Scritture femminili:
da Mary Wollstonecraft a
Virginia Woolf
Atti del Convegno in ricordo di
Gabriella Micks (Pescara, 24-25 ottobre 2007)
a cura di
Andrea Mariani
Francesco Marroni
Massimo Verzella
Copyright © MMIX
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I edizione: novembre 2009
Indice
Prefazione
9
Nora Crook
Who Wrote Frankenstein?
13
Sandro Jung
Sensibility, Class and Comedy in
Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
33
Michela Vanon Alliata
Il diario segreto di Mary Shelley
51
Lilla Maria Crisafulli, Keir Elam
Valperga di Mary Shelley e la polifonia della storia
73
Colomba La Ragione
Mary Wollstonecraft: Lettere dalla Scandinavia
99
Paola Partenza
“Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?”:
un paradigma filosofico letterario in Mary Wollstonecraft
137
Alfonso Viola
Le eroine gotiche nei drammi e nelle tragedie storiche
di Byron e l’episteme romantica
151
Paola Evangelista
‘Paesaggi musicali’: quattro poesie di Emily Brontë
163
Anna Enrichetta Soccio
Elizabeth Gaskell, le donne e il problema dell’interpretazione
173
Allan C. Christensen
Performing Artistry in the Novels of Henrietta Jenkin
189
6
Indice
Raffaella B. Sciarra
Gender e mesmerismo in The Lifted Veil di George Eliot
217
Emanuela Ettorre
“Women travel differently”:
Mary Kingsley e la scrittura di viaggio
229
Eleonora Sasso
“darkness that can be felt”: la poetica della malinconia
di Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Rossetti
241
Renzo D’Agnillo
Female Vision and Experience
in D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow
257
Raffaella Antinucci
Jean Rhys and the Duplicity of Landscape
273
Michele Russo
The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854) di Caroline Lee Hentz:
allegoria edenica o messa in scena di denuncia?
285
Leo Marchetti
Margaret Collier in Rome and by the Adriatic
305
John Paul Russo
“Mingled love and wonder”: Vernon Lee on Travel and Leisure
313
Alan Shelston
“Tell all the truth but tell it Slant”: Concealment and
Self-revelation in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
333
Cristina Giorcelli
Intermedialità e intertestualità in Willa Cather:
The Professor’s House
343
Carlo Martinez
Il local color di Mary Noailles Murfree
tra turismo ed eterotopia
367
Indice
7
Silvia La Regina
Inediti di Gabriella Micks
389
Notizie sugli autori
401
Prefazione
Quando, nell’autunno del 2004, Gabriella Micks comunicò
ai colleghi e agli amici della Facoltà di Lingue dell’Università
“Gabriele d’Annunzio” la sua intenzione di andare fuori ruolo
qualche anno prima di quanto tutti noi ci aspettassimo (e molto
prima di quanto avremmo desiderato) sembrò a tutti importante
attivarsi per pubblicare, in tempi ragionevolmente brevi, un volume di saggi in suo onore, col quale manifestare concretamente
l’unanime riconoscimento della sua eccezionale dedizione alla
didattica e della misura con cui la sua ricerca aveva contribuito
al prestigio dell’Istituzione in cui aveva operato per tanti anni.
Erano stati anni anche difficili, di assiduo impegno, ma certamente fruttuosi e, in definitiva, assai gratificanti, da quando il
corso di laurea in Lingue e Letterature Straniere, attivato
all’interno della Facoltà di Economia e Commercio, si era reso
autonomo con l’inaugurazione di una nuova Facoltà.
Nell’arco di poco più di un anno uscì L’arguta intenzione:
studi in onore di Gabriella Micks (Napoli, Liguori, 2006), risultato dei contributi di oltre una trentina di studiosi; non è difficile
immaginare la sorpresa e la gioia con cui Gabriella lo vide e lo
“gustò”, quando una scelta delegazione di colleghi della Facoltà e
dell’Ateneo gliene consegnò alcune copie a Salvador de Bahia, in
Brasile, dove si era momentaneamente stabilita. Era, invece, difficile immaginare, e poi accettare, che Gabriella fosse destinata
a non sopravvivere a lungo a quei momenti di impagabile soddisfazione.
