Romancing experience: the seduction of Mary Shelley's Matilda.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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IN THE DOZEN OR SO YEARS THAT MARY SHELLEY'S MATILDA HAS RECEIVED sustained critical attention, the eponymous character's fictional autobiography has been read persistently through the lens of Shelley's own life. Nothing new, this tendency dates back to one of the first critical accounts of the novel: Elizabeth Nitchie's 1943 introduction to the then unpublished manuscript. "Certainly," Nitchie asserts with confidence, "Mary is Mathilda." (1) More recently, critics have tempered their claims. If few have concluded, with Nitchie, that Shelley and her fictional character are synonymous, however, the biographical collapse of the author into her text remains a critical commonplace. One of the first critics to take seriously Shelley's "other" fiction, Anne K. Mellor reads Matilda as the author's expression in fantasy of her relationship to her father, William Godwin. In Matilda, Mellor suggests, "Mary Shelley both articulates her passionate devotion to her father and takes revenge for his cruelty toward her. At a psychobiographical level, the novella is pure wish-fulfillment.... But in her fantasy, Mary reverses the power dynamic of her relationship with Godwin. Now it is the father, not the daughter, who loves with an overwhelming and self-destructive passion." (2) Terence Harpold adopts a similar hermeneutic when he reads the story and its transmission as revelatory of the author's primal fantasy to replace her lost mother as object of her father's affection. The "submission of the novel to Godwin signals Mary's effort," Harpold maintains, "to engage him in the seduction fantasy" which the novel stages. (3) Even readings of the narrative which pursue a more nuanced understanding of the relation between text and life still presuppose the relative transparency of Shelley's motives in writing and in circulating the story. (4) Tilottama Rajan suggests, for example, that Matilda "can be fully appreciated only with reference to the author's life." (5) Arguing that Godwin is the text's "fictional subject" (60), and that, "however disguised its biographical origins might have seemed to its author, [Matilda] was clearly a daughter's accusation against her father" (49), Rajan reads Shelley's decision to send the manuscript to her father as a self-conscious act of abjection. Invoking the author's biography to broaden the text's historical and political significance, this kind of critical approach to the text simultaneously reinforces an image of Shelley that is, admittedly, appealing: in these readings, Matilda's author is seen to defy both the daunting influence of her family circle, and the reigning principles of Romanticism itself. (6)

If there has been a surfeit of psychobiographical readings of Matilda of late, this is hardly a new development in Shelley criticism. Mitzi Myers has observed, for example, that "Matilda [is] fast becoming the competitor of Frankenstein as overdetermined family romance." (7) The proximity of Shelley's biography to the narrative details of much of her fiction has, of course, readily lent itself to a blurring of the bounds between text and life. This critical tendency is one which Shelley herself could be seen to sanction inasmuch as she draws, in her letters, explicit connections between events in her life and the substance of her writing. Certain kinds of political criticism--feminist criticism not least of all--have raised the solidification of these connections, moreover, to the level of a critical imperative in attempting to oppose the unconditional occlusion of the author's life from consideration of her texts. Yet what are the implications of suggesting, as many readers of Matilda have, that the value of the text can be fully measured only with reference to the author's life? What function of literature do we thus presuppose? And how are we to ascertain what form the relation of text to life might, or ought to, take? More than merely questions that I would bring to my reading of Matilda, these questions are ones that Shelley's text itself forcefully poses and explores. Consequently, the exemplary power of Matilda, I shall argue, lies less in its status as yet another instance of thinly-veiled Shelleyan life-writing, than in the challenges it articulates to one of the most well-established interpretive modes through which Shelley's corpus has been received.

In approaching these questions, I will suggest that it is precisely on the example which Matilda provides that we must resist any simple attributions of transparency or strict causality to the relation between the author and her text. Rather than presuppose its reference, Shelley's narrative itself is centrally concerned with the nature of the relation between text and life. In recounting her history, Matilda works to make sense of the events which have seemingly governed her fate; the connections that she draws among the traumas of her past, and the self-consciousness with which she reflects on this act of connecting, call into question the foundations of history, memory, and self-understanding. The text's thematic concern with problems of knowledge, moreover, extends equally to the generic register in which the tale unfolds. Shelley constructs this story not only in the first person, but as an autobiography, the specular structure of which accentuates the blurred boundaries between the text's subjects of knowledge: between Matilda as author of her life story, Matilda as author in her life story (as subject of her own understanding), and Shelley as author of Matilda, whose own history stands in such uneasy proximity to her text. By articulating this tale within a genre that necessarily foregrounds the relation between author, text, and reference, Shelley draws attention to the inherently unstable structure of self-knowledge, perception and understanding, and insists on the highly mediated nature of these relations.

Beyond raising these epistemological issues, the problem of genre in Matilda is important in its own right, and is one that demands to be considered on at least two registers. Most immediately, the autobiographical form of this text engages more directly than any of Shelley's other fiction the questions of biographical reference which have dominated criticism of her writing; because of the self-consciousness with which Shelley takes up these questions in Matilda, it provides an especially powerful site from which to interrogate her investigation of the relation between the author's text and her life. More broadly, it is significant that Shelley's exploration of autobiography takes place through the extensive citation and redeployment of a range of generic forms and fictional tropes that are thoroughly familiar in the literary culture of the period. Her articulation, for example, of Matilda's life history by way of conventional romance structures and the virtually ubiquitous form of the incest narrative serves to foreground the fact that the process of Matilda's life-writing is--far from a search for an adequate narrative form within which to represent the singular and original character of her experience--a highly mediated affair.

In an important concluding episode of the autobiography, in which Matilda refers to herself as a "fragile mirror," the text makes manifest the specular relation entailed in her perception of the landscape, and by extension, of herself. Having completed the narration of her life drama, Matilda addresses an apostrophic farewell to the scene outside her window:

Your solitudes, sweet land, your trees and waters will still exist, moved by your winds, or still beneath the eye of noon, though what I have felt about ye, and all my dreams which have often strangely deformed thee, will die with me. You will exist to reflect other images in other minds, and ever will remain the same, although your reflected semblance vary in a thousand ways, changeable as the hearts of those who view thee. One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken, crumbled to dust. But everteeming Nature will create another and another, and thou will loose nought by my destruction. (8)

Literally addressed to the landscape, this apostrophe retrospectively presides over the narrative it concludes, and demands that the "Nature" it contemplates must be broadly understood. In addressing the processes...

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