Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters by Anne K. Mellor (review)

Book Reviews107 expression "ofthe infinitude ofthe private man." Marr relates James' parrying with other past and present philosophers, such as Hegel and Horkheimer, and eventually links him with Emerson; the linkage rests primarily on the condition that James diminishes the past and anticipates a future that must be free ofcontingency so that experience remains a basis ofphilosophical affirmation. Subsequently, Marr turns to the twentieth-century critic, R.P. Blackmur, and the poet, Robinson Jeffers, to illustrate their opposite stances in regard to avoidance or acceptance of "that radical inwardness which is the American literary-philosophical heritage" (122-23). Jeffers escapes from solipsism to transcendence for recognizing one's divine nature, but Blackmur's "bourgeois humanism" does not essentially confront the individualism of Emerson, Whitman, and James; in the end it presents a civilizing power that is merely "homeopathic" (173). The author's final chapter reveals Joseph Heller's Catch-22 as an exploration ofbureaucratic encroachment upon individualism through the use of language and its attendant symbols. Marr also invokes the writing of Ralph Ellison to display the survival of blacks, and whites, in a modern humanity threatened by non-Emersonian thinking. He states that the "republic of letters founded by Emerson and Whitman may be down to one of its last citizens" (209). Marr, with the inclusion of an epilogue, becomes justifiably skeptical and questions whether or not a permanent democracy has ever become an accomplished fact in America. He uses The Handmaid's Tale to illustrate that a movement away from Emerson's Nature results in an artificial world ofdecree that subjugates men and women alike. The author's point is well taken: The pluralistic entities composing American democracy must not fail to realize that they are in danger—when beings are taken as things, only a sterile automaton-like nation can result. NEAL B. HOUSTON Stephen F. Austin State University ANNE K. MELLOR. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988. 276 p. In this carefully researched and documented text, Anne Mellor argues that although the egalitarian bourgeois family was the goal of Mary Shelley's life and the moral touchstone in much of her fiction, the novelist was painfully aware of the limitations of this paradigm. Bereft of her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, at birth and increasingly distanced from her father, initially by his attention to his second wife—whom Mary posited as her mother's opposite and her own antagonist—Mary Godwin came to idealize the nuclear family she glimpsed in her visits to the Baxter family in Scotland. Her intimate circle continued to fail her, however: William Godwin, for example, hypocritically denounced her alliance with Percy Shelley and, later, selfishly refused to comfort her on the deaths of her children. Percy Shelley was little 108Rocky Mountain Review better—happy to allow Thomas Hogg to console his mourning wife, while he enjoyed the company of her step-sister Clair. Mary's plaint was not simply Percy's neglect of herself, Mellor notes, but his neglect of his family, of the nurture and care a father owes his children. Turning from Mary Shelley's life to Frankenstein, Mellor uncovers many neglected layers, deciphering in their folds traces of Shelley's own life and of the intellectual and cultural spirit of her circle. On the first level Mellor reads a woman's ambivalence and anxieties about pregnancy and motherhoodMary Shelley's "waking dream." Aligning her "modern Prometheus," however, with the Romantic poets she knew best, Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley extends her critique to aesthetics and revolutionary politics. Like the poet of Percy Shelley's Alastor, Victor Frankenstein seeks to "penetrate Mother Earth" (76), to discover the secret of life. Responsive only to his egotistical desire, Frankenstein turns his affections from father and fiancée to his own goal. And, finally, enacting the Romantic preoccupation with the act rather than the consequences, Frankenstein, revolted at his creation, flees his work. The De Lacey family, Alphonse Frankenstein, Henry Clerval, and the Russian sea-captain, foils to the irresponsible, unfatherly Victor Frankenstein, all represent the values of mutual caring that Mary Shelley identified with the egalitarian family. Ironically, Mellor shows, Percy Shelley, rather...