Czytaj książkę: «Children of Prometheus: Romanticism and Its Legacy»

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

For

Natasha Eve Coats

&

Wanda Irene Lani Len Parker

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

Part I Essays in Comparative Literature and Ideas

1 The Paradoxes of Faith in Sir Thomas Browne and Kierkegaard

2 Intertextual Dialogue: Father and Daughter Novelists

3 Tolstoy and the “Spiritual Delights” of Schopenhauer

4 Rilke’s Self-Portrait and the Example of Rodin

5 Three Modernist Poets and the Search for Cultural Rebirth

Part II Essays in Cultural Politics

6 William Godwin: A Life in Literature and Politics

7 German Literature and English Radicalism

8 Generic Fusion in the Romantic Travel Novel

9 From Translation to Authorship: Anglophone Women Writers and Goethe

Preface and Acknowledgements

Over the years, colleagues, students, and friends have urged me to collect and publish in one place essays that were scattered in various journals and anthologies, and thus, with this volume, I have done so. From early attempts at emulating the belletristic verve of my first teachers—Erich Heller, Harry Levin, and W.J. Bate—to more rigorously scholarly work, which incorporates the example of my Ph.D. mentors, James Engell and Jerome H. Buckley, these essays map the intellectual journey taken from my undergraduate days through graduate school and into the early years of my academic career. Besides reflecting the personal evolution of one who owed his rescue from a chaotic childhood to courses on literature and art into a politically engaged scholar on the faculty of a minority-majority urban university, these essays represent a sustained effort to understand the revolutionary cultural dynamism unleased by Romanticism which continued to be felt for more than a century.

Beginning with an assessment of Arthur Symonds’s critique of Sir Thomas Browne, “The Paradox of Faith in Sir Thomas Browne and Kierkegaard,” which resonates with the values of the Aesthetic Movement (inspired by Victorian admiration of the sonically lush poetry of John Keats), and then culminating in “From Translation to Authorship: Anglophone Women Writers and Goethe,” a survey of the formative impact of Goethe’s works in Britain and America, the essays in between mark some of the forms in which the legacy of Romanticism was expressed in English, German, and Russian. The first five essays are categorized as “comparative” because in each of them one or more works are compared with others. In all of them, acknowledged or unconscious affinity—between Browne and Kierkegaard, William Godwin and his daughter Mary Shelley, Tolstoy and Schopenhauer, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the sculptor Auguste Rodin, and the poets Osip Mandelstam, Rilke, and David Jones—forms the basis for ideological and formal comparison. The last four essays are organized under the heading of “cultural politics.” Each of them seeks to illuminate and better understand the fusion of literature, philosophy, and politics associated with writers in the Godwin Circle in Britain and Transcendentalism in New England with an appreciation of the central role that anglophone women writers played in the reception of Goethe.

Uniting the diversity of cultural activity discussed and analyzed in this collection of essays is the Titan god Prometheus, in whose double aspect as “fire bringer” (Pyrphoros) and “creator” (Plasticator) of humankind out of earth and water is embodied the qualities synonymous with the Romantic Movement—rebellion, defiance, suffering, endurance, and martyrdom, which are combined with creativity and altruism. Above all, Prometheus, who animated the homunculi that he molded with the fire that he had previously stolen from heaven, is a symbol of the struggle against arbitrary, abstract, oppressive authority, which includes rejection of the international Enlightenment consensus on taste, decorum, and acceptance of hereditary autocratic rule. The Promethean fire that energizes and gives rise to much of the cultural production discussed in this book was generated by German writers and thinkers—Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—who inspired and empowered writers in combination with the revolutionary political, social, and cultural forces of liberation unleased in the American colonies in 1776 and in Paris in 1789. The resulting literary and philosophical works are the figurative offspring of Prometheus signaled in the title of this book.

The research represented in these pages was generously funded by an I.A. Levin Fellowship at Harvard University, an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Washington University, and a Jackson Fellowship at the Beinecke Library. Early versions of these essays appeared previously, and the author and publisher are grateful to the editors of The University of Mississippi Studies in English, the Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, the European Romantic Review, the SB Academic Review, and 1650–1850 for permission to publish revised versions here. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I wish to thank Valerie Lange and Malisa Mahler at ibidem for their editorial and design expertise. As ever, I am profoundly indebted to my colleagues and students in the English Department at St. John’s University for both moral and material support.

Cider Creek House

Griggstown, New Jersey

Here I sit and form

A man like myself;

A race like me,

To suffer and to weep,

And have enjoyment,

And to despise,

As I do, thee.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Prometheus” (1785)

(translated by Henry Crabb Robinson)

Part I Essays in Comparative Literature and Ideas

1 The Paradoxes of Faith in Sir Thomas Browne and Kierkegaard

“How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to believe only possibilities, is not faith, but mere philosophy.”

Religio Medici, Section 48

In an essay on Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), the great Victorian critic John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) remarks on a salient feature of Religio Medici (1642–43): “There is a sustained paradox in his thought which does not seem to belong to the man so much as to the artist.”1 Here Symonds verges on—but, as we shall see, just misses—a profound insight, characteristic of the Aesthetic Movement and the followers of Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and Walter Pater (1839–1894). He removes the burden of analysis from psychology and biography to form and style. That he should do so reflects the aversion of Symonds’s time to religious orthodoxy and its distrust of writers, such as Browne, who profess strong religious faith.

In Browne’s case, one cannot immediately fault the critics for turning to his writings and giving only an impatient, sidelong glance at the author’s life and beliefs. After all, Browne’s uneventful career offers precious few insights into his writings. He was neither an iconoclastic pamphleteer turned epic poet nor tormented cleric who charted the dark nether regions of despair. Instead, he was a contemplative, variously learned country doctor, who devoted the leisure hours of his short-lived bachelorhood to the composition of his spiritual autobiography. Symonds’s remark seems appropriate, then, and justified. Justified also then are the many studies of Browne’s prose style. Inspiring many of these efforts is the formalist credo which states the impossibility of discussing the religious beliefs and moral values underpinning much serious literature: “something which, in its very essence, is too subtle and elusive to admit of definition.”2 This is an untenable position to defend. However difficult or offensive it might be, for some, to discuss these issues, only in so doing does one acquire the means of judging the suitability of the style adopted by the author and of unriddling what might otherwise remain a torturous labyrinth of language surrounding a mysterious web of ideas. Many forget that a supremely successful style is usually accompanied by equally compelling thoughts. Indeed, one is the “litmus test” of the other; a writer could not be said to employ a “good” or “interesting” style if his thoughts are muddled, or vice versa. Therefore, it is indefensible to justify, as many critics have, a preference for formalist criticism by appealing to the catch phrases of the “know-nothing” school of literary criticism. It is a fool’s errand to assert that “the medium is the message” or that style is “the last most detailed elaboration of meaning” and expect to make oneself understood or arrive at a deep understanding of a literary work.3 To do so is to abandon the primary responsibility and the raison d’etre of the literary critic: the elucidation of meaning in a work of art.

For obvious reasons, it is easier to discuss an essay or a poem of more recent vintage than an older one. The latter case requires a more strenuous exercise of the sympathetic imagination and the historical understanding than the former. Moreover, it may also involve a consideration of such “difficult” matters as belief and value, which still retain importance for writers of an age perhaps more innocent than ours. Attempts at bridging the gap between “the divided and distinguished worlds” of the past and present are often regarded by partisans of formalism as essays into the “history of ideas,” as if to imply purity of motives as well as it has become an act proscribed by rigid taboos. Making an excursion into the sensitive areas of thought and belief is to venture into forbidden territory. Of course, there is no denying that the task facing historical-humanistic scholarship becomes increasingly beyond our strength. It is not that, over time, the burden of historical facts becomes ever more cumbersome, but rather the longer ideas are allowed to lie fallow the more difficult it is to restore them imaginatively to common usage as accoutrements of the modern mind, even for as long as a brief literary exercise. But even a failed attempt to treat an idea sympathetically, infusing it with the credibility and the truth it enjoyed in the writer’s mind, is preferable to a stylistic analysis which avoids the ideas expressed on the printed page, or treats them with derision or condescension.

