Claire Clairmont and Mary Shelley:
identification and rivalry within the
“tribe of the Otaheite philosopher’s”
DEIRDRE COLEMAN
ABSTRACT The relationship between Mary Shelley and
Claire Clairmont is
usually looked at and analysed from Mary’s point of
view. This article reopens the
debate on their relationship by demonstrating the
importance of Rousseau’s Julie,
ou La
Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
for both women. For Claire it offered a way of
imaginatively refiguring the triangle of herself,
Percy and Mary; for Mary,
Rousseau’s
novel proved to be an important influence on the writing of
Frankenstein (1818). The
principal aim throughout this article is to put Claire
centre stage, where she always wished to be. Through
emphasising her “horrors”
and her histrionics, and her extraordinary passion for
living out literary plots and
characters, it is argued that she was more than just a
thorn in the side of her
stepsister, and that her monstering of herself as the
“third” was part of a serious
attempt to rethink monogamous, heterosexual
arrangements. The article forms
part of the ongoing discussion of female friendship
and Sapphism in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Until the recent publication of Marion Kingston
Stocking’s The Clairmont
Correspondence (1995) [1],
researchers and biographers of Claire Clairmont have
had to make do with excerpts and snatches from her
letters, published in works
such as R. Glynn Grylls’s biography, Claire
Clairmont: Mother of Byron’s Allegra
(1939) and G. Paston & P. Quennell’s “To Lord
Byron”: Feminine Profiles Based
upon Unpublished Letters 1807–1824 (1939).
As the titles of these collections
make clear, the interest is not so much in Claire
Clairmont as in her relationship
with Lord Byron. Claire does not fare much better in
biographies of the Shelley
circle, often appearing as the rather shadowy,
troublesome stepsister of Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin – the third who accompanied Mary
when she eloped
with Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1814.[2]
Only with the publication
in 1968 of Claire Clairmont’s Journals, also
edited by Marion Stocking [3], did
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DEIRDRE
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310
readers begin to get a fuller picture of this complex
and fascinating woman; and
in 1992 a new biography appeared, R. Gittings & J.
Manton’s Claire Clairmont
and the Shelleys 1798–1879.[4]
These new materials mean that we need no longer
read Claire so lopsidedly, through Byron’s or Mary’s
eyes.
Claire was, and remains, a controversial figure,
particularly when
discussion centres on her relationships with Byron and
Percy Shelley.[5]
Without doubt she was a radical freethinker and
feminist, a fierce critic of
marriage, a flouter of custom and convention, and a
follower of Wollstonecraft
on the issue of women’s rights. She also appears to
have had a daring and well-
developed taste for sexual
experimentation, which she delighted in boasting
about (and then demonstrated) to Byron during her
pursuit of him in March–
April 1816, just as he was attempting to escape from
the scandal of his own
unconventional
sexual tastes. Byron’s
tolerance of Claire’s unconventionality
was strictly limited, however. Referring to her as
“that odd-headed girl” [6], he
viewed with suspicion her relationship with Percy,
whom he dubbed “the
Otaheite philosopher” [7], an allusion to Diderot’s
imaginary Tahitian sage,
Orou, who so eloquently expounded his creed of
untrammelled free love,
including incest.[8]
This article aims to problematise Claire’s
relationship with Mary, using
similar techniques to those which have been useful for
problematising Claire’s
relationships with Percy and Byron – namely biography
and intertextual
analysis. I believe, for instance, that Mary was a
loved as well as a hated rival,
and that Claire entertained erotically charged
feelings for her stepsister both
during Percy Shelley’s life and well beyond; indeed,
Claire continued to be
exercised by the memory of Mary after the latter’s
death in 1851.[9] Also, in
addition to seeking recognition for her acting and
singing talents, Claire longed
for the position of writer standing above the sexual fray, so that her rivalry and
identification with Mary must be seen as literary as
well as erotic. As far as Mary
was concerned, I believe that, during their earlier
life together, it was as much
the intensity of Claire’s focus on her, as the
suspected intimacy with Percy,
which disturbed and unsettled her. Two literary texts
seem to me to be crucial
for throwing light on the sexual
and textual dynamic between these two
women: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and
that most popular and reprinted
of eighteenth-century novels, J.
J. Rousseau’s Julie, ou La
Nouvelle Héloïse (1761).
www
La Nouvelle Héloïse was an
important work for the Shelley circle, but while its
significance for Percy and Byron during the Genevan
summer of 1816 has been
explored [10], no one has speculated about the novel’s
impact upon Mary and
Claire prior to 1816. Mary lists it under her reading
for 1815, together with
Émile and the Confessions.[11]
She was also rereading the novel in 1817 whilst
writing Frankenstein (MS Jnls, pp.
175–176). That Mary was, like her mother, a
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CLAIRE CLAIRMONT AND MARY SHELLEY
311
close student of Rousseau’s
writings, has been well demonstrated by critics,
particularly in relation to Frankenstein.[12]
Of all Rousseau’s works, however, the
influence of La Nouvelle Héloïse on her oeuvre
has been the most overlooked,
which is surprising given its prominence in
Wollstonecraft’s important last
novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria [13], and
Mary’s own later predilection
for romanticising the dead Percy as a latter-day St
Preux figure: “There was
something in the character of Saint-Preux, in his
abnegation of self, and in the
worship he paid to Love, that coincided with Shelley’s
own disposition”.[14]
While there is no definitive record of Claire reading La
Nouvelle Héloïse
[15], there can be little doubt that she knew the
novel well. Fluent in French,
Claire was reading Rousseau
intensively during and after the elopement journey
of 1814. Her new Journal first records that she is
reading “in Roussea[u]” in
Switzerland in August 1814 (CC Jnls, p. 28).
Then, as they travel through
Holland, she is immersed in Émile, noting, with
Wollstonecraftian emphasis, that
Sophie’s education “tended to fit her more for a
Seraglio than the friend & equal
of Man” (CC Jnls, p. 40). Her heroising of
Wollstonecraft, who had suggested a
ménage à trois to
accommodate her love for the married Fuseli, might also have
been the germ for some fantasising about her own
predicament vis à vis her two
amorous companions. Quoting from King Lear,
“What shall poor Cordelia do –
Love & be silent”, she mused, “Oh [th]is is true –
Real Love will never [sh]ew
itself to the eye of broad day – it courts the secret
glades” (CC Jnls, p. 31).
