative means of being
seen or understood.
The monster, in his "father's" view, does not
even
seek
to
make
his
language
transparent.
Frankenstein's
fear
for
his own life on his wedding night arises from a misinterpretation of
his monster's threat—"I shall be with you on your wedding-night"
(p. 168). Once his bride of a few hours has been strangled, Franken
stein attributes his misinterpretation to the ambiguities of language or
to the power of a speaker intentionally to blind one to his intended
of magic powers, the monster had blinded
meaning: "as if possessed
me to his real intentions" (p. 191).
An earlier instance of blinding occurs when the monster demands a
mate, suggesting that it is, in fact, the female behind his creature
which the father fears. When Frankenstein encounters his monstrous
son on the Mer de Glace, he commands:
"Begone! relieve me from
the sight of your detested form" (p. 101). In response the monster
takes advantage of the magic of language so as to act in accordance
"
with the letter but not the spirit of his father's command.
'Thus I re
lieve thee, my creator,' he said, and placed his hated hands before
my eyes, which I flung from me with violence; 'thus I take from thee
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James
P. Carson
441
a sight which you abhor'" (p. 101). Part of what is at stake in filial
insubordination
is the appropriation of meaning for one's own ends
—the end of blinding the father or rendering him impotent. In order
for the child to force the father to listen, he or she must perform the
operation of symbolic, upwardly displaced, castration. The monster
serves as Mary Shelley's surrogate within the novel for the female
linguistic strategy that she will later term mutilation. Still, the mon
ster's temporary blinding of his father is a far less violent act than
Frankenstein's destruction of the female body. In fact, such blinding
may be necessary to transform the paternal figure in the patriarchal
order into a new, feminized male subject.
The monster forces his father to listen, so that he may argue in fa
vor of a whole new set of values—values
represented by Elizabeth
Lavenza and, perhaps, by the monster's female mate, whom the eli
tist creator tears apart with his own hands. In fact, it is the emphasis
on the female position that removes Shelley's use of images of up
wardly displaced castration from containment in the Oedipal model
of a power struggle between son and father. Shelley emphasizes
the
female position in order to indicate that power and mastery are not
the only or even primary objects of the struggle between father and
child. As in sentimental literature generally, power and sexual po
The blinded father and the cas
tency are placed under suspicion.
trated male are compensated
for their losses by a new moral stature.
Such men of feeling become the representatives of the value of self
sacrifice, as well as the recipients of their children's care. In this re
Gothic novel St. Leon (1799)
stands behind his
spect, Godwin's
first
novel.
While
St.
Leon
is
daughter's
squandering his patrimony in
his
son
is
the
of
Zaleucus the Locrian, who
gambling,
reading
"story
out
one
of
his
own
he
that
put
eyes,
might preserve eye-sight to his
son."20 When Mary Shelley borrows the figure of the blinded father,
in the character of De Lacey, from her father, acknowledged
indebt
edness, a desire to become her father's nurse, and the implicit wish to
see this great enlightenment figure reduced to dependence
all take
over
the
aim
of
authorial
self-assertion.
priority
The ideological conflict between the paternal scientist and his sen
timental child is fought in part with philosophical
tools—for exam
and
her
monster's
subversion
of the hierarchy
ple, Mary Shelley's
that conventionally
places the self and the visible object above lan
The
monster
is fortunately able to present himself to the fa
guage.
ther of Felix and Agatha De Lacey by means of his voice alone, be
cause of the old man's blindness.21 The operation of De Lacey's sym
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442
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
pathy is cut short, however, by the return of the children who serve
as his eyes. The blinded father both arouses sympathy and is himself
of greater
capable
sympathy
than
a man
who
is entire,
seamless,
and
potent, with no need for the care of others and no inclination to hear
their voices. Deprived of the male prerogative, the "mutilated"
man
lacks the pride of man. But this disability has its compensations,
as it
appears from Mary Shelley's defence of the castrato Giovanni-Battista
Velluti: "If he has not all the boasted energy of that vain creature
man he has what is far better, a strength all his own, founded on the
tenderness & sympathy he irrisistibly excites" (1: 522, 23 June 1826).
