[In the following essay, Harpold draws parallels between the events in Mary Shelley's life and the action of Mathilda, noting that the book mirrors major events in the author's life.]

In a dream, I saw myself descending toward my father, intending to join him in the library. But along the way, the little skeleton always snatched me from behind with its outstretched hand. And I continued to live with my nightmares, and would never dare, when night had fallen—and now even in the day—to go down alone to the library.

This phobia was a too marvelous compromise between two powerful tendencies in my unconscious: to be my mother, in dying like her, which satisfied the most positive part of my oedipal complex: the love for my father; and to be punished with death by my mother, in reprisal for the death that I had caused her, which satisfied, in the other part of my oedipal complex, the unconscious sentiment of culpability attached to it.

—Marie Bonaparte, “L'identification d'une fille à sa mère morte”¹

Mary Shelley's entries to the journal dating from her elopement with Percy in July of 1814 are interrupted in early June of 1819, near the end of the Shelleys' brief stay in Rome. William, the Shelleys' first son, had fallen ill on May 25. His condition wavered uncertainly for much of the following week, and on June 4—when Mary broke off her journal—he seems to have taken a sudden turn for the worse.² At noon of June 7, William died.³ That William's illness and death is marked by a discontinuity in her journal suggests the singular importance of this, the third such loss for Mary in four years. There are only a few breaks in the journal before June 4, 1819: the death of Mary's unnamed first child (a girl, d. March 6, 1815), and that of her third child, Clara (d. Sept. 24, 1818), are recorded without any corresponding interruptions (Feldman 73, 223; Jones 39, 105).⁴ On June 27, three weeks after William's death, Mary wrote to Amelia Curran about arrangements for his tomb, “near which I shall lie one day & care not—for my own sake—how soon—I shall never recover [sic] that blow … Everything on earth has lost its interest to me.”⁵

Mary resumed her journal after the Shelleys moved to Leghorn, on August 4, 1819—Percy's twenty-seventh birthday—where she indicated that she was at work on the novel which in its final version was entitled Mathilda. It appears from her entries that she wrote out a first draft and corrected the fair copy through about September 12, revised it further on November 8, and finally, dated the manuscript on November 9.⁶ The next day, November 10, there is again a break in her journal. On December 31, she wrote, “I have not kept my journal all this time; but I have little to say, except that on the morning of Friday, November 12, little Percy Florence was born” (Feldman 297; Jones 126).

It is evident from the first draft of Mathilda that the novel is, at least in part, Mary's response to William's death. In that draft, entitled The Fields of Fancy, Mathilda's autobiographical narrative is embedded in the account of an unnamed narrator.⁷ “It was in Rome,” the narrator begins, “that I suffered a misfortune that reduced me to misery & despair” (90). She is visited by a “lovely spirit” named Fantasia who, though unable to repair her loss (“those you love,” she says, “are gone for ever & great as my power is I cannot recall them to you” [90]), offers to reassure her with a vision of the afterlife. She conveys the narrator to “the Elysian fields” (91), where they attend a circle of recently-departed spirits recounting their earthly lives. Among these is Mathilda, a woman “of about 23 years of age” (94)—Mary was 22 in 1819—whose tale of “dark & phre[n]zied passions” (100) is directed to the narrator. Mathilda's story is strong stuff—a mother's death in childbirth, the father's incestuous love for the daughter, his suicide, her mourning and death—but the relation between the narratives is clearly one of lack and reparation: Mathilda's tragic history is presented to the narrator to fill the gap in her own history.

This narrative frame was discarded in the final version of the novel, in which the text is presented as Mathilda's written memoir, rather than another's record of her oral account. The discarding of the frame conflates the previously discrete levels of the narrative: the act of writing (reporting another's life or remembering one's own) and the experience recorded in writing belong in the final version of the novel to the same person. If, as I will argue, Mathilda is a profoundly autobiographical work, the collapse of the transparently autobiographical frame narrative into Mathilda's narrative is significant because it exemplifies a principle of identification at work across the structure of the novel. The events that frame the period in Mary's life during which she wrote Mathilda—the death of one son and the birth of another—invoke and sustain that principle. By way of Mathilda (by way of Mathilda), Mary reported or remembered a history of forbidden desire and death to repair a loss at the origin of that history. The composition of the novel and the circulation of its manuscript are inextricably bound to that history; they represent Mary's effort to revise, account for and neutralize its dangers.⁸

The death of Wollstonecraft ten days after her daughter's birth must have forever altered the course of Mary's psychological development. Her representations of her mother could be constituted only after the fact, drawing on the recollections of others—first among these being her father—and subject to the effects, après-coup (nachträglich),⁹ of her subsequent experience. The well-documented preoccupation of the Godwin circle with the memory of Wollstonecraft would have reminded Mary at every turn that the figure of her mother was joined to that of her father. Moreover, this “memory” of Wollstonecraft—Mary's source of information for a woman that she herself could not have remembered—would have been, given Godwin's romantic proclivities, uniquely subject to reshaping by literary and sentimentalizing interests.¹⁰ Mary's capacity for “pre”-oedipal identification with the mother—establishing both the model for subsequent development and the potential for rivalry at a critical stage of that development—would have been sharply restricted, in effect, already oedipalized, irreducibly subject to the imperatives of the father's desire.¹¹

This is what happens in Mathilda. The passage relating the romance of her parents and her mother's death takes up fewer than three pages in the novel (4-6). Throughout this section, the mother, Diana, is portrayed only as the object of the father's passion, with no independent initiative or interest. The only independent sign for the mother appears in the discarded narrative frame of The Fields of Fancy, in the character of Diotima, “a woman about 40 years of age” (Wollstonecraft was thirty-eight at the time of her death), whose “eyes burned with a deep fire and every line of her face expressed enthusiasm & wisdom—Poetry seemed seated on her lips which were beautifully formed & every motion of her limbs although not youthful was inexpressibly graceful” (94). Diotima is clearly an idealized figure of Wollstonecraft, but she is, significantly, relegated to the frame of Mathilda's narrative, where she remains bound by the imperative to tell the story of the father's desire. Insofar as she represents the figure of the mother, it is a mother who acquiesces to that imperative: she is the one who presses Mathilda to tell her tale of “phre[n]zied passions” (100).

