is provided as a comment to this post. NOTE: BECAUSE I'D RATHER NOT BE LAMBASTED FOR CONFUSING ANYBODY, THIS IS NOT THE OFFICIAL PLACE TO POST YOUR WEEKLY RESPONSES. DO NOT POST ANY COMMENTS HERE, AT ALL, EVER.
Thank you.
***
CORRECTION FROM GINA: Please post response #5 HERE, in the comments section!
***
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Weekly Response 5: “Sacred Horror” and the Private Imagination
Scott Offutt/May 8, 2008
While I was impressed by Mary Shelley’s exemplary treatment of loneliness as an inherited state in Mathilda, and considered writing my response for this week with an exclusive focus on the forms of isolation expressed in that novel and evoked indirectly in Percy Shelley’s “On Love,” the more challenging preoccupation of the novel—and the consideration which I have chosen to address, if only because I am eager to explicate it to improve my own understanding—relates to its portrayal of the imagination. Specifically, Mathilda’s union of the descriptor, “sacred,” and the subject, “horror,” captured my attention early on, due to the relative iconoclasm of the term (Shelley 15). In class, the consensus seemed to waver between several points: the description of the horrible as sacred or sanctified either violated the condition of sanctity, or engendered a novel, grotesque condition grounded in the correlation of two directly opposed ideas, or described Mathilda’s state of mind, which, given the unprecedented character of the narrator’s experience, would be considered an accomplishment—if the argument were true. Contrary to these considerations, I maintain that the horror of which Mathilda speaks relates directly to the nature of the imaginative life, which must be secluded, save in such primordial transitory states as death, at which point “I unveil the mystery,” and which must be grotesque to foreigners at the time of its discovery, no matter what it involves (Ibid). Here, the thesis of “On Love” resonates: Percy Shelley has “found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land” when he has attempted to communicate his innermost feelings to people with whom he feels sympathy (Shelley 1080). The ambiguous “something” purported to be contained “within us” by Shelley, which “thirsts after its likeness,” approximates the artifices fashioned by Mathilda, as well as the “soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow dare not overleap” (Ibid). While “On Love” explicitly provides a model of desire for the ideal partner, its subtext is rife with notions regarding the power and vulnerability of the imagination in relation to the outside world; the ideal position of absolute synchronicity between lovers is, after all, “invisible and unattainable” (1081).
The delusions which facilitate the resolution of the recursive transgressions of Rivers and his paranoia, like Mathilda’s solitary dreams of being her father’s “consoler, his companion in after years,” relate to this prospect insofar as they only function internally, and then in such a way as to be totally unrelatable, except in the rarest or most profound of circumstances (Shelley 22). Mathilda’s traumatic experience, having been destructively impressed upon her fragile visionary perception, only exacerbates the problem of relation—her torment is sacred not only because it is obscene, but because it is inextricably twined with any number of internal fears and anxieties which cannot be expressed except in death, which separate her from the rest of the world by force and by her own will. Thus the significance of Percy Shelley’s note, “in solitude […] we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters and the sky”—without any medium for the communication of her innermost feelings, Mathilda finds solace exclusively in natural reflections, the “lulling, quiet medicine” of “the sunset and the gentle moon, the blessed motion of the leaves and the murmuring of waters” (49). She desperately searches for restorative properties in the external reflection of her inner world, and the absence of an adequate panacea leads her to “the final decay of nature” in isolation (69). Mathilda comes to live outside of sympathy, and thus, embraces death.
Works Cited
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Mathilda. Hard Press: 2006.*
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “On Love.” Romanticism: an Anthology Third Edition. Ed. Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
*Note: no location given.
Love is a feeling that is universally experienced yet unable to define because the levels and circumstances under which it arises vary greatly within each individual. Percy Shelley attempt to locate the intimate love between two people in a space where both completely understand and adapt to each other thereby creating the perfect match. He, however, in the first paragraph states his incompetence in discussing the subject, which renders his explanation of love questionable. Shelley creates the trajectory of divulging explanation of conceptual feelings from those who experience it: “Ask him who lives, what is life,” which would exhaust an appropriate answer. He discredits himself from his own argument in the last line of the first paragraph as he writes, “I have everywhere sought [love], and have found only repulse and disappointment,” indicating by his own standards he should not be explaining love, yet he continues.
