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‘Mary Shelley’s Sublime Bodies: "Frankenstein", "Matilda", "The Last Man"'
Steven Vine
English, Volume: 55, Issue: 212, Pages: 141 - 156
Swansea University Author: Steven Vine
Abstract
Feminist readings of Mary Shelley have shown how her work critiques the values of ‘masculine’ Romanticism, in particular the transcendences of mind and the sovereignty of self. The essay examines how Shelley’s early fictions - 'Frankenstein' (1818), 'Matilda (1819) and 'The Last...
| Published in: | English |
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| Published: |
2006
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa17984 |
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| Abstract: |
Feminist readings of Mary Shelley have shown how her work critiques the values of ‘masculine’ Romanticism, in particular the transcendences of mind and the sovereignty of self. The essay examines how Shelley’s early fictions - 'Frankenstein' (1818), 'Matilda (1819) and 'The Last Man' (1826) - mount this critique on the privileged terrain of male Romantic transcendence: the ‘sublime’. It 'argues that Shelley does not reject the sublime, but appropriates it so as to disclose what the idealising masculine sublime - typified in Kant’s version - represses: woman and the body. The essay suggests that monstrosity in 'Frankenstein', melancholy in 'Matilda' and plague in 'The Last Man' construct a ‘feminist’ sublime that draws attention to what is ‘abjected’, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, from patriarchal Romanticism - to what, in Lyotardian manner, is ‘unpresentable’ within it. Mary Shelley’s ‘sublime bodies’ bear witness to the feminine repressed of patriarchal Romantic idealism. |
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| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Issue: |
212 |
| Start Page: |
141 |
| End Page: |
156 |