by William D. Brewer
[Brewer, William D. "Unnationalized Englishmen in Mary
Shelley's Fiction." Romanticism On the Net 11 (August 1998)
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/mwsfiction.html>]
The title-character of Mary Shelley's novel Lodore (1835), a British
aristocrat, begins his Grand Tour of Europe at the age of
nineteen:
Once on the continent, the mania of travelling
seized him. He visited Italy, Poland, and Russia: he bent his
wayward steps from north to south, as the
whim seized him. He became of age, and his father earnestly desired
his return: but again and again he solicited
permission to remain . . . until the very flower of his youth seemed
destined to be wasted in aimless rambles,
and an intercourse with foreigners, that must tend to unnationalize him,
and to render him unfit for a career in his
own country. (1)
Lodore is one of several young Englishmen in Shelley's fiction who go
abroad, become 'unnationalized,' and then find
reassimilation into their native cultures difficult if not impossible.
She considers the controversy over the advantages and
disadvantages of the Grand Tour in the first part of Lodore; she explores
the consequences of prolonged global travel in
Mathilda (written 1819), and her last novel, Falkner (1837), examines
the formative influence of Indian culture on a young
English soldier. In this essay, I will argue that these characters
reflect her concern about the effects of travel on impressionable
young Englishmen, particularly travel outside of Western Europe.
During the eighteenth century English tourism boomed, (2) and more and
more Englishmen became involved in the lucrative
trade with India and, later, its colonization. This increased contact
with other cultures provoked both cosmopolitan and
xenophobic responses. Travel provided educational opportunities; it
also, in the view of some critics, presented vulnerable (and
inadequately supervised) young men with innumerable temptations. They
could waste time and money gambling and drinking,
frequent brothels, contract venereal disease, (3) or marry against
their family's wishes. Of course, they could do the same things
in England, but xenophobic commentators believed that there were more
corrupting influences and opportunities for misconduct
on the continent. Opinions were similarly divided regarding the customs
and religious beliefs of the various cultures that English
merchants, soldiers, and missionaries encountered in India. For example,
while the famous orientalist William Jones presents a
sympathetic portrait of Hindu morality, (4) Robert Southey's The Curse
of Kehama (1810), which begins with a sati, or ritual
sacrifice of wives on the funeral pyre of their husband, mounts an
Evangelical Christian critique of Hinduism. (5)
This essay will examine the ways in which Shelley incorporates these
cultural debates into her fiction. Lodore, Mathilda's
unnamed father, and the title-character of Falkner all spend many years
abroad, and their exposure to foreign customs and
creeds has a profound influence on their behavior and their moral principles.
To varying degrees, they are modeled on Lord
Byron, whose Grand Tour included such exotic countries as Albania,
Greece, and Turkey and who was later ostracized by
Regency society because of his putative violation of the incest taboo.
They become cultural hybrids, torn between the mores
and customs of England and those of foreign cultures.
As Jeremy Black observes, while the Grand Tour was intended to '[equip]
the traveller socially and [provide] him with useful
knowledge and attainments', (6) a number of its critics believed that
it was, at best, an expensive waste of time. For example,
Thomas Pennant claimed that the English students at the Academy of
Geneva
either give themselves up to the rural sports
of the country or abandon their studies for the enervating pleasures of
the South of France, unknown to their friends
who are regretting the unaccountable expenses of an education they
were taught to believe was as reasonable as
it was good. (7)
The negative effects of Grand Tour could, however, be more serious.
Black notes that 'Problems were created when
impressionable young men fell in love. Venereal disease was bad, but
so was a mesalliance.' Highly-born and wealthy tourists
might fall in love with women below them in class or fortune. In some
cases, 'Forceful intervention was necessary':
George, Viscount Parker's involvement with
an Italian woman, and his failure to heed the instructions of his father,
Lord Chancellor Macclesfield, led Macclesfield
to mobilize the resources of British diplomacy to regain his son.
The young James Stuart Mackenzie fell for
the famous opera-singer Barberini and arranged to marry her in
Venice. This was prevented by Archibald, 3rd
Duke of Argyll, who used his friend John, 3rd Earl of Hyndford,
envoy in Berlin, to have Barbarini brought
to Berlin and Mackenzie banned from Prussia. She had earlier engaged
the attention of Samuel Dashwood. (8)
Shelley addresses the problem of ill-advised foreign marriages in Lodore,
in which Horatio Saville, the son of a nobleman,
marries Clorinda, a mentally unstable Italian woman. Horatio is partly,
but only superficially, 'Italianized' (L 168) by his wife,
who refuses to accompany him to England and torments him with her 'jealous
freak[s]'. (L 171) His father, Lord Maristow,
admonishes him to return to England: '"your career, your family, your
country, must not be sacrificed to her unreasonable folly".'
(L 279) Luckily for Horatio, Clorinda suddenly dies as a result of
a 'burst . . . blood-vessel' (L 279): 'the victim of the violence
of passion and ill-regulated feelings native to her country, excited
into unnatural force'. (L 275) Her timely death allows him to
return to England, rejoin his aristocratic family, and resume his career
as a member of the ruling class. Shelley cautions against
marriages between members of different cultures more explicitly in
her review-essay '[The English in Italy]' (1826):
We can none of us attempt, with impunity, to
engraft ourselves on foreign stocks: the habits of our childhood cling
to us, and we seek in vain for sympathy from
those who have travelled life quite on a different road from that
which we have followed. (9)
In Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling (1805, republished 1832), Shelley's
father, William Godwin, describes the
Parisian debaucheries of his privileged title-character. Sent to 'make
a tour of other countries for [his] improvement', Fleetwood
becomes infatuated with 'a finished coquette', and when she proves
unfaithful, he attaches himself to another. (10) The
'inconstancy' of his second mistress teaches Fleetwood 'to abhor and
revile her sex', (11) and his misogyny affects his marriage,
many years later, to an Englishwoman:
Every time she did any thing that jarred with
my propensities–my favourite theory about the female sex revived; I
recurred to the bitter experience of my youth;
and swore that, however it might in certain instances be glossed
over, all women were in the main alike, selfish,
frivolous, inconstant, and deceitful. (12)
In Fleetwood Godwin suggests that even when they do not lead to a mésalliance,
a tourist's sexual adventures can have a
negative influence on his later life.