La sua scomparsa ha lasciato un grande vuoto, ancora nettamente percepibile, anche a distanza di anni; il che accade
sempre nel caso di studiosi che abbiano saputo naturalmente,
senza nessuno sforzo o impegno “programmatico”, coniugare
l’attenta indagine su tematiche pertinenti alle loro competenze,
con una ben più vasta e sana curiosità nei confronti di tante altre
aree e province della cultura, nonché (cosa forse ancora più ra-
10
Prefazione
ra) con una didattica vissuta con straordinaria umanità e con una
innata capacità di simpatia/sintonia nei confronti degli allievi:
dai più giovani, che, titubanti e circospetti, varcavano da matricole la soglia del mondo universitario, a quelli che, già molto
cresciuti intellettualmente (e molto per merito degli insegnamenti di Gabriella stessa), dopo aver concluso il loro percorso
istituzionale, si aprivano ad altri livelli di studi e ricerche, con
l’intenzione di intraprendere la carriera accademica seguendo,
nel programma del Dottorato di Anglistica, le orme dei maestri
che sceglievano come modelli.
L’idea del Convegno di Studi dedicato alla memoria di Gabriella Micks è partita dall’opportunità di renderle omaggio con
due giornate di studio esplicitamente convergenti verso gli interessi dell’esimia anglista, e la pubblicazione degli Atti è stata
fin da principio considerata come il miglior possibile compimento di un percorso di elaborazione di un lutto, che non poteva
non trasformarsi nel recupero e nel riscatto di una presenza forte, tramite il dialogo (necessariamente a distanza) con le idee, i
personaggi, i temi, i testi che avevano reso così ricca la vita di
Gabriella Micks, e che, per merito della sua preziosa mediazione, restano nella coscienza e nel bagaglio culturale dei suoi discepoli, oltre che negli scritti che ci ha lasciato.
Mentre nel caso dell’Arguta intenzione eravamo stati felici di
accogliere saggi di colleghi e amici fraterni di Gabriella che, pur
appartenendo alle discipline più varie (anche apparentemente lontane dalla letteratura inglese e angloamericana), erano stati tanto
sensibili da “mirare” in qualche modo i loro contributi ai numerosi, possibili agganci che la vasta cultura e le infinite curiosità
della studiosa offrivano in tante direzioni (la letteratura italiana e
le altre letterature europee, la storia del pensiero e del gusto, le
“arti sorelle”, l’architettura, le problematiche linguistiche e
l’affascinante mondo della traduzione), e quindi avevamo potuto
pubblicare un volume che aveva una sua non fittizia unità nel
rispecchiamento delle sfaccettature di una personalità prismatica e di una mente agile e prensile, deliziosamente pronta a seguire la seduzione di mille echi e richiami, nel caso del Convegno del C.U.S.V.E. (e degli Atti che qui presentiamo) la scelta
Prefazione
11
non poteva che essere diversa, e doveva concentrarsi, fra le tematiche nei confronti delle quali l’intelligenza critica di Gabriella Micks si era messa in gioco, su quelle di pertinenza del Centro
di Studi.
All’interno di un ambito che continuava ad essere piuttosto
vasto, si doveva, poi, scegliere una linea guida che ben rappresentasse, allo stesso tempo, il profilo disegnato dai percorsi di
ricerca e di lettura dell’intellettuale cui si rendeva omaggio, e la
fisionomia dell’Istituzione che, come un contenitore naturale,
tutt’altro che limitante (meno che mai “condizionante”), accoglieva i contributi degli studiosi italiani, inglesi, statunitensi,
appositamente convenuti a Pescara per l’occasione. La soluzione, alla fine, si è presentata quasi da sé, configurandosi come
un’indagine intorno all’universo della scrittura femminile, su
cui, da un lato, tanto aveva riflettuto e prodotto Gabriella Micks
e, dall’altro, anche in altre occasioni, per quanto non sistematicamente o esplicitamente, aveva investito il C.U.S.V.E.
