Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Mathilda, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Audra Dibert Himes (essay date 1997)

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Audra Dibert Himes (essay date 1997)

SOURCE: “‘Knew shame, and knew desire’: Ambivalence as Structure in Mary Shelley's Mathilda,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997, pp. 115-29.

[In the following essay, Himes offers a comparison of the sources Shelley used to compose Mathilda.]

“Such is my name, and such my tale,
          Confessor—to thy secret ear,
          I breathe the sorrows I bewail,
And thank thee for the generous tear
This glazing eye could never shed.”

—Lord Byron, “The Giaour” (1813)

Mathilda is an arresting, riveting work, strange in its representation of incestuous love yet believable in its evocation of forbidden desire. The tightly confined internal and external spaces of and around the title character, who is the scriptor of this confessional work, force the reader to participate...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Terence Harpold (essay date 1989)
   2. Tilottama Rajan (essay date 1994)
   3. William D. Brewer (essay date 1994)
   4. Kerry McKeever (essay date 1996)
   5. Margaret Davenport Garrett (essay date 1996)
   6. Rosaria Champagne (essay date 1996)
   7. Audra Dibert Himes (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Mary Shelley