Let us return to Symonds’s remark on the probable source of paradox in Religio Medici: It “does not seem to belong to the man so much as to the artist.” In the preface “To The Reader” in the authorized edition of 1643 Browne seems to support this conclusion by inserting the following proviso: “There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein merely Tropicall, and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid test of reason.”4 Browne wrote this, no doubt, to avert the criticism of those who might take exception to his “sundry particularities and personall expressions.” (3) Just to be safe he reminds the reader that “what is delivered therein was rather a memoriall unto me than an example or rule unto any other,” whose “intention was not publick.” (3) Instantly, one wonders how seriously these qualifications are meant to be taken. Should the reader not beware of falling prey to Browne’s ironic, conciliatory manner in the “To The Reader” (which follows the composition of Religio Medici by a decade), thereby suspending his judgment before examining the main body of meditations? That Browne dons a shy, self-effacing mask is not owing to his embarrassment over a callow enterprise of his youth. Undoubtedly, he is aware of the difficulties involved in appreciating some of his conclusions, which are based on the immaterial foundation of religious conviction and tend to follow the suprarational dictates of faith. What are Browne’s half-ironical strictures if not warnings to the reader that a supernatural logic has endued his meditations?

The reader has, it seems, two choices. Either they take Browne at his word and agree not to submit these “private conceptions” to scrutiny. This is the stance of formalism. Or, if the reader has it in mind to ignore Browne’s mature proviso and sets out to identify the pattern in Browne’s skein of thoughts, they risk getting caught in the snares of Browne’s paradoxes. That is, unless the reader succeeds beforehand in ferreting out the source of paradox in Browne’s meditations.

Perhaps, “the sustained paradox in his thought” has its origin not in Browne the artist, but rather in Browne the religious thinker? All great art (and, for that matter, every human order stabilized by tradition) rests on a fundamentally fixed correspondence between the answers that may be given on varying levels of profundity and with varying degrees of precision, but they are all recognizable by their basic color as the more or less right answers. Indeed, the imagination seeks out new waters in lands which have long remained inaccessible and unexplored, but there will be a place for them, hitherto left blank, on the maps of the familiar world. In Religio Medici we confront one such remote sphere where we survey the inner landscape of religious experience. To be sure, there are some important resemblances shared by aesthetic and ethical-philosophical (or religious) modes of expression and understanding. Both depend on the synthesizing power of the imagination, “the faculty . . . by which we unite the broken and dispersed images of the world into a harmonious poetic symbol . . . . The power of subjecting the less to the greater reality, of associating the outer with the inner, and thus of finding through the many that return to the one.”5

In Religio Medici, the “religion of a physician,” the strands of poetry and philosophy are woven together to form a double-layered fabric, which shows on one side the pattern of paradox, and, on the other, the union of contraries. W.P. Dunn ascribed this power of integration to Browne the “natural believer, who really knew that the intellect is not the only road to truth, and who by virtue of that instinct managed to unify the world.”6 The synthetic tendency of Browne’s mind, which first isolates and then yokes such opposites as faith and reason, good and evil, art and philosophy, Christianity and paganism, the universal and the particular, angel and human being, is captured in a memorable passage in Section 34 of Religio Medici:

We are only that amphibious piece between a corporall and spirituall essence, that middle forme that linkes those two together, and makes good the method of God and nature, that jumps not from extreames, but unites the incompatible distances by some middle and participating natures . . . (32)

Human beings occupy the middle position between heavenly benediction and earthly squalor. Equidistant from resurrection and damnation, each person is “that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to life not only like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds.” (32)

It is necessary only to cite the Dialogues of Plato or the biblical parables of Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in order to suggest the rich allusiveness, the play of irony, and the dramatic tension that belong to both strictly literary works and some philosophical tracts. Even if Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s appraisal of Browne’s metaphysics is not the last word on the subject, his famous remark on Religio Medici underscores its uncertain position in the hierarchy of literary genres. Coleridge (1772–1834), the great Romantic poet and critic, argues that Browne’s book should be considered “in a dramatic, and not in a metaphysical view, as the sweet exhibition of character and passion, and not as an expression or investigation of positive truth.”7 That is to say that one may still find pleasure in reading Religio Medici in spite of Browne’s obtruding philosophical preoccupations. It is neither to deny the importance of Browne’s ideas nor relegate them to a dark lumber room in the mansion of literature.

The case of Kierkegaard offers an especially illuminating parallel to Browne. Not only does he disclaim responsibility for his books far more vehemently than Browne; he goes so far as to disguise them as anonymous epistles and religious parables, and then published them under a pseudonym. Nevertheless, no one would dispute the seriousness or the enduring relevance of the disinherited offspring of his mind. In addition, Kierkegaard is recognized as one of the masters of Danish prose. And yet, at the first sign of ambivalence—just a sentence or two written in a tone of mild reproof against the enthusiasms of his youth—many English critics are prepared to ignore Browne’s meditations altogether, as though unaware that the style and tone of Religio Medici are derived from his religious temperament and concerns. For example, Edward Dowden argues that Browne’s work is “not modeled on the articles of a creed, but is far more the exposition of a religious temper; it concerns itself with the Christian graces.”8 Furthermore, Kierkegaard knew the contradictions of logic and willing lodged in faith as well as the difficulties encountered in sustaining the irrational premises of belief against the visible evidence of natural laws. For Kierkegaard, “faith is not an aesthetic emotion, but something far higher . . . it is not an immediate instinct of the heart, but is the paradox of life and existence,” the yoking of the particular and the universal in the relationship of worshipping believer and adoring God.9 Kierkegaard’s faith, as well as Browne’s, rests upon “a paradox, inaccessible to thought.” For, in Browne’s phrase, “to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion.” (11) In his parable of Abraham and Isaac upon Mount Moriah, Kierkegaard identifies the man of faith as him “whose life is not merely the most paradoxical that can be thought but so paradoxical that it cannot be thought at all. He acts by virtue of the absurd,”10 as Browne does when he pursues his reason “to an O altitudo.” (11)

Kierkegaard defines the “absurd” as “not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding.” It is a mystery. And the mystery of faith is comprehended in the paradox that “with God all things are possible.”11 Browne is aware that the intoxicating anthropomorphism of Parmenides, who taught that “man is the measure of all things,” blinds us to God’s omnipotence. “We doe,” Browne scolds the reader, “too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities.” (28) Indeed, “our understanding,” in Browne’s epistemology, “is dimmer than Moses’s Eye.” (14) Unwavering faith is impossible without first submitting reason to rigorous discipline. In Section 10 of Religio Medici Browne describes the reinforcement of faith as the process of taming the unruly flights of reason: “For by acquainting our reason how unable it is to display the visible and obvious effects of nature, it becomes more humble and submissive unto the subtleties of faith; and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed reason to stoope into the lure of faith.” (12) Browne does not believe in what is believable to his senses. He believes in the apparently preposterous. According to him, it is “no vulgar part of faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to reason and against the arguments of our proper senses.” (12) And it is his believing itself that becomes believable in the act of worship. In a different sense from that which is cited by his critics, like John Addington Symonds, Browne’s ideas are utterly false. This sense of falsity is, however, not derogatory. There is a kind of falseness which, quite legitimately, affords the most refined aesthetic pleasure: it is enjoyed at that point where consistently sustained belief in the absurd assumes the semblance of spontaneity, and the most elaborate magical procedure, Browne’s prose style, conjures the appearance of the naively miraculous.

