Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Mathilda, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley - Rosaria Champagne (essay date 1996)

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Rosaria Champagne (essay date 1996)

SOURCE: “The Law of the (Nameless) Father: Mary Shelley's Mathilda and the Incest Taboo,” in The Politics of Survivorship: Incest, Women's Literature, and Feminist Theory, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 53-89.

[In the following essay, Champagne discusses Mathilda as an example of incest narratives that were consistently suppressed because of their de-centered vision of paternity.]

Society expressly forbids that which society brings about.

—Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship

British romanticism, a literary movement spanning the years from 1790 to 1830, is the only canon to remain almost wholly resistant to feminist challenges. Still represented by six male poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), romanticism is really the last bastion of...

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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