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 with Mathilda in the text. The reader cannot objectively receive the novel but must engage with Mathilda in her psychological landscape, and that is an area fraught with ambivalence created by vacillation between two equally powerful poles: Mathilda's position as both the subject and the object of the verb “to desire.” This ambivalence provides the structural and intellectual underpinning for the story as a whole, both within the text and, by extension, within the consciousness of the responding reader.

Mathilda's father and his desire for her are the figure and force that determine her internal world and her responses to the external one. Of course, incest is one conventional theme in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature; therefore, we should not be titillated to find that Mary Shelley, an informed reader and writer, used it in her own writing as well. Yet in her novel. Mary Shelley considers the theme of incest in a way that is quite different from the portrayals of incestuous pairs that are found in her sources' works, including Ovid and Vittorio Alfieri,¹ and her contemporaries' writings. The difference is the way in which the novel treats the issue of Mathilda's desire, an especially transgressive one, and how she attempts at once to confess and cloister herself and her desire, both by choice and imposition.

Before beginning an exploration of the novel's sources, we must demarcate the ground between Mary Shelley and Mathilda. I treat Mary Shelley as an author function in this study; her proper name is that which assures a “classificatory function.”² Treating Mary Shelley in this way prevents a biographical reading of Mathilda, a reading that has been ventured already by other students of Shelley's work.³ As Roland Barthes asserts about biographical criticism, “Explanation of the work is still sought in the person of its producer, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always, ultimately, the voice of one and the same person, the author, which was transmitting [her] ‘confidences.’”⁴ Treating Mary Shelley as an author function allows us to focus more clearly on Mathilda as the scriptor of Mathilda who “is born at the same time as [her] text.” Mary Shelley “is not the subject of which [her] book would be the predicate”; rather, Mathilda is the book, and the book is Mathilda (52).

Yet examining two works that contain plots based upon father-daughter incest that Mary Shelley, the biographical author, read leads us toward a better understanding of how differently the same subject is treated in Mathilda.⁵ Shelley's principal sources for her unsettling story are Ovid's Metamorphoses and Vittorio Alfieri's tragedy Myrrha.⁶Myrrha is a story of incestuous desire and passion felt by the title character/protagonist of the play for her father, Cinyras. Throughout the play, Myrrha suffers from guilt that is provoked by something that remains unnamed until the terminal moments of the action. Every character in the play (which includes only Myrrha, Myrrha's beloved father, and her mother, nurse, and fiancé) and the audience/reader guess at the cause of Myrrha's misery, evidenced by her physical and verbal expressions of despondency and affliction. However, the dramatic structure itself functions as a nondisclosing narrator.

The master stroke of Alfieri's work is the remarkable, forced nondisclosure of Myrrha's desire. The nondisclosure unfolds the narrative slowly and thereby compels the audience/reader to stay with the play in order to partake of the pleasure of discovering what impels the text. Franco Betti notes that we, the audience to Myrrha's suffering, “become so engrossed with [her] behavior that we forget what causes it. … [A]lmost paradoxically, [Alfieri] can create an eventful action where apparently there would be none.”⁷

Ambivalence underpins the structure of Alfieri's play as it does in Mathilda. Alfieri promotes ambivalence in the reader's response to Myrrha by pairing the implication that the young woman's passion is as unnatural as it is misdirected with the verbal underscoring of Cinyras's paternal love for his child. Over and over again, Myrrha's father asserts his sensitivity and his wish for her happiness. The most pointed of these exclamations of his love occurs in the first act:

Nature made me a father, chance a king.
Those which are deem'd by others of my rank,
Reasons of state, to which they are accustom'd
To make all natural affections yield,
In my paternal bosom would not weigh
Against a solitary sigh of Myrrha's.
I, by her happiness alone, can be
Myself made happy.(8)

In this passage, Cinyras's words stress his concern and love for his daughter. Against that filial responsibility, we compare what we might suspect already to be Myrrha's misplaced and transgressive passion and sexual desire for him.