1 Quoted by Austin Warren, “The Style of Sir Thomas Browne,” Kenyon Review (13): 674–687 (678).

2 Norton R. Tempest, “Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne,” Review of English Studies (3): 308–318 (318).

3 The latter is William K. Wimsatt, the former is Marshall McLuhan.

4 Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (New York: Collier, 1909), The Harvard Classics, Vol. 4, 3–4. Hereafter intra-textual references are to this edition.

5 Paul Elmer More’s description of the “esemplastic power” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s imagination, in Shelburne Essays, Studies of Religious Dualism, Sixth Series (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company/The Riverside Press Cambridge, 1909), 167.

6 W.P. Dunn, Sir Thomas Browne: A Study in Religious Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1950), 46.

7 Quoted by Robert Sencourt, Outflying Philosophy: A Literary Study of the Religious Element (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1923), 250.

8 Edward Dowden, Puritan and Anglican: Studies in Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1901, 2nd ed.,), 46.

9 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and the Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton UP, rev. ed., 2013), 59.

10 Ibid., 47.

11 Ibid., 67.

2 Intertextual Dialogue: Father and Daughter Novelists

“A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

“The importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One’s own discourse and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse.”

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

A brief survey of literary history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries yields several prominent examples of intertextual dialogue: James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), the collaboration of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) with Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) in the journals Die Horen (1795–1797) and Musenalmanach (1796–1800) and then again with C.M. Wieland (1733–1813) in Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s controversial appropriations of German sources in Biographia Literaria (1817). Dialogue in these works reflects a process fraught with more complexity than the term usually implies, since the emergence of each new text presupposes a struggle with more authoritative discourse. There are enough additional examples, such as the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare (1797–1801, 1810), William Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), and J.P. Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (1836–48), to suggest that intertextual dialogue is one of the paradigmatic modes of Romanticism. These examples also illustrate Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of literary history as “an arena of struggle constantly being waged . . . against various kinds and degrees of authority”: the young Schiller and the amanuensis Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854) with Goethe, Boswell with Johnson, the “Great Cham,” Coleridge (1772–1834) with Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), and the translators Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) with the works of William Shakespeare.1

For Bakhtin the generic locus of this struggle is the novel and an intertextual dialogue that exemplifies the effort to achieve individuated discourse during the Romantic Period is exemplified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and William Godwin’s St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799). The intertextual ligatures connecting these texts have previously been acknowledged, but never fully revealed.2 The present discussion is built on this previously unvisited site and is intended to satisfy two objectives: first, to suggest that St. Leon is the primary precursor text with which Shelley engaged in intertextual dialogue during the composition of Frankenstein; and secondly, as a re-writing of Godwin’s novel, Frankenstein illustrates the dialogic progression from Shelley’s appropriation of her father’s discourse to the emergence of her own authorial originality. Seen from this perspective, the novel functions as an allegory of its author’s education and literary apprenticeship. Moreover, intertextual dialogue between Frankenstein and St. Leon imposes a slight modification on Harold Bloom’s paradigm of influence. Here, and in some of the examples named above, the “strong precursor” with whom the “ephebe” grapples is not a poet of the past but a near contemporary. As the product of intertextual dialogue, Shelley’s novel embodies the female child’s quest for independence from patriarchal authority, but the act of asserting her independence is made problematic in this case by the fact that her “strong precursor” is not merely a near contemporary but her own father. Partially orphaned and then alienated by a stepmother whom she saw as a rival for her father’s attention, Shelley’s attachment to her father was perhaps also afflicted by a trace of culpability for her mother’s death in childbirth.3

II.

Following Wollstonecraft’s death in 1797, Godwin was left to care for their infant daughter and the three-year old Fanny Imlay. At this time he began to work on St. Leon, and the new novel, which anticipates the interest in history and the historical accuracy of his Life of Chaucer (1803) and History of the Commonwealth of England (1824–28), examines what Godwin described a few years before as “the evils which arise out of the present system of civilized society,” and he considered the novel’s publication an effort to “disengage the minds of men from prepossession, and launch them upon the sea of moral and political inquiry.”4 Thus St. Leon resumes the critique of “things as they are” that commenced with An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and was continued in Caleb Williams (1794) and, like the previous novel, St. Leon was intended to make Godwin’s political teachings more widely accessible. In particular, the new novel reveals the extent to which Godwin’s views on marriage had been modified under the tutelage of Wollstonecraft; in fact, even friendly critics charged that he had recanted his revolutionary views on relationships between the sexes. (He concedes this point in the novel’s Preface: “I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind that cherishes them.”)5 Scattered throughout the text, variations of this view contradict Godwin’s memorable description of marriage given in Book VIII of Political Justice (1793) as “the worst of all monopolies.”6 And yet, the revised argument presented in St. Leon, which accommodates bourgeois family life, is but another example of the intertextual dialogue conducted between Political Justice and Godwin’s prose fiction: the later texts suggest modifications to the ideology set down in the philosophical treatise.

The overall design and thematic patterns of St. Leon are replicated typologically in Frankenstein. At the center is a presentation of the “education” of the protagonist Reginald de St. Leon alternately via chivalry and alchemy. (Alchemy, it is implied, is analogous to chivalry; both are anachronistic social and scientific paradigms.) The latter is perceived initially by the protagonist as a possible vehicle by which he might simultaneously serve mankind and seek atonement for his betrayal of the chivalric code. Reginald’s travels embody an ironic inversion of the classical Bildungsreise; his education is based on disillusioning rather than edifying experiences. And, anticipating the trajectory of the Monster’s experience, rather than the popular gratitude he expects in response to his benevolent actions, suffering and destruction seem ineluctably to follow in his wake and he is rejected precisely by those whom he had intended to help. As a result, he is hunted down by such adversaries as his son Charles and his erstwhile friend, Bethlem Gabor. Reginald’s fate is shared by Victor and the Monster (who alternately serve as each other’s prey), and parallels to all three characters are found in the tragic situation of Oedipus. Sophocles’s tragedy, St. Leon, and Frankenstein are all myths of misguided benevolence in which hubristic transgression of social, religious, and epistemological boundaries is punished by exile from human society. Mary Godwin also suffers ostracism from her family following her elopement with Shelley—an intolerable act of rebellion against her father’s authority—which coincides with a new phase of authorship independent of her father’s influence. And yet her new status as an author connects her more closely than ever to her precursors Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley.

Following his disillusioning experience of the brutalities of war in the Italian campaigns of French King Francis I (1494–1547), Reginald finds himself ill-equipped to function in civilian society. Precisely because he is publicly celebrated as a paragon of chivalry who no longer believes in its values, Godwin presents his fall from grace as symptomatic of a culture in decline. Thus chivalry, Edmund Burke’s shibboleth in The Reflections on the Revolution in France and Godwin’s target in Caleb Williams, is exposed as already otiose even during its supposed heyday. A living anachronism driven to gambling, Reginald forfeits his family’s honor and fortune. Flying from France in disgrace, he settles his family near Lake Geneva. The idyllic scene is reminiscent of the De Laceys’ cottage in the forest where Victor’s Monster finds refuge.

