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The Law of the (Nameless) Father: Mary Shelley's Mathilda and the Incest Taboo
British Romanticism, a literary movement spanning from 1790 to 1830, is the only canon to remain almost wholly resistant to feminist challenges. Still represented by six male poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Byron, and Percy Shelley), Romanticism is really the last bastion of male canonicity. Both a celebration of individualism and a placekeeper in intellectual history marking the historical moment when subjectivity and perception became privileged terms, Romanticism is defined differently by the different Romantic poets. But what happens if we allow another Romantic, Mary Shelley, to define this cultural and literary movement? Because Mary Shelley is marshalled into the canon derivatively, as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Percy Shelley, she is only considered a "minor" Romantic, in spite of the fact that Frankenstein (1818) is easily the most popular piece of literature to emerge from this time period. And Mary Shelley's minor status invites critics to dismiss Mathilda (1819), her unpublished and suppressed novella about father-daughter incest, for a variety of reasons, the most pernicious being that the incest taboo protects and maintains patriarchal culture by rationalizing and downright outlawing certain (feminist) methods of reading. We see this revealed in the suppression of Mathilda, a text whose 140-year burial at the hands of hostile fathers (that is, not only Godwin, but also those literary critics who serve as canonical standard-bearers) reeks of the patriarchal privilege to silence incest narratives.(1)
Mathilda radically decenters the power of paternity and the Law of the Father in at least four ways. First, using trauma theory, we see that Mathilda reveals how the Law conceals the ineffectiveness of the incest taboo by preventing a woman from reading the text of her sexual abuse. Second, because silence is the daughter's duty to the father, Mary Shelley's autobiographical heroine kills her father twice, first by forcing him to name his incestuous desires, and second, by writing about her body as a text. Third, Mathilda presents contemporary readers with a physical document, suppressed by William Godwin until his death and then dismissed by conservative critical standards until its first publication in 1959; this 140-year suppression demonstrates the physical struggles between this...