In her journal entry for this day Mary records that
their reading of
Shakespeare was “interrupted” by Claire’s “horrors”,
fits of hysteria which were
soon to become more frequent. The most striking of
these fits occurred after
their return to London, in October 1814, when Percy
succeeded in terrifying
Claire by a mesmerising and sinister facial
expression, causing her to cry out,
“How horribly you look ... Take your eyes off!” This
cry is the cry of Orra, the
heroine of Joanna Baillie’s play, Orra, a Tragedy,
after she has been driven mad
through a seduction plot of “terrors” gone badly
wrong.[16] Particularly
striking in Mary’s journal is Percy’s description of
Claire’s monstrous
countenance: “distorted most unnaturally by horrible
dismay”. After retiring to
bed, she had suddenly reappeared to Percy. Now it is
Claire’s turn to shock and
terrify; indeed, she appears to be understudying for
the role of Frankenstein’s
monster:
her lips & cheeks were of one deadly hue. The skin
of her face &
forehead was drawn into innumerable wrinkles, the
lineaments of
terror that could not be contained. Her [?ears] were
prominent &
erect – Her eyes were wide & starting: drawn
almost from their
sockets by the convulsion of the muscles the eyelids
were forced in,
& the eyeballs without any relief seemed as if
they had been newly
inserted in ghastly sport in the sockets of a lifeless
head. (MS Jnls,
pp. 32–33)
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If Shelley somewhat cruelly enjoyed this game of
monstering Claire, she was
often not far behind in the techniques and strategies
of monstering her own self.
Of course in 1814 there was no Frankensteinian monster
to model herself upon,
but in La Nouvelle Héloïse Claire found a
romanticised woman-monster with
whom she could identify. Significantly, it was during
this period of intense
“horrors”, towards the end of 1814, that Jane (or Mary
Jane Clairmont, as she
was first known) started renaming herself Claire.[17]
At first she chose Clara,
then Clare, and eventually Claire Clairmont. Clara was
the name of Eloisa’s
friend in William Kenrick’s popular English
translation of La Nouvelle
Helöise.[18] I
believe that it was Rousseau’s novel which
inspired her to fashion
a new name and identity for herself, one with more
glamour, Gothicism and
intrigue than “plain Jane”.[19]
The intimacies and perplexities of the triangle of
Percy, Mary and Claire
during the period 1814–18 have been much pored over by
critics and
biographers; for the most part, though, the final
analysis tends to be the one
which Thomas Jefferson Hogg found so amusing, and
which Claire recorded in
her journal: Shelley and his “two Wives” (CC
Jnls, p. 59). Hogg’s understanding
of the triangle is predictably male-centred, and as
such it falls far short of how
Mary and Claire experienced each other, and how they
imagined themselves in
relation to Percy. Claire, for instance, did not (and
did not wish to) see herself
as one of two wives. Disliking heterosexual and
monogamous arrangements, she
espoused love under the sign of the triangle, and was
energised by the thought
of herself as “the third”. Mary, on the other hand,
was essentially conservative
about sexual
matters, favouring the bourgeois family, such as that promised in
her 1818 novel by the marriage of Frankenstein with
his first cousin and
adopted sister, Elizabeth Lavenza. While there may be
nothing particularly new
in my claim that Mary lacked enthusiasm for radical sexual theories, I want to
show how La Nouvelle Héloïse became the terrain
for exploring some of her
troubled feelings about Claire; I will then
demonstrate that this terrain is
revisited in the writing of Frankenstein.
As in the Rousseau
novel, the triangle of Claire–Mary–Percy is one man
and two women, with Percy cast as the philosopher St
Preux, tutor and mentor
to two young women – Eloisa, whom he loves, and her
cousin Clara. Like Mary
and Percy, St Preux and Eloisa are the main
constellation, with the
friend/cousin, Clara, playing asteroid to her stellar
companions. The
possibilities of erotic rivalry and intrigue generated
by the role of “third” are
explicitly
dramatised in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle
Helöise. In fact, reading the lived
triangle of Claire–Mary–Percy through Rousseau’s novel inverts Hogg’s triangle
so that, instead of “two wives” at the base of the
triangle, we have two women
at the top, Julie and Clara. For as Rousseau reveals in his Confessions, La
Nouvelle
Héloïse is very much
about passionate female friendship – or same-sex love – and
the testing of these bonds by heterosexual love:
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313
I imagined two female friends, rather than two of my
own sex,
because if an instance of such friendship is rarer, it
is at the same
time more amiable. I bestowed upon them two analogous,
but
different, characters ... I made one dark, the other
fair; one lively, the
other gentle; one prudent, the other weak, but with so
touching a
weakness, that virtue seemed to gain by it. I gave to
one a lover,
whose tender friend the other was, and even something
more; but I
admitted no rivalry, no quarrelling, no jealousy,
because it is difficult
for me to imagine painful feelings, and I did not wish
to mar this
charming picture by anything which degraded Nature.
Smitten by
my two charming models, I identified myself with the
lover and
friend.[20]
Claire’s habit of living passionately through books
was something she shared
with Percy and Mary, and the particular configuration
of Rousseau’s famous
literary triangle, composed of a heterosexual couple
and an ambiguously
situated friend, cannot have failed to exert a
powerful hold over her
imagination. Measuring herself up against Mary was not
always an agreeable
exercise, but the positive gloss given here of the
differences between the two
cousins, “one lively, the other gentle”, may well lie
behind her theatrical (and
not dissatisfied) projection of herself to Byron as
“inconstant & volage”, quite the
opposite of Mary, who sails her steady course “like a
ship under a gentle &
favorable wind” (C Corr, I, p. 111).
Furthermore, the Clara of Rousseau’s novel
might well have given Claire Clairmont some hope that
she would, in the end,
move centre stage and into the lead role, where she
always longed to be. Her
intensely uncomfortable presence in Mary’s life, first
as companion and
confidante, then as rival seemingly fixated on Mary’s
pre-eminence, is an acting
out of some of the more puzzling aspects of Rousseau’s novel.
Although the Clara of Rousseau’s
novel is later construed as having been
in love with St Preux from the first, the most
interesting and sexually entangled
relationship of this novel is (as Rousseau
says) that which exists between the
two women.[21] Clara is Eloisa’s confidante, her
chaperone, referred to irritably
by St Preux as their “constant companion”, sometimes
aiding, sometimes
obstructing the course of their romance. Whereas
Eloisa is virtuous, gentle and
(despite her “fall”) conventional in outlook, Clara is
more volatile, warning her
own fiancé:
be not deceived; as a woman, I am a kind of monster;
by whatsoever
strange whim of nature it happens I know not, but this
I know, that
my friendship is more powerful than my love. When I
tell you that
my Eloisa is dearer to me than yourself, you only
laugh at me; and
yet nothing can be more certain.[22]
In Rousseau’s novel,
as soon as St Preux has become Eloisa’s lover, Clara is
instrumental in banishing him and bringing on the
union of her cousin with the
older and more acceptable mentor, Wolmar. The salvaging
of her friend’s virtue
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can be construed as an act of unwitting jealousy which
reunites the two cousins,
but it unites them on a less intense plane. Married
herself, Clara must forfeit her
privileged position of lesbian voyeur to the young
lovers, and keeper of their
letters; she must remove herself to a proper distance.
