A Summary of Criticism on Godwin and Mary Shelley

After Monday’s lecture, I was interested in learning more about Mary Shelley’s relationship with her father, both personally and intellectually. I read a few articles from books in the library, and it seems that there has been some debate about whether Mathilda was autobiographical or not, and whether this has pertinence. The earliest article I read, published in 1988, followed in the feminist tradition Gina mentioned, using extensive biographical information to draw conclusions not only about the novella, but Mary Shelley herself. “Fathers and Daughters, or ‘A Sexual Education’” from Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters says in Mathilda: “Mary Shelley projects and displaces her deepest and most ambivalent feelings toward her father,” (193). The novella becomes Mary Shelley’s “pure wish-fulfillment” and “fantasy” as Mathilda “embodies Mary Shelley’s most powerful, and most powerfully repressed, fantasy: the desire both to sexually possess and punish her father,” (194-195). As for this temptation to analyze the author, I am in agreement with Betty T. Bennett, who argues “the assumption that a female writer must personally experience a subject to write about it suggests that Mary Shelley was also a murderer or a warrior or lived in America or drowned at sea, as did the central characters in her other novels,” (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction, 51). Diagnosing Mary Shelley, the long-dead individual, from print materials (letters, novels, journals) makes me uncomfortable because this evidence does not seem enough to prove that these were her intentions, conscious or unconscious. Though one could be swayed by Godwin’s dismissal of Mathilda’s “disgusting and detestable” subject matter or Mary’s confession to a friend in an 1834 that she had an “excessive & romantic attachment” to Godwin as a child, interpreting her book as a revenge fantasy misses the more interesting connections between this father and daughter (Mary Shelley: Her Life, 254-255).

In “Frankenstein, Mathilda, and the Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft,” published in 2003, Pamela Clemit similarly acknowledges and dismisses the psychological analyses of her critical predecessors.

“The autobiographical format of Matilda… together with its emotionally intense language, has traditionally led critics to read the work as an uncontrolled expression of Mary Shelley’s psychological anxieties following the deaths [of her children] in September 1818 and June 1819… yet to read Mathilda merely as an expression of psychic crisis is to overlook her self-consciousness as a literary artist. The exploitation of autobiographical material and the use of a self-dramatizing, histrionic narrator are established features of the Godwinian novel,” (37).

Clemit here refers to Godwin’s interest in “sincerity,” enacted not only by his novels, but also in Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which “shocked rather than liberated… [and] provoked widespread hostility from the conservative press,” (27-28). Sincerity and frankness are employed and critiqued, according to Clemit, during Mathilda’s confession scene. “When her father continues to resist her entreaties, [Mathilda] exclaims, ‘You do not treat me with candour,’ invoking the Dissenting principle which formed the moral underpinning of Godwin’s notion of the duty of private judgment,” (39). This becomes a critique when private judgment and sincerity lead not to improvement, but “in the breakdown of community, and, finally, death,” (39). The failure of sincerity and “Godwin’s belief in the individual’s duty to exercise his or her talents in pursuit of the general good…may suggest the limitations of utopian social theories in the face of individual suffering,” (40). While Clemit uses biographical information in her analysis, it is largely to indicate Mary Shelley’s influences, through her journal.

It’s clear that I prefer the non-personal analytical approach to the “psychobiographical” one employed in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (194). Though it makes me uncomfortable to pin down something so slippery as an unconscious Freudian intention, articulating psychological intimacies has the potential to be interesting, if not open to an objective (thus morally justified) proof. “Fathers and Daughters, or ‘A Sexual Education’” was most novel in its arguments for Mathilda as social commentary. For example, the chapter points to a portion in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which noted that women “were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone,” (198). Given this relationship formula, the divisions between bride and child are broken down, and this bourgeois “generational hierarchy… produces father-daughter incest,” (199). It’s considerations like this one that I think bring something unique to interpretations of this text.

Works Cited:

Anne K. Mellor. “Fathers and Daughters, or ‘A Sexual Education’” in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. (New York: Methuen Inc., 1988).

Pamela Clemit. “Frankenstein, Matilda, and the legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, edited by Esther Schor. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Betty T. Bennett. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).