University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Pastoralism in the novels of Mary Shelley

(USC Thesis Other)

Pastoralism in the novels of Mary Shelley

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content PASTORALISM IN THE NOVELS OF MARY SHELLEY
by
Karen McGuire
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
June 1977
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
_ ___________ K __ re 'v __________ _: l __ G 4 _ 1_ ,,.. ------------------------------
und cr the direction of h_~_'C.,_ Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirernents of
the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Date __ 1)J __ J _ li_l.9.7.] __ _____________ _
Ph
E
1
77
tvllY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
•
II.
FRANKENSTEIN AND THE LAST MAN
• • • • • • • •
III.
VALPERGA AND THE FORTUNES OF PERKIN WARBECK
•
IV. MATHILDA, LODORE, AND FALKNER
• • • • • • • •
v. CONCLUSION.
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
BIBLIOGRAPHY ••
• • • • • • • • • • •
. .. .
• • • •
1
31
67
99
137
161
. . I
ii I
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Mary Shelley occupies a unique position as a popu
lar novelist and associate of the major Romantic poets.
Her marriage to Shelley stimulated her already developing
literary aspirations. She took her early writings with her
when they eloped to the continent in 1814, and began her
first novel, Hate, on their honeymoon trip. March 11,
1818, marked her literary debut with Frankenstein. From
then until 1837, she wrote six novels, a novelette, and
numerous short stories. Throughout the novels, her major
themes are modeled after the pastoral tradition.
Although the theme is most powerful in her Gattie
stories, all of Mary Shelley's novels develop the major
Romantic conflict between the desire for power and knowl
edge as opposed to the desire for contentment and with
drawal from society. This theme provides a popular form of
the Romantic Pastoral. In her novels, happiness and even
survival are constantly thwarted by violent emotions, espe
cially by sexual passion and ambition for knowledge or
political power. Happiness rests in stoic self-denial, a
pastoral withdrawal, and above all in a non-sexual love
l
I
between brother and sister, parent and child.
However, the characters who seek and need pastoral
withdrawal, for example, Lionel Verney, Richard, and
Euthanasia, are always defeated. The pastoral vision
simply does not work; rather it is overpowered by the vio
lent forces of ambition and sexuality. Destructiveness
violates the pastoral world. However, in her last two
novels, Mary Shelley seems to lose courage, because she can
no longer face the defeat of her ideal. She forces Ethel
and Villiers to succeed in Ladore; and Elizabeth, Neville,
and Falkner all live happily ever after in a sublimated,
triangular love affair.
For a better understanding of Mary Shelley's use
of pastoralism, one must discuss the development of the
pastoral tradition from its ancient origins with an empha
sis on the nineteenth century modifications of that
tradition.
The very term "pastoral" is difficult to define.
Given too broad an interpretation, it can include all
nature poetry, picturesque novels, and works which contrast
simple and complex modes of living. For example, William
Empson defines the pastoral process as "putting the complex
into the simple,
111
which assumes that one can draw conclu
sions about complex people and situations by considering
1
william Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral
(Norfolk, Connecticut: A New Directions Book, n.d.), p. 23.
2
simple people and situations. However, given too narrow a
definition, pastoral can include only those works which
focus on the shepherd and reveal a conflict between this
shepherd's life and urban living. This narrower definition
places the emphasis on conforming to conventions: the
Golden Age, idealized shepherds, idealized natural
settings, unrequited love. By this narrow definition,
pastoral only "lingered on" in the eighteenth and nine-
h
. 2
teent centuries. By Walter Greg's definition, which
emphasizes conventions, pastoral relies on accidentals and
hence fails to justify its pretentions as a serious or in-
3
dependent art form, and so as Frank Kermode believes, the
pastoral form ended in the eighteenth century.
4
However, pastoralism did not end in the eighteenth
century, as the rich pastoralism of Wordsworth attests.
Problems of definition arise because pastoral is an
evolving, not a static form. Authors cannot simply plug
into conventions of shepherds and idealized nature, because
these are the nonessentials. A more useful definition of
pastoral would include works that express a withdrawal from
2
walter Wilson Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral
Drama (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959), p. 420.
3
rbid., p. 421.
4
Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry from the
Beginnings to Marvell (London: George G. Harap Co., 1952),
p. 4 2.
3
complexity, power and aspiration and that accept content
ment, through a pattern of escape, illumination, and return [
usually in a rural setting or an environment of natural
5
beauty.
Rooted in ancient myths, the pastoral tradition is
long and varied. The following is but a brief discussion
of the tradition from which Mary Shelley derived her form
of the pastoral.
When art can be removed from the hardship of real
country life, a stylized version of rustic life becomes
possible. Hence the pastoral arose as a by-product of the
most artifical period of Greek civilization, between the
6
Peloponnesian War and the conquest by the Romans. During
the third century B.C., Theocritus established the pastoral
genre in his collection of thirty idylls, focusing on the
countryside of Sicily and attempting to imitate actual
rustic language. Although stylized and intended for edu
cated readers, the Idylls are faithful to the details of
5
This definition is based primarily on chapter one
of John F. Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960) and the first
two chapters of Michael Squires, The Pastoral Novel
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1974).
6
Theokritos, Idylls of Theokritos, trans. Bariss
Mills (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Studies,
1963), p. vii.
4
Sicilian life, with only slight idealization.
7
Hence the
genre began in reality, not convention. For example, in
the Seventh Idyll, the goatherd smells of rennet and
carries a crooked olive stick. In the Tenth Iayll, the
unrequited lover is told that a working man should not
think beyond his work.
Influenced by Theocritus, although more polished,
8
Virgil wrote ten eclogues between 42 and 39 B.C. and estab
lished pastoral conventions as they developed and even
tually froze in the Renaissance.
9
Virgil discovered
Arcadia, the idealized setting for pastoral withdrawal and
lO h' h. d
contentment, w ic is contraste to the encroachment of
. d . 11
organize power in Rome. Pressure from the hostile forces
of civilization forms the pastoral impulse. Movement is
away from Rome toward nature, which is not merely passive,
I
7
James Edward Congleton, Theories of Pastoral
Poetry in England 1684-1798 (Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1952), p. 5.
8
Barris Mills, "Preface to The Idylls of
Theokritos," p. xii.
9
congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England,
p. 5.
10
Bruno Snell, "Arcadia: The Discovery of a
Spiritual Landscape," in The Discovery of the Mind: The
Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 281.
11
Leo Marx, "Two Kingdoms of Force," The
1
Massachusetts Review 1 (1959): 92.
5
· 12
but responsive to ,man.
The Tenth Eclogue, which Bruno Snell considers
13
Arcadia in its purest colors, presents the retreat of the
speaker into the forest and wild crags of nature. Both the
urban-rural contrast and the relation between man and
nature will be central to the pastoral tradition and
especially important for Mary Shelley. In the Fourth
Eclogue, Virgil introduces the theme of the Golden Age
projected into the future. Virgil's other Pastoral work,
The Georgics, a didactic poem on agriculture, stresses the
cooperation of man and nature (stanza 2, lines 23ff)
14
and
localizes the Golden Age's ideal in Italy (stanza 2, lines
136ff), much as Mary Shelley localizes the idyllic retreat
of Lionel Verney and his friends at Windsor in The Last
Man. More significantly for Mary Shelley's novels,
Virgil's Georgics strike the major pastoral theme of the
. . f rnb. . 15
renunciation o a ition.
12
Ibid., p. 91.
13
snell, "Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual
Landscape," p. 2 95.
14
Virgil, Georgics of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1947). All references
to this edition will be made parentheticallr in the text.
15
squires, The Pastoral Novel, p. 29.
6
Oh too lucky for words, if only he knew his luck,
Is the countryman who far from the clash of armaments
Lives, and rewarding earth is lavish of all he needs
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
But calm security and a life that will not cheat you.
(Georgics, stanza 2, lines 458-67).
As the earliest practioners of pastoralism,
Theocritus and Virgil became the chief influences on the
1 f f h
. 16 h
pastora orms o t e Renaissance, wen people felt the
development of the tension between town and country.
During the Renaissance, London emerged as a metroplis with
its own urban ethos,
17
which provided the contrast, essen
tial to the pastoral, between urban and rural. The
Renaissance use of pastoral motifs ranged from Sidney's
Arcadia and Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar to Milton's Eden
in Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's As You Like It.
According to Greg and Kermode, Spenser was the
first English Renaissance writer to combine the traditional
regular pastoral of Virgil and Petrarch, with the "wayward
f
. . . . .. 18
graces o native inspiration.
Although Spenser's use of
natural elements of the English environment was more con
ventional and not as spontaneous as those of earlier
writers, he did modified conventional modes of expressing
16
Ibid., p. 2 2.
17
Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry, p. 37.
18
walter Wilson Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral
Drama, p • 8 4 .
7
19
pastoral verse. Following the pastoral conventions
established by Virgil, Spenser in Book Six of the Faerie
Queene (1590's) presents the pastoral interlude with its
idealized settings and withdrawal from the world, until the
idyllic bliss is invaded by outsiders. After this pastoral
retreat, Calidore returns to the quest. Similarly, those
who retreat to Windsor in The Last Man must return to the
world when the plague invades.
At this same time (1580-1590), Sidney was com
posing Arcadia, the most influential of prose, pastoral
romances. In the Old Arcadia, Book Four, again appears the
theme of the shepherd's lack of ambition contrasted with
the political turmoils of the nobles.
20
Intrusions from
outside the pastoral furnish the contrast between urban and
rural. The shipwrecked heroes withdraw from urban to pas
toral, achieve harmony of soul, and return to the world.
21
Mary Shelley repeatedly altered this pattern to demonstrate
the defeat of the pastoral vision by the disruptive forces
of violent passion.
Even toward the end of the Renaissance, the pas
toral was much alive in the writing of Marvell, in which
20
Robert Kimbrough, Sir Philip Sidney (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1971), p. 84.
21
squires, The Pastoral Novel, p. 32.
8
[the contrast between urban and rural appeared in the
Mower's hatred of gardens in "The Mower Against Gardens"
and in which the dangers of passionate love left the Mower
bleeding in the grass in "Damon the Mower." The classic
-
-
pastoral theme of withdrawal into "delicious Solitude'
received a succinct rendering in "The Garden."
However, as the Renaissance came to an end, the
ancient pastoral tradition had been reduced to primarily
stylized conventions. The enclosure system began to
encroach upon Arcadia. With the disappearance of the fic
tional setting, the framework for the pastoral writers'
view of rural life began to disappear. In the late seven
teenth and early eighteenth centuries, pastoralism per
sisted primarily as an imitation of ancient pastorals,
22
especially Virgilian Eclogues and as a pretty legend
. h h 1 d' ·
23
wit out muc re evance to or inary experience.
By the time Pope was writing, pastoral had been
reduced to prescribed conventions; as Pope said in
Discourse on the Pastoral, "So that we are not to describe
our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as
p. 5.
22
congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England,
I
23
Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, pp. 11-
12.
9
r
1
they may be conceiv'd then to have been" (lines 40-41).
24
Further, pastoral should "consist in exposing the best side
only of a shepherd's life, and in concealing its miseries"
(lines 64-65). Pope deliberately sought to use conventions.
"' T.is _ th_e~efo _ re from the ractice of Theocr · tus- and Vi gil
(the only undisputed authors of Pastoral) that the Criticks
[sic] have drawn the foregoing notions concerning it" (lines
83-85). Any merit in his own pastorals Pope held should be
"attributed to some good old Authors, whose works as I had
leisure to study, so I hope I have not wanted care to
imitate" (lines 161-63). In his pastoral poems, Pope amply
demonstrated his theory, for they are imitative and decora
tive with the shepherd's head bound with bays, as he
embraces his love ("Summer" lines 35-38).
In contrast to Pope's emphasis on imitation of the
Ancients, Addison is the spokesman of the rationalistic
25
theory of pastoral. In Addison's view, pastoral should
represent native materials, rather than "antiquated
26
fables." In this contention, Addison received support
24
Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetr and an Essa
Criticism, ed. E. Audra Williams and Aubrey Williams
Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). All references
edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
on
New
to this
25
congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England,
p. 85.
26
spectator 523 for October 30, 1712, quoted in
Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, p. 86.
10
from Thomas Tickell, who endorsed the use of indigenous
rustics, scenery, and customs in pastoral, rather than ser
vile imitation of the ancients. Tickell also stressed the
. ~ 1 d . 1· 27
importance o~ natura goo ness in pastora ism.
As Tickell and Addison attest, the pastoral was
ready for a change. The rise of scientific skepticism in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced the need
for the pastoral, with its idealized Arcadian settings, to
adapt to a more realistic view of rustic life, such as
Crabbe portrayed. The conventions were but the form given
to the pastoral spirit, and new forms were necessary.
Crabbe seems to have taken seriously Tickell's
advice on writing pastorals, for he writes of the country
as it actually existed in deliberate contrast to the
idealized and literary rural setting (The Village, book 1,
lines 39-62).
28
He incorporates sympathy for the humble
man (book 1, lines 182-226) with social criticism (book 1,
lines 300-17). Crabbe tends toward an anti-pastoral vision
because of his emphasis on the inadequacy of poets to
express the needs of real country dwellers. He emphasizes
27
Guardian 22, 23, 28, 30, and 32 in April 1713,
quotes and discussed in Congleton, Theories of Pastoral
Poetry in England, pp. 87-89.
28
George Crabbe, The Village in Poems, 3 vols.,
ed. Adolphus William Ward (Cambridge: University Press,
1905). All references to this edition will be made paren
thetically in the text.
the contrast between traditional pastoral idealization and
real country life, and he does not attempt a fusion of the
two.
Goldsmith better illustrates the shift of interest
in the pastoral from imitation of the ancients to an empha
sis on native rural elements, but without the realism of
Crabbe. In The Deserted Village (1770), Goldsmith was nos
talgic for the rural past (lines 1-14),
29
yet focused on
the actual state of the country in a tone of social protest
(lines 37-40). The process of enclosure, which was gaining
momentum by the mid-eighteenth century, was dispossessing
the small farmers. Goldsmith compared the luxurious
country estates with the former village of independent
peasants (The Deserted Village, lines 63-66 and lines 265-
86). Thus he presented the traditional country-urban
contrast, but without the conventional artifices advocated
by Pope.
In the nineteenth century, this emphasis on real
peasants was united with natural sublimity in the poetry of
Wordsworth. Having reached the era in which Mary Shelley
was writing, one must consider in more detail the pastoral
motifs in Wordsworth, Shelley, Godwin, and Byron.
29
oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village in The
Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols, ed. Arthur
Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966). All references
to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
12
I
In Michael (1800), Wordsworth defined pastora~
a domestic tale of shepherds, dwellers in the valley, whom
he loved not for their own sakes, but because of the fields
and hills where they lived (lines 21-26).
30
In his letter
of January 14, 1801, to Charles James Fox, he stressed that
pastorals like Michael were to help remedy "a rapid decay
of the domestic feelings, which were rooted in the land.
1131
Following the lead of rationalist critics like Addison and
poets like Goldsmith, Wordsworth chose to treat incidents
from rural life in a language really used by men ("Preface
to Lyrical Ballads"). Therefore, pastoral figures, such as
Michael and Margaret, really work and frequently have dif
ficulties. Landscapes are neither Sicilian nor Arcadian,
but English (Prelude, book 8, lines 129-72).
32
The country
dwellers, as in Book Eight of The Prelude, are men "With
the most common; husband, father" (lines 288-89), who must
work at rustic tasks, as herding sheep to winter quarters
(book 8, lines 223-38).
30
william Wordsworth, The Poetic Works of William
Wordsworth, 5 vols., ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1944). All references to poems from this
edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
31
william Wordsworth, The Letters of William and
Dorothy Wordsworth, 2 vols., ed. Ernest de Sel1ncourt,
2nd ed. revised by Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1967), pp. 312-15.
32
william Wordsworth, The Prelude, ed. Ernest de
Selincourt, 2nd ed. revised by Helen Darbishire (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959). All references to this edition
will be made parenthetically in the text.
l __________ __________________ 1 _ 3 _
Like Theocritus, Wordsworth starts with actual
peasants in his natural locale. He idealizes these peas
ants, but not through conventions; rather his own imagina
tion transforms the experience of comprehending the
shepherds in the scene. For example, the shepherd, glori
fied in the setting sun and sublimely alone above all
height, is nevertheless "Far more of an imaginative form/
Than the gay Corin of the goves" (The Prelude, book 8,
lines 284-85).
Despite his innovations, Wordsworth's poetry
understandably bears many characteristics of traditional
pastoral. In Michael and the Margar et episode of Book One
of The Excursion (lines 511-956), the setting is rural.
Wordsworth uses the encroachment of urban values on rural
values in the climax of Michael, in which Michael's life is
ruined by Luke's city dissipation (lines 442-66}. As Mary
Shelley in Lodore emphasized a withdrawal from the city
into nature, so Wordsworth must receive the spirit of
Nature amid the blank confusion of the city (The Prelude,
book 7, lines 722-77). This strong theme of rural content
ment, as opposed to the ambitious drives of the city was an
pbiding part of Wordsworth's pastoral vision.
33
However, Wordsworth was no mere imitator of a tra
dition, for he made several substantial contributions to
33
squires, The Pastoral Novel, p. 47.
14
pastoral art. Especially important in relation to Mary
Shelley's stress on nonpassionate, safe, filial love, is
Wordworth's confidence in domestic affection. Wordsworth
particularly emphasized the importance of Dorothy in his
own life in "Tintern Abbey" as well as in The Prelude,
(book 11, lines 333-54 and book 14, lines 232-66). Further
contributions of Wordsworth to the genre include the fre
quent mentioning of labors and sufferings of country
dwellers and the taking of the setting literally without
the need for the shepherd to function as a disguise for the
34
sophisticated poet. Therefore, Wordsworth broadened the
scope of the pastoral form; conventions were superseded by
a realistic portrayal of country life and work.
Unlike Wordsworth, Shelley, when he used pastoral
motifs, tended to idealize the pastoral setting. More tra
ditional than Wordsworth, Shelley borrowed conventions to
trigger set responses in the reader, but never- ~heless, in
"Epipsychidion" and "To Jane: The Invitation,a Shelley
spelled out explicitly the feelings that lie behind the pasT
1 d
. . 35
tora tra 1t1on.
Particularly important to Mary Shelley because of
her repeated interest in brother-sister incest in yalperga,
3 4
Ibid. , p. 4 8 •
35
Lawrence Lerner, "An Essay on Pastoral," Essays
[in Criticism 20 (1970): 293.
15
and Perkin Warbeck is the concept of the soul mate: "Would
we two had been twins of the same mother" (Epipsychidion,
I , ine 4 5) •
3 6
This same longing to mate with a sister
appears later in the same poem, where the Ocean king's
pleasure house is ambiguously described as "Made sacred to
his sister and his spouse" (line 492).
The pastoral call to withdrawal echoes in the
invitation to Emily to be "lady of the solitude" on the
Ocean king's isle (Epipsychidion, lines 513-57) and in the
request for Jane to join the speaker in the wild wood away
from men and towns in "To Jane: The Invitation," lines 21-
32. A similar withdrawal occurs in Prometheus Unbound, in
which Prometheus invites Asia to withdraw into the cave.
This cave (act 3, scene 3, lines l0ff) and its natural
setting are given meaning by the mind which interprets
nature. Similarly, in Mathilda and The Last Man, both
heavily influenced by Shelley, the speaker influences the
interpretation of a natural setting. Nature remains
unchanged, but Lionel Verney's image of it when he is left
alone in the worldi differs markedly from his attitude
toward nature when he is surrounded by his family.
36
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Works of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, 10 vols., ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter E.
Peck (New York: Gordian Press, 1965). All references to
Shelley's poems will be made parenthetically to this edi
tion in the text.
16
Other features of traditional pastoralism in these
poems include idealized natural settings in Epipsychidion
and "To Jane: The Invitation," where there is neither
strife nor ~~in, ~p~ where there are ·aealized rustics, who
perform little work. Indeed in Epipsychidion, there are
tracks "which the rough shepherd treads once a year" (line
440). For Shelley in Epipsychidion, the "simple life wants
little" (line 525) and a nostalgia for the golden age
pervades:
This land would have remained a solitude
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited; (lines 425-29)
Godwin, like Shelley, is highly traditional in his
use of pastoral, especially in Imogen, but also in St. Leon.
He stresses the value of the simple life in the country
(Imogen, p. 81 and St. Leon, 1:240),
37
while including the
importance of solitude in pastoral bliss (Imogen, p. 77).
As in most pastoral, Godwin contrasts the country with the
dangers in the city. Roderic in Imogen feels a need to
escape periodically from his magical castle to enjoy the
"artless innocence" of the shepherds in the valleys (p. 51).
37
william Godwin, Imogen, A Pastoral Romance from
the Ancient British (London: William Lane, 1784; reprint
ed., N~w York: New York Public Library, 1963) and St~ Leon:
A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (London: G. G. andJ.
Robinson, 1799; reprint ed., New York: Garland Publications
1974). All references to these editions will be made
parenthetically in the text.
After St. Leon has left the country to live in the city,
he realizes his domestic life is now ruined. Like
Wordsworth, Godwin places much emphasis on the value of the
family and genuine affections (St. Leon, 1:247 and 270-71).
Only after St. Leon possesses the secret of eternal life
and the transmutation of metal does he withdraw from his
domestic circle (2:120-21). Although warned against ambi
tion, which is set in direct opposition to domestic affec
tions (St. Leon, 1:126-27), St. Leon does not heed the
warning, but seeks his fortune in the city. His son dis
owns him and his wife dies. Thus Godwin heavily under
scores the folly of ambition.
Godwin, along with many late eighteenth century
novelists, shares with his daughter the use of nature to
reflect emotions of a character. This commonplace motif,
evident in de Stael's Corinne, Radcliffe's The Mysteries of
Udolpho, and Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, expresses a close
link between nature and the characters. For example,
Godwin places St. Leon out in a storm (1:235-42) during
which "nature found her way to [his] heart, and made a man
of [him] (1:241). In Imogen, Roderick abducts Imogen
during an electrical storm, which is symbolic of his lust
(pp. 40-41), while the solemn stillness of nature is able
to calm Edwin, even if only momentarily, after Imogen's
abduction (p. 43). This close link between the characters
and nature is also a reflection of the pastoral vision.
18
I
Byron, unlike Wordsworth, Shelley and Godwin,
examined the pastoral mode and found it lacking; as he said
lin Hints from Horace, none can exceed Pope in Pastorals,
for it is hard to find the median between too polished and
too coarse a wit.
38
In spite of this assertion, Byron
still used the pastoral motifs in both the Haidee episode
of Don Juan (cantos 2-4) and in The Island.
Don Juan does not voluntarily withdraw into a pas
toral world. Like the heroes of Sidney's Arcadia, he is
shipwrecked on Lambro's island. Neither are the island
dwellers simple peasants. Haidee is described in terms of
her jewels, and Lambro's palace is rich in artifice. The
island itself is far from idyllic with its "wild and
breaker-beaten coast" (canto 2, stanza 177), although to
the lovers it seems an Eden: "for their young eyes/ Each
was an angel and earth Paradise" (canto 2, 204). But as
1
. . th h . . . d. 39
Love 1 notes, it is ey w o envision it a para ise.
They withdraw to the cave, where Haidee had nursed
Juan, but eventually they come to Lambro's palace and their
inevitable separation. Juan and Haidee "were not made in
38
George Gordon Lord Byron, The Works of Lord
Byron, 13 vols., ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London:
John Murray, 1898-1904; reprint ed., New York: Octagon
Books, 1966). All references to Byron's poems will be
made parenthetically to this edition in the text.
39
Ernest James Lovell, Jr., Byron: The Record of a
Quest (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966), p. 206.
19
lthe real world to fill/ A b,1sy character in the dull scene"
(canto 4, stanza 15). "They should have lived together
deep in woods,/ Unseen as sings the nightingale" (canto 4,
stanza 28), but they do not live together in the woods,
which implies that in this real world, which Haidee and
Juan do inhabit, such idyllic love is not possible.
Unlike Wordsworth, Byron uses the Classical and
traditional pastoral forms in The Island: idealized nature
(canto 2, stanza 15, lines 346-69), idealized lovers, Neuha
and Torquil, a heroine described according to nature
(canto 2, stanza 7, lines 123-44), and contrast between
pastoral contentment and the world or society (canto 2,
stanza 14, lines 334-39). However, in spite of Byron's
frequent idealizing, his pastoral is firmly planted in the
real world, even to being based on the true episode of the
mutiny on the Bounty. Byron demonstrates that civilization,
from which the mutineers came, corrupts the innocent pas
toral world (canto 1, stanza 10, lines 201-34). The
mutineers are guilty "renegades" to that which gave them
birth," (canto 2, stanza 1, line 14), so they do not fit
into pastoral innocence, although they desire pastoral
withdrawal (canto 1, stanza 2, lines 36-39). The
mutineers enter the pastoral through a savage and violent
mutiny and bring the retribution of civilized man upon the
innocent islanders.
20
r
Byron describes the attractions of the pastoral
with apparent delight, yet he is aware of its limitations.
The pastoral view of life is sufficient for those born in
it, but Byron denies the ability of civilized man to with
draw into idyllic pastoral life.
Unlike Don Juan, in which there is no compromise
("Where all is Eden, or a wilderness" [canto 4, stanza 54]),
The Island offers an alternative to the opposition of pas
toral and civilization. Byron believes that civilized man
must take action toward the restoration of the degraded
ld f
. . 1 · . 40
wor o c1v1 1zat1on. The situation of civilized man
depends upon his intention. "'Tis the cause makes all"
(canto 4, stanza 11, line 261). Because of their violent
intentions, the mutineers have polluted the natural pas
toral world; as Christian realizes: "' And but for me."
he said, and turned away;/ Then gazed upon the pair"
(canto 3, stanza 9, lines 208-9). The island lovers are in
danger because the pursuers of the guilty mutineers have
come to the island. Therefore, rather than withdraw from
civilization, which is shown to destroy the pastoral world,
the millions need to remove tyrants to restore freedom
(canto 2, stanza 13, lines 320-21). Action within the
civilized world, not a withdraw! into pastoral, will remedy
man. Byron is more traditional than Wordsworth, Shelley,
40
Arthur D. Kahn, "The Pastoral Byron," Arcadia 8
(1975): 238.
21
or Godwin, who emphasize a withdrawal, but who do not place
any emphasis on a return to positive action.
Not only belles-lettres, but also the popular fic
tion of Mary Shelley's own time offered ample proof that
pastoralism was still an important theme at the time she
was writing. In Alicia Lefanu's Strathallan, Lady
Torrendale says, "I came down to the country, glowing with
the romantic hopes inspired by the fine description given
in novels, of rural innocence and sensibility, and for the
first days, Miss Langrish and I did nothing but work, and
talk of the~' (1:3).
41
The heroine's father, Melbourne,
lives in domestic peace withdrawn from all society. This
gentle recluse, who lives in harmony with nature, is con
trasted with the more eccentric Sir Harold, who lives in a
wild and savage rustic retreat (3:137). Lord Torrendale
enjoys his country estate because of the pleasures of domes
tic intercourse and of retirement (1:20). Although Lefanu
does not emphasize the pastoralism of the novel, she does
make it clear that deep perceptions and finer emotions
require solitude (1:352), especially rural seclusion undis
tracted by society.
Similar to Lefanu's Lord Torrendale is
Mrs. Robinson's Count Vancenza, who enjoys tranquillity of
41
Alicia Lefanu, Strathallan, 4 vols. (London:
Sherwood, Neely, & Jones, 1816). All references to this
edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
22
mind in the secluded paradise of his castle, which is
rarely found in the splendid city (1:4).
42
The count lives
in domestic peace and seclusion with his sister, her
daughter, and a young orphan. Although the daughter is
delighted with the city (1:99), the family's trip into
society results in the death of the Count (1:144). The
women return to their pastoral retreat, which is ultimately
disrupted by the orphan's awareness that her love for
Alzanza is incestuous. She dies because she cannot wed her
brother (2:128). These themes will occur throughout Mary
Shelley's novels.
Jane Porter's Pastor's Fireside also presents the
ideal of rural seclusion, personified in Mr. Athelstane,
a benevolent, country parson. Louis, the protagonist,
spends the major part of the novel amid the political tur
moil on the continent, but returns to Marwick Hall and
Mr. Athelstane at the end of the novel. Louis leaves
behind him the world of social strife to settle into the
comfortable rural retreat of Mr. Athelstane.
Even such an unlikely setting as the exotic Valley
of Cashmire in India provides a pastoral focus for Lady
Morgan's The Missionary. This novel emphasizes the lovely
seclusion of the pagan priestess' shrine and the charms of
42
Mary Robinson, Vancenza or the Dangers of
Credulity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Authoress,
1792). All references to this edition will be made paren
thetically in the text.
23
solitude on the heart of the young Christian missionary who
falls in love with her. The Valley of Cashmire becomes the
ideal of rural seclusion, which is destroyed by their
passion. Luxima would shut out the evil passions, which
would disorder their world (p. 191).
43
BuL their own love
is a passion too strong for the delicate world of the
pastoral. After they leave the valley, the Missionary is
captured and condemned by the Inquisition, and Luxima dies
trying to save him.
Such is the rich heritage of pastoralism with which
Mary Shelley would have been familiar through her extensive
reading and through her discourses with Shelley. Her major
theme stresses that value, and even a chance for happiness
and survival, lies in the pastoral, symbolized predomi
nantly in the idyllic family.
For Mary Shelley pastoralism means primarily with
drawal either spiritually, physically or emotionally.
Withdrawal from city or society is usually for the good,
but withdrawal from family is evil, because it generally
leads to solipsism and frequently suicide. Man fails when
withdrawal is self-indulgent, i.e., a retreat into the sel~
rather than stoical. However man succeeds when he redis
covers the self in isolation. This pattern of alienation,
43 . h . . An
Miss Owenson, Lady Morgan, Te Missionar!,
Indian Tale (New York: Franklin & Butler & White,811).
All references to this edition will be made parenthetically
in the text.
24
withdrawal, retreat, and rediscovery of the self in isola
tion, aptly termed "the romantic syndrome" by R. F.
Brissenden,
44
is repeatedly present in Mary Shelley's
novels. However, frequently the pattern is not carried to
the final step of rediscovery, and hence pastoral with
drawal fails.
Central to Mary Shelley's pastoralism is the threat
of ambition, whether from politics, sex, or knowledge. The
horror of going ahead, as Frankenstein, Castruccio and
Raymond do, to fulfill individual satisfaction outside the
responsibility of family and society is the price of
heroism.
45
To test the powers of ambition, a character
asserts selfhood and risks loss, the alternative being non
heroic repression, which is an exercise of constraints for
the sake of order within the pastoral vision. Passivity
clashes with ambition, just as the country clashes with the
court which represents politics and power.
Mary Shelley's symbol for the pastoral contentment
which opposes aggressive emotionalism and ambition was the
idyllic family, "a place apart, a walled garden," which
seemed a country of peace and innocence apart from the
4
4 · · . D. t St d. .
R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in is ress: u ies in
the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974), p. 67.
45
George Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of
Realism," Novel 7 (1973): 28-29.
25
city.
46
Walter Houghton comments that "in the recoil from
the City, the home was irradiated by the light of pastoral
imagination."
47
Domesticity led inevitably to tranquillity
and conten ment, whereas sexuality led just as inevitably
to disruption and violent passions.
Mary Shelley's comfortable stress on non-sexual,
familial love and a brotherly love in marriage is disrupted
by the repeated overtones of incest. Of course, there is
precedent enough for the theme of incest in the sentimental,
Gothic, and romantic literature upon which Mary Shelley
undoubtedly drew. According to Joyce Tompkins, not a
critic protested against the theme of incest,
48
which was
much in evidence in eighteenth century sentimental novels,
if one accepts Montague Summers' lengthy list of titles in
The Gothic Quest.
49
Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Lewis'