The appearance of a mysterious interloper, Zampieri, violates the intimacy of the family circle and awakens Reginald’s dormant ambition. The stranger offers to share the mystery of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir vitae but only on condition that Reginald agrees in advance not to share this secret with anyone, not even Marguerite, his high-minded wife. Her character is an idealized portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft and serves as the model for all the noble female characters in Frankenstein: Caroline, Agatha, Safie, Justine, and Victor’s cousin, childhood companion, and fiancée Elizabeth Lavenza. Reginald’s first impulse is to refuse Zampieri’s offer, insisting that his “heart was formed by nature for social ties . . . and I will not now consent to anything that shall infringe on the happiness of my soul.” (II, 7) Zampieri responds by striking at Reginald’s Achilles’ heel; as a true knight and the flower of French chivalry he desires to serve once again as an agent of justice and public welfare: “Feeble and effeminate mortal! Was ever a great discovery prosecuted, or an important benefit conferred upon the human race, by him who was incapable of standing, and thinking, and feeling, alone?” (II, 7, 8) The esoteric skills are imparted and immediately Reginald experiences a complete resurrection of his former pride and ambition. His transformation parallels Victor’s metamorphosis following the creation of his hideous offspring, but as the bearer of a monstrous secret he embarks on an odyssey “hated by mankind, hunted from the face of the earth, pursued by atrocious calumny, without country, without a roof, without a friend.” (II, 9)

While Reginald’s and Victor’s horrible inner transformation is comparable, the knowledge engendering such change in the psyche of the protagonists is different and must be distinguished. In contrast to the “new science” of natural philosophy that engenders Victor’s creative act of hubris, Godwin’s protagonist, Reginald de St. Leon, pursues the arcane arts of alchemy, but both Reginald and Victor are both afflicted by a mania for illicit knowledge that Chris Baldick has called “epistemophilia.”7 Knowledge per se is, however, not the crucial issue; it is rather the specific character of the knowledge that they seek. Awakened by the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus, alchemy is also Victor’s first intellectual passion, and he confesses to Walton that “if only he had been content to study the more rational theory of chemistry which had resulted from modern discoveries” it is possible “that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin.” The following passage, with its self-analysis and confessional tone, might just as easily have been spoken by Godwin’s protagonist:

My dreams were therefore undisturbed by reality, and I entered with the greatest diligence into the search of the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. But the latter obtained my most undivided attention: wealth was an inferior object, but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame, and render men in vulnerable to any but a violent death.8

Masao Miyoshi observes that “in Frankenstein the main vehicle of Gothic fantasy is no longer the conventional supernatural” such as alchemy; instead, it is the “new science,” which, as a result of the protagonist’s misapplication, vitiated its claims to being “a humane pursuit by demonstrating its possible monstrous results.” Shelley reveals in her appropriation and revision of her father’s novel that “science,” the definitive Enlightenment pursuit, “can generate a totally new species of terror. If scientific man is a kind of God, his scientific method becomes a new supernaturalism, a contemporary witchdoctoring of frightening potential.”9 But clearly, what Reginald and Victor have most in common is the abuse of their respective sciences. Both novels present the distortion and perversion of procreation as a misapplication of science, old and new, and the process leading to Mary Godwin’s emergence as a novelist corresponds to Reginald’s application of alchemy and Victor’s exploitation of the “new science,” since all three processes presuppose the transgression of nature, established authority, and, ultimately, the social order.

The enormous destructive potential of Reginald and Frankenstein’s secret powers condemns them to the remorseless isolation experienced by all those who possess the Midas touch, starting with Godwin himself, whose influence as a philosopher appears under the guise of alchemy and science in both novels.10 If Reginald’s powers are shared with others the laws of nature will be violated, thus posing a threat to the whole basis of human civilization: “Exhaustless wealth, if communicated to all men, would be but an exhaustless heap of pebbles and dust; and nature will not admit her everlasting laws to be so abrogated, as they would be by rendering the whole race of sublunary man immortal.” (II, 103) In this way, Reginald’s concerns over the potential misuse of his powers anticipate Victor’s principled refusal to create a female companion for the Monster. It is important to note that altruism dominates the following passage and not, as Anne K. Mellor insists,11 fear of female sexuality or the conscious drive to “usurp” the female principle in procreation:

I was now about to form another being of whose dispositions I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness. He had sworn to quit the neighborhood of man and hide himself in deserts; but she had not; and she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation . . . . Even if they were to leave Europe and inhabit the deserts of the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror. Had I a right for my own benefit, to inflict this curse upon everlasting generations? (122–123)

The use of his illicit powers increases Reginald’s sense of isolation, and his lament resonates with his counterpart’s in Frankenstein: “Man was not born to live alone. He is linked to his brethren by a thousand ties; and, when those ties are broken, he ceases from all genuine existence.” (III, 97) But rather than put an end to his wretched wanderings, Reginald, after employing the elixir vitae in order to make good his escape from the Spanish Inquisition, “panted for something to contend with and something to conquer. My senses unfolded themselves to all the curiosity of remark; my thoughts seemed capable of industry unwearied, and investigation the most constant and invincible. Ambition revived in my bosom . . . desired to perform something . . . that I might see the world start at and applaud.” (III, 284)

Illustrating Godwin’s prowess in the historical travel mode made popular by Ann Radcliffe and M. G. Lewis, Reginald crosses Europe and finds his desired new field of action in Hungary. Ravaged by war, famine, and grinding servitude under the Turks, the inhabitants of this nation seem ready for a savior, and Reginald seizes the chance to atone for the death of his wife and the breakup of his family with some supreme act of charity and benevolence. However, rather than endearing himself to his Hungarian hosts, the gold he creates in order to buy wheat undermines the nation’s markets, stokes runaway inflation, and increases the suffering of the population. Once again, the use of alchemy has been shown to disrupt the laws of nature and society and to alienate the protagonist still further from the human circle. Reginald’s ostracism marks him as another member of the band of Romantic outcasts: the Ancient Mariner, Childe Harold, Prometheus, and his literary double, Victor Frankenstein. Transgression is the natural consequence of hubris, and it is punished by exile from one’s home culture. Mary suffers ostracism from her family as a result of transgressing her father’s will and the hubris of elopement is equated with the exercise of her procreative powers and her emergence as the author of her own literary texts. This is the same pattern of creation/transgression/isolation replicated in St. Leon and Frankenstein. Release from this condition is achieved only in confession or by acts of unselfish caring that lead to absolution. But such deliverance is denied to Reginald and Victor. Even though the Monster reads Victor’s lab notes, his scientific method is never disclosed to others. Similarly, Reginald keeps his promise to Zampieri and the secret of the philosopher’s stone is never revealed to the reader. Indeed, the entire first-person narrative in St. Leon forms a series of complex circumlocutions corresponding to the evasive actions and disguises that Reginald requires to preserve his secret at all costs. Instead of genuine communication, Godwin’s protagonist offers what he admits is only the semblance of communication and “the unburdening of the mind” simply because he recognizes it is of the essence of being human “insatiably [to thirst] for a confident [sic] and a friend.” (II, 103) Reginald’s faux confession functions merely as auto-therapy, and his sufferings, while offering an admonition to the reader, are not redeemed. He is doomed to continue his wanderings without respite.

III.

Written by Mary when she was only nineteen, Frankenstein is among the most enduring icons of Romanticism, and in recent years it has attracted as much attention from critics as any text in the canon. As the only daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s ill-fated union, Mary was “nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my father.”12 Emily Sunstein dismisses as inaccurate the assumption still accepted by some that Mary received no systematic education prior to falling under the influence of Shelley. “Living with Godwin was an education; she loved leaning; he encouraged her, and gave her the background Wollstonecraft had not had and regretted having missed.”13 Years later, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont corroborated her stepsister’s account of the tenor and routine of their Godwinian education:

All the family worked hard, learning and studying: we all took the liveliest interest in the great questions of the day: common topics, gossiping, scandal, found no entrance in our circle, for we had been brought up by Mr. Godwin to think it was the greatest misfortune to be fond of the world, or worldly pleasures or of luxury or money; and that there was no greater happiness than to think well of those around us, and to delight in being useful or pleasing to them.14

Godwin described the spirit that governed Mary’s education in this way: “I am anxious that she should be brought up like a philosopher even like a Cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character.”15 Her father’s choice of a second wife was only the first of devastating paternal rebuffs she suffered; the other was his reaction to her elopement with the older married poet, which may be seen as an effort to establish independence from Godwin’s control over her discourse.16 As the precocious child grew into a young woman and emerged as an author, her father’s texts provided the authoritative discourse with which she contended in an effort to establish her own distinctive voice. Her earliest literary efforts were, of course, published by the Juvenile Library, her stepmother’s publishing venture, and Mellor suggests that there is “a peculiar symbolic resonance” in the loss of Mary’s early writings which were “accidentally” left behind at a Parisian hotel: “Mary’s first impulse in her new life with the poet Shelley was to establish her own literary credentials, to assert her own voice, and to assume a role as his intellectual companion and equal.”17 But at least initially she merely exchanged one male tutor for another; it was only with her emergence as an author that she attained liberation from both father and husband.

