UBC #6: Mary Shelley

[truepenny]

Sorry, Percy, you've been voted off the island.

---

UBC #6
Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. 1988. New York: Routledge, 1989.

This is going to be rather scattershot, since there are several quite distinct issues this book raised for me.

1. The problem with Mellor's literary analysis is that she does not distinguish shades and degrees of meaning with any degree of sophistication or subtlety. Here, the most egregious example (discussing Frankenstein):

Victor most ardently desires his bride when he knows she is dead. The conflation with his earlier dream, when he thought to embrace the living Elizabeth but instead held in his arms the corpse of his mother, signals Victor's most profound erotic desire, a necrophiliac and incestuous desire to possess the dead female, the lost mother.
          To put this point another way, we might observe that Victor Frankenstein's most passionate relationships are with men rather than with women.
(121)

Mellor does not, of course, mean that a dead woman is the same as a gay man. But her language is imprecise enough to make it more difficult to construe her intended meaning than her inadvertent assertion.

2. The problem with her argument (in a nutshell: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novels idealize and promote the egalitarian bourgeois family, despite acknowledging its problems) is something she herself admits: this mythical "egalitarian bourgeois family" NEVER APPEARS in any of Shelley's novels. I don't think Mellor is wrong that that ideal is something Shelley's novels wrestle with, but again, the phrasing of Mellor's argument is clumsy enough that it undercuts itself.

3. There is nothing new under the sun, including the Singularity. Both MWS's father, William Godwin, and her husband espoused a utopian political philosophy that held, among other tenets, "the conviction that the improved powers of the rational mind could conquer disease and even death" (162). Man is perfectible through the power and exercise of his own mind. And I use the noun "man" deliberately, because this seems to me to be a preoccupation of male thinkers at the expense of women. As Mellor says in her discussion of Shelley's use of Prometheus:

The romantic attempt to marry opposites, to unite the mortal and the immortal in a transcendental dialectic, to create the human form divine, is seen by Mary Shelley as pure fantasy, no more real than Walton's dream.
          Worse, as Frankenstein suggests, it is a very dangerous fantasy. Hidden behind Godwin's and Percy Shelley's dream of human perfectibility is a rampant egoism, the cardinal sin of the Satanic Prometheus. For Godwin and Percy Shelley, as for Coleridge and Blake, it was the mission of the philosopher-poet to guide mankind toward salvation, to participate in the infinite I AM, and to destroy the mind-forged manacles of society. Mary Shelley had seen just how self-indulgent this self-image of the poet-savior could be.
(79)

Replace "poet" with "engineer," and it starts looking all too horribly familiar. It's mind over matter, which in Western binary thinking always carries the freight of man over woman. And that binary thinking is wrong, but you don't fix the problem by trying to get rid of one of the terms (matter, in both Romantic Prometheanism and the Vingean Singularity, becomes irrelevant because ultimately controllable). You fix the problem by getting rid of the binary. And that involves accepting the body and--as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was arguing, nearly two hundred years ago now--the consequences and responsibilities of the material world. Frankenstein sins in creating the monster, but he damns himself when he repudiates it.

4. matociquala and I were agreeing yesterday that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley should have killed her husband with a shovel. Also her father. Which led me to this odd little AU doggerel:

Mary Shelley took an axe,
And gave her father forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her husband forty-one.

5. Among Percy Bysshe Shelley's many crimes against his wife are his "improvements" of Frankenstein. Let me offer the example Mellor uses (60):

MWS wrote, in her ms of Frankenstein:

Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was also a favorite pursuit and if I never saw any I attributed it rather to my own inexperience and mistakes than want of skill in my instructors.

Which isn't good enough for PBS. He "improves" it, thus:

Nor were these my only visions. The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally accorded by my favorite authors, the fulfillment of which I most eagerly sought; and if my incantations were always unsuccessful, I attributed the failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake, than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors.

What PBS is doing is a form of scaffolding (to hark back to an earlier conversation). It is not the only form of scaffolding, but it is very distinctly a species of the genus. He's taking MWS's direct, simple, quite pithy sentence and weighing it down with unnecessary verbiage. Strunk & White are waiting for their turn with the shovel.

Also, PBS distorted the text. He imposed his own philosophy on it, simplified and misinterpreted the psychology, and insisted on reading Victor Frankenstein sympathetically (subconsciously recognizing his own portrait?)--and MWS let him get away with it. She did not STET any of his edits except one. His psychological hang-ups dictated that he run roughshod over her; her psychological hang-ups dictated that she let him. And I'm angry at her, in that painful way you get angry when you see a beloved friend doing something stupid that's going to hurt them, for letting him mutilate her novel.

6. Mellor knows nothing about science fiction, but she does feel obliged to gesture in its direction, resulting in this rather interesting paragraph:

Mary Shelley based Victor Frankenstein's attempt to create a new species from dead organic matter through the use of chemistry and electricity on the most advanced scientific research of the early nineteenth century. Her vision of the isolated scientist discovering the secret of life is no mere fantasy but a plausible prediction of what science might accomplish. As such, Frankenstein has rightly been hailed as the first legitimate example of that genre we call science fiction. Brian Aldiss has tentatively defined science fiction as "the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mold." And Eric Rabkin and Robert Scoles have identified the conventional elements of science fiction as "speculation and social criticism, hardware and exotic adventure." We might expand these criteria to say that science fiction is a genre that (1) is grounded on valid scientific research; (2) gives a persuasive prediction of what science might be able to accomplish in the foreseeable future; and (3) offers a humanistic critique of either specific technological inventions or the very nature of scientific thinking.
(107)

Discuss amongst yourselves.

7. Mary Shelley's novels are characterized by the absence of the mother, and by the desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempts of daughters, sons, and fathers to find surrogates or replacements.

8. Mellor manages to do biographical criticism in a way that convinces me, and as I have said before, and loudly, biographical criticism gives me a wiggins. But Mellor goes at it the right way round. She discusses Mary Shelley's biography and then argues that these biographical problems led to an interest in/preoccupation with certain themes. She's also much more aware than most biographical critics I have read of the ways in which the personal is political.

Final verdict: flawed but interesting.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Just getting rid of disease and death doesn't strike me as much of a Singularity. Where's the acceleration? Where are the Jupiter-sized brains? Where is the radical transformation?

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Considering that four of Percy Bysshe Shelley's five children died in infancy, considering that Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever before her daughter was two weeks old ... I think for the early nineteenth century, the defeat of disease would have been an incredibly radical transformation.


In any event, those are the trappings of the Singularity. I'm talking about the idea: the idea that mankind is perfectible through the use of reason.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Antecedents got all tangled up there.

Mary Wollstonecraft married William Godwin--and died, poor woman, 6 months later, of puerperal fever after her daughter's birth. That daughter was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who grew up to marry Percy Bysshe Shelley (she dropped the Godwin, not the Wollstonecraft, when she married)--and to carry five children, only one of whom survived her. I'm also not sure that my implication that PBS generated even an iota of his identity from fatherhood was justified. I was trying, clumsily, to suggest that he had firsthand and very brutal experience of the ravages of disease, even if he seems to have done his best, in general, to ignore it.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Word. Mostly, we don't get--really don't get--the effects not merely of contagious and infectious disease pre-antibiotics, but we fail in general, to grasp the implications and effects of life in a society pre-mid-20th century medicine.

Not only are so many things treatable and controllable that once weren't, but we have much better idea about what causes health problems in the first place. There was a somewhat better knowledge of medicine in 1850 than in 1650--but nor much. This was an issue that they felt in their bones, and we're past that now.

[luna-the-cat.livejournal.com]

Ugh. You know, I had no idea that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein had been rewritten that way. Yeah, that's just ugly.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I think one could convincingly argue that Dante wrote hard sf of the speculative "wander through this interesting proposition without having a real plot" sort years before Frankenstein.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

And he included some science--mostly astronomy, but there's a little optics too.

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

The three major sciences of his time were central to the Divine Comedy. (Theology, Geometry, and Astronomy)

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I completely forgot about optics. Yeah, the four main sciences.

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

Re: #6

Setting aside the eternaly fun discusion of what is the first science fiction book...

I'm impressed with the last half of that paragraph. It's a nice, tidy wrap up of a hundred years of books in a loosely defined genre.

She's not dissmissive. In fact, she tris to identify and break down sci-fi's driving force and does a pretty nice job of it.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Er... except for the space operas, and many genre crossovers like SF mysteries. And things like FTL drives or wormholes as accepted shortcuts for getting your characters around space, or impossible planetary set-ups. And much of the military SF tradition. And any science fiction whose themes aren't about the technology or the science -- even if you choose to include the soft sciences -- but are about some other aspect of society or humanity.