The Monk, and Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest are
the roost prominent examples of the Gothic use of the incest
theme, which symbolizes the basically irrational and
46
walter Edward Houghton, The Victorian Frame of
Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957}, pp. 343-45.
47
rbi'd., 344 p • ... ....
48
Joyce Marjorie _Sanxter Tompkins, The Popular
Novel in England 1775-1800 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1961}, p. 65.
49
Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of
the Gothic Novel (London: Fortune Press, 1938}, p. 391.
26
unconscious forces in life.
5
0
In Romantic treatments of the theme, however,
incest is usually a fully conscious act between either
parent and child, which is universally condemned or between
brother and sister, which is usually treated sympathet
ically or, in the case of Percy Shelley, idealized.
51
Shelley wrote:
Incest is like many other incorrect things a very
poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love
or of hate. It may be that defiance of every thing
for the sake of another which clothes itself in the
glory of the highest heroism, or it may be that cyni
cal rage which confounding the good & bad in existing
opinions breaks through them for the purpose of
rioting in selfishness & anti~athy (Letter to Mar ia
Gisborne, November 16, 1819). 2
Thus Shelley covers both brother-sister incest, which is
heroic, and parent-child, such as in The Cenci, which
expresses selfishness.
According to Peter Thorslev, the theme of incest
provides a perfect vehicle for the narcissistic sensibility
and the intellectual solipsism of the Romantics.
53
Cer
tainly Shelley's soul mates in Epipsychidion and Alaster,
50
Peter L. Thorslev, Jr., "Incest as Romantic
Symbol," Comparative Literature Studies 2 (1965), pp. 44-
45.
Sl b'd 47
I 1 ., p. .
52
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters of Percy Bysshe
Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Fredrick Lafayette Jones (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1964), 2:154.
53
Thorslev, "Incest as Romantic Synlbol," p. 5 0.
27
as well as Byron's Manfred and Astarte, would qualify as
examples of Thorslev's view. A sisterly love that is at
the same time sensuous and inevitably incestuous is at the
heart of The Revolt of Islam, originally Laon and Cythna.
Brother-sister incest also figures in Rosalind and Helen,
which was completed at Mary Shelley's request, according to
the notes.
54
Obviously, Mary Shelley's interest in incest was
not unique to her; however, her use of it is surprising in
view of her stated emphasis on the need for domestic affec
tions because incest by its very existence would disorga
nize the foundations of family life and the basic pattern
f 1
. l . 55
o al socia ties.
One additional element of pastoral which figures
significantly in Mary Shelley's novels is nature. Nature
receives two distinctly different treatments in the novels.
The Last Man and Mathilda, for example, focus on the mind
which interprets the natural setting. Nature is reassuring
to Lionel Verney as long as other people are there, but
when he is truly the last man on earth, then that same
nature is repugnant to him. He seeks the city, where man's
54
Jean de Palacio, Mary Shelle dans son Oeuvre;
.....-:-----~---~~r----=----,~--=--
C on tr i but ion aux etudes Shelleyennes Klincksieck,
1969), p. 129.
55
'l D k .
Emi e ur eim,
the Taboo, trans. Edward
1963), pp. 125-26.
Incest; The Nature and Origin of
Sagarin (New York: L Stuart,
28
artifacts, if not man, still exist. Nature remains un
changed; it is Lionel who is different. However, in
Frankenstein, Perkin Warbeck, and Ladore, for example, Mary
Shelley adopts a more Wordsworthian view. Nature becomes
a mirror of the mind. For example, as Frankenstein
feverishly strives to animate the Monster, it rains. Like
wise the bleak atmosphere of the attempted creation of a
mate reflects the state of mind of the participant.
In general, Mary Shelley tends to be reductive in
her use of pastoralism. She gives the form few of the
nuances and subtle distinctions apparent in Wordsworth and
Byron. However, she was not attempting to write great
poetry. She was trying to produce novels which would sell,
aimed at a not very discriminating reading public. The
difference in her intent from that of the great poets of
her age helps to explain the black and white reduction of
many of her novels, particularly the later ones.
Mary Shelley conjoins pastoral themes with popular
conventions. The pastoral theme takes on different forms
in the different genres. The Gothic genre allows a more
symbolic representation, while the historical supplies a
remoteness for the pastoralism. The domestic melodramas
are set in Mary Shelley's contemporary society. Hence the
pastoral theme takes a more literal form in the later
novels.
29
The subsequent chapters will discuss the pastoral
theme and the idyllic family in relation to Mary Shelley's
Gothic novels, historical fiction, and domestic m~lodramas.
Her most enduring novels, Frankenstein (1818) and The Last
Man (1826), will be discussed as Gothic fiction in
Chapter II. Chapter III will cover her historical novels,
Valperga (1823) and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830),
while Chapter IV will consider her least important fiction,
the domestic melodrama of Mathilda (1819), Ladore (1835)
and Falkner (1837). Wherever relevant, Mary Shelley's
numerous short stories will also be included in the
discussion.
30
CHAPTER II
FRANKENSTEIN AND THE LAST MAN
Mary Shelley most carefully worked out these pas
toral themes in her first novel, Frankenstein, and her
other entry into Gothicism, The Last Man. By the early
nineteenth century, Gothicism was a well-established form,
an offshoot of the sentimental novel and a derivative of
1
the cult of emotion of the late eighteenth century.
According to Devendra Varma,
Interpreted in its social context, the Gothic novel
is a subtle and complex aesthetic expression of the
spirit of Europe in revolutionary ferment. It is
the most characteristic literary expression of the
orgy of mental and emotional excitement that accom
panied the French Revolution and grew out of the
Industrialization of Britain.
2
The reading public was ready to accept a probing of the
darker powers beneath the surface of life; as Leo Braudy
states, "The induction through the daylight public world to
the private world of darkness and emotion beyond is the
legacy of the sentimental to the gothic.
113
1
Ernest Albert Baker, The History of the English
Novel, 10 vols. (London: H.F. & G. Witherby, 1942), 5:175.
2
oevendra P. Varma, The Gothic Flame (New York:
Russell & Russell, 1957), pp. 216-17.
3
Leo Braudy, "The Form of the Sentimental Novel,"
~ovel 7 (1973), p. 7.
31
r
I
Imitators of Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764)
gradually moved away from the original Gothic setting and
emphasized "the grotesque, ghastly, and violently super-
1 h
. f. . .. 4
natura or super uman in iction. Mary Shelley, appa-
rently attuned to the popularity of the Gothic and temper
mentally suited to the dark and brooding mood of the genre,
used many characteristics of the Gothic in Frankenstein and
The Last Man.
According to Varma, Gothic characters are aloof
from conventional mortality.
5
Frankenstein with his supe
rior, but forbidden knowledge; the Monster with his uncom
mon height, physiognomy, and endurance; and Raymond with
his ambitious powers of leadership are all beings set apart.
The Gothic tends to probe emotional states, especially
tumultuous emotions. The Monster's narrative, as well as
Frankenstein's and Lionel's lengthy broodings, reveal the
interior states of the characters. The Gothic frequently
treats of primitive excitement, born of danger and fearful
6
events, such as the creation of the Monster or the murder
of the false prophet in The Last Man. Further, the Gothic,
especially in such novels as The Monk and The Castle of
4
Varma, The Gothic Flame, p. 13.
5
rbid., p. 212.
6
rbid., p. 226.
32
Otranto, was aware of the destructive side of sexuality,
7
which is evident in the Monster's murder of Elizabeth and
Frankenstein's destruction of the Monster's mate. The
remote and isolated setting in Gothic novels is frequen t ly
ominous, such as the environs of Udolpho. The fatal pesti
lence in The Last Man, as well as the laboratory of
Frankenstein and the scene of Victor's vowing the death of
the monster at the cemetery, conveys the fearful effects of
the environment. In this same vein, the Gothic presents
b h d h b
. . 1 8
ot scenery an weat er su Jective y. Mary Shelley uses
storms, blasted trees, and portents in the sky to reinforce
the emotional states of the characters participating in
these events or to probe further the mind of the viewer of
these events. Furthermore, the pernicious and evil machi
nations of the Gothic villain are often countered by an
idyllic, pastoral society and a love of the mountains.
9
In
Frankenstein, the Monster retreats to the idyllic cottage
of the DeLaceys and later to the mountains. Similarly,
Lionel and his friends find a pastoral retreat at Windsor.
Because of the contrast between the ominous and the tran
quil, as well as the subjectivity of the emotional states
7
James Rieger, "Introduction to Frankenstein"
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974), p. xxv.
8
varma, The Gothic Flame, p. 20.
g Ibid. , p. 218.
33
and environment of the characters, the Gothic was ideally
suited for Mary Shelley's purposes.
The stated purpose of Frankenstein exemplifies
Mary Shelley's central preoccupation, "The exhibition of
- - -·--• - ---~- ·---· --
the amiableness of domestic affection" (p. 7).
10
Within
the novel, Frankenstein himself realizes that he needs the
domestic, for he says:
A human being in perfection ought always to preserve
a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion
or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquillity.
I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge is an
exception to this rule. If the study to which you
apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affec
tions, and to destroy your taste for these simple
pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then
that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say not
befitting the human mind. (p. 51)
In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley shows the denial of
both the domesticity, mentioned in the above quotation, and
of sexuality, resulting in the death and sterility of both
Frankenstein and the Monster, symbolized u ~timately in the
icy expanses of the North Pole.
In order to gain the knowledge necessary to create
life, Frankenstein turns not to Elizabeth, his fiancee,
with whom he could have procreated a natural child, but to
an obsessive pursuit of knowledge. His ambition to create
lOAlthough Shelley wrote the introduction to
Frankenstein, it expresses her views. Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, Frankenstein (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding,
Mavor and Jones, 1818; reprint ed., ed. with intro. James
Rieger, New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974). All references
to this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
34
life becomes his only concern. He ironically severs all
contact with his family and Elizabeth to create life. How
ever, his creation is not a human infant, but a monster.
That Frankenstein has violated the natura- r -order of pro
creation is emphasized in the gigantic size and excessive
ugliness of the Monster, Frankenstein's child and son. To
emphasize that Frankenstein in creating life without using
sex has subverted the natural order and in essence com
mitted a crime, Mary Shelley gives Frankenstein a
frightening Oedipal dream.
I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I
saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the
streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I
embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her
lips, they became livid ~ith the hue of death; her
features appeared to change, and I thought that I held
the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud en
veloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling
in the folds of the flannel. (p. 53)
This dream is a direct result of the creation of
the Monster. At least subconsciously, Frankenstein
realizes that the Monster, the direct result of his ambi
tious passion, brings not life, but death. Immediately
after the dream, Frankenstein sees the Monster reaching
toward him and muttering inarticulately while grinning.
The description is frightening only because of
Frankenstein's interpretation of the circumstances, but
the literal description, if applied to a tiny infant, would
have been appealing. Hence it is Frankenstein himself, wh~
by irresponsibility, initially causes the murders, which
35
the Monster will later perpetrate.
Frankenstein is the first of many of Mary Shelley's
characters who fail to accept the need for contentment with
the simple life and domestic virtues. His life is a para
digm of the price of heroism, which causes isolation and
consequently loneliness. As an ambitious hero, Franken
stein sets out to discover the secrets of life for the
benefit of mankind. But when his ambitious drives come to
fruition in the birth of the Monster, Frankenstein forgets
the need for responsible, domestic virtue. He denies
responsibility for the being to whom he has given life.
Like a guilty parent, he allows his son to face alone a
totally alien world. Frankenstein simply lapses into the
inactivity of a totally passive hero. He becomes ill; he
makes no effort to find out what has become of his crea
tion; as George Levine states, "the notion of domestic
affections and of the need for communal and family ties
runs deeply through the novel, and as Frankenstein longs
for these, his ambition drops away and he falls into
. t. . .. 11
inac 1v1ty. Frankenstein totally retreats from the
Monster, even literally fleeing from him (p. 53). Later
Frankenstein simply allows Justine to die for a crime he is
certain she did not commit. Frankenstein, comfortably
enscounced again with his family, does nothing.
He is an
11
Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of
Realism," p. 29.
36
example of the destructive force of ambition. However, the
theme of anti-ambition in the novel is undercut by a con
tradictory impulse in Frankenstein's character through
which the dying Frankenstein urges Walton to succeed in
that in which he himself has failed (p. 215).
12
His inability to act stems directly from his over
reaching in creating life without the natural process of
sexual union. His ambitious obsession severs his family
connections, a point brought out in Frankenstein's comments
quoted earlier. Like St. Leon, whose secret knowledge
causes him to withdraw from his family (St. Leon, 2:120-21),
Frankenstein leaves his family to study the secrets of life.
However, his withdrawl is not just physical, but also emo
tional. He deprives himself of the love of Elizabeth, his
fiancee, and in the original version, his cousin. The pos- j
!sibility of overt incest probably led Mary Shelley to ex
lcise the references to the cousin and to make Elizabeth
merely an orphan adopted into Frankenstein's home and
raised as Victor's "more than sister" (p. 236. 1831 ed).
However, incest, which appeared in almost every one of her
novels and was the central issue of her next tale Mathilda,
written in 1819, is yet a part of Frankenstein's relation
ship with Elizabeth.
13
Frankenstein's father suggests,
12
Noted in William A. Walling, Mary Shelley (New
York: Twayne Publishers, 1972), p. 41
13
· · h d · . t . F k t .
Critics w o iscuss inces in ran ens ein
37
"You, perhaps, regard her as your sister, without any wish
that she might become your wife" (p. 148). And indeed
Frankenstein does consider Elizabeth as his sister.
Although not related by blood in the 1831 edition, they
were raised together, making them socially brother and
sister. Likewise they are psychologically siblings.
Frankenstein's mother presented Elizabeth to him as a gift,
which as a child he took literally and considered Elizabeth
his "to protect, love, and cherish" (p. 235). This rela
tionship between Frankenstein and Elizabeth is reinforced
by the similar relationship between Walton and his actual
sister to whom he addresses his letters and toward whom he
d
. h , . ff .
14
irects is a ection.
include Palacio, Mary Shelley dans sons Oeuvre, pp. 125-37;
Brian Aldiss, "Origin of the Species," Extrapolator 14
(May, 1973): 183; Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition
of Realism," pp. 2 0-21; Morton Kaplan, "Fantasy or
Paternity and the Doppelganger: Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein," in The Unspoken Motive, Morton Kaplan and
Robert Kloss (New York: Free Press, 1973), pp. 132-35.
14
Mary Shelley's interest in affection between
1
brothers and sisters extended to her short stories as well. 1
She tended to idealize the relationship as in "The Brother
and Sister; an Italian Story," in which the sister knew
none to love except her brother. The brother raised his
sister; "the fondest mother could not have been more indul
gent. And yet there was mingled a something beyond per
taining to their difference of sex" (Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, Mary Shelley Collected Tales and Stories, ed.
Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1976), p. 170; further references to this edition
ill be made parenthetically in the text). In the excised
assages from this short story, one sees more of the
idealization of a brother. "She lived only for heaven and
er brother" (p. 387). Similarly in "Euphrasia" the
eroine's "brother was her idol--her hope--her joy"
(p. 302).
38
However, Elizabeth is not only a sister for
Frankenstein, she is also a mother figure for him. The
incestuous overtones of Frankenstein's oedipal dream must
not be overlooked, for Elizabeth becomes his mother in the
dream. Frankenstein's mother had wanted Elizabeth to
replace her for the younger children and to marry
Frankenstein. The mother thus imposes a sense of guilt on
Victor for even considering marriage with Elizabeth, his
surrogate mother. Hence union with Elizabeth would be
doubly incestuous for Frankenstein. Although covert,
incest is a major reason for Frankenstein's ambivalence
toward Elizabeth in his maturity and for his hesitation to
wed her.
Overtly, Victor's obsession with creating life
makes him unable to reach out for Elizabeth. Frankenstein
denies a need for Elizabeth, along with the rest of the
family. In denying his family, he denies a part of him
self, the part which recognizes the need for domestic
virtue. Without that part of him, Frankenstein unleashes
the Monster, who murders all those whom Victor loves.
According to Brian Aldiss, one perversion of the natural
order leads to another. He sees the Monster's murders as a
sign of "the disintegration of society which follows man's
arrogation of power.
1115
Frankenstein himself makes a
15
Aldiss, "Origin of Species," p. 183.
39
comparison between his ambitious pursuit of knowledge and
political disruption when he says,
If no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to inter
fere with the tranquillity of his domestic affec
tions, Greece had not .been ensiaved; Caesar would
have spared his country; America would have been
discovered more gradually; and the empires of
Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. (p. 51)
This point will be greatly expanded in The Last Man.
Once Frankenstein has created life in the Monster,
he denies that life by rejecting any responsibility for
the Monster. Just as he denied his own need for others,
Frankenstein denies the Monster's need for domesticity;
Victor rejects his son, just as he previously turned from
the parents, his brothers, and his sister Elizabeth.
Frankenstein not only rejects the Monster initially, but
also denies him when the Monster openly pleads for help
during their meeting in the Alps, an appropriate place for
!the sterile and unfeeling Frankenstein to meet the pro-
duct of his ambition. At this point, the Monster's need
for familial love has already been thwarted, originally by
Frankenstein's rejection of him and then by the DeLaceys'
rejection. Frustrated and made miserable because of his
isolation, the Monster turns to a young child,
Frankenstein's brother. The Monster hopes to educate this
boy, as a parent would its child, to love him (p. 138).
However, William spurns him as a "Hideous monster" (p. 139).
To avenge himself on his father and creator (p. 135), the
Monster kills William.
There follows an unusual passage in which the Mon
ster sees a picture of Frankenstein's mother. Incest
hovers over these events, for h€ is ~ttracted by Victor's
mother, but remembering that he "was for ever deprived of
the delights that such beautiful creatures would bestow"
(p. 139), the Monster flies into a rage. Although this
scene is motivated by the Monster's frustration because of
a lack of female companionship, it is significant that the
woman who arouses these emotions in the Monster is
Frankenstein's mother. Kinship and the bonds of family
tightly bind Frankenstein and his Monster not only to each
other, but to the other characters as well. The Monster
kills only those close to Frankenstein, his brother, his
closest friend, his wife. Even Justine, whose death is
caused by the Monster's incriminiating evidence and
Frankenstein's silence about her innocence, is an intimate
of the Frankenstein household and "acted towards [William]
like a most affectionate mother" (p. 80).
The sexual overtones when the Monster puts the por
ltrait of Frankenstein's mother into the folds of Justine's
ldress are made more explicit in the 1831 edition. Perhaps
Mary Shelley realized that the sexuality of the Monster
could be overlooked, as it has been by such critics as
41
16
Muriel Spark and Milton Mays. The 1818 edition merely
says,
she was young, not indeed so beautiful as her whose
portrait I held, but of an agreeable aspect, and
blooming in the loveliness of youth and health.
Here, I thought, is one of those whose smiles are
bestowed on all but me; she shall not escape.
(p. 140)
Whereas the 1831 edition adds,
And then I bent over her, and whispered "Awake,
fairest, thy lover is near--he who would give his
life but to obtain one look of affection from thine
eyes: beloved awake."
The sleeper stirred; a thrill of terror ran
through me. Should she indeed awake, and see me,
and curse me, and denounce the murderer? Thus would
she assuredly act, if her darkened eyes opened, and
she beheld me. The thought was madness; it stirred
the fiend within me--not I, but she shall suffer:
murder I have committed because I am for ever robbed
of all that she could give me, she shall atone.
The crime had its source in her; be hers the punish
ment. (p. 251)
The Monster does not realize how truly he speaks, for it is
the absence of a woman at his birth that has caused his
existence to be monstrous. However, to understand the
Monster's meaning here, one must realize that he is frus
ltrated sexually. Because his drive for companionship can
not be fulfilled he channels his frustrations outward into
the violent emotions that induce murder. The Monster
16
Muriel Spark, Child of Light (Hadleigh, Essex:
Towerbridge Publications, 1951), p. 149 and Milton A. Mays,
"Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Black Theodicy," in SF the
Other Side of Realism: Essa sin Modern Fantasy and Science
Fiction, ed. Thomas D. Clareson (Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971), p. 177.
42
himself realizes that the absence of passions and feelings
specifically directed toward women filled him with impotent
(a well-chosen word) envy and desire for vengeance
(pp. 2 1 7-18) .
Having revealed violence and passion, the Monster
pleads with Frankenstein to "create a female ..• with
whom [he] can live in the interchange of those sympathies
necessary for [his] being" (p. 140). Frankenstein reluc
tantly acquiesces. Appropriately, as Walling points out,
Mary Shelley endows the Monster with a voice to plead for
the very thing Frankenstein has rejected, human companion-
h
.
17
h " . h h'l.. f
sip; as t e Monster says, My vices are t e c i aren o
a forced solitude that I abhor" (p. 143).
By idealizing the elder Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
wanted the reader to feel Frankenstein's loss of familial
connection more deeply. His family represents Franken
stein's prelapsarian innocence. The preparation for and
eventual creation of the Monster represents Frankenstein's
. . d . d' 18 .
fall and explusion from his omestic para ise into a
nightmare world of murder, illness, and an inability to
control events. Elizabeth, however, remains in the
17
11· h 11 39 Wa ing, Mary Se ey, p. .
18
For a contrasting view see Katherine Ellis,
"Paradise Lost: The Limits of Domesticity in the Nineteenth-,
Century Novel," Feminist Studies 2-3 (1975): 57-59, which
suggests that the Frankensteins' domestic bliss is a false
paradise that caused Victor to suppress his drives.
L _ ___ 43
paradise of pastoral tranquillity; as she says, "We surely
shall be happy: quiet in our native country, and not
mingling in the world, what can disturb our tranquillity?"
(p. 89).
The other positive example of domesticity in the
novel is the lengthy stay of the Monster in the hovel
beside the DeLaceys' cottage. In this episode, the Monster
· · d
19
b h . . b 1 h · 1
is in E en, ut e is a passive o server on y. W i e
watching the DeLaceys' cottage, the Monster first "felt
sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature" (p. 103),
that is, first felt love and friendship toward others.
These cottagers present the first of many pictures of pas
toral retreat throughout Mary Shelley's novels. The
DeLaceys live in harmony with nature and regulate their
work to seasonal cycies. The Monster observes,
Nothing could exceed the love and respect which the
younger cottagers exhibited towards their venerable
companion. They performed towards him every little
office of affection and duty with gentleness; and
he rewarded them by his benevolent smiles. (pp. 105-6)
To symbolize the pure familial love of the cottagers, Mary
Shelley aptly chose the exchange of the first white flower
lof Spring between Felix and Agatha (p. 108). However, even
I
19
Lowry Nelson, Jr., "Night Thoughts on the Gothic I
Novel," in Pastoral and Romance; Modern Essays in Criticism
ed. Eleanor Terry Lincoln (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 262-63.
44
the DeLaceys' happiness was mitigated by their exiled con
dition and the ingratitude of Safie's father (p. 121).
Through the DeLaceys, the Monster first learns dif
ferences of the sexes and knowledge "of brother, sister,
and all the various relationships which bind one human
being to another in mutual bonds" (pp. 116-17). The
DeLaceys are the ideal of the idyllic family, which
appears repeatedly in Mary Shelley's fiction and which rep
resents the positive vision of pastoralism that the
majority of characters fails to achieve.
Also typical of Mary Shelley is the perversion of
the pastoral vision by strong or violent emotions, such as
Frankenstein's vehement passion to learn (p. 237, added in
1831 edition) or the Monster's murderous fury against
mankind. The prevention of any possibility of procrea
tion further violates pastoral and domestic bliss. After
Frankenstein destroys the Monster's mate, the Monster, too,
must deprive Frankenstein of his mate. Of course,
Frankenstein himself procrastinates over marrying Elizabeth,
partially from the taboo against incest and partially from
an apparent fear of sex. Victor has discovered how to
create life without procreation and hence has no need for
lsex. He sees Elizabeth as a safe and primarily non-sexual
sister-mother figure. However, he does marry Elizabeth, in
spite of his anxiety, if only to fulfill his mother's
wishes (p. 29), but this marriage is never consummated.
45
On his way to the honeymoon, Frankenstein feels not
the "exulatation of a --lover," but rather "a sudden gush
of tears blinding [his] sight" (p. 190). Frankenstein
here expresses concern because the Monster has threatened
to be with him on his wedding night, but beyond this,
Frankenstein has a fear of sex. Before consummating his
marriage and before confronting the Monster, Frankenstein
describes the scene thus:
I was anxious and watchful, while my right hand
grasped a pistol which was hidden in my bosom;
every sound terrified me; but I resolved that I
sell my life dearly, and not relax the impending
conflict until my own life, or that of my adversary,
were extinguished. (p. 192)
Further, he tells his wife, "'This night, and all will be
safe: but this night is dreadful, very dreadful'" (192),
suggesting apprehension about the wedding night itself.
20
Realizing how dreadful the expected combat would be for
Elizabeth, he entreats her to retire alone. Frankenstein
allows her to be alone and does not admit the truth that
the Monster intends to kill her until after he hears her
scream. The Monster, whom Frankenstein has created with
out procreation, kills Frankenstein's wife before Victor
lean have sexual union, which he avoids and seems to fear.
Frankenstein cannot fulfill natural sexual functions
because he has violated nature by creating the Monster,
20
Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 165.
46
who as the physical manifestation of his obses ive ambi
tion, literally kills all that Frankenstein could love.
The result of the creation of the Monster is death, not
life. Life would come through conjugal love, but
Frankenstein has pursued the physical in the wrong way.
His attempt to leave carnal limitations produces a son,
but with the result of death, not a sexual or domestic
life. Both Frankenstein and his Monster are murderous
and ultimately suicidal. Frankenstein is even overtly
suicidal. His only consolation at Justine's death is
"deep, dark, death-like solitude" (p. 86). While floating
on the lake, symbolic of Frankenstein's drifting passivity,
he "was tempted to plunge into the silent lake, that the
waters might close over [him] and [his] calamities for
ever" (p. 87). In the same passage, Frankenstein wishes
to "extinguish that life which [he] had so thoughtlessly
bestowed" (p. 87). Frankenstein pursues the Monster to his
own self-destruction. The Monster manifests Frankenstein's
own guilt and surpressed passion which he has channelled
into the pursuit of knowledge of life through intellect
r3-lone. The novel ends with the Monster's promise to "exult
·n the agony of the torturing flames" (p. 221).
rankenstein's passivity and withdrawal from family and
rom Elizabeth are defeating, not renewing. Physically and I
motionally cut off from others, Frankenstein merely sinks
47
deeper into the self, becoming depressed and suicidal; as
George Levine states,
Frankenstein kills his family, and is, in his
attempt to obliterate his own creation, his own
victim. As he dies, he severs the monster's last
link with life so that, appropriately, the monster
then moves out across the frozen wastes to immolate
himself. The family is an aspect of the self and
the self cannot survive bereft of its family.21
Frankenstein could have fulfilled his life by reaching
others, but he chose isolation instead. Yet he is not just
a condemned failure; rather he stands as a symbol of the
price of heroism and the isolation of genius.
Another aspect of Mary Shelley's pastoralism in
Frankenstein is the responsiveness of man to nature and of
nature to the mind of man.
22
For example, the Monster's
spirits are elevated "by the enchanting appearance of
nature" (p. 111) during the Spring he spent hiding in the
DeLaceys' cottage. Frankenstein, too, responds to nature
(p. 65), but usually to her harsher aspects, such as a
21
Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of
!Realism," p. 21.
22
Mary Shelley frequently includes lush natural
descriptions in her short stories, as well as in all of her
~ovels. "The Sisters of Abano" opens with an affectionate
escription of Spring (Robinson, Collected Tales and
tories, p. 51). Similarly, "The Mourner" begins with a
engthy description of "the fair expanse of Virginia Water"
1
1
(Robinson, pp. 81-83), and "Valerius" includes a description
f the natural setting of the Pantheon (Robinson, p. 342).
n "The Heir of Mandolfo," Ludovico and Viola are reunited
·n a minutely described pine wood, complete with birds and
ountains (Robinson, pp. 330-31).
48
r
violent storm (p. 71), or lightning's striking the oak
(p. 25). Frankenstein frequently prefers the destructive
elements in nature, whereas the Monster, not natural him
self, ironically prefers the benign aspects of nature. In
the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley lays more stress on nature's
ability to soothe Frankenstein (p. 248), but Victor soon
slips back into g~ief, for his transgression against nature
puts him at variance with her. Mary Shelley equates his
separation from nature with Frankenstein's isolation from
domesticity.
It was a most beautiful season; .•• but my eyes
were insensible to the charms of nature. And the
same feelings which made me neglect the scenes
around me caused me also to forget those friends
who were so many miles absent and whom I had not
seen for so long a time. (p. 50)
As Frankenstein's isolation from his family becomes more
pronounced, so does his estrangement from nature (p. 152),
until by the end of the novel, he encounters only the
harshness of nature in the froz·en wastes of the North Pole
(p. 204), where he pursues the Monster and ultimately his
own destruction.
I
At times, Mary Shelley shows man's effect on nature.
She accepts the familiar pastoral convention of using
nature to talk about man. For example, during the creation
of the Monster, nature responds to a violation of her laws
with dismal rain. Her technique is similar to the pastoral
convention in which nature acts as a reflector of man's
L
49
_____ ____,
mental and emotional states. But more typically in
Frankenstein, man's mind interprets nature, which is merely
neutral.
Wrought up after agreeing to create a mate for the
Monster, Frankenstein reflects on the solemnity of nature,
Oh! stars, and clouds, and winds, ye are all about
to mock me: if ye really pity me, crush sensation
and memory! let me become as nought; but if not,
depart, depart and leave me in darkness. (p. 145)
The stars weigh upon him and the wind seems ready to con
sume him, but obviously, it is his own state of .mind which
makes nature seem oppressive. This same sky, but clouded,
looks upon him after he has destroyed the female creature,
but now it feels refreshing, not because of the scene,
which objectively is far more oppressive than the star
studded sky of the previous passage, but because of his
relief from anxiety.
Similarly in The Last Man nature remains constant,
but Lionel, the viewer and interpreter, changes. Although
he can forget the plague in the healing powers of earth,
sky, and the tameless wind (p. 294)
23
while others are still
alive, nature becomes barren and savage for Lionel (pp. 325
and 333) when he is left the last man. Nature is not
enough; Lionel needs sensate responses from people, which
23
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man
(London: Henry Colburn 1826; reprinted ed., ed. Hugh J.
Luke, Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
All references to this edition will be made parenthetically
in the text.
50
nature cannot give; as Lionel says, "The castle walls, and
long familiar trees, did not hear the parting sound of our
carriage wheels with regret" (p. 240). Although nature
does not respond to man with its own personal sensibility,
she can, nevertheless, console man in his misery (p. 309).
Indeed, nature can provide a complete experience of
Epiphany, such as Lionel undergoes at Lake Lehman, reminis
cent of Wordsworth's crossing the Alps in the Prelude
(book 4, lines 523-40).
Nature, or nature's favourite, this lovely earth,
presented her most unrivalled beauties in resplen
dent and sudden exhibition. Below, far, far below,
even as it were in the yawning abyss of the ponderous
globe, lay the placid and azure expanse of lake
Lehman: vine-covered hills hedged it in, and be
hind dark mountains in cone-like shape, or irregular
cyclopean wall, served for further defense. But
beyond, and high above all, as if the spirits of
the air had suddenly unveiled their bright abodes,
placed in scaleless altitude in the stainless sky,
heaven-kissing, companions of the unattainable
ether, were the glorious Alps, clothed in dazzling
