Factitious states: Mary Shelley and the politics of early nineteenth century women's identity and fiction.

Abstract

This dissertation explores female characterization and narrative form in each of Mary Shelley's seven novels, with particular emphasis on Mary Wollstonecraft's influence. Wollstonecraft argued that women should be educated in reasoning and logic, and her texts became the foundation for Shelley's social and political attitudes toward women's roles within the culture. From her influence, Shelley produced critiques of the patriarchal power structure through epistolary, autobiographical, historical, apocalyptic and romance-manners narrative forms that both challenged and examined the consequences of the politics of female exclusion in the public sphere. The patriarchal expectations for female behavior were in turn augmented by the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary politics which destabilized the English monarchy early in the century. Shelley wrote in her sixth novel, Lodore (1835), "A man is more thrown upon the reality of life, while girls live altogether in a factitious state." Not only does this statement point to distinctions between male and female conditioning in the culture, but it suggests that Shelley disapproved of the education women received, molded as they were to exist somewhere outside of "the reality of life." The conventions of eighteenth-century domestic fiction and conduct books had defined women's education as training in the cardinal feminine virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Female behavior in these works both fulfilled and perpetuated a male fantasy of true womanhood. Drawing from this stereotype, Shelley's female characters expose the restrictive effects of culturally induced male domination on female self-identity. The stereotype of female perfection in Shelley's fiction ultimately subverts male identity and trivializes men's presumed successes in the public sphere. In Frankenstein, as in the works that follow it, women such as Justine triumph through moral and ethical superiority recognized only by the "sub-culture" of women, while men blatantly suffer the consequences of their excessive ambition and ignorance of women's lives. By drawing attention to the factitious states of female existence, Shelley's texts show a closer alignment with Wollstonecraft and prove more consciously political than has previously been suggested of her fiction.