Mary Shelley & Gothic Feminism

 

 

As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and a political philosopher named William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley may have been destined for intellectual greatness.  In many ways she did fulfill the philosophical and literary visions her mother once had, but she championed for the female sex in a manner far removed from her mother’s ideals.

When people think of English novelist, biographer, short story and travel writer Mary Shelley, chances are they do not equate her with feminism.  By contemporary standards she would not be considered a feminist  were she alive today, nor is it believed that she ever considered herself to be a feminist.  Shelley did, however, consistently use her writing to highlight the social system underlying 19^th Century British culture that dictated the legal, financial, class, religious, and education realities of women.  According to Diane Long Hoeveler, author of Gothic Feminism: the Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes, female novelists like Shelley weren’t trying to reshape their worlds subversively through their writing.  Instead, they sought to construct a literary setting that would “allow their female characters and by extension their female readers a fictitious mastery over what they considered an oppressive social and political system.”  For these reasons, Shelley’s most popular work, the Gothic novel Frankenstein:  or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), as well as many of her other works including the short story The Mortal Immortal, function as “a coded and veiled critique of all of (the) public institutions that have been erected to displace, contain, or commodify women”. (Hoeveler)

Raised by her father after Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after childbirth, young Mary adopted her father’s liberal political views.  At seventeen she developed a romantic relationship with one of his political followers and future acclaimed author, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley.  The two would eventually marry, but M. Shelley remained a sort of political radical throughout her life, facing ostracism from much of society for her views on marriage as much as those she held on societal reform.  Best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein, Shelley made other literary contributions in regards to feminism.   The Mortal Immortal (1833), one of several short stories written for money years after Frankenstein, tickles readers’ imaginations with the possibility of making mortals immortal, and was written during a time when many women, including Mary Shelley, hoped to believe that there may be a way to equate women with men.

In Iconoclastic Departures:  Mary Shelley After ‘Frankenstein’, edited by Syndy Conger and Frederick Frank, it is stated that “if Wollstonecraft could barely imagine a brave new world for women inhabited by sensitive men, Mary Shelly puts her fictional women into that world and reveals that the sensitive male hero is a mad egoist intent on corrupting feminine values and destroying all in his despotic quest for mastery.”  Such a hero can be found in both male characters of The Mortal Immortal, the philosopher Cornelius and his hapless assistant Winzy—Conelius seeking to master death with eternal life, and Winzy seeking to master love in order to forget his beloved Bertha.   Both quests end up destroying any true happiness for Cornelius, Winzy or Bertha.

 While Wollstonecraft urged women to effectively “masculinize themselves and shun ‘feminine’ values as weak and debilitating, M. Shelley understood all too well the consequences of such behavior for both men and women.” (Conger & Frank) She wrote in her journal, written 21 October 1838 and published by Oxford: Clarendon, 1987, “the sex of our material mechanism makes us quite different creatures [from men]—better though weaker.  In TMI, the physical body of Winzy is valued.  It is an object to be preserved for eternity.  Bertha’s body, along with the other women described in the story—the Old Crone, for example—are devalued and flawed to worthlessness.

By the time TMI was written, a Female Gothic formula had evolved.  “The female Gothic heroine became the figure to purge the world of aristocratic corruption.  Such a woman, virginal, innocent, and good, assumed almost religious significance because within the system of the novel, everything at stake was represented by her and her intact body,” writes Jennifer H. Williams in Literature by Women, Mary Shelley.  Williams further states that Gothic Feminism was born when women such as M. Shelley realized that women had not only formidable and varied external enemies, but an internal enemy in the form of their own sexual difference, perceived by others as a weakness.  TMI can be read as a critique of the female Gothic formula as well as a departure from the feminist ideals of Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft.   Almost everyone in Mary Shelley’s stories is a victim, but her female characters are victims of victims and thus doubly pathetic and weak. (Conger & Frank)

 

References:

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Gothic Feminism:  The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontes"

Mary Shelley and Gothic Feminism:  The Case of 'The Mortal Immortal' in Iconoclastic Departures:  Mary Shelley after 'Frankenstein' 150-163. eds. Syndy Conger and Frederick Frank.  (Rutherford:  Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997)

(21 October 1838) The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paul R. Feldman & Diane Scott-Kilvert. [Oxford:  Clarendon, 1987] 2:553-54)

