“The Remembrance Haunts Me Like a Crime”: Narrative Control, the Dramatic, and the Female Gothic in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Mathilda

After the death of her father, the eponymous heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Mathilda feigns madness, steals money, and orchestrates her own death. Of her lies and deceptions she writes, “The remembrance haunts me like a crime–I know that if I were to endeavour to relate it my tale would at length remain unfinished.”¹ During this pivotal moment of transition in the narrative, Mathilda proves unable to articulate the fictions she has created in order to “purchase freedom” (p. 217). She writes her story from her deathbed in a document addressed to her friend and potential suitor, the young poet Woodville; in it she tells of her father’s incestuous desire, his eventual suicide, and her self-imposed isolation after his death. With its themes of alienation, entrapment, and unutterable personal secrets, Mathilda’s story participates in many of the conventions of the female gothic form, by which I mean to suggest not only gothic texts authored by women but also those texts that deploy elements of the gothic to address issues of profound concern to women.² In fact, however difficult it is to arrive at a consensus regarding the female gothic, it is clear that Shelley masterfully deploys the elements typically attributed to the genre.³

The assessment of the female gothic by feminist literary scholars, on the whole, has not been a positive one. Juliann E. Fleenor and Kate Ferguson Ellis have suggested that the genre illuminates the perceived dangers inherent in female sexual maturation as well as women’s subordination in patriarchal society. Traditionally, the female gothic narrative has been suspect amongst scholars who argue for the genre’s conservative depiction of women’s agency, most often evidenced in closure through marriage and then (often) motherhood. Critics such as Kay J. Mussell, Eugenia DeLamotte, and Diane Long Hoeveler posit that the female gothic novel asserts a conservative vision of gender that proves detrimental to women readers.⁴ By reading these books, women participate in glamorizing their own oppression and promoting traditional gender roles. Hoeveler focuses on the ideology of what she terms “victimization feminism,” a cultivated pose of professional femininity relying on a masquerade of docility, wise passivity, and tightly controlled emotions that served as propaganda for a new bourgeois morality with its emphasis on Christian submission (p. 10).⁵ For Hoeveler, this seductive fiction may suggest female strength, but it ultimately deprives gothic heroines of control over their narrative destinies while closing down possibilities female readers may envision of asserting power within a patriarchal paradigm (p. 246).

By extension, I argue that, just as dramatic elements may be characteristic of female gothic works, female gothic heroines may serve as powerful actresses or artist-figures; consequently, both of these elements may be considered as a means of refining the genre’s definition contending that female gothic heroines possess a greater degree of control over their narratives, and over the eventual closure of their narratives, than scholars of this genre have tended to acknowledge. These demonstrations of control may serve to empower female readers. For women readers, the depictions of agency in female gothic texts bear import as they free readers from common misunderstandings of the genre.

This article will propose a reconsideration of the female gothic’s feminist potential, suggesting that many heroines of these novels offer readers positive models of female agency. In the case of Mathilda, by encountering elements of the dramatic in conjunction with elements of the female gothic genre,⁶ readers find a heroine whose performative activities code her as a powerful actress or artist rather than as a submissive victim. Although Shelley’s novella appears to relate a conventional female gothic narrative of a young woman victimized by her father’s incestuous desire, it leaves open the possibility that, in fact, it is Mathilda, rather than her father, who wields control over the novel’s gothic script. Throughout the narrative, she imagines and then orchestrates a series of female gothic encounters in order to gain empowerment. She exerts a covert...