The Invention of Mary Shelley: Fictional Representations of Mary Shelley in the Twentieth Century

The Invention of Mary Shelley: Fictional Representations of Mary Shelley in the Twentieth Century Selina Packard Goldsmiths College Submitted for the degree of PhD in the University of London Abstract This thesis is an examination of fictional representations of the life of Mary Shelley. As such it forms a contribution to two main areas of study: the postmodern debate about the relationship between fictional and factual discourses, and also to the perception of Mary Shelley in criticism. Chapter 1 constitutes a historical survey of the biographies of Mary Shelley, from her death to the present, which are the factual sources for most of the fictional texts examined in the thesis. Chapter 2 goes on to examine the prose fictions in which Mary Shelley appears as a fictional character in the years from the 1930s to the 1960s. In these we find her determined by her role as wife to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and she is thus presented as the standard heroine of romance fiction. In Chapter 3, study of later prose fictions from the 1960s to the present reveals a figure determined more by her role as author of Frankenstein. In Chapter 4, I look at her representation on stage, and show how her persona is determined by developments in late twentieth-century theatre, and she thus becomes beleaguered wife to the radical Percy. In Chapter 5, which looks at her presentation on screen, it is her visual appearance that is the dominant force in her construction, and she appears as Pandora, beautiful but deadly releaser of evils. Finally, in Chapter 6, which looks at the more unusual media in which she has appeared as a fictional character, her construction as mother to Frankenstein, birther of literary monsters, is foregrounded. In conclusion it becomes possible to see how the nature of her persona has been determined as much by genre, medium, and historical context as by biographical facts. It also becomes possible to see how her fictional representation is emblematic of the entanglement of factual and fictional discourses in general. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 6 1. A Short History of Mary Shelley Biography. 17 2. 'Kiss me, Percy!': Mary Shelley in Prose Fictions, 1930s -1960s. 51 3. The True Story of Frankenstein: Prose Fictions, 1960s - Present. 82 4. She Comes to Life: Mary Shelley on Stage. 125 5. The Modem Pandora: Mary Shelley on Screen. 160 6. Mother of her Text: Mary Shelley in other media. 178 Conclusion 219 Appendix I: Poems by Erica Jong and Liz Lochhead 221 Appendix II: Transcript of Dead Man Talking. 231 Bibliography 241 3 Acknowledgements Thanks must go first and most obviously to Chris Baldick, my supervIsor, for laughing in all the right places, and on top of everything else, improving my grammar. I've only now realised just how much this thesis was shaped by him. But also to Lucia Boldrini and Helen Carr who provided more general intellectual support. I must thank too, the Student Awards Agency for Scotland, for making this work possible at all, and the British Library and the University of London Library, for simply existing. Honourable mentions go to Goldsmiths and Queen Mary and Westfield College Libraries, and the Barbican Library for filling in the gaps. I would also like to thank the kind staff at the BFI for sparing time and patience in helping me use their film catalogue. Without Merryl Jones and Maria Macdonald, the secretaries of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, the department wouldn't function, and so for that, and for not rolling their eyes every time I appeared with yet another question, I must thank them. For intellectual stimulation and general emotional support, I am happy to thank Justine Baillie, Alex Braithwaite, Caroline Day, Alex Lines, Sarah Martin, Emma McEvoy, Keren Omry, Alison Stenton, Catherine Spooner, and David Vick. For more specific instances of practical help and/or advice I must thank Claer Barratt, Fred Botting, Rhona Brown, Forkbeard Fantasy, Timonie Greene, Susie Shanks, Gordon McMullan, Catherine Packard, and Ralph Parfect. I would also like to thank Mike Lukey, for making sure I didn't stay completely sane, but without whom my brain simply wouldn't be the same. And [mally, to my family: my dad Jay, my sister Catherine, and my nieces Finn and Ciara. 4 Dedicated to the memory ofmy mother, Rina Packard, 1932-2000. 5 Introduction Over the last twenty to thirty years increasing critical attention has been paid to the entanglement of the discourses of fiction and history. This problematic relation has been central to debates surrounding postmodemism in general. Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), her study of the aesthetic strategies of this period, describes 'the problematizing of history by postmodernism' as 'the guiding concern of the entire book'. 