Shelly wrote his ideal love would be a “prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving…eagerly refer to all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it.” He wants a person exactly like himself because he thinks they would always know what he needed for comfort and therein lays the love. He says we imagine this ideal person, which is what makes us unhappy with the real people we connect with in the world. He writes an ideal relationship would be “like the chords of two exquisite lyres strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice” which suggests both people need to give and receive love. Even if one person could feasibly always contend to please another perfectly, that could not be love because the couple would be shaped around one person hence only traveling one way. That is not reciprocal love, even though it involves two people. It is still only love of self and would leave one person empty. Shelley offers that since love as he idealizes it is not attainable, “we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters and the sky.” This fundamental love of nature may partially fulfill the void, yet it still is not reciprocating, thus it cannot entirely replace this fantastical love. Therefore, people continue to search for the impossible love they desire, which renders them lonely and in a position to settle for less than ideal.
Mary Shelley mirrors that thought in her story Mathilda. Mathilda looks for love within her fantasy of her father and pushes for it to manifest when he becomes present in her life. Since her father is unable to reciprocate the love she desires, he is forced away from her and creates what she feels to be the ultimate loss of perfect love. This is why she turns to the seclusion of nature after his suicide. She is drawn to the animals and foliage of the countryside, yet still despairs because she is missing that ideal love. When Woodville seeks her out she has to reject him in order to maintain her ideal love. She describes him much as Percy would describe the ideal lover because he is there to support and wants her to indulge in her troubles by confiding in him, yet the most pleasurable way for her to indulge is keeping to herself. This is why Percy’s ideal love falls apart. It cannot connect to other people because it consists of pleasuring the self over the other, which, understandably, is upsetting and unpleasant to the other. When Woodville finally leaves, Mathilda is finally able to let what is within her out, but again only to herself on paper. Then she is content to continue seeking her ideal love, however with the understanding it can only be achieved through death, which means vacating reality.
Kathy Brown
Eng 344- Franco
Response #5
5-9-08
Mary Shelley’s Mathilda shows what happens to people when they are not raised correctly. Mathilda, who is abandoned by her father after her mother dies, shortly after her birth, lives a solitary childhood. She spends her days locked away from the world and creates a fantasy world for herself to live in. She does this because she isn’t raised the right way. Even if her aunt was a fine caretaker unlike the description of the cold, uncaring and distant person Mathilda describes, it is no substitution for a proper father. It even goes so far as to say that even if Mathilda’s father had been a constant presence in her life, he still would not raise his daughter properly and the same problem would happen again, because he is incapable of being a decent father. He was never taught how to be a good person or father, so he would never be able to be one for Mathilda. There is no escape from the bad parenting in Shelley’s Mathilda, because if a person is not raised correctly, there is no way he would be able to do any better with his own children. In this sense, there is no way to end the cycle of sending on poor values and bad people into the world. It is a pessimistic view of a world where every generation becomes more and more corrupt and there is no way to bring good people into the world, because who would raise them to hold such values? When it is becomes impossible to raise good children, it becomes impossible to raise good people.
Mathilda is not raised well by her absent parents, and so she has none of these good values. She is a selfish, self-centered, self-suffering girl who, on top of all this, is an extremely unreliable narrator. She claims of her own aunt that “without the slightest tinge of bad heart she had the coldest that ever filled a human breast: it was totally incapable of any affection” (Chapter 2). Mathilda goes on to claim that her aunt only took her on because she felt some sort of duty to do so. Yet the aunt must have been the one who told Mathilda the story of her father and mother, which is very unlike the behavior one might expect of the cold, heartless woman Mathilda describes her as. We cannot believe what she says. Even in her last dying confession she lies to the world to make her life sound the way she needs it to be fit into the fantasy she lives in. Mathilda might actually believe everything that she says, but it is clear that it is all laid out in such a way to help Mathilda continue to live in a world where she is a victim and her father is an idealized figure that will someday take her away from her terrible life with her aunt.