At this point in the novel,
as the two women draw apart, Clara reroutes St Preux’s
passion away from
Eloisa towards herself. Conveniently widowed, she is now
the recipient of St
Preux’s passionate letters about her cousin. Smitten
by what Rousseau was so
fond of referring to as the “contagious power of love”
[23], Clara begins to
warm to the Eloisa role, so much so that the two women
start to appear more
alike than unlike. Similar in so many ways, in age, in
experience, and in
attractiveness, the only factor continuing to separate
them is Clara’s unshakeable
(and occasionally melancholy) conviction of her
cousin’s absolute pre-eminence
in all things, including St Preux’s affections (Eloisa,
III, p. 21). As she later
admits to Eloisa, referring to herself and St Preux:
“with both our hearts
engaged by the same object, we were so accustomed to
place it between us, that
without annihilating you, at least, it was impossible
for us to come together”
(Eloisa,
IV, p. 98). Volume IV brings this troubled identification and
rivalry
between the two women to a climax, with St Preux’s
relation to Clara of his
terrifying dream, both wish-fulfilment and prophecy of
Eloisa’s death.
In this dream, St Preux’s murderously possessive
feelings for Eloisa (“she
lives, and her life is my death ... she lives, but not
for me”) are projected onto
Eloisa as the death wish of a daughter distraught with
guilt at her mother’s
death. The dream opens with the deathbed scene of
Eloisa’s mother and closes
with St Preux going forward to look upon the corpse of
the mother:
but she was vanished, and Eloisa lay in her place, I
saw her plainly,
and perfectly knew her, though her face was covered with
a veil;
but, methought, after many attempts to lay hold of it,
I could not
reach it, but tormented myself with vain endeavours to
grasp what,
though it covered her face, appeared to me impalpable.
Upon which,
methought, she addressed me in a faint voice, and
said, “Friend, be
composed, the aweful veil that is spread over me is
too sacred to be
removed.” At these words I struggled, made a new
effort, and
awoke. (Eloisa, IV, p. 55)
Falling asleep again:
the same mournful scene still presented itself, the
same appearance of
death, and always the same impenetrable veil, eluding
my grasp, and
hiding from me the dying object which it covered. On
waking from
this last dream, my terror was so great, that I could
not overcome it,
though quite awake. I threw myself out of bed, without
well
knowing what I did, and wandered up and down my
chamber, like
a child in the dark, imagining myself beset with
phantoms, and still
fancying in my ears the sound of that voice, whose
plaintive notes I
never heard without emotion. (Eloisa, IV, pp.
55–56)
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CLAIRE
CLAIRMONT AND MARY SHELLEY
315
Eloisa is both herself and not herself, perfectly
familiar yet somehow other,
thanks to the enigmatic veil, palpable and impalpable
at the same time. In terms
of what is shortly to come in the novel – Clara’s
declaration of love for St Preux
and Eloisa’s offering of her cousin to him as “the
better half of myself” – it is
clear that
the veil functions as a blind for the absorption of Clara’s identity into
Eloisa.
What the veil hides from St Preux is the recognition that Eloisa and
Clara are
one and the same. On one level, this reductive merging of identities,
or too easy
abdication of one woman for the sake of another, is what we might
expect from
Rousseau, so given, as Wollstonecraft would
say, to thinking about
woman as “a
fanciful kind of half being”.[24] It is also, one might argue, another
instance of
what Terry Castle has described as the “ghosting” of the lesbian,
where
lesbian desire surfaces only in the moment of its forfeiture.[25] Clara may
move centre
stage towards the end of the novel as Eloisa moves inexorably
towards
death, but the most enduring image of the death chamber is that of
Clara
“spiritless and pale ... her eyes heavy and dead” while Eloisa appears
animated,
as though she had “borrowed the vivacity of her cousin” (Eloisa, IV, p.
221).
St Preux’s
nightmare of the dissolution of the living daughter’s identity
into that
of the dead mother is reproduced in that founding moment of
Frankenstein: the nightmare following the birth
of the monster in chapter IV, the
first part
of the novel to be conceived by Mary Shelley. In Frankenstein’s
nightmare
the embrace of his beloved Elizabeth becomes the embrace of his
dead
mother:
I was
disturbed by the wildest dreams. I thought I saw Elizabeth, in
the bloom
of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted
and
surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her
lips, they
became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared
to change,
and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother
in my arms;
a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-
worms
crawling in the folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep
with
horror.[26]
According
to Mary, in her Introduction to the novel of 1831, one of the sources
for her
story (and obviously for this scene in particular) was “The History of the
Inconstant
Lover”, a tale in which the protagonist, reaching out to clasp his live
mistress,
finds himself “in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had
deserted”.[27]
In other words, the scene of Elizabeth Lavenza fading into
Frankenstein’s
dead mother has its origins in a story of amorous infidelity,
betrayal
and punishment – a story in which a man wreaks havoc with the two
women in
his life.
The shroud
enveloping Frankenstein’s dead mother looks forward to the
ending of
the novel where a handkerchief is thrown across the face and neck of
the dead
Elizabeth, another allusion to Rousseau’s
novel, when, near the end of
that work,
Clara spreads a veil over Eloisa’s decomposing face (Eloisa, IV, p.
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271). The
significance of the parallel between the veiled corpses of Elizabeth
and Eloisa
becomes apparent after Elizabeth has been murdered by the jealous
monster.
Bending over the covered face of his dead wife, Frankenstein
recognises
the “murderous mark of the fiend’s grasp ... on her neck”, a
recognition
instantly greeted by a sight of the monster himself, “a figure the
most
hideous and abhorred” (Frankenstein, p. 166). If, as one critic has
recently
argued, the
monster’s face is, under cover of the veil, “superimposed on the face
of the
victim” [28], then the monster’s face in Frankenstein is a rewriting of
Clara/Claire’s
face, the self-declared monster of Rousseau’s
novel. The heroine
who
declares herself “a kind of monster” for loving her woman cousin more
than her
fiancé is also the bane of Mary Shelley’s life, the too “constant
companion”
whose unsettling and often explosive emotional intensity always
had the
ability to send her stepsister fleeing for cover.[29] Although later in life
Mary
claimed to feel less animosity towards Claire for having “poisoned my life
when
young”, she conceded that Claire “has still the faculty of making me more
uncomfortable
than any human being – a faculty she, unconsciously perhaps,
never fails
to exert whenever I see her”.[30]
www
Biographers
have sought different explanations for Jane’s renaming of herself,
such as
Richard Holmes’s “firm and musically satisfying Claire Clairmont” or
Ann
Mellor’s “more poetic Clara/Claire”.[31] Edward Augustus Silsbee records
Clairmont’s
claim in the 1870s that Percy gave her the name Claire for her
“transparency”
(C Corr, I, p. 29), a radical concept derived from Rousseau
and
applied by
him to the “two charming friends” of La Nouvelle Helöise: “If my
image of
the hearts of Julie and Claire is correct, they were transparent to one
another”.[32]
The term also acquired currency in French revolutionary
discourse,
meaning openness and authenticity, as opposed to secrecy,
dissimulation
and intrigue.[33] However we might interpret Claire’s claim about
the meaning
of her adopted name, one thing is clear, and that is that her
renaming
coincided with a period of extreme moodiness and tension, when
sexual experimentation and the idea of a “shared household” were
in the
ascendant.