The daughter's account of herself is likewise shaped by the father's intervention in mother-daughter identifications. Because Mathilda can only represent the scene of her origin as already subject to her father's desire, her subsequent response to his love is already complicit with it. When she “chances” to mention her liking for Alfieri's “Myrrha,” she is frightened and confused by the violence of his reaction (20), though her interest in a tragedy about a daughter's incestuous passion for her father can hardly seem to be the product of chance, in light of what she knows has happened when she records the event (20).¹² His equation of mother and daughter—“Diana dies to give her birth; her mother's spirit was transferred into her frame, and she ought to be as Diana to me” (40)—signifies as well Mathilda's sense of her succession to her mother's place. His despair at having “betrayed” his daughter's “confidence” (37) is also her despair at his having exposed their secret alliance.

The mutually implicating desires of father and daughter refigure Mary's compromised position in the oedipal configuration brought about by Wollstonecraft's death. The relations of Mathilda and Diana to the father represent, in this light, both Mary's chief inheritance from her mother and what she must make of that inheritance in order to find a place for herself in her mother's absence. After he confesses “the hell of passion” (40) that will burn in him until his death, Mathilda's father complains, “How dare I go where I may meet Diana, when I have disobeyed her last request; her last words said in a faint voice when all feeling but love, which survives all things else was already dead, she then bade me make her child happy” (40). His memory of Diana's final request revises Godwin's account of his last conversation with Wollstonecraft:

I … affected to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been very ill, and that it would be some time before she could expect to be well; wishing her to tell me any thing that she would choose to have done respecting the children [Mary and Fanny], as they would now be principally under my care. After having repeated this idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length said, with a significant tone of voice, “I know what you are thinking of,” but added, that she had nothing to communicate to me upon the subject.¹³

In Mathilda, the daughter missing from her mother's last wishes is written in as their principal concern. Moreover, the mother who commands the father to make their daughter “happy” provides in fantasy the maternal approval of oedipal succession that is possible for Mary only by implication in her relations with her father.

In a recent study of Frankenstein, Marc Rubenstein has suggested that the writing of that novel was motivated by Mary's “search” “for the mother of her origins.”¹⁴ He conjectures that Mary read the love letters of Godwin and Wollstonecraft from the period during which she was conceived, on a November evening much like the “dreary night of November” when Victor Frankenstein brings the monster to life.¹⁵ The creation at the imaginative center of the novel, he concludes, refigures the scene of Mary's origin; the conflicting representations of the mother which spill out from that scene into the rest of the novel represent Mary's effort to rehearse and contain the dangers of motherhood signaled by Wollstonecraft's death.

Rubenstein's reading of Frankenstein suggests an analogous reading of Mathilda. Mary's fiction rehearses the problematic scene of her origin, and Mathilda, like Frankenstein, revises the elementary familial positions that emerge in that scene. It differs from the earlier novel in that the fantasy of origin it represents more actively foregrounds the oedipalization of the primal scene that is the effect of the father's intervention in the mother-daughter relation. The primal scene is refigured in Mathilda as a scene of seduction, between father and daughter, recasting Mary's emergence from her parents' embrace as a substitution of the daughter in the place of the mother, the object of (and responding to) the father's desire. The abstraction of the seduction fantasy over the entire novel signals its function as a primal fantasy: every character in the novel is an accomplice to the seduction, because every position in the fantasy is cathected by the daughter who records it.¹⁶ The narrator's story in The Fields of Fancy frame, Mathilda's story, her father's and her mother's stories—the structure of seduction that informs all of these stories—each of these is a version of Mary's story. These versions of Mary's story constitute, moreover, a revision of her family history in keeping with its oedipal interests and conflicts. In the family romance¹⁷ as seduction fantasy, the revision of history is to the daughter's benefit: the mother is absent, or only implied, and the daughter's success in defining herself by supplanting the mother is made clear by her father's desire for her in her mother's place.

The mother's apparent absence from the seduction fantasy does not, however, lessen her influence on its structure. She returns from within it, as its limiting term—and with a vengeance. The contradictions of Mathilda's father's confession of his love signals Mary's internalization of the incest taboo and its implicit affirmation of the mother's continuing authority:

“I hate you! You are my bane, my poison, my disgust! Oh! No” And then his manner changed, and fixing his eyes on me with an expression that convulsed every nerve and member of my frame—“you are none of these; you are my light, my only one, my life.—My daughter, I love you!”

(30)

Mathilda's response to her father's confession is first pity, and then revulsion, the change so sudden that the repression is unmistakable:

for the first time that phantom seized me; the first and only time for it has never since left me … I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back in horror I spurned him with my foot

(31, emphasis added).