robes of light by the setting sun. And, as if the
world's wonders were never to be exhausted, their
vast immensities, their jagged crags, and roseate
painting, appeared again in the lake below, dipping
their proud heights beneath the unruffled waves-
palaces for the Naiads of the placid waters. Towns
and villages lay scattered at the foot of Jura,
which, with dark ravine, and black promontories,
stretched its roots into the watery expanse
beneath. Carried away by wonder, I forgot the
death of man, and the living and beloved friend
near me. (p. 305)
This scene is all the more poignant for being the last con
solation to those few survivors. Just as Frankenstein and
his Monster face their end in the frozen waters of the
Artie, so the plague appropriately ends on the frozen
51
cliffs of Mount Blanc (pp. 309-10), where the last plague
victims are buried in an avalanche.
All was bare, wild, and sublime, while the singing
of the pines in melodious murmurings added a gentle
interest to the rough magnificence ... here,
endowed with giant attributes, the torrent, the
thunder-storm, and the flow of massive waters,
display [nature's] activity. (p. 310)
Nature in her vastness and power to destroy life here plays
against the earlier descriptions of calm and maternal
nature to heighten the pathos of the end of mankind.
Mary Shelley uses weather and atmospheric condi
tions, as she did in Frankenstein, to intensify and reflect
the feelings of the characters in The Last Man. The
thunder and heavy rain as Lionel seeks Raymond portend
Raymond's death (p. 145), just as the snow signals the
death of Idris (pp. 237-38). Perdita equates her loss of
Raymond to the Autumn in which creation has become bankrupt
(p. 97). Before the spread of plague and fear had disrupted
man's relationship to nature, the traditional urban-rural
contrast of pastoralism was effective. While in London,
;
Lionel remarks ''Oh, how I longed then /or the dear
soothings of maternal Nature" (p. 204). He turns with
apture from political turmoil to the peace and love of
ome (p. 183).
As the plague advances and the people's fears
·ncrease, nature functions symbolically to reveal the dis
urbed state of the survivors. In the early stages of the
52
plague, Lionel reports a strange story of the darkening of
the sun (p. 162), but he obviously doubts the truth of the
report and is further sheltered by the geographic distance.
But after the plague reaches England and the refugees from
the plague reach Dover, they are terrified by the "fright
ful storm of wind and clattering rain and hail" (p. 268),
which floods the town and destroys many of the houses.
Most of the people believe this objective act of nature is
the judgment of God. Soon after this storm, three meteors,
appearing like other suns, "united into one, and plunged
into the sea. A few seconds afterwards, a deafening watery
sound came up with awful peal from the spot where they had
disappeared" (p. 270). These omens send many fleeing in
terror, until the people cannot distinguish the external
workings of nature from their inner fears (p. 288). Man's
view of the upheaval in nature eventually symbolizes man's
fears. The apparent weakening of the sun, which even
!Lionel fears he will attribute to the supernatural, does
portend the extinction of life, but the characters and
readers alike can no longer distinguish reality from
"extravagant deJ.usions" (p. 298). These omens are heralds
of the total disruption of nature in relation to man and of
the end of the world through the instruments of plague.
Mary Shelley uses this rupture of the relationship
between man and nature toward the end of the novel to
heighten the reader's awareness of the extreme situation
53
of the few survivors. Descriptions of the extremes of
plague are common in the literature of her time. Two of
these, Arthur Mervyn and City of the Plague, are included
in Mary Shelley's reading for 1817.
24
Charles Brockden
Brown's Arthur Mervyn contains vividly descriptive passages
of ghastly and putrescent plague victims (p. 158 and
25
165), as well as discussions of the desertion of wives
by their husbands and children by their parents (p. 122).
Society begins to crumble in Brown's novel just as it does
in The Last Man. Less graphically descriptive than Arthur
Mervyn, although more like Mary Shelley's presentation of
the plague, is John Wilson's play, City of the Plague,
which includes portends and omens that attend the plague
26
(pp. 86-89), as well as an emphasis on the isolation of
individuals from human fellowship (p. 31). Wilson's play
~epeatedly emphasizes the contrast between the previous
24
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary Shelley's
Journal, ed. Fredrick Lafayette Jones (Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1947), p. 89. This same year Mary
Shelley read Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe's
and Brown's works are even cited in The Last Man, p. 187.
25 h ·
Charles Brockden Brown, Artur Mervyn or Memoirs
f the Year 1793 (Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799, and New
ork: George F. Hopkins, 1800; reprinted ed., ed. Warner
erthoff, New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)- All
eferences to this edition will be made parenthetically in
he text.
26
John Wilson, City of the
rchibald Constable & Co.~ 1816).
ade parenthetically in the text.
Plague tEdinbu~gh:
All references will be
54
harmony of nature and man and the grief brought by the
plague (for example, p. 77). Wilson implies that the
protagonists would have been safe in the mountains of
Rydal, but plague overtook them in the city, thus empha
sizing the urban-rural contrast, which Mary Shelley used,
but did not underline. For her, the malignancy is so great
that it infects even the country.
Thus the contrast between the disruptive force and
the preceding tranquillity of the country was a part of the
traditional presentation of plague. However, Mary Shelley
places far more emphasis on the image of pastoral retreat
than other discussions of plague, especially in the first
half of The Last Man. Just as in Frankenstein, she wishes
to stress domestic affection through the symbol of the
idyllic family and pastoral withdrawal in the novel. The
major family relationships are primarily non-sexual and
safe. Even the marital bonds between Idris and Lionel are
more fraternal than passionate. Actual brothers and
sisters such as Idris and Adrian, Lionel and Perdita have
the strongest relationships. For example, from natural
affection, Perdita chose Lionel "to be the partner in her
overflowings of delight ...• Security gave dignity to
her passion; the certainty of full return, left her with no
wish unfulfilled" (p. 85). Brothers and sisters, united by
blood as well as reared together, are closer than others
meet later in life. To draw the
lwho are not related and
55
main characters closer together, Mary Shelley makes them
feel as close as brothers and sisters. Adrian calls
Lionel, brother, and Perd'ta loves Adrian as an elder
brother and Idris as a sister. Thoughts of his wife move
Lionel to reflect upon her role in relation to the family-
wife, sister, mother. Kinship is the primary uniting force
whether through blood or common feeling. The characters
seem to be all of one family. Incestuous overtones, which
disrupted the tranquillity of Frankenstein's possible union
with Elizabeth, do not appear in The Last Man. Sexuality
is suppressed and passion sublimated into fraternal, not
sexual affection. Therefore domesticity is not threatened
by passion; however, it is threatened by the violent emo
tion of ambition, particularly in the case of Raymond who
initially marries for love, not ambition (p. 48). He
chooses to marry Perdita over Idris, daughter of the abdi
cated king, who could have advanced him in rank and power.
However, Raymond is not content in the idyllic withdrawal
from the world at Windsor and returns to London and even
tually to Constantinople. His ambition for power destroys
him. Mary Shelley does mitigate Raymond's ambition, for he
jis a man of action, not contemplation. He is different
from the recluse Adrian (p. 69), who admits Raymond "was
never born to be a drone in the hive, and find contentment
in [their] pastoral life" (p. 68). However, ambition, like
any other violent and consuming drive, would become
56
Raymond's companion throughout his life. Apparently, Mary
Shelley had mixed feelings about the merits and drawbacks
of an ambitious man, because Raymond is presented as a
dynamic and often admirable character. The straining
toward a presentation of domesticity and withdrawal as an
ideal, which often does not ring true in her later novels,
is already evident in a character such as Raymond.
27
In The Last Man, ambition was itself the source of
the plague. The plague actually a rose from Constantinople,
the traditional seat of civilization, and hence of politi
cal ambition, but Lionel's dream revealed the symbolic
source of the plague:
I fled before the anger of the host, who assumed the
form of Raymond; while to my diseased fancy, the
vessels hurled by him after me, were surcharged with
fetid vapour, and my friend's shape, altered by a
thousand distortions, expanded into a gigantic phan
tom, bearing on its brow the sign of pestilence. The
growing shadow rose and rose, filling, and then
seeming to endeavour to burst beyond, the adamantine
vault that bent over, sustaining and enclosing the
world. (p. 146)
The plague figuratively arose from Raymond;s body. It was
Raymond's ambition for power that led him to his own death
at the literal level of plot. But symbolically his ambi
tion was the source of the plague, which caused the
27
walling, Mari Shelley, pp. 84-85, notes Raymond's
dissatisfaction with his choice of love over ambition, but
does not discuss the conflicting sides of the presentation
of Raymond and the possible influence in Mary Shelley's
later novels of her ambivalence· toward the ambitious
Raymond.
L
57 1
breakdown of the ethical standards of society and ultimately
destroyed all mankind by its virulence. Lionel commented,
"As the rules of order and pressure of laws were lost, some
began with hesitation and wonder to transgress the accus
tomed uses of society" (p. 230). Young people sought to
escape from their expectation of illness into amusement.
"Many had lost father and mother, the guardians of their
morals, their mentors and restraints" (p. 197); that is,
family relationships, which hold man to moral and ethical
standards in society, began to crumble and with them all
society until "there are no difference in [them]; the name
of parent and chi ld had lost their meaning" (pp. 231-32).
The structure of society was completely destroyed. This
world parallels Frankenstein's own personal world, which
crumbles because of the destructive forces of the Monster,
a product of Frankenstein's ambition, just as the plague
symbolically results from ambition. John Dussinger notes
of Frankenstein, "The tenuous bonds that unite the com
munity snap assunder as one by one 'all that was dear to
µie' fall victim to his repressed hostility."
28
Because the people in The Last Man need a father
figure as society crumbles, they turn to a "self-erected
rophet," who offers safety and salvation only to those who
put their trust in him (p. 274). Motivated by ambition,
28
John A. Dussinger, "Kinship and Guilt in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein," Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 50.
58
this prophet hopes to become a patriarch, even a diety 7
(p. 281). This embodiment of ambition kills himself rather
than face defeat (p. 296). He is but one of many of the
traditional trappings of plague literature.
29
Less traditional and far more personal is the
impact of the plague on the narrator, who contracts the
disease, but survives. However, when Lionel thinks he is
dying, he goes to his wife. He comments,
I must die, for I had caught the plague; earth was
a scene of desolation; hope was madness; life had
married death; they were one; but, thus supporting
my fainting love, this feeling that I must soon die,
I revelled in the delight of possessing her once
more; again and again I kissed her, and pressed
her to my heart. (p. 246)
Lionel here contemplates the bed and bier as equals. This
joy-in-death suggests an equivalence between death and
sexual orgasm. Feeling he must die, he revels in posses
sion of his wife with mingled exhaltation and despair.
Both death and sexual climax include the idea of release
after ecstasy, followed by relaxation. Lionel explains his
situation thus: "I sat by her, we embraced, and our lips
met in a kiss long drawn and breathless--would that moment
had been my last"' (p. 246). His previous frenzied
activity yields to a feeling of relief that he will die.
Idris shares his sense of release; both fall into heavy
29 ·1 . f
Wison, City o
ger who may have been the
the astrologer's deluding
the Plague, mentions an astrolo
source for the prophet, although
of others is far less malignant.
59
sleep, which again conforms to the pattern of sexual inter
course. Death is the goal of passion and its end, as
deRougemont has noted.
30
The primary focus of the pastoral vision in The
Last Man is Windsor, where Lionel and Idris, as well as
Adrian, Perdita, and for a time, Raymond, live secluded
from the world. Their idyllic life is undisturbed, even
by Raymond, who "was content to give up all his schemes of
sovereignty and fame to make one of [them], the flowers of
the field" (p. 65). The "tranquillity of [their] divine
forest" (p. 65) become all the more dear through the tradi
tional urban-rural contrast. Trips to London, as well as
political turmoil (p. 75), make them more aware of the
beauty and repose of their own circle. Mary Shelley obvi
ously wants the reader to appreciate the pastoral vision
thus presented, yet the attentive reader cannot help but
notice the slight reservation, which suggests the need for
activity. Lionel says, "We talked of change and active
pursuits, but still remained at Windsor, incapable of
violating the charm that attached us to our secluded life"
(p. 66). Of course, the active life of Raymond is not ful
lfilling; his life becomes dissipated in his search for
pleasure (p. 106). Perdita urges him to return to the
l
3
o · d . th W t W ld
Denis eRougemont, Love in e es ern or ,
trans. Montgomery Belgian (Philadelphia: A. Saifer, 1940),
p. 36.
60
security of their rural abode (p. 94}, but Raymond chooses
instead to flee from himself to Greece (p. 110).
It is Lionel who presents the perfect example of
the happiness within pastoralism. He longs for his family
whenever he is away (for example, p. 158). He laments the
"labyrinth of evil" of the world and wishes to "build h · gh
the wall" separating him from the world. He seeks peace
in his home "near the inland murmur of streams, and the
gracious waving of trees" (p. 158). In the structure of
the novel, this pastoral interlude immediately follows the
ominous entrance of a lone plague victim from a ship into
Portsmouth. Mary Shelley repeatedly contrasts the
encroachment of plague and the turmoil of politics with the
tranquillity of pastoralism and domesticity either by
direct contrast or by juxtaposed passages. Adrian# sac
rificing himself for the sake of others in the city, is
consoled only by the thought that there is still peace at
the seclusion of Windsor. For his part, Lionel longs to
"avoid the necessity of action" (p. 185). Mary Shelley was
aware that pastoralism could lead to apathy. Much as she
believed in pastoralism as an ideal, she was also aware of
:its limitations, at least in her early novels.
Her view of pastoral always includes the need for
people within the natural setting. For example, when
61
31
Lionel returns to Perdita's ruined cottage, the weed
chocked paths and gardens, natural, but untended by man,
arouse his grief and fear (p. 186). The ruined cottage
symbolizes the encroachment of the plague on man. Lionel
sees change encroaching on his pastoral happiness and
coming to destroy it, just as the plague will destroy
mankind. Indeed after the plague leaves only four sur
vivors, the "paradisical retreat" near Como could not bring
them happiness because of "a remediless cutting off from
our extinct species" (p. 315).
The myth of Eden receives an ironic twist in The
Last Man, for immediately after recovering from "the gloomy
labyrinth of madness," Adrian believes, "let us will it,
our habitation becomes a paradise" (p. 54}. In view of his
own inability to depend upon his will and intellect against
madness, such idealism seems incredibly ingenuous for a
~otential ruler. Later Adrian naively states that earth
could become an Eden if the present peace would last but
twelve months (p. 159}. Adrian, the doomed idealist, fails
to realize that it is the plague which thus has forced man
31
ouring the time before the plague, Lionel des
cribed this cottage as Mary Shelley's usual pastoral re
treat within tranquil nature. "She [Perdita] dwelt in a
1 cottuge whose trim grass-plot [sic] sloped down to the
~aters of the lake of Ulswater; a beech wood stretched up
the hill behind, and a purling brook g~.ntly falling from th~
cclivity ran through popular-shaded banks into the lake"
(p. 11}. The decay of this cottage is an excellent symbol
f the destruction of the pastoral vision in The Last Man.
l
62 j
into peace. Man need not kill man . Yet Adrian and Lionel ~
too, persist in seeking "some natural Paradise, some garden
of the earth, where [their] simple wants may be easily
supplied" (p. 226). Ultimately, the pastoral vision is
defeated. It is beautiful, but it cannot resist the
encroachments of violent drives symbolized in The Last Man
by the plague. In view of Adrian's desire to bring men to
Eden, it is fitting that the plague is seen as an expul
sion from paradise.
It is all over now. He [mankind] is solitary: like
our first parents expelled from Paradise, he looks
back towards the scene he has quitted. The high
walls of the tomb, and the flaming sword of plague,
lie between it and him. Like to our first parents,
the whole earth is before him, a wide desart [sic].
(p. 234)
Man falls from pastoral innocence through his own passions.
Mankind is to be pitied, but remains, nevertheless,
guilty, like Adam and Eve.
Allied to the pastoral theme of The Last Man is the
Romantic syndrome of alienation and retreat into solitude.
The isolation of the individual was a prominent theme in
Romantic poetry, which was so much a part of Mary Shelley's
personal background as well as of her milieu. In this con
nection, Hugh J. Luke, Jr. mentions the exile of the Byronic
hero and Wordsworth's recurring myth of the Solitary.
32
32
Hugh J. Luke, Jr., "The Last Man: Mary Shelley's
Myth of the Solitary," Prairie Schooner 39 (Winter, 1966):
325; also discussed in Walling, Mary Shelley, pp. 86-87.
63
I
Lionel Verney embodies Mary Shelley's myth of the solitary,
who is driven "back upon [his] heart, to gather thence the
joy of which it had become barren" (p. 26). However,
driven by a desire for sympathy and human response, Lionel
returns to his sister (p. 28). Significantly, Perdita
draws Lionel back to society (p. 35). The need for family
heals the kind of withdrawal which cannot be productive
unless the seeker of isolation returns to the world after
his period alone with himself.
Adrian experienced isolation similar to Lionel's,
but deeper. Adrian withdrew into insanity and "lived in
seclusion, no one knew where" (p. 32) .. Rejected by Evadne,
Adrian retreated totally into the self and made no response.
However, Lionel was able to draw him out and lead him back
to others. Adrian was glad to "have experienced sympathe-
tic joy and sorrow with his fellow-creatures" (p. 54). On
the other hand, Perdita consciously fled into loneliness,
even avoiding the family circle. Rejected by Raymond, she
shut "her heart against all tenderness" (p. 111). Unlike
Lionel and even Adrian, however, she did not return to
others, but rather retreated further into self-indulgent
withdrawal, which led ultimately to suicide (p. 155). She
is an example of the destructive force of an isolation that
does not lead to a return. Perdita's situation prefigures
Lionel's condition as the last man. He, however, makes a
stoic, not a self-indulgent, response to total isolation,
64
which results from the devastation of the plague. Here is
Romantic withdrawal in the extreme. Lionel must live with
no society, as well as no family. Realizing that he is
totally alone, Lionel wanders disconsolately through a
deserted Rome in search of some companionship and
occupation. Mary Shelley typifies his loneliness in the
single scene of Lionel's viewing the statuary in Rome.
Lionel says,
The perfect moulding brought with it the idea of
colour and motion; often, half in bitter mockery,
half in self-delusion, I clasped their icy propor
tions, and, coming between Cupid and his Psyche's
lips, pressed the unconceiving marble. (p. 338)
The reader contrasts this grotesque and pathetic kiss with
the filial caresses and conjugal kisses which had once meant
so much to Lionel. Now he is adrift, cut off from all men.
Nevertheless, he seeks instinctively the centers of civili
zation. The pastoral can no longer sustain him. For Mary
Shelley, effective pastoralism must include a return to or
sharing with other men. No such return is possible for
Lionel. His world is dead. Like Frankenstein's Monster
floating on an ice raft (Frdnkenstein, p. 221), Lionel
lans to drift over the world's oceans in a tiny skiff.
~lone and despairing as he ought to be, he yet will turn to
ature for what little support he has available.
I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that
the elements can assume--! shall read fair augury
in the rainbow--menace in the cloud--some lesson
or record dear to my heart is everything. (p. 342}
65
Lionel realizes that nature cannot respond to him, yet he
can still respond to her. He has nothing else.
In spite of its thematic and symbolic strengths,
The Last Man must finally be considered as excessively
sentimental because of the high coloring of its emotional
presentation and the self-indulgence of Mary Shelley's
obvious personal grief over her husband's death. In this
respect none of the novels is without fault. But because
of the symbolic nature of Gothic fiction, Mary Shelley
could present her material indirectly, that is, through a
psychological screen that helped to control the sentiments.
So, in comparison with the later, less symbolic novels,
Frankenstein and The Last Man may be considered her most
significant works. The Gothic genre suited both her
temperament and her talent.
66
CHAPTER III
VALPERGA AND THE FORTUNES OF PERKIN WARBECK
According to Avrom Fleishman, the historical novel
was a natural development from the Gothic novel.
1
The new
attitude toward history in the late eighteenth century
first found expression in Gothicism. Medieval history and
the more recent past supplied a setting which provided dis
tance and at the same time concreteness for the less logi
cal aspects of Gothicism; as Baker comments, historical
fiction rose during the late eighteenth century because of
a growing interest in the past and a rage for the medieval
and antique.
2
Hence it seems appropriate that Mary
Shelley's venture into fiction after Frankenstein should be
Valperga, her first historical novel. Similarly, The Last
Man was followed by her other historical novel, The
Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.
Because historical knowledge was partial and thinly
spread in the eighteenth century, the historical novel and
1
Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel
(Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 19-20.
2
Baker, The History of the English Novel, 5:176.
the romance provided the same type of entertainment.
3
There had been no historical fiction in England apart from
a few historical characters and events which occurred in
some of the tales of Deloney, Lodge and Nashe and
4
Shakespeare's historical plays. Thomas Leland's
Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762) was one of the first
novels to employ historical characters, although with very
5
little historical coloring in the story. It was not until
the 1790's that the historical novel proper began to sepa
rate itself from romance. The earlier historical novel
made only occasional use of historical facts, which could
be distorted to suit the author's purpose. Although nomi
nally historical, these romances were usually a mixture of
the impressions made by Gothic architecture and eighteenth
6
century mores. Without knowledge, the historical novel
only provided a withdrawal from everyday, an escape, not an
increase in knowledge or imaginative awareness, which the
historical novel of Scott would provide. Hence Mary
Shelley was writing in a new genre in which little atten
tion had been paid to historical accuracy or research.
3
Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, p. 224.·
4
Baker, The History of the English Novel, 5:177.
6
k' h 1 1 . E 1 d 227
Tamp ins, Te Popu ar Nave in ng an, p. •
68
A definition of historical fiction is difficult
to locate because critics seem to assume everyone knows
what historical fiction is. The following definition is
based primarily on Fleishman.
7
By his standards, histori
cal fiction is set in the past beyond two generations,
which is hence not part of the reader's immediate
experience. The plot includes historical events of easily
recognizable scenes, such as events in war or politics,
which influence the fictional characters. Further, there
should be well-known historical persons interacting with
the fictional ones. As Fleishman says, "The historical
novel is distinguished among novels by the presence of a
specific link to history: not merely a real building or a
real event but a real person among the fictitious ones.
118
The structure of historical fiction follows the career of
an individu~l, which gives meaning to the more random
movements of history around the character.
The historical novel as defined above was given
its primary shape by Walter Scott, who first created a fic
tional world according to historical principles.
9
Scott
emerged at the time of transition between the Gothic, which
7
Fleishman, The English Historical Novel, pp. 3-15.
8
Ibid., p. 4 •
9
rbid., p. 23.
69
used the past for decorative purposes, and the rise of his
torical fiction, formed on clearly historical principles.
10
For Scott, the historical was rooted in the social and
economic conditions of the past. Hence he laid emphasis on
historical faithfulness to details.
11
Mary Shelley was likewise a faithful researcher.
Although historical fiction was still a young genre, it had
been given decisive shaping by Scott. Mary Shelley was
writing at the same time as her more famous contemporary;
Waverley was published in 1814, Valperga in 1823, although
it was completed by 1821. Mary Shelley obviously sought
historical accuracy in Valperga, for she says she gathered
the materials for her story at Naples, but needed other
books, which she located at Pisa.
12
She delayed writing to
be sure of the historical facts surrounding Castruccio. At
!the time Shelley was researching and composing the Cenci,
Mary Shelley was consulting "a great many books" as she
worked on Valperga, "a work of some labour.
1113
Because
l Oibid. , p. 2 5
11
Gyorgy Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans.
Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press,
1962), p. 89.
12
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Letters of Mary
W. Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Fredrick Lafayette Jones (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1946), 1:145, letter to Maria !
Gisborne, June 30, 1821.
13
rbid., 1:145-46.
70
historical fiction was beginning in the early nineteenth
century, her Journal reveals a reading of only Scott's his
torical novels, such as Ivanhoe, Waverley, The Antiquary,
and Rob Roy. She did read Porter's The Pastor's Fireside
in 1817. This novel, like Scott's fiction, was set in the
historical past and does include historical characters,
such as Isabel of Spain, but it makes no effort to present
a believable past.
Mary Shelley seemed even more assiduous in her re
search for The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, perhaps because
she did not have Shelley as a resource. That she was aware
of Scott's importance to historical fiction is apparent
from her letter of May 25, 1829, in which she seeks his
advice for her romance about Perkin Warbeck. She asks if
he "could point out any writer of its [Scotland's] history-
any document, anecdote or queer ballad connected with him
[Perkin] generally unknown, which may have come to [Scott'aj
14
knowledge."
For background in English history, Mary Shelley
consulted Godwin, who sent her an account of the children
lof Edward IV and of Henry VII's actions after the Battle of
Bosworth and information on Mowbray, whose daughter, Anne,
14
rbid., 2:15.
71
b h d
. h d 15
was etrot e to Ric ar . According to his correspon-
dence, Godwin did research for his daughter at the British
Museum in addition to lending her books on English
h
. 16
1story.
In pursuit of accuracy and specificity of details
on Ireland, Mary Shelley also consulted Thomas Croker,
antiquarian and authority on Irish folklore.
17
Further,
she applied to John Murray for Leland's History of Ireland
and any other book of travels on Ireland which would treat
of antiquities rather than contemporary places.
18
On
September 10, 1828, she again applied to Murray for books
of travels in Andulusia and descriptions of Moorish man
sions for the Irish settings in Fortunes of Perkin
Warbeck.
19
15
[Lady Jane Gibson Shelley and Sir Percy Florence
Shelley, ed.], Shelley and Mary, 4 vols. (London: Chiswick
Press, 1882), p. 1106c, letter of September 26, 1827;
pp. 1122A and 1122B, letters of May 29, 1829, and May 30,
1829.
16
Ibid., p. 1122B, letter of May 30, 1829.
17
Garth Dunleavy, "Two New Mary Shelley Letters and
the Irish Chapters of Perkin Warbeck," KSJ 14 ll96 4 l : 6-10,
notes two letters, October 30, (1828?) and November 4, 1829;;
l
also discusses her application of Croker's Researches in
the South of Ireland to The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.
18
Jones, et., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 2:5,
letter of August 20, 1828.
19
Ibid., 2:7.
72
rn ·view of her serious research for both Valperga
and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, it is not surprising
that Valperga received critical praise for its historical
accuracy.
20
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck was not as well
praised for historical accuracy, presumably because Mary
Shelley equated Richard with Perkin Warbeck.
21
For Mary Shelley, the historical genre serves as
another vehicle for her pastoral theme. Castruccio is an
example of the ruin of those who reject the pastoral vision.
His longing for eternal fame is to be fulfilled, but the
narrator comments, "would he not have been happier, if they
[his desires] had failed, and he in blameless obscurity,
had sunk with the millions that compose the nations of the
22
earth?" (1.43). The book answers this question in the
20 l .
Pa acio1 Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre, pp. 665-
67; of sixteen reviews cited for Mary Shelley's times, five
(58, 61, 65, 67, 69) specifically mention her historical
accuracy; only one (59) complains about her lack of his
toricity and that in relation to Castruccio. These reviews
are also discussed in William H. Lyles, Mary Shelley, An
Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Press, 1975),
pp. 172-74.
21
rbid., pp. 664-67; no. 105 and no. 107 mention
her inaccuracies, while no. 102 equates Mary Shelley to the
masters of the historical mode, and no. 104 ("puffing
advertisement") mentions the historical reality of the
novel. All but no. 104 are also discussed in Lyles, Mary
Shelley, An Annotated Bibliography, p. 178.
22
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Val!erga; or the
Life and Adventures of Castruccio Prince o Lucca, 3 vols.
(London" G & w. B. Whittaker, 1823). All references to
this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
73
affirmative. For while Valperga traces Castruccio's
political rise, it simultaneously records the decline of
his emotional and personal life. His first mentor,
Guinigi, lived withdrawn and secluded in the hills of
Lombardy. Guinigi, who with a typical urban-rural contrast
refers his "lowly cottage to yonder majestic castle"
(1:47), tried to impress upon Castruccio a taste for rural
pleasures (1:51) and true values, "characterized by a
simple yet sublime morality, which resting on natural
bases, admitted no factitious colouring" (1:48).
Castruccio, however, "neither sympathized with nor under
stood him" (1:50). Guinigi is the advocate of Mary
Shelley's ideal of pastoral and domestic bliss; as he says,
"When I would picture happiness upon earth, my imagination
conjures up the family of a dweller among the fields,
whose property is secure, and whose time is passed between
labour and intellectual pleasures" (1:53). He is a more
intellectualizing version of the DeLaceys family. A brief
'year with this mentor was Castruccio's only time of peace,
but even here he was not content because of his tremendous
ambition for fame, which eventually consumed all his
positive values.
23
23
The reader is told several times that Castruccio
was "born for fame"; given his family background and this
congenital fatality, he seems doomed to ambition.
74
Castruccio proceeded to the court of England, where
his drives for power were augmented and corrupted, culmi
nating in the murder of a nobleman after a trivial argument
(1:83). At this point, like Adam and Eve expelled from
Paradise, Castruccio stood with the world before him
(1:85). The parallel is appropriate, for Castruccio has
fallen from paradise after he has left Guinigi's influence
and has come under that of Alberto Scoto (1:95). Unlike
Raymond in The Last Man, whose ambition was at least chan-
I
nelled toward public good, Castruccio lusted after fame and
political power through tyranny. He is initially charac
terized as ingenuous, frank, and tender (1:94). He is even
capable of being moved to tears by nature (1:121), a mark
of superiority in the sentimental hero. But influenced
initially by Alberto Scoto, and later by Benedetto Pepi and
Galeazzo Visconti, Castruccio learned tyranny and cruelty
until "the ambition, lightheartedness, and pride which he
had long been nourishing ..• manifested itself in its
true colours to the eyes of men. Ambition, and the fixed
desire to rule, smothered in his mind the voice of his
better reason" (2:146). Castruccio was capable of feeling
shame after his involvement with Beatrice, but instead of
acknowledging his remorse to Euthanasia, he turned to Pepi.
Hence Castruccio lost his chance to purify himself by
1
turning to a destructive instead of a beneficial influence; !
as the narrator says,
75
As we are wont, when we return from the solitude of
self-examination to the company of fellow-sinners,
he twisted up again the disentangled tresses of his
frank and sincere thoughts into the million-knotted
ties of the world's customs and saintly-looking false
hoods. ( 2: 101)
Schooled in Machiavellian politics by Scoto,
Castruccio learned the ways of gaining power by force and
of ruling by terror. Implying the tactics of his evil men
tors, he gained political success, conquering Lucca and
surrounding areas and invading Florence without a declara
tion of war (2:200-2), until eventually his thoughts were
identical to Benedetto Pepi's. "He now fully subscribed to
all the articles of Pepi's political creed, and thought
fraud and secret murder fair play, when it thinned the
ranks of the enemy" (2:197). Castruccio's corruption was
complete.
Ethically Castruccio was bankrupt. The next time
he and Euthanasia met after his complete conversion to
Pepi's philosophy, "he was no longer her lover, scarcely
her friend" (1:209). As early as the first volume,
Euthanasia "feared she ought not to love Castruccio"
(1:214). She began to feel a struggle between inclination
land duty, which ended when Castruccio became totally cor
rupted by ambition and was "all in all to himself" (2:171);
as William Walling notes, "the task which confronted Mary
as that of showing how Castruccio's ostensible political
success is nothing more than a hollow victory since it is
76
I
h d h t f h
. t· 1 h .
24
pure ase at t e cos o is essen ia umanity. Mary
Shelley repeatedly tells the reader that this is so; for
example, "Love was with him, ever after, the second feeling
in his heart, the servant and thrall of his ambition
(2:174). By the end of the novel, evil predominates in his