Williams, Jennifer H.  Questions Concerning Religion:  Literature By Women, Mary Shelley.  http://questionsconcerningreligion.org/E290/10-23-mary-shelley. Web

 



The Prints & Propaganda of James Gillray

     The 18th century's Age of Enlightenment saw the introduction of the political and satirical cartoon.  These hand-coloured etchings or engravings were both highly topical and engaging.  No illustrator played a more important role in the propaganda campaigns of the time than England's James Gillray.  Gillray's grotesque and fiendish depictions of French revolutionaries as dangerous sans-culottes took the stereotype of the revolutionary projected by many anti-radicals across the Channel to the extreme.

     Born in 1757, James Gillray was apprenticed to a letter engraver in London during his youth.  When he began to find the work boring, however, he deserted his master to join a troupe of strolling players.  When that endeavour failed, Gillray returned to London and eventually became a student at the Royal Academy before setting himself up as a portrait painter.  When he received no commissions, he returned to producing engravings for print shops.  While his first prints were devoted to social subjects, in 1782 Gillray began to concentrate on political caricatures.  Party warfare among Whigs and Tories was carried on with great vigor and bitterness during Gillray's time--much as it is today in American politics.  Gillray's wit and humor along with his keen sense of the ludicrous earned him a top place among political caricaturists.  Following the years of the 1789 French Revolution, English satirists, including James Gillray, focused their attention more and more past internal Whig and Torie party disputes and toward the mobs of "mad, bloodthirsty revolutionaries" in France.

The Zenith of French Glory: the Pinnacle of Liberty (1793)

     Following the publication of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), James Gillray produced the piece pictured above.  Influenced by Burke's opposition to the fervour of revolution in France, (Burke's work did much to alter the English conservatives' views of the typical Frenchmen from a "poor, frog-eating laughing-stock", as PT from Propagandatheory.com writes in a post entitled Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire From England, to that of a dangerous fiend) Gillray set about illustrating his own dismay at the progress of the French Revolution. 
     The Zenith of French Glory's primary figure, the sans-culotte (translated literally as having 'no trousers') is noticeably without the fashionable knee-breeches that characterized the wealthy of England and sits atop a city lamp bracket.  Three members of the clergy are hanging below him, and he rests his foot on one of their heads.  He is wearing a Phrygian cap, or liberty bonnet, and plays a fiddle while Paris burns in the background.  In the middle distance, Louis XVI is facing his execution by guillotine.  The mob gathered to watch the spectacle are differentiated only by the outlines of their red liberty bonnets.  At the bottom of the illustration is scrawled:  "The Zenith of French Glory:  The Pinnacle of Liberty, Religion, Justice, Loyalty & all the Bugbears of Unenlightened Minds, Farewell!"

Un petit souper a la Parisienne:  or A Family of Sans Culottes refreshing after the fatigues of the day (1792)

  Following the September Massacres of 1792, a series of mob violence that overtook Paris and marked the start of the 'radical phase' of the French Revolution, Gillray composed Un petit souper (above).  The piece confirms the widely held English notion of French barbarity.  The sans-culottes are even more grotesque, obscene, and fearsome.  The character at the head of the cannibalistic feast sits atop the "Properite de la Nation", the prosperity of the nation, and eats an eyeball.  Corpses litter the floor.  Young sans-culottes devour intestines while an elderly grandmother roasts an infant's body on a spit.  Gillray's picture of depravity conveys the message that the revolution is to blame for producing such monsters.  In Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England, PT argues that "Most of the 'golden boys' of the Revolution would eventually be devoured by the forces they helped unleash," in the same way that the figures in Un petit souper cannibalize their victims.  At the bottom of the piece appears the following poem:

"Here as you see, and as tis known,

Frenchmen mere cannibals are grown;

On Maigre Days each had his dish,

Of soup, or Sallad, Eggs, or Fish;

But now tis human flesh they gnaw,

and every day is Mardi Gras."

     Analyzed from an historical perspective, James Gillray is among the most popular and prolific print satirists of the golden age of English caricature.  While he is much revered, he is also much reviled for the way he portrayed French Revolutionaries during a time when shock waves of fear and anxiety traveled to England from France.  Like most Englishmen, Gillray believed that life was better in his part of the world and he feared that the Revolution could turn that world upside down.  His prints, along with those of similarly minded artists', heavily influenced his countrymens' ideas about the Revolution and the French people in general.  Sometimes blatant and other times more subtle, James Gillray's techniques are still being employed by satirists today seeking to draw attention to political issues and personalities.