Alfieri treats Myrrha's ardor more subtly than Ovid treats the same theme in Metamorphoses, Alfieri's acknowledged source.⁹ In Alfieri's play, Myrrha's yearning drives her mad because she believes that it is immoral and unnatural to feel such an emotion. She commits suicide because she thinks that her desire has contaminated her completely, making her a wholly unnatural creature. She is a human degraded to a beast—an Ovidian transformation that happens because Myrrha fails to recognize and regulate her appetites. Her filial affection transposes into a discordant key, that of physical passion for her father. In Metamorphoses, Ovid's Myrrha is tormented by her desire, but not for the same reason as in Alfieri's Myrrha; in fact, Ovid's Myrrha consents to a sexual quenching of her fires, while Alfieri moralizes the myth.

Alfieri's Myrrha can neither name her desire nor its object for most of the play, and when she finally does, it costs her her life to voice her craving. Myrrha's naming the object of her desire is her final confession. Her confessor is her father/beloved, who forces the confession from her by threatening to withhold from Myrrha his adoration of her. After Myrrha tells Cinyras finally that he is the one she wants and then stabs herself with his dagger, she gasps, “—Thou thy-self, … / By dint of violence, … from my heart … didst wrest … / The horrid secret … But since … with my life … / It parted … from my lips, … I die … less guilty. …”¹⁰ Confession equals expiation from her sin of transgressive desire for Myrrha. She has called herself “an impious wretch” before this confession, so Myrrha is very much concerned with the idea that her desire is a sin (Act 4, Scene 7). In Ovid's “The Story of Cinyras and Myrrha,” Myrrha is able to murmur, “O mother, mother, happy in your husband!” which is enough to galvanize her nurse to the action of tricking Cinyras into accepting his daughter into his bed.¹¹ Thus, the main point of Ovid's story is not the struggle within Myrrha, the struggle that silences her and leads to her climactic confession, as it is in the tragedy. Instead, Ovid focuses our attention on Myrrha's emotional state after her sexual union with her father and the consequent conception of her sibling/offspring Adonis.

The narrative voice of Metamorphoses states explicitly that the passion the reader is to witness is morally unnatural, something left implicit in Alfieri's play. The Metamorphoses narrator exclaims:

                                                  The story
Is terrible, I warn you. Fathers, daughters,
Had better skip this part, or, if you like my songs,
Distrust me here, and say it never happened,
Or, if you do believe it, take my word
That it was paid for. Nature, it may be,
Permits such things to happen. I would offer
Our land congratulations, that it lies
So far away from such abominations.

(10.5.299-306)

The dichotomy here between what might be considered strictly “natural” and what is actually socially permissible, and even legal, admits that a culture's demands can override the desires of Nature, an idea to which we will return.

Whether or not the Ovidian narrator recognizes that something such as incestuous love might be strictly “natural,” both Myrrhas are devastated and driven to annihilation after they realize their desire to the outer world either by word, as with Alfieri's character, or by deed, as with Ovid's. Nevertheless, neither of these characters is able to express precisely what she feels; indeed, Ovid's Myrrha is unable to name what she has done in having sex with her father. Even after she has conceived her father's child, she is able to pray for her own eradication with only these words:

                                                  O gods,
If any gods will listen, I deserve
Punishment surely. I do not refuse it,
But lest, in living, I offend the living,
Offend the dead in death, drive me away
From either realm, change me somehow, refuse me
Both life and death!

(10.5.483-89)

Forbidden desire, alluded to in this prayer, silences both Ovid's and Alfieri's Myrrhas, but the insularity and narcissism of their desires also make each of them mute. However, Mary Shelley's Mathilda does not voice or show her transgressive desire to her father during his life or in his presence, and that is not the only difference between Shelley's conception of incestuous desire and that of her sources.