This “phantom” appears nowhere else in the novel, though there can be little doubt as to her identity. Too-close an identification with the mother leads to death, as the daughter must conclude from the evidence of her own birth. The absent, usurped mother may still punish her rival; indeed, the rival will share her mother's fate if she takes her mother's place—she, too, will be subject to the fatal effect of the father's desire.¹⁸ The problem that the seduction fantasy written into Mathilda must resolve is, how to enjoy the father's desire without suffering its consequences?¹⁹

The resolution described in Mathilda is a passive submission to the dangers of identification with the mother, a transformation of its penalty into a defense. After his confession of incestuous love, Mathilda's father flees from her, leaving behind a letter suggesting that he intends to cast himself into the sea. She sets out immediately in pursuit. As she nears the coast, a storm that began with nightfall grows more violent. The height of the storm coincides with a crisis of recognition:

About two hundred yards distant, alone in a large meadow stood a magnificent oak; the lightnings shewed its myriad boughs torn by the storm. A strange idea seized me; a person must have felt all the agonies of doubt concerning the life and death of one who is the whole world to them before they can enter into my feelings—for in that state, the mind working unrestrained by the will makes strange and fanciful combinations with outward circumstances and weaves the chances and changes of nature into an immediate connection with the event they dread. It was with this feeling that I turned to the old Steward who stood pale and trembling beside me; “Mark, Gaspar, if the next flash of lightning rend not that oak my father will be alive.”

I had scarcely uttered these words than a flash instantly followed by a tremendous peal of thunder descended on it; and when my eyes recovered their sight after the dazzling light, the oak no longer stood in the meadow

(44).

The prophecy here is realized on several registers, for Mathilda has already dreamed of her father's flight to the sea and her unsuccessful effort to prevent his suicide, before she receives the letter describing his intentions (36).²⁰ Who is the victim of the blast (and who or what is responsible for it) is, moreover, unclear: the destruction of the oak fulfills Mathilda's earlier demand of her father that he “speak that word” (29) that will explain his suffering—“I demand that dreadful word; though it be as a flash of lightning to destroy me, speak it” (30).

Prophecy, like dreaming, is a form of wish-fulfillment; its utility in the work of fantasy is that it attributes the wished-for event to a necessity independent of the desires of the dreamer or prophet. Mathilda insists from the first paragraphs of the novel that her fate has been “governed by … a hideous necessity” (2). Mary's interest in that necessity is evident. It signals, on one hand, her acknowledgement within Mathilda of the irreversibility of the conditions of her birth and early childhood; on the other hand, it represents her defense against the sentiments of culpability produced by those conditions. The awkward syntax of Mathilda's cry (“if … rend not … will be alive”) suggests that, more than the father's life or death, what is at stake in the passage is a denial of responsibility for the event it predicts. The more straightforward, “if the next flash of lightning rend that oak my father will be dead,” would imply a direct engagement of the speaker in that event. Mary's awareness that the daughter's innocence is compromised by her prediction is clear from Mathilda's explanation of the prediction, a striking formulation of the unconscious motivation of fantasy: “the mind working unrestrained by the will makes strange and fanciful combinations with outward circumstances and weaves the chances and changes of nature into an immediate connection with the event they dread.” For Mary, for whom Mathilda's dream and prophecy are a defense, the consequences of the father's desire are more dreadful than his death. If the father takes his own life, he takes with it the menace of his desire, leaving the daughter free of responsibility for his removal from the scene.

Were Mathilda to end with the father's suicide, that event would signal the priority of the phantom mother's menace over her daughter's need for identification with the mother. His death, however, comes only a little more than halfway through the novel. Mathilda's decision after his suicide to feign her own death, and then retreat into exile and decline, suggests that his removal not only defends her against the penalty of his love, but also prepares for her eventual identification with the mother.

I who had before clothed myself in the bright garb of sincerity must now borrow one of divers colours: it might sit awkwardly at first, but use would enable me to place it in elegant folds, to lie with grace. Aye, I might die my soul with falsehood untill [sic] I had quite hid its native colour … My father, to be happy both now and when again we meet I must fly from all this life which is mockery to one like me. In solitude only shall I be myself; in solitude I shall be thine.

(48-49, emphasis added)

As she wastes away in the last pages of the novel, she muses, “In truth I am in love with death; no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attire than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapt in their shroud: is it not my marriage dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal mental union we shall never part” (77-78).

A longing for death can represent a desire to dissolve the self, to return completely to the mother. For Mathilda, death is a doubly effective return: the mother is already dead, and to be like her in that respect is to be more with her than is possible in life. In death, moreover, the desired reunion with the father that compels her to take her mother's place is no longer forbidden. Death brings with it “mental” union—that is, asexual union—which can make a shroud into a wedding dress, and a daughter her father's bride, without fear of the mother's retribution.²¹ The bride in her shroud is at once the mother, victim of the father's desire—the only mother the daughter has ever known—and the daughter who has taken her place.²² The merging of mother and daughter frees the daughter from the menace of the phantom mother by embracing the menace and erasing the phantom. When Mathilda imagines the afterlife, it is a world in which the mother no longer has a place. She envisions the terrestrial paradise of the Purgatorio: “[I] thought it would be sweet when I wandered on those lovely banks to see the car of light descend with my long lost parent to be restored to me” (74). Only one lost parent is restored to her, and it is for his love that she embraces death.²³