A prolonged residence abroad could also affect a young man's future
political career. John Wilkes, the renowned political
adversary of George III, believed that this was a significant problem:
that mistake we too often run into, of sending
our young nobility and young gentlemen upon their travels . . .
before they know enough of the constitution
of their own country to give a just or even tolerable account of it[,]
. .
. makes them very apt, from what they see
abroad, to imbibe false or inadequate ideas of the true foundation and
end of government. The consequence of which
is that when, by inheritance or election, they are admitted to a
share in the legislative authority of their
own country, they are in great danger of espousing . . . the wrong side
of
the question. (13)
Thus the dangers of the Grand Tour are political as well as domestic;
since many tourists are of the ruling class, any 'false and
inadequate ideas' that they absorb in foreign countries can have a
devastating effect on their legislative careers.
Although the protagonist of Shelley's historical novel The Fortunes
of Perkin Warbeck (1830) is not a tourist, it could be
argued that his career as a pretender to the British throne is negatively
affected by his long sojourn on the continent. Richard of
York (also known as Perkin Warbeck) is forced to flee from England
as a young boy after Henry VII, having defeated Richard
III, becomes king. He is taught that he is the son of Edward IV and
that it is his duty to regain the throne of England, and the
novel recounts his many failed attempts to oust Henry Tudor. He spends
his formative years in Spain, where he becomes
'accomplished in knightly exercise in the land of chivalry'. (14) Unfortunately
for him, England is no longer a feudal nation: 'The
spirit of chivalry, which isolates man, had given place to that of
trade, which unites them in bodies'. (FPW 306) Thus the
outmoded chivalric ideas that Richard absorbs in Spain put him at a
disadvantage in his struggle against the politically astute and
unprincipled Henry VII. Unable to understand or adjust to the 'commercial
spirit [which has] sprung up during [Henry's] reign',
(FPW 306) he fails abysmally in his attempts to rally his countrymen
to his cause.
Lord Byron was the most famous tourist of Shelley's time. His Grand
Tour began when he was twenty-one, on 2 July 1809,
and ended on 14 July 1811. During these two years he visited Portugal,
Spain, Albania, Greece and Turkey. As Leslie
Marchand observes, Byron's travels 'instilled in him a deep-lying cosmopolitanism'.
(15) They extended well beyond the usual
itinerary of a Grand Tourist to the Albanian palace of Ali Pacha, a
'politician, bandit, road-builder, sadist, peace-keeper,
mass-murderer and energetic bisexual'. (16) Back in England, Byron
considered returning to the Levant, and in a 9 September
1811 letter to Augusta Leigh he jokingly wrote that he believed he
would 'turn Mussulman in the end'. (17) To Francis
Hodgson he declared:
In the spring of 1813 I shall leave England
for ever. . . . Neither my habits nor constitution are improved by your
customs or your climate. I shall find employment
in making myself a good Oriental scholar. I shall retain a mansion
in one of the fairest islands, and retrace
. . . the most interesting portions of the East. (18)
But despite this resolution, he remained in England and became a literary
celebrity following the publication of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage, Cantos I and II. His scandalous affair with Lady Caroline
Lamb, who was married, mercurial, and indiscreet, was
followed by an ill-advised engagement to Annabella Milbanke, whom he
married on 2 January 1815. Lady Byron left him a
year later, and they became legally separated on 21 April 1816. Hounded
by rumors of cruelty, infidelity, incest (with his
half-sister, Augusta Leigh), and sodomy, (19) Byron left England for
good. Shelley told Thomas Moore in 1827 that Byron
'had told her all about his sister' and expressed 'her surprize &
disgust at finding he had also told it to Medwin'. (20) Moreover,
she was appalled by his treatment of her step-sister, Claire Clairmont,
whom Byron impregnated before leaving England, and
summarily dismissed in Switzerland. (21) He later placed his and Clairmont's
illegitimate daughter in a convent, where she died
at the age of five. Byron's assimilation into Italian culture was so
successful that in '[The English in Italy]' Shelley dubs him 'the
father of the Anglo-Italian literature' and identifies his poem 'Beppo
as being the first product of that school'. (22)
In essence, the life-stories of Shelley's Lord Lodore, Mathilda's father,
and Falkner follow the trajectory of Byron's career.
These characters return to England after spending many years abroad
and are unable to readjust to life in their native country.
They also develop dysfunctional relationships with Englishwomen. While
Lodore's feelings toward his wife are bitterly
antagonistic, Mathilda's father is unable to control his incestuous
desire for his daughter. Falkner abducts Alithea Rivers, who
became Mrs. Neville during his absence from England, and she drowns
trying to escape him. Like Byron, Lodore leaves
England with a ruined reputation. Mathilda's father attempts to make
amends for his transgressive behavior by committing
suicide, and Falkner travels 'from place to place, pursued by [the]
upbraiding ghost' (23) of the woman he has buried in
unconsecrated ground. Their failures to reassimilate themselves into
English society and observe its customs have tragic
consequences.
Lord Raymond, the Byron-surrogate in Shelley's The Last Man (1826),
also spends a significant time abroad, fighting 'in the
Greek wars'. (24) But unlike Lord Lodore, Mathilda's father, and Falkner,
he is able to function effectively in English society
for a number of years; in fact, he becomes Lord Protector of England.