The uncanny mutilation which deprives the father of the pride of the
eyes gives children more vital roles in the patriarchal family. The
scenes of daughters caring for their blinded fathers in Frankenstein, in
Valperga (1823), and in The Last Man (1826) perhaps betray a wish
for the father's blindness but are much more nearly concerned with
opportunities for the exertion of the feminine duty of caring for an
other.
The situation in Valperga is characteristic in showing how adoption
of this conventional
feminine role provides a justification for female
education. In the course of caring for her scholarly father "and serv
dei Adimari derives
ing as eyes to his blinded sense,"22 Euthanasia
from her classical reading a new sense of history, a love of liberty,
and a place in the fourteenth-century Italian revival of learning.
There is no simple reinscription here of the subservient role of Mil
ton's
even
daughters,
if such
young
women
in
Shelley
waste
away,23
perhaps
from the guilt of having desired to overturn hierarchy by as
suming
the
role
of
parent
to
one's
own
father.
Nor,
however,
can
these situations be explained by Oedipal self-assertion, since the chil
dren do not aspire to the paternal position of power, in which the self
can be confidently affirmed.
We have already seen a similarity between Shelley and her "hid
eous progeny" in their shared aversion to bringing themselves for
ward, until they possess linguistic mastery. In the course of the novel,
however, the possibility of such mastery is questioned, and it appears
more likely that language masters (wo)man than vice versa. We have
now seen a shared desire for the blinding of father figures, linguisti
cally or otherwise. Another analogy between Shelley and her mon
ster is situated in the opposition between reality and representation.
This opposition is reinscribed in several subordinate ones: those be
tween origination and reflection, sun and moon, male and female.
Just as the monster appears almost invariably by the light of the
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James
P. Carson
443
more than once identified herself with
moon, so Mary Shelley
"moonshine,"
though, according to Betty Bennett, "not in a self
deprecating way but rather as a metaphor for her reflection of Shel
ley's sunshine and her commitment to 'endeavour to consider my self
a continuation of his being'" (1: 285, n. 5). Such a metaphor certainly
sounds
and indeed
self-deprecation
might have
self-deprecating,
been prompted by Mary Shelley's ethics of self-denial even while it
would have been resisted by her special love of the feminine and her
criticism of the male prerogative. The slippage here from the child
father relationship to that of the wife and husband under patriarchy
is more Mary Shelley's than mine; for, in a letter written shortly after
the journal entry about her striving to continue Percy Shelley's being,
she informs Jane Williams that, "Until I knew Shelley I may justly
say that [Godwin]
these
nearly
was my God
. .
(1: 296, 5 Dec.
statements
contemporaneous
are
the
Both of
1822).
of
product
the
pe
riod of grief in the months following Percy Shelley's death.
Prior to his death, however, Mary Shelley's resistance to (self-)rep
resentations as a subordinate part of her husband appears through a
slip of the pen (indicated within angle brackets) even in her passion
ate defence of him in the face of rumors that he conceived a child by
her step-sister, Claire Clairmont: "Need I say that the union between
(1:
my husband and <hims>
myself has ever been undisturbed"
10
207,
Aug. 1821). Mary Shelley begins to write of a "union be
tween my husband and hims[elf]," but corrects herself in the middle
of
the
refuses
word,
"hims"
leaving
to allow
writing
under
to remain
erasure
a transparent
in
the
text.
Shelley's
medium
for
the
pen
com
munication of thought, questioning once again the conventional hier
archical scheme of signification.
Another gender-based
self-correction occurs in an earlier letter, one
written shortly before the publication
of Frankenstein about Claire
Clairmont's seven-month-old
daughter: "Miss Alba is perfectly well
& thriving—she crows like a little cock although (as Shelley bids me
say—) she is a hen—" (1: 39, 6 Aug. 1817). A cross-gender metaphor
is used to describe
the assertive voice of a healthy female infant, but
as soon as the metaphor is suggested it is censored and the confusion
of genders corrected. The agent of this censorship is, characteristi
cally, male authority—the husband and great Romantic poet. By the
final clause—"she
is a hen"—the
voice of the female letter-writer has
been
expropriated and the male author speaks through her in the
manner of a ventriloquist. Mary Shelley playfully protests against a
double denial of the female voice (Miss Alba's and her own). Another
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444
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
such epistolary self-correction occurs when Mary Shelley writes of
her early favorable assessment of Trelawny: "& Shelley agreed with
me, as he always did, or rather I with him" (1: 253, 27 Aug. 1822).
to her husband always comes only on
Mary Shelley's subordination
second thought.