È inutile insistere a lungo sul fatto che, sulle scritture femminili, anche in ambito inglese e angloamericano, moltissime
cose sono state autorevolmente, e da tempo, dette, con tagli diversi, più o meno radicalmente “femministi”, variamente orientati nel contesto dei “gender studies”. Ma è anche ovvio, come
ci pare risulti evidente dalle pagine del presente volume, che il
tema centrale, e le infinite tematiche ad esso correlate, possono
ancora essere declinate nella certezza di sempre nuove scoperte,
o di sempre più opportuni approfondimenti. Nel caso specifico,
bisognava essere fedeli sia all’apertura mentale e alla prontezza
di reazione che Gabriella mostrava nei confronti di ogni proposta di lettura innovativa e anticonvenzionale, sia alla sua capacità di ridimensionare, con finissima ironia e grande senso della
misura, gli eccessi di astrazione teorica e il frequente narcisismo
di chi indaga sulle modalità di costruzione del discorso critico,
sia, infine, al suo temperamento e al gusto sicuro, che la facevano rifuggire dall’aggressività degli estremismi iconoclasti e “fondamentalisti”, che pretendono, talora, di monopolizzare l’analisi
della fenomenologia e della retorica comunicativa.
12
Prefazione
Confidiamo di essere riusciti nell’intento, confortati da
un’altra scelta, che abbiamo compiuto, ci pare, coraggiosamente,
ma molto consapevolmente: ossia di aver accolto, accanto ai contributi di studiosi e amici di Gabriella Micks, italiani e stranieri,
di consolidata autorevolezza, quelli di più giovani studiosi della
cosiddetta “scuola pescarese”, molti dei quali si sono formati, e
hanno incominciato a pubblicare, incoraggiati e guidati
dall’eccellente Maestra. Se fossero mancati i loro nomi
dall’indice, il volume non avrebbe reso omaggio fino in fondo,
e non avrebbe rispecchiato, con così sicura intenzione e nitido
equilibrio, lo scopo principale cui Gabriella Micks aveva dedicato l’intera sua esperienza, e in funzione del quale aveva investito le sue non comuni doti personali e le energie che le derivavano
dal suo ricchissimo bagaglio culturale.
Andrea Mariani
Francesco Marroni
Massimo Verzella
Pescara, giugno 2009
Nora Crook
Who Wrote Frankenstein?
“There is nothing to which contemporaries
are more prone than to discover that an
author does not write his own works”.
Mary Shelley, “Luigi Pulci”1
An unintended result of Frankenstein’s increased fame over
the last forty years is that MWS2 has now joined Shakespeare as
one of a select band of authors to whom individuals dedicate
much time and energy, searching for a proof that work attributed
to them was written by someone else. In the spring of 2007 a
forthcoming book was announced in which MWS’s authorship of
Frankenstein would be exploded as a fraud sustained by the
academic establishment, and her husband PBS established as the
true author3. There was a buzz of excitement. The critic Camille
Paglia blogged that the author, John Lauritsen, had assembled
“an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated
teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of
Frankenstein”. Germaine Greer retorted that Frankenstein’s very
badness proves that it was written by MWS4. Editors prepared for
a good literary squabble. The revelatory book, though written
1
Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, vol. I, No. 63
of Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, London, Longman, 1835, p. 178.
2
“MWS” and “PBS” designate Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy
Bysshe Shelley respectively.
3
John Lauritsen, The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, Dorchester, MA, Pagan
Press, 2007. He endorsed arguments previously made in Phyllis Zimmerman’s
Shelley’s Fiction, Los Angeles, Darami Press, 1998.
4
Camille Paglia, <http://home.earthlink.net/~asporders/id43.html>. Review of 14
March 2007. Germaine Greer, “Yes, Frankenstein really was written by Mary Shelley”;
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0, 2053061,00.html> 9
April 2007.
14
Nora Crook
with proselytizing fervour, proved to be thinly argued when it
appeared. Nevertheless, “without contraries there is no
progression”, as William Blake said5. And the excitement
prompts some significant general questions. Why should the
authorship of Frankenstein arouse such interest? How would
one proceed to verify it? What is meant by authorship here?
This questioning of MWS’s authorship brings full circle a
controversy that arouses deep passions about gender and
writing. “Who wrote Frankenstein?” is a question as old as the
book’s anonymous 1818 publication. The Shelleys used the
anonymity convention (common for a first-time author, who
could own the book if it was well-reviewed, and disown if it
was not) to obscure both name and gender6. There was a family
precedent for this. MWS’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had
first published anonymously A Vindication of the Rights of Men
(1790), her answer to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
French Revolution, but put her name to the second edition.