Ultimately, however, he re-enacts the Byronic pattern of
transgressive action and self-banishment: his clandestine relationship
with an expatriate Greek woman, Evadne, destroys his
marriage, and he exiles himself from his native land, rejoining the
struggle in Greece. Like Shelley's other Byronic characters, he
is the 'slave' of his 'over-ruling heart' (TLM 45) and prone to self-destructive
acts: unable to persuade his men to enter
plague-infested Constantinople, he rides in alone and is killed by
'some falling ruin'. (TLM 149) But since The Last Man is set
in the future (the twenty-first century), it does not directly address
the nineteenth-century cultural issues explored in this essay:
the effects of the Grand Tour and Indian colonization on young Englishmen.
Byron was not the only cultural hybrid who engaged Shelley's imagination:
less than a year after the composition of Mathilda
she met Percy Shelley's cousin, Thomas Medwin, who had spent five years
in the Indian army, and in 1822 she met Edward
John Trelawny, who told her numerous tales of his exploits in the south
seas. Medwin, who had retired from the Indian army,
spent the winter of 1802-21 with the Shelleys, and in January Edward
Ellerker Williams, whom Medwin had known in India,
joined them in Pisa. (25) According to Nigel Leask, Medwin's Indian
experiences had a profound influence on him:
After a love affair with a Hindu woman which
had ended badly but which nevertheless had the effect of converting
Medwin to the doctrines of the Hindu reformer
Rammohun Roy[,] . . . the stability of his cultural identity was
shaken no less than his health . . . [H]e
had survived the cholera epidemic which ravaged the grand army of Lord
Hastings in November 1818, [and] had witnessed
at least one incident of sati or widow-burning at Mandla. (26)
He read 'a part of his journal in India' to the Shelleys on 4 November 1820. (27)
Shelley described Trelawny as 'a kind of half Arab Englishman . . .
he is clever–for his moral qualities I am yet in the dark . . .
[He has] raven black hair which curls thickly & shortly like a
Moors . . .[,] his shoulders are high like an Orientalist'. (28)
Trelawny, whose naval career in the Indian Ocean was actually quite
undistinguished, appeared to be more Byronic than Byron
himself and regaled the Shelleys with mendacious accounts of his life
as a privateer. He later accompanied Byron to Greece,
where he joined the forces of a Greek brigand, Odysseus Androutzos,
whose thirteen-year-old half-sister he married. It seems
likely that most of Shelley's Byronic characters (with the exception
of Mathilda's father, since the composition of Mathilda
predates Shelley's friendship with Trelawny) were at least partly influenced
by this strange 'half Arab Englishman.'
After reading Lodore, Claire Clairmont complained to Shelley that the
title-character is a 'á<beastly> modification of the
beastly character of Lord Byron'. (29) Subsequent commentators on the
novel have tended to agree with this identification:
Ernest Lovell, Jr. argues that Lodore, along with Castruccio (the male
protagonist of Valperga [1823]), Raymond, and
Falkner, 'were modelled in significant part on Byron', (30) Jane Blumberg
asserts that Valperga, The Last Man, Lodore, and
Falkner 'take the Byronic hero as their central characters', (31) and
Lisa Vargo contends that 'Lodore is meant to represent a
conflated version of Byron and Trelawny'. (32) Lord Lodore, like Byron,
takes an extended and somewhat exotic Grand Tour:
whereas Byron explored the Levant, Lodore wanders through central and
eastern Europe, periodically secluding 'himself in
some unattainable district of northern Germany, Poland, or Courland'
(part of present-day Russia). (L 35) (33) His father dies
during his travels, and his devoted sister, Elizabeth Fitzhenry, sadly
asks: 'Wherefore did he leave his native country? Wherefore
return to reside in lands, whose language, manners, and religion, were
all at variance with his own?' (L 34) Shelley answers
Elizabeth's questions:
Passion, and the consequent engrossing occupations,
usurped the place of laudable ambition and useful exertion.
He wasted his nobler energies upon pursuits
which were mysteries to the world, yet which formed the sum of his
existence. (L 35)
During his thirteen-year absence from England, Lodore has a long, enervating
affair with 'a Polish lady of rank', and 'the better
energies of his mind [are] spent in forging deceptions, and tranquillizing
the mind of a jealous and unhappy woman.' (L 50) He
eventually tires, however, of these 'unlawful pursuits,' and returns
to England to marry 'one whom his judgment, rather than his
love, should select' and begin a political career: 'he wished to accustom
himself to the manners and customs of his own country,
so as to enable him to enter upon public life'. (L 37).
But when he returns to England at the age of thirty-two, he finds that
he has little in common with his fellow aristocrats: 'he did
not feel one of them.' He withdraws 'himself from the haunts of men'
and mourns his 'wasted . . . youth'. (L 37) Riding through a
lightning storm, he comes to the aid of a beautiful fifteen-year-old,
Cornelia Santerre, and unwisely decides to marry her in spite
of 'the discrepancy of their age, and consequently of their feelings
and views of life'. (L 43) But his attempts to overcome his
Cornelia's 'deficiencies in education' (L 42) are frustrated by her
interfering mother. '[A]ccustomed to be managed by his
[foreign] mistress,' Lodore is unable to contend 'with the sinister
influence of his mother-in-law' over his wife, whose
'inexperience render[s] her incapable of entering into the feelings
of her husband'. (L 46) Lady Lodore's 'deficiencies in
education' and insensitivity to her husband's 'feelings' do not, however,
prevent her from becoming 'the glass of fashion– . . .
imitated by a vast sect of imitators' (L 73) following Lodore's self-exile
from England. Unlike her unnationalized husband, she
skillfully performs her culturally prescribed roles: society regards
her 'as an injured and deserted wife, whose propriety of
conduct [i]s the more admirable from the difficulties with which she
[i]s surrounded'. (L 72-73)
Having failed to achieve 'domestic felicity,' Lodore pursues a career in 'public affairs' but is again disappointed:
His long residence abroad prevented his every
acquiring the habit of public speaking; nor had he the respect for
human nature, nor the enthusiasm for a part
or a cause, which is necessary for one who would make a figure as a
statesman. His sensitive disposition, his
pride, which, when excited, verged into arrogance; his uncompromising
integrity, his disdain of most of his associates,
his incapacity of yielding obedience, rendered his short political
career one of struggle and mortification.