Given this history of self-correction in her union with her husband,
we cannot treat the crossed-out "hims" in her defence of Percy Shel
ley as if it were not there. Does this grapheme constitute an indict
ment of his egotism? Does the "hims" which must be erased hint at
Mary Shelley's feelings that the "myself" has been erased in this
union? Or is it a question of Percy Shelley's self-division? Mary Shel
ley's letters record certain of her husband's
out-of-body experiences,
which suggest that a union between him and himself might have
been a happy prospect. But the content of one of these visions serves
to collapse the distinction between the two readings of the crossed
out "hims": as either Percy's self-division or the erasure of Mary's
self. For Mary Shelley tells how her husband in a visionary moment
"saw the figure of himself strangling me" (1: 245, 15 Aug. 1822).24
Thus a Percy who is split into two selves—actor
and visionary spec
tator—threatens to extinguish Mary's self. The mode of the visionary
attempted murder is significant, for the husband's dream may be less
that of killing the wife than of silencing her.
The doubling
Mary Shelley's,
in
a novel
in
of Percy Shelley's self and the potential erasure of
discovered here in her letters, have their counterpart
which
the
female
author's
perspective
is relinquished
to
a series of male doubles. The epistolary form of Frankenstein is simul
in
taneously an attempt to obtain whatever immediacy is available
novel writing and an interrogation of the status of the self. The fic
tional epistle and fictional memoir have always been seen as instru
ments for self-analysis, for the investigation of motives. I believe that
the status of the self is questioned in another way, as well, in novels
in which the "I" speaks as a result of impersonation
across gender.
The "I" can no longer be seen as the product of an originary, unified,
and gendered self.
In her second
most famous novel, Mary Shelley uses italicized first
person pronouns to recreate imaginatively an inverse situation from
the one we have just analysed in her letters: now, not her own self
correction, but the possibility of Percy Shelley's self-correction. In The
Last Man, the male first-person narrator, Lionel Verney—who
serves,
at least in part, as a self-portrait by Mary Shelley—tells
how Adrian,
the Percy Shelley figure, intends to nominate Lord Raymond as Lord
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James
"If 1—that is, if we propose him, he will as
(p. 68). In parliamentary matters, Adrian's in
Protector of England:
suredly be elected . .
clusion
of the
445
P. Carson
non-aristocratic
Verney
comes
belatedly,
evidence
of a
certain egotism or elitism. A subsequent italicization of a first-person
pronoun appears not in the context of exerting political power but of
sharing sympathetic tears. Lionel consoles his wife, Idris, as they pre
pare to leave Windsor Forest forever: "she hid her face in my bosom,
and we—yes,
my masculine firmness dissolved—we
wept together
"we"—a
tears"
consolatory
(p. 239). The non-assertive
pronoun
which here includes not men of different classes but persons of dif
ferent genders—requires
the dissolution of the firm boundaries of the
male self. Dissolving in tears is a female privilege which Verney often
wishes were permitted to men. Male tears, according to Verney, rep
resent the "natural"
rebellion
of a softness within men which a cer
tain social construction
solution
of male
of gender has denied (pp. 125, 259). The dis
firmness and Lionel's yielding to softness indicate
that, while an apocalyptic plague may be necessary for the levelling
of distinctions of age and class and property, the ordinary operations
of human sympathy and love are sufficient to threaten social con
structions of gender.
the character Evadne
Indeed, patriotism and disappointed
to become a female warrior. While
love lead
dressed
in
male guise, "her limbs had lost the roundness of youth and woman
hood" (132). In a novel in which Mary Shelley portrays herself as,
and writes in the narrative voice of, a man, she draws characters
whose transformations question stereotyped gender roles: the loss of
masculine firmness and feminine roundness. Her italicization of pro
nouns signals the gender divisions which mark the first-person singu
lar as other than self-identical. The male I in whose voice she speaks
recognizes the desirability of male and female eyes dissolving to
gether in sympathetic tears.