character and he is hated by most (3:171). Mary Shelley
also demonstrates Castruccio's decline through the decline
of Euthanasia's love for him and through the ruin of
Beatrice, both of which need to be discussed in greater
detail.
The most damning proof of Castruccio's real failure
is his rejection of the values of Euthanasia, who is the
positive and stabilizing force of good in the novel.
Castruccio did not sympathize with Euthanasia, but appeared
to do so, because he loved her (1:187). As the fair
heroine, Euthanasia is meditative, calm, dutiful, sisterly.
There is even a hint of incest, as in Frankenstein, because
Castruccio and Euthanasia "had been educated together
almost from their cradle. They had wandered hand in hand
among the wild mountains and chestnut woods that surrounded
lher mother's castle [Valperga]" (1:26) .
25
Although in
24
11· Sh 11 65 Wa ing, Mary e ey, p. .
25
Frequently Mary Shelley's lovers are raised
together, especially in her short stories. The narrator of
"Transformation" was raised with Juliet (Robinson, p. 122),
just as Vernon was raised with Rosina, his future love
(Robinson, "The Invisible Girl," p. 195). The narrator of
77
Valperga, Mary Shelley does not pursue the question of
incest, the mere presence of this suggestion indicates her
abiding interest.
Euthanasia's love for Castruccio, then, began in
their childhood and continued through many years of separa
tion (1:166). At first, his love thrilled her with delight
(1:236). However, when she saw his unscrupulous military
plots and his murderous rise to power, and when she learned
that he planned to conquer Florence (2:128-29), she
realized that "if the ambition of Castruccio could not con
tent itself with the destruction of the liberties of
Florence, that she would never be his" (2:137). Euthanasia
did not make her decision lightly and experienced much
inner turmoil. "Often she thought that, in so mad a world,
duty was but a watchword for fools" (2:169-70). However,
she overcame her doubts until they could meet neither as
lovers or friends.
She had loved him passionately, and still dwelt
with tenderness on the memory of what had been;
but she saw no likeness between the friend of her
youth, beaming with love, joy, and hope, and the
prince who now stood before her. (2:209)
Euthanasia could have provided the ethical stability which
!Castruccio's character lacked, but he rejected her because
of his ambition.
"The Mortal Immortal" was the childhood playmate of his wife
Bertha (Robinson, p. 220). The overtone of psychological
incest is often a part of the background of Mary Shelley's
stories.
78
Euthanasia with her dependents provides the
familial mean so necessary to Mary Shelley's positive por
trayal of pastoralism.
Most of her time was now spent among her dependents
at Valperga; the villagers under her jurisdiction
became prosperous; and the peasantry were proud their
countess preferred her residence among them to the
gaieties of Florence. (1:170)
However, like the pastoral vision in The Last Man,
Euthanasia's world is destroyed by outside forces, in this
case the forces of Castruccio's ambition. She loses
Valperga and her dependents, her freedom, and eventually
her life to Castruccio. Her castle, isolated on the rocks
and impregnable to her enemies, stands as a symbol of
freedom in the novel and is associated with the person of
Euthanasia. Castruccio's forces are able to capture it be
cause he knows a hidden access from his childhood intimacy
with her (2:233-35). The fall of Valperga prefigures
Euthanasia's own end. Castruccio subordinates his love for
Euthanasia to his lust for power. Exiled to a palace in
Lucca, Euthanasia sees the weed choked and desolate court
yard as an image of her fortunes which indeed it is (2:276-
177).26 She joined a conspiracy against Castruccio to save
!his life (3:192), but betrayed by Tripaldi (3:224), she is
condemned to complete exile and is drowned in a storm at
sea.
26 h h' d
Later t e narrator uses tis same gar en as a
symbol of Castruccio's cruelty (2:14-15).
79
Although Euthanasia never abandons her beliefs in
liberty and peace, she is nevertheless defeated. She loses
her castle, her dependents, Castruccio, and even her own
life. Stoic self-denial and the placing of duty over per
sonal feelings may be the ideal, but they are nevertheless
defeated in Valperga, even though the end of Euthanasia is
less of a defeat than Castruccio's. The pastoral ideal is
brought to its inevitable failure.
Likewise doomed to failure is Euthanasia's dream of
pastoral bliss with Castruccio "on some lovely island on
the sea of Baiae" (2:205). Euthanasia naively hoped to woe
Castruccio from ambition in exile, so that
..• by degrees he would love obscurity. They would
behold together the wondrous glories of the heavens,
and the beauty of that transparent sea, whose floor
of pebbles, shells and weeds, is as a diamond-paved
palace of romance, shone on and illustrated as it is
by the sun's rays. (3:206)
Here again is Mary Shelley's ideal previously seen in the
DeLaceys and Lionel's friends at Windsor. But she never
permits these visions to last. The DeLaceys flee the'r
paradise in fear of the Monster, and plague destroys the
tranquillity of Windsor. Euthanasia's pastoral vision does
not even have the substantiality of the others. Hers is
only a dream, which Castruccio's driving ambition would
destroy with a touch. The pastoral is beautiful but
fragile and cannot be sustained in the real world of
cruelty, tyranny, and war. Even nature has no power and is
80
r
overthrown by the violence of man.
This is the season [summer] that man has chosen for
the destruction of his fellow-creatures, to make
the brooks run blood, the air, filled with caroling
of happy birds, to echo also to the groans and
shrieks of the dying, and the blue and serene heaven
to become tainted with the dew which the unburied
corpse exhales. (3:109)
In Valperga, war, the product of Castruccio's de
sires fo r power just as the murderous monster was the pro
duct of Frankenstein's quest for knowledge, destroys per
sonal loyalties. Euthanasia offered real love to
Castruccio, but he put politics first. Because "Castruccio
was ever at war" (2:170), Euthanasia had to give up her
love for him. Her loyalty to social duty and her moral
code contrast with Castruccio's moral degradation and the
depravity which allows him to murder, banish, and execute
all who stand in the way of his power. Whereas Castruccio
selfishly sees the war only in terms of personal aggran
dizement, Euthanasia realizes the disruptive violence of
the war, which is similar to the plague which destroyed
familial relationships in The Last Man. Euthanasia says,
"Have you not seen the peasants driven from their cottages,
their vines torn up, their crops destroyed, often a poor
child lost" (2:160). Castruccio's ambition, the immediate
and direct cause of the destruction of society at all
levels, blights the lives of Castruccio, Euthanasia, and
also Beatrice, who, as Walling mentions, "provides much the
same effect as Euthanasia in helping the reader experience
81
a concrete sense of Castruccio's decline.
1127
However, the dark and brooding Beatrice is the
antithesis of the dutiful and self-sacrificing Euthanasia,
for Beatrice is passionate and totally self-destructive.
Nonetheless, she is the most interesting character in
Valperga. As a violent and disruptive figure, she jeopar
dizes Mary Shelley's ideal of pastoral tranquillity,
embodi· ed in Euthanasia. Yet Mary Shelley was aware of
Beatrice's appeal and effect, for she wrote to Maria
Gisborne: "Did the end of Beatrice surprise you [sic].
I am surprised none of these Literary Gazettes are shocked--
I feared that they would stumble over a part of what I read
28
to you and still more over my Anathema." She is probably
referring to Beatrice's heretical beliefs, for Beatrice
believes in "the eternal and victorious influence of evil"
(3:44) and enumerates the injustices committed in the name
of religion, as well as the evils and disease which prove
the injustice of God (3:44-51).
Beatrice's character was totally spiritual and
emotional with no firm intellectual and domestic rooting,
such as Euthanasia experienced at Valperga. Beatrice's
mother was a fanatic, who died in the child's infancy. As
27
walling, Mary Shelley, p. 59.
28
Jones, ed., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 1:224,
letter of May 2, 1826.
82
a ward of the Bishop of Ferrara, Beatrice grew up as a
prophetess, whose imagination was infected by the vulgar
superstitions of her times (2:87). She followed the
promptings of her ardent, but wild imagination, believing
in the prompting of heaven. When she met Castruccio, she
mistook the stirrings of physical desire and love for
divine inspiration. She gave herself physically to
Castruccio under the delusion that their carnality was
visionary and "dictated by the loftiest impulses" (2:90).
Further she "thought that the Holy Spirit had revealed
himself to bless their union, that, by the mingled strength
of his manly qualities, and her divine attributes, some
great work might be fulfilled on earth" (2: 94). When he
left her to return to his duties and to Euthanasia,
Beatrice was totally undone. For Mary Shelley, violent
emotions are always destructive. Beatrice is consumed by
her passion. She wants Castruccio totally, but she is all
spirituality and he is all corporality. Driven by her pas
sion, she sets out on a pilgrimage, which becomes a sur
realistic nightmare in which she enters the landscape of a
recurring dream (3:83-85). Escaping after three years from
a house of prostitution, she wanders lost and confused for
many weeks before she awakens in a cave (3:91-92). Her
dependence on emotions has led to total disorientation.
Beatrice's condition is unnatur 1, as revealed in
her dream of the doppelganger. Her spiritual and physical
83
selves are not integrated. She says, '"There advanced to
meet me another form. It was myself"' (3:132). However,
Beatrice is not able to understand or accept the meaning of
dream. Rather she seeks the advice of a witch who tells
her the other self is an emanation of divinity (3:133).
Thus led deeper into madness, Beatrice, seeking but a
glimpse of Castruccio, dies amid mad ravings and the
intoxicating effects of henbane, administered by the power
hungry witch. She finds no peace in her life; she cannot
accept pastoral contentment.
Beatrice is the negative example of retreat into
the self. Her imagination needs a guide, for she has no
inner control. Her reveries lead not to a return, but
deeper into the unconscious, into madness. Her thoughts
are not self-examinations like Euthanasia's, but "feverish
meditations and thoughts burning with passion, rendered
still more dangerous from her belief in the divine nature
of all that suggested itself to her mind" (2:70). She
fears to be alone, because she has no strength of will.
Appalling sensations inspire her solitude. She goes mad
partly from overreliance on imagination and partly because
she cannot accept her physical desire for Castruccio after
she realizes these desires were not divinely inspired. She
has no background of domestic tranquillity or any base in
pastoral stability. Hence she has no ideal in which to
anchor her beliefs.
84
On the other hand, Euthanasia, firmly ensconced
in domestic values and pastoral retirement into nature,
represents the positive aspect of withdrawal into the self.
In seclusion with nature (1:118), Euthanasia can find a
voice which answers hers in "the gentle singing of the
pines" (1:190), and she can extract the strength necessary
to face life and Castruccio as they are. She neither loves
nor hates him; she feels only grief (3:67). In times of
crisis, such as her realization that Castruccio is the
enemy of Florence (2:168-70) or her decision to fight for
Valperga (2:242), Euthanasia receives solace from a with
drawal into nature and strength to return and face the con
sequences of her realizations.
In Valperga, nature generally reflects the
viewer's emotional state, as it frequently did in
Frankenstein. For example, Castruccio thinks of the wrong
he has done by accepting and then abandoning Beatrice,
while the wind moans and howls, as lightning from a distant
storm illuminates the sky (2:97-98). Similarly nature dis
plays her violent thunder while birds scr.eam in the trees
as Castruccio plans his infiltration of Valperga (2:134-
36). Disturbed by the knowledge that Castruccio's ambition
may destroy her hope of union with him, Euthanasia returns
to Valperga amid heavy rain (2:139), which becomes a raging
tempest upon the arrival of Castruccio (2:140). Nature
reveals the mood of the characters. By the time Euthanasia
85
has joined the conspiracy against Castruccio and the novel
is hurrying toward its sad, but inevitable conclusion,
nature has become completely sombre:
The olive and ilex woods, and the few cork trees and
cypresses, that grew on the declivities of the hills,
diversified the landscape with their sober green:
but they had a funereal appearance; they were as
the pall of the dying year, and the melancholy song
of their waving branches was its dirge. (3:202-3)
The three main characters, regardless of their
values, strengths, or weaknesses, all die unfulfilled.
Beatrice dies in madness and delusions without love and
without religious consolation. Euthanasia, deprived of all
she valued at Valperga, as well as her dream of pastoral
bliss with Castruccio, drowns on her way to exile. Duty
may have sustained her, but it has brought her no gratifi
cation. Castruccio, who accepts Euthanasia's final judg
ment that his life is miserable and unworthy (3:248), dies
without a fit successor and in the knowledge that the
Lucchese "would fall into their primitive insignificance
when he expired" (3:268). His ambition has cost him his
ethical, as well as his emotional life, and has led only to
a meaningless death.
Galeazzo [Visconti, one of Castruccio's early
corruptors] found, that, if he had lost sovereignty
and power, Castruccio had lost that which might be
considered far more valuable; he had lost his
dearest friends •.• if Castruccio revealed the
sorrows of his heart, Galeazzo might have regretted
that, instead of having instigated the ambition, and
destroyed the domestic felicity of his friend, he
had not taught him other lessons, through which he
86
might have enjoyed that peace, sympathy and happi
ness, of which he was now for ever deprived.
(3:266-67).
Walling believes that Mary Shelley deliberately chose a
main character who judged by earlier standards would have
been a positive example of heroism "to show the superiority
of liberty and of domestic virtues and of the absence of
personal ambition.
1129
It is Euthanasia, not Castruccio,
who is the ethical and moral center of the book.
Castruccio stands as a model of the deteriorating effects
of ambitious overreaching; a less imaginative, if more
realistic, version of Victor Frankenstein.
The pastoralism in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
is more explicit than it was in Valperga. Richard is
raised completely apart from the court in the country,
unlike Castruccio, who spends only one year under the
benevolent influence of Guinigi. Madeline's cottage is a
retreat within nature.
It was a lovely spot--trees embowered the cot,
roses bloomed in the garden, and jessamine and
woodbine were twined round the porch. The morning
breeze and rising sun filled the atmosphere with
sweets (1:145).30
29
walling, Mary Shelley, p. 70.
30
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Fortunes of
Perkin Warbeck, a Romance, 3 vols. (London: H. Colburn &
R. Bentley, 1830). All references to this edition will
be made parenthetically in the text.
87
In this environment, Richard learns the true values of
country life. Unlike Castruccio, who could reject the
value of human life and have hundreds executed, Richard
"burst into tears" at the sight of the deaths and destruc
tion caused by his invasion of England (2:306-7).
31
Such compassion for suffering marks the sentimental hero,
but does not aid the would-be conquerer in Richard. While
Richard was trying to raise an army for his cause, his
imagination "could only build another bower among the folds
of the mountains of Andalusia, and place his White Rose
therein" (3:246). He is a dreamer and would have been
contented in seclusion, but his desire to vindicate his
honor drives him into the corrupted world of the court,
32
where he does not belong. He cannot understand the
treachery of others, nor can he adopt the policies which
brought power to Castruccio. Richard is better suited to
the peasant life, for he does not have the disposition of
a soldier. He even pleads with King James not to hurt the
peasants (2:311-12).
31
castruccio becomes hardened to human sufferings.
In the beginning, he, too, wept at the pillaging of the
German soldiers of the first emperor under whom he fought
in his early career.
32 h 1 I • • • •
Mary Seley s opinion of courtly life is made
clear in "The Pilgrims" in which she comments, "an honest
man is more in his element amidst the toils of the battle,
than amongst the blandishments of a court; where the lip and
the gesture carry welcome, but where the heart, to which
the tongue is never the herald, is corroded by the un
ceasing strifes of jealousy and envy" (Robinson, p. 279).
88
The central hero of a sentimental novel tends to
b
. h h t'
33
e passive rat er tan ac ive. This well describes
Richard, who is repeatedly defeated, and by the end of the
novel, repeatedly captured. He surrenders himself to
Henry (3:191-92) ane is imprisoned, only to escape from
Westminster (3:218-22). Betrayed :Jy the treachery of his
followers (3:250), he is again imprisoned. His attempted
escape from the Tower leads directly to his execution. He
is constantly acted upon. According to Brissenden, the
sentimental hero is usually depicted as struggling to
prevent others forcing him to do things they want.
34
Richard is a sentimental hero, and as such, he is ill
equipped for his role as a leader in a political cause.
He is ineffectual in his mission to claim the throne of
England because of the pastoral values which have taught
him to value individual life, sincerity, and contentment.
His defeat betrays the ineffectiveness of pastoral values
in the real world. Castrucci was able to attain power,
whereas Richard retains his pastoral virtues, but attains
no power and accomplishes nothing with his life. Richard
is simply weak and ineffectual; he lacks animation. He
admits he is dependent on women in the crises of his life
(3:223-24).
33
Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, p. 129.
34
rbid.
89
Pastoral life to be effective must remain with
drawn from society. Violent ambition or hunger for knowl
edge disrupted the pastoral worlds of the previous novels.
In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Richard tries to imple
ment his pastoral vision in the political world. Because
he lacks the violent drives and emotions of a Castruccio
or a Raymond, his attempt to claim the English throne must
fail. In the world of the court, the evil characters, such
as Clifford, have the strength. Clifford and Frion re
peatedly manipulate and betray the trustin~ Richard, who
naively takes one or the other back into his confidence.
Richard lacks the cunning and sophistication necessary to
understand treachery.
The world appeared to slide from beneath the Prince,
as he became aware that Clifford's smiles were false;
his seeming honesty, his discourse of honour, the
sympathy apparent between them, a lie, a painted
lie, alluring him by fair colours to embrace foulest
deformity. (2:68)
Richard could not see Clifford's hypocrisy, because the
pastoral world of innocence excludes such evil. His hope
for a life of peace and love in sunny Spain (3:97) could be
fulfilled only by a withdrawal from the political world
into which he had thrust himself to vindicate his honor.
In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Mary Shelley's
emphasis begins to shift from the creation of an ideal
world centered in pastoral withdrawal to the defeat of
pastoral values in the political world. In Frankenstein,
90
The Last Man, and Valperga, the pastoral is ultimately
overcome by outside forces which trespass into the pastoral
domain. In The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, pastoralism is
still a positive goal. But the main character, who
attempts to transplant pastoral values into the outside
world, meets only defeat, because pastoralism, even in its
natural setting, is delicate.
Like Valperga, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck
concerns the lives of a princely ruler and two heroines:
one aristocratic and blond, the other dark and peasant
born. Richard loves each of these women. Interaction
between Richard and these two women constitutes the domes
tic involvement central to the novel. Katherine, "bred in
a palace, accustomed to a queen-like sovereignty over her
father's numerous vassals in the Highlands" (3:59), wished
to keep Richard for herself. She did not favor his mili
tary aspirations. On the other hand, the cottage-bred
Monina actively solicited aid for Richard's cause. Richard
had to choose between these two women. Initially he loved
Monina with whom he was raised and with whom he shared the
motherly caresses of Madeline (1:95). After participating
in a war in Spain, Richard returned "to Madeline and her
fair child; and domestic peace succeeded ~o the storms of
war. Richard loved Madeline as his mother; her daughter
was his sister" (1:214). However, Richard later realizes
that he loves Monina, but he will not tell her, because he
91
cannot marry her. Richard believes that he must sublimate
his love for fear of misalliance (2:40), but more probably
it is fear of incest which prevents their union. Although
not biologically related, they are still socially and
psychologically brother and sister. Both are not con
sciously aware that their erotic wishes are incestuous.
But the exi stence of the possibility of incest presents a
conflict between their incestuous wishes and the incest
taboo of society.
Richard definitely fears union with Monina and
resolves to protect her, even for himself (2:121). Like
wise, Monina is sexually afraid of Richard. She is afraid
to be alone with him for fear her father will have to
vindicate her honor (2:179). Why she should feel such
doubts about Richard's love is not stated. Most probably
Monina is consciously aware of her erotic wish for Richard,
but unconsciously she draws back, because her choice is
incestuous. Even the suggestion of incest is dangerous
enough to make an erotic relationship between Richard and
Monina impossible.
The narrator maintains, "It was dangerous for
their young hearts thus to be united and alone in a fairy
scene of beauty and seclusion" (1:238). Love in the seclu
sion of benevolent nature is Mary Shelley's ideal, but the
operation of the incest taboo undercuts the stated inno
cence of Richard and Monina. Throughout the novel, their
92
relationship remains pure and "angelic." "She [Monina]
was not his, as a lover or a wife, but as a sister might
be; ... a sharing of fate and of affection, combined with
angelic purity" (3:178). The brother-sister relationship
between Monina and Richard, apart from the allusions to
danger, is idealized in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck.
Monina so loves Richard that she dedicates her l~fe to his
cause and cannot bear to survive him (3:178). Richard,
embroiled in the complexity of politics and war, laments,
"Why did I leave the land of beauty, where with
Monina ..• ?" (3:246). However, Richard moves away from
pastoral contentment by entering the world of politics.
He moves beyond Monina's world. He consciously makes the
choice to turn from Monina to Katherine. Journeying in the
Scottish Highlands with James, Richard is startled by a
voice answering his as he ascended a hill, "for it was not
his own, but [took] the thrilling sweetness of Monina's
tones" (2:242). Although Richard is unaware of the near
ness of his marriage to Katherine, he realizes at the
moment he seems to hear Monina's voice that he no longer
feels the passion of love for Monina, but rather tender
ness, a brother's care (2:243). He renounces those
feelings toward Monina which represented a threat to his
position as the true heir of the English crown and settles
for the more conventional and acceptable, although less
dynamic, Katherine. He chooses to remain in the court and
93
dooms himself to failure, at least in the world of pastoral
worth which Mary Shelley established.
Because of his pastoral background, Richard iB not
suited to the court. Ironically, Katherine will draw
Richard from his desire to vindicate his name. "She per
ceived that power failed most, when its end was good; she
saw that in accomplishing its purpose in the cottage, or in
the halls of state, felicity resulted from affections only"
(3:60). Although raised at court, Katherine is aware that
warmth of heart and simple pleasures, the primary ingredi
ents of happiness, were more often found "among simple
minded peasantry" than "among false-hearted, ambitious
courtiers" ( 3: 61) . Her values are those of the pastoral
world, which Richard, too, values. But with his desire to
vindicate his honor, Richard is moving away from the pas
toral and toward the court. However, Richard lacks all
insight into his situation. Katherine "wept that Richard
should encounter fruitless danger for a mistaken aim"
(3:94), while Monina at the same moment is gladdened that
he goes as a conquerer to become a monarch. Richard's
ambivalent desires are reflected in the pastoral maiden who
encourages his political efforts and the courtly maiden who
encourages withdrawal. Richard is ill-suited to the role
of conquerer because he totally lacks ambition. He seeks
to avenge his honor, but a king's power seems only a "play
thing fit for Henry's hand" (3:97). Richard prefers a life
94
of peace and love "with her he idolized, in the sunny clime
of his regretted Spain" (3:97). He continues to value the
pastoral, but makes no effort to regain his peace.
As in Valperga, physical sex in The Fortunes of
Perkin Warbeck is dangerous because of its violence, which
allies sex with power and ambition. Clifford, an obvious
villain, offers Monina physical sex only, not love. Sex is
literally imprisoning. At the same time that Clifford pro
poses to Monina, he claims her as his prisoner. Henry,
another villain, uses sex to manipulate. After he
imprisons Katherine, he seeks self-gratification from her
(3:308) and hopes he can use her to wring a false confes
sion from Richard. Henry's desire for Katherine is only
lust, and Monina must enlighten Katherine as to Henry's
motives (3:210).
The violence of manipulation through sex and lust
and the treachery of men of the world such as Clifford and
Frion are alien to the pastoral world. Richard is power
less against these villains, because his values are all
passive. He is continually acted upon by those who betray
his confidence.
Pastoral tranquillity in Richard's life is centered
in Madeline's cottage. He repeatedly longs to return to
the bliss in nature which he knew in Spain. Nature offers
peace to man and eliminates the need for social distinc
tions. Nature is
95
... the vast theatre whose shifting scenes and
splendid decorations were the clouds, the mountain,
the forest and the wave, where man stood, not as
one of the links of society, forced by his relative
position to consider his station and his rank, but
as a human being, animated only by such emotions as
were the growth of his own nature. (2:243)
Katherine also seeks peace in the loveliness of
nature (3:175). Later in a scene of a violent storm,
nature reflects Katherine's own situation. The peace of
nature gives way to "earth, and sea, and sky! Strange
mysteries! that look and are so beautiful even in tumult
and in storm" (3:176). Fearing what may ha.ve happened to
Richard and soon to be captured herself, Katherine watches
the storm. The tumultuous image of nature mirrors the dis-
ruption of her happiness. In another scene, a similar
storm rouses unexplained emotions in her, as the thunder
seems to speak to her (3:215). Nature would warn Katherine
of Henry's treachery, for the next day she is made an abso
lute prisoner. In these scenes, external nature reflects
Katherine's condition. Other storms throughout the novel
contrast with the idyllic and temperate Spain, where Monina
and Richard were raised, and contribute an atmosphere
appropriate to Richard's inevitable failure. When Richard
is about to be captured, a sudden, violent storm arises.
"All was so instantaneous, that it would seem that nature
was undergoing some great revulsion in her laws" l3: 162).
Nature is in sympathy with Richard, for later another
storm, more violent than the one which portended his
96
capture, heralds his escape. While the imprisoned Richard
is attending vespers in Westminster Abbey, a violent storm
terrifies the congregation, "while Richard stood fearless,
enjoying the elemental roar, exulting in the peal, .
• •
as powers yet rebellious to his conquerer" (3: 218-19) .
Richard escapes as lightning strikes the priest at the
altar and the guard, who raises his weapon against Richard.
Nature directly intervenes to save Richard. The court
dwellers are terrified by the storm and fall to their ·
knees, while he feels soothed. He believes nature is on
his side.
The pastoral image of nature mirrors Richard's
inclinations of soul, while the tumultuous image of nature
. . f 35
mirrors opposing orces. The next day, Richard is free
among the abundance of nature in summer. "If paradise be
ever of this world it now embowered Richard" (3:244). This
scene is the last time Richard "might ever see the waving
corn or shadowy trees" (3:245). Finally realizing the
hopelessness of his cause, Richard acknowledges the two
things he most values, nature and the women he loves.
Imprisonment and his ultimate defeat deprive him of both
pastor 1 consolations, nature and domesticity.
35
Mary Shelley defined "pastoral weather" as
"weather when it is possible to sit under a tree or 1 ie
upon the grass, and feel neither cold nor wet. Such days
are too rare not to be seized upon with avidity" (Robinson,
"Recollections of Italy," p. 24). Such temperate weather
reflects her ideal of comfort in pastoralism.
97
I
In Mary Shelley's historical fiction, the pastoral
remains an ideal, but one which cannot stand ~gainst the
threats of political power. Euthanasia's world is des-
troyed by Castruccio's ambition; Richard's pastoral world
is destroyed by his desire to vindicate his honor. He does
not wish to deny pastoral values. His dream is to withdraw
to Andalusia with Katherine, but he is defeated by the
superior power of Henry's political cunning. As in
Frankenstein and The Last Man, the pastoral world is
morally superior, but doomed to defeat by the violent
emotions which exist and act in opposition to it.
98
CHAPTER IV
MATHILDA, LODORE, AND FALKNER
Mary Shelley's fiction shares its faults with sen
timental fiction in general. Lack of variety in plot and
lack of depth in characterization are the most outstanding
flaws of both. James Foster suggests that the poorer sort
of author made concessions to his readers' desires for
excitement and "after jettisoning almost all intellectual
1
cargo, arrived at melodrama." Mary Shelley also left her
more substantial Gothic and historical novels to write her
least satisfactory fiction, domestic melodrama.
The growth of melodrama was encouraged by the
Romantic movement itself. According to Michael Booth,
The uncontrolled expression of emotion, the heroic
individuality, the sweep of rhetoric and richness of
setting, the gloom and the wild flights of joy that
mark romantic poetry also mark popular melodrama,
albeit on a much cruder level.
2
1
James Ralph Foster, The History of the Pre-
Romantic Novel in England (New York: Modern Language
Association of America, 1949), p. 18.
2
Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (University
Park: Pensylvania State University Press, 1967), p. xiv.
99
Because melodrama was influenced by pastoral and romantic
fiction, including the Gothic,
3
it seems a natural area for
Mary Shelley's literary abilities. Melodrama emphasizes
story line, while completely subordinating character to
4
plot.
The characters remain stereotypical--persecuting
villain, hero, suffering heroine--whose lives are neatly
capped by poetic justice. The protagonist has only exter
nal forces against which to fight--an evil villain, a
f h
. . . 5
natural orce, or a uman institution.
to blame for a character's misfortunes.
Often mere fate is
Much depends on
chance, as the plot manipulates the characters. According
to Smith, "Triumph, despair and protest are the basic
emotions of melodrama.
116
In point of view, melodrama is
conventionally moral and sentimental.
7
Although this defi
nition is based primarily on stage melodrama, it is equally
applicable to melodramatic novels. Specifically, domestic
melodrama, which includes Mathilda, Lodore, and Falkner,
3
Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University
Park: Pensylvania State University Press, 1967), p. xiv.
4
Booth, English Melodrama, pp. 14-15.
5
James L. Smith, Melodrama (~ondon: Methuen & Co.,
1973), p. 8.
6
rbid., p. 9.
7
Rahill, The World of Melodrama, p. xiv.
100
concerns everyday people with whom the reader might iden
tify, but involves their plain lives in thrilling adven
tures, which end happily (Mathilda is an exception to the
conventional happy ending).
Mary Shelley has used melodramatic elements
throughout her fiction. The Last Man abounds in melodrama
tic descriptions of plague victims and lengthy lamentations
by Lionel on the cruelty of fate. Beatrice's death in
Valperga and Richard's escape during the thunderstorm in
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck are other obvious examples.
However, i n these novels, Mary Shelley allows her charac
ters to confront their difficulties honestly. Euthanasia
loses love, her castle, and eventually her life in spite of
her loyalty to right principles and duty. The good are not
spared suffering or death in The Last Man. However, in
Falkner and Ladore the happy endings do not ring true; they
seem wish-fulfillment. Mary Shelley experiences a failure
of nerve from the honesty of presentation in Frankenstein.
In Falkner and Ladore, the conflicts between action and
passivity, violent emotions and tranquillity, are not as
decisively expressed. Perhaps because Ladore and Falkner
are set in the present and deal with people as such, rather
than with symbolic or historical events, Mary Shelley does
not want to confront explicitly the issues with which she
had dealt in the Gothic and historical novels. A symbolic
presentation allows her to convey her themes indirectly
101
through a psychological screen. Even the historical genre
allows a certain remoteness and distance in time, which
permits a less personal treatment, as Mary Shelley herself
must have realized. In a letter to John Murray
(February 19, 1828) about The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,
she wrote, "An historical subject of former times must be
treated in a way that affords no scope for opinion.
118
However, in her melodramatic fiction, she had no
historical facts to restrain her material, and she indulged
more fully her tendency toward excessive emotionalism. The
gloomy and self-dramatizing Mathilda withdrew from all
sexuality after her father merely mentioned his desire.
Eventually, she proposed a contrived, joint suicide to
Woodville. Even more excessive were incidents from the
later novels, Ladore and Falkner. A duel became imminent
when Lodore's illegitimate son flirted with Lady Ladore.
Ethel and her mother met after years in an overdrawn scene
at Parliament. Lodore's duel of honor and eventual death,
his supposed influence beyond the grave, and Lady Lodore's
character transformation were all exaggerations beyond the
probable. Similarly, Falkner abounded with melodramatic
incidents like Neville's wild youth and Alithea's drowning
and burial. In the black and white world of melodrama,
8
Jones, ed., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 1:37.
Alithea and Elizabeth are totally good,
9
while Sir Boyvill
was totally evil until his unlikely, deathbed reformation.
Major plot developments hinged on coincidences like
Elizabeth's mother having been a friend of Alithea,
Mrs. Jervis' having recognized the wild boy in Italy as
Neville, and Neville's having been in the same boat with
Elizabeth and the seriously ill Falkner. Coincidence,
which might not jar the viewer of a stage melodrama, passed
the bounds of logic in Falkner.