'And this is life!' he said; 'abroad, to mingle with the senseless and
the
vulgar; and at home, to find a–wife, who prefers
the admiration of fools, to the love of an honest heart!' (L 47)
This recalls both John Wilkes's concern about the disorienting effects
of travel on the 'young nobility and young gentlemen' who
have the opportunity to lead their country and Byron's brief political
career (which did not, however, appear to involve much
'struggle and mortification'). Partly because of Lodore's many years
abroad, the 'family tradition, that a Fitzhenry had sat in
parliament' (L 6) comes to an end.
Lodore's situation becomes even worse when his Polish mistress, now
Countess Lyzinski, visits London with their illegitimate
son, Count Casimir. Unaware of Lodore's relationship to him, Casimir
flirts with Lady Lodore. Overcome by the 'unnatural
flame' (L 59) of jealousy, Lodore strikes the youth and thus faces
the prospect of fighting a duel which could result in the spilling
of 'kindred blood.' In order to avoid 'making the innocent a parricide'
(L 56), he flees to America, leaving his wife and taking
their infant daughter with him. He violates the code of honor by refusing
to give 'satisfaction' (L 55) to his son, but he commits a
much more serious offense when he separates Cornelia from her daughter:
'to deprive a mother of her child were barbarity
beyond that of savages'. (L 61) Completely 'unnationalized' by his
Grand Tour, he fails both as a husband and politician and
must leave his native country in disgrace.
Lodore settles 'in the district of Illinois in North America', (L 9)
where his farming reflects his cultural hybridization: he often
chooses 'practices' employed in 'Poland and Hungary [over] American
and English modes of agriculture' (L 10) In America he
develops an abnormally close relationship with his daughter, Ethel
Fitzhenry: 'she inspired her father with more than a father's
fondness'. (L 19) When Whitelock, Ethel's drawing instructor, declares
his love for her, Lodore impulsively decides to leave
America 'before she should invest [Whitelock], or any other, with attributes
of glory, drawn from her own imagination and
sensibility, wholly beyond his merits'. (L 75) While waiting to sail
to England, he overhears an American discussing 'the
intemperate violence of Lodore–and the youthful Lyzinski's wrongs.'
When the American says that 'My lord . . . sneaked off
like a mean-spirited, pitiful scoundrel,' Lodore strikes him. According
to Shelley, duels 'are more fatal and more openly carried
on [in America] than in [England]'; (L 90) in light of this cultural
difference, Lodore's challenge is particularly rash. The two men
fight a duel, Lodore is killed, and his daughter loses the only parent
she has ever known. Vargo notes that the duel's 'Byronic
aspects may have something to do with Byron's incident with a dragoon
in Italy'. (34) Like Byron, Lodore is prone to impulsive
and self-destructive acts.
Lodore suggests, however, that in some cases foreign acculturation can
have a positive effect. While Lord Lodore's long stay
abroad has a devastating effect on his political career and domestic
life, his daughter's upbringing in the wilds of Illinois prepares
her to live in poverty in England:
She had spent her youth among settlers in a
new country, and did not associate the idea of disgrace with want. . .
.
She had acquired a practical philosophy, while
inhabiting the western wilderness, . . . which stood her in good
stead under her European vicissitudes. The
Red Indian and his squaw were also human beings, subject to the
same necessities, moved . . . by the same
impulses as herself. (L 257)
This passage indicates that a long sojourn in a foreign country can
be enlightening and even prepare one for 'European
vicissitudes.' Of course, Ethel's and Lodore's characters, backgrounds,
and genders are different. Since she is a woman, Ethel
could not have had a political career even if she had stayed in England,
and she does not feel compelled to quarrel violently with
those who offend her. Thus unnationalization does not affect her in
the way it affects her father.
I have unchronologically grouped together the next two works I will
discuss because they both feature Englishmen who travel to
India. As Nigel Leask points out,
The anxieties embodied in British Romantic
writing about the East–both the assertion of superiority and the fear of
instability and absorption–reflect the tenuous
nature of East India Company rule in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, its necessary investment
in the Mughal terms of power and its complicated attitude to
indigenous idioms . . . There is space here
for hybridized Englishmen as well as hybridized Indians. (35)
Romantic-era writers were particularly intrigued by the Hindu custom
of sati. Godwin declares in Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) that this practice is incomprehensible to
Europeans: 'What can be more contrary to European modes
than the dread of disgrace, which induces the Brahmin widows of Indostan
to destroy themselves upon the funeral pile of their
husbands?' (36) In Southey's The Curse of Kehama, which Shelley read
in 1814 (Journals 27), sati is presented as a
barbaric and inhumanly cruel practice. The protesting younger wife
of Arvalan is forced onto his funeral pyre:
Woe! woe! Nealliny,
The young Nealliny!
They strip her ornaments away,
Bracelet and anklet, ring, and chain, and
zone
. . .
O sight of misery!
You cannot hear her cries,...all other sound
In that wild dissonance is drown'd;...
But in her face you see
The supplication and the agony,...
See in her swelling throat the desperate strength
That with vain effort struggles yet for life;
Her arms contracted now in fruitless strife,
Now wildly at full length
Towards the crowd in vain for pity spread,...
They force her on, they bind her to the dead.
Then all around retire;
Circling the pile, the ministring Bramins
stand,
Each lifting in his hand a torch on fire.
Alone the Father of the dead advanced
And lit the funeral pyre.