While a number of candidates for Mary’s precursor text are named or cited in the novel, including those by Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, St. Leon is the “adult” text for which Frankenstein serves as a reduction, translation, and revision. Its author combined the functions of Mary’s father and mother as well as her chief teacher and her chief literary “precursor,” and yet the most striking structural and thematic correspondences between Frankenstein and St. Leon arise from the urgency of Mary’s efforts to mediate her Godwinian education by re-writing one of its canonical texts. In a modification of the Russian linguist I. M. Lotman’s model of the “reception” and “appropriation” of adult texts by children, Michael Holquist suggests that “not only do children thus limit the scripts of the playlets their parents enact with them; they also limit the size of the cast. That is, for children all possible players in the world’s drama are reduced to the characters experienced in the family culture.”18 Barbara Johnson has written that “Frankenstein can be read as the story of the experience of writing Frankenstein,” but actually the writing of Frankenstein is about the re-writing of St. Leon.19 This accounts for the parallels between St. Leon and Frankenstein with respect to their dramatic personae. The model for St. Leon’s family is, of course, Godwin’s own deceased first wife, daughters, and stepson; and in Frankenstein Mary sustains this pattern, less as a way of exorcising an Electra complex by gender substitution (in this sense Victor and Alphonse Frankenstein can be seen as surrogates for Shelley and Godwin; Elizabeth is Fanny Imlay’s double) than as a means of completing her literary education. As such, education assumes the form, initially, of appropriating parental speech patterns and narratives. Once this step is successfully completed, the child moves on to the second stage in the process of Bildung: the articulation and creation of her own original discourse.

Bakhtin used the term “novel” to denote “whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits and the artificial constraints of that system.” According to this view, “literary systems are comprised of canons and novelization is fundamentally anticanonical.”20 This characterization applies to both St. Leon and Frankenstein, since each work is a militantly anti-canonical, composite literary form that explores the outer boundaries of the novel’s possibilities as a genre and combines, appropriates, and fuses other narrative sub-genres, including the Gothic, travel, and sentimental fiction. Bakhtin argues that the content and images of the novel are therefore “profoundly double-voiced and double-languaged” because they “seek to objectivize the struggle with all types of internally persuasive discourse that had at one time held sway over the author.”21 One such sub-genre exhibited in Frankenstein that illustrates this process is the Bildungsroman, in which the process of intertextual dialogue has been fused with the dialectic of education.

The composition of Frankenstein may, in fact, be compared to the manner in which children learn to appropriate adult speech for themselves and the means by which a writer distinguishes their voice from those of precursors and literary authority figures. The first process is analogous to translation in that it involves assimilation, rearrangement, a certain amount of necessary distortion, and simplification of the parental discourse adopted by the child as models in developing their own voice and speech patterns. Lotman describes language acquisition as a mediating process combining translation, appropriation, and reconfiguration:

The child’s contact with the world of adults is constantly imposed on him by the subordinated position of his world in the general hierarchy of the culture of adults. However, this contact itself is possible only as an act of translation. How can such translation be accomplished? . . . [T]he child establishes a correspondence between some texts familiar and comprehensible to him in “his” language and the texts of “adults” . . . . In such a translation—of one whole text by another whole text—the child discovers an extraordinary abundance of “superfluous” words in “adult” texts. The act of translation is accompanied by a semantic reduction of the text . . . . The child reduces the semantic model obtained from [the language of adults] in such a way that translation into his own language of the texts flowing from without is possible.22

The child’s mediation of adult discourse thus may be likened to the reception of literary texts belonging to a foreign culture. In Les voix du silence (1951) André Malraux describes the process of cultural interaction in terms of a “conquest,” an “annexation,” a “possession” of the “foreign,” of that which is culturally “other,” and Bakhtin characterizes the impact of another’s discourse upon the writer as a dialectical opposition between the self and the other involving, first, the recognition of difference that is then followed by the struggle for individuation or originality:

When someone else’s ideological discourse is internally persuasive for us and acknowledged by us, entirely different possibilities open up. Such discourse is of decisive significance in the evolution of an individual’s consciousness: consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself . . . . One’s own discourse is gradually and slowly wrought out of other’s words that have been acknowledged and assimilated, and the boundaries are at first scarcely perceptible . . . . When such influences are laid bare, the half-concealed life lived by another’s discourse is revealed within the new context of the given author. When an influence is deep and productive, there is no external imitation, no simple act of reproduction but rather a further creative development of another’s discourse in a new context and under new conditions.23

In its mythical treatment of the necessity to struggle against even the most beloved presence in one’s life, Mary Shelley’s novel also reflects the centrality to Romanticism of Germaine de Staël’s maxim: “Force of mind is developed only by attacking power.”

The Monster’s acquisition of speech, reading skills, and, most importantly, the capacity to generate texts symbolically, replicates Mary’s education as a struggle with another’s, more powerful discourse. Within her narrative this process approximates the Lotman/Bakhtin paradigm according to which the Monster learns, first, by appropriating the discourse of the De Lacey family and of the books he finds in the “leathern portmanteau”: Milton, Plutarch, and Goethe, and, secondly, in articulating its own individuated discourse.24 In the Godwin household the categories of parents and authors were conflated, and the circle of family friends included prominent literary and cultural figures who were familiar to the children.25 Mary’s, and by extension, the Monster’s obsession with language reflects their shared struggle to gain command of a medium in which to express their own thoughts in the midst of many authoritative models of discourse: “By degrees I made a discovery of still greater moment: I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experience and feelings to one another by articulate sounds . . . . This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it.” (83) There is a remarkable parallel between the Monster’s language acquisition through a process of eavesdropping on the De Laceys and the famous anecdote of Mary and the other Godwin children hiding behind the sofa in order to hear Coleridge’s reading of the “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” How many countless times was this scene replicated over the years during visits by Wordsworth, Lamb, and Holcroft? An interesting irony disclosed in the dialogic process is how the Monster acquires and demonstrates a command over language that far surpasses the eloquence of any other figure in the novel. Indeed, the source of his eventual domination of Victor is not his superhuman strength, but his greater rhetorical power. It is also an irony of literary history that in securing her authorial identity with the endurance of Frankenstein Mary surpassed the success enjoyed by St. Leon, her primary precursor text, which Byron considered superior to Caleb Williams. And while Frankenstein continues to generate countless literary and cinematic spinoffs at a dizzying rate, Godwin’s novel, until recently, was only available in an antiquarian reprint.