Frankenstein was bound to be controversial, especially as a
woman’s composition; the Shelleys would have wanted fair
reviews that neither patronized it as a product of a ‘fair
authoress’, nor damned it as the brain-child of an ‘unsexed
female’7. Doubtless they intended to gain critical attention
before revealing its authorship to an astonished world. The
subject-matter, the dedication to Godwin, PBS’s terse, forceful,
anonymous Preface, which hinted that the author had spent the
5
A temperate and productive discussion about the book, conducted on
Australian broadcasting’s The Bookshow (26 October 2007) between John
Lauritsen, Charles E. Robinson and Neil Fraistat, made this point. See
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2007/2063976.htm
6
Unlike Jane Austen, who concealed her name but signed her first novel
“By a Lady”.
7
The Quarterly Review’s relatively gentle handling of Eleanor Porden’s
scientific epic The Veils (1816), on a ‘masculine’ theme, but politically
orthodox, illustrates the patronizing treatment well. The unidentified reviewer
suggests that Miss Porden’s talents are misapplied in trying to blend science with
poetry, concluding with a back-handed compliment: “[The] age cannot
produce many female writers possessing ability and information enough to err
as she has done”; Quarterly Review, 16 (January 1817), p. 396.
«Frankenstein»
15
summer of 1816 in the company of Byron (as PBS was widely
known in London circles to have done) — all combined to
mislead readers into thinking that Frankenstein was by a male
disciple of MWS’s father, William Godwin, without PBS’s
telling a direct lie. Significantly, two hostile reviewers who
somehow had learned of the female authorship regarded this as
exacerbating the book’s offensiveness8, whereas Walter Scott,
who assumed that it was by PBS, in spite of PBS’s telling him
otherwise, was Frankenstein’s most favourable and perceptive
contemporary critic9. Scott’s son-in-law later wrote:
Frankenstein, at the time of its appearance, we certainly did not
suspect to be the work of a female hand; the name of Shelley was
whispered, and we did not hesitate to attribute the book to Mr Shelley.
Soon, however, we were set right. We learned that Frankenstein was
written by Mrs Shelley; and then we most undoubtedly said to
ourselves “For a man it was excellent, but for a woman it is
wonderful”10.
This initial obfuscation, which Godwin tried to clear by putting
MWS’s name to the second (1823) edition of Frankenstein, was
compounded by MWS’s second novel, Valperga, or, The Life
8
The British Critic, n.s. 9 (April 1818), p. 438; The Literary Panorama, n.s. 8
(1 June 1818), p. 414. Excerpts in Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, ed.
Susan J. Wolfson, New York and London, Longman, 2003, pp. 322, 325.
9
F. L. Jones (ed.), The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols., Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1964, vol. I, p. 590. Scott, who persistently denied
being the author of the Waverley novels, evidently measured PBS by his own
behaviour and thought his disclaimer of authorship a conventional fiction.
Additionally, he may have recognized a quotation from PBS’s poem
“Mutability” in Frankenstein, and made an incorrect deduction from that.
“Mutability” had been collected in PBS’s recently-published Alastor (1816),
which Scott’s son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, reviewed retrospectively in 1819. See
Walter Scott “Remarks on Frankenstein”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2
(March 1818), pp. 613-620;
10
J. G. Lockhart, “Valperga”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 13 (March
1823), p. 283. A Blackwood’s theatre critic, however, thought that “the romance
[…] was probably in a great degree written by Shelly’s [sic] pen”, because
Frankenstein depicts a mind “vibrating on the edge of a melancholy insanity” —
like PBS! See Blackwood’s, 14 (August 1823), p. 191.
