Mary Shelley on the therapeutic value of language

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

Ten years after she composed Mathilda, Shelly returned to the themes of father-daughter love and linguistic repression in a short story entitled "The Mourner." In "The Mourner" a young woman, Clarice Eversham, is obsessively devoted to her father: "He appeared to her like an especial gift of Providence, a guardian angel--but far dearer, as being akin to her own nature" (Robinson 92). When she and her father are caught in a shipwreck, she refuses to leave her father when the women are being put on boats, even though the angry captain expostulates with her: "You will cause your father's death--and be as much a parricide as if you put poison into his cup--you are not the first girl who has murdered her father in her wilful mood" (94). She remains with her father because she has the "fearful presentiment" (93) that if she leaves her father he will die; ironically, however, she does indirectly cause his death when the one boat that returns for them has room for only one person. Her father tosses her aboard it and is drowned (like Mathilda's father)--during the homeward voyage Clarice hears reproaches from her fellow passengers who, rather harshly, conceive "a horror of her, as having caused her father's death" (94). In essence, "The Mourner" is a reworking of Mathilda without the incest theme: like Mathilda, Clarice responds to her father's death by isolating herself and ultimately dying in that isolation. Clarice even goes so far as to change her name to Ellen and pronounce her earlier self (Clarice) dead. She befriends Horace Neville, who, like Woodville, is a Percy Shelly surrogate (the names of both characters end in "ville"), and who, again like Woodville, must persuade her not to commit suicide.

As Ellen, Clarice is characterized by "wordless misery"--instead of telling Neville her story, she generalizes on the subject of sorrow: "She recited no past adventures, alluded to no past intercourse with friend or relative; she spoke of the various woes that wait on humanity" (89). This relatively abstract form of therapy does not alleviate her suffering, and she occasionally begins to tell her story, but then breaks off: "Sometimes she gave words to her despair...and every pulsation of her heart was

throb of pain. She has suddenly broken off in talking of her sorrows, with a cry of agony--bidding me to leave her" (89). This fragmentary type of language therapy does not seem to help in the least, and she soon falls ill, refusing medical help and doing "many things that tended to abridge [her life] and to produce mortal disease" (91). Her ultimate confession, like Mathilda's, is in the form of writing, but even here she fragments the word that describes her "crime." In her final letter she asks Neville to give the following message to her erstwhile lover, Lewis Elmore: "Tell him...it had been destruction, even could he have meditated such an act, to wed the parrici--. I will not write that word" (98). Like Mathilda, she has made "the vulgar mistake of [confusing]...a word for a thing"--she represses the word parricide--just as Mathilda represses the word incest, but neither woman is truly guilty of what she accuses herself. They leave writings that will be read posthumously and seek to escape both life and fearful words in death. And, like Mathilda, Ellen-Clarice prefers written revelations to oral confessions, even though she is unsure of the justification for her final document. As Ellen-Clarice muses, "Perhaps it is a mere prevarication to write," but write she does, and she seems to gain some measure of consolation from the fact that she has bid those who loved her "a last farewell" (98) Again, while spoken words are rejected as a possible form of communication, written words are at least posthumously acceptable.