In her short story “The Ideot” (c. 1814), begun in Switzerland but for
years “a
favorite Plan”, Claire invented a radical female character who, in
refusing to
conform to the “vulgar & prejudiced views” of common people (CC
Jnls, p. 40), provided (somewhat baldly)
just the persona needed for yet another
of Percy’s
experiments in free love and communal living.[34] That Claire liked
to take the
lead in acting out Percy’s theories is clear from one of Mary’s letters
to Hogg of
January 1815, in which she promises that they will soon (after her
pregnancy)
be happier “than the angels who sing for ever or even the lovers of
Janes world
of perfection” (LMWS, I, p. 6).
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CLAIRE CLAIRMONT
AND MARY SHELLEY
317
The period
from November 1814 until mid-May 1815 is a murky one for
biographers,
with full-scale obliteration of Mary’s and Percy’s shared Journal.
But while
it is impossible to describe with any exactitude what Claire’s “world
of
perfection” might have involved, her utopia almost certainly arose out of
discussions
with Percy as to alternative moralities and modes of social
organisation.
As is well known, Percy had for some years been engaged in the
project of
gathering around him “a methodical society ... to resist the coalition
of the
enemies of liberty” [35], and his favourite reading had been of subversive
philosophical
sects and associations, such as the Illuminati of Ingolstadt, held
responsible
by the anti-Jacobin L’Abbé Barruel for the violence and excesses of
the French
Revolution.[36] Related to this enthusiasm was a delight in
projecting,
and in reading others’ speculations about, alternative sexual
arrangements.
Among the texts most admired by Percy at this time was a work
by Sir
James Lawrence espousing polyandry. Within a fortnight of their return
from
overseas, he had Mary and Claire reading Lawrence’s Empire of the Nairs; or,
the
Rights of Women (CC
Jnls, p. 46; MS Jnls, p. 29), a novel-cum-polemic
extolling
the Hindu caste of the Nairs for their rejection of marriage, their
matrilineal
system of inheritance, their uninhibited sexual
relations, and their
nudism.
Just as “it is the privilege of the Nair lady to choose and change her
lover”, so
Lawrence argues, “Let every female live perfectly uncontrolled by any
man, and
enjoying every freedom, which the males only have hitherto enjoyed;
let her
choose and change her lover as she please, and of whatever rank he may
be”.[37] In
1812, a year after the novel was published, Percy declared himself
to Lawrence
as a “perfect convert” to his doctrines of women’s equal rights and
liberties (LPBS,
I, pp. 322–323).
To the
extent that Lawrence was a Wollstonecraftian, he was preaching to
the
converted when it came to Claire. As we have already seen, in her remarks
on Rousseau’s Sophie, Claire believed that woman
should be the friend and
equal of
man. Hence her impatience with masculine gallantry and courtship
rituals (CC
Jnls, p. 407), and her outspoken views on double standards, such as,
for
instance, “the usual nonsense about infidelity being unpardonable in women,
but very
pardonable in men” (CC Jnls, p. 408). Furthermore, as she was to
demonstrate
so clearly in her pursuit of Byron, women should be as free as men
to take the
sexual initiative and, like the good Nairess,
“surrender at the first
summons, if
inclined to surrender at all” (Lawrence, I, p. 53). Lawrence was
careful,
however, to dissociate the Nair system from sexual
promiscuity, arguing,
as Percy
would always do, for the importance of constancy rather than fidelity
(Lawrence,
II, p. 130).[38]
Mary, on
the other hand, does not appear to have felt much sympathy for
Lawrence’s
“paradise of love”.[39] For instance, his novel opens with a rather
prurient
scene in which a nubile Nairess strips off and plunges naked into a
river, a
scene which can only have reminded her of her failure to live up to
Percy’s
Nairean ideals in France. Of the 1814 elopement journey Claire recalls:
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On our way
to Pontarlier, we came to a clear running shallow
stream, and
Shelley entreated the Driver to stop while he from under
a bank
could bathe himself – and he wanted Mary to do the same as
the Bank
sheltered one from every eye – but Mary would not – first,
she said it
would be most indecent, and then also she had no towel
and could
not dry herself – He said he would gather leaves from the
trees and
she could dry herself with those but she refused and said
how could
he think of such a thing.[40]
Mary’s refusal
to play Eve to Percy’s frolic – “just as if he were Adam in
Paradise
before his fall” quipped Claire – hardly provides certain proof of her
antipathy
towards Lawrence’s theories. Firm evidence for that can be found
instead in Frankenstein,
where the drawbacks for women of Lawrence’s
“liberated”
world are made abundantly clear. After enumerating the various
advantages
to Nairesses of the Nair system, Lawrence enthuses about the new
freedoms
which would accrue to a nation of aspiring Nair bachelors. Lawrence’s
combination
of scientific fervour, self-absorption, and a good deal of misogyny,
is
remarkably Frankenstein-like:
If
unimpeded by marriage, the lover of botany would search every
distant
forest, the mineralogist would inspect every foreign mine,
and the
naturalist would quit his country to examine a new volcano.
How many
circumnavigators would aspire to rival the name of the
immortal
Cooke [sic]! How many travellers, ardent for glory like
Bruce,
would penetrate the bosom of unknown and uncultivated
realms!
What improvement would every art, every science receive!
with what
depth of thought would every speculative subject be
examined!
(Lawrence, p. xxxvii)
Despite the
disclaimer in Percy’s 1818 Preface to Frankenstein, that the novel
should not
be seen “as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever
kind”, the
novel’s demonstration of the “amiableness of domestic affection”
might be
read as a powerful critique of the bachelor utopia lying on the flip side
of
Lawrence’s pro-woman tract.[41]
If the
“philosophical doctrine” informing Claire’s “world of perfection”
was
Nairism, then the late night discussions of autumn 1814 between her and
Percy about
“making an Association of philosophical people” would be
relatively
easy to sketch in (CC Jnls, p. 48), were it not for Percy’s own
mystifying
version of the same discussion: “Jane states her conception of the
subterraneous
community of women” (MS Jnls, p. 32). Marion Stocking has
suggested
that Claire was thinking of Ludvig Holberg’s Journey to the World
Under-Ground
by Nicholas Klimius,
a satirical imaginary voyage first translated
into
English in 1742 and frequently republished, 1812 seeing one of its many
reappearances.[42]
Among the many exotic countries visited by the famished
philosopher
Klimius, some are meritocracies with every advantage open to their
female
citizens. In Potu, where the President is a woman, “there was no
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Difference
of Sexes observed in the Distribution of publick Posts; but an
Election
being made, the Affairs of the Republick were committed to the wisest
and most
worthy” (Holberg, p. 23). Genius alone was regarded, “without any
respect to
Sex or Condition” (Holberg, p. 94). In one country, Cocklecu,
Klimius
encounters an extreme inversion of the gender order, a world in which
the men are
uneducated household drudges while the women “are in Possession
of all
Honours and Employments sacred, civil, or military” (Holberg, p. 119).