16
Nora Crook
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), set in
14th-century Tuscany, and superficially so different from
Frankenstein that a reviewer questioned whether MWS could
be the author of both. Though self-confessedly he had read only
Volume I, he dismissed Valperga as “cold, crude,
inconsecutive, and wearisome”, and could only suppose that
PBS had written Frankenstein. He then retracted, and advanced
reasons for thinking that MWS did write Frankenstein after all:
Still I should not, from internal evidence, suppose Frankenstein to be
the work of Shelley. It has much of his poetry and vigour — but it is
wholly free from those philosophical opinions from which scarcely
any of his works are free, and for which there are many fair openings
in Frankenstein […]. It may be, that Mrs. Shelley wrote Frankenstein
— but, knowing that its fault was extravagance, determined to be
careful and correct in her next work; and, thence, as so many do from
the same cause, became cold and common-place11.
When MWS’s dystopic The Last Man (1826) appeared, to
almost universal dispraise, doubts as to her authorship of
Frankenstein did not resurface. Reviewers judged that The Last
Man was just such a “sickening repetition of horrors” and
display of “genius […] perverted and spoiled by morbid
affectation” as might be expected of the mind that had
conceived the story of the scientist and his monster12.
Edward Trelawny’s hostile description (1878) of the novels
that MWS wrote after PBS’s death (“more than ordinarily
commonplace and conventional”) revived earlier doubts in an
attenuated form. He accounted for Frankenstein thus: “Whilst
overshadowed by Shelley’s greatness, her faculties expanded”13.
His letter to The Athenaeum added: “The only remarkable work
published with her name is ‘Frankenstein’, and that was the
11
Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, III (August-November 1824), p. 199.
See Appendix F, Anne McWhir (ed.), The Last Man, Peterborough,
Ontario, Broadview, 1996, pp. 411, 412.
13
E. J. Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author, 2 vols.,
London, William Pickering (1878), vol. II, p. 229.
12
«Frankenstein»
17
creation of her husband’s brain”14. Richard Garnett’s article on
MWS in the standard reference-work, The Dictionary of
National Biography, clearly shows Trelawny’s influence:
“Nothing but an absolute magnetising of her brain by Shelley’s
can account for her having risen so far above her usual self as in
‘Frankenstein.’”15. Later, Mario Praz, who did much to establish
Frankenstein as a serious Romantic text in La carne, la morte e
il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (1930), wrote that MWS
had merely provided “a passive reflection of some of the wild
fantasies which, as it were, hung in the air about her”16.
In the 1970s it became known that the greater part of the
Draft manuscript of Frankenstein had survived. It was in
MWS’s hand, with corrections and short interpolations in
PBS’s17. MWS had not mentioned PBS’s interventions in her
Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, where she had
declared:
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
world. From that declaration I must except the preface. As far as I can
recollect, it was entirely written by him18.
14
Published 3 August 1878; H. Buxton Forman (ed.), Letters of Edward
John Trelawny, London, Oxford University Press, 1910, p. 265. Trelawny
knew PBS only during the last six months of his life, and never claimed inside
knowledge of the circumstances of Frankenstein’s genesis. His view seems to
derive from MWS’s famous account in her 1831 Introduction of
Frankenstein’s being inspired by Byron’s and PBS’s late-night conversation
on the possibility of re-animating a corpse.
15
Entry signed “R. G.”, “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”, Dictionary of
National Biography, 63 vols., London, Smith, Elder, 1882-1900.
16
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, Translated […] by Angus Davidson.
2nd ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 116.
17
A small portion of the Fair Copy, which went to the publisher, as
Charles Robinson has shown, also survived. It contains further changes, most
of them probably also initiated by PBS. Changes continued to be made by the
Shelleys at proof stage.
18
Wolfson, op. cit., p. 192.
18
Nora Crook
Her concern in her 1831 Introduction was not to itemize
PBS’s contributions, but to claim responsibility for having, at so
young an age, developed her “very hideous” idea of a
manufactured man. Hence her assertion to her 1831 readers that
PBS had encouraged her in this, but that the actual incidents
that fleshed out her original short story were also entirely hers.
Thus her declaration refers to form, plot, and paratext, granting
PBS the odd “train of feeling”, but not spelling out that he had
intervened at the verbal and sentence level. Her reputation for
veracity has paid dearly for this omission. The critic James
Rieger (1974) interpreted it as casting doubt on her account of
the genesis of Frankenstein, and proposed, after examining the
corrections, that PBS was “more than an editor”; he strongly
suggested that he ought to be given “the status of minor
collaborator” with a measure of “final authority” for the text19.
This was to describe PBS as, effectively, a co-author.