When this finally happens, the fantasy is not enough for her. Having what she dreamed of for so many years is not enough and she begins to see the holes in the reality of her fantasy. Her father does not act the way she thought he would, and she cannot figure out why this is. It takes incest to wake Mathilda out of the fantasy she created for herself. She is so completely self-absorbed that she fails to see anything but her fantasy until her father admits his terrible secret to her. Even after he dies, she fails to let go of her fantasy and continues to fantasize about her father and his love, now untainted because he is dead. Once her father is dead, Mathilda changes what he said to her, ignoring it and instead believes that one day “I should raise my eyes fearlessly to meet his, which ever beamed with the soft luster of innocent love” (chapter 12). But Mathilda’s father never had an innocent love for her. This is all in her imagination, and if this is her dream of what she will see when she greets her father after death, she can only be disappointed. The way her father raises her, or rather, his failure to raise her, causes Mathilda to live her life in a fantasy that she can not escape even after he returns to her, and long after he dies.
Sean Frohling
Professor Gina Franco
Romanticism
May 9, 2008
Mathilda Response #5
The story of Mathilda is a story of strange remorse and the lies the human mind will play against itself. What first caught my eye as I read Mathilda was the way her over-dramaticized writing accentuated her existence in the eyes of the reader. At one point “Mathilda” even stoops to write, “I will pause a few moments, wipe my dim eyes, and endeavor to lose the present obscure but heavy feelings of unhappiness in the more acute motions of the past” (20). The first and most catching point of this passage is the character of Mathilda that is so strongly explained. In one line we can see the image of the girl, whose past has been centered heavily around novels of Romance and other such literature.
We can see a character whose life has been well shielded, and who exudes a degree of naivety that is astounding. Along these lines it also becomes clear that Mathilda does not have a history with the untold cruelties of children, nor does she expect people to behave any differently than she would find in her own books. It comes as no surprise to find that she as been raised by her aunt who “was very unlike my father. I believe that without the slightest tinge of a bad heart she had the coldest that ever filled a human breast: it was totally incapable of affection” (27). This just cements the knowledge that the reader has for the character. Immediately it is obvious that Mathilda is lacking some understanding of the human emotions and cannot completely grasp what her own feelings are. One the same level, the reader can already see where this seems to be leading too, and cannot do much but to slightly pity Mathilda.
The second most interesting part of the first passage is the wording of the passage itself. When Mathilda writes that she is tying to forget the “present obscure but heavy feelings of unhappiness in the more acute motions of the past…”(20) it quickly becomes a literary paradox. By delving into the past, the “acute motions of the past” (20) will be immediately brought back to the fore with the same sharpness that they were originally forged with. This is not done on accident by the author, but instead with a deft and sharp purpose of displaying the characters intent and traits in a far clearer and more subtle manner. Her lack of understanding of the nature and cause of these problems is evident in this line, giving the reader a hint of the tragedy to come. Because of her misunderstanding of the nature of her problems, Mathilda will never come to terms with how her love for her Father will twist her love for others away. It is through this tat we can begin to understand and see the nature of the romantic character in her words and actions.
Epistolary Form of Mathilda
The narrator of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novella Mathilda recounts her narrative in epistolary form, with the intended recipient of Woodville. The text imitates actual written discourse; it is essentially a narrative described as a letter. The form of the narrative tempts the reader to consider Mathilda as a text existing somehow outside of the fictional, as it is presented in the form of an everyday, utilitarian document. However, the narrator also addresses the wide readership. Mathilda writes to Woodville, “I do not address them (the pages of the text) to you alone because it will give me pleasure to dwell upon our friendship in a way that would be needless if you alone read what I shale write” (20). By addressing the reader, Mathilda seems to acknowledge that her tale is also a work of literature. The presentation of the narrative is able to produce a tension between the conversation of a letter and the fiction of a tale.
