Weekly Response

I’d like to take apart Shelley’s response to Coleridge’s review in the Prometheus Unbound preface because it clarifies how Shelley wants to view poetic process and tradition. He first summarizes the issue as “the degree in which the study of contemporary writings may have tinged my composition,” a flattering interpretation, given that Coleridge calls him “an unsparing imitator,” (1093). This immediately establishes Shelley’s divergent moral outlook on “mimicry,” which he believes innate to the poetic art (ibid). The poetic geniuses work within forms that are “the endowment of the age in which they live,” making the art and its intellectual movements a collective experience (ibid). This collectivity is reflected in his historical characterization of English literary traditions. Shelley’s period-oriented summary sounds very like other triumphalist progressive nineteenth-century histories: “we owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion,” (ibid). To parse this sentence: “we,” the current collective, are indebted not to the writers in the golden age of “our” literature, but to “that fervid awakening of the public mind.” The responsible party is oddly given a passive role in Shelley’s sentence, further dodging problems of causation and authorship. The “public mind” fuses all the English into a single operating entity, a generalization that attributes some unifying intellectual feature to the people in that period. This “spirit of the age” concept, common to other nineteenth-century philosophies may have influence Shelley’s conviction that authors are ‘products of their time.’

It interests me that he emphasizes the conditions under which one writes and thinks to such a degree:

“the circumstances which awaken [capability] to action perpetually change. If England were divided into forty republics, each equal in population and extent to Athens, there is no reason to suppose but that, under institutions not more perfect than those of Athens, each would produce philosophers and poets equal to those who… have never been surpassed,” (ibid).

This statement again fails to fully elucidate the cause for genius work, implying in a quasi-scientific manner that if all the variables remain unchanged, tests should produce consistent results. He does not flesh out fully why these particular institutions encouraged such enduring work. Are there discernable characteristics inherent to the republican system or to city-state diversity that foster great thinkers? Shelley had an overt aversion to his contemporary institutions, so he could have planted this as social criticism. After all, “the great writers of our own age are… forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition,” (ibid). Writers thus have an unusual awareness about the world in which they live, particularly its social aspects. Although Shelley says it is “a mistake to suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct enforcement of reform,” it could still be argued that he finds change to be a writer’s duty (1094). He references contemporaries who will enact these mass periodical changes, “restoring” the “equilibrium between institutions and opinions,” (1093). Yet the individual is only a portion of “the cloud of mind” that “is discharging its collected lightning,” functioning as one brain and one action (ibid). Further, the successful poetic device is not new, but “has some intelligible and beautiful analogy with those sources of emotion and thought, and with the contemporary condition of them,” exactly what Prometheus Unbound attempts to accomplish by reworking a classical source-text (1093-1094). Although I am willing to accept the argument that the poet’s mind is reflective, “modified… by every suggestion which he ever admitted to act upon his consciousness,” I am unsatisfied by his silence about how and why circumstances affect the writer so supremely (1094). In a writing culture that worships individuals, process, and craft, it is difficult for me to accept a model that characterizes writers as passive vehicles impressed by their environment.

My Weekly Response... [RESPONSE #5]

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.

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CORRECTION FROM GINA: Please post response #5 HERE, in the comments section!

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The Other Side of Mary Shelley Criticism: Steering Away From Frankenstein

After Gina had mentioned that there is a lack of criticism and exploration on Mary Shelley's works besides Frankenstein, I took it upon myself to find what I could scrounge up for those interested in Mary Shelley's lesser known pieces (and any criticism that surround them).

Starting with what we're, as a class, familiar with, there is Mathilda. As expected, most criticism focuses around the biographical relation between the story and Mathilda's relationship with her father. But, if possible let's avoid those predictable biographical readings and find more intriguing criticism...

Unfortunately, this link on this criticism on Mathilda requires a FREE Trial subscription to read the rest of the article (“Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism" by Tilottama Rajan) but it sounds promising. Although it seems to touch on the father-daughter incestuous (we can't get away!) relationship, it also explores the parallels of this novella to Shelley's other novels and the exploration of psychoanalysis circulating around the combination of feminism and Romanticism.

This last article references Mary Shelley's novel Valperga. If you would like to check out this novel, it is magically all available online for your desire. Also, for a quick summary if you would like a taste of the book check out this website. Like most of Shelley's novels, this novel focuses on love and death while keeping to a historical context in 14th century Italy surrounding the love and turmoil of the of the prince of Lucca. I have been able to find an interesting, full-text article on this novel entitled "Mary Shelley and the Therapeutic Value of Language" by William D. Brewer. The article uses a psychoanalytic approach considering the use of voice and language in the Shelley's characters, helps them recoup (temporarily) from their psychological trauma. Without using language to discuss their traumatic situations, the characters fall into depression and agony.