A further instance of Mary’s identification with the Monster is found in their similar responses to maternal deprivation. Victor and Reginald are also motherless, and for both this loss is exacerbated by the deaths of other loved ones. Anne Mellor has described Frankenstein as “an analysis of the failure of the family, the damage wrought when the mother—or a nurturant parental love—is absent.”26 This is also the central theme of St. Leon, which is, as already suggested, a transparent redaction of the Godwin family experience, and Mary’s treatment of the orphan’s agony of the Monster illustrates Sigmund Freud’s view that “missing someone who is loved and longed for is the key to an understanding of anxiety.”27 John Bowlby, the English psychologist and biographer of Charles Darwin, modifies Freud’s observations on grief and separation anxiety to suggest a possible cause of Mary’s frequent bouts of anxiety during her many pregnancies:

States of anxiety and depression that occur during adult years, and also psychopathic conditions, can, it is held, be linked in a systematic way to the states of anxiety, despair, and detachment . . . that are so readily engendered whenever a young child is separated for long from his mother figure, whenever he expects a separation, and when, as sometimes happens, he loses her altogether.28

By virtue of a kind of sorcery akin to alchemy, Mary and the Monster seem to have been formed by a hermaphroditic father, who combines both the male and female principles of generation and whose powers of multiplication correspond to the recondite powers of the philosopher’s stone. As a descriptive term “hermaphroditic” is preferable to William Veeder’s “androgyne,” since androgyny refers only to proclivity or “sexual character,” while hermaphroditism actually has reference to actual sexual nature or capacity.29 Victor’s ability to create life from inanimate matter and Reginald’s multiple rebirths by means of the elixir vitae are methods of creating life that circumvent the female body but not the maternal principle. In a thinly veiled disguise for Godwin’s relationship to Mary and her half-sister Fanny, Reginald outlives his wife and appropriates the maternal role in his relationship to his daughters. The life-giving powers exhibited by Victor and Reginald correspond to Mary’s own birth in which the maternal principle was eliminated in Wollstonecraft’s death. Through their traumatic births and status as orphans the Monster stands revealed as her fictive other.

The main narrative and thematic vehicle in both novels—the perversion or misuse of science, old and new—is, in fact, a distortion of procreation, and the bridge between alchemy and natural philosophy is the discovery of the means of creating or perpetuating life by a subtraction of the female principle from procreation. Ironically, the stain of mortality is removed from persons not of woman born. The elimination of the female principle in procreation invites Mary’s critique of the monstrosity of neglectful parenting. Testifying to the power of environmental conditioning in childhood, which is a fundamental teaching in Godwin’s Political Justice, both motherless protagonists reveal themselves to be neglectful parents in their own right. And Victor’s feckless record as the “parent” of the offspring of his scientific labors is symbolic of the neglectful male parents in Mary’s personal life—Godwin and Shelley, Victor rationalizes the abandonment of his child on grounds not usually associated with maternalism, that is, aesthetic criteria, insisting “that no mortal could support the horror of that countenance”; even a “mummy endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch.” (43) There are strong parallels here to Godwin’s “monstrous” behavior as a parent, for we know that he not only opposed Mary’s decision to elope with Shelley, but he also refused to claim or identify the body of Fanny Godwin following her suicide on October 9, 1816. (Like her half-sister, this doubly orphaned young woman had, in her father’s view, indelibly stained the family’s honor.) The novel also provides subversive commentary on the egregious behavior of other parents in the Shelley circle: Percy, Claire Clairmont, Byron, and even Mary herself. Byron gained custody of his daughter Allegra only to have her placed in a convent where she died of neglect. The frenetic wanderlust (and the woeful traveling conditions they endured) of the Shelleys may be directly implicated in the deaths of their children Clara I (March 6, 1815), Clara II (September 24, 1818), and William on June 7, 1819. Perhaps of all acts the most reprehensible was Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet and their children when he eloped with Mary. In what can only be reckoned a display of astonishing insensitivity, Percy and Mary were then married less than three weeks after Harriet, who was pregnant at the time, drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Considering this monstrous record of neglect, which clearly contravened the teachings of Godwin by which the Shelleys claimed to be fashioning their lives, the Chancery judgment delivered on March 17, 1817 denying Percy custody of his children with Harriet could have come as no surprise and, respecting the moral universe of both St. Leon and Frankenstein, was certainly justified.30

With the appropriation and rewriting of St. Leon Mary attains independence, as a creator of texts, from both her father and her husband. For her husband, she serves as an extension of her father; her elopement and marriage to Shelley represent efforts on his part to attain consanguinity with her father, his great idol, through the instrumentality of her mind and body. At the same time, it reflects Percy’s attempt to usurp Godwin’s role as Mary’s primary educator and literary precursor. We can see this as an attempted exclusionary gesture whose objective is to assume control over her continuing development as a writer. In Frankenstein Mary therefore seeks to perform a double divestiture not only of parental influence, but also of authoritative discourse associated with both dominating literary figures in her life, her father and her husband. In this way the novel serves as a powerful reminder that literary texts function instrumentally. In Holquist’s phrase, “they serve as a prosthesis of the mind. As such, they have a tutoring capacity that materially effects change by getting from one stage of development to another,” and in its dual capacity as an enabling device and as a necessary stage in the dialectic of education leading to the attainment of a secure authorial identity, Frankenstein enacts for its author and protagonists a dual process of soul and voice formation.31 Emulating Reginald’s and Victor’s search for ideal companionship, empowering knowledge and opportunities for doing some action that is “great and good,” the Monster’s odyssey begins with the discovery that he lives in a hostile world and that he has been rejected by his “father” and denied the right to engender his own offspring. His odyssey or Bildungsreise ends with the murderous inversion of Godwinian altruism as he lashes out at Victor, destroying all those with whom he enjoys emotional intimacy in order to render his condition identical to his own. The rebellion of the Monster, which proceeds from inarticulate rage to the discovery of speech and the art of discourse, invites comparisons with Mary’s efforts, first, to assimilate and, secondly, to overcome her father’s authoritative discourse, a process which culminates in her marriage to Shelley and the nearly simultaneous inception of her novel.

Recognizing that even the most persuasive interpretation may fail to convince, I would hesitate to suggest that the genesis and development of Mary’s novel is fully explained as the result of intertextual dialogue with Godwin’s St. Leon. Neither would I reduce the text’s function to mapping her development as a writer. But, as I have attempted to show, such an interpretation brings us closer to the novel’s textual and psychological matrices and it delineates the central autotherapeutic function of writing. Moreover, by adopting Bakhtin’s dialogic framework we gain a more pronounced awareness of the struggle involved in moving beyond mere appropriation of another’s authoritative discourse to the production of discourse that is distinctly one’s own. In contrast to those critics who have inserted Frankenstein into or extracted the novel from a patriarchal tradition, the preceding discussion should make it is possible to reject both alternatives. The tradition into which we should place Frankenstein is that which makes apparent its structure and language as empowering psychological scaffolding. Godwin’s St. Leon provided Mary with a dialogic partner in the struggle for self-expression, and Frankenstein is a reflection of the will to articulate her own consciousness and to attain individuation apart from the discourse associated with the “strong precursors” in her personal and literary experience. What makes the intertextual dialogue forming Frankenstein of particular interest is that the authoritative discourse with which its young author contended was formed by the texts of her father, mother, and husband—a body of texts that she habitually and even ritually read at home and on her mother’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard. This is the tradition formed by St. Leon. From this perspective Mary’s novel can be seen to replicate intertextual dialogue with a text that we can readily identify, St. Leon, and because of Shelley’s filial relationship with its author, it is possible to extrapolate from this process of intertextual dialogue to her development and growth as a writer. The end result of this process is the acquisition and exercise of genuine cultural power.

1 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 345.

2 In citing St. Leon but not pursuing the extensive thematic and plot correspondences with Frankenstein, recent studies follow Burton R. Pollin, “Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein,” Comparative Literature 17 (1965): 97–108. See, for example, Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 37; Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge reprint, 1989), 85; and Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1991, paperback edition), 23–24.

3 Emily Sunstein takes a neutral stance in the dispute over the character of the second Mrs. Godwin as compared to the first and reminds the reader that Mary’s singularly possessive attachment to her father was such that “no woman under Heaven, not even Mary Wollstonecraft had she descended from it, would have been readily accepted as her father’s consort by the four-year-old Mary Godwin,” Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 2.