Mary Shelley had a long standing interest in
writing for the stage and did write two blank-verse dramas,
Proserpine and Midas, in 1820. With the exception of these
two dramas, she never wrote a completed play or received
any satisfaction for her dramatic aspirations.
10
Yet she
9
The narrator, aware of Elizabeth's unbelievable
goodness, comments, "It may be thought that the type is pre
sented of ideal and almost unnatural perfection" (1: 165),
but he defends her characterization on the grounds that her
history would not have made a topic for a novel, "unless
she had possessed rare and exhalted qualities" (Ibid.).
10
In 1835, Mary Shelley wrote that she had wanted to
write for the stage, but her father strongly dissuaded her
(Jones, ed. Letters of Mary w. Shelley, 2:98, letter of
June 11, 1835). Godwin had written in part: "Your per
sonages are more abstractions--the lines and points of a
mathematical diagram--and not men and women •... Your
talent is something like mine--it cannot unfold itself
without elbow room ..•• It is laziness, my dear Mary,
that makes you wish to be a dramatist. It seems in pros
pect a short labour to write a play, and a long one to
write a work consisting of volumes ... there is no idle
and self-indulgent acting that leads to literary eminence."
Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary
103
had great respect for the "ideality of the drama.
1111
After seeing "Kean in Richard" she wrote, "I said I would
write a tragedy--I began one--my labours are futile [sic]
how differently did I commence an undertaking with my
beloved Shelley to criticize and encourage me to
12
advance." In "Notes to The Cenci," she also wrote that
Shelley believed she had dramatic talent and often encour-
13
aged her to write a tragedy. As late as 1835, she still
believed she could have written a good tragedy, but not at
14
the time she wrote the letter. She channelled her frus-
trated interest and aspirations as a dramatic writer into
the less lofty field of domestic melodramatic fiction.
After Shelley's death and toward the end of her writing
career Mary Shelley turned to domestic embroilments in
Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Bentley & Son, 1889), 2:107-8,
letter of February 27, 1824.
11
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of
Cloudesley," Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 27 (May, 1830):
712.
12
unpublished journal entry, January 30, 1824,
cited in a personal letter from Dr. Paula R. Feldman,
October 13, 1975, who is currently editing Mary Shelley's
journal.
2:156.
13
Shelley, Complete Works, ed., Ingpen and Peck,
14
Jones, ed., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 2:98,
letter of June 11, 1835.
104
Ladore (1835) and Falkner (1837). During Shelley's life-
time, she wrote Mathilda, which she did not publish during
her lifetime, presumably because Godwin found the subject
"disgusting and detestable."
15
Godwin even severed a 11
dealings with the Gisbornes who were acting as intermedi-
16
aries for Mary.
Godwin's sensitivity about Mathilda is understand-
able, because the central issue is father-daughter incest.
Pastoral withdrawal remains only a secondary theme.
Mathilda's father did not enter her life until she was
sixteen. Her youth had been spent alone amid the "lovely
solitudes" of nature, as she said,
My greatest pleasure was the enjoyment of a serene
sky amidst these verdant woods; yet I loved all the
changes of Nature; and rain, and storm, and the
beautiful clouds of heaven brought their delights
with them.17 (p. 10)
However, her heart longed for a return for affections.
"[Her] pleasures arose f ram the contemplation of nature
alone, [she] had no companion" (p. 10). Mathilda lived
in pastoral peace with nature. However, Mary Shelley did
and
and
pp.
15
Jones, Fredrick Lafayette, ed., Maria Gisborne
Edward E. Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals
Letters (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951),
41-42, Godwin's letter of August 8, 1820.
16
rbid., p. 75.
17
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mathilda, ed.
Elizabeth Nitchie (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1959). All references to this edition will
be made parenthetically in the text.
105
not emphasize the pastoral bliss of Mathilda's life, but
!instead stressed her lack of companionship. Mathilda's
loneliness made her more receptive to a fascination with
her father, who returned just as she was becoming a woman.
Because her father deliberately severed any ties of kinship
when he left the infant Mathilda, his return could bring no
good into a world created by Mary Shelley. Ironically,
Mathilda said she began to live when her father returned
(p. 14), but the reader knows from the opening pages that
Mathilda was moving not toward life but death.
Mary Shelley was careful to make an attraction
between father and daughter believable. The father was
still young and had not seen his daughter during the years
she was growing up. His wife had died at Mathilda's birth.
He tended to put Mathilda into the place of his dead wife.
On her side, Mathilda had stirrings of desire for her
father's "love-breathing countenance" (p. 20) and for the
"ravishing delight" of his smile. Such words do not des
cribe mere filial affection. In an excised passage,
Mathilda mentioned "the excess of what I may also call my
adoration from my father" (p. 83, note 23). She regretted
whenever they weere joined by a third person (p. 17). The
father's overt desire for her became evident when he
shunned her after a young man of rank took an interest in
her. According to R. E. L. Masters, a father's separating
106
a daughter and a young man expresses unconscious incest
. 18
cravings.
Because Mathilda could not accept her father's
rejection of her, she begged to know his secret grief. The
revelation that he loved her (p. 30) roused her pity and
fear (p. 31)--pity for her father and fear of her own
emotions. She withdrew from her father in confusion not
revulsion. Because she had been habitually alone, Mathilda
was naturally attracted to her father, the nearest thing to
her own self. When she lost her father, she had no one but
herself and therefore turned inward. She and her father
had disrupted and destroyed the domestic peace which should
exist within the family. Absorbed in her own solipsism,
Mathilda could not accept Woodville, he remained a friend,
never a lover.
Mathilda said that she frequently crept to her
father's door, fearing she knew not what (p. 22). Her
incestuous desires were completely unconscious during this
period. After her father's revelation, he, too, came to
her door, but did not enter. Again she felt fear (p. 35).
Their respective doors symbolize the channel of access to
their persons. Father and daughter desire each other but
cannot consummate their love, because it transgresses the
18
R. E. L. Masters, Patterns of Incest; a Ps cho
social Study of Incest, base on Clinica an Historica
Data (New York: Julian Press, 1963), pp. 100-1.
107
socially prescribed roles of father and daughter. The
father was immediately conscious of his social transgres
sion and fled to his death (p. 45). According to Masters,
depression and suicide are self-punishment for incest.
19
After her father's suicide, Mathilda withdrew to a
cottage situated "on a dreary heath bestrewen with stones"
(p. 51). She lived in peace and seclusion in nature. How
ever, Mary Shelley was not presenting her usual pastoral
idyll in this scene, for Mathilda's withdrawal was solip
sistic and ultimately deadly. There was no increase of
awareness or return to the world and new knowledge. Even
Mathilda was aware of the lack of sincerity and depth in
her retreat from the world. She said, "I was dressed also
in a whimsical nunlike habit which denoted that I did not
retire to solitude from necessity, but that I might indulge
in a luxury of grief, and fanciful seclusion" (p. 60).
Mathilda's early joy in being alone was replaced by morose
solitude; her youthful sensibility and desire for others
were replaced by suicidal longings and peevishness toward
her one friend, Woodville. In her solitude, Mathilda
became a "selfish, solitary creature, far unlike her
younger self. As a child, Mathilda had run wild across the
fields · (p~·-·- ~j"j and delighted in nature (p. 10). The young
Mathilda was Mary Shelley's ideal of a person living in
19
Ibid., p. 194.
108
response to nature. But after her father's death, Mathilda
sought the dreary and desolate heath because it more nearly
reflected her own life, which she believed had been des
troyed. In reaction to her father's confession of love,
Mathilda wanted to become a nun "that [she] might be for
ever shut out from the world" (p. 34). By wanting a con
vent as a place of withdrawal, Mathilda chose to withdraw
not just from people, but specifically from sexual
encounter. Like Jane Shore in The Fortunes of Perkin
Warbeck, Mathilda feared sex. But after two years in iso
lation, Mathilda met a young man, Woodville. Although she
did not consciously realize that she feared sex, she
rejected Woodville, ostensibly because memories of her
father's unlawful desires set up a barrier between herself
and others (p. 61). Mathilda believed she was fit only for
death, because nature had set a ban on her (p. 62) because
of the unnatural love she had inspired (p. 71). In
reality, her own withdrawal from others was deadly and her
self-imposed chastity was symbolically suicida1.
20
Mathilda made clear her suicidal wishes in her plea for
Woodville to take laudanum with her. This scene demon
strates Mathilda's distorted view of life as merely a pre
lude to death. If she continued in good health, she would
consider herself a living pestilence (p. 72). Mathilda,
2
0 · th W t W ld 37 Rougemont, Love in e es ern or , p. .
109
who should have offered sexual attractions to Woodville,
offered instead the means for their mutual death. She
wished for words to "express the luxury of death that [she]
might win him" (p. 68), but she made no appeal to a rela
tionship or union between them. Woodville dissuaded
Mathilda by appealing to the need of bringing happiness to
others. However, Mathilda had turned inward and toward
death.
Mathilda's opportunity to die came when Woodville
had to return to his mother. After he departed, Mathilda
became lost in a barren plain (pp. 74-75), symbolic of her
unproductive solipsism. Significantly, she lost her way
because she was wrapped in a daydream of union with her
f th F th
. ht' . h .
21
h'ld
a er. ram e nig s exposure int e rain Mat i a
developed consumption and remained near death at the end
of the novelette. By allowing Mathilda to die of natural
causes, Mary Shelley absolved her of guilt in her own
death. In her dying moments, Mathilda contemplated a
lovely meadow of newly mown grass. In this scene, Mathilda
returned to an appreciation of nature which she had had as
a child (p. 10). She had returned to an acceptance of the
21
As in the other novels, nature reacts to the
situation of the characters. The storm reflects Mathilda's
chaotic state when left alone by Woodville. Nature mirrors
her mood. Similarly, it rained at her father's suicide
(pp. 43-45), and at the time she was planning her suicide
with Woodville tpp. 66-67).
110
good in nature. She renounced all passion, which through
out the story had produced only pain.
No pastoral bliss was possible for Mathilda after
her encounter with her father. She was tainted not so much
by his passion, as by her own desire for him. Because her
father was dead, she could only envision union with him in
the next life. Her death wish developed as soon as her
father's attitude changed to incestuous love. Aroused pas
sion awakened in her a desire for death. Even her attach
ment to Woodville excited her suicidal tendencies. Death,
the instrument by which she could attain union with her
father, became as beautiful as love to her (p. 64). By the
end of the novelette, she is "in love with death" (p. 7 7).
She even thinks of her shroud as a wedding dress, which
"will unite [her] to [her] father when in an eternal mental
union [they will] never part" (p. 78); as Rougemont says,
d th
. th 1 f . d · d
22
ea is e goa o passion an its en.
Mathilda is an early work, written shortly after
Frankenstein in the summer of 1819. Mary Shelley's pas
toral themes were still in embryo. In Mathilda, she pre
sents the destructive force of passion, but she does not
develop the ideal of pastoral bliss, which is destroyed by
that passion. Mathilda's withdrawal after her father's
death is solipsistic. Her earlier withdrawal into nature
22
Rougemont, Love in the Western World, p. 36.
111
to escape the lack of affection of her aunt presents a
brief pastoral interlude, but Mathilda does not sustain her
delight in nature~ for she believes her affections are
wasted on inanimate objects. Typically, Mary Shelley
emphasizes an individual's need for other people, espe
cially the family, even within nature. After the total
disruption of any domestic satisfaction for Mathilda, she
withdraws completely into herself until she finds death.
Mathilda never shares her sensibilities with anyone. She
is rejected by her aunt and betrayed by her father's love.
She herself rejects Woodville. Passion is ultimately fatal
to both Mathilda and her father. Withdrawal from society
leads only to death.
In Ladore, withdrawal has more ben~gn effects on
those who retreat from society. Ladore comes to the wil
derness of Illinois seeking escape from the problems of
life in England. His flirtatious wife had attracted the
tt t
. f h . . 11 . .
2 3
a en ion o is 1 eg1t1mate son. The inevitability of
a duel of honor with his son because of social pressures
drives Ladore to seek escape. Surrounded by majestic
nature in Illinois, Ladore is healed of the deep wounds
inflicted by society "through the ministration of all-
24
healing nature" (1:228). He finds pleasure in solitude
23
Mary Shelley's constant interest in incest
extends into even minor incidents in Ladore.
24
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Ladore, 3 vols.
(London: R. Bentley, 1835). All references to this edition
will be made parenthetically in the text.
112
and eventually learns to be contented, rather than suici-
dal ( 1: 2 3) . "Peace descended upon his soul. He became
enamoured of the independence of solitude, and the sublime
operations of surrounding nature" (1:22). With his young
daughter, Ladore lived secluded and at one with nature.
"He grew to love his home in the wilderness" (1:22). Such
is Mary Shelley's standard picture of pastoral bliss. Into
this Eden comes the inevitable disruptive passion. Ladore
cannot face Ethel's dawning womanhood. When she is fif
teen, he leaves her alone. During this time, a young man
makes advances toward her.
As in Mathilda, the entrance of the young man pre
cipitates catastrophe. The possibility of incest had been
a part of Lodore's relationship with Ethel, because he had
reared her as he wished his own wife had been. When still
in England, he had aroused Lady Lodore's jealousy by his
treatment of Ethel (1:132). Her great affection for Ladore
"inspired her father with more than a father's fondness"
(1:42). Incestuous overtones, which occurred in
Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,
are also a part of Ladore. Morton Kaplan's comments in
relation to incest in Frankenstein are even more pertinent
to Ladore. He writes:
A good example of this disguise in Frankenstein is
the fairy tale formula in . which a father lives alone
with his daughter, or with his wife who is young
enough to be his daughter. The first situation is
doubly incestuous because it not only fulfills the
113
daughter's wish to replace the mother, but it also
constrains the young suitor for the daughter's hand
to win from the father the only woman of the house-
hence, symbolically, the mother.25
As in the case of Mathilda and her father, the daughter is
the wife-figure for Lodore.
On her side, Ethel idolized her father (1:37).
"Ethel's visionary ideas were all full of peace, seclusion,
and .her father" (1:43). These are primary ingredients for
domestic bliss in Mary Shelley's fiction. But considering
Lodore's excessive attachment to Ethel, these factors will
lead to an eventual avowal of incestuous desire with the
advent of Ethel's womanhood. However, the entrance of the
young man into Ethel's life differs from Mathilda's
situation. Unlike Mathilda, Ethel does not consider
Whitelock's visits as "obnoxious" (Mathilda, p. 19), nor
does Lodore respond by changing his attitude toward Ethel.
However, as soon as Whitelock makes his intentions obvious,
Ethel does feel the eyes of her father penetrating her
soul and discovering her "vanity" (1:62). When Lodore
returns and realizes there is a rival for Ethel's love, he
becomes impetuous again (1:63). He does not withdraw from
his daughter, as does Mathilda's father. Lodore turns from
passivity to action. All the passion, which he had been
suppressing in his rural retreat, returns. He decides to
25
Kaplan, "Fantasy of Paternity and the
Doppelganger: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," p. 134.
114
return to the world and meet the difficulties, not "await
their advent in his seclusion" (1:63).
In Mary Shelley's fiction the man of action may
have admirable qualities, but he is doomed to defeat. Mary
Shelley makes it clear that Ladore in leaving his pastoral
retreat is leaving Eden. Ethel has passed from the inno
cence of childhood to the experience of womanhood. She and
her father may have come close to overt incest, but they
never reach a point of open avowel. Passion remains
suppressed and does not interfere with their rural idyll.
However, the arrival of Whitelock spells the end of Eden.
The arousal of Ethel's sexual awareness and Lodore's
jealous reaction to Whitelock disrupt the peace. Echoing
Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley writes, "The world was before
him" (1:63). Ladore is cast from paradise by Ethel's sexual
awakening. There is no compelling reason in the plot why
Ladore and Ethel must leave their American Eden. If Ladore
wanted to preserve Ethel's innocence, he should logically
have remained in seclusion. However, Mary Shelley's pas
toral ideal never includes passion. There can be love such
as existed at Windsor in The Last Man, but this love must
be fraternal or at least familial, but never passionate.
Like the ambitious Raymond, who could not remain
long at peace in Windsor, Ladore himself is ill-suited to
pastoral bliss. "His passions were powerful, and had been
ungoverned" (1:20). Mary Shelley is not explicit about
115
Lodore's past, but alludes to the Byronic coloring of his
life before the story opens. Therefore the reader is not
surprised to find Ladore questioning how he endured the
undisturbed life in Illinois and desiring a return to
action (1:228-29). Ladore has to return to the world.
Mary Shelley's pastoral vision never accepts violent emo
tions, no matter how hazily they are defined. Therefore
Ladore returns to the society of others.
In Ladore, the contrast between the wickedness of
society qnd the bliss of rural retreat is more marked than
in the other novels, which only emphasizes the strengths of
pastoralism.
to his death.
Lodore's return to society leads inevitably
He is killed in a duel, an acceptable death
by society's standards.
After her father's death, Ethel finds herself
unfit for society. Raised amid wild and interminable
nature, she has been molded by the "brawling stream," "the
wide spread forest" and the "wide-winged clouds" (1:39-40).
She returns to England and to the care of her Aunt
Elizabeth, another person ill-suited to society, for
Elizabeth has lived all her life in rural seclusion at the
family seat, Longfield. Ethel and Elizabeth must live for
a time in London because of Ethel's ill health (1:288-89);
however, the two ladies are confused and disturbed by urban
life. "Happiness, the agreeable tenor of unvaried daily
life, was to be found in the quiet of the country only"
116
(2:85). They find peace amid the trees and meadows of
Richmond. Here Ethel can again experience the tranquillity
of Illinois. "Imagination could .transform wooded parks and
well-trimmed meadows into bowery seclusions, sacred from
the f oat of man, and fresh fields, untouched by his hand"
(2:84-85). In this environment, Ethel slips quietly into
love with Villiers without "any of the throes of passion
[to] disturb the serenity of her mind" (2:86). Non-
passionate love is acceptable. Ethel may wed Villiers
and remain in peace, for there love is safe and passion
less. It does not disrupt pastoralism.
In order to accept Villiers, Ethel must rework her
feelings toward Ladore. This time Ethel is careful not to
offend her father, but calls upon his spirit to approve
her attachment (2:114). She believes that she is ful
filling Lodore's "last behests in giving herself to him
[Villiers]" (2:114). In Ladore, the incestuous parent,
unlike Mathilda's father, is exorcised. The daughter can
have an acceptable relationship with another man. However,
Ethel's clinging dependency upon Villiers, so similar to
2·6
her parasitic attachment to Ladore, makes it apparent
that Villiers is a father substitute for her. When Ladore
was killed, Ethel was at a loss what to do because Ladore
26
To describe Ethel's relationship to Ladore, Mary
Shelley even uses the image of a parasite clinging to a
supporter or destroyer (1:39).
117
had been the prop of her entire world (1:274). But in
marrying Villiers, "she was constant to the first affection
of her heart" (2:168). Ladore had raised Ethel to be
dependent on him, and she transferred that dependency to
Villiers. In Ladore, Mary Shelley raises many of the same
issues which she considered in Mathilda.
.
However 1.n
Mathilda, she faced the destructive power of incestuous
passion and allowed the characters to confront their own
feelings of transgressing ethical standards. But in
Ladore, she gives her heroine the happiness of fairy tales.
Mary Shelley does not face or resolve the issues she
.
raises.
Even less realistic is her treatment of Lady
Ladore. Ladore married Cornelia Santerre because he mis
takenly believed her to be a pastoral maiden, "the
nursling, so he fancied, of mountains, waterfalls, and
solitude" (1:107). However, Cornelia was actually far dif
ferent. "The fair girl had been brought up ... to view
society as the glass by which she was to set her feelings,
and to which to adapt her conduct" (1:117). In Lodore's
marriage, the villains are Cornelia's mother and society
itself. Cornelia accepted the flatteries of her mother and
her friends in society, while rejecting Lodore's efforts to
guide her to truth and clearness of spirit ll:119). "The
system of society tended to increase their mutual estrange
ment" (1:124). Lady Ladore involved herself completely in
118
engagements and amusements, while Ladore entered public
affairs to compensate himself for the loss of ''domestic
felicity'' (1:125). Ladore offers Mary Shelley's most
obvious condemnation of society's values, as opposed to
pastoralism. Of course, it is also her first novel set in
an identifiably contemporaneous society.
Apparently Mary Shelley intended to use Cornelia
Ladore as the personification of the eventual triumph of
pastoral values over society's shallow standards. She
first depicts Lady Ladore as the perfect thrall of
society's values and then devotes the concluding chapters
to her rebirth in the countryside of Wales. However, the
change in Cornelia's character is so unmotivated that it
seems totally improbable. Because Cornelia's values are
completely regulated by society, she is able to remain
placid and smiling in spite of the deaths of her husband
and mother (2:51). With levity and willfulness, she flirts
with various suitors (2:56), while attempting to maintain a
lover's control over Saville. She wants only to keep up an
appearance of gaiety in the eyes of society. She regulates
all her actions by the opinion of society. Her attitude is
typified in her belief that she cannot draw near the daugh
ter Ladore took from her years before because her conduct
would be criticized at every gossip's tea-table in England
(2:73). The reader can accept this Cornelia, for she is so
clearly delineated and so much a product of her mother's
119
rearing. Mary Shelley's hatred of the shallow socialite
makes Cornelia's faults clear.
On the other hand, Cornelia's transformation into a
concerned mother, an anonymous bestower of beneficience,
and a lover of pastoral solitude, is unconvincing. For no
stated reason (she herself does not understand why [3:
126]), Cornelia suddenly resolves to sacrifice everything
for Ethel and free Villiers from debtor's prison (3:127).
Cornelia feels rapture in contemplating her own ruin. Such
thoughts hardly sound like those of the same character who
a few pages previously "had desired some interest, some
employment in life, but ... recoiled from any that should
link her with Ethel" (3:112).
Without revealing her intentions, Cornelia leaves
her money to Ethel to extricate her and Villiers from
debtor's prison. Then Cornelia magnanimously withdraws
into the solitude of Wales. But even in her generosity,
Cornelia retains the stigma of society's protegee.
Her resolutions were in accordance with the haughti
ness of her disposition, and she felt satisfied, not
because she was making a noble sacrifice, but because
she thus adorned more magnificently the idol she set
up for worship, and believed herself to be more worthy
of applause and love. (3:186)
Cornelia denied any desire for Ethel to know that she had
"resolved on retiring into absolute solitude" (3:273).
However, Cornelia is not committed to pastoral retreat;
she merely mouths the pastoral ideals without any believ
able commitment. She tells Elizabeth that she finds the
120
garden "very pretty," but even with nature, Cornelia is a
manipulator not one who accepts tranquillity.
In the last twenty-five pages, Cornelia's transfor
mation of character is completed. However unlikely, "soli
tude and nature grew lovely to her eyes" (3:295). She
prays for her daughter to come and receive her love. The
garden scene of Cornelia's prayer and its immediate answer
by the entrance of Ethel is meant to symbolize redemption
and renewal. But in view of all that the reader knows of
Cornelia as the haughty and shallow slave of society, it is
difficult to accept her standing in the garden blessing all
things like the Ancient Mariner. She thinks "Much wrong
have I done, but love pure and disinterested is in my heart,
and I shall be repaid" (3:300). Perhaps the reference to
"repaid" is intended to mitigate the total change in
Cornelia's personality, but the scene does not work. The
message of a reversal from worldliness to withdrawal is
present, but it does not ring true.
Ethel, not Cornelia, is the true embodiment of pas-
toral values. Raised apart from all society amid the
splendor of nature in Illinois, Ethel is never comfortable
in London and persistently longs for a return to the peace
she had known with her father in the wilderness. The only
threat to her tranquillity comes naturally enough from
society. After Villiers has returned to London, because he
is determined not to expose Ethel to the financial problems
121
that their marriage would involve, she is desolate without
her lover. When she sees him amid his young and beautiful
cousins in Hyde-park, she believes he has forgotten her and
accepted a flirtatious relationship with these socialites.
Of course, he is innocent of any estrangement from Ethel
through the taint of society. His concern is "the absolute
penury, the debt, the care, that haunted him" (2:154). But
Ethel's fears are nevertheless real. Society steps between
her and her lover. Later debts will disturb them in the
first months of their marriage. Society will not accept a
man of Villiers' station working to pay his debts.
Villiers and Ethel are forced into a fugitive existence,
hiding from the bailiffs. Alone and without hope of relief,
they flee from one poor inn to another. Thus cornered by
the pressures of society, Ethel retreats into a dream of
bliss similar to Euthanasia's vision of an island retreat
with Castruccio. Ethel envisions a return to Illinois,
where, with Villiers, she could live as she once lived with
her father. The "measureless forest rose before her, and
in her ear was the dashing of the stream which flowed near
their abode" (3:61). She envisions man living in harmony
with tranquil nature.
Similar to the other novels, Ladore because of its
pastoral emphasis expresses Mary Shelley's value of nature.
Ethel's and Villiers' visit to Longfield is described in
extensive passages on picturesque nature. "Fatigued by the
122
town ... the young pair took a new lease of love in
idleness in this lonely spot" (2:230). Mary Shelley
deliberately paints "the beauty of a pastoral picture" (2:
234). Villiers becomes her spokesman for the true value of
pastoralism and the corrupting influence of civilization.
Find a people who truly make earth, its woods and
fells, and inclement sky, their unadorned dwelling
place, who pluck the spontaneous fruits of the soil,
or slay the animals as they find them, attending
neither to culture nor property, and we give them
the name of barbarians and savages--untaught,
uncivilized, miserable beings--and we, the wiser
and more refined, hunt and exterminate them:--
we, who spend so many words, either as preachers
or philosophers, to vaunt that with which they are
satisfied, we feel ourselves the greater, the wiser,
the nobler, the more barriers we place between our
selves and nature, the more completely we cut our
selves off from her generous but simple munificence .
• . • We, the most civilized, high-bred, prosperous
people in the world, make no account of nature, unless
we add the ideas of possession, and of the labours of
man . ( 2 : 2 3 7 - 3 8 )
This passage is Mary Shelley's most outspoken and direct
espousal of the pastoral view of life. Obviously, her
interest in pastoralism had not weakened with her years of
writing. However, this passage is buried amid hundreds of
pages of sentimentality and melodrama. Her earlier works
did not need such a direct expression of the value of pas
toralism, because the theme was demonstrated through the
imagery, the symbols, and the actions of the characters.
Apparently, her interest had not lessened, only her ability
to express that interest. She had grown more bitter toward
the fashionable world. In Ladore, society, more than the
123
passions of individuals, has become the major opponent of
pastoral tranquillity.
The weather, always a part of a character's reac
tion to nature, is still a part of the background of Ladore.
However, the emphasis is no longer on the observer or par
ticipant in the scene, but on the setting as such. Ladore
first meets Cornelia in a violent storm (1:100), but
neither Ladore nor Cornelia makes any reflection on the
storm. When Ethel becomes worried about Villiers, she goes
to London to seek him. A dense, yellow fog envelops London
(2:257). Similarly, Ethel and Villiers escape from the
bailiffs in a snow storm (3:73). In both instances Mary
Shelley uses the pathetic fallacy, but the characters are
not concerned about the fog or storm. The exception to the
lack of connection between the observer and the weather is
the concluding scene of the novel. Cornelia directly
responds to the influence of Spring. She believes her hap
piness is near at hand (3:300-1).
27
The hollowness of
Cornelia's redemption makes the use of atmosphere to
heighten the emotions all the more jarring to the reader.
Mary Shelley seems to be plugging into a convention, but no
longer expressing her own beliefs.
27
h 11 . 1 . . t.
Mary Se ey cannot resist pacing spring ime
conjunction with a happy ending. In Falkner, Neville,
Elizabeth, and Falkner are all reconciled in May.
.
in
124
In Falkner, the participant's relationship to
nature or the weather is usually made clear to the charac
ter involved, as well as to the reader. When the young
Neville cannot locate his mother, he compares his fate to
the scene of desolation around him--a rude hut and a
stunted tree (2:50).
28
He is aware of the connection
between his situation and the setting. When he leaves the
court after testifying in Falkner's trial, he is grateful
for the contrast offered by being alone with nature on the
sandy beach where his mother is buried (3:55). Falkner,
also, is aware of his relationship to nature. "He loved
nature--he had spent his life among her scenes" (3:278).
After he is released from prison, he walks beneath the
leafless trees in the widespread fields and remarks, "'How
sweet is nature'" (3:278). When Falkner abducts Alithea,
a storm rages. His decision to return her to her husband
coincides with the cessation of the storm. Falkner blesses
the sea and wind, as he feels the guilt pass from his Goul
(2:274). However, Alithea has already drowned in the
tides, symbolic of Falkner's passion for her.
In Falkner, the obstrusive narrator frequently
interjects a commentary about nature to make the reader
aware of a character's link with it. For example, when
28
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Falkner, 3 vols.
(London: Saunders and Otley, 1837). All references to this
edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
125
Falkner is in prison, the narrator coroments that the wigwam
of an Indian is more pleasing to an imagination "that is in
close contiguity with Nature" than a prison (3:121).
29
Later the narrator continues his raptures on nature by
stating that "there is brotherhood in the growing, open
flowers, love in the soft winds, repose in the verdant
expanse, and a quick spirit of happy life throughout, with
which our souls hold glad communion" (3:139). Through the
narrator, Mary Shelley repeatedly tells the reader, rather
than demonstrates through a character's reaction, how
important nature is to man's inner peace.
As in the other novels, Falkner does contain the
ideal of pastoral withdrawal. In this novel, Alithea and
her mother, living in seclusion in a small cottage, embody
the contentment necessary to Mary Shelley's version of
29
rt is curious that Mary Shelley does not empha
size Falkner's imprisonment as a type of withdrawal from
the world. Tompkins writes that a prison "provides that
recess (otherwise sought for on desert islands, in Arcady
or the pale allegorical realms), that limited fragment of
being, secluded from the complexities of social life, where
consciousness is forced back on itself" (Joyce Marjorie
Sanxter Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England, p. 269).
However, Falkner views his imprisonment not as a time to
reflect upon his remorse, but as "an aspect of slavery"
(3:123). Mary Shelley emphasizes the prisoner's need to
submit and the exposure and ignominy of even a suspected
criminal (3:122-23). The prison is a barrier to nature and
to freedom (3:121). Because Mary Shelley wants to retain
sympathy for Falkner and emphasize his innocence, she does
not allow him to dwell on his remorse or solitary reflec
tions while he is in prison.
126
t 1
. 30
pas ora ism. Mother and daughter live in "a cottage
clustered over with woodbine and jessamine, standing
secluded among, yet peeping out from the overshadowing
trees" (2:176). "Peace" and "tranquillity" are Falkner's
words for the dwelling, while "gentle" and "angelic" char
acterize Alithea and her mother. More endearing than the
secluded cottage is the innocent and country-bred Alithea.
Into this pastoral idyll comes the unloved boy Falkner,
who had lived with a brutal father, endured the torment of
his life at school, and later "felt the cold and rigid
atmosphere" of his uncle's home (2:171).
31
As he drives
30
Mary Shelley's short stories frequently contain
an episode of pastoral retreat in a cottage or other
sequestered location. In "The Mourner," Ellen lives alone
in a secluded cottage (Robinson, p. 88), similar to,
although not as poor as, the weather-beaten cottage of Jane
and her family in "The Smuggler and His Family" (Robinson,
p. 204). Viola in "The Heir of Mondolfo" lives in a
dilapidated and miserable cottage, which is nevertheless
shaded by a rose tree (Robinson, p. 315). This cottage is
dearer to Viola a nd Ludovico than any palace (Robinson,
p. 331). In "The Brother and Sister," Flora is pleased
in the sequestered solitude of a villa inhabited by a
peasant's family and a housekeeper (Robinson, p. 178). An
excised passage states, "she rejoiced in her seclusion,
which shut out all but Nature and her own imagination"
(Robinson, pp. 387-88). Here Flora reflects Mary Shelley's
ideal of pastoral retreat into the country.
31
The trials of Falkner's early life are similar to
