Mary Shelley on the therapeutic value of language

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

number of Shelley's traumatized characters and create a dialectic that she explores extensively in the figures of Mathilda and Beatrice, both of whom are modeled on Percy Shelley's tragic protagonist Beatrice Cenci. Like Beatrice Cenci, Mary Shelley's heroines can find no words to heal their psychic wounds. Both Mathilda and Beatrice Cenci are confronted with the horror of father-daughter incest, and Mathilda also resembles Beatrice in her fear of forbidden words, or, more specifically, in her repression of words signifying incest, the "guilt that wants a name" (Nary Shelly Reader 239). Thus a comparison of Mathilda and The Cenci allows us to see how Mary Shelley's treatment of the theme of logophobia builds on her husband's dramatic portrayal of post-traumatic word repression.

In Percy's The Cenci, after Cenci has struck and cursed Beatrice, Lucretia asks her what is wrong, and the stunned Beatrice forces herself to say: "It was one word, Mother, one little word" (II. i. 63). That unspeakable word has, however, put Cenci in the position of power. While before it was Cenci who left Beatrice uttering "inarticulate words" (II. i. 112), after Cenci's threat it is she who is afraid to speak. Moreover, following her father's rape of her, Beatrice is unable to give the act a name. In response to Lucretia's questions she repeatedly equivocates: "What are the words which you would have me speak?" (III. i. 107); "Of all words,/That minister to mortal intercourse,/Which wouldst thou hear?" (III. i. 111-113). All victims of incest, she suggests, are compelled to leave "it...without a name" (III. i. 117).As Anne McWhir notes, Beatrice's repression of the word incest results in the word's revenge: "rejected as a way of dealing with passion, [the word] returns as a means of suggesting perverse, excessively literal action" (148).(6) Because she could not give her horror a name, Beatrice feels compelled to have her father murdered.

Like Beatrice, Mathilda struggles with unutterable words, but, unlike Beatrice, Mathilda precipitates her own tragedy by begging her father to speak "that dreadful word" (201 ). Whereas Beatrice's mistake may be her refusal to give Cenci's crime a name, Mathilda's initial error is to insist that her father tell her his dark secret, and his confession of incestuous passion is what leads to their destruction. Mathilda passionately demands that her father "Speak that word," and his "strange words" (200) are fatal to him and, eventually, to her. In fact, in the scene in which Mathilda confronts her moody and evasive father, "word" and "words" are repeated with obsessive regularity. She replies to her father's "terrific words": "the sword in my bosom [is] kept from its mortal wound by a hair--a word!--I demand that dreadful word; though it be as a flash of lightning to destroy me, speak it" (201). Her father resists uttering the "strange words" of his confession, but Mathilda's "words [he] cannot bear" (200), so his secret is extracted: "My daughter, I love you!" (201). In his subsequent ravings he tells her that he foolishly believed that "these words...would blast her to death" (201). Unfortunately, those words, once uttered, can never be taken back, and inevitably lead to the father's death and Mathilda's decline. Thus, after learning the fatal consequences of certain words, Mathilda becomes, like Beatrice Cenci, logophobic: her thoughts become "too harrowing for words" (219), and, although her narrative is ostensibly written for Woodville, she is never able to "give words to [her] dark tale" (239).