(1.8-9)
As Southey writes in his preface to The Curse of Kehama, his poem is
a critique of 'the religion of the Hindoos, which of all
false religions is the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal
in its effects'. (37)
In contrast, Sydney Owenson presents a much more sympathetic perspective
on sati and Hinduism in general in her novel The
Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), which Shelley read in 1817. (Journals
180) The heroine of The Missionary is Luxima,
'the Prophetess and Brachmachira of Cashmire', (38) who falls in love
with Father Hilarion, the Franciscan missionary of the
novel's title. As the Pundit of Lahore tells Hilarion, women of Luxima's
caste are willing participants in the rite of sati:
Pure and tender, faithful and pious, zealous
alike in their fondness and their faith, they immolate themselves as
martyrs to both, and expire on the pile which
consumes the objects of their affection, to inherit the promise which
religion holds out to their hopes; for the
heaven of an Indian woman is the eternal society of him whom she loved
on earth. (39)
Later in the novel, Hilarion is sentenced to death by the Inquisition
and taken to be burned at the stake. Luxima runs to the auto
da fè and sees
in every thing she beheld, a spectacle similar
to that which the self-immolation of the Brahmin women presents: . . .
she believed the hour of her sacrifice and
her triumph was arrived, that she was on the point of being united in
heaven to him whom she had alone loved on
earth; and when she heard her name pronounced by his well-known
voice, she rushed to the pile in all the enthusiasm
of love and of devotion. (40)
Whereas Southey's denunciation of sati is unequivocal, Owenson suggests
while Luxima's expression of selfless love is
misguided, it is far more admirable than Christian fanaticism: fatally
wounded by an Inquisitor, Luxima expires 'with a smile of
love and a ray of religious joy shedding their mingled lustre on her
slowly closing eyes'. (41)
D. S. Neff has explored some of the possible influences of The Curse
of Kehama and The Missionary on Frankenstein. (42)
For example, he contends that at the end of Frankenstein 'the creature,
like Luxima, is attracted to the idea of death on a
funeral pyre, wishing to commit his own version of sati, vowing to
ascend the 'funeral pile [of his creator] triumphantly, and
exult in the agony of the torturing flames, with his ashes later "swept
into the sea by the winds".' (43) I would argue that The
Missionary also influenced Shelley's conception of acculturation in
Mathilda and Falkner. Leask convincingly argues that
The polemical thrust of [Owenson's] novel is
to show that . . . cultural assimilation cannot succeed; rather than
'making a Christian' Hilarion only succeeds
in 'destroying a Hindu,' and he himself ends up a hybrid. (44)
At the conclusion of The Missionary, Hilarion becomes an outcast 'whose
religion [is] unknown' and who is found dead 'at the
foot of an altar which he had himself raised to the deity of his secret
worship.' Neither Christian nor Hindu, he 'pray[s] at the
confluence of rivers, at the rising and the setting of the sun'. (45)
Similarly, in Mathilda and Falkner the major male characters
are transformed by their Indian experiences. They become unnationalized
and violate cultural taboos when they return to their
native cultures.
In Mathilda, the title-character's father is heartbroken after Mathilda's
mother, Diana, dies a few days after giving birth to her.
Diana had persuaded him to 'become one among his fellow men; a distinguished
member of society, a Patriot', (M 179) but
after her death he precipitately leaves England and their infant daughter,
taking 'the road of Germany and Hungary to
Turkey'. (M 181) His travels are longer and far more exotic than Lodore's:
He . . . passed the sixteen years of absence
among nations nearly unknown to Europe; he . . . wandered through
Persia, Arabia and [like Hilarion] the north
of India and had penetrated among the habitations of the natives with a
freedom permitted to few Europeans. (M 187)
The fact that he is allowed to move among the 'natives with a freedom
permitted to few Europeans' suggests that he easily
adapts to their cultures, perhaps because he has never been fully integrated
into his own. During his sixteen-year absence
Mathilda's father fails to develop or mature:
All the time he had passed out of England was
as a dream, and all the interest of his soul, all his affections
belonged to events which had happened and
persons who had existed sixteen years before. It was strange when
you heard him talk to see how he passed over
this lapse of time as a night of visions; while the remembrances of
his youth standing seperate [sic] as they
did from his after life had lost none of their vigour. He talked of my
mother as if she had lived but a few weeks
before. (M 188)
Rather than enlightening him, his years abroad seem to have halted his
social and psychological development: his foreign
experiences are 'a night of visions' through which he escapes from
the realities of bereavement and parental responsibility. He
returns to his daughter an antinomian:
The burning sun of India, and the freedom from
all restraint had . . . encreased the energy of his character: before
he bowed under, now he was impatient of any
censure except that of his own mind. He had seen so many
customs and witnessed so great a variety of
moral creeds that he had been obliged to form an independant [sic]
one for himself which had no relation to the
peculiar notions of any one country. (M 188)
Although Mathilda's father is usually compared to William Godwin, this
passage seems more descriptive of Byron. (46) Like
Byron, Shelley's character is 'a man of rank', (M 176) the recipient
of a public school and university education, and a
freethinker who is resistant to 'any censure except that of his own
mind.' He is also well-travelled, and his years abroad provide
him with a cosmopolitan perspective on local customs and moral creeds.
Most important, Mathilda's father, like Byron during
his Regency career, proves susceptible to transgressive sexual impulses.