Men are the
ones who prostitute themselves for hire, while the Matrons and
Virgins
“without the least reproach, can prowl up and down, gaze at the young
Fellows,
nod, whistle, tip the Wink, pluck them by the Sleeve, importune them,
write
Love-Verses upon their Doors, boast of their Conquests, and reckon up
their
Gallantries” (Holberg, p. 121). Given the crudity of this, Percy probably
meant that
Claire sat up formulating “her conception of the subterraneous
community
of women” (my emphasis), in contradistinction to the too glib satire
of Holberg.[43]
Another work which might have captured their attention at this
time was
the Earl of Charlemont’s essay on the island of Lesbos, an “Amazonian
Commonwealth”
in which the women “arrogated to themselves the department
and
privileges of the men”.[44]
Whether or
not Claire consummated her relationship with Percy after
their
return from Europe, they were spending more and more time with each
other, much
to Mary’s irritation, who, pregnant and unwell, wished her
stepsister
well away.[45] Mary’s desire for “absentia Clariae”, coupled as it was
with her
conviction that her relationship with Percy would thereby be
rejuvenated
(MS Jnls, p. 79), was to persist until 1820, provoking the outburst
of 1836
that her idea of Heaven at this time “was a world without a Claire”
(LMWS,
II, p. 271), the formulation “a Claire” underscoring the generic role-
playing
such a persona entailed. Mary’s failure to establish that heaven on earth,
and
Claire’s triumph, can be seen in the latter’s jotting, circa 1820,
inside the
back cover
of Percy’s notebook: “3 still/Clare” (Sunstein, Mary Shelley, p. 426,
n. 13).
Claire’s
enjoyment of triangles can be seen in her later jibe against two
Russian
men, “delightful creatures” who considered her “dislike to men”
affected.
Piqued by their belief that she was no doubt always falling in love and
would
readily succumb if either should attempt to woo her, she joked, “I must
really take
great care of my poor heart lest I should not only fall in love with
one but
perhaps with both at once” (CC Jnls, p. 407). The extraordinary
seduction
of Byron is itself an instance of projected triangulation. A number of
critics
have noted the obvious parallel with Mary’s position as poet’s lover and
companion.
But what is overlooked in many of the accounts of this affair is the
extent to
which Claire dwells on the possibility of Mary also becoming Byron’s
lover. It
is Mary, not Percy, whom she introduces to Byron in London; shortly
after their
introduction, Claire writes to say that Mary is “delighted” with him,
and eager
to know his address in Geneva. What might seem an innocent ploy to
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disguise
her own eagerness soon re-emerges in most unusual form, once she has
achieved
her objective of following the poet abroad. From Paris she writes in
triumph,
“‘the whole tribe of the Otaheite philosopher’s are come’”; the same
letter
continues:
you will I
suppose wish to see Mary who talks, & looks at you with
admiration;
you will I dare say fall in love with her; she is very
handsome &
very amiable & you will no doubt be blest in your
attachment;
nothing can afford me such pleasure as to see you happy
in any of
your attachments. If it should be so I will redouble my
attentions
to please her; I will do every thing she tells me whether it
be good or
bad for I would not stand low in the affections of the
person so
beyond blest as to be beloved of you. (C Corr, I, p. 43)
There are a
number of ways of reading this, all of them consonant with the
supremely
operatic roller-coaster of emotions informing her correspondence
with Byron
– at one time melancholy and affectionate, at another abject and
imperious,
and finally, towards the end of the affair, bitterly rancorous and
sarcastic.
Read in isolation, this offering of Mary might seem to involve an
element of
abjection, springing from a certain fatalism regarding her stepsister’s
superior
credentials and attractiveness, and her own secondariness. But as one
reads
further in the letters, a pattern of identification, substitution, and exchange
emerges,
suggestive of the theories of sexual sharing
promulgated by Percy who
had, after
all, offered Mary to his friend Hogg, just as he had earlier offered to
Hogg his
first wife Harriet. This sexual sharing had
for its rationale a cementing
of prior
relationships, in Percy’s case, of course, male friendship.[46] Indeed,
according
to Claire many years later, the model which Percy held out to the
reluctant
Mary was that of Beaumont and Fletcher, and their sharing of “one
mistress” (C
Corr, I, p. 11, n. 3; Silsbee’s words).
In offering
Mary to Byron, Claire appears to be modelling herself on
Percy,
whose gift of female disciples to other men had the double advantage of
freeing him
up for other attachments whilst confirming the primacy of the male-
homosocial
erotic economy.[47] It is also possible that Claire’s fascination with
Byron, the
male libertine par excellence, exemplifies what Terry Castle has
described,
in a chapter on the diaries of another Byron enthusiast, Anne Lister,
as the
covert connection between heterosexual male rakery and lesbian desire,
whereby the
homosexually inclined woman is drawn to her “heterosexual twin”,
the man who
flamboyantly (and transgressively) desires women.[48] At any rate,
whether
impersonating Percy or identifying with Byron, the awkwardness of
Claire’s
position can be seen in her somewhat wistful declaration, “I have no
passions; I
had ten times rather be your male friend than your mistress” (C Corr,
I, p. 43).
Yet Claire
was also indulging in a bravura performance of the role she so
much
relished – that of Godwin’s unconventional stepdaughter: “I who was
educated by
Godwin however erroneous my creed have the highest adoratio[n]
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for truth”
(C Corr, I, p. 44). Boasting herself as “unloosed” from “the trammels of
custom
& opinion” (C Corr, I, p. 110), her letters to Byron make it clear
that she
enjoyed
horrifying him with her forthright views, suspecting (accurately) that he
found her
“imprudent vicious; my opinions detestable. my theory depraved” (C
Corr, I, p. 36). Chief of the trammels
was marriage, “the most odious of all
monopolies”,
Godwin had argued.[49] Claire’s own conception of marriage was
more
unusual than Godwin’s; it was an “unhappy querulous state” born of an
even
number, the “symbol of division”, unlike the odd number which was “most
perfect
because it cannot be divided into two equal parts” (CC Jnls, pp. 116–
117).[50]
There can be little doubt, then, that the “lovers of Janes world of
perfection”
would always number three at least, and that Byron’s understanding
of this
(and his suspicions about Claire’s relationship with Percy) lay behind his
joke about
her and Mary as the Otaheite philosopher’s “tribe” (C Corr, I, p.
43).[51]
That she and Mary were regarded as Percy’s, as well as Godwin’s
disciples,
can be seen in Polidori’s remark upon the arrival of the “tribe” in
Geneva; he
noted, Shelley “separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of
Godwin, who
practice his theories”.[52]
There is a
general consensus amongst critics and biographers that, in
pursuing
Byron in 1816, Claire was realising for herself Mary’s role of poet’s
lover and
companion. But she was rehearsing other roles too, asking for his
advice
about her prospects as actress and then as writer. She was also (as she
had done
with Percy) rehearsing the role of Mary Shelley’s monster. By this I
mean that
she was acting out those aspects of the monster’s psyche which are
now so
familiar to us from the novel: extreme dependency and a pitiable sense
of being an
outsider, a longing for love and acceptance, and an unmitigated fury
at
rejection. The dependency and fear of rejection is there in the first letter to
Byron.
