Journal article 1065 views
'The Father's Seduction in Mary Shelley's "Mathilda"'
Steven Vine
News from Nowhere, Volume: 2, Pages: 57 - 74
Swansea University Author: Steven Vine
Abstract
The essay examines the contradictory figure of the ‘father’ in Mary Shelley’s 1819 novella, 'Mathilda, a tale of father-daughter incest. Highlighting the paradoxes of incestuous love in Romantic literature – in which father-daughter inces't is figured as oppression and sibling incest as tr...
| Published in: | News from Nowhere |
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| Published: |
1997
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa17979 |
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| Abstract: |
The essay examines the contradictory figure of the ‘father’ in Mary Shelley’s 1819 novella, 'Mathilda, a tale of father-daughter incest. Highlighting the paradoxes of incestuous love in Romantic literature – in which father-daughter inces't is figured as oppression and sibling incest as transgression – the essay argues that Shelley’s text folds these opposing impulses into one another. The desiring father in Mathilda is a figure both of law and transgression. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s notion of the ‘amatory father’ in 'Tales of Love' (1987), the essay argues that 'Mathilda' discloses the contradiction by which patriarchal law denotes both desire and prohibition. It shows how 'Mathilda' opposes a bodily ‘maternal’ sublime to abstract paternal transcendence, undoing the latter in the name of the former. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
57 |
| End Page: |
74 |