Any definition of SF that sounds to me like it excludes Dune* has a problem.


* not due to any specific fondness I have for the book, but because it's so much an accepted cornerstone of SF.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

4. Yay axe!!

5. The fule probably was convinced he was "improving" her text by taking a bald and direct statement and giving it some rhetorical polish. There's a powerful tendency in prose writing in Early Modern English to reach for what they thought were the elegancies and refinement of classical rhetoric, all too often to such an extent that you need a trained team of machete-wielding analysts to determine what the original sentence was supposed to be about. Straightforward, pithy English was somehow vulgar in its directness; it lacked that je ne sais quoi of Latinate elegance necessary for civilized discourse among persons of education and refinement. I mean, I'm a clause whore myself, and I can see how easy it is to succumb to the urge, but these people not only had no shame, they were convinced it was the right thing to do. (Why am I telling you this? You've seen the early stages of the debates among & about Shakespeare & co.) I don't think this was just a matter of he couldn't approve of the taste of the soup until he'd spit in it; he knew, based on received wisdom, that she wrote too plainly, and she didn't have the experience or the confidence to say "I like my way better." Of course, he had to spit in the soup, that's the way he was.

6. What?! Applies humanist values?! You mean, science fiction is supposed to somehow involve humans!?!?! That'll disappoint quite a few folks who keep claiming it's been ruined by all those mushy "soft" SF writers that dare to drag people into their stories, instead of letting it be all about The Hard Science (comment devolves into parody of overworked rant about how lack of hard science-SF is ruining the genre with especial emphasis on Why Women Can't Write Real Science Fiction.)

7. All writers have squids.

8. The fact that you've found so few who can do this well should be enough of a warning to others considering that angle. But it won't stop them. Alas.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Um.

PBS & MWS are not writing Early Modern English. Unless they've changed the definition without telling me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

PBS tries to write EME. And because I am very mean, I laugh at him for it. ("Chariotest"? wtf?)

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I defer here, as my ignorance of the technical identifiers of English literature is vast. Really, really vast.
As someone who managed, in fact, to avoid much exposure to English literature classes as an undergraduate (a neat trick in the American system, but it can be done, and since my degree was in Classics, I don't think I'm an utter barbarian for having done so--just mostly) I keep thinking of Early Modern as, you know, 18th century/early 19th century, because that's what it looks like to me--I should probably just stick to identifying by century, as I'm less likely to get into trouble that way.

Also, mock PBS at every chance you get. It makes him twist and writhe in fury and pain, little emo boy that he is.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare is early modern. (Chaucer is middle English, and Beowulf's Old English). Anything 18th century and later is definitely modern-modern, strange as that seems.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Thanks--and that just doesn't seem right, but I'll try to remember it. Or specify by centuries, or whatever else is less likely to suck my unwary feet into the dreadful Bog of Error.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Modernism being a movement of the early twentieth century, it would actually make sense if Early Modern was the nineteenth. But if we were that logical, something would have to be done about us.

Early Modern English is English in its transitional state. It's not Middle English anymore, but it's not quite Modern English either. It has artifacts of Middle English--bits of declensions, bits of conjugations--but it's recognizably not the language that Chaucer or the Gawain poet was writing.

I think it is one of the most beautifully flexible examples of language as an instrument there will ever be. But if you pointed out I was biased, I would not say you were wrong.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, all righty then. It's a linguistic reference. Linguistic references are graspable here. I just have trouble parsing it in literary terms, because of that modernism issue you mention. I'll just add it to my list of things I'm out of date on and go on.

You're right, it is a beautiful instrument, and didn't they have a lot of people who could play it well? They weren't ashamed of regional dialects yet, either.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

You know, once you remove the term Early Modern English, and replace with Romantics, I think the basic point about the flourishes stands... :)

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Well, then there's everyone from Addison and Steele, through Swift and on up through Gibbon and all that lot. Latinate writing, lots of it. You'll see it in the late 17th century as well, although not so much in Defoe and not really at all in Bunyan.

I'm not sure how you would classify Monk Lewis, given his subject matter--early Gothick/romantic?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I read Frankenstein for the first time ever this year. What struck me is that it isn't the grand experiment which makes it sf, but the monster's experience of education (watching a family through the window) and the argument that education (not birth) makes the person, and that "the state of nature" and the romantic savage were false ideas. These are astonshingly radical ideas, and help to seed SF's fascination with pedagogy.