Approaching him anonymously for a rendezvous, ostensibly to discuss
with him
her prospects of an acting career, she begs him not to cast her letter
away, for
“the Creator ought not to destroy his Creature” (C Corr, I, p. 24). This
rather
abject and melodramatic self-dramatisation coexists with the more exotic
presentation
of herself as a species of wild child: unacquainted with the world,
reared in
“entire seclusion”, ill-humoured and forbidding in aspect, with a
“harsh”
style and “ungracious” sentiments. The French wild child story of the
1730s was
enjoying something of a resurgence in the early nineteenth century
[53], and
certainly this primitive and exotic figure was well suited to Claire’s
emphasis on
her lack of conventional female socialisation, and on her sexuality.
Mysteriously,
darkly, she suggests to Byron that he should be seduced, not by
the
“sparkling cup ... but the silent and capacious bowl” (C Corr, I, p.
27). She
had been
anything but silent, however. Quite the contrary; she had “withheld
nothing” of
her life story, which she obviously presented in lurid and
spectacular
detail, protesting that he not dismiss “the romance” of her story as
“improbable”.
In order to bolster the truth claims of her life-history she cites
two
somewhat extraordinary narratives, Coleridge’s tale of Maria Schoning and
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Barruel’s
account of Adam Weishaupt, stories which between them cover rape,
judicial
execution, homicide, atheism, incest and infanticide.[54] Small wonder
he called
her a “little fiend”, a characterisation she disputed, claiming that Percy
(who knew
her better) called her “sweet Child”, finding her gentle and cheerful,
if a bit
irritable on account of her “nervous disorder” (C Corr, I, p. 38). That
the
wild child
figure was not invariably bestial and fiendish can be seen in the
suffering
and vulnerable heroine of Mme de Graffigny’s popular novel, Lettres
d’une
Péruvienne (1747),
a captive native woman who exposes as bogus the
supposedly
superior “civilisation” of the masculine, colonising culture. And yet
even this
sentimental tale about a Peruvian “virgin of the sun” has a titillating
primitivism
about it, which includes the connected themes of male/female
discipleship
and incest.[55]
That Claire
felt isolated on account of her unconventionality can be seen
in her
outline to Byron of her tale, “The Ideot” (c. 1814), which has as its
heroine a
creature at once Godwinian and monstrous. The heroine, “educated
amidst
mountains & deserts” and knowing “no other guide than herself or the
impulses
arising from herself”, commits “every violence against received
opinion”.
But notwithstanding “the apparent enormity of her actions”, she
should
however appear highly amiable, full of noble affections &
sympathies;
whose sweetness & naivite [sic] of character should draw
on her the
pity rather than the contumely of her readers, who,
kindly
attributing her errors to the neglected state of her education,
& the
unfortunate circumstances which first attended her entrance
into the
World, might imperceptibly be led to a toleration of errors
which if
laid before them without the disguise of narrative &
romance
would infallibly disgust and terrify. (C Corr, I, p. 33)
The trope
of “narrative & romance” as the veil for that which is disfigured and
terrifying
points forward to the monster’s verbal eloquence, his rhetorically
persuasive
powers.
www
According
to Silsbee, until the end of her life Claire defended Percy’s “theories”,
his “Greek
ideas & his desire to be superior to the prejudices of the world ... to
have all in
common even wives” (C Corr, I, p. 11, n. 3; Silsbee’s words). This
dedication
of herself to Percy’s doctrines of free love only exacerbated the
powerfully
ambivalent feelings she harboured for Mary. The promise to devote
herself to
her stepsister should she become Byron’s mistress is to be matched by
her
determined schooling of herself in sisterly affection, confiding to Byron,
“[Mary]
says too that if she were ever so much detirmined [sic] not to like you
she could
not help so doing, & so I like her” (C Corr, I, pp.
77–78; Claire’s
emphasis).
Similarly, after the publication of Frankenstein, “private feelings of
envy” are
ostensibly buried under a paean to the virtues of her own sex:
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all yields
when I consider that she is a woman & will prove in time
an ornament
to us & an argument in our favour. How I delight in a
lovely
woman of strong & cultivated intellect. How I delight to hear
all the
intricacies of mind & argument hanging on her lips! If she
were my
mortal enemy, if she had even injured my darling I would
serve her
with fidelity and fervently advocate her as doing good to
the whole.
(C Corr, I, p. 111)
Here is
Claire the Wollstonecraftian, the champion of her sex; there is an echo
of Percy,
too – specifically, his admiration of the beauty of Mary’s intellect, and
more
generally, his claim that the contemplation of “female excellence” was the
favourite
food of his imagination (LPBS, I, p. 401). But the residual, and
enduring,
impression of this passage is that Claire does indeed regard Mary as
an enemy –
an enemy, moreover, to all that she holds most dear. The allusion to
her child,
Allegra (her “darling”), and the harm that might come to her, reveals
her
awareness of Mary’s anxious desire to be rid of the child, a desire springing
from Mary’s
secret fear that the gossip could indeed be true – that Allegra was
Shelley’s
child, not Byron’s.[56] Several years after Allegra’s death in 1822 in
an Italian
convent, Claire’s bitter memory of Mary’s acquiescence in Byron’s
convent
scheme caused her to regard her stepsister with horror, as culpable in
every
detail as the child’s “executioner” (that is, Byron): “I never saw her
afterwards
without feeling as if the sickening crawling motion of a Deathworm
... had
replaced the usual flow of my Blood in my veins”. Here the very sight of
Mary
becomes, for Claire, the internalised equivalent of Frankenstein’s embrace
of his dead
mother, or the inconstant lover embracing the woman he has
betrayed.
Yet the very same entry venting these sentiments of revulsion and
loathing
opens with an elaborate, almost rapturous, evocation of the angelic
beauty and
fineness of Mary’s light brown hair, “flowing in gauzy wavings
round her
face and throat, and upon her shoulders ... so fine the slightest wind
or motion
tangled it into a golden network”. Similarly, alongside the desire that
Mary should
“perish without note or remembrance, so the brightness of his
[Shelley’s]
name might not be darkened by the corruptions she sheds upon it”,
Claire pays
tribute to “the surpassing beauty of her mind; every sentiment of
her’s is so
glowing and beautiful, it is worth the actions of another person” (CC
Jnls, pp. 431–433).
The
profound ambivalence of Claire’s feelings, amply demonstrated by
these
reminiscences of 1828–30, seems to have eluded Mary. Focusing later in
life on the
bald fact that they were “never friends”, “never loved each other”,
Mary was
quite at a loss to explain Claire’s “eternal complaints”: “Claire always
harps upon
my desertion of her”, she puzzled in a letter of 1836 (LMWS, II,
p. 271).