The first difference between Mathilda and the two Myrrha stories lies in the novel's narrative scheme. Instead of an outside narrator recounting an age-old tale, as in Ovid, or a gradually unfolding structure governed by the main character's actions, as in Alfieri, Mathilda is narrated by the young woman who is at first the object of her father's desire but who then realizes that her desire for him has surrounded his for her, for her desire has preceded his and endures and follows it. No other characters intervene in this transgressive relationship. In fact, there are few characters who act in Mathilda's story; Woodville, her father, and she are the only three who directly affect the unfolding plot (her mother, aunt, childhood nurse, and would-be lover are mentioned). Mary Shelley's limited cast is like that of Alfieri's tragedy, in which five characters make up the dramatis personae. The few actors and the limited timeframe in which the work is written by the dying Mathilda make the book necessarily condensed. Mathilda certainly could not write many volumes in her weak condition during the “three months” left to her before she succumbs, yet the novel has been criticized for following this logic.¹² Jane Blumberg states that the book “does not rank as one of Shelley's important novels; it is remarkably slim compared to her customary three-volume works of fiction. … [I]t is undisciplined and uncomfortably personal,”¹³ and Tilottama Rajan asserts that “Mathilda is a short, bare narrative of trauma.”¹⁴ The book is not short or slim because it is “uncomfortably personal” or traumatic; rather, it is uncomfortable for the reader because it is so devoid of any perspective except Mathilda's.¹⁵ Consequently, the reader must share Mathilda's vision of the world because it is the only moral, emotional, and intellectual universe offered to her or him. This exceptionally tight focus on Mathilda's inner realm does not mar the work. It is part of the overall design of the novel, a design like the one that Mary Shelley recognized to be at work in Alfieri's tragedies.

In her biocritical essay on Alfieri, Shelley delineates his narrative strategy:

Energy and conciseness are the distinguishing marks of Alfieri's dramas. Wishing to bring the whole action of the piece into one focus, he rejected altogether the confidantes of the French theatre [explained later as “the action being carried on by a perpetual talk abot it”], so that his dramatis personae are limited to the principals themselves. The preservation of the unities of time and place also contributed to curtail all excrescences; so that his tragedies are short, and all bear upon one point only, which he considered the essence of unity of action.¹⁶

Mathilda and Myrrha are similar in their limited numbers of principals, and even as, according to Mary Shelley, Alfieri's “tragedies are short, and … bear upon one point only,” so is and does her novel. The unities of time and place are established otherwise in Mathilda, however. In Mary Shelley's work, they are congruent within Mathilda's mind. In her consciousness and memory, everything that has happened to her over the preceding four years and all the locations where she has been are fused, and every event is happening at every place at this moment, the moment of her writing her final confession.

As Michel Foucault writes, “For us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual secret.”¹⁷Mathilda and its creator/creation, Mathilda, is such an expression. The novel is what Foucault calls a “discourse of truth”:

The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile.

(62)

The naturalness versus unnaturalness of incestuous desire is what creates ambivalence in Mathilda. Our own ethical system—the guidelines for social behavior in which we live—defines Mathilda's passion as unnatural. Thus, because she has violated our ethics, Mathilda's culture—again, our own—demands a confession from her about her father's and her transgressive desire so that she may expiate her guilt, just as Alfieri's Myrrha confessed her desire and believed that she died less guilty of it. As Mathilda begins her tale, she writes, “Perhaps a history such as mine had better die with me, but a feeling that I cannot define leads me on.”¹⁸ This feeling is the pressure on her of the reader's desire—and the reader is the law's representative as she or he participates in the text—to know about Mathilda's position as the creation and creator of this text of incestuous desire. This relationship based on desire—the reader/advocate of the law's desire to know Mathilda's relation to her and her father's desire—makes the text seem “uncomfortably personal.” The reader gains pleasure initially through the power of being Mathilda's confessor, but the pleasure is mitigated first by the reader's realization that the pleasure can come only through an intimate knowledge of a transgressive, unlawful desire, and second by the reader's realization that Mathilda wants only a listener, not a confessor who might offer her absolution.

Mathilda's work is a testament that constitutes a voicing of her desire and a confession of what she has felt and continues to feel until the conclusion of the tale as she waits to die in her self-made cloister. Mathilda is actively cloistering her emotional and physical desire by turning life into art—into discourse. Foucault explains that during confession “a twofold evolution tend[s] to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire.”¹⁹ Within her story, Mathilda divulges to the reader the culmination of her father's confession of his stirred desire for her in the form of the revealing epistle that he addresses to her, a letter that mirrors in a reduced size her own confessional document that inhabits the space around that smaller text. Also, the narrative frame formed by confessional document surrounding confessional document echoes the way in which Mathilda's longing for her father precedes, surrounds, and endures his desire for her. Mathilda replicates her father's confession for her reader; she then reveals how his confession affects her feelings. Although the act of physical incest never takes place between father and daughter—the incest is psychic, and her remorse arises from thought, not deed—Mathilda traces and retraces “the stirrings” of desire that move in both of them.