the problems Neville encountered in "The Mourner" (1830).
Whereas Falkner's mice were killed, Neville's bullfinch was
destroyed (Robinson, p. 86). While Falkner escaped to the
cottage of Mrs. Rivers and Alithea, Neville hid in Windsor
Forest and eventually found solace at Ellen's cottage
(Robinson, pp. 87-88).
127
toward the cottage, unaware of the pastoral retreat he is
about to enter, Falkner feels a sense of happiness in
viewing the streams and gioves (2:175-76). He is not
disappointed in his two new friends who provide the
familial love lacking in his life. He contrasts the
inhuman treatment at his school (2:189-92) to the serene
and peaceful lessons of Mrs. Rivers (2:188). Living in
harmony with nature, Alithea and Falkner wander through
woods and over hills "with a rapture unspeakable" (2:189).
This pastoral retreat is destroyed by the death of
Mrs. Rivers and the return of the uncouth Captain Rivers,
who rejects Falkner's suit for Alithea. Turned out from
Paradise, Falkner seeks his fortune only to return and find
Alithea married and thus lost to him.
Falkner himself was responsible for the end of pas
toralism, because his passions began to awaken toward
Alithea. He did not want to disclose his passion to her
(2:207). He himself realized the destructive potential of
passion. He "wished to be but as a brother to her" (2:
207), because brotherly love was safe and would not disrupt
pastoral bliss. Alithea reciprocated his love with "sis
terly feeling" (2:212) and vowed "never to forget her
brother" (2:213). Falkner was doomed to rejection by the
violence of his emotions and by his perversion of the ideal
of brotherly affection. When Falkner returned to find
Alithea married, he assumed "a brother's part" with
128
"satanic cunning" (2:237) to lure her from her loveless
marriage. Falkner's attempts to win Alithea disguised his
sexual intentions. He offered himself as a father to her
son (2:251) not as a husband. He presented a vision for
her of pastoral bliss devoid of any taint of passion; ac
he said, "I would place her in some romantic spot, build a
home worthy of her, surrounded with all the glory of
nature, and only see her as a servant and a slave" (2:259).
However, Falkner realized that his vision of pastoral would
not be fulfilled, because Alithea placed duty over happi
ness. He was unaware that the very violence of his passion
would destroy tranquillity.
In contrast to the flower-covered cottage of
Mrs. Rivers is the small, deserted hut to which Falkner
took Alithea. He chose "a barren extent of mud and marsh,"
where "any deviation from the right path is attended by
peril" (2:255). In this setting, he would display all his
passion for her. The setting, as well as Falkner's
actions, is totally opposed to tranquil nature and pastoral
withdrawal. Ironically, Falkner would use force to obtain
peace. He suffers the highest price for his blunders in
Alithea's death and his unending remorse.
l
His failure to force himself into pastoral bliss
sends Falkner into a secluded village of Cornwall where he
intends to kill himself. Because his passions have
129
destroyed Alithea and all his hopes of peace, he withdraws
from life. However, he is saved from himself by the child
Elizabeth (1:47). Redeemed by lcve for Elizabeth, he
determines to live for her.
Through the relationship of Elizabeth and Falkner
and further through Alithea and Neville, Mary Shelley
raises the issue of parental affection as opposed to sexual
attraction between parent and offspring and the issue of
conflict between familial or brotherly affection and sexual
desire. Unfortunately, as will be seen, she does not
honestly face the issues raised, but retreats, as she did
in Ladore, into the happy endings of fairy tales.
Falkner's love for Elizabeth has a selfish and
unnatural tinge from the beginning. His desire to adopt
her sprang from a desire to mold her and teach her to lean
on him. He thinks of her as a possession. Her sympathies
and affections would be hers, "yet all modeled by him-
centred in him--to whom he was necessary--who would be
his: not like the vain love of his youth, only in imagina
tion, but in every thought and sensation, to the end of
time" (1:90). Unlike Alithea, whom Falkner never had in a
physical way but only in imagination, Elizabeth will be
totally his. That Falkner would like to substitute
Elizabeth for his lover Alithea is made apparent in his
dream in which 'he is uncertain whether the fair, beckoning
shape is Alithea or Elizabeth (3:253).
130
r
Although Falkner could objectively remind Elizabeth j
!that someday he will not be all in all to her and that
daughters leave fathers to follow their husbands in the
common law of hunLan society (3:244), these are mere words.
Actually he dreaded the thought of losing Elizabeth and
knew that "if love had insinuated itself into her heart, he
was ejected" (2:131). Like Mathilda's father and Ladore,
Falkner instinctively feared a suitor to his daughter,
because a rival would thwart his incestuous desires.
Falkner "felt how passionately he loved her" (2:124). The
name of Neville, her suitor and his rival, "brought a cold
chill with it" (2:125) partly from the knowledge that he
was responsible for the death of Neville's mother, but
partly from jealousy. Later Falkner will watch Elizabeth
with "all the jealousy of excessive affection" (3:294).
Falkner's love for Elizabeth, although not particularly
paternal, was ardent (3:127). He lived not in himself but
in Elizabeth (1:94).
On her side, Elizabeth felt toward Falkner "a sort
of rapturous, thrilling adoration, that dreamt not of the
necessity of check, and luxuriated in its boundless excess"
(1:102). As Falkner would replace Alithea with Elizabeth,
so Eli7.abeth would replace his lover, although she realized
she could not completely supersede his first love.
Elizabeth said, "I cannot be to you what she was, but you
can no more banish me from your heart and imagination than
131
you could her" (3:246-47). Elizabeth, who never communi
cated her love for Neville, would even give up her young
suitor rather than part with Falkner (3:298). Because
Elizabeth was Falkner's adopted daughter, any love beyond
the familial would be incestuous. However, the father
daughter incest is not as boldly treated as in Mathilda.
Falkner's passionate interest in Elizabeth seems even more
unethical and disrupting than a typical case of incest
because she is an orphan, who conventionally represents
vulnerable and isolated virtue,
32
which a foster father
should cherish, not violate. But in Falkner, incestuous
desires are hidden under the rhetoric of self-sacrifice for
a father's or a daughter's happiness.
Elizabeth's overt passion for Falkner, which would
disturb the familial peace, must be sublimated, so she
settled for safe and brotherly affection for Neville. When
Falkner was ill, Neville assisted her as if he had been her
brother (1:216-17). Their relationship did not develop
into a more sexual one, for in Volume Three, after he
declared his love (3:114), he still asked her to use him as
a brother and to realize that no brother ever cherished the
honor and safety of his sister more than he did hers (3:
117). Neville and Elizabeth loved ideally, purely, and
never passionately.
3 2
h d · . C t . ( [Ath ]
Jon P. Ree, Victorian onven ions ens :
Ohio University Press, 1975), p. 254.
132
r
Neville's passionate relationship, like
Elizabeth's, had been with his parent. Because Alithea
received little if any love from her husband, she made
Neville "all in all" to her by turning "the full, but
checked tide of her affections from her husband to her
son" (1:297). Neville "returned her love with more than a
child's affection" (1:297). Understandably, Boyvill was
jealous of his son and "strongly objected to the excess to
which she carried her maternal cares" (1:297). In his
turn, Neville was jealous of his father and eyed Boyvill
with indignation "on his daring to step in between them"
(1:297). Because Boyvill did not love his wife, he drove
Alithea to her child as a substitute. The incestuous
nature of Alithea's desires were apparent and Boyvill gave
this unnatural relationship between mother and son its
worst construction after Alithea's death by assuming that
she fostered morbid sensibilities in Neville to excite
depravity (1:318).
The perversion of his affections did lead the young
Neville into an unhealthy withdrawal from society. He
created a false pastoral in which the violence of his frus
trated passions for his dead mother were expressed in reck
lessness to no purpose. At that time, he lived "savage,
and secluded to a degree that admitted of no attention
being paid to him" (1:128). He shunned others and rambled
over the countryside. He found no peace and did not
133
respond to nature. Neville's incestuous desires disrupted
his life. Incest is always a destructive passion, which
Mary Shelley once treated openly in Mathilda but now will
treat only covertly. One suspects that she was unwilling
to shock the society ladies for whom her books were
intended. Therefore she only indirectly discussed such
shocking issues as incest and passionate love.
In the conclusion, these complex relationships
among the major characters are compromised. The conflicts
which would have arisen from such involved relationships
are not faced. Instead Mary Shelley ties together the
wishes of Falkner, Elizabeth, and Neville in a tidy ending.
These three main characters will remain together throughout
life. Elizabeth's conflicts need not be resolved because
she can have both Neville and Falkner. Falkner can become
a wise old sage dispensing happiness to Elizabeth and
Neville (3:318), and Neville can settle in as the devoted
son-in-law and brotherly husband of Elizabeth. Mary
Shelley must have been aware that the blissful happiness
of these three would not be believed, for the narrator
comments, "Whether the reader of this eventful tale will
coincide with every other person, fully in the confidence
of all, in the opinion that such was the necessary termina
tion of a position full of difficulty, is hard to say--but
so it was" (3:316-17).
134
In Mathilda, Ladore, and Falkner, pastoral themes
are still present. However in the latter two novels, the
forces opposed to pastoral tranquillity, such as the pas
sion of incest or the strategem of society, are only
superficially treated. Ethel and Villiers may live happily
ever after, because Ladore conveniently dies in a duel.
Ethel need not face her own incestuous desires. For no
reason, Lady Ladore converts to an appreciation of content
ment and familial responsibility. Falkner, Ethel, and
Neville, all settle in to peaceful coexistence. The oppo
sition to pastoralism is never faced. In Ladore and
Falkner, the characters can lead fulfilled lives because
they never have to face Frankenstein's Monster, plague, or
political defeat. Mary Shelley allows the characters and
the reader an easy escape from ethical or moral decisions.
Although Ladore and Falkner are far more complex
novels than Frankenstein or Valperga in terms of the
numbers of characters and their relationships to one
another, Mary Shelley's concerns have narrowed into an
expression of need for "genuine affections of the human
heart
1133
and a display of fidelity.
34
Although this moral
was also the theme of her earlier novels, Falkner and
33
Elizabeth Nitchie, "Eight Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley," KSMB 3 (1950): 29, letter of
January 31, 1833, referring to Ladore.
34
Jones, ed., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley,
2:108, letter of November, 1835, referring to Falkner.
135
Ladore are markedly inferior as novels, as William Walling
notes:
In the earlier books, the implied argument for the
primary of "the genuine affections of the heart" is
presented against a background of concrete relevance-
both Castruccio and Richard move in a world of politi
cal struggle. In Ladore and Falkner, however, the
"moral" is tested against nothing more than a back
drop of theatrical vagueness.35
Her treatment of contemporaneous society weakened the
frankness of her presentation. Both Ladore and Falkner
are marred by overlong passages of philosophizing and by an
unwillingness to face honestly the psychological conflicts
which jealousy, incestuous desire, and sexual passion would
arouse within the characters.
35
11' Sh 11 106 Wa ing, Mary ~ e ev, p. •
136
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
By examining Mary Shelley's use of the pastoral,
one becomes aware of the consistent imaginative composition
of all the novels. Running throughout them is the creation
of a self-contained pastoral world, as Lionel found at
Windsor with his family and Adrian. Mary Shelley primarily
uses the pastoral mode to focus on idyllic family life.
Because familial relationships are non-sexual and safe,
they do not threaten pastoral bliss. Idealized domesticity,
such as the DeLaceys in Frankenstein, or Mrs. Rivers in
Ladore, is enhanced by living in harmony with nature. Mary
Shelley emphasized man's relationship to nature, an impor
tant aspect of traditional pastoralism, by drawing a cor
respondence between landscape and character. Although a
man's withdrawal into nature to reflect upon his life is an
important part of her pastoralism, nature alone is not suf-
ficient. Man needs others even within nature. In The Last
Man, Lionel's early years were spent with nature, but he
was then like a wild animal. It is through Adrian and
later through his sister Idris that Lionel is able to
adjust his life into a peaceful domestic withdrawal into
137 I
...J
nature with others. Mathilda's withdrawal leads only to 7
death because she cuts herself off completely from other
persons.
For Mary Shelley, pastoralism includes a withdrawal
from complexity of interaction with the world into the
simplicity of cottage life, such as Ladore experienced in
the wilderness of Illinois. Because of the delicacy of
passive values, pastoralism can only survive in withdrawal.
When Richard tries to carry his pastoral values into the
political sphere, he is destroyed. Not only the political
world but also the violent emotions generated by ambition,
sexuality, and incest thwart pastoral bliss. Whereas
Frankenstein, The Last Man, Valperga, and The Fortunes of
Perkin Warbeck present a threat, such as ambition, to pas
toralism from within the characters, Mary Shelley's last
two novels place more emphasis on the contrast between the
country retreat and society. Particularly in Ladore, the
pressure of society itself becomes the enemy of pas
toralism. But whatever the forces might be- which oppose
pastoralism, throughout all the novels Mary Shelley uses
the pastoral to concentrate on the importance of the family
and the destructive forces of passion.
Because Mary Shelley read extensively, she was well
aware of the pastoral tradition in which she worked, as
well as of the common themes and conventions of contempo
raneous fiction and belles-lettres. A survey of the works
138
listed in Mary Shelley's Journal reveals many generally
accepted practices and conventions of contemporaneous
I , • 1
1
f1ct1on.
Probably the most common practice in Mary Shelley's
time was the use of nature to reflect man's situation.
1
Particularly prevalent in the early nineteenth century was
the Romantics' interest in man in relation to nature as a
response to the development of modern civilization. Nature
usually represented spiritual health and strength, and
authors frequently sent the hero or heroine out to muse
upon nature with little or no provocation. The development
of the common subject of man in his relationship to nature
was an important part of the fiction of the period and
received its fullest statement in the poetry of
Wordsworth.
2
In fiction, the primary spokesman for and mirror of
popular taste was Ann Radcliffe. A typical scene depicts
the heroine soothed and exhalted by a glorious sunset
3
described with the minutest of detail (p. 273). Such
1
All the works in the discussion are in Jones, ed., I
Mary Shelley's Journal, pp. 32-33, 47-49, 71-73, 88-90,
114-15, 143-44, and other entries throughout the journal.
I
2
Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, pp. 68-75. See
pp. 68-69 for a discussion of the reasons for the
Romantics' interest in nature and p. 70 for a discussion
bf La Novelle Heloise and Werther and man's relationship
nature.
to
3
Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, in Three i
139 1
scenes recur in all of her Gothic novels, as well as in the
novels of her imitators. In Pastor's Fireside, "Louis felt
I 4
the soothing aspect of nature" as he watched the sunset.
Even writings primarily about education, such as Adelaide
and Theodore included scenes of pleasure amid the beauty of
the countryside and cottage life.
5
Travel books as well
dwelt on the raptures of experiencing a serene sky and
6
smiling landscape. Not all treatments of nature were
found in ephemeral works because it was also an important
part of belles-lettres. Wordsworth chose rustics as the
principal characters in Lyrical Ballads partly because "in
that condition the passions of men are incorporated with
7
the beautiful and permanent forms of nature" (1:125).
Eighteenth Centuri Romances, ed. Harrison R. Steeves (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959). All references to
this edition will be made parenthetically in the text.
4
Jane Porter, Pastor's Fireside, 3 vols. (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1817), 3:185.
5
Madam la Contesse de Genlis. Adelaide and
Theodore or Letters on Education, 3 vols. (London: C.
Bathurst, 1784), 1:184-85.
6 h .
Jon Davis,
America 1798-1802, 2
Bibliophile Society,
Travels in the United States of
vols., ed. John Vance Cheney (Boston:
1910), 1:92.
7
william Wordsworth, "Preface to L~rical Ballads"
in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vols., ed.
W. J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1974). All references to this preface
will be made parenthetically in the text.
140
,- Hence characters, such as Michael, Lucy, or the
!Leech Gatherer, attain their worth through their relation
I
ship to natural elements. Because of the myriad
examples available to Mary Shelley in contemporaneous
fiction, it is understandable that she would involve her
characters in the natural setting. In her Gothic and his
torical novels, she incorporated the pastoral image of
nature as a mirror of inclinations of soul with the tumul
tuous image of nature as a mirror of opposing forces.
However, in the later novels, Ladore and Falkner, the use
of nature and weather are merely gratuitous. She uses
natural elements to heighten the emotionalism of a scene,
but the character remains unaware of his relationship to
his surroundings.
Closely allied to the use of nature in fiction and
poetry to reflect upon a character's situation was the idea
of a retreat from society into the natural world, which was
often contrasted with urban folly. For example, in -Claire
d' Albe, the heroine says that Fredrick's ardent imagina
tion and tender heart were strengthened by "the contempla-
8
tion of nature, the solitude of this place." In this
passage, as in the minds of most early nineteenth century
writers, solitude, contemplation and nature went hand in
glove. Solitary communing with nature was considered
BM . C . 1 2 1
aria ottin, Cara, vo s. (London: Henry
Colburn, 1808), 1:71.
141
morally uplifting
9
and strengthening to the inner life of
imagination. Great value was placed on being raised in
reti emen par t from the city or the court. The main
point of Adelaide and Theodore is to illustrate how well
the title characters will grow up because they were raised
apart in the country. In Vancenza, Elvira was raised in
retirement so that she would not fear the vicissitudes of
fortune (1:19). Similarly, Mary Shelley's Ethel in Lodore
and Perdita in The Last Man were raised in rural seclusion.
Recluses, such as Mr. Melbourne in Strathallan or
St. Aubert in Mysteries of Udolpho, make ideal fathers for
sensitive heroines, because they live apart from the
tainted world. After his retreat into the Illinois wilder
ness, Lodore becomes a suitable father for Ethel. Lodore
must retreat into the country because of an unsatisfactory
experience in society, which is a typical reason for a
character to withdraw from others. In Rhoda, the heroine
goes to live in absolute retirement after her husband's
suicide,
10
and in Strathallan, the lovesick hero shuts him
self up in seclusion to think of his Mathilda (2:249).
Usually the need to withdraw was linked to a contemplation
of nature. The wilderness in Edgar Huntly and the Lake
3:408.
9
Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, p. 69.
lORhoda, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1816),
142
Country in The City of the Plague represent pastoral
bliss in the same way as Windsor in The Last Man and the
DeLacys' cottage in Frankenstein. Even in Caroline Lamb's
Glenarvon, a tedious and confusing society novel, Calantha
compares the folly of those who live in society to the
11
tranquil gaiety produced by nature. The predominance of
seclusion as a topic in nineteenth century fiction was
matched in belles-lettres by Wordsworth's emphasis on the
the solitary and on man alone with nature in The Prelude
and The Excursion, as well as in his shorter poems.
Because of Mary Shelley's interest in pastoralism, the
prevalent use of both nature and seclusion in literature
well suited her own interests.
Mary Shelley's particular interest in incest
between both brother and sister and parent and child was
also shared by some contemporaneous novelists. Usually the
partners to an incest11ous affair are unaware that they are
biologically related. Such was the usage in Wieland's
Agathon, Lawrence's The Empire of the Nairs, and Lewis'
The Monk. Typical of this type is Vancenza in which the
heroine dies rather than marry her brother when their kin
ship is revealed. Even in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, where
propriety is never overstepped, Montalt in Romance of the
Forest has designs upon Adeline, who is first falsely
11
[caroline Lamb], Glenarvon, 3 vols. (London: Henry
Colburn, 1816), 1:279-80.
143
revealed as his daughter (p. 548) and later revealed as his
actual niece (p. 559). Mary Shelley deplored this popular
method of playing with incest without awareness on the part
f h
. 1 d 12
o the c aracters invo ve. In her fiction, the charac-
ters are at least aware of their kinship, if not always of
their incestuous impulses. She seems to have enjoyed the
suggestion of incest as a part of the atmosphere in her
novels. Other writers also allowed their characters to
skirt incest without actually bringing the issue forward.
In Manfred, Manfred's relationship with Astarte, although
extremely suggestive, is never labeled incest by Byron. In
The Milesian Chief, a character marries the sister of his
first wife, an act which Dale Kramer says would suggest
13
incest to a nineteenth century reader. Mrs. Morgan in
The Wild Irish Girl allows a father and son to be suitors
for the same girl, again suggesting incest without overtly
referring to it. Mary Shelley frequently uses this near
occasion of incest in her novels (for example, both Lodore
and Falkner show jealousy of their daughters), and the hero
is frequently raised with the heroine as her brother, thus
implying a psychological if not biological relationship.
12
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of The
English in Italy, Continental Adventures, A Novel, and
Diary of an Ennuyee," Westminster Review 6 (October 1826):
338.
13
Dale Kramer, Charles Robert Maturin (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1973), p. 49.
144
I --1
Frankenstein and Elizabeth, Castruccio and Euthanasia, l
Richard and Monina are raised together. Mary Shelley uses
this covert incest, which never reaches the conscious
level, as a threat to pastoral, as well as domestic, bliss.
In less common usage ·, incest was overtly alluded to
and portrayed. Mary Shelley's primary model for her expli
cit use of incest in Mathilda must have been Shelley
himself. In "Laon and Cythna," the main characters are a
brother and sister, who have a sexual relationship. Like
wise in "Rosalind and Helen," "a sister and a brother/
Had solemnized a monstrous curse" (lines 156-57). But his
most explicit use of incest was The Cenci. Father-daughter
incest was rarely if ever treated in either the popular
fiction or the literature of Mary Shelley's time, except
by Shelley. Mary Shelley probably followed his lead in
Mathilda, which contains her only explicit use of incest.
Because father-daughter incest was so rarely portrayed,
Mary Shelley may not have needed Godwin's disapproving
attitude to dissuade her from publishing the novelette.
Incest was the greatest threat to Mary Shelley's
primary value, domestic affection. She always stresses the
need for family life. In her use of this theme, she is
closest to Godwin. For example, St. Leon is contented
while he devotes himself to domestic pleasure and the cul
tivation of the minds of his children (St. Leon, 1:117).
After he nearly loses his family to a violent hailstorm, he
145
I
revels "in the luxury of domestic affection" (1:271).
Unfortunately, St. Leon's ambition destroys his domestic
bliss. More successful are Godwin's later characters
Fleetwood and Cloudesley, both of whom are reclaimed from
misanthropy by the power of domestic affection. Although
Godwin seems to be the primary spokesman for the power of
Jomesticity, other writers also stressed this theme. In
both Mary: A Fiction and The Wrongs of Woman or Marie by
Mary Wollstonecraft, the heroines suffer from the depriva
tion of familial affection. Both heroines are aware of the
need to have family to love. The heroine of Mary: A
Fiction comments, "In a state of bliss, it will be the
society of beings we can love .•. that will constitute
[sic] great part of our happiness.
1114
In Alicia Lefanu's
Strathallan, Lord Torrendale, father of the hero, is "fond
of the pleasures of domestic intercourse, and of retire
ment" (1:20). The Victorian interest in family life was
already a part of early nineteenth century fiction.
A less common aspect of domestic affection, which
Mary Shelley stressed, was brotherly or sisterly affection
for the beloved. For example, Lionel and Idris in The
Last Man and Elizabeth and Neville in Falkner love each
other with safe, non-sexual love. Usually, lovers in
14
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary: A Fiction (London: J.
Johnson, 1788; reprint ed., New York: Garland Press, 1974),
p. 109.
146
contemporaneous fiction love each other passionately, even
lif discreetly. However, in Caroline of Lichtfield, the
heroine believed that her love for Lindorf, her paramour,
was sisterly, not passionate. Actually she was only
infatuated with Lindorf and eventually returned to her
husband. But the idea of sisterly affection for the
beloved was rare. Usually the two types of affection were
distinguished, as they were in Emmeline, in which the
heroine r e3 lized that she felt the love of a sister for
D 1 h h
. h b h' 'f lS
e amere, rat er tan any wis to e is wi e. About the
closest one can come to Mary Shelley•s brotherly affection
between lovers is in Mrs. Radcliffe's novels, in which one
can scarcely imagine the lovers kissing. In The Castles of
Athlyn and Dunbayne, each hero marries the sister of the
other. But Mary Shelley's substitution of brotherly affec
tion for conjugal love seems unique to her. She stresses
fraternal love in marriage because it is safe and asexual;
it represents the innocent side of incestuous drives.
For Mary Shelley, pastoralism was threatened also
by ambition. Although the danger of ambition was a common
theme in the literature of Byron, Wordsworth, and even
Scott, it was not much a part of popular fiction. However,
Mrs. Robinson and Alicia Lefanu do make some mention of
15
charlotte Smith, Emmeline the Orphan of the
Castle, 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Cadell, 1788; reprint ed.,
ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis, London: Oxford University Press,
1971), p. 71.
147
ambltion as a threat to domesticity and retirement. In
Vancenza, Madam Montalba finds that ambition is ill-suited
to retirement (1:102). Whatever mention is made of ambi
tion in the novel offers the contrast between ambitious
tyranny and philanthropy. Similarly, in Strathallan,
Mathilda reflects that suffering follows ambition, which
leads the heart from domestic virtue (2:213-14). These two
commentaries on ambition, like the attitude toward ambition
in belles-lettres, coincides with Mary Shelley's belief
that political and even sexual ambition can destroy
tranquillity.
Mary Shelley probably became aware of the destruc
tive force of ambition in the literature of her day. For
example, in Childe Harold, the ambition and labors of
Napoleon are shown to be vain (canto 3, stanza 18). Like
wise in Don Juan, the vanity of man's ambition for power is
reflected in the War Cantoes (7 and 8). Don Juan himself
is a passive hero, on the order of Scott's passive heroes,
who are contrasted with the ambitious and overreaching
villains. Wordsworth also reflects upon the defeat of
man's ambitions for change in The Prelude. He shows that
the French Revolution had disasterous results because man
placed his confidence in his ability to produce change
instead of relying on the process of natural change; that
is man "had been turned aside/ From Nature's way by outward
accident" (Prelude, book 11, lines 290-91). For Wordsworth,
148
ambition destroyed what should have been man's relationship
to nature. Similarly for Mary Shelley, ambition destroyed
pastoral bliss.
Mary Shelley also viewed sexual passion as danger
ous to pastoraJ.ism. Although she termed Godwin's Imogen,
16
"a forced and fictitious pastoral," she could have dis-
covered one of her major themes in the sexually potent and
threatening figure of Roderick. His attempts to seduce
Imogen would destroy the pastoral world of which the
heroine was a natural resident and Roderick merely a pre
tender. Godwin makes it clear that Roderick's threat to
Imogen ls sexual, just as Comus' threat to the lady was
lust. When Roderic failed to persuade Imogen to capitulate
to him, he decided that "future enticements shall therefore
address themselves to her senses" (Imogen, p. 67). As he
proceeded with his plans, "his eager curiosity wandered
over her hoard of charms; and his brutal passion was
soothed with the contemplation of her disorder" (p. 71).
Similarly in The Missionary, Luxima was a sexual
threat to Hilarion. Their passion led directly to their
deaths. Luxima was aware of the danger of their passion.
She pointed out the hills which she hoped could "shut out
the universe, exclude all the evil passions by which it is
16
The Introduction to William Godwin, Imogen, A
Pastoral Romance from the Ancient British quotes from a
fragment of Mary Shelley's biography of Godwin, p. 18.
149
agitated and disordered" (The Missionary, p. 191). How
ever, these examples are not typical. Usually the fiction
of the time employs a mild love story suited to the
fainting heroine and the weak hero. In Mary Shelley's
novels, sexual passion thwarts pastoral bliss, although the
complete subversion of sex in Frankenstein is also destruc
tive. She condemns either extreme. Thus many of the
themes and conventions of contemporaneous fiction occurred
in Mary Shelley's novels as well. She read extensively and
was well aware of the common practices of the fiction
within which she was working. She even wrote a few reviews
in the literary journals of her time. In these reviews,
she made qualitative judgments about fiction and the art of
writing. Although she only infrequently alluded to the
craft of writing in her journals and letters,
17
she did
have a theory of fiction much in keeping with Wordsworth's
views on the realistic pastoral. For Mary Shelley there
were several components of good fiction, each of which was
also discussed by Wordsworth. In her review of The English
in Italy she state8, "A fie ion must contain no glaring
17
In Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley, the author quotes Mary Shelley's
friend as saying, "In fact, she was almost morbidly averse
to the least allusion to herself as an authoress. To call
on her and find her table covered with all the accessories
and unmistakable traces of book-making, such as copy, proofs
for correction, etc., made her nearly as nervous and unself~
possessed as if she had been detected in the commission of
some offense against the conventionalities of society, or
the code of morality . • . " ( 2: 315) •
i__ ___________________________ 150
improbability, and yet it must never divest itself of a
18
certain idealism, which forms its chief beauty.
Similarly, Wordsworth believed in using the real
language of men, but with "a certain colouring of imagina
tion, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the
mind in an unusual aspect" {Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,
1:123).
19
Wordsworth strove for a realistic presentation
of rustic and pastoral life, but did not hestiate "to throw
a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence
over the whole composition" {Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
1:147). In her fiction, Mary Shelley consistently strove
for verisimilitude. Ironically, contemporaneous reviews of
Frankenstein repeatedly objected to the lack of verisimili
tude in the novei.
20
Even in her later fiction, where
idealization of the characters, such as Cornelia Ladore or
Elizabeth Raby, was extreme, Mary Shelley still strove to
18
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of The
English in Italy, p. 339. She would qualify her support of
verisimilitude with the stipulation that fiction should not
misrepresent reality. "Review of Love of the Poets,"
Westminster Review 11 {October 1829): 474 and "Review of
The English in Italy," p. 340.
19
wordsworth's point is similar to Mary Shelley's
comment on the poetic power of "linking the apparently dis
similar by their real similitudes," "Review of Cloudesley:
A Tale," p. 712.
20
Lyles, Mary Shelley, An Annotated Bibliogra~hy,
p. 169, #C7, "setting probability at defiance"; Palacio,
Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre, pp. 649-50, #18, 24, and 26.
---------------------------
151J
-
make her story believable. The narrator in Falkner even
comments on hi.s hopes that the story will be believed in
spite of how perfect the characters are.
For Mary Shelley, part of the believability of a
story rested in its basis in the experience of the author.
But she believed that "copying from our own hearts" is not
21
sufficient; experience must be tempered by rules.
Wordsworth likewise based his poetry on "Invention--by
which characters are composed out of materials supplied by
observation" (Preface to Poems (1815), 3:26).
22
But like
Mary Shelley, he, too, believed personal experience was not
enough; judgment must determine "what are the laws and
appropriate graces of every species of composition"
(Preface to Poems (1815), 3:27).
The Prelude, Wordsworth's most important work, was
autobiographical. Similarly Mary Shelley's novels have
been recognized by her twentieth century critics as pri
marily biographical. She called attention to this aspect
of her novels in her letter to Mrs. Gisborne in November
1835. Mary Shelley wrote, "Have you read Ladore ... did
21
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of
Cloudesley: A Tale," p. 712.
22
william Wordsworth, "Preface
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth,
All references to this preface will be
in the text.
to Poems (1815) in
ed. Owen and Smyser.
made parenthetically
152
I
you recognize any of Shelley's and my early adventures-
when we were in danger of being $tarved in Switzerland--
la d
. . . d ,.23
and cou get no inner at an inn in Lon on. She tended
to use portraits of Shelley, Byron, Claire, and other of
24
her friends as models for her characters.
In her review of Cloudesley: A Tale, Mary Shelley
cited another aspect of writing that she valued. She
believed that an author "transfuses himself into the very
souls of his personages; he dives into their secret hearts,
and lays bare, even to their anatomy, their workings.
1125
Here, too, Mary Shelley much resembled Wordsworth, who
believed the poet should "bring his f eelings near to those
of the persons whose feelings he describes ... and
[should] even confound and identify his own feelings with
theirs" (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1:138)~ Mary Shelley
did try to bring insight into her characters. She believed
she could reveal Lionel's anguish in The Last Man because
