Daughter of the Revolution: Mary Shelley in Our Times

Abstract

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) Daughter of the Revolution: Mary Shelley in Our Times Charlotte Sussman Feminist literary history moves in waves, uncovering fig ures in the sands of time, and lifting them to crests of pop ularity, interest, and print runs. The figures we pick have some resonance for our present moment, either as scholars, as women, or as both, something of which feminist literary historians have been perhaps hyper-consciously aware. Ever since Virginia Woolf asked us to think back through our fore mothers, we have been looking for answers in history, even though the questions change. Perhaps no other woman writer thought back so assiduously through her foremothers as Mary Shelley?particularly back through her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has never been as completely forgotten as many of her female contemporaries have been, Mary Shelley has been enjoying an energetic revival of inter est since the bicentenary of her birth in 1997. Four volumes of essays have been published since then, along with over a hundred articles (Conger, Frank, and OTDea; Bennett and Curran; Eberle-Sinatra; Buss, MacDonald and McWhir).1 All of these collections, of course, were foremothered themselves by the groundbreaking collection, The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein.2 The present moment, however, is not Shelley's first time in the spotlight of feminist scholarship, however. What one might call the firstwave of present day feminist literary history lifted her into the spotlight in the 1970s and 80s. In this essay, I try to account for our contin ued interest, while using Shelley as a way to think back Sussman 159 through our literary critical foremothers, and to consider the shape of feminist histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth century British literature over the last few decades. Shelley's interrogation of how and why women are remembered or for gotten?herself included?has inspired a number of impor tant engagements with her work and casts a revealing light on our own project of re-membering a body, even a canon, of female authors. In her introduction to Mary Shelley's Fictions, Nora Crook asserts that there have been three phases to the "growth of [Shelley's] canonicity" (xix): first, "[the] 'Author of Frankenstein9 phase"; next, "the 'Not Frankenstein9 or 'Other Mary Shelley' [phase]"; and finally "The Inclusive Mary Shelley" phase, which considers all her work, early and late (xix-xx). I construct a slightly different history of her impor tance to feminist scholars, emphasizing the transition between an earlier focus on Shelley as a mother, and the current interest in her as the daughter of radical parents. We should note, however, that these stages were preceded by a stage that might be labeled "Mary Shelley: Wife," in which scholarship centered on her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley.3 Looking at the difference between what Shelley fig ured for feminist literary history as a mother and what she represents as a daughter also allows us to see the way fem inist understanding of the relationship between autobiogra phy and creative texts has evolved over the past thirty years or so. The filial position, particularly Shelley's vexed and thwarted experience of it, draws the interest of feminist scholars today as we think back not only through our liter ary foremothers, but also through our critical ancestresses. Different generations of feminists turn to the past for dif ferent things, and in doing so find different kinds of fore mothers. One of the most iconic figures of early feminist his tory, for example, never discusses Shelley at all. Given the continuous popularity of her first novel, Frankenstein,4 Shelley's absence from Virginia Woolf s A Room of One's Own seems conspicuous, even a little surprising, from today's perspective. Woolf urges her readers to throw flowers on the grave of Aphra Behn and to judge the relative merits of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, but never mentions Shelley. I will return toWoolf s interest in Behn, but I first want to con 160 The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies sider her blindness to Shelley, and to posit that the reason for her irrelevance toWoolf is probably the same as her sud den relevance...