Not altogether coincidentally, this proposal occurred at the
historical moment in the early 1970s when Frankenstein was
being reinterpreted as MWS’s independent creation. As long as
Frankenstein was a wild quasi-scientific tale about the
agonizings of a Promethean overreacher who dared to play God,
the “magnetising” of MWS’s brain had remained an idée reçue.
But female-centred interpretations of Frankenstein as being
about the dead mother’s abjected body, or the mother’s fear of
rejecting her child, or female self-hatred, or a critique of the
male will-to-power and feared usurpation of motherhood,
displaced this, and continue to dominate. The Creature now
routinely gets all the sympathy and Frankenstein is condemned
as an irresponsible parent20. Biographical references have been
unearthed — Frankenstein’s being rubbed to life before the
19
James Rieger (ed.), Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. The
1818 Text, Indianapolis, Bobbs, Merrill, 1974, p. xliv.
20
Notable feminist readings include Ellen Moers, Literary Women (1976);
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); Barbara
Johnson, “My Monster/My Self” (1982); Margaret Homans, Bearing the
Word (1986); Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley, Her Life, her Fictions, her
Monsters (1987).
«Frankenstein»
19
stove recalling MWS’s 1815 dream of reviving her dead baby21;
Walton’s letters are written to “Margaret Walton Saville” — the
same initials as “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley”. Frankenstein
dies on 11 September 1797, the day after the real-life Mary
Wollstonecraft died22. By contrast, Lauritsen objected that such
interpretations deny the essential plot: a man’s search for
romantic male love23. However, even if the priority of ‘malecentred’ or ‘female-centred’ readings could be settled in the
case of a polysemous text like Frankenstein, this would not
provide a methodology for determining authorship. The creative
imagination, like the internet chat-room, allows an author to
adopt any persona or gender24. Personal responses concerning
whether Frankenstein ‘speaks’ to one’s self as a man or as a
21
Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (eds.), The Journals of Mary
Shelley 1814-1844 (1987), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 70.
22
See Wolfson, op. cit., pp. xxv-xxvii, building on the chronology
deduced by Mellor. On dating in Frankenstein see Charles E. Robinson (ed.),
The Frankenstein Notebooks, 2 vols., New York, Garland Publishing, 1996,
vol. I, pp. lxv-lxvi. On the North American Society for Studies in
Romanticism on-line discussion list (August 24-25, 2003), Darby Lewes
suggested that the dead mother is at the epicentre of Frankenstein. Safie’s
enlightened mother never tells her story because, in three words, “This lady
died”. The ‘Chinese box’ of life stories of which Frankenstein is composed
begins to wind back at this point to the first story-teller, Walton.
23
Queer Theory readings of Frankenstein include Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire, New
York, Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 91-92 and George E. Haggerty,
Queer Gothic, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp. 52-57. The issue
raised by Lauritsen’s book, however, is not whether the novel contains a
strong theme of attraction / repulsion between men (which it obviously does)
but whether the author is writing in code as a male gay writer. A way of
further exploring this question might be to take interpretations of Frankenstein
as closeted gay text, such as the underrated film Frankenstein, the True Story
(1973), in which the Creature is beautiful, and analyse the changes and
omissions made in adapting the novel to such a reading.
24
Both MWS and PBS were more likely than most authors to go in for literary
cross-dressing. MWS was expected to exhibit her mother’s ‘masculine’ mind,
while, according to Thomas Love Peacock, PBS once tried to shame his first wife
into breast-feeding by attempting to suckle the infant himself (Newman Ivey
White, Shelley, 2 vols., New York, Knopf, 1940, vol. I, p. 326).
20
Nora Crook
woman cannot be a substitute for other kinds of evidence,
including textual.
If PBS was the true author, his behaviour is hard to explain. If
he intended MWS to have the glory of authorship (even in
borrowed plumage), he oddly undermined this objective by
keeping it secret from the wider public. If he was hoaxing for its
own sake, it is a strange hoax where members of the hoaxer’s inner
ring are the dupes while outsiders know the truth. The Shelleys’
intimates and friends thought that MWS wrote Frankenstein, as
their letter and journal evidence overwhelmingly attests25. Those
who believe in his authorship therefore downplay the significance
of external evidence and rely on arguments based on style and
aesthetic value: how else, but by PBS’s authorship, can we
explain the fact that all of MWS’s works are inferior to, and
markedly unlike, Frankenstein?