Somewhat ironically, Mary’s incomprehension was matched only by
Claire’s
clear conviction that she had been betrayed by the person who knew
her best.
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Correspondence
Dr Deirdre
Coleman, Department of English, University of Sydney, Sydney,
NSW 2006,
Australia (deirdre.coleman@english.usyd.edu.au).
Notes
[1] The
Clairmont Correspondence: Letters of Claire Clairmont, Charles Clairmont, and
Fanny
Imlay
Godwin, 2 vols
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Subsequent
references appear in the text as C Corr, followed by volume and
page
numbers.
[2] The two
girls were brought together as stepsisters when Mary was 5 and
Claire 4.
[3] The
Journals of Claire Clairmont (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968),
hereafter
cited in text and footnotes as CC Jnls.
[4] R.
Gittings & J. Manton, Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys, 1798–1879 (Oxford
and
New York:
Oxford University Press, 1992), hereafter cited as Gittings.
[5] The
publication of The Clairmont Correspondence provoked quite a stir; see
Claire
Tomalin’s
review, and the reaction it provoked (Times Literary Supplement, 30
June 1995,
and “Letters to the Editor”, 11 August 1995).
[6] Byron to
Kinnaird January 1817, Byron’s Letters and Journals, 13 vols, ed.
L. Marchand
(London: John Murray, 1973–81), vol. 5, p. 162.
[7] Shelley
would appear to be the best candidate for the Tahitian philosopher.
Godwin is a
less likely one, although there was the well-circulated rumour that
he had sold
his daughters to Shelley, fetching £800 for Mary and £700 for
Claire! See
Peter H. Marshall, William Godwin (New Haven and London: Yale
University
Press, 1984), p. 307. The phrase “the whole tribe of the Otaheite
philosopher’s”
occurs in quotation marks in one of Claire’s letters to Byron.
Stocking is
probably right to think that Claire is quoting Byron’s own phrase
back at him
(see C Corr, I, pp. 43, 44, n. 1).
[8] See
“Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage” in Diderot’s Selected Writings,
ed.
L. G.
Crocker; trans D. Coltman (New York and London: Macmillan, 1966).
[9] Edward
Augustus Silsbee’s records show the extent of Claire’s preoccupation
with Mary in
the half dozen years leading up to her death in Florence in 1879;
see, for
example, C Corr, II, pp. 616, n. 6, 619, n. 4, 625.
[10] “Mont
Blanc” has been read as the clinching argument of a public/private
debate
between Percy and Byron on the nature of the creative imagination, a
debate
centred on Shelley’s enthralled reading of Rousseau’s
La Nouvelle Héloïse
in 1816; see
Robert Brinkley, “Documenting Revision: Shelley’s Lake Geneva
Diary and
the Dialogue with Byron in History of a Six Weeks’ Tour”, in the Keats–
Shelley
Journal, 39 (1990),
pp. 66–82.
[11] The
Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, eds P. Feldman & D. Scott
Kilvert
(Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; originally published in 2
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CLAIRE
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325
vols by
Oxford University Press, 1987). Hereafter abbreviated to MS Jnls,
followed by
page numbers; this reference, p. 90.
[12] David
Marshall writes, “There are biographical, psychological, literary, and
philosophical
indications that Rousseau is inscribed in the
margins and
characters
of Mary Shelley’s first novel more than any other author except
Wollstonecraft
and Godwin” in his The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux,
Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988),
p. 233.
[13] Mary
Wollstonecraft: “Mary” and “Maria”, Mary Shelley: Matilda, ed. Janet Todd
(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1992), pp. 70–71.
[14] “Note
on Poems of 1816, by Mrs. Shelley” in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed.
Thomas
Hutchinson,
2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 536.
Ironically,
in a recent book which does draw an interesting connection between
La
Nouvelle Héloïse and
Frankenstein, the literary influence is marshalled as part of
the evidence
working against Mary’s claims to authorship of her own novel; see
M-H. Huet, Monstrous
Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),
p. 149.
[15] The
closest we get to proof are some jottings in her Journals of place names
associated
with the novel’s Swiss setting (CC Jnls, p. 60).
[16] At the
end of the play Orra pleads, “Take off from me thy strangely-fasten’d eye
… / Unfix
thy baleful glance: Art thou a snake? / Something of horrid power
within thee
dwells. / Still, still that powerful eye doth suck me in / Like a dark
eddy to its
wheeling core” (in Joanna Baillie, A Series of Plays: in which it is
intended
to delineate the stronger passions of the mind, 3 vols [1798–1812]; this
reference,
vol. 3 [London, 1812], pp. 94–95). Baillie’s play, with its Gothic
settings and
thrilling psychological exploration, was undoubtedly an influence
upon Frankenstein;
for instance, Orra’s lover is Theobald of Falkenstein, a Swiss
nobleman and
burgher in the Canton of Basle.
[17] See CC
Jnls, p. 13, n. 1. Mary’s first recorded reference to Jane as Clara was on
10 November
1814 (CC Jnls, p. 60, n. 24).
[18] The
1803 text of William Kenrick’s popular translation has recently been
reprinted;
see Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eloisa, or a
series of original letters, 2 vols
(Oxford:
Woodstock Books, 1989).
[19]
Gittings and Manton are also of this view; see Gittings, p. 22. Sophie Cottin’s
popular
epistolary novel, Claire d’Albe, closely modelled on La Nouvelle
Helöise,
may also
have played a role in the renaming. It was published in 1798/99 and
translated
into English in 1808 as Clara; a Novel; see Stocking’s interesting
footnote on
the significance of this work (CC Jnls, p. 76, n. 33).
[20] The
Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (New
York: Modern Library, 1945), Book
IX, p. 444.
[21] This
topic has been admirably discussed by Janet Todd in chapter 3 of Women’s
Friendship
in Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 132–
167. Two
recent articles on female friendship, which also discuss La Nouvelle
Helöise, have appeared in Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 32 (1999): Susan S. Lanser,
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“Befriending
the Body: Female Intimacies as Class Acts” and Christine Roulston,
“Separating
the Inseparables: Female Friendship and Its Discontents in
Eighteenth-century
France”.
[22] All
quotations, together with the original volume and page numbers, are from
the
four-volume 1803 English translation by William Kenrick, facsimile reprint
Eloisa,
or a series of original letters, 2 vols (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989); this
reference,
I, p. 299.
[23] This
phrase is taken from Rousseau’s description of
his violent passion for
Madame
d’Houdetot (his model for Eloisa), herself consumed by love for
another man;
see Confessions, Book IX, p. 455.
[24] Vindication
of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed.
Janet
Todd &
Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1989), vol. 5, p. 108.
[25] See
Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern
Culture
(New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993).
[26] Mary
Shelley: Frankenstein, 1818 Text, ed. Marilyn Butler (Oxford
University Press,
1994), p.
39.
[27] Ibid.,
p. 194.
[28] See
Huet, Monstrous Imagination, p. 141.