In Frankenstein, as I have suggested above, the pronoun my is simi
that is, one
force—since,
larly deprived of much of its possessive
should accept responsibility for what is one's own without claiming
absolute property in it. A theory of invention that denies origination
thus provides
tion:
an appropriate
introduction
to Shelley's
story of crea
Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean
phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that
went before. . . . Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does
not
consist
in creating
out
of void,
but
out
of chaos;
the
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mate
446
Frankenstein
Through
Shelley's
Letters
rials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to
dark, shapeless
substances, but cannot bring into being the
substance itself, (p. 8)
Within Shelley's genetic account of her novel, she points to the folly
of seeking origins. Her account here suggests an infinite regression,
while the parody of Genesis in the body of the work implies that new
creation is always prompted by and modelled on prior texts. Hence
can only speak of origins "in Sanchean
phrase." Paradoxi
"to
in
Sanchean
refers in
cally, however,
speak
phrase"—which
in Cervantes to speak proverbi
Shelley to textual mediation—means
ally, like the illiterate Sancho Panza. Speaking in Sanchean
phrase,
though the product of literary borrowing, would thus align Mary
Shelley
with the traditional
village culture which is opposed by the
projects of Walton and Frankenstein.
humble admission
even
Shelley's
concerning invention becomes
more humble, problematically
so, in the course of the Introduction.
Shelley
enlightened
For, when Shelley comes to discuss her husband's contribution to the
work, she limits his influence to matters of formal presentation: "I
certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of
one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it
would
never have
taken the form in which it was presented to the
But
invention has just been defined as the capacity of
(p. 10).
The waking dream
substances."
"giv[ing] form to dark, shapeless
which Mary Shelley recounts in explaining the genesis of her work
would seem to be more on the level of dark substance than of literary
form. Does Mary Shelley herself, then, license us to consider Percy
world"
Shelley the inventor or author of Frankenstein?
Mary Shelley's non-originary and non-assertive authorship would
certainly not prompt her to exclude Percy Shelley's writing from the
text, but it might lead as well to the recognition that if he is entitled
to a share of "final authority," then so perhaps are other authors, liv
ing and dead, such as Godwin and Milton. Literary influence in Fran
kenstein reinforces the splitting of the narrative I and the emptying
out of the possessive my. The character Frankenstein, on the contrary,
engages in Titanic self-assertion. He seeks through his creative proj
ect to exceed the human, to take his place among the immortals. Rob
ert Walton shares this ambition to go beyond. He only conceived of a
through barren wastes after having aspired to a place in the
already crowded poetic mansion: "I also became a poet, and for one
year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also
voyage
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James
447
P. Carson
might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and
are consecrated"
(p. 17). Outside the novel, the humble
Shakespeare
of
terror
fiction
does not enter into competition with
(women's)
genre
the works of such poetic fathers. Instead, the novelistic activity of ex
ceeding the human through forays into the supernatural can be justi
fied by invoking these consecrated
names: The Iliad, The Tempest,
Midsummer Night's Dream, and Paradise Lost (p. 13) are all called in to
sanction the imaginative procedures of Frankenstein. I use the passive
in the last sentence, since it is not the "author" of Frankenstein who
calls upon Homer, Shakespeare,
and Milton. That is to say, it is Percy
rather than Mary Shelley who wrote the Preface which contains the
defence of supernatural
fiction with its attendant appeal
to poetic au
thority.
Yet Mary Shelley is not without ambitions of joining the immor
tals, however much she may attempt to reconcile these ambitions
with the conventional role of the faithful wife, the romantic image of
love beyond the grave, and her own ideal of self-denying sympathy:
But were it not for the steady hope I entertain of joining him
what a mockery all this would be. Without that hope I could
not study or write, for fame & usefulness (except as far as re
gards my child) are nullities to me—Yet I shall be happy if
any thing I ever produce may exalt & soften sorrow, as the
writings of the divinities of our race have mine. But how can
I aspire to that?