Put that way, the question assumes what needs to be
demonstrated. But even granting this assumption, authors who
disappoint expectations by trying not to repeat themselves are
common (as the Knight’s Quarterly reviewer recognized); some
write only one outstanding book in a life-time. Jonathan Swift
never matched the exuberant invention of his Tale of a Tub
(1704); James Hogg’s The Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner (1824) towers above everything else he wrote.
In both cases their authorship has been doubted26. Charlotte
Brontë disappointed admirers of Jane Eyre (1847) with the
25
There are more than 15 references in the private correspondence of the
Shelleys, the Clairmonts, T. J. Hogg, Leigh Hunt, and William Godwin to
Frankenstein as MWS’s novel, and 10 instances in MWS’s journal where she
records her correction of Frankenstein (not to mention runs of entries in her
journal, “Write” “Transcribe” and “Copy”, which occur during the autumn
and spring of 1816-1817 at the very times when she would be expected to be
composing, transcribing, and fair-copying Frankenstein); for a listing of most
of these, see Frankenstein Notebooks, vol. 1, pp. lxxx-xcvii. Those who
believe in PBS’s authorship are obliged to make selective use of these records,
advance strained interpretations of them, or conjecture forgery.
26
For Samuel Johnson’s doubts of Swift’s authorship see James Boswell,
The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 3rd ed., London, Dilly, 1786, p. 32.
Hogg’s novel was often attributed to J. G. Lockhart.
«Frankenstein»
21
diffuse and deliberately “unromantic as Monday morning”
Shirley (1849), which like Valperga (1823) and The Last Man
(1826) attempts to address current political and social issues by
mapping them onto another time-zone set in the past or the
future27. There is a mundane reason why MWS’s other novels
often appear markedly different in style from her first. She was
a chameleonic writer, who readily took on the colour of the
authors that dominated her reading before and during
composition. In the two years before Frankenstein (1814-1816)
she read heavily in Gothic fiction and in the works of her
parents28; accordingly, we find in her first novel a mingling of
the Tale of Terror, the Godwinian novel, and the mixture of
sublime, sentimental and plain styles found prominently in
Wollstonecraft. Her reading of Gothic fiction abruptly declined
after 1817 when she immersed herself in reading drama,
philosophy, Latin, Italian, and history. The results are seen to
27
PBS found it hard to develop an episodic narrative like Frankenstein.
His two completed novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St Irvyne (1811) have intense
psychological situations, and serious purposes, but neither shows ability to
sustain a complex plot; Zastrozzi does not attempt one, while St Irvyne gives
up the struggle.
28
This reading included PBS’s Zastrozzi, Weber’s The Sorcerer, Lewis’s
The Monk and Tales; Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Norway; Posthumous
Works; Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Fleetwood, St Leon; Brockden Brown’s
Edgar Huntley, Ormond, Wieland; Radcliffe’s The Italian, The Mysteries of
Udolpho; Burger’s Lenora; Beckford’s Vathek; Schiller’s The Ghost-Seer;
Naubert’s Herman d’Unna; Coleridge’s Christabel. Other items in her reading
during this period that had their effect on Frankenstein include T. J. Hogg’s
Prince Alexy Haimatoff, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werter; Milton’s Paradise
Lost; Plutarch’s Lives; Barruel’s Histoire du jacobinisme; Moritz’s Travels in
England; Rousseau’s Emile; Introduction to Davy’s Elements of Chemistry;
Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding and various books on
exploration and travel. MWS, Journals, pp. 85-97. At Geneva in 1816 her
recital of the bloodthirsty “Fire, Famine and Slaughter” persuaded Polidori
that Coleridge was a poet (The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori: 1816,
Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc., ed. W. M. Rossetti, London, Elkin Mathews,
1911, p. 113). Her translation of the spurious Correspondance (1803) of Louis
XVI (ed. A. A. Markley, Mary Shelley’s Literary Lives, 4 vols., London,
Pickering & Chatto, 2002, vol. 4), which she abandoned in Geneva to write
Frankenstein, influenced the style of Walton’s letters.