Her father's letter traces the stirrings of only his desire, but after she has read it, Mathilda's tumultuous phrasing reveals a deep ambivalence as she brushes against the subject of her feelings for her father:

He must know that if I believed that his intention was merely to absent himself from me that instead of opposing him it would be that which I should myself require—or if he thought that any lurking feeling, yet he could not think that, should lead me to him would he endeavor to overthrow the only hope he could have of ever seeing me again.²⁰

Mathilda's father has already made a demand on her by communicating to her, however ambivalently, his desire when he stated, “‘Yes, yes, I hate you! You are my bane, my poison, my disgust! Oh! No! … [Y]ou are none of all these; you are my light, my only one, my life.—My daughter, I love you!’” (201). Jacques Lacan writes, “As an unconditional demand of presence and absence, demand evokes the want-to-be under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other's being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request.”²¹ These three figures conflict in Mathilda to create the ambivalence in the desire of the protagonist (Mathilda) and the antagonist (her father) for each other.

Undoubtedly, Mathilda feels a keen desire for her father. She has practically willed and prayed her father back to life, and in her intense desire to know him, she has developed a deep desire for his presence in her life and for him as a person—his body. He was dead to her; she had never met him. Her father had lived only as a letter, another text within the text of Mathilda, and Mathilda underscores that letter's significance when she confesses, “I bestowed on him all my affections; there was a miniature of him that I gazed on continually; I copied his last letter and read it again and again.”²² She relates that he was “the idol of my imagination,” and her actions toward the relics of him that he has left behind are very much like those of a lover who has lost her beloved. Mathilda desires her father, and his absence allowed her longing for his presence to develop into idealizing him and, finally, idolizing him.

After Mathilda reads her father's confession to her, she realizes that he reciprocates her desire, indeed, her sexual passion. She states that her father is “a lover, there was madness in the thought, yet he was my lover” (211). Malcolm Bowie asserts that any person to whom another person makes an appeal cannot answer it unconditionally, and “he too is divided and haunted, and his yes, however loudly it is proclaimed, can only ever be a maybe, or a to some extent in disguise.”²³

When Mathilda states unequivocally that her father is her lover, she accepts her father's demand, although she never proclaims a loud yes. In spite of the fact that her desire has preceded his, Mathilda is especially “divided and haunted”; her feelings about her father's confessed desire for her are conflicting, and her answer to her father is particularly equivocal. All of her ambivalence is caused by the socially defined unnaturalness of the desire that she perceives, a definition with which she agrees, despite her yearning for her father. When Mathilda recognizes her own passion as she reads his letter, a recognition signaled by her understanding that her father is her lover, the novel begins to travel on one path of development—others are closed for the story, Mathilda, and the reader. Thus, the act of reading performs a cardinal function in the narrative. Mathilda's declaration of awareness, instigated by reading—“a lover, there was madness in the thought, yet he was my lover”—is the core of this novel.

When the plot of her life and her text takes this turn, Mathilda turns with it. Instead of willing her now dead father back to life, she wills herself to death. Mathilda states that she looks forward to death because “alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal mental union we shall never part.”²⁴ Her death is a liebestod, an extension of her sexual desire. Her phrase “an eternal mental union” is her carnal desire disguised and an excellent demonstration of her use of ambivalence as a technique of self-cloistering.

The first step that Mathilda takes to make herself dead to the world, and hence closer to her father, is to cloister herself. This is a state to which she is accustomed. As a child, Mathilda was cloistered in solitude in the cathedral of nature. She had loved with a deep attachment the inanimate nature she had found on her aunt's Loch Lomond estate. When her father came to her finally, Mathilda stayed in the woods the night before his arrival, sequestered by nature for the last time. When she tried to return home the next day, the woods attempted to encompass her and to keep her in their embrace. Shelley's trees might be related to Ovid's Myrrha, who has turned into the myrrh tree after her prayer to the gods to obliterate her as a human. It is tempting in this context to see the Scottish woodlands as attempting to keep Mathilda from experiencing the maddening physical desire that Myrrha felt, as if Ovid's metamorphosed Myrrha were attempting to protect Mathilda from herself.