(1: 254, 27 Aug. 1822)
Shelley aspires to the condition of "the divinities of our race," while
She declares that
at the same time denying her own aspirations.
has value only in the
"fame" is empty for her and that "usefulness"
in Valperga, Mary Shelley
maternal sphere. Just as with Euthanasia
uses
a conventional
feminine role to justify unfeminine ambitions,
such as that of mastering classical languages and literature. The study
and the exertion of genius that it would take to achieve fame and
are justified by Shelley on the basis of fidelity to her hus
a fidelity which extends to a desire to join him beyond the
grave. It is only by not, like Frankenstein and Walton, seeing fame
and usefulness as ends in themselves that Mary Shelley may be able
usefulness
band,
to escape from making her own life a "mockery." Indeed, for her, di
vine authors fulfill the feminine function of softening others' sorrows:
hence, the God that she made of her father and husband is trans
formed into a divine being more suitable to her own aspirations, a
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448
Frankenstein
Through
Letters
Shelley's
being who would not wish to supplant her father and wrest away his
authority but would hope rather to soften his sorrows in his necessar
ily dependent human condition. Shelley animates the conventional
social roles of daughter, wife, and mother with more than conven
tional electricity in order both to justify her ambitions and to escape
the egotistical endeavors which merely mock divine works.
But James Rieger does not raise the question of "final authority"
for the text of Frankenstein in terms of theories of literary influence or
of Mary Shelley's self-denying authorship. Rieger bases his claim for
Percy Shelley's share of final authority, in large part, on such manu
a
script evidence as that which shows that Percy Shelley composed
of
realistic
of
social
context
in
the
of
Ge
passage
description
republic
neva (p. 60, n. 2). The passage
cal
commitment
and
is especially
to
relevance
a
important since ideologi
social
context
are
viewed
commonly
as a new development
in the Gothic genre in the early nine
teenth century.25 Hence, that Percy wrote the following political ob
servations might seem to support the contention that Mary Shelley's
political interests were merely a passive reflection of her husband's
and that whatever is most innovative in Frankenstein is probably ow
ing to Percy Shelley's
contribution:
The
institutions of our country have produced
republican
and
simpler
happier manners than those which prevail in the
great monarchies that surround it. Hence there is less distinc
tion between the several classes of its inhabitants; and the
lower
orders,
manners
are
does
mean
gland.
not
being
more
the
neither
refined
same
so
poor
moral.
and
thing
as
nor
A
a servant
so
despised,
in
servant
in
France
their
Geneva
and
En
(Frankenstein, ed. Joseph, p. 65)
The matter of Percy Shelley's authorship is, however, complicated by
the resemblance of this passage to one in a letter Mary Shelley wrote
from Lake Geneva:
There is more equality of classes here than in England. This
occasions
a greater freedom and refinement of manners
among the lower orders than we meet with in our own coun
try. I fancy the haughty English ladies are greatly disgusted
with this consequence
of republican institutions ....
(1: 21, 1 June 1816)
While it may well be impossible to determine what influence Percy
had on the sentiments Mary Shelley expresses in this letter, pub
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James
449
P. Carson
lished prior to Frankenstein in Mary and Percy Shelley's History of a
Six Weeks' Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and
Holland (1817), nevertheless
we now have some basis for specula
tions different from Rieger's on the nature of Percy Shelley's "final
of the Frankenstein text
authority" for such significant developments
as the realistic description of Genevese
society. In this and other ad
ditions to Frankenstein, Percy Shelley may be writing as he thinks his
wife would
(or should) write. What better way of writing like Mary
Shelley than elaborating upon a passage from one of her own letters?
The notion of cross-gender narration supplies another way of stat
ing my argument about this instance of Percy Shelley's authorship.
Mary Shelley wrote her first novel in the narrative voice of three
male characters, leaving the female voice largely unheard. But in
making this addition to Frankenstein, Percy Shelley is required to
write as a woman, since this passage is contained in a letter by Eliza
beth Lavenza. What better way of writing as a woman would write a
letter than by adapting a passage from a woman's letter? Percy Shel
ley engages in a double "female impersonation,"
assuming the mask
of his wife in order to write as Elizabeth. His authority in this case
would be better described as "derived"
than "final." But perhaps
even a sincere and sympathetic effort to write as a woman would not
eliminate the irony and the pathos of this male production of the fe
male voice, given a tradition of literary history in which Percy Shel
ley's ventriloquism in Frankenstein has been praised while Mary Shel
ley
has
Given
been
maligned
for
the
"mutilation"
of
her
husband's
works.