In the opening of the novella, the narrator positions herself in the present act of writing. The first paragraph begins with the time the pen touches the paper, “It is only for o’clock; but is winter and the sun has already set…” (20). The reader is presented with the moment the narrator recounts her story. The present tense of, “I am in a strange state of mind,” and “What am I writing? – I must collect my thoughts,” read conversationally (19, 20). They imitate the language of actual letter-writing, but more importantly seem to offer an unfiltered reality of the narrative. However, the epistolary form can only read as a disguise, for the opening of Mathilda’s actual tale is conventionally literary: “I was born in England. My father was a man of rank: he had lost his father early…” (20). Although the narrator attempts to justify a casual authorship, she is too aware of her own fictional representations and literary daydreams to present a conversational text. The reader is not entering a letter to a friend, but rather another one of Mathilda’s reconstructive fantasies.
The reader moves from the conversation of a letter into a brief history of Mathilda’s father. However, this history is not first-hand, as Mathilda is physically unable to have access to her father’s experiences prior to her birth. The reader is not receiving Mathilda’s actual memory, but rather the narrator’s reconstruction of the narrative. The epistolary structure allows the narrator to reorganize time, so that the narrative of the father’s childhood (disclosed to Mathilda either by her Aunt of father) may be told before the narrative Mathilda’s childhood and later reunion with her father. The narrator is able to lift conversations from later moments in life and present them as an objective sequence of events. Since the narrator is relaying a letter and not creating a strict literary text, she may reconstruct the order of events in order to address moments of interest to the Woodville. Similarly, long stretches of Mathilda’s life may be described as only abstract loneliness, while content relevant to her letter is elaborated upon. At the end of her tale Mathilda tells Woodville:
Although the real interest of my narration is now ended and I ought quickly to wind up its melancholy catastrophe, yet I will relate one instance of my sad suspicion and despair and how Woodville with the goodness and almost the power of an angel, softened my rugged feeling and led me back to gentleness (90).
The reader is not receiving a full text of the narrative, but rather a series of incidents related in a letter. Even the continuity between moments is broken by the intrusion of the present; as the narrator relates her time in London, she returns to the present to re-evaluate the past, writing, “but I now remember that my father was restless and uneasy whenever this person visited us…” (38). Rather than creating text verisimilar to real-life written discourse, the narrator utilizes epistolary form in order to draw attention to the reconstruction of her narrative.
The narrator’s reconstruction of past and present fractures the narrative. The reader is forced to consider the present positioning of the narrator in relation to representations described by the narrator. The tension between letter writing and fiction telling emphasizes the discrepancy between the reality of Mathilda’s written discourse and her fantasies. Her letter to Woodville is not unlike her father’s letter, which Mathilda recalls, “having copied his last letter and read it again and again” (30). Mathilda has re-represented her life in daydreams, and in her attempt to communicate her sorrows in a letter to a friend, she succeeds only in telling another tale.
Projection of Sensuality in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda
It seems obvious that in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Mathilda, there is an exploration and discovery of various sensualities between the characters of Mathilda and the father. Although most of the portrayal of sensuality is focused on the father after his confession of his incestuous desires with Mathilda, there is even more sensual mystery and promiscuity to the character of Mathilda. She is just not as comfortable expressing her sensuality overtly (her father wasn’t either but he could admit to his desires). To avoid discussing her desires directly, Mathilda hints at them through sublime language and projects her sensualities onto her father.
One of the first ways that we can see Mathilda’s reaction to her own sensuality and fantasy is from the first page where she sets up her story as a reflection on her fantasy. She starts to reveal her feelings about her fantasy when she says, “While life was strong within me I thought indeed that there was a sacred horror in my tale that rendered it unfit for utterance, and now about to die I pollute its mystic terrors” (Mathilda 15). In this case, there is a combination between the sacred and the horror which illustrates the mix of sacred spirituality (beauty) and the horror which disrupts the religious (innocent) spirituality by creating a sense of a situation being terrible/sublime. Since the sublime is typically focused on the “I”, there is a sense in terror when one realizes (as Mathilda does) the disastrous combination of innocent spirituality (scared/beautiful) and terrible sublimity with a focus on oneself (horror/sublime). The sacred horror is that Mathilda is horrified by her own fantasy because it disrupts the innocent spirit that she believes that she is. The horror presents itself again when her father confesses to her: “My daughter, I love you!” (35) and Mathilda cannot live through her fantasy because she is scared of what that might mean for her situation, since she loves him just as much but more as a slave to idolize her being. She expressed so much love to her father, believing it a fantasy that she actually projected her sensuality onto him (without acknowledging the consequences and reality that this creates) and is horrified by its reflection back onto her when he confesses. The horror is also the realization of Mathilda discovering her own sensuality portrayed through her father.
