By Lechi Eke
Romanticism is regarded as a non-feminine engagement. The phenomenon is historically attributed to men. However, there were also women writing at this time even though female and male Romanticism have more to do with “the ideological gender construction” than the writer’s sex.
Yet, male Romantic writers were in the majority (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, etc.) and many women lived and submitted in the patriarchal society of the period.
Nonetheless, women like Mary Wollstonecraft ((1759 -1797) the revolutionary feminist) wrote sharing her ideologies, and yet married! Wollstonecraft was able to confront self-imposed constraints on women created by the patriarchal society in which women were born to accept.
One of her quotes says, “I do not wish them (women) to have power over men; but over themselves.”
In the 18th century, it was considered improper for a woman to write publicly unless through a pseudonym, and if they did write, they were supposed to confine their writings to unserious subjects.
Wollstonecraft broke that. She asserted herself and her ideologies on a society which believed that women should be in the background caring for children, the sick and the dying and minding menial duties.
Although publicly vilified, especially after her death, Wollstonecraft unconventionally wrote with courage about serious issues and paved way for other women like her own daughter, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), etc,. She is most remembered by her book, A Vindication of the Right of Woman. She was also regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers.
Mary William Godwin (1797-1851) born by the very literary parents: Mary Wollstonecraft the feminist philosopher, writer and women’s rights advocate, and father who was a writer and a political philosopher, William Godwin, grew up a writer in her own right.
Encouraged by her father, Mary lived a literary life. She was home-schooled by her father before sending her briefly to boarding school. She also had a home tutor.
Godwin encouraged his daughter, Mary, to read vastly, and to learn how to write by composing letters. Although most of Mary’s juvenilia were lost, Mary’s later works showed that she read and practised writing throughout her life.
Her works tilted towards her mother’s feminism and domestic reforms, although, Mary Wollstonecraft died untimely at 38, twelve days after giving birth to her.
Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin (1756-1836), was a philosopher and author of two very successful books: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Things as They Are which is an early mystery novel attacking aristocratic privileges.
Godwin is considered one of the earliest exponents of utilitarianism and anarchism. He was a very prolific writer in the genres of novel, history and demography and held the ideals of the Enlightenment era.
However, Mary Shelley who was one of William Godwin’s three educated daughters preferred the ideals of the Romantic literary movement.
If we recall, Romanticism rejected almost everything Enlightenment, embracing emotionalism rather than rationalism. They had a deep interest in ruins and relics of the Ancient times and writings; and expressed inner feelings; a celebration of nature, beauty and imagination. They also delved into supernaturalism (which formed the basis of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) which is a gothic tale).
Romanticism also held the idealization of women, children and rural life; rejection of industrialization and social convention, and experimentation with poetic form among other things.
Mary Shelley met the reckless and radical Romantic poet and philosopher, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was her father’s admirer, during one of her holidays at home. They became inseparable despite the fact that he was a married man, and her father disapproved.
Mary stole P. B. Shelley’s wild heart and later became his second wife in 1816, three weeks, after his first wife committed suicide by drowning. She wrote that he incited her to obtain “literary reputation; telling me that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage and enroll myself on the page of fame.”
Mary grew up to immerse herself in literary activities, writing, editing, composing, telling and sharing stories with literary-like minds. She and her husband, P. B. Shelley kept a group of literary friends who encouraged one another to read, appreciate works, write and edit for one another.
I pause here to digress a little. Literary people should be ardent readers and form groups to help them hone their skills like the Shelleys.
Although it was a very unconventional thing for a woman to be engaged in writing and publishing serious issues at this time, but Mary Shelley took after her mother. The idealization of women is seen in Mary Shelley’s works as a “lifelong reformer deeply engaged in the liberal and feminist concerns of her day.”
In 1820 when there was a Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution, Mary wrote that she was “thrilled”.
In 1823, she wrote articles for Leigh Hunt’s periodicals, The Liberal. She was glad that the Whigs returned to power in 1830 and was thrilled at the prospect of the Reform Act in 1832, as shown by her letters.
Mary’s latter works however portray her as beating a retreat from her earlier reformist politics. Some scholars opined that Mrs Shelley “grounded her alternative political ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois family”- arguing that in her latter writing, she endorsed a conservative vision of gradual evolutionary reform.