the structure of inequality within which the male Romantic
or
male literary critic speaks, he cannot escape his complicity
poet
with patriarchy and is doomed, at best, to assume the paternal role
for which, as Mary Shelley notes, Godwin was not fitted: "My Fa
ther, from age and domestic circumstances, could not 'me faire va
loir.'"26
Mary Shelley, then, overturns a tradition of male ventriloquism in
part by her editorial and fictional strategy of mutilation, which, as we
have seen, cannot be wholly comprehended
in the Oedipal scheme
since it aims at the creation of a new, sympathetic male subject. She
also opposes
ventriloquism
by writing her novels Frankenstein and
The Last Man in the male voice. The function of her cross-gender nar
ration, with its vestigial reminders of carnivalesque
cross-dressing,27
might be that it provides Shelley with one means of indicating that
she locates truth in the beliefs and feelings of her audience rather
than in isolated opposition to them. Cross-gender narration would be
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450
Frankenstein
Through
s Letters
Shelley
associated with the sympathy her readers extend to the monster in
stead of with the community violence of the villagers who, resem
bling Frankenstein, pursue the monster with stones (p. 106). Franken
stein indicates
the similarity of popular superstition and elitist en
in their eradication
of the alien.
"male
Shelley's
lightenment
on the contrary, highlights the value of sympathetic
impersonation,"
identification with the other, just as her theory of authorship would
privilege quotation as the sign of otherness within the text. Such
identification does not serve as a guarantor of the identity of the au
thorial self but rather depends on sympathetic dissolution and insists
on the changing social constructions of the first person. Mary Shel
ley's rejection of the "me" and her embrace of non-originary author
nature of her work.28 Fran
ship are signs of the anti-elitist, "popular"
kenstein aspires to a place in oral culture—which
it has in a sense at
while it riots in its literariness.
tained—even
Dalhousie
University
Notes
I would
like
of Canada
1.
"To
Shelley,
to thank
ed.
T.
Betty
1980-88), 2: 72.
2.
Quoted
Univ.
Press,
3.
vols.
John
1878;
Writer
Univ.
Sciences
Trelawny,"
3 vols.
Bennett,
in R. Glynn
217.
Edward
Yale
Social
supporting
Grylls,
and
Humanities
Research
my research.
Letters
Apr. 1829,
of Mary
Johns
Hopkins
(Baltimore:
Mary
Shelley:
A Biography
Council
Wollstonecraft
Univ.
Press,
Oxford
(London:
1938),
(London,
4. Sandra
Woman
the
for generously
Edward
John
M.
Gilbert
and
Press,
Trelawny,
rpt. New
and
Records
York:
Susan
of Shelley,
Benjamin
Gubar,
the Nineteenth-Century
1979),
p. 189.
Byron,
Blom,
1968),
The Madwoman
Literary
and
the
2
Author,
2: 229.
in the Attic:
The
Haven:
(New
Imagination
5.
The Proper
Writer: Ideology
as Style
Mary Poovey,
Lady and the Woman
in the Works of Mary
and Jane Austen
Wollstonecraft,
Mary Shelley,
(Chicago:
Univ.
of Chicago
Press,
1984),
pp. xvi, 116, 158-60.
6.
John Keats
and
Percy
Bysshe
Shelley:
Complete
1 (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 2: 366.
7.
See
Michel
Foucault,
The
History
of Sexuality:
Poetical
An
Works,
2 vols,
Introduction,
in
trans.
Robert Hurley (1978; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1980), p. 131.
8. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rpt.
New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 740.
9. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,ed. F. E. L. Pries
U of Toronto
1: 128.
P, 1946),
tley, 3 vols. (Toronto:
10. The pun on mutilation
would
as "castration"
have
been
available
in
sentiments
and books
castrated.
circle, where
Shelley's
might be emasculated
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P. Carson
James
In
letter
a
to
Thomas
Godwin,
censored
in
Holcroft
Yale Univ. Press, 1984], p. 80).
11.
For
tion
of
U.
three
C.
Knoepflmacher,
male
personae
on the Aggression
at finding
pleasure
first part of Paine's
be unto God
and ]. S. Jordan!)
