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Gender, Authorship and Male Domination: Mary Shelley's Limited CHAPITRE DE LIVRE « Gender, Authorship and Male Domination: Mary Shelley’s Limited Freedom in ‘‘Frankenstein’’ and ‘‘The Last Man’’ » Michael E. Sinatra dans Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 95-108. Pour citer ce chapitre : SINATRA, Michael E., « Gender, Authorship and Male Domination: Mary Shelley’s Limited Freedom in ‘‘Frankenstein’’ and ‘‘The Last Man’’ », dans Michael E. Sinatra (dir.), Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, p. 95-108. 94 Gender cal means of achievement ... Castruccio will unite in himself the lion and the fox'. 13. Anne Mellor in Ruoff, p. 284. 6 14. Shelley read the first in May and the second in June 1820. She also read Julie, 011 la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) for the third time in February 1820, Gender, Authorship and Male having previously read it in 1815 and 1817. A long tradition of educated female poets, novelists, and dramatists of sensibility extending back to Domination: Mary Shelley's Charlotte Smith and Hannah Cowley in the 1780s also lies behind the figure of the rational, feeling female in Shelley, who read Smith in 1816 limited Freedom in Frankenstein and 1818 (MWS/ 1, pp. 318-20, Il, pp. 670, 676). 15. On the entrenchment of 'conservative nostalgia for a Burkean mode] of a and The Last Man naturally evolving organic society' in the 1820s, see Clemit, The Godwinian Novel, p. 177; and Elie Halévy, The Liberal Awakening, 1815-1830, trans. E. Michael Eberle-Sinatra 1. Watkin (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961) pp. 128-32. 16. lt is significant, too, that in the few instances in Valperga where Shelley actually introduces quotations from Romantic poets, they are unidentified and tend to be constituted as inheritors of an ltalian tradition. The most [T]he man of genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the striking instance occurs with 'Tis said, that some have died for love'. Not present is still constituted by the future or the past. only has Shelley chosen an example of Wordsworth's experimentation (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria)l with the canzone but the poet is also seen as giving voice to what the ficti­ tious Euthanasia had felt six hundred years previously: 'she would exclaim Frankenstein, Paula R. Feldman rightly says, is: as a modern poet has since done; 'Thou, thrush, that singest loud, and loud, and free ... '. Twice Shelley quotes briefly from 'Ode to the West Wind', the only poem in terza rima by P.B. Shelley to be published in his a nove! about itself and about its author's relation to it. At its heart lifetime (V 191, 204, 233 [II. viii, Il. x, lll. 227]). lies Mary Shelley's individual struggle with the act of creation, a 17. Bennett, Evidence, p. 363. struggle characterized by fear as muchas by ambition.2 18. On the character of Beatrice see Barbara Jane O'Sullivan, 'Beatrice in Valperga: A New Cassandra', in Other MS. 19. Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley's Early Navels: 'This Child of Imagination and Ever since Ellen Moers's Literary Women (1976), Frankenstein has been Misery' (Basingstoke: Macmillan and Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, recognized as a nove! in which issues about authorship are intimately 1993) pp. 99-100; Joseph Lew, 'God's Sister: History and Ideology in bound up with those of gender. The work has frequently been related Valperga', Other MS, p. 171. to the circumstance of Shelley's combining the biological role of 20. Bennett, Evidence, p. 363. mother with the social role of author.3 The creation of the Creature and Victor's attempt at transgressing the rules of nature have been widely understood as an expression of what Chris Baldick calls '[Shelley's] mixed feelings, both assertive and guilty, of the adolescent for whom fully adult identity means both motherhood and (in her circle) authorship too'.4 Authorship and its gendering are no less, I would argue, central thematic concerns in The Last Man. Indeed, both Shelley's first and her third nove! evidence a struggle, in paratext and text, dver whether she is to be present as a (pseudo-) male author, a female author, a usurped author or an author of indeterminate gender, a struggle in which the 'fear' and 'ambition' mentioned by Feldman in the opening quotation are key operatives. Io take ambition first: Shelley writes as the daughter of two success- 95 96 Gender Gender, Authorship and Male Domination 97 ful and well-known authors, who is expected and encouraged to private sphere, Shelley seems to adhere, at least publicly, to the become an author herself, as she herself testifies in her Introduction prescribed norm. to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein: But do