Mathilda is also horrified to realize that her fantasy has been played out far enough that it has actually become a reality with amounts of true love that she (and her perceived spiritual innocence) cannot handle without simply seeing the terror in the situation. This terror focuses simply on the “I” which is Mathilda. So, in the end, Mathilda wants to explore the “I” (herself) and its sensuality as a fantasy where it will not disrupt her fantastical perceptions of who she and her “unrequited” lover is. She lives for the pursuit of potential loves and becomes disappointed and shocked when the lover of her affection turns out to actually be attracted to her in return. The distance that Mathilda craves with her fantasy and desires is stopped once there is a confession from a lover.
Percy Shelley “On Love”
Shelley begins with a series of questions. The questions address love, life, and God. In some strange way, these three subjects seem interrelated. Unclear as to who he’s addressing, it seems that the questions connect these three subjects in a way that suggest that only “him” who has live and adored God, knows love.
It seems that as Shelley attempts to articulate his thoughts to the person he is addressing, he recognizes the inability to be understood. First, he acknowledges that he does not know the internal constitution of men, or he does understand the inner workings or the thoughts of men. Even though “external attributes” such as physical appearance or even culture resembles [him]” he finds his “language misunderstood.” And as he finds himself continually misunderstood it widens the gap of receiving sympathy. The person he addresses no longer sympathizes with him and this person has become repulsed. I found this interesting because it seems to reject Burke’s idea of commonality because human beings share the same senses in the physical body.
But, he returns to the question. But this time the person whom he address demands a response from him. And love for him is an attraction of what can be conceived in the mind. In its interesting that this love is not physical, but it is a longing to fulfill a void. It is a word used to make community. He presents two opposing views of love. One is that of reason. And the other is that of imagination. This is where I become unsure as to what he trying to say. It seems that he is saying that only in reason do we understand each other. But, it is imagination that is not easily understood. The only way to understand the imagination of another is to have that imagination and wish that it was physically in the mind of the other person. Love is when one understands, not only in reason, but when one understands the imaginative thoughts of another. He suggests that this bond, yearning has been with human beings since the beginning.
The love for another is to see a mirror image of yourself. However, the mirror only reflects those things which are good “pure and bright.” In this person, one can hold their soul within them. They become one. They “resemble,” they understand the “subtle.” However, he suggests that this love is “invisible and unattainable.” A man could be in the midst of strangers and still feel alone. Only in nature does one find true harmony with their imagination. In nature there is “a secret correspondence without our heart.” Only in nature does one truly feel fulfilled. After this imaginative, unattainable love is dead, then man becomes a walking dead person.
This last line is somewhat ambiguous. I do not know whether or not if he is truly advocating for love. It seems that he saying that not striving for that unattainable love is not human. It is a natural thing we do, just like an “infant drinks milk.” And to not advocate for love leaves you a “living sepulcher.” However, there is still an element of love that is unreal. Maybe the whole point of the essay is to comment on the reality of love. One cannot be too consumed in nature, at the same time; one cannot be overly unrealistic about one’s love for another.
Re-posted to the correct week. Response for 05/09/08.
Love and Narcissism
Percy Shelley states that once the desire to seek self in other is extinguished, humans are “living sepulchres” of themselves. The most obvious reading of this refers to a certain quality of spirit that is lost once the desire to seek love is gone, though I believe the language resonates in a biological sense as well. The loss of desire to propagate one’s family line and raise children by seeking out a partner effectively halts one’s “survival” genetically. I think this reading does not signal Shelley’s conflation of the two ideas, but rather signals the naturally entwined way that romantic love and physical love function in human beings. Romance is often said to give meaning to physical love and the two are considered complimentary to one another.