William
Godwin
Haven:
[New
expresses
of
J. S.
Jordan's
publication
"Not
a single
castration
(Laud
Rights of Man:
can I discover—"
in Peter H. Marshall,
(quoted
nothing
451
his
the
of a young
woman's
significance
adop
rather
than
social
primarily
psychological
of Daughters,"
The Endurance
of "Franken
the
is
("Thoughts
on Mary Shelley's
stein":
Novel,
Essays
flmacher
Univ.
of California
[Berkeley:
ed. George
Levine
and U. C. Knoep
In consider
Press,
1979],
pp. 105-06).
of male
1 have
been
influenced
narrative
voices,
by
on the opposite
of "female
narrative
situation
imper
use
Mary
Shelley's
work
K. Miller's
Nancy
sonation."
See
Nancy
ing
K.
"T's'
in Drag:
The
Miller,
and Interpretation,
22 (1981),
or the Modern
Frankenstein
Eighteenth
Century:
Theory
12. James
ed.,
Rieger,
xviii.
rial
29
view
initiative
tion
and
troubled
"Mary
13.
"that
E.
(1978),
at times
B.
"Female
Moers,
See
struggle
game"
Studies
Gilbert
Fred
and
V.
and
Gubar,
Randel
wins,
time
of
two
bodies
Gothic."
Doubleday, 1976), p. 94.
14.
1818
(The
Murray
that at the
by the idea
were effectively
and Shelley
Ellen
position,
Prometheus
evidence
for the bal
presents
ample
creative
added
its own
[Percy
Shelley's]
impulse
to the novel's
in keeping
with Mary's
effect, though
always
concep
with her implicit
sanction"
is, however,
(67).
Murray
insufficiently
Bulletin,
anced
Recollection,"
47-57.
York:
Bobbs-Merrill,
(New
1974),
Shelley
p.
Memo
to Mary's
Frankenstein,"
Keats-Shelley
Wollstonecraft
by Mary
In "Shelley's
Contribution
Text),
of
Sex
argues
an
"outperforming
Feminism,
24 [1985],
and
529).
composition
with but one
Women
Literary
187-247.
pp.
that Mary
("Frankenstein,
in Romanticism,
the
Frankenstein
(56).
(Garden
Gilbert
Disputing
Shelley
illustrious
of
soul"
City,
and
N.
Y.:
Gubar's
in the Bloomian
engages
male
tradition
at its own
the
of Mountains,"
Intertextuality
William
in a psychobiogra
Veeder,
of the conventional
the artistic
model,
phical
critique
Oedipal
regards
pro
ductions
of the Shelleys
as negotiating
or ways
of dealing
with
strategies,
their psychical
investment
in personal
and
see Mary
literary
relationships;
Shelley & Frankenstein: The Fate of Androgyny (Chicago:
Press,
1986).
My
the context
own
Univ. of Chicago
to
Mary
Shelley's
place
struggles
of individualism
follows
the gen
incipient
critique
eral lines of, while
it draws
on different evidence
of Gay
from, the argument
atri Chakravorty
in "Three
Women's
Texts and a Critique
of Imperial
Spivak
within
attempt
authorial
of an
ism," Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 243-61.
15.
ature
(New
Toril
nism,
self
sole
Kamuf,
Peggy
and Society, ed.
York:
Praeger,
is part
author
1985], p. 8).
Mary
Women
Ruth
and
Borker,
in Liter
Language
and Nelly
Furman
In her critique
of Anglo-American
femi
1980),
p. 286.
Moi makes
a similar
how the notion
of the integrated
point about
of patriarchal
"In this humanist
the self is the
ideology:
ideology
of history
and male—God
phallic
text"
(Sexual/Textual
16.
Like a Woman,"
"Writing
McConnell-Ginet,
Sally
and
of the
in relation
Politics:
Wollstonecraft
literary text: the humanist
to his world,
the author
Feminist
Shelley,
Literary
Frankenstein;
Theory
creator
is potent,
to his
in relation
[London:
or, the Modern
This content downloaded from 14.139.45.244 on Tue, 1 Jul 2014 02:05:01 AM
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Methuen,
Prometheus,
452
ed.
Frankenstein
M.
K. Joseph
1980), 5.
17.
For
the
and
James
Through
(1969;
Kinsley
late eighteenth-century
of human
nature
itself,"
"feminization
Letters
Shelley's
Oxford:
rpt.
of
"feminization
see
Terry
Oxford
discourse"
The
Eagleton,
Press
Univ.
or
Rape
even
of Clar
issa: Writing,Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell,
1982),
13,
pp.
and
95;
"The
Castle,
Terry
Representations, 17 (1987), 13-15.