of her own condition. She wrote in her journal, "The lat
man! Yet, I may well describe that solitary being's
23
Nitchie, "Eight Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley, " P. 3 2 •
24
Nitchie in Mary Shelley covers much identity
hunting in Mary Shelley's novels. Different critics see
different people behind the characters. Nitchie footnotes
some of the identifications other critics have made (as
p. 102 or p. 112).
25
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of
Cloudesley: A Tale," p. 7 12.
153
feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved
26
race, my companions extinct before me." Usually she
dealt in types only. She possessed little ability to con
vey the inner workings of a character. although she did try
to reveal them, as in the scene where Cornelia Lodore looks
at the trinkets after flirting with Casimir (Lodore, 1:
144-45). But such scenes reveal little, because Mary
Shelley's characters are primarily two dimensional.
Also in the Review of Cloudesley: A Tale, Mary
Shelley advocated the use of restraint and simplicity in
writing. She believed that artless works are preferable,
but rare, because "they are genuine and untaught."
27
This
valuing of simplicity is understandable in view of her
belief in pastoralism as an ideal. Wordsworth, also,
valued simplicity and chose humble and rustic life "because
in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist
in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be
more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communi
cated" (Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1:125). Wordsworth
repeatedly criticized the use of poetic diction and
elaborate language to convey ideas. He believed that the
language of rustics, like their life, was suited to his
26
Jones, ed., Mary Shelley's Journal, p. 193, entry
of May 14, 1824.
27
[Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley], "Review of
Cloudesley: A Tale," p. 712.
154
poetry because,
Such a language, arising out of repeated experience
and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far
more philosophical language, than that which is fre
quently substituted for it by Poets. (Preface,
1:125)
Unfortunately, although Mary Shelley would have agreed with
Wordsworth, and did herself believe in simplicity in
writing, she did not follow her own advice. Her novels,
especially Ladore and Falkner are clotted with consistently
overblown rhetoric. In her efforts to make a situation
clear to the reader, she desired to tell all about a topic
and then repeat it. The reader is informed of Falkner's
guilty feelings about Alithea's death more times than even
a guilty conscience would reflect upon remorse.
Mary Shelley's values for good fiction--verisimili
tude, idealization, understanding of feelings, simplicity,
and restraint--all lent themselves to pastoralism, which
would present a believable rustic life with some idealiza-
tion of the tranquillity and bliss of the countryside.
Like Wordsworth, her literary ability did not live up to
her aspirations. She was no Wordsworth of the novel.
However, Mary Shelley must be admired for what she
accomplished within her limited range. She tapped a tra
ditional genre, the pastoral, to concentrate on the impor
tance of familial affection and to emphasize the destruc
tive forces of excessive emotions and passions. Although
one could not call Mary Shelley's novels pastorals in the
155
sense in which Michael Squires refers to Eliot's, Hardy's
1
l
and Lawrence's early novels, Mary Shelley is working in the
!broadest sense of pastoral. The pastoral genre, by its
very nature, is fairly simple in tr aL~ent of maLerial and
in theme. Her novels demonstrate the value, as well as the
limitations, of withdrawal, seclusion in the country, and
retreat from passion and violent emotion. Her use of
society and the external world as a threat to pastoralism,
in for example Ladore and Falkner, is in the traditional
and conventional pastoral mode. Ambition, sexual passion,
and political power as threats to pastoralism from within
the individual are M~ry Shelley's less conventional and
more original contribution to nineteenth century
pastoralism.
Throughout the twenty years of her writing career,
her pastoralism remained the dominant theme in all of the
novels. However
1
over the years, there were some changes
in the treatment of her material. In Frankenstein, the
denial of sex was deadly, but beginning with The Last Man
and extending throughout the rest of the novels, sexual
passion itself was destructive and had to be sublimated to
fraternal affection. Mary Shelley also changed her treat
ment of weather and nature. In Frankenstein, the weather
reinforced Frankenstein's condition. Even in a novel as
late in her career as The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck,
nature intervened to help Richard. However, in the last
156
_J
r wo novels, Lodore and Falkner, Mary Shelley was merely
plugging into a convention. A response to nature was a
traditional part of pastoralism, and she must have felt
required to use the tradition.
But perhaps the greatest change in the novels
occurred because she began to use different genres. The
symbolic nature of the Gothic genre allowed an indirect
approach to the destructiveness of sexual passion and
ambition, which oppose the pastoral ideal. She honestly
expressed the fraility of pastoral bliss and the strength
of the forces which oppose the pastoral. Even the histori
cal genre allowed enough remoteness in time for her to face
the violation of the pastoral by lust for political power.
However, the conflict between pastoralism and its opposi
tion was weakened in the last novels, the domestic melo
dramas. Perhaps because she was dealing with people as
such from her contemporaneous society, rather than charac
ters from distant centuries and settings, she did not want
to confront the conflicts which would arise from opposition
to the pastoral. Therefore both Falkner and Ladore contain
unbelievable changes in the characters whose violent emo
tions would threaten pastoralism. In the Gothic and his
torical novels, Mary Shelley was willing to face the defeat
of pastoralism. She was aware of its fragility and the
danger of its defeat by man's inner drives and excesses.
In the domestic melodramas, Mary Shelley forced things to
157
work out well for the characters. The happy endings in
spite of the incredibility of such bliss without the reso
lution of the sexual conflicts with which these novels end
was mere wish fulfillment. Lady Lodore's relationship to
Saville and her daughter, as well as Falkner's relationship
with Elizabeth and Neville is not convincing.
Modern critics such as Walling, Nitchie, and Spark
are well aware that her earlier novels are her best. Con
temporaneous critics did not see her decline. Indeed most
believed that Falkner and Ladore, which have only a literal
level set against a vaguely contemporaneous society, were
her best efforts. In her own time, Frankenstein was con-
sidered bizarre and lacking in a proper moral, while The
Last Man was considered extr&vagant, unbelievable, and
morbid.
28
These critics valued Ladore and Falkner because
of their beautiful descriptions and familiar situations.
The very conventionality, which now detracts from the
appeal of these two novels, was then their most valued
aspect. The most repeated praise in the review of both
Falkner and Ladore was for their sentimentality and
delineation of feeling, both of which impeded Mary Shelley's
honest treatment of the conflict between bliss and passion.
Mary Shelley's decline as a writer was directly related to
28
Lyles, Mary Shelley, An Annotated Bibliography.
pp. 168-84 and Palacio, Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre,
pp. 648-74; both discuss the reviews of Mary Shelley's
novals.
158
her handling of pastoralism. She achieved her best affects
in her earlier novels, although nineteenth century critics,
I
who juCged by the ephemeral standards of best sellers, were
seemingly unaware of her decline.
One of the most telling aspects of her decline. was
the change in her narrative from showing through the action
of the plot to merely telling the reader what he ought to
think. In the early novels, events are presented, and the
reader is left to draw conclusions. The destructive forces
of monomaniac ambition are demonstrated in the ruin of
Frankenstein's family, himself, and his creature. In later
novels, Mary Shelley became overly explicit and intent upon
interpreting a character's actions for the reader. In
Falkner, instead of presenting a scene in which paEtoral
values would be depicted, she has Neville expostulate to
Elizabeth for pages on the importance of pastoralism.
Mary Shelley's novels may not explore the hidden
recesses of human complexity, nor do they reach high
achievement in art. It would obviously be wrong to rank
her with her contemporaries Scott and Austen. However,
within their limited range, these novels should be judged
in relation to what they accomplish. Mary Shelley was able
to adapt the traditional genre of pastoral to her concerns
for familial love and a rejection of violent emotionalism.
She wrote with a message in mind. If at times her talents
fell short of her aspirations, she nevertheless retained a
159
creative confidence throughout her career. In a letter to
Hunt, August 3, 1823, she wrote that "Valperga is merely a
book of promise, another landing place in the staircase I
am climbing.
1129
An unpublished journal entry for June 7,
1836, shows that she believed Falkner would be her best
30
novel. Unfortunately, the longer she wrote, the more
conventional her writing became; she relied on sentiment
rather than imaginative conception to interest the readers
of her day. Her treatment of pastoral themes became more
literal in Falkner and Ladore and far less symbolic.
29
Jones, ed., The Letters of Mary W. Shelley,
1:243; this quotation is from the section dated August 5.
3
o 11· M Sh 11 101
Wa ing, ary e ey, p. .
L_
160
BIBLIOGRAPHY
7
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aldiss, Brian. "Origin of the Species." Extrapolator 14
(May 1973): 167-91.
Allen, Walter Ernest. The English Novel: A Short Critical
History. New York: Dutton, 1955.
Baker, Ernest Albert.
10 vols. London:
The History of the English Novel.
H.F. & G. Witherby, 1924-39.
Bald, Marjory Amelia. Women Writers of the Nineteenth
Century. New York: Russell & Russell, 1963.
Beach, Joseph Warren. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth
Century English Poetry. New York: Russell & Russell,
1966.
Bigland, Eileen. Mary Shelley. London: Cassell, 1959.
Bloom, Harold. "Frankenstein & the New Prometheus."
Partisan Review 32 (1965) :611-18.
Booth, Michael R. English Melodrama. London: Herbert
Jenkins, 1965.
Bowers, Ritly. "Wordsworthian Solitude." MLQ 10 (1949):
389-99.
Brailsford, Henry Noel. Shelley, Godwin, and their Circles.
London: Oxford University Press, 1954.
Braudy, Leo. "The Form of the Sentimental Novel." Novel 7
(1973): 5-13.
Brissenden, R. F. Virtue in Distress; Studies i4 the Novel
of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade. New York:
Harper and Row, 1974.
Broughton, Leslie Nathan. The Theocritean Element in the
Works of William Wordsworth. Halle (Salle): Verlag
Von Max Niemeyer, 1920.
162
Brown, Charles Brockden. Arthur Mervyn or Memoirs of the l
Year 1793. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1799 and New
York: George F. Hopkins, 1800; reprint ed., edited by
Warhen Berthoff. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1962.
Brown, Norman o. Life Against Death; The Psychological
Meaning of History. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
University Press, 1959.
Byron, George Gordon Lord. The Works of Lord Byron. 13
vols. Edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge. London:
John Murry, 1898-1904; reprint ed., New York: Octagon
Books, 1966.
Callahan, Patrick J. "Frankenstein, Bacon, and the 'Two
Truths'." Extrapolator 14 (December, 1972): 139-48.
Campbell, Olwen Ward. Shelley and the Unromantics. New
York: Ru sell & Russell, 1966.
Cameron, Kenneth Neill, ed.
Shelley and His Circle.
Press, 1973.
Romantic Rebels, Essays on
Cambridge: Harvard University
Cameron, Kenneth Neill and Reiman, Donald H., ed. Shelley
and His Circle. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1961-1973~
Chambers, Edmund K. English Pastorals. Freeport, New
York: Books for Li raries Press, 1969.
Church, Richard. Mary Shelley. Folcroft, Pennsylvania:
Folcroft Press, Inc., 1928.
Cline, C. L. "Two Mary Sh lley Letters." N & Q 115
(October 28, 1950): 475-76.
Congleton, James Edward.
England 1684-1798.
Press, 1952.
Theories of Pastoral Poetry in
Gainesville: University of Florida
Cory, Donald Webster and Masters, R. E. I. Violation of
Taboo; Incest in the Great Literature of the Past and
Present. New York: Julian Press, 1963.
Cottin, Maria. Clara. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn,
1808.
Crabbe, George. Poems. 3 vols. Edited by Adolphus
William Ward. Cambridge: University Press, 1905.
163
lcude, Wilfred. "Mary Shelley's Modern Prometheus: A Study
in the Ethics of Scientific Creativity." Dalhousie
Review 52 (1972): 212-25.
I
I
Dalziel; Margaret. Popular Fiction a Hundred Years Ago: An
Unexplored Tract of Literary History. London: Cohen &
West, 1957.
I Davis , John . _T_r_a....,v,....e_l_s~_i_n_t_h_e.,,,...,.._U_n_i,,_t..,,.e_d __ S_t..,..a_t_e_s_o_f_Am ___ e_r_1_· _c_a,
, 1798-1802. 2 vols. Edited by John Vance Cheney.
I Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1910.
de Genlis, Madame la Comtesse. Adelaide and Theodore or
Letters on Education. 3 vols. London: C. Bathurst,
1784.
de Palacio, Jean. Mary Shelley dans son Oeuvre;
Contribution aux etudes shelleyennes. Paris:
Klincksieck, 1969 .
. "Mary Shelley and The Last Man: A Minor Romantic
-----
Theme." Revue de Litterature Comparee 42 (January-
March 1968): 37-48.
de Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World.
Translated by Montgomery Belgian. Philadelphia: A.
Saifer, 1940.
Dowse, R. E. and Palmer, D. J,, "Frankenstein: A Moral
Fable." The Listener 68 (August 23, 1962): 281, 284 .
• "Introduction" to Modern Library Frankenstein.
-----
New York: Dutton, 1970.
Duncan, Jeffrey L. "The Rural Ideal in Eighteenth Century
Fiction." Studies in English Literature 8 (1968):
517-35.
Dunleavy, Garth. "Two New Mary Shelley Letters and the
Irish Chapters of Perkin Warbeck." KSJ 14 (1964):
6-10.
Durkeim, Emile. Incest; The Nature and Origin of the TaboQ
Translated by Edward Sagarin. New York: L. Stuart,
1963.
Dussinger, John A.
Frankenstein."
"Kinship and Guilt in Mary Shelley's
Studies in the Novel 8 (1976): 38-55.
,...._ _________________________ 1~4j
Ellis, Katherine. "Paradise Lost: The Limits of
Domesticity in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Feminist
Studies 2-3 (1975): 55-63.
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Norfolk,
Connecticut: A New Direction Book, n.d.
Enk
~7iQ~ ~ilc Pr~k B~~t~~~ ~"~ Am~ri~~" To~~-r ~ 1.'n
\/-----, l."' ....... ..., .-.J............ .....&.. ..L.>J ... L ........... ...... ._.._ ____ ..... ~--\..\..C ::::;
Scandinavian Public Collection: A Survey. Abo: Abo
Akademi, 1964.
Erametsa, Erik. Study of the Word Sentimental and
Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth Century
Sentimentalism in England. Helsinki, n.p., 1951.
Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. The Noble Savage, A Study in
Romantic Naturalism. New York: Russell & Russell,
1923.
Ferry, David. The Limits of Morality; An Essay on
Wordsworth's Major Poems. Middletown, Connecticut:
Wesleyan university Press, 1959.
Fleck, P. D. "Mary Shelley's Notes." Studies in
Romanticism 6 (Summer, 1967): 226-54.
Fleishman, Aurom. The English Historical Novel.
Baltimore: JohnsHopkins Press, 1971.
Foster, James Ralph. The History of the Pre-Romantic Novel
in England. New York: Modern Language Association of
America, 1949.
Friedman, Donald M. Marvell's Pastoral Art. Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1970.
Gerson, Noel Bertram. Daughter of Earth and Water. New
York: William Morrow & Co., 1972.
Godwin, William. Imogen, A Pastoral Romance from the
Ancient British. London: William Lane, 1784; reprint
ed., New York: New York Public Library, 1963 .
. St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century. 3
-------
vols. London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1799; reprint ed.,
New York: Garland ?ublications, 1974.
Goldberg, M.A. "Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelley's
Frankenstein." KSJ 8 (1959): 27-38.
165
Goldsmith, Oliver. The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith.
5 vols. Edited Arthur Friedman. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1966.
Greg, Walter Wilson. Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama.
New York: Russell & Russell, 1959.
Gribble, Francis Henry. The Romantic Life of Shelley and
the Sequel. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1911.
Grylls, R. Glynn. Mary Shelley. London: Oxford University
Press, 1938.
Guerard, Albert, Jr. "Promethe1..1s and the Aeolian Lyre."
Yale Review ·33 (1944): 482-97.
Harper, Henry H. Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
(Mostly Unpublished). Boston: Bibliophile Society,
1918.
Heilman, Robert Bechtold. Tragedy and MelodLama. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1969.
Hildebrand, William H. "On Three Prometheus: Shelley's
Two and Mary's One." Serif 11 (1972): 3-4.
Hirsh, Gordon D. "The Monster was a Lady; on the
Psychology in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Hartford
Studies in Literature 7 (1975): 116-53.
Holland, Norman. "Prose and Minds: Psychoanalytical
Approach to Non-Fiction." In The Art of Victorian
Prose, pp. 314-37. Edited by George Levine and
William Madden. London: Oxford University Press,
1968.
Houghton, Walter Edward. The Victorian Frame of Mind.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957.
Johnson, Wendell Stacy. Sex and IV!a.rriage in Victorian
Poetry. Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press,
1975.
Jones, Fredrick Lafayette, ed. Maria Gisborne and Edward
E. Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals and
Letters. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951.
Joseph, Gerhard. "Frankenstein's Dream: Child as Father of
the Monster." Hartford Studies in Literature 7 (1975):
95-115.
166
F
---· Tennysonian Love; The Strange Diagonal.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.
Kahn, Arthur D.
274-83.
"The Pastoral Byron." Arcadia 8 (1975):
Kaplan, Morton and Kloss, Robert. "Fantasy of Paternity
and the Doppelganger: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein."
In The Unspoken Motive, pp. 119-45. New York: Free
Press, 1973.
Kermode, John Frank. English Pastoral Poetry, from the
Beginnings to Marvell. London: George C. Harrap &
Co., 1952.
Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1972.
Kimbrough, Robert. Sir Philip Sidney. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1971.
Kramer, Dale. Charles Robert Maturin. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1973.
[Lamb, Caroline.] Glenarvon. 3 vols. London: Henry
Colburn, 1816.
Leaves, Queenie Dorothy. Fiction and the Reading Public.
New York: Russell & Russell, 1965.
Lefanu, Alicia. Strathalla. 4 vols. London: Sherwood,
Neely, & Jones, 1816.
Lerner, Laurence. "An Essay on Pastoral."
Criticism 20 (1970): 275-97 •
.
Essays in
. The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral
___ P_o_e-try. New York: SchocKer Books, 1972.
Levine, George.
Realism."
"Frankenstein and the Tradition of
Novel 7 (1973): 14-30.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elemental Structures of Kinship.
Translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von
Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press,
1969.
Lincoln, Eleanor Terry, ed. Pastoral and Romance; Modern
Essays in Criticism. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall,
1969.
L__
167
Lovell, Ernest James, Jr. "Byron and the Byronic Hero in l
the Novels of Mary Shelley." Texas University Studies
in English 30 (1951): 138-43.
•
"Byron and Mary Shelley." KSJ 2 (1953): 35-49 .
______ . Biron: The Record of a Quest. Hamden,
Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966.
Lukacs, Gyorgy. The Historical Novel. Translated by
Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin
Press, 1962.
Luke, Hugh J., Jr.
the Solitary."
2 7 ~
"The Last Man: Mary Shelley's Myth of
Prairie Schooner 39 (Winter 66): 316-
Lund, Mary Graham. "Mary Godwin and the Monster."
University of Kansas City Review 28 (1962): 253-58.
Lyles, William H. Mary Shell~¥, An Annotated Bibliography.
New York: Garland Press, 1975.
Lynen, John F. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.
McCarthy, Bridget G. Later Woman Novelists 1744-1918.
Vol. 2: The Female Pen. Cork: Cork University Press,
1946-47.
Mccloskey, Frank H. "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." In
Humanities in the Age of Science, pp. 116-38. Edited
by Charles Angoff. Rutherford~ Fairleigh Dickenson
University Press, 1968.
Maisch, Herbert. Incest. Translated by Colin Bearne.
New York: Stein & Day, 1972.
Marshall, Mrs. Julian. The Life and Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley. 2 vols. London: Richard
Bentley & Son, 1889.
Marshall, William Harvey. Byron, Shelley, Hunt, and the
Liberal. Philadelphia: University of ~ennsylvania
Press, 1960.
Marvell, Andrew. The Complete English Poems. Edited by
Elizabeth Story Donno. New York: St. Martin Press,
1974.
168
Marx, Leo. "Two Kingdoms of Force." The Massachusetts
Review 1 (1959): 62-95.
Massey, Irvine. "Mary Shelley, Wa 1 ter Scott, and 'Maga. ' "
N & Q 207 (November, 1962): 420-21.
Massingham, Harold John. The Friend of Shelley; A Memorial
of Edward John Trelawny. New York: Appleton & Co.,
1930.
Masters, R. E. L. Patterns of Incest; A Psycho-social
Study of Incest, Based on Clinical and Historical
Data. New York: Julian Press, 1963.
Mays, Milton A. "Frankenstein: Mary Shelley's Black
Theodicy." In SF; the Other Side of Realism, Essays
on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction, pp. 171-80.
Edited by Thomas D. Clareson. Bowling Green, Ohio:
Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971.
Milhouser, Milton.
Frankenstein."
"The Noble Savage in Mary Shelley's
N & Q 19 0 ( June 19 4 6 ) : 2 4 8 - 5 0 •
Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the
Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York
University Press, 1969.
Moers, Ellen. "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother."
The New York Review of Books 21 (March 21, 1974):
24-28.
Moore, Helen. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Philadelphia:
J.B. Lippincott Co., 1886.
More, Doris. "Byron, Hunt and the Shelley's; New Light on
Certain Old Scandals." KSMB 10 (1959): 120-28.
Moynahan, Julian. "Pastoralism as Culture and Counter
culture in English Fiction 1800-1928." Novel 7
(1972): 20-35.
Nelson, Lowry, Jr. "Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel."
In Pastoral and Romance; Modern Essays in Criticism,
pp. 259-67. Edited by Eleanor Terry Lincoln.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Nitchie, Elizabeth. "Eight Letters by Mary Wollstonecraft
1
Shelley." KSMB 3 (1950} : 2 3-32.
169
_____ . Mary Shelley. New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1953 .
-----
. "Mary Shelley's Mathilda; An Unpublished Story
and Its Biographical S1.gn1.f1.cance." Studies in
Philology 40 (1943) :447-62.
•
"Mary Shelley Traveller." KSJ 10 (1961): 29-
42 .
• "Shelley at Eton: Mary Shelley vs. Jefferson
---~-
Hogg . " K SMB 11 ( 1 9 6 0 ) : 4 8 - 5 4 .
. "The Stage History of Frankenstein." South
---A-t-lantic Quarterly 41 (1942): 384-96.
No~man, Sylvia. Flight of the Skylark. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1954 .
. "Mary Shelley; Novelist and Dramatist." In On
---s-h~e-lley, pp. 55-99. Edmund Blunden, Gavin de Beer-,-
and Sylvia Norman. London: Oxford University Press,
1938 .
. "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." In Shelley and
---H~1.-s Circle, pp. 397-422. Edited by Kenneth Neill
Cameron and Donald H. Reiman. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1970.
Owen, Robert Dale. Treading my Way; An Autobiography.
New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967.
Owenson, Miss, Lady Morgan. The Missionary, An Indian
Tale. New York: The Franklin Co. & Butler & white,
1811.
Ozolins, Aija. "The Novels of Mary Shelley from
Frankenstein to Falkner." Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Maryland, 1972.
Parrish, Stephen. "Michael and the Pastoral Ballad."
In Bicentenary Wordsworth Studies in Memory of John
Alban Finch, pp. 50-75. Edited by Jonathan
Wordsworth. Ithica, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1970.
Peck, Walter Edwon. "Biographical Elements in the Novels
of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley." PMLA 28 (1923):
196-219 ..
170
Peckham, Morse. Beyond the Tragic Vision; The Quest for
Identity in the Nineteenth Century. New York:
G. Braziller, 1962.
Perkins, David. The Quest for Permanence; The Symbolism
of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1959.
Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown, The Evolution of
Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells.
Berkeley: · University of California Press, 1970.
Poggioli, Renato. The Oaten Flute. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1975.
Pellin, Burton Ralph. "Mary Shelley as the Parvenue."
Review of English Studies 8 (July 1967): 9-17 .
. "Philosophical and Literary Sources of
-----
Frankenstein." Comparative Literature 17 (1965):
97-108.
Pope, Alexander. Pastoral Poetry and an Essay on
Criticism. Edited by E. Audra Williams and Aubrey
Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.
Porter, Jane. Pastor's Fireside. 3 vols. London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brpwn, 1817.
Prescott, F. C. "Wieland and Frankenstein." American
Literature 2 (May 1930): 172-73.
Proper, Coenraad Bart Ann. Social Elements in English
Prose Fiction 1700 to 1830. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris,
1929.
Raglan, Fitzroy Richard Somerset. Jocasta's Crime; an
Anthropological Study. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1933.
Rahill, Frank. The World of Melodrama. University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967.
Rance, Nicholas. The Historical Novel and Popular Politics
in Nineteenth Century England. New York: Barnes &
Noble Books, 1975.
Railo, Eino. The Haunted Castle. New York: Humanity
Press, 1964.
Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. [Athens]: Ohio
University Press, 1975.
171
Rennie, Eliza. Traits of Character. London: Hurst &
Blackett, 1860.
Renwick, William Lindsey. Literature 1789-1815. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1963.
7
l
"Review of Frankenstein," The Quarterly Review 18 (January,
1818): 379-85.
Rhoda, 3 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1816.
Rieger, James. "Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of
Frankenstein." Studies in English Literature 1500-
1900 3 (1963): 461-72 .
. "Shelley's Paterin Beatrice." Studies in
-----
Romanticism 4 (Summer 1965): 169-84.
Robinson, Mary. Vancenza or the Dangers of Credulity.
2 vols. London: Printed for the Authoress, 1792.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet; Theocritus and
the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969.
Rosetti, Lucy Maddox. Mrs. Shelley. London: w. H. Allen,
1890; Facsimile reprint ed. Folcroft, Pennsylvania:
Folcroft Press, Inc., 1969.
Rossetti, William Michael, ed. Diary of John William
Polidori. London: E. Mathews, 1911.
Rubenstein., Marc A. "'My Accursed Origin': The Search for
the Mother in Frankenstein." Studies in Romanticism
15 (1976): 165-94.
Sambrook, A. J. "The English Lord and the Happy Husband
man." Studies in Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century
57 (1967): 1357-75 .
-----
. "An Essay on Eighteenth Century Pastoral, Pope
to Wordsworth." Trivium 6 (1971): 103-15 .
• "A Romantic Theme: The Last Man." Forum for
------
Modern Language Studies 2 (1966): 25-33.
[Sanburn, Franklin Benjamin, ed.] The Romance of Mary
Shelley, John Howard Payne, and Washington Irving.
Boston: Biblophile Society of America, 1907.
172
Santiago, Luciano P. Children of Oedipus: Brother-Sister
Incest in Psychiatry, Literature, History, and
Mythology. Roslyn Heights, New York: Libra
Publishers, 1973.
Scott, Walter. "Remarks on Frankenstein." Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine 2 (March, 1818): 613-20.
Scott, Walter Sidney, ed. Harriet and Mary. [London]:
Golden Cockerel Press, 1944.
Sencourt, Robert. "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley."
Contemporary Review 192 (October 1957): 215-18.
[Shelley, Lady Jane Gibson and Shelley, Sir Percy Florence,
ed.] Shelley and Mary. 4 vols. London: Chiswick
Press, 1882.
Shelley, Lady Jane Gibson, ed. Shelley Memorials; From
Authentic Sources. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.,
1859; reprint ed., St. Clair Shores, Michigan:
Scholarly Press, 1970.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Falkner. 3 vols. London:
Saunders & Otley, 1837 .
. Frankenstein. London: Lackington, Hughes,
__ ....,.,,..._.,,..
Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818; reprint ed., edited
with introduction by James Rieger. New York:
Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1974 .
. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance.
___ 3_v_o-ls. London: H. Colburn & R. Bentley, 1830 .
. The Last Man. London: Henry Colburn, 1826;
-----
reprint ed., edited by Hugh J. Luke, Jr. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965 .
• The Letters of Mary w. Shelley. 2 vols. Edited
___ b_y_F-redrick Lafayette Jones. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1946.
•
Ladore. 3 vols . R. Bentley, 1835.
---~-
. Mary Shelley, Collected Tales and Stories.
Edited by Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976 .
. Mary Shelley's Journal. Edited by Frederick
___ L_a_f~a-yette Jones. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1947.
173
. Mathilda. Edited by Elizabeth Nitchie.
-----
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
•
1843.
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and
2 vols. London: Edward Maxon, 1844.
[ ___ ]. "Review of Cloudesley; A Tale." Blackwood's
I Edinburgh Magazine 27 (May 1830): 711-16.
[ ] . "Review of The English in Italy, Continental
--A-a-ventures, A Novel, and Diary of an Ennuyee. "
Westminster Review 6 (October 1826): 325-41.
[ ] . "Review of Loves of the Poets." Westminster
---
Review 11 (October 1829): 472-77 .
. Valperga; or the Life and Adventures of
-----,C~a-s-truccio Prince of Lucca. 3 vols. London:
G. & W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe
Shelley. 10 vols. Edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter
E. Peck. New York: Gordian Press, 1965 .
. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 2 vols.
-----E~d-=--ited by Fredrick Lafayette Jones. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1964.
Sheppard, Alfred Tresidder. The Art and Practice of
Historical Fiction. London: H. Toulmin, 1930.
Small, Christopher. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Tracing
the Myth. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1972.
Smith, Charltotte. Emmeline: The Ornhan of the Castle.
2nd ed. London: Thomas Cadell, 1788; reprint ed.,
edited by Anne Henry Ehrenpreis. London: Oxford
University Press, 1971.
Smith, Elton Edward and Smith, Esther Greenwell. William
Godwin. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.
Smith, Hallett Darius. Elizabethan Poetry. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952.
Smith, James L. Melodrama. London: Methuen & Co., 1973.
--
Smith, Robert Metcalf in collaboration with Ehrsam, T. C.
and Walters, L.A. Shelley Legend. New York: Charles !
Scribner's & Son, 1945.
174
Snell, Bruno. "Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual
Landscape." In The Discovery of the Mind; the Greek
Origins of European Thought, pp. 281-309. Trans
lated by T. G. Rosenmeyer. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1953.
Spark, Muriel. Child of Light. Hadleigh, Essex: Tower
Bridge PublTcations, 1951 .
. "Mary Shelley: A Prophetic Novelist." The
-----..--
Listener 45 (February 22, 1951), 305-6.
Spark, Muriel and Stanford, Derek. My Best Mary. New
York: Roy Publishers, 1953.
Squires, Michael. The Pastoral Novel. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1974.
Steeves, Harrison Ross. Before Jane Austen; The Shaping
of the English Novel in the Eighteenth Century. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.
, ed. Three Eighteenth Century Romances. New
-----,,Y~o-r-k: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959.
Stein, Robert. Incest and Human Love; The Betrayal of
Soul in Psychotherapy. New York: Third Press, 1973.
Stevenson, John. "Arcadia Re-settled; Pastoral Poetry and
Romantic Theory." Studies in English Literature 7
(1967): 29-38.
Stocking, Marion Kingston. Journals of Clair Clairmont.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Stockwell, LaTourette. "Two Unpublished Letters of Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley." Dublin Magazine 8 (April
1933): 4-5.
Summers, Montague. The Gothic Quest; A History of the
London: Fortune Press, 1938. Gothic Novel.
Swingle, L. J. "Frankenstein's Monster and Its Romantic
Relatives; Problems of Knowledge in English
Romanticism." Texas Studies in Language and
Literature 15 (Spring 1973): 51-64.
Tate, Allen.
Essays_ .
The Forlorn Demon: Didactic and c~·tical
Chicago: Regnery, 1953.
L
175
-------
Taylor, John Tinnon. Early Opposition to the English
Novel; rrhe Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830.
New York: King's Crown Press, 1943.
Theokritos. Idylls of Theokritos. Translated by Barriss
Mills. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University
Studies, 1963.
Thorslev, Peter L., Jr. "Incest as Romantic Symbol."
Comparative Literature Studi~ 2 (1965): 41-58.
1
Toliver, Harold E. Pastoral Forms and Attitudes.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Tompkins, Joyce Marjorie Sanxter. The Popular Novel in
England 1775-1800. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1961.
Trelawny, Edward John. Records of Shelley, Byron, and the
Author. 1878; reprinted. New York: B. Blom, 1968.
Varma, Devendra P. The Gothic Flame. New York: Russell &
Russell, 1957.
Virgil. Ecologues of Virgil. Translated by C. Day Lewis~
London: Jonathan Cape, 1963.
~----· Georgics of Virgil. Translated by C. Day Lewis.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Walling, William A. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1972.
Ward, A. W. and Waller, A. R., ed. The Cambridge History
of English Literature. 15 vols. Cambridge: The
University Press, 1907-27.
Wilson, John. City of the Plague. Edinburgh: Archibald
Constable & Co., 1816.
Wise, Thomas James. A Shelley Library; A Catalogue of
Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Autograph letters
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Harriet Shelley, and Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley. London: Printed for Private
Circulation Only, 1924.
White, Newman I., Jones, Frank L., and Cameron, Kenneth N.
An Examination of the ~helley Legend. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951.
l
176 I !._ ______________________________ _
Whitmore, Clara Helen. Woman's Work in English Fiction
from the Restoration to Mid-Victorian Period. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Mary; A Fiction. London: J.
Johnson, 1788; reprint ed. New York: Garland Press,
1974.
Wordsworth, William. The Letters of William and Dorothy
Wordsworth. 2 vols. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt,
2nd ed. Revised by Chester L. Shaver. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1967-70 .
. The Poetic Works of William Wordsworth. 5 vols.
-----
Edited by Ernest de Selincourt. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1940-49 .
. The Prelude. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt.
--~=---=-
2nd ed. Revised by Helen Darbishire. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1959 .
. The Prose Works of Willi am Wordsworth. 3 vols.
-----
Edited by w. J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
Wotton, Mabel E. Word Portraits of Famous Writers.
London: Richard Bentley, 1887.
Wright, Walter Francis. Sensibility in English Prose
Fiction 1760-1814; A Reinterpretation. Urbana: The
University of Illinois, 1937.
Young, David P. Heart's Forest. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972.
177