When Shelley suggests that love is the “thirst for likeness” he is most obviously referring to a type of romantic love that seeks out a partner of like-mind or disposition. This basic idea can be extended to the realm of familial love, where there is innate sense of connection because the likeness to self is often as obvious as physical features. This connection is much more rudimentary and innate, being based in biology rather than personality. However, education plays a key role in the shaping of personality, and likewise is a significant factor in the development of familial love.
The problem raised in Mathilda is a result of the notion of romantic/physical love becoming conflated with the concept of familial love. Although Mathilda is repulsed by the idea of her father holding a physical desire for her, she constantly holds him up in her fantasies as the “beloved” object. Her education has not equipped her to separate the idealized, romantic love she had read about in stories from the familial love that she is naturally inclined to feel towards a parent. It is interesting to note that modern day psychology has studied the realities of genetic sexual attraction and found that it is a regularly occurring phenomenon, almost exclusively in cases where the two relations have grown to adulthood without meeting. Close domestic proximity during formative years creates what is known as the Westermarck effect, which essentially inhibits the mechanisms of genetic sexual attraction.
If perpetual longing for the reflection of self constitutes a vivacious quality in human beings, what of Mathilda’s fantasy world? Her fantasy of the father is certainly born from her own mind, since he abandons her shortly after her birth, and his letter and miniature function as props to give a concrete image to her imaginings. She projects this idealized image onto him until the reality of the father is no longer able to coexist with Mathilda’s imaginary figure. Although Percy Shelley presents the idea of love as a longing for sameness, a distinction between love and narcissism must be made. Mathilda’s fantasy is ultimately narcissistic; her imaginary world is a part of her that she has forged by her own mind. When the reality of her father’s confused feelings for her is brought to light, the two cannot co-exist in the living world. Once the father is no longer a real, physical presence, Mathilda indulges once more the idealized image that she has created. Thus, I would argue that Mathilda’s unconscious confusion with romantic love and familial love inhibits her from pursuing love as Percy Shelly has outlined it. Without this ability to project the self onto other in a realistic way, she is left with only the narcissistic self-indulgence of her fantasy life.
Mary Shelley’s Matilda and Conflict within the Text
The beginning of Shelley’s novel places the reader with the character Matilda, a young, depressed woman who we quickly learn isn’t stable and has us second guessing her motive for telling this story on her deathbed. The intense want that she has for the reader to sympathize with her is thwarted when it is revealed later in the story that she has become an unreliable narrator. Her almost unreal obsession with her father’s love puts her in a tragic state of mind; it starts to consume her, taking over her thoughts and dictating her overly dramatic actions. One could argue that because her life is relatively uneventful and secluded, she has very little to think about so her thoughts naturally gravitate to those about her father. To look at this love from her father’s point of view is just as compelling. He was madly in love with Diana, Matilda’s mother, when she died in childbirth: “he looked up to [Diana] as his guide, and such was his adoration that he delighted to augment to his own mind the sense of inferiority with which she sometimes impressed him (Shelley 154).” His feelings of love and yearning haven’t completely gone away, like he thought they would have after sixteen years. They resurface when he meets his daughter because of the woman Matilda has become – she obviously reminds her father of her mother. In his mind, he wants to return home to Diana, and not Matilda; he wants her to be her mother and remind him of the love that he once felt. This creates conflict within the father as he feels something he shouldn’t towards his daughter. He displaces the anger that he feels at himself (for having these thoughts about Matilda) onto his daughter, causing conflict within Matilda. It is interesting to follow the conflict as it is constantly shifting, eventually making its way to an innocent Woodville as Matilda’s depressing thoughts cause him to question the purpose of his life without Elinor and his relationship with what is valuable in life.
