Mary Shelley on the therapeutic value of language

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1994 by Brewer, William D

The therapeutic value of oral and written self-expression is a recurrent theme in Mary Shelley's works, particularly in those works, such as Mathilda and Valperga: or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, in which the heroines have been subjected to psychological trauma. For example, the eponymous heroine of Mathilda refuses to tell her friend Woodville of her dead father's incestuous passion for her because she fears words, especially the word "incest," and, perhaps partially as

result of this self-censorship, she lives out her life in a state of chronic depression. In contrast, Beatrice, the brutalized prophet of Valperga, does relate her tale of suffering to the sympathetic (and aptly named) Euthanasia, but this narration provides only temporary relief. Mary Shelley's often garrulous characters frequently speak or write of their experiences, even when, as in the case of Frankenstein's monster, these narrations seem implausible. As Marc A. Rubenstein notes, "the author permits the monster an improbable series of digressions as he relates how he has passed the months since he wandered away from Frankenstein's laboratory" (168). There is, however, a psychological reason for the narrative, which Rubenstein touches on when he compares the monster to a "patient in psychoanalysis" (168)--the monster feels the need to work through and even validate his experience, and Frankenstein is the only person who will listen to him. In this essay I will argue that while Mary Shelly presents characters who are skeptical about the therapeutic value of verbal self-expression, she acknowledges the human need to put suffering into words, and he short-term relief that words can provide. Moreover, Shelly suggests that in the case of extreme trauma writing is sometimes more viable than speaking as a form of language therapy.

Mary Shelley's somewhat skeptical attitude toward the power of words was probably influenced by Percy Shelley's views on language.' In "On Life," Percy writes: "How vain is it to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being" (475) ; he goes on to argue that "the misuse of words and signs" prevents "the mind" from acting freely (477).2 His frustration with the inadequacy of language is forcibly expressed in his note to "On Love": "These words are inefficient and metaphorical-Most words so--No help--" (474). Moreover, in A Defense of Poetry, Percy Shelly asserts that over time words decline into "signs for portions or classes of thought [i. e. abstract ideas] instead of pictures of integral thoughts"-if poets do not intervene to revitalize them, the language becomes "dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse" (482). Percy's concern about the inadequacy and abstraction of language is also expressed in his poetry. In Prometheus Unbound Prometheus repudiates his curse on Jupiter, declaring that "words are quick and vain" (IV.i.303), a sentiment echoed by the Maniac in "Julian and Maddalo," who exclaims "How vain / Are words!" (472-473). These declarations can be compared to many of the pronouncements in Mary Shelley's fiction regarding the effectiveness of language. For example, her meditation on the failure of words to improve the human condition in her historical novel The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck recalls Percy's views on language's limitations:

Oh, had I, weak and faint of speech, words to teach my fellow-creatures the beauty and capabilities of man's mind; could I, or could one more fortunate, breathe the magic word which would reveal to all the power, which we all possess, to turn evil to good, foul to fair; then vice and pain would desert the New-born world! It is not thus: the wise have taught, the good suffered for us; we are still the same. (III: 18)

Moreover, Clifford, the villain of Perkin Warbeck, soothes "his evil passions with words," thus exemplifying "the misuse of words and signs" that Percy Shelly warns against in "On Life": "It was some relief to this miserable man to array his thoughts in their darkest garb, soothing his evil passions with words, which acted on them as a nurse's fondling talk to a querulous child" (II: 73-74) As I will demonstrate, many o Mary Shelley's works seem to support her husband's view that words are essentially inadequate, too metaphorical and easily misused to provide a reliable mode of self-expression.

While Mary Shelley's novels and stories often cast doubt on the effectiveness of words, her explorations of the theme of language therapy anticipate the preoccupations of modern psychoanalysis. According to Jacques Lacan, successful psychoanalysis relies exclusively on the spoken word: "Whether it sees itself as an instrument of healing, of training, or of exploration in depth, psychoanalysis has only a single medium: the patient's speech....And all speech calls for a reply....there is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence, provided that it has an auditor" (40).' Without speech, or a linguistic relationship to "the other," the human subject can be reduced to what Lacan calls "the imaginary order," a self-regarding- mental state in which the subject is prone to narcissistic fantasies. As Peter Brooks has noted, Frankenstein's monster learns language in an attempt to enter "the symbolic order," or "the cultural system into which individual subjects are inserted" (207), and escape his "monsterism": "only in the symbolic order may he realize his desire for recognition" (208).