4 The British Critic (July 1795), 95.

5 William Godwin, St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, 4 Volumes (London: Printed for G.G. & J. Robinson, R. Noble, printer, 1799), Vol. I, ix. Hereafter all intra-textual references are to this edition.

6 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Third Edition, 1798), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 762.

7 Baldick, op. cit., 26.

8 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818 edition), in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York: Oxford UP, 1990), 30. All intra-textual references are to this edition.

9 Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York: New York UP, 1969), 86.

10 Gary Kelly is persuaded that Mary’s father “felt himself to be in possession of great and terrible secrets: the philosophy of Political Justice which he could not use for the benefit of mankind, but which, on the contrary, made him an object of fear and loathing,” The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), 209. Emily Sunstein (op. cit., 20) notes that Godwin’s contemporaries “compared him to a great, if failed explorer on humanity’s behalf, a Promethean paradigm that Mary Godwin would immortalize in her scientist, Frankenstein, whose confidant, Walton, is a polar explorer” and would-be altruist savior of mankind.

11 “The Female in Frankenstein,” in Feminism and Romanticism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1988), 224.

12 Journals of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Abinger MSS, 21 (October 1838).

13 Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, 38–39: “All the children were deeply influenced by him, but Mary was his star disciple, the most powerfully engaged and permanently affected, the one from whom he demanded and gave most. Her most felicitous, intimate, even thrilling intercourse with her father was that of pupil and teacher, and most inordinate as her later tributes to him might seem, it was homage to mentorship that few fathers gave their daughters.”

14 Journals of Claire Clairmont, ed. M.K. and D. M. Stocking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1968), 18.

15 Letter to W.T. Baxter, 8 June 1812 in Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, ed. Keith Neil Cameron and Donald H. Reiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1961–73), 3, 102.

16 Evidence for Mary’s idolization of her father is found in a letter: “Until I met Shelley, I may justly say that Godwin was my God,” The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennet (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 1, 296.

17 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 23.

18 Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 82.

19 Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 8.

20 From the author’s introduction, Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, xxxi.

21 Bakhtin, op. cit., 348.

22 I.M. Lotman, “On the Reduction and Unfolding of Sign Systems,” in Semiotics and Structuralism: Readings from the Soviet Union, ed. Henryk Baran (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, Inc., 1976), 302.

23 Bakhtin, op. cit., 345, 347.

24 All of these works figured prominently in Godwin’s scheme of education for his children, but Goethe’s Werther carried especially deep emotional resonance for the Godwin family because William was reading it at the time of Wollstonecraft’s death.

25 Regular visitors to the Godwin household included William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, S.T. Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft, Joseph Johnson, Samuel Rogers, John Flaxman, J.M.W. Turner, Maria Edgeworth, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith.

26 Mellor, op. cit., 39.

27 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926) in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974), Vol. XX, 136–137.

28 John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Separation: Anxiety and Anger (New York: Basic Books, 1973), Vol. II, 4–5.

29 William Veeder, Mary Shelley and Frankenstein—The Fate of Androgyny (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1986).

30 See Chapter Six, “Deaths by Land and Sea,” in Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), 66–73.

31 Holquist, op. cit., p. 83.

3 Tolstoy and the “Spiritual Delights” of Schopenhauer

In a letter to the lyrical poet Afanasy Fet (1820–1892) written on August 30, 1869, Lev Tolstoy waxes ebullient over his discovery of the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860):

Do you know what this summer has meant to me? Constant raptures over Schopenhauer and a whole series of spiritual delights which I’ve never experienced before. I’ve sent for all of his works and I’m reading them (I’ve also read Kant), and probably no student ever studied so much for his course, and learned so much, as I did this summer. I don’t know if I’ll ever change my opinion, but at present I’m certain that Schopenhauer is the most brilliant of men. I’ve begun to translate him and won’t you also take it on? We could publish it jointly. As I read him, it’s inconceivable to me how his name can remain unknown . . .1

It would be easy to dismiss this enthusiasm and the opinion it engendered as just another example Tolstoy’s penchant for hyperbole. One could similarly ascribe this sentiment to the fleeting, but intense passion Tolstoy experienced in his encounter with the German philosopher and his major work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [The World as Will and Representation] (1819, 1844), which was strong enough momentarily to becloud the Russian novelist’s judgment. But neither, in fact, is the case. Tolstoy’s infatuation with Schopenhauer was neither exaggerated nor ephemeral. On the contrary, we see from Tolstoy’s prose fiction and letters alike, that Schopenhauer’s influence on Tolstoy was profound, pervasive, and, like the impact Schopenhauer exerted on Nietzsche, lifelong. Of course, the important role that Schopenhauer’s thought played in the development of Tolstoy’s artistic, ethical, and religious Weltanschauung is acknowledged in passing by leading critics of Tolstoy, from Henri Troyat and R. F. Christian to John Bayley and Theodore Redpath. Few critics, however, have sounded the depths of Tolstoy’s affinity for Schopenhauer’s teachings on the “will” and even fewer have systematically traced the Schopenhauerian features of Tolstoy’s art and thought. While limitations of space prevent a thorough examination of these problems at this time, the aim of this essay is to offer some basic insights into this formative relationship.

No other philosopher in the nineteenth century assigned such an integral role for art in the workings of his metaphysical system than Schopenhauer. Unlike many of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), J.C. Fichte (1762–1814), and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), Schopenhauer does not consider art merely an intellectual narcotic or, even worse, a frivolous deviation from the path of serious philosophical investigation. On the contrary, Schopenhauer accords to art and the artistic genius the highest distinction. For unlike the scientist, who is concerned with observing the phenomenal world and establishing laws for its behavior, the artist, whether his tools are paint and brush, blueprint and plumb, pen and paper, or string and bow, pursues higher, eternal truths. Accordingly, “every work of art really endeavors to show us life and things as they really are; but these cannot be grasped directly by everyone through the mist of objective and subjective contingencies. Art takes away this mist.”2 And, the mist cleared, the observer is momentarily relieved of his attachment to the will and is free to contemplate his relation to the world as will as a disinterested, will-less subject of knowledge.

If, among Kant’s disciples and immediate heirs, F.W.J. Schelling (1775–1854), a contemporary and friend of the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, and Ludwig Tieck, consistently made the most far-reaching claims for the transcendental possibilities of artistic contemplation, Schopenhauer’s seductively elegant style and central doctrine that escape from the tyranny of the will-driven life is possible by means of either artistic creation or aesthetic perception exercised far greater influence among philosophers and practicing artists. Starting in the 1890s, widespread disenchantment with “professional” systems of thought, such as Hegel’s, led to an embrace of Friedrich Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s ideas. Intense enthusiasm for Schopenhauer also coincided with the rise of other aesthetic, pessimistic, and anti-rationalist credos. Some well-known examples include Richard Wagner’s dramatization of what he mistakenly believed was Schopenhauer’s “metaphysics of sexual love” in the opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Thomas Hardy’s conflation of Schopenhauer’s “will” and Hegel’s “world historical individual” in The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908).

Besides Nietzsche, Wagner, and Hardy, a short list of Schopenhauer’s admirers in those years could serve as a reliable guide to the dominant figures in the chief cultural centers of Europe, from London and Paris to Vienna and St. Petersburg—George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, August Strindberg, Ivan Turgenev, and Lev Tolstoy. In fact, veneration for Schopenhauer is one of the features which otherwise dissimilar minds of European culture have in common, from proponents of Naturalism and Symbolism, from The Birth of Tragedy to The Interpretation of Dreams. Schopenhauer’s impact upon the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century is such that it is difficult to imagine the shape of early modernism without him, especially in such areas as music, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology.

