Mary Wollstonecraft's poetry and philosophical contributions

¶ … Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly and her works. Mary Shelley's best-known work is Frankenstein, or a Modern Prometheus, a work of fiction that has been remade into myth, film, and legend around the world. However, Shelley wrote several other works of fiction, including this daring and eye-opening novella that was suppressed during her lifetime because of its scandalous content. Mary Shelley's work was often controversial and darkly tragic at the same time. These elements come together in this novel of father-daughter incest, which she felt at least partially paralleled her own tragic life.

It is important to understand elements of Shelley's life to see just how this novel parallels her own short and difficult life. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in August 1797 in London. Her mother died eleven days after she was born, and her father raised her along with her half-sister. Both of her parents were well-known writers of the time, and so it seems fitting that Mary would follow in their footsteps. In addition, her parents had led scandalous lives before they met and married. Her mother had an illegitimate child before she met William Godwin, and they had only married five months before she was born, because they did not believe in marriage. However, they wanted their daughter to be legitimate (and in fact, Gilbert gave Mary her mother's name to honor her memory). Her mother, also named Mary Wollstonecraft, had also attempted suicide twice, and when these details came out after her death, it marked the family and Mary (Teuber). It is interesting that her own life was also filled with scandal, controversy, and tragedy, much like that of her parents.

Mary grew up extremely close to her father until he married Mary Jane Clairmont when she was still a young girl. Her relationship with her stepmother was strained, and it placed a wall between father and daughter. Mary never attended a formal school, and gained all her knowledge from her father, a tutor, and endless reading. She always enjoyed writing, and had a children's story published in 1808, her first real piece of published writing. She first met the man who would become her husband at her father's home, where Percy Bysshe Shelley was a protege of the forward thinking Godwin.

Mary and Shelley began an affair, even though he was married at the time. Her father got wind of the affair, and banned Shelley from the house. After he attempted suicide, Mary and Shelley fled to France, where they traveled throughout Europe. It was here that she wrote Frankenstein, completing it when she was only eighteen (it was published two years later). The couple eventually married, after Shelley's pregnant wife committed suicide, which again set off scandal and shock in European society (Teuber). Mary seemed to be carrying on the tradition of her mother by scandalizing society and flaunting its values, much like the heroine in Mathilda does. In fact, Mathilda has often been called Mary's most autobiographical novel.

During their eight brief years together, Mary and Shelley had four children and one miscarriage that nearly killed her. Only one child survived to be an adult. One died eleven days after being born, and the next died of malaria. It was after these two deaths that Mary wrote Mathilda, at a time when she was extremely depressed and despondent. One of her biographers notes, "Written at the end of the tragic nine months during which both her children had died, this novelette was the fruit of the deep depression of spirits into which Mary fell. Her black moods had made her difficult to live with" (Nitchie 11). Indeed, Shelley and Mary's relationship suffered during this time, and the novel also illustrates this. A literary critic states, "She told Maria Gisborne in 1823 that 'Mathilda foretells even many small circumstances most truly -- & the whole of it is a monument of what now is'" ("The Journals of Mary Shelley" 442). She felt she was foretelling the future with the novel, and that it followed many of the tragic circumstances of her own life. Percy, impatient with her depression, engaged in affairs, and Mary knew about the. However, the tragic nature of her life would continue, her beloved Shelley drowned in 1822, leaving her a widow with two children to raise. She edited his poems, dedicated works to him, and continued writing. She died in 1851.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Mathilda in 1819, but due to its scandalous content, it was never printed until 1959. The story tells the tale of Mathilda, a young woman, who, just like Mary, loses her mother only a few days after her birth. Mathilda is raised by her father, a fine member of the community, at least so it seems. Mathilda spends time in Scotland, just as Mary did in her youth, and she marries a "beautiful" poet. However, the dark side of the novel is difficult to ignore. First, Mathilda is a victim of incest; her father "adores" her in all too familiar ways. Eventually, his guilt drives him to commit suicide, and drives Mathilda into isolation and depression. The comparisons are clear, and Mary does nothing throughout the novel to dispel them. It is dark and full of depression, just as Mary's life was at the time.

Mary lost the closeness of her father when she eloped with Shelley, and the incestuous love in Mathilda may be a reference to this. He finally forgave her for running away and finally marrying Shelley, but he could not console her in her grief for her two children. The father in the novel is clearly modeled after her own father, and it could have been her way of reproaching him for his lack of understanding of her grief and depression. For example, in the novel she writes of her father's impending suicide, "He was about to die! My blood froze at the thought: a sickening feeling of horror came over me that allowed not of tears" (Shelley 54). In fact, Mathilda's grief over her father's death (because of his incest with her), parallels her own estrangement from her father, and her grief at "losing" the man who was so important and influential in her early life. Indeed, she asked her father to help her find a publisher for the manuscript, but he refused. Another author notes that her father refused to offer it to publishers, finding it "disgusting." She writes, "Censored' by Godwin, who was asked to secure a publisher for it but found its focus on father-daughter incest 'disgusting,' and then left behind by Mary Shelley herself as she turned from the political to the domestic novel" (Rajan). Again, her father disappointed her and disapproved of her work, which carries through in the theme of this dark and tragic novel.

Mary also had the feeling that she was prophesizing what was happening in her own life in the pages of the novella. Another critic notes, "Not long afterwards she wrote to another friend about the death of the father in her novella Mathilda. 'Is not the catastrophe strangely prophetic but it seems to me that in what I have hitherto written I have done nothing but prophecy what has arrived' (MSL, 1:336)" (O'Sullivan 151). Many aspects of the novel have nothing to do with Mary's own circumstances, but she remained convinced she was foretelling the future. In a way, she was. Her father remained estranged, (a form of mental "suicide," removing him and his influence from her life), and her husband did die tragically, although it was not suicide. The heroine of the novel ends up spending her life alone and in isolation, and that describes much of Mary's life after Shelley died.

Of course, the topic of incest was scandalous at the time, and publishers refused to print the novella. However, many people believe the novel's scandalous content was only part of the real theme of the novel. One critic notes, "Instead of exalting the incestuous bond, Mellor believes that Mathilda "calls into question the bourgeois sexual practices of her day,... which defined the young, submissive, dutiful, daughter-like woman as the appropriate love-object for an older, wiser, economically secure and 'fatherly' man" (Teuber). Mary was known as a freethinker, which she learned from her very liberal father, and she often bucked the Romantic ideals of the time concerning womanhood and love. Her own conduct was certainly scandalous, but she learned to question society's beliefs at a young age, and her attempt in this novel may have been to show the subjugation of women, rather than the act of incest, an act of power and control, indeed.

The novel was a strong way for Shelley to work through her grief and depression after the deaths of her children, but in addition, it was an attempt to show her own participation in the strain in her marriage. Critic O'Sullivan continues, "Mathilda's secret knowledge of incest sets her apart from human society. Despite her isolation, which is partially self-imposed, Mathilda has a strong desire to make a final and complete communication with the outside world" (O'Sullivan 152). This communication with the outside world includes sections in the novel that clearly show she feels blame and guilt at her depression and how it has made her treat her "beautiful" poet, Woodville. She writes, "But now also I began to reap the fruits of my perfect solitude. I had become unfit for any intercourse, even with Woodville the most gentle and sympathizing creature that existed. I had become captious and unreasonable: my temper was utterly spoilt" (Shelley 76). In fact, she believed her own depression and temperament helped drive Shelley to indulge in extra-marital affairs, and because of this, she became even more depressed and morose. She shows this in Mathilda, in a way to assuage her grief and guilt at placing even more of a strain on her marriage.