After spending a 'few short months of Paradisaical
[sic] bliss' (M 189) with Mathilda, he becomes jealous of a young man
who courts her and realizes that his love for his daughter
is sexual rather than paternal. While he recognizes that his incestuous
passion is 'unlawful and monstrous', (M 207) he fails to
conquer or sublimate 'this guilty love more unnatural than hate'. (M
210)
Mathilda's father soon becomes convinced that he can 'never . . . conquer
[his] love' for his daughter, who 'in [his] madness'
seems to be the reincarnation of his dead wife. His delusion may stem
from his exposure in India to the Hindu doctrine of
metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls. (47) He is incapable of
establishing a normal father-daughter relationship with
Mathilda because he feels as though 'her mother's spirit was transferred
into her frame'. (M 210) Having repudiated his culture's
mores without constructing a coherent belief-system of his own, he
lacks a coherent moral base, and this is part of the reason
that he falls prey to his transgressive desires. Without a cultural
identity, he is little more than a 'desiring machine.' (48) In the
end, he avoids violating the taboo against incest by violating the
prohibition against suicide. His foreign experiences thus
undermine his ability to resist 'unlawful' desires and render him incapable
of performing his duties as a father in upper-class
English society. Significantly, while dying of 'a rapid consumption'
(M 243) three years after her father's suicide, Mathilda
describes her impending funeral in language that recalls the sati ceremony:
no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation
of her bridal attire than I in fancying my limbs already
enwrapt in their shroud: is it not my marriage
dress? Alone it will unite me to my father. (M 244)
The father's foreign acculturation seems to have been somehow transferred to his daughter.
The title-character of Falkner has resemblances to both Byron and Trelawny. As Pamela Clemit observes,
In her portrayal of the central character,
the passionate and self-divided Rupert John Falkner, Mary Shelley drew
on episodes from the lives of her friends
Lord Byron and Edward John Trelawny, notably Byron's expedition to
Greece in 1823, and Trelawny's account of
his rebellious childhood in Adventures of a Younger Son (1831),
which she prepared for publication and saw
through the press. (49)
Unlike Lodore and Mathilda's father, Falkner is abused as a child, both
at home and at school. He finds a temporary relief from
his life of 'blows and stripes, cold neglect, reprehension, and debasing
slavery' (F 162) in the company of Mrs. Rivers and her
daughter Alithea, who inspire him 'to conquer [his] evil habits'. (F
163) His schooldays abruptly end when an usher tries to kill
his pet mice and, in the ensuing struggle, Falkner cuts his head with
a knife. Mrs. Rivers arranges with his uncle to have him
placed in 'the East Indian military college'. (F 167) Following the
death of Mrs. Rivers, Falkner discovers that he loves Alithea,
but her father violently rebuffs him when he asks for permission to
marry his daughter. He sails to India still believing that she
will someday be his bride.
In India Falkner serves, like the Shelleys' friends Medwin and Edward
Ellerker Williams, as 'an officer in a regiment of the [East
India] Company's cavalry'. (F 171) Falkner's contempt for 'the English
governors' (F 172) of India recalls Trelawny's
sentiments in Adventures of a Younger Son:
In India Europeans lord it over the conquered
natives with a high hand. Every outrage may be committed almost
with impunity, and their ready flexibility
of temperament has acquired a servile subordination. . . . the greatest
kindness from Europeans, for long and faithful
services, never exceeds what is shewn to dogs. (50)
Falkner identifies with the victims of colonial oppression: 'I took
part with the weak, and showed contempt for the powerful. . .
. I attached myself to several natives; that was a misdemeanor. I strove
to inculcate European tastes and spirit, enlightened
views, and liberal policy, to one or two native princes.' He learns
'the language and respect[s] the habits and feelings of the
natives' and dreams 'of driving the merchant sovereigns from Hindostan'.
(F 171-172) Falkner privileges 'European tastes,
spirit, enlightened views and liberal policy' while embracing Indian
'language, habits, and feelings'; he attempts to Westernize
native princes while deploring the English influence in India. His
conflicting attitudes reflect his growing cultural hybridity. Even
Alithea begins to seem 'eastern' to him:
I never saw a young Indian mother with her
infant but my soul dissolved in tender fancies of domestic union and
bliss with Alithea. There was something in
her soft, dark eye, and in the turn of her countenance, purely eastern;
and many a lovely, half-veiled face I could
have taken for hers; many a slight, symmetrical figure, round, elegant
and delicate, seemed her own. (F 173)
In his 'fancies' Alithea Rivers becomes Anglo-Indian.
Falkner inherits his family's estate after ten years and returns to
England to propose marriage to Alithea. Like Mathilda's father,
he regards his years abroad as 'a dream' from which he wakes into 'the
real world' (F 184) of English life. Back in England, he
discovers that Alithea has married another man. Convinced that her
husband is unworthy of her, he implores her to break her
marriage vow and run away with him. He describes her situation in terms
that recall the plight of a sati victim, declaring that she
'must not offer [her]self up a living sacrifice to that base idol [her
husband]'. (F 182) She refuses, however, to leave her
husband, and, 'resolved to bend [English] laws to [his] desires', (F
184) Falkner abducts her. Horrified by this criminal act,
Alithea drowns trying to escape him. He then commits an act which he
recognizes, in retrospect, 'may . . . appear more
shocking to [his] countrymen, than all that went before' (F 190): he
buries Alithea hastily and without ceremony. According to
Falkner, his 'shocking' behavior must be judged within the context
of his ten years of acculturation in India, where his 'modes of
action were formed':
I knew little of English customs. I had gone
out an inexperienced stripling to India, and my modes of action were
formed there. I now know that when one dies
in England, they keep the lifeless corpse, weeping and watching
beside it for many days, and then with lingering
ceremonies, and the attendance of relations and friends, lay it
solemnly in the dismal tomb. But I had seen
whole armies mown down by sword and disease; I was accustomed
to the soldier's hastily dug grave, in a climate
where corruption follows fast upon death. To hide the dead with
speed from every eye, was the Indian custom.