22
Nora Crook
some extent in Matilda (1819) but even more in Valperga
(1823), which reads at points like an English translation of an
Italian novella, sometimes like a chronicle history or Vita of the
Middle Ages29. Nevertheless, MWS’s works after Frankenstein
(irrespective of their literary merit, over which there will
continue to be disagreement) frequently, if intermittently, do
remind readers of the earlier novel in theme, structure, and
language30. We find, for instance, a pattern of endings in which
a leading character gives a first person valediction in a style of
high eloquence: Matilda’s farewell to Lovell as she faces death
in Matilda, Verney’s leave-taking of Italy in The Last Man (a
peroration very much in the style of the Creature’s farewell),
even Castruccio’s epitaph in Valperga, fall into this pattern.
Passages such as the exhumation of the mother’s body in
Falkner (1837), and two supernatural tales written for The
Keepsake, “Transformation” (1830) and “The Mortal Immortal”
(1833), transmit the authentic unheimlichkeit and horror at
bodily deformity that we find in Frankenstein. MWS’s late
travel book, Rambles in Italy and Germany (1844), a first
person-narrative written in epistolary form, prompted one
reviewer to observe that her monster was not dead: “it only
sleepeth”31. A beautiful sentence in the Last Man, where
Verney, the only man left in the world, describes his
29
The Last Man shows the influence of PBS’s poems, Shakespeare’s
plays, Staël’s Corinne, Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, Raleigh’s History of the
World, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and operatic aria.
30
On The Bookshow (see note 6) PBS’s editor, the critic Neil Fraistat
mentioned the promise held out by the developing science of forensic
stylometrics as an attribution tool. On applying such a programme he found
that “Frankenstein and The Last Man are very close together: the number of
complex words used, the number of syllables per word, the number of words
per sentence, the degree of education someone would have to have to be able
to understand either work.” He cautioned against basing conclusions on this,
however. An even stronger caveat is needed for the website Gendergenie
(http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php), which claims, with an 80% rate of
success, to identify the gender of any author. Gendergenie rates Frankenstein
as female-authored. But it also finds that this essay is male-authored!
31
The Atlas, August 17 1844, pp. 556-557.
«Frankenstein»
23
wanderings amidst classical statues like a phantom through an
empty Rome, is as expressive of agonizing solitude and
yearning as anything in Frankenstein: “[O]ften, half in bitter
mockery, half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy proportions,
and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche’s lips, pressed the
unconceiving marble”32. The pun on unconceiving — the
marble figures cannot know of Verney’s clasp, his clasp cannot
lead to sexual union or engendering — refines on the
comparatively simple trickery of the Creature’s famous threat “I
shall be with you on your wedding night”.
Such examples could be multiplied. But if there is no
unfathomable mystery as to how MWS and the “Author of
Frankenstein” could be one and the same person, a more
original claim is advanced in The Man who Wrote
Frankenstein: that the rough Draft brought to light in the 1970s
is not any kind of evidence of MWS’s authorship, since it is not
a first draft33. The argument goes thus: all the drafts (assumed
destroyed) previous to the surviving Draft could have been
PBS’s. That the Draft is mostly in MWS’s hand is only to be
expected, as she often acted as PBS’s amanuensis, and she may
have composed none of it. Hence the corrections could be
PBS’s corrections of his own work34.
The Shelleys’ typical practice, however, makes this
improbable. The surviving evidence shows that for his own
compositions, PBS would either fair-copy his final draft himself
or would hand it over to MWS to fair-copy it for the press and /
or safe-keeping, but did not involve her as amanuensis before
this stage. When she was finished, he would insert final
additions and corrections, carefully and legibly, for the printer35.
32
McWhir, op. cit., The Last Man, p. 363.
Robinson established that it was shaped in at least two stages between
August-September 1816 and April 1817 and is the direct source of the faircopy that went to publishers and to the press in August 1817 (Frankenstein
Notebooks, vol. I, pp. xxvi, xlv).
34
Lauritsen, op. cit., pp. 51-52.
35
Examples of such surviving press-copies are (for poetry) Peter Bell the
Third (1819) and (for prose) A Defence of Poetry (1821), photofacsimiles in
33