Frankenstein and The Last Man reflect this adherence? Or can they be perceived as working within the normative in such a way that My husband ... was from the very first, very anxious that I should they embody a criticism of it? Is her adoption of male protagonists prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page and male narrators in these novels a tribute - a homage even - to the of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation. men in her life, particularly her father, P.B. Shelley and Byron, or a (F 176)5 transgressive act encoding a protest against male domination?11 In engaging with these questions, I find it helpful to refer to Gérard Moreover, purely literary mothers also existed. In 1818 there was an Genette's theory of the paratext, that is, everything that does not established tradition of writers - notably Ann Radcliffe - who in the belong directly to the literary text itself and yet can be perceived as previous generation had developed gothic into a genre that an ambi­ part of the work: title page, name of the author, epigraph, dedication, tious and gifted young woman might respectably attempt without preface, afterword and notes. All these materials constitute a special thereby being 'unsexed'. space 'around' the text that is both a transitional space and a transac­ Yet Shelley frequently betrays awareness of the strains of writing in tional space. 12 Readers have access to the literary text via the preamble a male-oriented society where the image of woman as passive and of the paratext. They may not pay attention to the elements consti­ docile, embodying beauty and delicacy, still is dominant, an aware­ tuting the paratext but these elements are nevertheless crucial to the ness in which fear and insecurity are present. In one of the most understanding of the work. interesting elements of the 1831 preface to Frankenstein, anxiety about being 'unsexed' is uppermost. This emerges from her attempt to 1 The title answer the question which she declares most people naturally ask her: 'How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very Both titles indicate the content of the navels: Frankenstein is the story hideous an idea?' (F 175).6 Nor could Radcliffe's novels have been of Victor Frankenstein and The Last Man is the narrative of the plausibly invoked by Shelley as offering a precedent for and thus a last man on earth. Both end with their chief characters left defence of Frankenstein. Shelleyan gothic would certainly have 'Companionless/As the last cloud of an expiring storm',13 Lionel incurred the censure of Radcliffe, who strongly criticized the literary Verney as last of his race, the Creature as the first and last of his use of horror (as distinct from terror or suspense) in her posthumously (unnamed) race. But both titles are also the sites of strong misreading. published 1826 article on the supernatural in poetry.7 Frankenstein has been famously misunderstood to refer to the Writing The Last Man gave Shelley the opportunity to create a space Creature. I would suggest that the long-standing confusion in the in which she could express her anxiety about her future as a writer, as mind of the public between Frankenstein as the creator, that is Victor well as to recount the part of her past life that she missed so terribly. 8 Frankenstein, and Frankenstein the unnamed Creature, epitomizes It also allowed her to set down in writing her sense of insecurity the displacement of discourse and naming in the novel. What is not within London society upon her return to England in August 1823.9 named in the text acquires an identity through the confused misin­ This insecurity, however, was expressed and assuaged rather than terpretation of the nove! by the reader. exorcized by the act of writing. Even though the publication of three An analogous misinterpretation has historically dogged the title, novels and her husband's Posthurnous Poerns had by the mid-1820s The Last Man, as a result not only of contemporary revièwers' know­ established Shelley's fame, she seems to disclaim any role as a woman ingness about the gender of the author but also of an ambiguity in the of letters. In a letter of 5 January 1828 she protested that 'my sex has title itself. Although Lionel Verney, the main character of the novel, precluded all idea of my fulfilling public employments' (MWSL II, is the Last Man once the plague has eliminated the rest of humanity, p. 22). 10 Confined within the limits of a society that attempts to contemporary readers of the novel identified Shelley, the female impose a passive role on women and to enclose them within the wdter, with the narrator. The anonymous reviewer of The Last Man in 98 Gender Gender, Autlwrship and Male Domination 99 The Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c.
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