On May 2, 1820, Maria Gisborne left Leghorn for England, taking with her a copy of Mathilda, which Mary had asked her to convey to Godwin for his assistance in its publication.²⁴ Mary and Maria had met for the first time in Mary's adult life at La Scala, in May of 1818. Their very first meeting, however, had occurred long before. During the week following Wollstonecraft's death, Maria (then Maria Reveley) cared for the infant Mary while Godwin was occupied with the affairs of his dead wife. Maria's intimacy with Mary's parents dated from well before their marriage, and she appears to have been an early rival of Wollstonecraft for Godwin's affections. The three remained close friends during the marriage. After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin took a renewed interest in Maria, though the jealousy of her husband, Willey Reveley, forced him to curtail his visits to her. In August of 1799, only one month after Reveley's death, Godwin proposed marriage to Maria. She received his offer coldly, no doubt put off by the impropriety of his advances. Shortly thereafter, she married John Gisborne. Godwin's letters to Maria during the courtship make it clear that Godwin intended (unconsciously?) for her to take Wollstonecraft's place in more ways than as simply his wife. “You have it in your power,” he writes, “to give me new life, a new interest in existence, to raise me from the grave in which my heart lies buried.”²⁵

Mary was aware of her father's feelings for Maria—most of what is known, in fact, of her father's relations with Maria comes from Mary's unfinished biography of Godwin.²⁶ In Italy, Maria became Mary's closest female friend and confidant, a stepmother of sufficient grace and intellect to approximate the idealized figure of the mother she had never known, and to surpass the much inferior substitute—Mary Jane Clairmont—chosen by her father.²⁷

During her visit to England, Maria and Godwin discussed Mathilda.²⁸ She writes in her journal,

The subject he says is disgusting and detestable, and there ought to be, at least if [it] is ever published, a preface to prepare the minds of the readers, and to prevent them from being tormented by the apprehension from moment to moment of the fall of the heroine; it is true (he says) that this difficulty is in some measure obviated, by Mathildas [sic] protestation at the beginning of the book, that she has not to reproach herself with any guilt; but yet, in proceeding one is apt to lose sight of that protestation; besides (he added with animation) one cannot exactly trust to what an author of the modern school may deem guilt.²⁹

Godwin's misgivings about the compromised innocence of the novel's heroine screen his concern for the innocence or guilt of its author, and show his active engagement in his daughter's seduction fantasy. Whether or not he recognized himself in that fantasy, he could not have resisted the implication of his desire in not only its plot and Mary's writing of it, but also—perhaps most of all—in her having sent him the manuscript.

There is no evidence that Godwin made any effort to see that the novel was published. When it became clear that Godwin was not going to act on its publication, Mary undertook to recover the manuscript. Beginning in January, 1822, her letters to Maria repeat earnest requests that she retrieve the manuscript from Godwin and have it copied, but he appears to have resisted or ignored Maria's efforts to do so. Following a break between the Godwins and the Gisbornes in February, recovery of the manuscript became increasingly unlikely. Mary suggested Maria write for Mathilda, and herself wrote to Godwin at least once, but without result.³⁰ By late April, Maria had decided that the manuscript would never be recovered,³¹ but Mary continued to hope otherwise. On June 2, she wrote to ask—and her question is informed by every identification that has shaped the novel and these letters—“Did you get Mathilda from Papa?”³²

Godwin's refusal to return the manuscript breaks a sequence of identifications and defenses that can be traced back at least as far as William Shelley's death. These identifications and defenses inform the composition of the manuscript and its circulation between Mary, Maria and Godwin. They are multiform and autobiographical: the life they trace, the tale they write out, is Mary's. These are its major moments:

1) Mathilda represents a fantasy of seduction, Mary's refiguring of the scene of her origin, subject to the effects of the father's intervention in mother-daughter identifications. The fantasy responds to Mary's need for identification with her dead mother, to her feelings of culpability for her mother's death, to her guilt for the oedipal succession that is facilitated by it, and to the fantasy mother's punitive power over the daughter who succeeds to her mother's place.

2) The submission of the novel to Godwin signals Mary's effort to engage him in the seduction fantasy, but to acknowledge the authority of his desire in the primal scene which determines her understanding of herself and her relations with each of her parents. The daughter's need to acknowledge the father's authority is brought to crisis by the loss of the son whose name had previously signified that authority. The manuscript of the novel takes the place (for both daughter and father) of prior signs of submission to the father's desire. It is a substitute for at least two lost sons, the “William Godwin” that Mary could not be,³³ and the “William Shelley” who might have partially repaired that lack, had he survived.³⁴

3) Mary submits the manuscript through Maria, who, acting in the place of the idealized mother (for both the daughter and the father), figures the fantasy mother's acquiescence to the daughter's succession to the mother's place.

4) The loss of William requires a substitute sign of submission to the father's desire—the manuscript of Mathilda; Percy Florence's birth changes the daughter's relation to the father, and overdetermines the function of the manuscript. Just as the name of her first son, “William,” was a signal of the authority of the first father, so the name of her second son, “Percy,” signifies the intervening authority of a second father. The seduction fantasy can serve not only to represent the daughter's submission to the father's desire, but also to restrict its authority to the fantasmatic scene of seduction. The writing of Mathilda and the naming of Mary's second son signal not only an effort to satisfy Godwin's desire and neutralize its dangers, but also to reshape the oedipal configuration that threatens the daughter with death. By satisfying the desire of one father—and restricting that satisfaction to its representation in fantasy—Mary is free to submit herself to the authority of another father's desire, and thereby assume the mother's place under conditions where she is less subject to the menace of that identification.³⁵ In Mathilda, the power of the family romance to remark the parents according to the daughter's desire remakes as well the daughter's sense of herself as parent, as mother and as wife.