At this point, before moving forward with a discussion of Tolstoy’s affinity for Schopenhauer, it might be useful first to offer a description of Schopenhauer’s doctrine of “disinterested” contemplation, that is, the manner in which a will-less subject of knowing must necessarily behold a work of art or an object in nature. Never does Schopenhauer, in proclaiming the virtues of disinterested contemplation, have in mind the same kind of disinterestedness that Kant insists is essential in making aesthetic judgments. And yet, when Schopenhauer speaks of the withdrawal of the will and the submergence of individuality as being essential to the realization of aesthetic experience, it is clear that his starting point is Kant’s foundational idea. At the same time, it would be incorrect to treat Schopenhauer’s adaptation of Kant’s teaching on disinterestedness as merely a kind of restatement of the Kantian position in Romantic terms. While in The Critique of Judgment Kant is chiefly interested in determining the status of aesthetic judgments and of eliciting their basis or ground in order to draw a sharp dividing line between aesthetic awareness and our ordinary or scientific knowledge of empirical facts, Schopenhauer, in a manner that is typically Romantic in orientation, argues that aesthetic awareness constitutes knowledge affording insight into reality of a higher order than that available through scientific inquiry. Similarly, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), a nearly exact contemporary, in the year before his death, ascribes to poetry a power that

awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar . . . . The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively . . . . The great instrument of moral good is the imagination . . . . Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man . . .3

Schopenhauer gives the notion of disinterested contemplation a wider significance than that granted to it by Kant, so that it encompasses not only beauty, but also what Schopenhauer identifies as “the sublime.” The nature of purely objective perception is such that it admits not only those objects which “accommodate themselves” to it, “when by their manifold and at the same time definite and distinct form they easily become representatives of their Ideas, in which beauty, in the objective sense consists,” but also things positively “unfavorable to the will.” (I, 205) Schopenhauer explains that the sensations evoked by the sublime are identical to the feelings associated with the contemplation of the beautiful, of the experience of pure will-less knowing, and knowledge of the eternal Ideas. “The feeling of the sublime is distinguished from that of the beautiful,” only by the addition, “namely the exaltation beyond the known hostile relation of the contemplated object to the will in general.” (I, 204–205) The feeling of the sublime varies according to the degree of danger that the beheld scene poses to the will:

of the spectator. It is at its weakest when we behold a stark winter landscape and strongest when we are abroad in the storm of tempestuous seas . . . . [I]n the unmoved beholder of this scene the twofold nature of his consciousness reaches the highest distinctness. Simultaneously, he feels himself as individual, as the feeble phenomenon of the will, which the slightest touch of these forces can annihilate, helpless against powerful nature, dependent, abandoned to chance, a vanishing nothing in the face of stupendous forces; and he also feels himself as the eternal, serene subject of knowing, who as the condition of every object is the supporter of this whole world, the fearful struggle of nature being only his mental picture or representation . . . . This is the full impression of the sublime. (I, 207–208)

In a famous scene in Chapter 14 of War and Peace Tolstoy illustrates the experience of the sublime that is just as forceful as Schopenhauer’s, even if it lacks his terrifying mystery:

High up in the light sky hung the full moon. Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its far-away depths. “And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!” thought Pierre.

The last sentence is nearly a verbatim extract from Schopenhauer: tat twam asi—“This is you”—his borrowing from the Upanishads—the recognition that there is no difference between I and Thou, or between the subject of pure will-less knowing and the contemplated world of phenomena. This is the pantheistic epiphany that Pierre experiences in the moonlight.

To see through the principium individuationis [the distinction of one object or being from all others], to divine its illusory, truth-shrouding character; to experience the emotional intuition that the will is the same in the one and the all: this is the knowledge that lies at the heart of Schopenhauer’s ethics—knowledge that is obtained primarily through aesthetic contemplation. Similarly, only in the aesthetic state, reached through purely objective contemplation, is it possible to attain knowledge of the Ding-an-sich, “the thing-in-itself,” the foundation of reality, which Schopenhauer asserts is the will. The will is the ultimate, irreducible primeval principle of being, the source of all phenomena, the begetter present and active in every single one of them, the impelling force engendering the whole visible world and all life—for it is the will to live. It is this through and through; so that whoever says “will” is speaking of the will to live, and if you use the longer term you are guilty of a pleonasm. The will always desires but one thing: life, and more life. And why? Because the will finds life priceless? Because the will affords the experience of any objective knowledge of life? Of course not. All knowledge alike is foreign to the will; it is something independent of knowledge, it is entirely original and absolute, a blind urge, a fundamentally uncausated, utterly unmotivated force; so far from depending on any evaluation of life, the converse is the case, and all judgments are dependent upon the strength of the will to live.

The will, then, this “in-itself-ness” of things, existing outside of time, space, and causality, blind and causeless, greedily, wildly, ruthlessly demands life, demands objectification, and this objectification occurs in such a way that its original unity became a multiplicity—a process that receives the appropriate name of the principium individuationis. The will, avid of life, to wreak its desire objectifies itself into the myriad parts of the phenomenal world existing in time and space; but simultaneously, the will remains in full strength in each single and smallest of those parts. The world, then, is the product and the expression of the will, the objectification of the will in space and time. But the world is at the same time something else besides: it is the idea, my representation, mine and yours, the idea of each one and each one’s idea about himself—by virtue, that is, of the discerning mind, which the will created to be a light to it in the higher stages of its objectification, namely, the higher primates and human beings. Thus, in the upper stages of its individuation, even in animals and especially in humans, the highest and most complicated of all creatures, the will, to give itself aid, comfort, enlightenment, and security, kindles the light of the intellect which should make an idea or representation of the world—a kind of three-dimensional projection map of phenomena. It is noteworthy that, for Schopenhauer, it was not the intellect that brought forth the will; the converse was actually the case, the will brought forth the intellect. It is not intellect, mind, knowledge, that is the primary and dominant factor in experience; it is the will that dominates, and the intellect serves it. In a world entirely the work of the will, of absolute, unmotivated, causeless, and unvaluated life-urge, intellect occupies, of course, only second place.

Will, as the opposite pole of passive satisfaction, is naturally a condition of perpetual unhappiness; it is unrest, a striving for something that never leads to satisfaction or fulfillment—it is want, craving, avidity, demand, and ceaseless suffering; and a world or will can be nothing else but a world of suffering. As a writer ceaselessly tormented by insatiable passions and by the knowledge of humankind’s irremediable sinfulness, Tolstoy concurred with Schopenhauer in the view that the ever striving will ought to enjoy the ascendant position over the intellect. Tolstoy’s much vaunted notion of the “natural man” has at its root precisely this knowledge of the will’s primacy over the intellect, of the superiority of humanity’s savage instincts over the civilizing urge. And Tolstoy found an antidote to his own miseries and hope for the redemption of humankind in Schopenhauer’s prescription of art and Christian, quietistic oblivion as the only means to achieve victory over the will. Art, or rather the contemplation of a work of art, has the power to free the intellect from its original subservience to the will, so that it rises above the trammels of everyday existence and beyond the illusory and only temporary satisfactions granted by the world of appearances. By the power of the artistic genius, whose talent consists in perceiving “not individual things which have their existence only in the relation, but the Ideas of such things,” the mist is cleared. The “veil of Maya” is torn back and the inner meaning of reality is revealed in the eternal Ideas, existing outside space and beyond time. Thus, as Nietzsche writes, “the heroism of truth consists in ceasing one day to be time’s plaything. In becoming, all is hollow, deceptive, superficial and contemptible; the riddle which man is to solve can only be solved in the unchangeable, in being, in being such-and-no-other.”4 At this point, the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure will-less subject of knowledge, the “clear eye” and “mirror of the inner nature of the world”: