Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I WOMEN AND DREAMS: AN ONEIRIC FEMININE LITERARY TRADITION
- PART II DREAMS, ALTERITY AND THE DIVINE
- PART III DREAMING (OF) MONSTERS: DREAMS, CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS IN MARY SHELLEY’S FICTION
- PART IV BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN
- Postscript: A Jigsaw of Dreams
- Index
Chapter 3 - The Passing on of Dreams: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and the Diana Figure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- PART I WOMEN AND DREAMS: AN ONEIRIC FEMININE LITERARY TRADITION
- PART II DREAMS, ALTERITY AND THE DIVINE
- PART III DREAMING (OF) MONSTERS: DREAMS, CREATIVITY AND AESTHETICS IN MARY SHELLEY’S FICTION
- PART IV BEYOND FRANKENSTEIN
- Postscript: A Jigsaw of Dreams
- Index
Summary
In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft articulates her model for a certain ideal female character on the mythical figure of the Roman goddess of the moon, Diana:
Perhaps, there is not a virtue that mixes so kindly with every other as modesty. – It is the pale moon-beam that renders more interesting every virtue it softens, giving mild grandeur to the contracted horizon. Nothing can be more beautiful than the poetical fiction, which makes Diana with her silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. I have sometimes thought, that wandering with sedate step in some lonely recess, a modest dame of antiquity must have felt a glow of conscious dignity when, after contemplating the soft shadowy landscape, she has invited with placid fervour the mild reflection of her sister's beams to turn to her chaste bosom. (Wollstonecraft 2004a, 161)
For Wollstonecraft, this ideal ‘modest’ female character is primarily one who experiences reverie: feeling that she is under Diana's tutelage, her steps are ‘wandering’, ‘sedate’, and her attitude is contemplative and ‘placid’. This passage seems conventional at first sight, notably because it harkens back to a long tradition associating women with modesty and with the moon. However, it is also punctuated with antithetical expressions: ‘mild grandeur’, which is in itself contradictory, responds to ‘contracted horizon’, while the dame's ‘sedate’ motion is accompanied by ‘conscious’ reflections. As the passage comes to an end, antitheses culminate in an oxymoron with the expression ‘placid fervour’. And most surprisingly, the dame's reverie leads to a sense of ‘conscious dignity’. One may argue that this quick succession of problematic words associating exaltation and restraint to describe feminine reverie shows how difficult it is for female authors to write about women's fantasmatic life while keeping a sense of propriety. On the other hand, these unusual associations may open up possibilities for articulating a new model of female imagination trying to reconcile passion and a sense of the self 's integrity. While Wollstonecraft's Diana model can also be found in her novels’ heroines, it is most strongly pursued by her daughter, Mary Shelley. In fact, the Diana figure becomes pervasive in Shelley's Matilda (1819) and Valperga (1823), to the point that it is possible to identify a ‘Diana paradigm’ in those works.
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- Dream and Literary Creation in Women’s Writings in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries , pp. 57 - 72Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2021