5) Godwin, however, refuses to recognize Mary's revision of the family history. The seduction fantasy written into Mathilda would satisfy his unconscious need for the daughter's acknowledgement of his desire, but the submission of the manuscript, while on the one hand establishing his authority, would on the other hand signal Mary's effort to contain it. Godwin's refusal to aid in the publication of the manuscript, or even to return it to Mary, defends against the daughter's effort to alter the oedipal structure that defines her place as daughter, mother and wife, relative to the father.³⁶ To sanction her substitution of another father would have called into question his own position, complicit with the seduction; it would have hit too close to home.

Soon, however, another accident of history would render Mary's effort and Godwin's refusal of little consequence. Mary's hope of a father's love without mortal penalty would be ended by Percy's death in July of 1822. After that event, the overdetermination of the names in Mary's life increases: what remained after Percy's death of the revised oedipal configuration was the son, proof of a father's love, who could love a daughter and a mother in the father's name. She writes in her journal on October 2, 1822—her first entry after Percy's death, “Father, Mother, friend, husband, children—all made as it were the team that inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily—but now I have no

That origin, in fantasy and in reality, would shape Mary's sense of her destiny. She mentions Mathilda for the last time in a letter to Maria, May 3-6, 1823: “It seems to me that in what I have hitherto written I have done nothing but prophecy what has arrived to. Mathilda fortells [sic] even many small circumstances most truly—& the whole of it is a monument of what now is.”³⁷

Notes

1. Revue française de Psychanalyse 2.3 (1928): 541-65. Bonaparte's memoir of her childhood neurosis is worthy of more attention than it appears to have received. It is, as nearly as I have been able to determine, the only first-hand account in psychoanalytic literature of the oedipal conflicts of a daughter whose mother has died giving birth to her. It is one of the most important sources for my reading of the place and significance of Mathilda in Mary Shelley's life. Translations of passages from Bonaparte's memoir are my own.

2. The Journals of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Annotated Edition, ed. Paula Renée Feldman, diss., Northwestern University, 1974 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1975. 7507910) 260. Mary Shelley's Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1947) 122. The heading “Friday 4th” is not followed by an entry, and there are no further daily entries in Book ii of the journal (the remaining pages in Book ii include transcriptions of poetry, fragments by Mary and Percy, lists of reading, clothing, etc., dating from a later period). Until recently, the only edition of Mary's Journal was that edited by Jones in 1947. The Jones text is marred by numerous omissions, and sometimes incorrect dates and annotations. Feldman corrects errors in the Jones text and restores omitted passages. In this essay, I follow Feldman's version of text and punctuation, but cite both editions, noting their differences when significant. Passages or words that are cancelled in the manuscript of the Journal are enclosed in angle brackets, thus: <=.

3. Claire [Clara Mary Jane] Clairmont, The Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. Marion Kingston Stocking (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1968) 113.

4. Only the entry for July 8, 1822, the day of Percy's death, is followed by a discontinuity comparable in length to that following William's death (Feldman 392; Jones 180). That entry, like that of June 4, 1819, is followed by no text, and is Mary's last entry in that journal book (Book iii). The only other sizable gap in the published journal prior to Percy's death is attributed by Feldman and Jones to the loss of the journal book for May 14, 1815-July 20, 1816, which included the date of William Shelley's birth (January 24, 1816) (Feldman ix; Jones 5on1). Following Percy's death, Mary's entries to the journal were more irregular.

5. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 vols, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980-88) 1: 100.

6. Elizabeth Nitchie, “Mary Shelley's Mathilda: An Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance,” Studies in Philology 40 (1943): 448-49. Mary's work on the novel took altogether a little more than three months. In the final version of Mathilda, Mathilda's literary effort also takes three months. Nitchie concludes that Mary finished copying the manuscript on September 12 on the basis of the entry, “Finish copying my tale,” which follows the heading “Sunday 12” in the journal. Under the same heading, however, Mary also writes, “on friday [that is, September 10]—S.[helley] sends his tragedy [The Cenci] to Peacock” (Feldman 292; Jones 124). Jones notes in his preface that, “after neglecting her journal for a few days, Mary's practice was to summarize the missing days, but she used only the one specific date for the entry, usually (but not always) the date on which she wrote the summarizing entry” (xiii). The next previous date heading in the journal is “Sunday 5th,” followed by no entry. The entry for “September 12” then, clearly records some events which occurred two days prior, and possibly others of several days before that. Though the evidence is admittedly ambiguous, it is not improbable that Mary finished copying the text of Mathilda—her “tale”—on September 10, 1819, the twenty-second anniversary of her mother's death. This would not have been the first time that a landmark in Mary's writing coincided with the anniversary of Wollstonecraft's death. Five years before, on September 10, 1814, she began her first attempt at a novel, now lost, entitled Hate (Feldman 26; Jones 14).

7. Mathilda, ed. Elizabeth Nitchie, Studies in Philology, extra ser., 3 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1959) 90-104. All subsequent references to Mathilda are to this edition.

8. The only substantive analysis of the work's biographical significance is Elizabeth Nitchie's 1943 study of the then unpublished manuscript. (Her conclusions are repeated in an abbreviated form, with some minor emendations, in her preface to the 1959 edition [Mathilda, vii-xv], and in Appendix iii of her biography, Mary Shelley, Author of “Frankenstein” (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1953; Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1970). While she concluded that the novel is largely an autobiographical document, Nitchie seems reluctant to speculate on the origin and significance of its central theme of father-daughter incest. She attributes the incest there to Percy's interest in that subject and—improbably, I think—to Mary's “horror” of her “unnatural and dreadful attitude” towards Percy after the death of Clara. “Mary may also,” Nitchie continues, “have been recording, in Mathilda's sorrow over her alienation from her father and her loss of him by death, her grief at a spiritual separation from her own father” (457)—the estrangement resulting from Godwin's demands for money and attacks on Percy. “Like Mathilda, she had truly lost a beloved but cruel father, a loss all the more poignant because of what she later acknowledged to Mrs Gisborne was her ‘excessive and romantic’ attachment to him” (459). That Nitchie does not make more of Mary's “excessive and romantic attachment” to Godwin seems to me a misjudgment.