Last, but not least (for this blog anyway) is Shelley's The Last Man. This novel received the worst reviews because the novel was seen as repulsive and the product of a cruel mind. I did find an article on this novel (it does parallel Frankenstein a little, be warned) entitled "Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Monstrous Worlds, Domestic Communities, and Masculine Romantic Ideology" by Julie K. Schuetz (a student, I believe, at the University of Notre Dame, but worth it). Some other interesting essays include this one (Mary Shelley's anti-contagionism: The Last Man as "fatal narrative" by Anne McWhir) that explores how disease is used as metaphor and literally in The Last Man alongside a critique by Shelley of the Romantic ideology behind disease.
**The is also a 2007 movie version of The Last Man and it looks...odd so check out the trailers! or IMDB of course**

So, steer away from Frankenstein and happy Mary Shelley essay hunting!

Mary Shelley's Journal

I know that Shelley’s life does not really matter that much in terms of reading Mathilda, but I was curious anyways as to what Mary Shelley actually wrote about the death of her children so I went to the library to do some research on the background of the Shelleys and I found a copy of their journal. It’s pretty interesting especially when Mary talks about Maie, her first daughter who died because she talks about her very briefly. On March 6^th, 1815, she writes: “Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg. Talk. A miserable day. In the evening read ‘Fall of the Jesuits.’ Hogg sleeps here” (39). Her sadness continues into other passages:

“Monday, March 13. Shelley and Clara go into town. Stay at home; net, and think of my little dead baby. This is foolish I suppose; yet whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point – that I was a mother, and am so no longer.” (40).

Her entries sometimes are very brief and sometimes her thoughts about her baby are mixed together with things that she does that day. Another entry I found interesting was this one:

“Sunday. Mar. 19. Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been a cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.” (41).

Later on when she talks about Clara’s death, she says even less: “On Thursday [September 24], I go to Padua with Clare; meet Shelley there. We go to Venice with my poor Clara, who dies the moment we get there” (105). She says almost nothing the days following this event.

So, I have it checked out right now but I’ll check it back in after a couple of days if anyone wants to read it.

On another note, I found this website that might be useful that has a lot of links to authors. It’s written by Jack G. Voller, a professor at Southern Illinois University: http://www.litgothic.com/index_fl.html

References:

Ed. Jones, Frederick. Mary Shelley’s Journal. University of Oklahoma Press. Norman, Oklahoma. Copyright 1947.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Christian Griepenkerl (1839-1916) Befreiung durch Herakles. Photo © Maicar Förlag-GML

Hercules Frees Prometheus

According to this site, it "includes links to online editions of Shelley's poetry, prose, and letters; hypertext critical editions of specific poems; and other Shelley resources currently available on the web." And this one , "includes a select listing of books devoted to criticism and interpretation of Shelley; biographies of Shelley; editions of Shelley's poetry, prose, fiction, and letters; and a select database of over 600 journal and book articles from 1980 to the present." Both sites are a product of the University of Maryland and are a valuable resource for quick access to some of Percy Shelley's writings.

After reading Shelley's "On Love" and the Preface to Prometheus Unbound, Percy I have a strong urge to say Percy Shelley is an idealist with an inclination to express an intense tenderness and commiseration for the human race, as do many romantics-perhaps part of the required qualifications for inclusion.

"On Love" is particularly interesting in paragraph three where Shelley writes, "We see dimly within our intellectual nature a miniature, as it were, of our entire self, yet deprived of all that condemn or despise. . . . To this we eagerly refer all sensations. . ." (1080). There is a connection here to Edmund Burke's idea of beauty/love for another human as being a projection of one's self; although, Shelley furthers the idea to include nature in the absence of humanity.

In the Preface of Prometheus Unbound, I cannot help but think of Urizen. For the most part, Shelley's statement, "the only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan" places me on that path of no return; hopefully, the actual text will delve into this subject deeper. Additionally, in the previous statement, Shelley uses the word "imaginary" to place both Prometheus and Satan into the realm of "fiction"--though I hate to use that word when speaking of a poet. Satan as a fictional character also puts forth Shelley's view on religion.

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).

A Brief Return to Wordsworth

I’d like to take a brief step backwards before continuing to Mathilda. First, attached is an online text of the complete The Borderers, primarily for its introductory note in which Wordsworth provides an interesting contextual description for the play, and secondly in case anyone would like to read the entire text. Also attached is an essay by Judith W. Page that explores Wordsworth through a biographical and Feminist approach. Some subjects of the essay have already been discussed in class, however, it supplies a different reading of Wordsworth than we have primarily discussed and touches on thematic connections to Mary Wollstonecraft.

http://www.everypoet.com/Archive/poetry/William_Wordsworth/william_wordsworth_120.htm

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft1t1nb1dd&chunk.id=0&doc.view=print

I bring up Wordsworth again because his text seems to take part in a dialogue with Matilda. We have already discussed Godwin’s influence on The Borderers, but may also draw parallels between the Rivers/Oswald character and Mathilda, as both characters follow a sort of Romantic tragedy model: an initial tragedy occurs in either character’s life, forcing his/her mind inwards towards superstition and repetition, in which both texts may be read as only another repetition of the initial tragic tale.

As Coleridge describes at the close of the Ancient Mariner:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.

As an aside: if anyone knows a good place to look for video/audio recordings of The Borderers, I am interested in what the Rivers character looks like on stage, but haven’t been able to find anything.

And finally, a sad endnote for our discussion on the whereabouts of Jonathan Wordsworth:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1827932,00.html