References:

PT, Propagandatheory.com, Propaganda of the French Revolution--Satire from England (2012)

James Gillray www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk Web

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911) Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed.) Cambridge University Press

John Clare, a Tortured Soul

For my first analysis, I have chosen John Clare's Romantic poem I Am.  Written in late 1844 or 1845 while Clare was institutionalized in Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, the melancholic piece was first published in 1848.  I was drawn to the poem as an inquiry into the identity of self by a man who spent the last twenty-two years of his life confined to an asylum--doubly so when I learned that Clare spent many years believing himself to be other literary greats such as Lord Byron and William Shakespeare.  In short order I was fascinated.  What lay at the root of  Clare's psychological troubles?  How did his mental state affect his work?  Was he just another example of a highly gifted man plagued by madness?  As an individual known as Thoughtful Versifier writes on authspot.com "Clare isn't the first person to feel this way, and he surely won't be the last.  That age-old question that slews of contemplative and despondent men have asked themselves--who am I really?"  I had to learn more.

John Clare was born and raised in rural Northamptonshire--a memorial that stands in his honor there calls him "The Nothamptonshire Peasant Poet".  He began writing poetry in an attempt to save his parents from being evicted from their home, and his rural upbringing and experience as an agricultural child labourer served his fledgling writing career well.  He received high praise and much success with his first two books Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery and Village Minstrel and Other Poems, both of which were suffused with the rustic dialect of his style.  His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced" citing the way Clare so powerfully wrote of "nature, rural childhood, and the alienated and unstable self".  Shortly after the release of Clare's second collection of poems, however, rural poetry went out of vogue, and his next publications were unsuccessful.  The rapid shifts from moderate poverty to success to near-pennilessness appear to be the catalyst for the severe bouts of depression Clare began to experience.  Coupled with increasing alcoholism, a growing sense of alienation after a move facilitated by friends and London patrons into a cottage with his wife and six children seems to have escalated Clare's instability to include bouts of erratic behavior and a growing dissatisfaction with his own identity.  An ever-growing burden to his wife Patty and his children, Clare voluntarily entered an asylum for medical care.  While institutionalized, Clare re-wrote famous poems and sonnets by Lord Byron and claimed credit for Shakespeare's plays before returning to original works and producing perhaps his most famous poem, I Am.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXTSNe2vOI8&feature=player_detailpage

I Am, a poem of bitter laments, woeful contemplations and hopeless longings, is written in three stanzas of regular iambic pentameter.  The first stanza includes the repetition of the phrase "I am", an indication of the author's inquiry into identity of self.  The second stanza appears to describe his mental condition:  his confusion and dementia "Into the living sea of waking dreams", his depression "Where there is neither sense of life or joys, But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems".  The third and final stanza is comprised of religious imagery.  Perhaps due to a lack of understanding of mental health diseases in the 1800's, this stanza appears to be Clare calling on God to ease his affliction and illustrates the author's hope for a spiritual afterlife or at least a peaceful "sleep" or rest entombed in earth.

After considering which analytical role to adopt for my analysis of I Am as directed by my instructor, I settled on The Marxist, not so much for any socioeconomic issues raised in the work (there appear to be none), but more for the socioeconomic issues that so greatly impacted Clare and ultimately led to the writing of the poem.  Clare may have been born with a predisposition to depression and alcoholism, he may have suffered from bouts of melancholy under the best conditions--most artists do--but I believe his progressive mental illness was largely fueled by the situational depression he suffered as a result of the realities of the socioeconomic conditions of England in the early 19th Century.  He was a writer that pulled himself out of poverty through his art, suddenly incapable of supporting himself or his family when the market for his work no longer embraced him.  Once a rural child labourer, he knew success both critical and financial for a short time before being plunged back into poverty and near obscurity.  I read I Am as the beautiful yet heartbreaking lament of a man struggling both figurative and literally to rediscover who he is after the world has told him that he and his brand of art isn't what they want anymore.


References

Bate, Jonathan (2003) John Clare:  A biography; Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Thoughtful Versifier (2009) Analysis of I Am; Authspot.com