Jessica Whalen
When I tell people about my love of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, I usually get one of the same two responses. They either confuse it for Matilda by Roald Dahl, or they’re surprised to find out another Mary Shelley novel exists besides Frankenstein– which is understandable. Frankenstein has been massively influential and culturally iconic since its initial publication in 1818, reimagined for countless classic films, stageplays, and TV shows. Mathilda, on the other hand, wasn’t published until 1959, more than a century after Shelley’s death, and it has never been adapted to the screen or stage the way Frankenstein and Dahl’s Matilda continually have. The text was deliberately suppressed by her father, William Godwin, who refused to return its manuscript after multiple requests on the grounds that its discussions of taboo topics such as incest and suicide were “disgusting and detestable” (Faubert 10). When the novel was finally transcribed from its manuscript copy by Elizabeth Nitchie, it met with scarce critical and popular acknowledgement, despite being arguably the spiritual successor to the most famous Gothic novel ever written. While its subject matter may be disturbing, I argue that Mathilda, in its deeply personal portrayal of grief, mental illness, and female subjectivity, deserves to be recognized, and that its themes remain deeply relevant to our culture today.
The novel, like Frankenstein, is written in the epistolary style. Our titular character, Mathilda, narrates her life story from her deathbed in the form of a letter, her last confession to her closest friend, Woodville. In the course of their friendship, the two had bonded over similar feelings of grief and isolation. Woodville has the profoundly Gothic backstory of being a renowned poet with a beautiful fiancée, Elinor, who died tragically young from illness and left him grief-stricken, a common poetic (or rather “Poe-etic”) trope. Mathilda, however, lives on a heath as an outcast from society for reasons she, until the moment of writing the letter, keeps secret, emphasizing their unspeakability. The unspeakable reasons, as we learn, are that her unnamed father, after conflating her in his mind with her mother who died in childbirth (as did Shelley’s), developed incestuous feelings toward her, and committed suicide after failing to overcome them. This devastates Mathilda, who, through no fault of her own, lost her dearest family member and lives on believing herself tainted by his desires, unable to confide to anyone what has happened: “the holy name of father was become a curse to me… I was in truth a marked creature, a pariah” (107). Like the monster in Frankenstein, she has been betrayed by her creator and forever cast out from society– but this situation is much more realistic and less supernatural, with more internal than external consequences. No physical sexual violence occurs in the text, but Mathilda’s trauma at being “the source of guilt that wants a name” takes a severe psychological toll on her: she isolates herself and falls into depression, contemplating taking her own life (107). Woodville, her only remaining friend, assures her that life is worth living, but in doing so asks, “Are you not young, and fair, and good?” (106). While I find most of his speech in that chapter uplifting and emotionally resonant, this rhetorical question stands out as a moment of cognitive dissonance. Even in encouraging her to live, he links the value of her life with her physical appearance’s adherence to oppressive beauty standards. Compare this line to Percy Shelley’s “Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one— / But thou art fled” as a description of Mary Shelley’s depression (Shelley, P.B., emphasis mine). In both Percy’s poem and Woodville’s dialogue, the focus for the male poet is largely on the female subject’s physicality and perceived beauty. Conversely, for both Shelley and Mathilda, the focus is on the heroine’s thoughts, experiences, and internal state.
Mathilda’s suffering in the novella is no longer an objectified description for a male speaker or fetishized theme of someone else’s poetry, but something we experience through her point of view. While Woodville does admirably take on the task of consoling Mathilda and arguing for the value of life, she nonetheless resents his inability to fully understand and empathize with her. She speculates that “perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure. I am a farce and play to him, but to me this is all dreary reality: he takes all the profit and I bear all the burthen” (101). To me, this reads as a direct challenge to the Gothic idea, put into words a few decades later in “The Philosophy of Composition;,” that the suffering and death “of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe). Mathilda is fascinated with, and even often romanticizes death, to be sure, but not from the perspective of an outsider framing its beauty to be seen by others. The way the novella is written invites us into this deeply personal and visceral experience. To me, even the typographical errors and ink blots preserved from the original manuscript add to the feeling that Mathilda is a glimpse behind the curtain of classical literature, showing a remarkably human side of a famous literary figure. However, it is only written with these errors preserved because it is a work Shelley never got to finish, a “repressed woman’s text” almost consigned to oblivion by her father (Hurlock). The text itself, then, is a testament to the silencing of these narratives deemed too uncomfortable to be spoken.
