Passive and Dynamic Sincerity in Mary Shelley’s Falkner

I

A few important (and still influential) twentieth-century critics suggest that Mary Shelley modifies her late fiction to valorize the self-effacing heroines of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837) to support conventional “feminine” norms and to empower herself as a woman writer.¹ More recent scholars emphasize the novels’ contrast between acceptable feminine behaviors and unacceptable masculine behaviors, what Anne Mellor calls “masculine Romanticism”—an aesthetic preoccupied with the creative imagination, transcendence, and the autonomous self. Critics view the late novels’ male protagonists as the unstable, self-deluded products of masculine Romanticism and the heroines who soften and reform them as steadfast exemplars of feminine Romanticism: ethical and rational women characters held up for emulation.²

This essay challenges the exalted ethical position of heroines Lady Katherine Gordon, Ethel Fitzhenry, and Elizabeth Raby in the discursive structure of their respective novels by examining the ethic of sincerity presented in the texts.³ Taking up one of Wordsworth’s signature ideas, Mary Shelley fills her novels with conflicts between sincere and insincere characters, identities and acts, interiors and exteriors. Two stories Shelley wrote for the 1829 Keepsake (“Ferdinando Eboli: A Tale” and “The Sisters of Albano”) feature characters who assume their siblings’ identities. The tyrant Castruccio Castracani of Valperga (1823) can “fit himself for each scene in which he was to take a part” and “adap[t] himself to every character.”⁴ The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck is about a Flemish pretender to the English throne in the late fifteenth century, whom Shelley casts (against conventional histories) not as a counterfeit but as the legitimate prince of England. In Lodore and Falkner, narrativizing the human is practically a matter of measuring how “true” she is to herself. Shelley tends to organize her characterization largely around the idea of sincerity. But what she means by sincerity is not always straightforward. A few of her female characters are described as immaculately authentic, antitheatrical, harmonious: specimens of perfect integrity and propriety. At the opposite end are the splintered male characters: unsure of themselves, delusional, and often living life as if it were art. It may seem logical for readers to esteem the first set at the expense of the second, and to presume that Mary Shelley does as well. But the late novels are not unproblematic didactic stories that uphold sincere/good/antitheatrical people and expose, punish, or correct insincere/bad/theatrical ones. Mary Shelley examines these categories to determine their true meaning and feasibility. The present-day distinction between essentialist and performative models of character helps us understand her investigations.

I suggest that Mary Shelley’s late fiction examines both passive and dynamic sincerity. While the passively sincere person is all but incapable of theatrical self-representations, the dynamically sincere person demands these identifications as necessary to psychological development. Consider Elizabeth Raby of Falkner. She is not always a desirable alternative to the theatrical and extravagant romantic hero, her adoptive father Rupert John Falkner. Her sincerity is portrayed as unreflective and as lacking autonomy. In effect, she is born grown: her mechanistic motives are immediately harmonized with a necessitarian universe that runs on cause and effect.⁵ The character of Falkner is an altogether different case: as an individual “disharmonized” with the universe’s necessitarian laws, he must achieve any sincerity he comes to possess (Selected Works MWS, vii, 33). His achieved sincerity is a dynamic product of psychological work. His experiments with performative models of the self only humanize him and enable him to assume his identity in a manner unavailable to Elizabeth. Mary Shelley’s classification of sincerity thus roughly resembles William Blake’s distinction between Beulah’s unorganized innocence and Eden’s organized or higher innocence. Irrespective of direct influence, Mary Shelley shares with Blake a valued place for the autonomous individual who would transcend social and cultural forces.⁶ This realization complicates the received opinion that her final novels snuffed out that ethos.

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Mary Shelley’s fictional universes are usually governed by some variation of Necessity. Matilda’s fate, for example, is “governed by necessity, a hideous...