(F 190-191)
Soon after these events, he attempts suicide. His first impulse is to
'destroy [him]self at her side, and leave [their] bodies to tell a
frightful tale of mystery and horror', (F 191), but the presence of
his terrified henchman prevents this act of atonement. He
travels, therefore, to 'a secluded village of Cornwall, with the intent
there to make due sacrifice to the outraged manes of
Alithea'. (F 192) Falkner's plan to commit suicide following the death
of his beloved may also be related to his Indian
acculturation: he decides to perform an impromptu sati with himself
in the role of the sacrificial widow and with a revolver
rather than a funeral pyre as his instrument of destruction. According
to the protagonist of Owenson's The Missionary, 'the
idea of death [is] ever welcome to an Indian's mind': 'the crime of
suicide to which despair might urge its victim, [is] sanctioned
by the religion of the country, by its customs and its laws'. (51)
Falkner's suicide attempt is, however, thwarted when a child,
the orphaned Elizabeth Raby, knocks his pistol out of his hand while
he sacrilegiously sits on her mother's grave.
Having failed to commit suicide like Mathilda's father, Falkner flees
England like Lodore, bringing Elizabeth with him in his
'somewhat erratic . . . course [through] Paris, Hamburgh, Stockholm,
St. Petersburgh, Moscow, Odessa, Constantinople, . . .
Hungary to Vienna'. (F 31) Subsequently, he fights in the Greek war
of independence while Elizabeth waits for him in 'the
Ionian Isles'. (F 53) His love for his adoptive daughter recalls the
incestuous or quasi-incestuous feelings Mathilda's father and
Lodore have for their daughters. Inadequately socialized themselves,
these father-figures are ill-equipped to raise young girls:
their love for their daughters tends to be obsessional and sexual rather
than paternal. Thus Falkner feels that Elizabeth will 'be
his: not like the vain love of his youth, only in imagination, but
in every thought and sensation, to the end of time'. (F 32) As
Katherine C. Hill-Miller observes, 'he yearns for his adopted daughter
to succeed and replace his lover, Alithea [Rivers]'. (52)
Later in the novel, Elizabeth recognizes that her relationship with
Falkner has been abnormally close: 'I suppose . . . that I am
something of a savage–unable to bend to the laws of civilization. I
did not know this–I thought I was much like other girls–. . . I
nursed my father when sick: now that he is in worse adversity, I still
feel my proper place to be at his side . . . He is my
father–my more than father'. (F 238)
In addition to caring for her unnationalized father, Elizabeth helps
him become reassimilated into British society. Falkner's
reacculturation is, however, extremely arduous. He confesses his criminal
behavior to Elizabeth and to Alithea's son, Gerard
Neville, expecting Gerard to kill him in a duel. But Gerard reveals
Falkner's crime to his father, who has him arrested for
Alithea's murder. Falkner must languish in prison, where he again meditates
'self-destruction', (F 244) and suffer the humiliation
of a public trial: 'the gaze of thousands–the accusation–the evidence–the
defence–the verdict–each of these bearing with it to
the well-born and refined, a barbed dart, pregnant with thrilling poison;
ignominy added to danger'. (F 279) After enduring a
lengthy period of public scrutiny and humiliation, Falkner is found
innocent of Alithea's murder. Gerard Neville and his fellow
citizens forgive him, and he experiences 'As much happiness as any
one can enjoy, whose inner mind bears the unhealing
wound of a culpable act'. (F 299) Shelley's final novel suggests that
in order to be reintegrated into his native culture, the
'unnationalized' Byronic hero must subdue his pride and submit to the
judgment of the culture whose laws and values he
spurned.
Thus in Shelley's Lodore, Mathilda, and Falkner, long sojourns abroad,
especially in exotic countries like India, have negative
effects on her male protagonists. In these works she critiques both
the institution of the Grand Tour and British imperialism: the
Grand Tourist in Lodore can never truly go home, and in Falkner the
young Indian army officer, the Englishwoman he loves,
and her son are among the many victims of empire. This does not mean,
however, that Shelley believes that foreign
acculturation is always harmful: as I have noted, Native Americans
teach Ethel Fitzhenry how to deal with poverty, and the
fatalism that Falkner learns during his 'eastern life' helps him 'meet
the evils of his lot'. (F 254) Shelley's point is sociological
rather than xenophobic or insular: her novels describe how exposure
to the mores and customs of foreign cultures can confuse
and unnationalize unformed or psychologically vulnerable young men.
Without a strong sense of national identity her Byronic
characters become cultural hybrids and, following their return to England,
are unable to perform effectively and appropriately in
the important masculine roles of father, husband, lover, citizen, or
legislator. Disoriented by the 'dream' of foreign travel, they
never learn how to function in 'the real world' of English society.
Notes
(1) Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Fiona Stafford, Volume 6 of The Novels
and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, General Editor
Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1996) 33;
hereafter abbreviated as F. (back)
(2) Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth
Century (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)
p. 7. (back)
(3) Black, The British Abroad p. 191. (back)
(4) P. J. Marshall, The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth
Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970) pp. 40-1. (back)
(5) D. S. Neff, 'Hostages to Empire: The Anglo-American Problem in Frankenstein,
The Curse of Kehama, and The
Missionary,' European Romantic Review, 8.4 (Fall 1997) pp. 389-392,
394-396, 401-402. (back)
(6) Black, The British Abroad p. 289. (back)
(7) Quoted from Black, The British Abroad p. 299. (back)
(8) Black, The British Abroad p. 202. (back)
(9) Mary Shelley, “[The English in Italy],” in Matilda, Dramas, Reviews
& Essays, Prefaces & Notes, ed. Pamela Clemit,
Volume 2 of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, General
Editor Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit (London:
William Pickering, 1996) 150. (back)
(10) William Godwin, Fleetwood: or, The New Man of Feeling (London:
Richard Bentley, 1832 [1805]) pp. 39, 48;
hereafter Fleetwood. (back)
(11) Fleetwood 62. (back)
(12) Fleetwood 263. (back)
(13) Quoted from Black, The British Abroad p. 288. (back)
(14) Mary Shelley, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, a Romance, ed. Doucet
Devin Fischer, Volume 5 of The Novels and
Selected Works of Mary Shelley, General Editor Nora Crook with Pamela
Clemit (London: William Pickering, 1996) 88;
hereafter abbreviated as FPW. (back)
(15) Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) p. 99. (back)
(16) Peter Cochrane, 'Nature's Gentler Errors: Byron, the Ionian Islands,
and Ali Pacha,' The Byron Journal, 23 (1995) 23.
