Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Jasmine Richards (Goldsmiths)
On a dark and stormy night in the summer of 1816, Mary and Percy Shelly, Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, Byron and his Doctor John Polidori gathered at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Léman. They passed the night by taking turns reading from a book of German ghost stories. Inspired by this, Byron challenged his companions ‘to write a ghost story.’ Provoked by this challenge, Mary Shelley began work on the novel that would become Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s 1831 preface to Frankenstein reveals Shelley’s creative and emotional anxiety over Byron’s challenge which suggests that she heard it as a profoundly personal, bullying demand that she prove herself worthy of the company of male Romantic poets and prove that her literary heritage as the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had not gone to waste.
This paper examines Mary Shelley’s rewriting of Promethean Myth and The Arabian Nights in Frankenstein. Through the intersection of these two sets of allusions, Shelley displaces her anxieties regarding her lack of a formal classical education, and her primary and general anxieties of authorship onto the characters of Victor Frankenstein and his creature. Shelley appropriates the character of Safie from ‘The Five Ladies of Bagdad,’ draws on the similarities between ‘The Fourth Voyage of Sindbad’ and the Circe episode of the Odyssey, and adopts the narrative structure of The Arabian Nights, in order to manipulate the conventional use of Promethean imagery – representing the revolutionary male Romantic poet as a heroic saviour – to speak to her concerns with the position of women in society.
Shelley shared with Byron and Percy Shelley the tendency to associate the ‘feminine’ power of the imagination with an oriental muse. However, whereas they tended to use this figure as an authorisation or inspiration for their own classical appropriations in their poetry, Shelley identified with a ‘Scheherazade’ figure in full possession of her female creative power. By associating herself with the teller of The Arabian Nights, Shelley came to possess Scheherazade’s set of mythological allusions; alternative but analogous to the classical. In her ability to move between the two sets of allusions, Shelley was thus also able to show the extent of her knowledge of classical texts, proving herself the intellectual and creative equal of her male contemporaries. In Frankenstein, these classical and oriental threads of influence intertwined to produce a text grounded in the classical inheritance of the male Romantic tradition, and yet Frankenstein can be seen to express an explicitly ‘feminine Romantic’ aesthetic. Shelley found that the symbolic language and structure of the Nights could provide her with a code through which she could safely express her resistance to patriarchal discourses of female creative lack.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 5 Dec 2013 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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