However, after her father confesses verbally to Mathilda, she turns away from the natural world. Rather than retreating into nature to find solace for her pain, which is what we might expect, Mathilda puts a barrier between herself and it. Indeed, “perfect solitude” from everything well describes the state of existence that Mathilda strives to find. Mathilda emphasizes her solitude when she writes:

Even after this, I thought, I would live in the most dreary seclusion. I would retire to the Continent and become a nun; not for religion's sake, for I was not a Catholic, but that I might be for ever shut out from the world.

(204)

Here we find the first explicit evidence that Mathilda wishes to cloister her body, her desire, and her entire self. The only way that she can think of to cope with what she feels is to remove herself in every possible way, but not from desire.

Mathilda considers removing herself from the social world by assuming a facade. She concludes that she “must heap an impenetrable heap of false smiles and words: cunning frauds, treacherous laughter, and a mixture of all light deceits” (216). Her mind continues to wander, creating many different types of mental and emotional cloisters where she might shelter herself. She writes, “I dared not die, but I might feign death” (216).

One of the most effective ways to “feign death” from the world, to annihilate herself from the world of the living while yet retaining life, would seem to be to silence her writer self about her experiences with her father and her desire for him. Mathilda, though, attempts to subdue herself by removing herself from all human company. She leaves London for the wild heath of the north country and describes herself as she appeared on her journey:

A youthful Eremites dedicated to seclusion and whose bosom she must strive to keep free from all tumult and unholy despair—The fanciful nun-like dress that I had adopted; the knowledge that my very existence was a secret known only to myself; the solitude to which I was for ever hereafter destined nursed gentle thoughts in my wounded heart.

(219)

Mathilda's story has broached the classic element of the recognition of desire. That recognition leads to a cloistering of the self from the world, which leads to confession in order to explain her reasons for cloistering herself. It is this confessional and seclusive aspect of self that Mathilda creates through her writing and that, in turn, creates her.

Seclusion was supposed to lead a woman into the contemplative life, a life in which she could empty herself of concern for the world.²⁵ The cloister, or anchor hold, was to function as a tomb, making its inhabitant “dead to the world” (3). From there, the anchorite was to live a life of quiet thought, prayer, and meditation, preparing herself for her union with God, a union that was often consummated in a spiritual marriage between the woman and the Holy Spirit or Christ.

Mathilda enters her own self-made cloister on the heath in northern England, and there she arrives through her writing at an intellectually active life rather than a contemplative one. Her verbal self will not be silenced. It feels the demand of the law to know her desire, so it gives a voice through writing to Mathilda's sins of thought. Her writing functions in several ways: it acts as an exercise in remembering and keeping alive her love, and it serves as a confession, ostensibly for Woodville's eyes but in reality for any other reader's.

Another unconventional aspect of Mathilda's self-cloistering is her method of prayer: “And morning and evening my tearful eyes raised to heaven, my hands clasped tight in the energy of prayer, I have repeated with the poet—

Before I see another day
Oh, let this body die away!”(26)

Nowhere does Mathilda mention a complete turning away from the world, toward God. Indeed, in this passage, she bases her appeal on contemporary Romantic poetry, not around traditional invocations, as we would expect from a woman who had cloistered herself in the conventional sense of the term. Myrrha's prayer in Ovid, quoted above, is unconventional, as is her inability to give her act a name and thus confess to the gods what she has done. Throughout most of her confession, Mathilda never states explicitly her desire to satisfy her father's desire. She is part of a culture that deems such desire nefarious; therefore, she is ambivalent about her own feelings. Neither Ovid's Myrrha nor Shelley's Mathilda can articulate why she wants to be removed from humanity or the world. Their transgressive desires, which put them so far outside the standards of their communities, preclude their full confessions because they have no language with which to portray what they feel.

In the very act of confession, however, Mathilda forms another cloister for herself. We can see that she attempts to explain her desire to her reader by confessing it, “by the mere fact of transforming it—fully and deliberately—into discourse.”²⁷ The conversion of desire into discourse, an act that gives the unnamed passion formal bounds, invests in the reader a great deal of power over judgment. The reader becomes Mathilda's confessor through the process of participating in the text, but in the end, Mathilda does not wish for expiation from the reader/confessor for her sin of desire because that would amount to an emptying of desire from herself. Instead, she wishes for an even closer union with her father, the “eternal mental union” from which “we shall never part.”

This is not a comfortable ending for the reader. Because Mathilda's incestuous desire crosses the taboo line, the reader instinctively wishes for a closing that will rectify the character of Mathilda.²⁸ However, the reader's desire for an ending in which Mathilda would renounce her “unnatural” desire clashes with Mathilda's desire to experience the desire of her father more fully. The reader, who presumably believes and obeys the Electra taboo surrounding father-daughter incestuous love, cannot accept Mathilda's desire and absolve her of its societally defined sinfulness. The subject of the story, then, the reader's inability to resolve the tensions between her or his desire for an ending that is empty of desire, and Mathilda's desire to fulfill her desire, prevent any neat closure.

The reader is left, too, with the tension created between the concepts of “natural” and “unnatural.” Another dichotomy of naturalness versus unnaturalness involves the description of the fresh, blooming season of the year and Mathilda's imminent death in that month: “It was May, four years ago, that I first saw my beloved father; it was in May, three years ago that my folly destroyed the only being I was doomed to love. May is returned, and I die.”²⁹ In this, the penultimate paragraph of her confession, Mathilda breaks her silence about her passion for her father and names it “love.” Perhaps this naming of her desire is really the purpose of this confession. She does not seek absolution; she seeks realization for herself of what she feels.

Peter L. Thorslev Jr. states, “Parent-child incest is universally condemned in Romantic literature” and goes on to assert that “when it does appear—notably in England in Walpole's The Mysterious Mother and in [Percy Bysshe] Shelley's The Cenci—it is always the object of horror.”³⁰ Mathilda reveals, though, that she feels the same desire as her father and yearns to join him at some other level of consciousness, a less than horrified reaction to his initially expressed want for her. The Romantic norm might be to seek transcendence from the physical world through a metaphysical affair with nature or art; however, Mary Shelley's revised Romanticism has her Mathilda seeking the metaphysical in the physical, or more exactly, carnal union with the forbidden figure.

In approaching Mary Shelley's work as it resides within the context of persistent Romantic themes, it is not interesting in and of itself that she chose the theme of incest as a subject early in her writing life. Many writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries chose it, chief among them her contemporaries, who surrounded her in Leghorn as she wrote the tale that would become Mathilda. But the structure of her story, the sources that she drew on in creating it, and her inversion of certain ethical and traditional aspects of incest, such as the movement toward spiritual unification of the emotionally incestuous pair, make her work intriguing. The highly individualistic creativity apparent in Mary Shelley's Mathilda shows this novel to be a vital work of art worthy of serious and sustained consideration.

Notes

1. Jean de Palacio minimizes Alfieri's influence on most of Mary Shelley's work but admits its effect on Mathilda when he writes, “Quant à Alfieri, son influence se limite pratiquement au seul motif littéraire de l'inceste; aussi trouvera-t-on ce point traité dans le cadre des éléments gothiques” (Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: Contributions aux études Shelleyennes [Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1969], 23). He also hints at a biographical reading of the novel: “Sans nier ici l'influence de la Myrrha d'Alfieri, on retrouve dans ce livre des résonances profonde qu'une simple rencontre littéraire ne suffirait pas à expliquer. Mathilda n'est pas une oeuvre de circonstance, mais le développement d'un thème qui lui tenait à coeur et dont son propre cas peut fourmir le point de départ” (133).

2. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” trans. Josué V. Harari, in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141-60. Reprinted in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schliefer, eds., Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies, 3rd ed. (New York: Longman, 1994), 342-53. Foucault suggests that such a name used as an author function “permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others” (346).

3. For biographical and psychobiographical readings of Mathilda, see the following writers: Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley's Early Novels: “This Child of Imagination and Misery” (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds., The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814-1844, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Terence Harpold, “‘Did You Get Mathilda from Papa?’: Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley's Mathilda,” Studies in Romanticism 28.1 (1989): 49-67; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Methuen, 1988); Bonnie Rayford Neumann, The Lonely Muse—A Critical Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Salzburg Studies in English Literature 85 (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979); Elizabeth Nitchie, “Mary Shelley's Mathilda: An Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance,” Studies in Philology 40 (1943): 447-62; Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor, eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26.2 (1994): 43-68; Janet Todd, Mary, Maria and Matilda (New York: New York University Press, 1992); William Walling, Mary Shelley (New York: Twayne, 1972).

4. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 50.

5. From Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, The Journals of Mary Shelley, we find that in October 1814 she read Vita di Vittorio Alfieri … scritta da esso (1804), translated as Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Victor Alfieri … written by himself (1810) (632); in April and May 1815, she read Ovid's Metamorphoses (665); a few months later, between 4 August and 12 September 1815, she wrote The Fields of Fancy, the first version of Mathilda (294, 296); in September and October 1818, she read Alfieri's Work (632); on Monday, 14 September 1818, she had begun to translate Alfieri's Myrrha (226); and on 15 March 1819, she might have been continuing her translation of Alfieri (253). The beginning of Mary Shelley's drafting Mathilda and Percy Bysshe Shelley's ending The Cenci overlap—he ended his work on 8 August 1819, she began Mathilda on 4 August; she ended her work on Mathilda on 12 September 1819 (Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], 104, 105). (Palacio examines the period of Percy's writing of The Cenci and Mary's writing of Mathilda [Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre, 134-35]). Feldman and Scott-Kilvert note that when Mary Shelley recorded “write & correct—” in her journal entry for Friday, 11 February 1820, she meant “probably Mathilda,” and they add that “The fair-copy version … is dated ‘Florence Nov. 9th 1819’” (308).

6. Mathilda names Vittorio Alfieri in chapter 4 of Mathilda: “I chanced to say that I thought Myrrha the best of Alfieri's tragedies” (Mary Shelley, “Mathilda,” in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennet and Charles E. Robinson [New York: Oxford University Press, 1990], 192).

7. Franco Betti, Vittorio Alfieri, ed. Anthony Oldcorn (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 83.

8. Vittorio Alfieri, “Myrrha,” in The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri; Translated from the Italian, 3 vols., trans. Charles Lloyd (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), Act 1, Scene 3. This is the edition that Feldman and Scott-Kilvert believe Mary Shelley read (226 n. 7).

9. In Mary Shelley's biographical sketch of Alfieri, she quotes his discussion about Ovid's Myrrha from his autobiography: “‘I had never thought,’ he says, ‘either of Myrrha or Biblis as subjects for the drama. But, in reading Ovid's ‘Metamorphoses,’ I hit upon the affecting and divinely eloquent speech of Myrrha to her nurse, which caused me to burst into tears, and, like a flash of lightning, awoke in me the idea of a tragedy. … My idea was, that she should do in my tragedy what Ovid describes her as relating, but do it in silence’” (Mary Shelley, “Alfieri: 1749-1803,” in Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal, 2 vols. [London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green and Longman, 1835], 2:291-92).

10. Alfieri, “Myrrha,” Act 5, Scene 2.

11. Ovid, “The Story of Cinyras and Myrrha,” in Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 10.5.423.

12. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 245.

13. Blumberg, Mary Shelley's Early Novels, 225.

14. Rajan, “Mary Shelley's Mathilda,” 43.

15. In contrast, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, or even St. Augustine's, are structured to appeal to the reader's power to see, to sympathize, and to forgive. This structure, which includes the reader's perspective and appeals rhetorically to him or her, is more typical of confessional literature than of Mathilda.

16. Shelley, “Alfieri: 1749-1803,” 282.

17. Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality, 3 vols., trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990), 61.

18. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 175.

19. Foucault, Sexuality, 1:19-20.

20. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 211.

21. Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 265.

22. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 185.

23. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 136.

24. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 244.

25. Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 3.

26. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 221.

27. Foucault, Sexuality, 1:23.

28. Certainly, William Godwin wished for a “proper” conclusion. He called the subject of Mathilda “disgusting and detestable” and urged Mary Shelley to amend the story by putting a disclaimer at the beginning of the tale, assuring the reader that Mathilda never committed physical incest (Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Maria Gisborne and Edward E. Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951], 44).

29. Shelley, “Mathilda,” 246.

30. Peter L. Thorslev Jr., “Incest as a Romantic Symbol,” Comparative Literature Studies 2.1 (1965): 41-58.

I thank Professor Stephen C. Behrendt for his generosity in giving me the opportunity to begin this work. I thank Professor Frederick S. Frank for his astute, critical eye. And, as always, thank you, Glenn T. Dibert-Himes, for the innumerables.