(back)
(17) Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 Vols.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973-82) II,
94. (back)
(18) Byron's Letters and Journals II, 163. (back)
(19) Leslie A. Marchand, Byron: A Portrait p. 225. (back)
(20) Quoted from Paula Feldman, 'Mary Shelley and the Genesis of Moore's
Life of Byron,' SEL, 20.4 (Autumn 1980) 613.
(back)
(21) See Letters I, 226. (back)
(22) Mary Shelley, “[The English in Italy]” 149. (back)
(23) Mary Shelley, Mathilda, in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T.
Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990)192; hereafter abbreviated as M.
(back)
(24) Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. Jane Blumberg with Nora Crook,
Volume 2 of The Novels and Selected Works of
Mary Shelley, General Editor Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit (London:
William Pickering, 1996) 27; hereafter abbreviated
as TLM. (back)
(25) Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) pp. 187,
195-6. (back)
(26) Nigel Leask, British and Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties
of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992) pp. 68-9. (back)
(27) Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman
and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore and London:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 [1987]) 339; hereafter abbreviated
as Journals. (back)
(28) Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty
T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore and London : Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980-88) I, 218. (back)
(29) The Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles
Clairmont, and Fanny Imlay Godwin, ed.
Marion Kingston Stocking, 2 Vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995) vol. II, p. 341. (back)
(30) Ernest J. Lovell, Jr., 'Byron and the Byronic Hero in the Novels
of Mary Shelley,' The University of Texas Studies in
English, 30 (1951) 175. (back)
(31) Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley's Early Novels: 'This Child of Imagination
and Misery' (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1993) p. 60. (back)
(32) Lisa Vargo, 'Introduction,' in Mary Shelley, Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997) p.
26. Emily Sunstein declares (without elaborating on her point) that
Lodore 'is Byron neither in temperament nor actions, and is
more likely drawn from the Beauclerk brothers'. [Emily W. Sunstein,
Mary Shelley p. 320n] Shelley quotes, however, from
Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in her description of Lodore: 'Quiet
to quick bosoms is a hell' (L 12; Childe Harold
3.370). (back)
(33) Shelley's views of Eastern Europe were shaped by the letters she
received from Claire Clairmont, who worked for years
as a governess in Russia; Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton, Claire Clairmont
and the Shelleys 1798-1879 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1992) pp. 91-123. (back)
(34) Vargo, 'Introduction' p. 27. See Letters I, 228. (back)
(35) Leask, British and Romantic Writers and the East p. 24. (back)
(36) William Godwin, Political and Philosophical Writings of William
Godwin, General Ed. Mark Philp. 7 Vols. (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 1993) vol. III, p. 19. (back)
(37) Robert Southey, The Curse of Kehama (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1810) p. vii. (back)
(38) Sydney Owenson, [Lady Morgan], The Missionary: An Indian Tale,
3 Vols. (Delmar, N. Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles &
Reprints, 1981 [1811]) vol. 1, p. 78; hereafter The Missionary. (back)
(39) The Missionary vol. I, p. 99. (back)
(40) The Missionary vol. III, pp. 188-189. (back)
(41) The Missionary vol. III, p. 215. (back)
(42) Joseph W. Lew also discusses the relationship between Frankenstein
and 'Orientalist fictions' like The Missionary; see
Joseph W. Lew, 'The Deceptive Other: Mary Shelley's Critique of Orientalism
in Frankenstein,' Studies in Romanticism,
30.2 (Summer 1991) 255. For discussions of The Curse of Kehama and
The Missionary within the context of Percy
Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, see John Drew, India and the Romantic
Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987) pp. 235-254. (back)
(43) Neff, 'Hostages to Empire' p. 401. (back)
(44) Leask, British and Romantic Writers and the East p. 128. (back)
(45) The Missionary vol. III, p. 221. (back)
(46) See, for example, Terence Harpold's heavily biographical reading
of Mathilda ['“Did you get Mathilda from Papa?”:
Seduction Fantasy and the Circulation of Mary Shelley's Mathilda,'
Studies in Romanticism, 28 (Spring 1989) 49-67] and
Katherine C. Hill-Miller, 'My Hideous Progeny': Mary Shelley, William
Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship
(Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995) p. 105. (back)
(47) Shelley would have read in a footnote to Owenson's The Missionary
that 'To quit life, before it quits them, is among the
Hindus no uncommon act of heroism; and this fatal custom arises from
their doctrine of metempsychosis, in which the faith of all
the various cast[e]s is equally implicit'. (The Missionary vol. II,
p. 145n) Southey quotes from the Bhagavad Gita in one of his
notes to The Curse of Kehama: 'As a Man throweth away old garments
and putteth on new, even so the soul, having quitted
its old mortal frames, entereth into others which are new'. [Southey,
The Curse of Kehama p. 280] (back)
(48) I borrow this term from the postmodern identity theorists Deleuze
and Guattari. [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1990) p. 20] (back)
(49) Mary Shelley, Falkner, a Novel, ed. Pamela Clemit, Volume 7 of
The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley,
General Editor Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit (London: William Pickering,
1996) ix; hereafter abbreviated as F. (back)
(50) Edward John Trelawny, Adventures of a Younger Son, ed. William
St. Clair (London: Oxford University Press, 1974) p.
50. (back)
(51) The Missionary vol. II, p. 145. (back)
(52) Katherine C. Hill-Miller, 'My Hideous Progeny' p. 181. (back)
William D. Brewer
Appalachian State University
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