Female
Thermometer,"
to a new novel
of Virginia
Woolf's
reaction
by
to lie across
the
a chapter
or two a shadow
seemed
like the letter
It was
a straight
dark bar, a shadow
shaped
something
page.
Own [Harmondsworth:
to be tired of T"
T. . . . One began
(A Room of One's
18.
is reminded
One
"Mr.
A.":
"after
here
reading
of the
with the insistence
1975],
p. 98). Dissatisfaction
concern
of
has
been
a
woman
not,
however,
exclusively
singular
in The Figure of Theater:
David
Marshall's
of Shaftesbury
reading
first-person
as
writers,
Penguin,
Adam
Defoe,
Shaftesbury,
York:
Univ.
Columbia
Press,
1986)
George Eliot (New
or The Language
"In his notes
for the Second
Characters,
for dealing
with the grammatical
a strategy
per
plans
and
Smith,
demonstrates:
amply
of Forms, Shaftesbury
sons of his text. 'The
12),
(SC:
he
use
instructs
of the
himself,
banished
ego
in all
to 'speak
conspiring
but
always
kind'
epistolary
once
fail
the
(without
ing) in the style of we, us, and our, for I, me, and mine'" (pp. 28-29).
19.
Norway,
Arno
Press,
and
Written
Letters
Wollstonecraft,
Mary
den,
ed.
Denmark,
Carol
a Short Residence
in Swe
During
Poston
Univ.
of Nebraska
(Lincoln:
H.
Press, 1976), p. 5.
20. William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (New York:
21.
her
as
Barbara
1972),
p. 58.
Freeman
cites
contention
an
Theory
25).
that
index
adequate
of Monstrosity,
22.
the
Frankenstein
to the
truth
or the
167.
blind
. . . that
De
in support
of
faith in vision
Lacey
metaphysics'
with Kant:
A
is misplaced"
("Frankenstein
of Theory,"
52 [1987],
SubStance,
Monstrosity
W. Shelley,
Or,
Mary
Valperga:
Printed
3 vols. (London:
of Lucca,
Prince
of the
figure
"shows
the Life and Adventures
of Castruccio,
1:
for G. and W. B. Whittaker,
1823),
who
dies in
German
woman,
twenty-year-old
The Last Man, ed. Hugh
J. Luke,
Mary Shelley,
Univ.
of Nebraska
Press,
Jr. (Lincoln:
1965),
pp. 306-07.
in the context
24. Discussing
this encounter
of Percy Shelley
with a double
in Shelley's
life and
Kelvin
Everest
of numerous
works,
argues
doublings
incidents
are an index
of Shelley's
that such
posi
paradoxical
persuasively
23.
Such
the Alps
tion
as
is the
in The
a radical
representative
fate
Last
of the
thinker,
of the British
'Julian and Maddalo,'"
ence,
25.
stein
value
ed.
see
Man;
Kelvin
and
difficult
("Shelley's
person
can
poet,
Doubles:
and
An
a polished
Approach
to
in Shelley Revalued: Essays from the Gregnog Confer
Leicester
Univ.
[Leicester:
it
is
to
Butler,
Marilyn
only with
According
the Wanderer
"that an ideological
and Melmoth
for the
Everest
a sophisticated
ruling class
be
read
into
a sustained
Press,
1983],
pp. 63-88).
the appearance
of Franken
hatred
of oppression
and
English
Gothic
tale"
{Jane
Austen and the War of Ideas [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], pp. 50-51).
26. 21 Oct. 1838, Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman:
Univ.
of Oklahoma
Press,
1947),
204.
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James
P. Carson
453
27. For the classic
of the significance
account
of carnivalesque
cross-dress
"Women
on Top,"
in Early Modern
Davis,
ing, see Natalie
Society and Culture
France (Stanford:
Stanford
Univ.
Press,
1975),
pp. 149-50.
28. "The
is aware
of his debt to tradition,
hence,
[oral] performer
perhaps
the impersonality
of traditional
or stories,
the lack of reference
to 'me,'
songs
the narrator
himself"
Culture
in Early Modern
Burke,
(Peter
Popular
Europe
[London: Temple Smith, 1978], p. 115).
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