9. On Freud's use of nachträglich (Nachträglichkeit; in the Standard Edition, infelicitously translated as “deferred action”), see Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth, 1973) 111-14.

10. Mitzi Myers has shown (“Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject,” Studies in Romanticism 20.3 [1981]) that Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (written in 1798, immediately after Wollstonecraft's death) is deeply informed by such interests. Though Mary must have been familiar with the Memoirs before she wrote Mathilda, the only evidence by her own hand indicating that she read them is a journal entry dated eight months after the completion of the novel. Mary read the Memoirs together with the Posthumous Letters, the Letters from Norway and Mary, A Fiction during the period of June 1-7, 1820 (Feldman 314-15; Jones 133-34)—the first anniversary of William Shelley's illness and death.

11. Mary Poovey's recent reading of Frankenstein, while it convincingly accounts for Mary's conflicting desires for self-assertion and acceptance, is limited by its privileging of an idealized mother. Poovey writes, “The motherless daughter's relationship with the father carries the burden of needs originally and ideally satisfied by the mother; in a sense, the relationship with each father [Godwin and Percy] is only an imaginative substitute for the absent relationship with the mother” (The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984] 168). The “needs originally and ideally satisfied by the mother” are, however, already subject to oedipal defenses against the mother as the primary rival for the father's desire, because his desire is already a principal element of any representation of the mother. This is true whatever the origin of the material for the representation (whether the daughter is told of her mother by her father or by someone else), as the father is present by implication in every fantasy of the mother.

12. Alfieri's play could serve as a gloss to Mathilda. The eponymic heroine of “Myrrha” is tortured by her incestuous desire for her father, brought to a crisis by her approaching marriage, and by the impossibility of responding truthfully to the repeated inquiries of her parents, who recognize that she is in love with someone other than her intended husband. At the close of the play, Myrrha reveals by a slip of the tongue made in her father's presence the name of her beloved—his name. She seizes his dagger and kills herself. Percy read the play in translation in 1815 (Feldman 97; Jones 49), as did Claire Clairmont, in 1819 (Journals 502). Percy encouraged Mary to translate the play (The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols., ed. Frederick L. Jones [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964] 2: 39, where it is misidentified by Jones as “Ariosto's ‘Myrrha’”). Jean de Palacio concludes that the play was as influential as The Cenci on Mary's writing of Mathilda, which he finds to be a “conjugation” of the two plays (Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre: Contributions aux études shelleyennes, [Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1969] 135). William Veeder notes that Thomas Medwin believed that Mary planned to write a father-daughter incest play based on “Myrrha” (“The Negative Oedipus: Father, Frankenstein, and the Shelleys,” Critical Inquiry 12.2 [1986]: 388n17), but the “Tale probably suggested” by the play that Medwin remembers is clearly Mathilda (Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, rev. ed. H. Buxton Forman [London: Oxford UP, 1913] 252).

13. William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft [Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman], ed. W. Clark Durant (New York: Gordon, 1972) 122.

14. “‘My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 15 (1976): 187.

15. Rubenstein 172.

16. Cf. Laplanche and Pontalis: “The originary fantasy [fantasme originaire] … is characterized by an absence of subjectivization coincident with the presence of the subject in the scene … “A father seduces a daughter” might perhaps be the summary formulation of the seduction fantasy. The indication here of the primary process is not the absence of organization, as is sometimes suggested, but the peculiar character of the structure, in that it is a scenario with multiple entries, in which nothing shows whether the subject will be immediately located in the term, daughter; it can as well be fixed as father, or even in the term seduces” (“Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 49.1 [1968]: 13-14, translation slightly corrected).

17. My use of “family romance” here and below is specific, and closer to Freud's use of the term than is usually the case when it is invoked. A Familienroman is the narrative motivated by oedipal conflicts, in which the history of the child's family is revised; “romance” refers to the literary genre of the revision, rather than to the bond of affect between the child and one or another of the parents. See Freud, The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fleiss, Drafts and Notes: 1887-1902, eds. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, trans. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey (New York: Basic, 1954) 205; 256; “Family Romances,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953-74) 9: 235-41.

18. Cf. Bonaparte 547-48: “The place of my mother was empty, and I could perhaps more easily than another little girl dream of occupying it. But the identification with the mother encountered on the other hand a condition which did not exist for the other little girls for whom the mother is the living rival: death … To be dead, for me, was to be identified with the mother, was to be in the place of the wife of my father, was, like my mother, to die—a kind of strange delight—by his agency [par lui mourir].” The last two chapters of Godwin's Memoirs would have provided Mary with ample evidence of the effect of the father's desire. Chapter ix begins, “I am now led, by the progress of the story, to the last branch of her history, the connection between Mary [Wollstonecraft] and myself” (97); chapter x begins, “I am now led, by the course of my narrative, to the last fatal scene of her life” (112).