This vision is neither perfect in the sense that yes, it allowed women to participate in the public sphere, but it inherited the inequalities inherent in the bourgeois family setting. Nevertheless, some later scholars have argued that Mrs Shelley did not change at all, that she was never a radical like her father and her husband, that her earlier works challenged their stance.
This school of thought believes that Victor Frankenstein’s (the protagonist of her book, Frankenstein) thoughtless rejection of family is seen as evidence of Mrs Shelley’s constant concern for the domestic.
Mrs Mary Shelley was a hard worker. She wrote, read, proofread, edited and portrayed herself as her husband’s practical muse. She noted that she had suggested revisions as he wrote.
After her husband’s untimely death, Shelley proved herself a scholarly and professional editor as she grabbed her husband’s ‘messy textbooks’ and gleaned from them marvels, even including poems addressed to other women (love interests to her restless and unfaithful husband). Although, either in difference to public propriety, and, or pressure from her editor, Mary edited out some useful passages.
Then there was the embargo on writing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biography from his father, the Baron, Sir Timothy Shelley, who said if Mary ventured to do that, he would withdraw the meager financial support he gave her for the upkeep of their son, Percy Florence Shelley. And Mary needed that support.
However, every scholar agrees that Mary Shelley through her relentless editing and publication of all her husband’s works saved the dead writer from total obscurity, despite her omissions.
Scholars agree today that Mary Shelley is a major “Romantic figure, significant for her literary achievements and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.”
She also co-wrote very interesting books with her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Below are some of them:
1. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour ((1817) the story of when P. S. Shelley abandoned his wife, Harriet (in 1814), who was pregnant with their second child, a son, and eloped with his lover who later became wife number two, to Switzerland, much to the displeasure of the 16 year old girl’s father – William Godwin.
2. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus (1818) – a novel whose story came to Mary Shelley as she and her future husband (then, they had not married) were in Lord Bryon’s manor on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, in the summer of 1816. The host suggested they tell ghost stories. And ‘they’ included P. B. Shelley and John Polidori (Bryon’s physician). She said she was inspired by thoughts of having her dead son, Willy, restored to life (Mary and Percy lost three children; two in one year!).
Frankenstein is about a young scientist who creates a hideous monster in an unorthodox scientific experiment. It was first published anonymously in London in 1818. Infused with elements of the gothic novel and Romanticism, the book is said to be the first true science fiction. It has influenced modern horror stories, films and plays.
3. Proserpine and Midas (1820) – about Midas, Percy contributed two lyrical poems in the play which Mary called “a short mythological comic drama in verse”. In the story, she imitates the Greek and Roman mythology, from the Dionysiac cycle of legends elaborated from the burlesques of the Anthenian satyr plays. This is retold in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book XI.
What is important in Mary’s version is that she told it from an angle portraying the divergent roles of men and women in the society. It is a verse drama in blank verse, and Mary focuses on challenging patriarchy in the play and satirizing the evil of avarice.
Also it should be noted that it is a rework of classical myth which is one of the features of Romanticism. Romantic writers were definitely drawn to the Classical period as they romanced the themes of rebellion, heroism, emotion, sense and sensuality, sublimity, etc.
The story goes that the servants of an avaricious king of Phrygia named Midas brought to their king, a wandering satyr named Silenus from their farm. This satyr was a companion of the god, Dionysus. Because King Midas treated the satyr well, Dionysus asked him to make a wish and it would be granted him as reward for the king’s kindness to Silenus.
King Midas out of greed asked that everything he touches becomes gold. Dionysus warned him of his bad wish, but he wouldn’t listen. Not until his foods turn to gold at his touch and he almost starved to death, and his daughter turns to gold at his touch, that Midas realizes his mistake.
This story has different versions of how it ended. One said, Dionysus granted him release to bathe in the Pactolus River near Sardis in modern Turkey which legend said that’s how the river to this day contains alluvial gold.
Another ending says that Midas was asked to judge a musical contest between Apollos and Pan, when he decided against Apollo, the god turned his ears into donkey ears. Midas hid them under a turban and told his barber not to tell anyone, but the barber bursting with the secret screamed it into a hole in the earth. Plants sprouted from there and when winds blow, the branches whisper the secret! Mary adopted this version.
In line with the gender issue, male dominated readers had paid attention to Percy’s two lyrical poems in the book than Mary’s verse drama as it focuses on the details of everyday life.
By the end of her life in 1851, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had been as prolific just as her father, mother and husband. Some of her other works are: Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837).