The Columbia History of the British Novel

not been destroyed.

Shelley here draws the analogy between the personal and the political that underpins the feminine Romantic ideology: only when all human beings exercise an ethic of care both at home and in the public realm, using their capacity for empathy and love to mother all living things-including monsters-and living in cooperative harmony with nature can the human community improve morally, politically, and scientifically. Significantly, the only member of the Frankenstein family alive at the end of the novel is Ernest, the farmer. A society built on the model of the family-politic advocated by both Mary Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth is the only one, according to Shelley, with the capacity to «read» the face of the unfamiliar not as monstrous but as lovable. Opposing her husband's Promethean, revolutionary politics and his celebration of the Romantic imagination, Mary Shelley insisted, following Erasmus Darwin's scientific theories of the gradual evolution of the fittest, that men and women must unite as equal partners in the reproduction and preservation of life, controlling the unfettered scientific imagination with a specifically maternal, nurturing love that can embrace freaks and subjugate the pursuit of knowledge to the maintenance of family tranquillity. The failure to do so creates monsters capable of destroying civilization itself: as Victor's creature proclaims, 'You are my creator, but I am your master;-obey!'

Shelley's later «society» novels, Mathilda (1819), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), continue to depict the damage done when the mother is absent, showing how a daughter who devotes her life to her father, or father figure, and engages in the incestuous emotional dependence that devotion entails, is denied the psychological capacity for gender equality, for personal growth, and, in the case of Mathilda, even for life itself. The nihilistic vision of The Last Man (1826) explores both the futility of the human imagination in the face of indifferent Nature, and the failure of the masculine ego to take what few steps might suffice to save the human species (the irresponsible Adrian finally drowns rather than impregnate Clara Verney). Throughout her fiction, Shelley sustains the ideal of an egalitarian family, which she acknowledges to be a fiction in her own experience, but which she nonetheless insists is the only salvation available to a society corrupted by the systems of hierarchy and oppression that prop up the patriarchal bourgeois family and the imperialist nation it produces. - 349-

Whether one looks at the didactic or the Gothic tradition of women's fiction in the Romantic period, one finds a shared political ideology: a 'revolution in female manners' that insists that good government, both at home and in the public sphere, depends on the education and equality of women, on the benevolent parenting of all living beings, and on meeting the needs of all who require care. Such a program, for these Romantic women writers, necessarily involves an acknowledged respect for the rights of Mother Nature as well as for all those classes, races, and nationalities previously defined as 'the other.' For such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Amelia Opie, the fate of African slaves in the Americas was directly analogous to the fate of women living in England. Despite the legal decision of Lord Mansfield in 1772 that 'the air of England was too pure for a slave to breathe in,' their fiction reiterates Wollstonecraft's claim that the badly educated and legally disenfranchised wives and daughters of England were but 'slaves.' They calculatedly used their fiction to promote a political program of sexual and racial liberation, one founded on the triumph of the 'domestic affections.' Their program failed in the antifeminist and antiegalitarian backlash of Victorian England, perhaps because it was too closely identified with the bourgeois values of the professional middle classes to which these women novelists belonged. Nonetheless, the social vision promoted in the novels of these Romantic women writers offered a genuine political alternative to the patriarchal system ensconced in early nineteenth-century British law, and it contributed significantly to the social revolutions of the twentieth century.

Anne K. Mellor

Selected Bibliography

Armstrong Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Davidoff Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850. London: Hutchinson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Ellis Kate Ferguson. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

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Gilbert Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

Jones Ann H. Ideas and lnnovations-Best-Sellers of Jane Austen's Age. New York: AMS Press, 1986.

Kelly Gary. English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830. London: Longman, 1989.

Kowaleski-Wallace Elizabeth. Their Father's Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mellor Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen; London: Routledge, 1988.

Mellor Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. New York and London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992.

Poovey Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

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'Speak what we think': The Brontës and Women Writers

We do not hesitate to say that the tone of mind and thought which has overthrown authority and violated every code human and divine abroad, and fostered Chartism and rebellion at home, is the same which has also written Jane Eyre.

Elizabeth Rigby, Quarterly Review, 1848

English novels have for a long time… held a very high reputation in the world… for a certain sanity, wholesomeness, and cleanness unknown to other literature of the same class… [Now] a singular change has passed upon our light literature… It has been brought into being by society, and it naturally reacts upon society. The change perhaps began at the time when Jane Eyre made what advanced critics call her «protest» against the conventionalities in which the world clothes itself.

Margaret Oliphant, Blackwood's, 1867

The drawbacks of being Jane Eyre are not far to seek. Always to be a governess and always to be in love is a serious limitation in a world which is full, after all, of people who are neither one nor the other… [Charlotte Brontë] does not attempt to solve the problems of human life; she is even unaware that such problems exist; all her force, and it is the more tremendous for being constricted, goes into the assertion, 'I love,' 'I hate,' 'I suffer.'

Virginia Woolf, 1923

Jane Eyre… the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction… an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism…

Gayatri Spivak, 1985 -352-