19. The structure of the seduction fantasy will be determined by the outcome of a struggle for predominance between idealizing and prohibitive functions of the super-ego. The fantasy objects that have replaced the dead mother can, on the one hand, provoke feelings of inferiority and resentment, as the daughter aspires forever unsuccessfully to match her ego-ideal. On the other hand, the fantasized mother can take on a sadistic, punitive character, strengthening the daughter's feelings of culpability for her mother's death, and enforcing the incest taboo from beyond the grave with the threat of the consequences of its violation. The content of these fantasies of the mother is likely to be in large part determined by the father's attitude towards his lost love object and the daughter that can be identified with that object: her idealization will be encouraged by his idealization, her experience of the prohibition of incest will be encouraged by his repression of the identification. The daughter is trapped by 1) the necessity of idealization in the absence of the mother, as a prerequisite to super-ego development on the basis of introjected imagos of the mother; and 2) the consequent threat of identification with the ideal, which, while it enforces the prohibitive function of the super-ego, does so at the expense of the socializing function of the identification. On the sadistic character of the daughter's fantasies of the dead mother, see Peter B. Neubauer, “The One-Parent Child and His Oedipal Development,” The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 15 (1960): 286-309; Otto Fenichel, “Specific Forms of the Oedipus Complex,” The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel, 2 vols., ed. Hanna Fenichel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953). On the distinctions between idealizing and prohibitive functions of the super-ego, and the related question as to whether or not these operate independently or within a larger structure, see Laplanche and Pontalis, Language, 144-45; 435-38.

20. Mathilda's pursuit (or her prophetic dream) is mentioned in Mary's letter (Sept. 2, 1822) to Maria Gisborne describing Percy's death: “It must have been fearful to see us [Mary and Claire]—two poor, wild aghast creatures—driving (like Mathilda) towards the sea to learn if we were to be for ever doomed to misery” (Letters 1: 247). The storm in Mathilda may refigure the terrific storm during the night of the Shelleys' elopement to the Continent (Feldman 3-5; Jones 3-4). The father's letter to Mathilda explaining his departure may then refigure the letter Mary left behind for Godwin, described by Godwin in a letter to John Taylor, August 27, 1814 (The Elopement of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin as Narrated by William Godwin, ed. H. Buxton Forman [Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Press, 1969] 11-12).

21. The repression of the daughter's sexuality is a precondition for her passage into the afterlife and access to the father: the disguise Mathilda adopts in her exile is described variously as a “fanciful nunlike dress” (50), “a whimsical nunlike habit” (60), and “a close nunlike gown of black silk” (85n49).

22. Cf. Bonaparte 544-45: “My dead mother, I had even seen her. In the great watercolor hung by my grandmother in the salon, where my mother appeared lying on her back on her bed, in a white robe, looking like a bride—and pale, pale.” Mary would have also seen her dead mother—in John Opie's portrait, which hung over the fireplace in her father's library (Glynn R. Grylls, Mary Shelley: A Biography [London: Oxford UP, 1938] 26; Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974] 231). The portrait, executed in April of 1797, shows Wollstonecraft in a loosely-fitting light-colored gown, something like the shroud-wedding dress Mathilda envisages for herself. Mary is present implicitly in the portrait, as Wollstonecraft, in her fifth month of pregnancy, is noticeably plump. Godwin used a retouched engraving of the Opie portrait as the frontispiece of his Memoirs (Tomalin, pls. 19-21). See also Durant's note on the Opie portrait in his Supplement to Godwin's Memoirs, 327-32.

23. In Purgatorio xxvii, Matelda (clearly Mary's source for her heroine's name) directs the poet-voyager to the waters of forgetting of evil and of remembering of good (Lethe and Eunoë); she sings to him from Psalms 31[32]: 1, “Beati quorum tecta …” “Happy is he whose fault is taken away, whose sin is covered” (Purgatorio xxvii: 6 ff). Only after drinking from these waters is Dante sufficiently purified to be able to enter Paradise. Palacio discusses at length the relation between Mathilda and the Purgatorio, finding (inappropriately, I think) Mathilda at fault for being incapable of a Matelda-like purification of her father's memory, and for that reason at least partially responsible for their separation (Palacio 42-46). He misses entirely the significance for Mary of the transition made possible by the memory-renovating springs tended by Matelda/Mathilda. Mary read the Purgatorio from August 4 to August 20, 1819, while she was writing out the first draft of The Fields of Fancy (Feldman 289-91; Jones 122-23).

24. Maria's journal entry for May 9, 1820 records that she read the novel with approval: “This most s[ingu]larly interesting novel evinces the highest powers of mi[nd] in the author united to extreme delicacy of sentime[nt]. It is written without artifice and perhaps without [the] technical excellence of a veteran writer—There are [perhaps] some little inaccuracies which, up[on] revisal [sic], might have been corrected: but these are trifling blemishes [and] I am well persuaded that the author will one day be the admiration of the world. I am confident that I [should] have formed this opinion had I not been acquainted [with] her and loved her” (Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams, Shelley's Friends: Their Journals and Letters, ed. Frederick L. Jones [Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1951] 27). Others who were familiar with the novel (besides Maria, Godwin, and, presumably, Percy) were Edward and Jane Williams, to whom Mary read from the copy she had retained in August and September of 1821 (Feldman 363-64; Jones 159-60). Nitchie concludes of Mary's submission of the manuscript to Godwin, “highly personal as the story was, [she] hoped that it would be published, evidently believing that the characters and the situations were sufficiently disguised” (Mathilda vii). Again, I think, Nitchie misses the significance of the “characters” and “situations” of the novel.

25. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 2 vols., ed. C. Kegan Paul (New York: AMS Press, 1970) 1: 335.

26. William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries 1: 83, 162, 332-33.

27. Entering Mary's life relatively late, after four years of an exclusive if distant relationship with Godwin, the second Mrs. Godwin must have appeared to the young Mary as proof of the mother's power to deprive the daughter of the father's love, and proof as well that the real stepmother could not equal the fantasy mother—encouraging in both Mary and Mrs. Godwin conflicting feelings of inferiority and superiority, and heightening their rivalry for the father's attentions. (See, for example, Mary's letter to Percy, September 27, 1817: “as to Mrs G. something [sic] very analogous to disgust arises whenever I mention her” [Letters 1: 43].) That Mrs. Godwin was Mary's rival in every sense to the privileged position occupied by the fantasy mother would have been made very clear by her name, Mary Jane; Mary always calls her “Mrs. Godwin.” There were other women in the Godwin household whom Mary may have associated with the fantasy mother. Chief among these was Louisa Gray Jones, the servant assigned the task of caring for Mary and Fanny, who left the house when Mrs. Godwin arrived (Jane Dunn, Moon in Edipse: A Life of Mary Shelley [New York: St. Martin's, 1978] 16-20). Grylls suggests (12) that Jones expected to marry Godwin.

28. The Gisborne's visits to the Godwins were marked by confusion and increasing tensions (Maria Gisborne Journals 35-48). The strain was due in part, no doubt, to Godwin's discomfort with the memory of his unsuccessful courtship, but it was attributed by him to Mrs. Godwin's reaction to Maria's intimacy with Mary, whom she considered “the greatest enemy she has in the world.” Mrs. Godwin was, Maria reports, so shocked at her first expressions of admiration for Mary that she thereafter refused to receive her (Gisborne Journals 39-40).

29. Gisborne Journals 44. Mary may never have known the details of Godwin's estimation of the novel; there is no evidence that she ever read Maria's journal (Gisborne Journals 8n).

30. Letters 1: 224. Her letter and Godwin's reply, if any was made, are lost. She mentions the request to Godwin in a letter to Maria, April 6-10, 1822 (Letters 1: 229).

31. Gisborne Journals 82.

32. Letters 1: 237.

33. Wollstonecraft and Godwin expected their first child to be a boy, whom they would name after his father (Godwin & Mary: Letters of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, 2 vols., ed. Ralph M. Wardle [Lawrence: U of Kansas P, 1966] 80, 82, 88, 92, 102; U. C. Knoepflmacher, “Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters,” The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, eds. G. Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher [Berkeley: U of California P, 1979] 92-93). When Godwin's first child with the second Mrs. Godwin, a boy (b. 1802), was given his father's name, Mary must have perceived him as a rival, not only in the way that any new child born into a family threatens the position of the older children, but also in a very particular way signified by his name: William Godwin the Younger enjoyed a privileged relation with his father that Mary (who could never be a “William”) could not enjoy. Cf. Mathilda's childhood fantasy of reunion with her father, in which the roles of daughter and son are conflated: “disguised like a boy I would seek my father through the world. My imagination hung upon the scene of recognition; his miniature, which I should continually wear exposed on my breast, would be the means and I imaged the moment to my mind a thousand and a thousand times, perpetually varying the circumstances. Sometimes it would be in a desart [sic]; in a populous city; at a ball; we should perhaps meet in a vessel; and his first words constantly were, ‘My daughter, I love thee!’” (11, emphasis added).

34. On the page preceding Mary's first journal entry following William's death, she has written a fragment, evidently addressed to him:

              That time is Gone for ever—child—
              Those hours are frozen forever
    We look on the past, & stare aghast
              On the ghosts with aspects strange & wild
              Of the hopes whom thou & I beguiled
                        To death in life's dark river.
              The waves we gazed on then rolled by
              Their stream is unreturning
    We two stand, in a lonely land,
              Like tombs <m= to mark the memory
              Of joys & griefs that fade & flee
                        In the light of lifes [sic] dim morning

    (Feldman 289; omitted from Jones)

    The “ghosts with aspects strange & wild” must include the phantom of the fantasy mother; the hopes that Mary and William might have beguiled would include the resolution of the conflicts associated with the fantasy mother.

35. Mathilda addresses her memoirs to a character named Woodville, the one person who befriends her during her exile. Woodville is clearly an idealized Percy (Mathilda xiii; Nitchie, “Mary Shelley's Mathilda” 459), but his authority within the novel is extremely limited: his effort to dissuade Mathilda from her suicidal melancholy is ineffective, and he disappears completely from the novel in its last pages. The primary function he fulfills in the novel is, I suspect, to mark the transfer between oedipal configurations that the novel undertakes. Mathilda is, in this respect, addressed to both men: to Godwin (Mathilda's father), as the father in the originary configuration, for whom the narrative should represent a reassurance of his continuing authority; to Percy (Woodville), as the father in the substitute configuration, for whom the narrative should represent a reassurance that the first father's authority is limited to the realm of fantasy.

36. The manuscript held by Godwin was never returned to Mary, and is, presumably, lost. The copy that Mary retained remained unpublished among the Shelley papers (Nitchie, Mathilda vii-viii; Mary Shelley 207). This manuscript is divided between two notebooks containing the finished draft of Mathilda and parts of The Fields of Fancy, in Lord Abinger's collection, the remainder of the rough draft in the Bodleian Library, and some fragments among the Shelley-Rolls papers in the Bodleian (Nitchie, Mathilda vii-viii; Mary Shelley 207). Among the Shelley-Rolls fragments is the conclusion to the Fields of Fancy narrative frame, which ends with Mathilda saying to Diotima, “I am here, not with my father, but listening to lessons of wisdom, which will one day bring me to him when we shall never part” (Mathilda 89n83).

37. Letters 1: 336.

I am grateful to Stuart Curran for his critical acumen and patience during the several revisions of this essay.