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My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley and the Feminization of Romanticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary Poovey
Mary Poovey*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
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Abstract

As the daughter of two notorious Romantic rebels and as the wife of a third, Mary Shelley was encouraged from her youth to “enrol [herself] on the page of fame,” to prove herself by her pen and her imagination. But since Shelley also wanted to conform to the more conventional feminine model—to be modest, self-effacing, and devoted to a family rather than to a career—she developed a prevalent ambivalence toward self-assertion. In the 1818 edition of Frankenstein, this ambivalence surfaces in her criticism of the egotistic imagination and in the grotesque but sympathetic monster that symbolizes its essence; the 1831 revision applies this judgment more forcefully to her own youthful “transgression.” Nevertheless, by characterizing the artist as the victim of an uncontrollable destiny, Shelley also sanctions the very self-expression she professes to regret and elevates the dilemma of the female artist to the status of myth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 332 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 In Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1889), ii, 197.

2 From “Blue Stocking Revels” (1837); quoted by R. Glynn Grylls, Mary Shelley: A Biography (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1938), p. 211, n. 2.

3 Mary Shelley, Introd. to the 3rd ed. (1831), in Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (the 1818 Text), ed. James Rieger (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 227. All citations, to both editions, will refer to this text, in which Appendix ? consists of a collation of the two editions.

4 Quarterly Review, Jan. 1818; quoted by Grylls, p. 316.

5 Shelley's reading of her contemporaries' egotism, while certainly colored by the inhibitions she, as a woman, had internalized, is an understandable interpretation. For example, Coleridge's depiction of the artistic act as a repetition of “the eternal act of creation in the infinite i AM” appropriates godlike power for the poet, whatever Coleridge's own doubts might have been in practice. The Byron of Childe Harold, parading his bleeding heart for all Europe, also conveys a sense of self-importance, and Percy Shelley's image of the artist as priest-lawgiver-prophet assumes that the poet is allpowerful, or ought to be. In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar discuss both this masculine image of the poet and the “anxiety of authorship” it causes for women. Although I think that the dilemma was intensified by the Romantic image of the artist as creator, I essentially agree with their perceptive analysis of the self-doubts this image caused women, who read into the claims of male writers more confidence than the poets' works sometimes reveal (see esp. pp. 45–64 and the discussion of Frankenstein, pp. 213–47).

6 Shelley seems to be answering, among others, William Godwin and David Hartley.

7 See esp. 11. 61–74 and 100–14.

there, many a precipice,
Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power
Have piled: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,
A city of death, distinct with many a tower
And Wall impregnable of beaming ice.
Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin
Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky
Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing
Its destined path, or in the mangled soil
Branchless and shattered stand.
(11. 102–11)

8 For a discussion of the chains of signification that make up Frankenstein, see Peter Brooks, “Godlike Science / Unhallowed Arts: Language and Monstrosity in Frankenstein” New Literary History, 9 (1978), 591605.

9 For a discussion of Percy Shelley's participation in the revision of Frankenstein, see Rieger's introduction. Rieger goes so far as to assert that Percy's “assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator” (p. xviii). The microfilms of the Frankenstein manuscript that I have examined in Duke University's Perkin Library (Abinger Collection, Reel 11) suggest that, while Percy made many marginal suggestions and probably helped recopy the manuscript, his contributions were largely stylistic and grammatical.

10 Mary Shelley, Preface, Second Collected Edition of Percy Shelley's Poetry (1839), in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new ed. corrected by G. M. Matthews (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. xxi.

11 “A Defence of Poetry, or Remarks Suggested by an Essay Entitled ‘The Four Ages of Poetry,‘ ” in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 486, 487–88.

12 In Literary Women: The Great Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday, 1977), Ellen Moers proposes that Frankenstein is specifically “a birth myth,” that the novel is “most feminine … in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” (p. 142). While Moers's insights seem to me suggestive, I think her equation of the monster and the newborn too limiting. Childbearing is only one kind of extension or projection of the self, and Shelley conflates several meanings in this central incident.

13 Homans, “Dreaming of Children: Literalization in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights,” unpub. essay Yale Univ. 1979, pp. 1–2. According to Homans, women cannot participate in [the dualism of self and other, or of self and object] as subjects as easily as men can. The feminine self is on the same side of that dualism with what is traditionally other. Women who do conceive of themselves as subjects—that is, present, thinking women rather than “woman”—must continually guard against fulfilling those imposed definitions by being transformed back into objects.

14 Shelley's endorsement of the nontextualized imagination is clear both from her portrait of Clerval, “a boy of singular talent and fancy” who gives up his childish composition of stories to become simply a connoisseur of natural beauty (p. 159), and from this journal entry of 1834: “My imagination, my Kubla Khan, my ‘pleasure dome,‘ occasionally pushed aside by misery but at the first opportunity her beaming face peeped in and the weight of deadly woe was lightened” (see Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1947], p. 203).

15 In his introduction, Rieger explains that Shelley is incorrect in remembering this mortification. “Polidori's Diary … records on 17 June, ‘The ghost-stories are begun by all but me’ ” (p. xvii).

16 The Last Man, ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr. (1826; rpt. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 290. Falkner (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837), p. 314.

17 Journal, p. 205. There is some confusion about the date of this entry. Although Jones places it in 1838, in n. 2 he agrees with Grylls that it properly belongs to 1831.