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Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley Domke, Rebecca (2013) Romantic disillusionment in the later works of Mary Shelley. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4626/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Enlighten: Theses https://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley Rebecca Domke PhD University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies Department of English Literature May 2013 (c) Rebecca Domke, May 2013 2 Abstract Romantic Disillusionment in the Later Works of Mary Shelley argues that, despite a growing consensus among modern critics that Mary Shelley’s works, and especially the novels written after Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, are of lesser quality than her earlier novels, especially Frankenstein, the later works deserve more attention than they have hitherto received. The title Romantic Disillusionment, at once establishes my disagreement with those of Shelley’s critics who insist that her work is continuous with her father’s, her mother’s and her husband’s. No doubt, she rehearses various elements that characterise her family’s writings, revisits their favourite themes, but she does so in a way that is distinctively her own. The thesis locates in Shelley’s work a more general sense of disillusionment with Romantic ideas, amongst them a reverence for the sublime, a confident faith in the power of the imagination, and a belief in human perfectibility, ideas current in her father’s writing and discussed in the circles in which he moved, as well as those she joined as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s lover and wife. The influence of her parents and husband and other contemporaries is traced with particular attention to the disillusionment that she at first shared with them and later came to feel in them. Shelley often invokes Romantic ideals, but characteristically she invokes them only to ironise or undermine them. The thesis is organized in six chapters: an introduction is followed by four chapters on the four novels Shelley wrote after her husband’s death, and a conclusion. The introduction gives an overview of Shelley’s early novels, Frankenstein and Valperga, as well as the novella Matilda, trying to establish how far Shelley even in her early writings did not simply, as seems to be the consensus, follow her family’s notions. This is followed by a chapter on The Last Man, which discusses the opposition between the public and the private life, between a life devoted to public activity and a life spent in seclusion. This chapter also explores Mary Shelley’s understanding of creativity and in particular her interest in biography. Indeed, all Mary Shelley’s later novels can be understood as 3 disguised biographies, substitutes for the book that she had been forbidden to write, the biography of her husband. This chapter also discusses the function of the plague as, like death itself, a leveller, the destroyer not simply of humanity but of all human ideals. I understand the novel in conclusion as a parodic challenge to Godwin’s and P. B. Shelley’s belief in human perfectibility and the millenarian cast of mind that the two men shared. The following chapter on The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck examines Shelley’s single later experiment in the historical novel. Clearly she is responding to the achievement of Walter Scott, as well as to his extraordinary commercial success, but once again hers is an active response. Unlike Scott, she does not pretend to offer a disinterested description of historical events but instead undertakes a passionate engagement with history. She effects, I will argue a self-conscious feminization of the genre of the historical novel. The chapter on Lodore focuses on education, especially the question of female education that has preoccupied not only Shelley’s mother, but many of the most significant female intellectuals of her mother’s generation. In the penultimate chapter, I argue that Falkner is an appropriate culmination of Shelley’s career as a novelist. It is a novel in which she incorporates disguised the ‘Lives’ of Godwin and Shelley, as well as a novel in which she attempts a vindication of the reputation of her mother. It is a novel in which she is especially concerned with her relationship with her father, but for her it is a literary as much as a personal relationship. The novel is modelled, I shall argue, on Hamlet, the play in which Shakespeare explores most complexly the fraught relationship between the parent and the child, and it can also be understood as a re-writing of her own father’s most successful novel, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams. 4 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 9 1.1. Frankenstein 13 1.2. Valperga 16 1.3. Matilda 31 2. The Last Man 35 2.1. The Private and the Public Spheres in The Last Man 36 2.2. Biography and The Last Man 47 2.3. The Plague in The Last Man 73 2.4. Creativity and the Meaning of Art 79 2.5. Conclusion 86 3. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck 90 3.1. Perkin Warbeck: Historical Context and Overview 91 3.2. The Literary Context 95 3.3. Sir Walter Scott, Chivalry, and the Historical Novel 102 3.4. Women and Chivalry 120 3.5. Autobiographical Elements in Perkin Warbeck: The Vindication of a Husband and a Wife 124 3.6. Conclusion 128 4. Lodore 130 4.1. Educational Writing 133 4.2. Education in Lodore 135 5 4.2.1. Ethel Lodore’s Education 139 4.2.2. Edward’s Education 144 4.2.3. Cornelia Santerre’s Education 147 4.2.4. Fanny Derham’s Education 152 4.3. Consequences of the Various Educations 154 4.3.1. Consequences of Ethel’s Education 155 4.3.2. Consequences of Cornelia’s Education 158 4.3.3. Consequences of Fanny’s Education 164 4.4. Conclusion 167 5. Falkner 169 5.1. Falkner and Biography 171 5.2. Education in Falkner 180 5.3. Conclusion 197 6. Conclusion 198 7. Bibliography 200 7.1. Primary Literature 200 7.2. Secondary Literature 203 6 Acknowledgements I would like to kindly thank my supervisors Dorothy McMillan and Richard Cronin who supported and helped me throughout this enormous task. Many thanks also to Professor Rolf P. Lessenich, who helped develop the idea for my applications to the Scottish Universities. I would also like to thank the University of Glasgow which made it possible for me to follow my husband to Germany and at the same time complete this thesis from afar. Additionally, I would like to thank the University Library in Konstanz and the Würtembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, as well as the City Library in Großbottwar, which all helped making this transfer, and studying without a University in close proximity so much easier. Thanks to the organizers of the Koblenz Conference ‘Romantic Explorations’ who published my article ‘Feminizing the Historical Novel: Mary Shelley’s Perkin Warbeck’ in the Conference Proceedings and kindly allow me to use part of its contents for this thesis. Furthermore I want to thank the Bodleian Library in Oxford, who opened their invaluable treasures, especially the Abinger Collection, to me. Last but certainly not least I would like to thank my husband, family and friends, who by permanently asking me, when I would finish this thesis, just pushed me enough to finally complete it, despite all adversities. Thank you all! 7 Author’s Declaration I declare that except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of others, that this dissertation is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for any other degree at the University of Glasgow or any other isnstitution. _____________________________ Rebecca Domke 8 Definitions/ Abbreviations Since Mary and Percy Shelley share the same last name, for reasons of clarity I am using Mary, Mary Shelley or Shelley to refer to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy, Percy Bysshe Shelley or P. B. Shelley to refer to her husband. 9 1.Introduction For much of her life Mary Shelley worked surrounded by other writers, philosophers and thinkers. Even when she was very young, her father received frequent visits from the most important authors of the time, Coleridge being perhaps the most eminent example. You could even argue that her parents formed a little coterie in themselves, although not one, of course, that she lived in, since her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth, Mary Shelley only knew her through her literary works and William Godwin’s memoir, which Mary Shelley read over and over again. After she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, they lived for some time in exile in Switzerland, where together with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron, and Dr John Polidori they formed the group from which emerged Frankenstein, probably one of the most famous novels to come out of a creative network. Godwin in particular, influenced Mary’s work practices – he taught her to take notes, construct chronologies and use cross-references – and he also influenced her ideas. His fascination with the impostor Perkin Warbeck, for example, suggested the subject of her fourth novel.
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