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