[29] Two
years before she died, Mary Shelley begged her daughter-in-law not to
leave her
alone in the room with Claire, who had come to visit; see Anne K.
Mellor, Mary
Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (Routledge, 1988), p. 34.
[30] The
Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols
(Baltimore:
Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980–88); this reference II, p. 271. Hereafter
abbreviated
to LMWS.
[31] Richard
Holmes, Shelley: the Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974),
p.
270 and
Mellor, Mary Shelley, p. 30. Sunstein is notably inconsistent on the
point; see
Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston: Little,
Brown,
1989), pp. 95, 115. William St Clair argues that the name change was
Claire’s way
of distancing herself from her mother, Mary Jane, in his The
Godwins
and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London: Faber, 1989), p. 376.
[32] Rousseau to Mme de la Tour, 29 May 1762; quoted by
Jean Starobinski, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. A. Goldhammer (University
of Chicago
Press, 1988), p. 84.
[33] For the
concept of transparency in La Nouvelle Héloïse and in Rousseau’s writings
as a whole,
see Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
passim.
[34] These
experiments are well documented. For an account of the triangles
involving
Shelley’s favourite sister, Elizabeth, and first wife, Harriet, with his
old friend,
Jefferson Hogg, see Holmes, Shelley, pp. 71, 90–92, 214, and Mellor,
Mary
Shelley, pp. 28–30;
see also Sunstein, Mary Shelley, pp. 94–95, 105. For an
interesting
discussion of Percy’s relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, see
Holmes, Shelley,
pp. 71–73, 140–144, 153.
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CLAIRMONT AND MARY SHELLEY
327
[35] Shelley
to Leigh Hunt, 2 March 1811, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2
vols,
ed. F. L.
Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), I, p. 54. Hereafter abbreviated
to LPBS.
[36] See
chapter 4 of Marie Mulvey-Roberts, British Poets and Secret Societies (London
and Sydney:
Croom Helm, 1986).
[37] James
Lawrence, “Introduction”, The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women.
An
Utopian Romance, in twelve books, 4 vols (London: T. Hookham, 1811), I,
p. xvii.
[38] Nairean
constancy might have played a role here in Claire’s poetic name
“Constantia”.
Stocking argues that “Constantia” is taken from Charles Brockden
Brown’s Ormond
(1799); see CC Jnls, p. 172, n. 17.
[39]
“Paradise of Love” formed part of the French title of Lawrence’s novel.
[40] Quoted
Holmes, Shelley, p. 240. The passage is from a later, revised copy of
Claire’s
journal, held by the Pforzheimer Library (see Holmes, Shelley, p. 757,
n. 10).
[41] Butler,
Frankenstein: 1818 Text, pp. 3–4.
[42] Ludvig
Holberg, Journey to the World Under-Ground by Nicholas Klimius. Translated
from the
original (London: T.
Astley, 1742). Claire’s journal makes no reference
to Holberg,
but Mary was reading the novel early in 1817; see MS Jnls, pp. 32,
n. 1, 157
& n. 2, 652.
[43] Other
possible sources for her thinking on women’s communities and utopias
might have
been Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (London: Richard
Wilkin,
1697–1701), and Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millenium Hall (London:
J. Newbery,
1762).
[44] The
Earl’s biographer, Francis Hardy, mentions the essay in his Memoirs of the
Political
and Private Life of James Caulfield, Earl of Charlemont, 2 vols (London:
Cadell &
Davies, 1812), II, p. 192. The essay, entitled “Account of a Singular
Custom at
Metelin, with some conjectures on the Antiquity of its origin” was
originally
delivered to the Royal Irish Academy in 1789; see The Transactions of
the Royal
Irish Academy, 1789 (Dublin:
George Bonham, 1790), pp. 3–20. I first
encountered
this reference to the Earl of Charlemont in St Clair, Godwins and
Shelleys, pp. 143, 534, n. 3.
[45] After
Mary’s premature baby girl died in March 1815, her desire to be rid of
Claire took
strong hold, beginning in earnest a few days after the baby’s death
(MS Jnls,
p. 69). Two and a half years later, in September 1817, when she gave
birth to
another little girl, she called her “Clara”, perhaps out of her desire to
match and
rival one new Clara with another, and have Shelley reconcentrate his
attention on
herself and their family.
[46]
Although evidence for it is thin, Holmes believes that Percy was not just au
fait
with
Claire’s seduction of Byron but an eager accomplice in the affair; see
Holmes, Shelley,
pp. 317, 320–322.
[47] For
male homosociality, triangles, and the asymmetrical nature of gender
arrangements,
see Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial
Desire (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1985).
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COLEMAN
328
[48] See Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian, pp.
103–104.
[49] Orou’s justification of incest draws on the
biblical story of Adam and Eve’s
children, and the necessity of incest with each other,
a joke also included in
Mary Shelley’s “History of the Jews” (?1815), a story
written under Percy’s
tutelage.
[50] Compare Percy’s arguments against monogamous
coupling in Epipsychidion
(1821): “True Love in this differs from gold and clay,
/ That to divide is not to
take away”, and “Narrow / The heart that loves, the
brain that contemplates, /
... / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A
sepulchre for its
eternity”, in Shelley: Poetical Works, p. 415.
[51] Byron’s reference to the two women as a “tribe”
is similar to his contemptuous
description of them as Percy’s “menage”; see Byron’s
Letters and Journals, vol. 5,
p. 162 (January 1817).
[52] Quoted in Leslie Marchand, Byron: A Biography,
3 vols (London: John Murray,
1957), II, p. 622. St Clair discusses some
contemporary perceptions of the trio
(St Clair, Godwins and Shelleys, p. 421).
[53] Julia Douthwaite has written an interesting
article on this topic, “Rewriting the
Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the ‘Wild Girl
of Champagne’”,
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28
(1994–95), pp. 163–192; this reference p. 192, n.
77.
[54] The tale of Maria Shoning was first published in The
Friend (1809–10); see The
Collected Works of S. T. Coleridge: The Friend,
ed. B. Rooke, 2 vols (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969), II, pp. 172–182;
for Weishaupt, “Incestuous
Sophister!”, “Atrocious Father!”, and founder of
Illuminism, see Barruel, Memoirs
Illustrating the History of Jacobinism,
trans. R. Clifford, 4 vols (1798), III, p. 3.
[55] The novel was translated from the French as Letters
Written by a Peruvian Princess
(London: J. Brindley, 1748). The heroine is the pupil
and fiancée of the
reigning Inca’s son. If Incas had no sisters to marry,
they married their closest
blood relatives instead. Mary Shelley lists the novel
amongst her reading for
1815; she is rereading it in 1817 (MS Jnls, pp.
181, n. 4, 650).
[56] See
Mary’s letters to Percy in September and October 1817, particularly those
of 30
September and 7 October (LMWS, I, pp. 48–49, 53). In this last letter
Mary
describes little William’s affection for his sister Clara and dislike of Alba
(Allegra),
“an argument in favour of those who advocate instinctive natural
affection” (Mary’s emphasis).