Mary Shelley revisited -- The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein edited by Audrey Fisch, Anne Mellor and Esther Schor / Mary Shelley's Early Novels: "This Child of Imagination and Misery" by Jane Blumberg

AUDREY FISCH, ANNE MELLOR, and ESTHER SCHOR, eds., The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 300, $49.95.

JANE BLUMBERG, Mary Shelley's Early Novels: "This Child of Imagination and Misery" (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), pp. 257, $27.95.

These books reflect the wide-ranging variety and theoretical pluralism that typify recent tendencies in both Romantic and novel-oriented scholarship. They also demonstrate the inclination in Romantic revaluations of the canon to look back on what was actually published during the period, rather than excluding certain works just because they fail to meet certain questionable--or rather, not thoroughly questioned--criteria of aesthetic achievement. Accordingly, this entails exploring novels that have essentially "disappeared" from the canon as though their existence had been inconsequential to literary history. A third concern could be added to this list as well: the recuperation of women's texts that operated within and against the strain of what some scholars refer to as "masculine Romanticism."

It is commonplace these days to observe that, with few exceptions, most Romantic women writers faced powerful opposition, both during their own time and in the canon formations thereafter, to their attempts to open a fictional space for themselves. Fortunately, the last fifteen years have yielded a wealth of studies that return much of this material to our conceptualization of "Romanticism." This is especially important for Mary Shelley, who wrote a large body of work that, with only a few exceptions, has received virtually no critical attention. The studies under consideration, however, point to the current, and long-neglected, reclamation of her oeuvre. (Although it is baffling why both books generally neglect Mathilda, a novel-length incest narrative that offers a great deal of insight into Shelley's work and will undoubtedly receive more attention in the future.)

My focus on The Other Mary Shelley will be on the discussions that deal specifically with Shelley's novels, although some of the best essays on other aspects of her work also provide considerable, if tangential, insight into her work as a novelist. These are by Mary Favret ("Mary Shelley's Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus"), Susan J. Wolfson ("Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley's Audiences"), Mary Jean Corbett ("Reading Mary Shelley's Journals: Romantic Subjectivity and Feminist Criticism"), Paul A. Cantor ("Mary Shelley and the Taming of the Byronic Hero: Transformation" and The Deformed Transformed", Alan Richardson ("Proserpine and Midas: Gender, Genre, and Mythic Revisionism in Mary Shelley's Dramas"), Laurie Langbauer ("Swayed by Contraries: Mary Shelley and the Everyday"), Sonia Hofkosh ("Disfiguring Economies: Mary Shelley's Short Stories"), and Esther H. Schor ("Mary Shelley in Transit").

The essays on The Last Man focus on several common, extended metaphors in the novel. Barbara Johnson's The Last Man" is somewhat of a disappointment, but only because one has come to expect more from her than this brief reflection on the idea of "lastmanism" (265) in relation to our conception of "man." Johnson considers a significant dilemma raised in The Last Man: if one were to "survive humanism," then how could this condition be articulated through a "postplague," "postuniversal" discourse? This creates a genuine impasse, as she suggests, because "The Plague is at once that which stops all systems of meaning from functioning and that against which those systems are necessarily erected" (264). Audrey A. Fisch's "Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man" explores "Shelley's exhaustive critique of the novel's variety of political leaders and systems, a critique that pinpoints some of the blind spots of masculine Romanticism." As she persuasively argues, it serves as a social analysis that can be illuminated through contemporary perspectives on politics and social dynamics of contagion and its human agents, with AIDS as a pertinent illustration (267). Similarly, Morton D. Paley's "The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium" focuses on the theoretical difficulties of positing he extinction of the human race without a remaining human consciousness to witness or reflect on its disappearance. As Paley says, "there is a suggestion" in Shelley's novel "that the imagination resists the idea of Lastness, an idea that presupposes a recipient or reader whose very existence negates the lastness of the narrating subject" (107). Moreover, Paley views The Last Man as a "repudiation" of the defining characteristics of Romanticism as embodied by Percy Shelley's promotion of "a search for the actuation of true power," a theme that surfaces frequently in recent Shelley criticism (including Blumberg's study) (111).

Among the essays that address Valperga, Barbara Jane O'Sullivan's "Beatrice in Valperga: A New Cassandra" considers the problematic situation of one type of Romantic heroine--"the creative female"--who suffers because her exceptional talents ironically "alienate her from the society in which she lives." Significantly, this gift manifests itself in discourse, an outlet which enables women to empower themselves while at the same time subverting this power because it signifies a dangerous incursion into the more stereotypical realms of male discursive practice--especially that of the vatic poet as described, for example, by Wordsworth. As O'Sullivan contends, Beatrice (one of the primary female characters in Valperga) stands as a prophetic figure "who is hunted, haunted, raped, imprisoned, and deceived until she is utterly destroyed," thereby revealing the "isolation from normal discourse