The Extra 109
Linist criticism or most new-style feminist revisionist criticism permits us to place at the center of our investigation. My own favorite case in point here is the ambiguous relationship between the two prefaces to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first (1818) ventriloquized by Percy, the second (1831) composed by herself. The first confidently places Frankenstein in the great western tradition of lofty didacticisms from Aeschylus to Milton. Mary Shelley as unacknowledged legislator of the world. The second makes no such claims but has as its main purpose merely to narrate, rather apologetically, the empowering dream that gave her the germ of the idea for the book- “my hideous progeny” as she calls it. At first glance, the 1831 autobiographical introduction deprecates and trivializes the claims of the 1818 preface-manifesto. Female discomfort with art as romantic prophecy was apparently never so dramatized.
Yet in assigning the genesis of her art to dream-vision, Mary Shelley is taking a version of the romantic highroad of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and her husband’s Defence of Poetry- although Percy’s claims for the prophetic authority of such moments are advanced by her, to the extent that they are advanced at all, obliquely and intermittently through the moral charge of the rhetoric (“I saw the pale student of unallowed arts”) rather than enunciated as an aesthetic doctrine. In a somewhat similar vein, Harriet Beecher Stowe defended Uncle Tom’s Cabin as God-inspired without ever arguing against that position in the scant literary criticism she did produce: practical tips to aspiring women authors as to how to master the craft of writing. For both Shelley and Stowe, a narrative of biographical cataclysm substitutes- or masquerades- for the more direct literary assertiveness of the romantic-prophetic mode. A significant difference, yes; but a difference within a broader frame of likeness.
The case of Mary Shelley, who authored a novel in the romantic prophecy tradition that derives its main force from its critique of that tradition and then authored a kind of anti-manifesto that
Both are printed in James Rieger’s editions of Frankenstein (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982).