1 She argues that 'what the postmodern writing of both history and literature has taught us is that both history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute systems of signification by which we make sense ofthe past [ ... ]. In other words, the meaning and shape are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past "events" into present historical "facts".'2 One of those historiographic systems is the practice of biography which gives shape and meaning to the lives of individual historical figures, and which shares in this problematic relation between factual and fictional discourses. Hutcheon points out that 'the provisional, indeterminate nature of historical knowledge is certainly not a discovery of postmodemism,.3 And the same holds true of the overlapping genres of biography and fiction: nearly a hundred years ago, Moderns like Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf were theorising about and practising biography that questioned the notional boundary separating it from fiction. However, in recent decades, it is not only biographers who have knowingly engaged fictional narrative strategies, but fiction writers too who have used history, and particular historical figures, deliberately to draw attention to their fictive practices. This practice has been addressed by critics in a variety of formats: already mentioned is Linda Hutcheon, who coins a phrase for these new kinds of fiction, 'historiographic metafiction', and devotes the second half of her book to discussion of various examples of this sub-genre, some of which (often discussed in other critical studies ofthis area) are, E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975), Graham Swift's Waterland (1983), Salman Rushdie's Shame (1983), and Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (1985).4 1 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988), p. xii. 2 Hutcheon, p. 89 (Hutcheon'S emphasis). 3 Hutcheon, p. 88. 4 Although a number of Ackroyd's novels could fit the description of 'historiographic metafiction': The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Chatterton (1987), or The House ofDoctor Dee (1993) for instance. 6 These kinds of texts have also had whole monographs devoted to them, for example Lucia Boldrini's Biografie Fittizie e Personaggi Storici (1998), and Naomi Jacobs' The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction (1990). There have been articles written on representations of individual historical figures, such as those collected together in Biofictions: The Rewriting of Romantic Lives in Contemporary Fiction and Drama (eds. Martin Middeke and Werner Huber, 1999), which includes essays on particular fictional representations of Mary Shelley. There have also been collections of articles on a single historical figure, such as The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years (eds. Uwe Boker, Richard Corballis and Julie A. Hibbard, 2002). Until now, however, there has been no study ofthe historical development of the fictional persona of a singular historical figure, and it is one of the aims of this study to address this absence. A study of this kind is necessary because in tracing the development of the fictional persona of a particular historical figure it becomes possible to see, in detail, to what extent representations of this kind are affected by the genre and/or medium in which they appear, and also more importantly, how they are affected by historical context. In this way, it becomes possible to trace the popular perception of a historical figure and to see how this is affected by (and, indeed, affects) changes in critical perception. More broadly, it also becomes possible to trace how far fictional and historical discourses overlap with each other: to trace how and to what extent biographical perceptions affect fictional and conversely, to what extent the kinds of fiction a historical figure appears in is determined by the facts of their biographical narrative. In the case of Mary Shelley specifically, it becomes possible to see how far her character becomes elided, not to say confused with the nature of the work she produced, and to see the tendency towards biographical criticism in the interpretation of her work as part of this larger, fictional, tendency. It is a tendency to which almost any writer or fiction-creator who became interested in Mary Shelley and her circle contributed. In tracing the connections between biographical and fictional texts it also becomes possible to see how Mary Shelley could be seen as partly responsible for this particular way of perceiving her persona, and that it was not necessarily wholly due to a male critical establishment (or female critics accidentally playing into their hands) attempting to minimise her creative abilities. 7 In this way, it becomes clear why it should be the fictional persona of Mary Shelley singled out for discussion, rather than a historical figure with a better known persona - someone like Byron, for instance. He could be seen as one of the more obvious choices for a study of this kind: he practically existed as a fictional persona during his own lifetime, and that persona has, over the years, solidified into an icon.

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