Speaking of Woodville, it is worth mentioning another aspect of the story that I find particularly appealing; that is the triangle that seems to form between Matilda, Woodville and goodness. After the death of Elinor, Woodville struggles with his purpose now in life. After her father’s death, Matilda struggles with life in general. She seems to have given up, contemplating suicide with Woodville and being careless when it comes to her health and wellbeing (eventually leading to her death). This attitude is very different than Woodville’s because although their situations are very similar (they have both lost someone who was a large part of their lives), they are dealing with it in two very different ways. This is the time that Woodville expresses his thoughts pertaining to the power of man and how there is so much left that he wishes to find answers for: “‘we know not what all this wide world means; its strange mixture of good and evil. But we have been placed here and bid live and hope… if misfortune come against us we must fight with her’” (Shelley 202). On the other hand, Matilda claims that she is not good enough to live: “‘you are good and kind but I am not fit for life. Why am I obliged to live?’” (Shelley 198). As friends, these two have very different thoughts on the meaning of life and how they should deal with the deaths of their loved ones. Perhaps Matilda and Woodville’s perceptions are meant to represent something larger, something created to symbolize the good and bad, the strong and the weak.
Emily Mutchler
ENG 344
Response # 5:
“The Unhallowed Gaze”
5/12/08
In Mathilda, Mary Shelley investigates the problems which arise from the attempt to preserve people and ideas, or rather, the ideal images of people, through the representations of narrative and memory. When Mathilda and her father try to structure and aestheticize their own situations and companions into representations, actual sympathy becomes impossible. These attempts at representation also become problematic and at odds with living in the present, as Mathilda and her father’s focus is on maintaining their own images and narratives, which are as much at odds with one another as they are with reality. As in Frankenstein, we can also see that the act of representation is linked to both preservation and death. To create an image of someone is to render them an object; the aesthetic object is a signifier, divorced from the meaning it signifies, in essence, killing the person. It is no coincidence that Mathilda has to kill herself in order to tell her story; that she has to remember Woodville in the past tense to dwell upon [the] friendship” (Shelley 176); She even imagines that he will sympathize with her as he reads the narrative, as she imagines that his “tears will fall on the words that record my misfortunes…I thank you for your sympathy” (Shelley 176). It is similarly no coincidence that her father has to completely abandon his friends when he gets married (because the two set-in-stone images of himself cannot coexist); and that Mathilda’s first impulse, after her father’s confession, is to decide to distance herself from her him. Tellingly, she ultimately abandons her plan and pursues him, because he beats her to the punch, abandoning her; once again, disrupting her tale.
As Mathilda writes to Woodville, because most of experiences with love have been through plays, she tries to structure her narrative into a tragedy, observing the Aristotelian concept of the unity of the “complex plot,” in which the change of fortune emerges, of necessity, from the events preceding it. As a result, like Victor Frankenstein brooding over his fate, she seems to think that what’s happening to her is part of an inescapable chain of events, as she writes: “I believe few would say that they could, by a different conduct and superior wisdom, have avoided the misfortunes to which I am the victim. My fate has been governed by necessity, a hideous necessity” (Shelley 176). Tellingly, she even evokes the image of the imaginative force of Los’ failed attempt to reconnect the Universe in Urizen, as she describes her “fate” as “the thick, adamantine chain that has bound me” (Shelley 176). Interestingly, when Mathilda describes her father’s education, we can see that the self-centeredness, for which he is criticized, is the very problem of imagining one’s own story. In the same way that Mathilda imagines that she at the center of a great, tragic plot, her father, “by a strange narrowness of ideas…viewed all the world in connexion only as it was or was not related to his little society” (Shelley 177).
This narration also becomes awkward, as unstructured reality interferes with Mathilda’s representation. It becomes difficult for her to both play the poet and the heroine as she has to simultaneously gaze at herself to depict herself, to describe her “dim eyes” and “thin hand” (Shelley 176) while we can assume she is still experiencing life within her own body. For example, when she starts to digress, particularly when she addresses Woodville directly, she has to redirect the narrative: “But I forget myself…wipe my dim eyes, and endeavor to lose the present obscure but heavy feeling of unhappiness in the more acute emotions of the past” (Shelley 176). Interestingly, immediately after “wiping” her “dim eyes;” an awkward attempt to aestheticize herself, to evoke the Aristotelian feeling of pathos, she launches into a calm discussion of her family history, to maintain the unity of her story.
Post a Comment