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The social ecology of delinquency in Los Angeles county: a structural analysis

PDF

Women and the city, 1870-1920

PDF

An examination of a concept of image in presidential campaigning: the Humphrey-Nixon compaign of 1968

PDF

Application of finite field transforms to image processing and x-ray reconstruction

PDF

Investigations of the oxidative metabolism of phagocytizing polymorphonuclear leukocytes

PDF

Public utility valuation: a study of the problem of determining in public utility rate cases the "rate-base" upon which a fair return should be predicated

PDF

The minorities in higher education: undergraduate characteristics of law students

PDF

Action of DDT on two clones of a marine green alga Pyramimonas

PDF

Administrative reform in Sudan: A human resource perspective

PDF

Anatomy of the aftermath of cover-ups: the lessons taught by the dynamics and processes of coverage of President Nixon's post-Watergate hospitalizations.

PDF

Effects of imposed background noise on listening comprehension of primary children

PDF

An investigation of the chronic physiological changes due to relaxation training and practice

PDF

The origins of American involvement in Vietnam: a thematic content analysis of the Pentagon Papers

PDF

The role of the campus instructor in student achievement in community college television instruction

PDF

The Muslim World and its efforts in Pan-Islamism

PDF

The employment of California women line administrators in K-12 districts in the years 1968, 1972, and 1976.

PDF

A computer assisted analysis of Stephen Crane's grammatical style

PDF

To preserve good humor and perfect harmony: Guy Carleton and the governing of Quebec, 1766-1774

PDF

An investigation of oxygen-pulse time course as a measure of cardiorespiratory adaptation to exercise

PDF

The Rorschach technique applied to the evaluation of educable mentally retarded secondary school age students

Asset Metadata

Creator McGuire, Karen (author)

Core Title Pastoralism in the novels of Mary Shelley

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 1977-06

Publication Date 05/11/1977

Defense Date 05/11/1977

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

Format theses (aat)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC25322

Unique identifier UC25322

Identifier Ph.D. E '77 M148 (call number),etd-McGuireKar-1977.pdf (filename)

Legacy Identifier etd-McGuireKar-1977

Document Type Dissertation

Format theses (aat)

Rights McGuire, Karen

Internet Media Type application/pdf

Type texts

Source 20230120-usctheses-microfilm-box5 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu