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UBC #6: Mary Shelley
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):
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:
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.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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:
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:
Which isn't good enough for PBS. He "improves" it, thus:
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:
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.
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.
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I'm not sure how you would classify Monk Lewis, given his subject matter--early Gothick/romantic?