Without getting too biographical in my criticism, it’s difficult not to read Shelley’s own resentment and grief seeping into the novella. It was written during her depression after the deaths of two of her children, and her journals detail how writing it was a therapeutic experience. Nowhere do I hear the voice of the author speaking more clearly than when Mathilda writes to Woodville, “death is too terrible an object for the living…for it is so intense a misery that it hardens & dulls the feelings,” as she was undoubtedly writing from experience (114). Likewise, Mathilda’s resentment toward Woodville and fraught relationship with her father has been pointed out by nearly all scholarship on the novella as reflecting Shelley’s complicated relationships with the men in her life. While she was depressed, her father harshly wrote her depression off as “lowering [her] character in a memorable degree,” and her husband described it as “sit[ting] on the hearth of pale despair / Where / For thine own sake I cannot follow thee” (Appendix D, 191; Shelley, P.B.). Although William and Clara Shelley were Percy’s children as well, he did not “follow” Mary Shelley into her despair, nor attempt to put himself in her position. Mathilda takes Percy Shelley’s own metaphor of despair a step further, with its titular character saying she has “learned the language of Despair… by heart, for I am Despair” (104). This is not just a lament of her situation, but a clever intertextual reference: Despaire is a character in Spenser’s Fairie Queene whom Mathilda has quoted earlier, and is one of the many male classical references throughout the text that both the character and the novel respond to and deconstruct. Feminist critics of nineteenth-century English writers have noted that “just as women have been repeatedly defined by male authors, they seem in reaction to have found it necessary to act out male metaphors in their own texts, as if trying to understand their implications” (Gilbert et al. xii). The character Mathilda is a clear example of this, as she casts herself in numerous male roles through metaphor in the text, including Oedipus, Despaire, Adam, and Cain. In a sense, Mary Shelley is not only a female author acting out male metaphors in this case, but a female author acting out a female author acting out male metaphors, which is but one of the intricate layers at play in this story. Scholar Diana Edelman-Young writes that despite the historical and textual support for a biographical reading, she “would like to see Mathilda treated as a deliberate work of artistic design, not simply the unstructured outpourings of an anguished wife and daughter,” and I couldn’t agree more (117). In fact, I would argue the novella itself is critical of the societal tendency to dismiss female artistry and consign women to the realm of “the beautiful” at the expense of their ability to live full lives. To this day, the way we talk about Shelley tends to reduce her contributions to the literary canon. While it’s less common nowadays to hear speculation that her husband wrote her most famous novel, even modern discussions of Frankenstein tend to focus on how supposedly surprising it is that this “innocent young wife” wrote such a visceral horror story. Had these critics of Frankenstein read Mathilda with an awareness of its context, it may have come as less of a surprise.
Marhilda is one of few literary heroines of her era to get a bittersweet ending that does not involve a marriage, even if it admittedly requires her death. Rather than lament her own death when it arrives, however, Mathilda concludes her tale in gratitude that she is dying of natural causes, and relief that Woodville won’t have to witness it as he witnessed the death of Elinor. Her death, despite being a major theme of the novel, ultimately goes unseen by Woodville and the reader. She escapes anyone else’s objectifying gaze, and we’re left at the end with only her expectations and her own narration. Through subverting conventions and telling her own story, Mathilda is not merely another tragic dead female figure, but one who can never die– one who, even centuries later, demands to be heard.
Works Cited
Edelman-Young, Diana. “‘Kingdom of Shadows’: Intimations of Desire in Mary Shelley’s Mathilda.” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 51, 2002, pp. 116–44. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30213309.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.
Hurlock, Kathleen. “Marking 200 Years of Mary Shelley’s Mathilda – K-SAA.” K-SAA, Keats-Shelley Association of America, 10 Sept. 2019, http://www.k-saa.org/blog/marking-200-years-of-mary-shelleys-mathilda.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “‘The Philosophy of Composition’ by Edgar Allan Poe.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69390/the-philosophy-of-composition.
Shelley, M. W., & Faubert, M. (2017). Mathilda. Broadview Press.Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Percy Bysshe Shelley – to Mary Shelley.” Genius, genius.com/Percy-bysshe-shelley-to-mary-shelley-annotated. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.
