A Disappearance in the World: Wollstonecraft and Melancholy Skepticism

There is nothing I shrink from more fearfully than publicity—I have too much of it—& what is worse I am forced by my hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways—Could you write my husband's life, without naming me it were something—but even then I should be terrified at the rouzing the slumbering voice of the public—each critique, each mention of your work, might drag me forward . . . now that I am alone in the world, [I] have but the desire to wrap night and the obscurity of insignificance around me. This is weakness—but I cannot help it—to be in print—the subject of men's observations—of the bitter hard world's commentaries, to be attacked or defended!—this ill becomes one who knows how little she possesses worthy to attract attention—and whose chief merit—if it be one—is a love of that privacy, which no woman can emerge from without regret . . . But remember, I pray for omission—for it is not that you will not be too kind too eager to do me more than justice—But I only seek to be forgotten.

Mary Shelley

As she shrinks away from the glare of the public sphere, how do we characterize Shelley's refusal of recognition in this letter?¹ On the one hand, there are palpable fears and terrors of involuntary exposure, of being dragged forward into the light and having one's agency wrested away as a condition of forced submission to the will of another. There are also longings here of a more domestic kind, longings for the securities of seclusion that banally translate into privacy and retirement. On the other hand, Shelley's refusal testifies to something more profound—a wish for disengagement, for an anonymity or invisibility of self beyond "the bitter hard world's commentaries" where personal intimacies and strategies are given room to maneuver despite their apparent "insignificance," far afield from prying eyes. Are these wishes (as Shelley maintains) signs of weakness? Her resistance to the "slumbering voice of the public" doesn't so much reject social participation altogether as intimate an alternative social presence. It thus comes as no surprise that by backing away from the writing of her husband's life, Mary Shelley wants a different history for herself, one that radically disavows the kind of fellowship and narrative plenitude her husband's biography promises: "I only seek to be forgotten." On one level, Shelley's disavowal might be read as symptomatic of what Julie Ellison has persuasively identified as a gendered blind spot in traditional narratives of Romanticism: "The invention of the romantic subject as the hero of desire is therefore wholly bound up with the feminine. At the same time, romantic writers suspect that desire may be a form of power, understanding a form of science, and woman a form of sabotage. Objects of desire are lost or violated in ambivalent allegories of the domestic and the maternal. Ultimately, the feminine becomes, first, wholly figurative or non-referential and then invisible."² Building upon the work of several critics who have pointed to tensions between feminist thought and Romantic ideology,³ Ellison seeks to return women as the absent causes to a philosophical tradition they had already partly inaugurated, taking the "language of mood" (intuition) to describe one kind of Romantic hermeneutic that can be "marked as a feminine quality."⁴

A suggestive implication of her argument is that the receding or lost figure of the feminine signifies the crucial object of loss or disavowal at the core of Romanticism's epistemological and ethical concerns. In this sense, femininity throws into sharper relief the melancholic structure of Romantic enlightenment of which it is a constitutive part. However, if the representation of women depends upon a volatile series of tropological substitutions through which they are initially rendered "wholly figurative or non-referential and then invisible," it would appear that the kind of nonrecognition Shelley longs for staunchly resists all progressive attempts at her critical rescue. After all, by refusing publicity and its various conferrals of meaning...