Notes
1. I thank Joel Faflak
for inviting me to be a part of this volume. I also thank
Richard Caldwell, Lionel Corbett, Aranye Fradenburg, and
Elisabeth Weber for providing helpful resources and
commentary.
2. Though characterized
as classic as well as romantic, Goethe remains the
strongest German literary influence on Freud's thinking.
For the fullest account of Goethe and Freud, see Rickels,
Aberrations.
3. In pointing this out,
The Language of Psychoanalysis differentiates
Phantasie from Einbildungskraft in ways
useful for understanding Shelley and her difference from
other English romantic writers: "less in the philosophical
sense of the faculty of imagining
(Einbildungskraft) than in the sense of the world
of the imagination, its contents and the creative activity
which animates it" (Laplanche and Pontalis 314). Owing to
Freud's illness, Anna Freud delivered the acceptance speech
in his absence. On the Goethe prize, see Mahony 1-4.
4. For a general
treatment, see Wollheim. For romantic connections on poetic
minds, see McDayter. For an account of English
romanticism's pre-theoretical invention of psychoanalysis,
see Faflak. For a psychoanalytic account of romantic
theories and practices of reading, see Jacobus,
Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading.
5. For a critique of the
developmental imperative, see Pyle.
6. See Rickels.
7. On the false binaries
underlying these debates, see Richardson and Myers. For a
recent survey, see O'Malley.
8. The term appears first
in the ur-text to Matilda, The Fields of
Fancy (365) by way of connecting Mathilda to
Proserpine, and later in Matilda (19). On
the term and topic, see Graham Allen and Carlson
152-60.
9. For the importance of
object-relations theory to the analysis of reading, the
book-object, and learning, see Jacobus, Psychoanalysis
and the Scene of Reading 1-51 and The Poetics of
Psychoanalysis, and Britzman.
10. Kolarov's specific
argument depends on not positing Freud's relation to Goethe
(or Shakespeare) as transferential but instead as
transmitting a core of their corpus that is not available
to Oedipal dynamics.
11. See esp. Rajan,
"Autonarration," and Shelley's proclivity for it in
"Between Romance."
12. Matilda
13-14.
13.
Introduction 370.
14. On precursors to
Freud's discovery of the unconscious, see Ellenberger
53-181. See also Punter, who focuses more on the
unconscious of romanticism than romanticism's discovery of
it.
15. See esp. "The
Unconscious" 187.
16. For the crucial
Freudian texts and contexts, see Masson. For an argument
about the use of literature in surviving incest, see
Champagne, which includes a chapter on Mathilda
(53-90).
17. Here I emphasize
reception history since, as Rickels argues in the case of
Frankenstein (The Vampire Lectures
287-300) and Jacobus in the case of Matilda
(Psychoanalysis 172-77), both of these texts are
marked by a refusal to mourn the mother.
18. See Francois and
Mozes, Harpold, Jacobus, Psychoanalysis 165-201,
Rajan, "Mary Shelley's Mathilda."
19. See Mellor
191-201.
20. Jacobus,
Psychoanalysis 196.
21. It is as if Shelley
here addresses to the phantasies inspired by literature the
question that Freud applies to dreams: "must one assume
responsibility for the content of one's dreams?" Her answer
is similar to Freud's: "I shall perhaps learn that what I
am disavowing not only 'is' in me but sometimes 'acts' from
out of me as well" ("Moral Responsibility" 132, 133).
22. To different ends,
this is a point made by Jacobus, Psychoanalysis
(194-201) and Champagne 3-6, 85-89.
23.
Frankenstein 175.
24. Leonardo
121.
25. One of the best
remains Knoepflmacher.
26. Percy Shelley
ascribes to imagination "the delineating of human passions
more comprehensive and commanding than any which the
ordinary relations of existing events can yield," which
even the "most humble novelist" can enlist.
27. On extimacy in
relation to the Thing, see Lacan, Seminar 139. On
how books constitute their reality—that is, the
techniques by which their objects are perceived as palpable
and life-like—see Scarry, esp. 3-74.
28. Rickels, The
Vampire Lectures 295. See also 282-83, 292-99.
29. Interestingly, this
is another "psycho-analytic" insight that Freud ascribes to
Goethe: his familiarity with "the incomparable strength of
the first affective ties of human creatures" ("Address"
209).
30. "Creative Writers"
143. Philip Rieff's translation of the title, "Dichter und
Phantasieren," as "The Relation of the Poet to
Day-Dreaming" is more accurate (Dichter rarely
being translated as "creative writer"), but the breadth
implicit in Strachey's choice suits the scope of Freud's
essay, which focuses on novels and considers the "less
pretentious authors of novels, romances, and short stories"
largely because they "have the widest and most eager circle
of readers of both sexes" (149). The distinction he makes,
between writers who, "like the ancient authors of epics and
tragedies," take over their material ready-made from
writers who "seem to originate their own material,"
indicates another way that the example of Shelley
complicates such distinctions.
31. The equitability of
Mary Shelley, Victor Frankenstein, Margaret Saville, and
the Creature has often been noted – striking "proof"
of "A Child is Being Beaten."
32. See Laplanche and
Pontalis 314-18.
33. In his introduction
to "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"
Strachey notes how Freud's studies of literature during
1906-7, especially "Delusions" and "Creative Writers," are
connected to efforts to "please Jung" (4).
34. I deal with this
claim in England's First Family of Writers, but
would instance here the following legends from their
biographies: Godwin's letters during Shelley's overwhelming
grief at the death of William in which he instructs her to
stop grieving or lose the love of those around her; the
lines in Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman" where Godwin reports that
Wollstonecraft on her death-bed had "nothing to
communicate" about the care of her two daughters; or the
many references in the press after 1805 that Godwin's
writings fall "dead-born" from the press.
35. The best example of
the first is the character Fanny Derham in Lodore
(the one satisfied by a life of reading who does not aim
after marriage); of the second, virtually all of the novels
that deal with female character in a "feminist" fashion
(Valperga, Adventures of Perkin Warbeck,
Lodore, and Falkner).
36. The term is
Tilottama Rajan's.
37. These debates are
well-rehearsed in Jackson, Myers, O'Malley, Richardson, and
Summerland.
38. See esp. Godwin's
"Of History and Romance" (1797), which privileges the
romance-writer above the historian on the grounds that
"nothing is more uncertain, more contradictory, more
unsatisfactory than the evidence of facts" (297) and
Wollstonecraft's fragmentary "The Cave of Fancy: A Tale"
(1787; pub. 1798) that, in linking female education to
fancy, story, and better object choices, sets the
novelistic agenda to follow.
39. The book as mentor
equation is clearest at the end of Wollstonecraft's
Original Stories from Real Life where Mrs. Mason
presents her charges with a book of their prior experiences
as a means of future counsel, but is thematized also in
Mary, in Godwin's Fleetwood and Deloraine. History
as necromancy is avowed in the Preface to Life of
Chaucer (1803) and enacted in Essays on
Sepulchres (1809).
40. Many of these
critiques are readily visible in the collection of
contemporary responses to their life/writings in Lives
of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and
Mary Shelley By Their Contemporaries (Vol. 1
Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit; vol. 2
Wollstonecraft, ed. Harriet Jump; vol. 3
Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennet).
41. See esp. Godwin's
"Essay of Scepticism" 302-11 and Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman 178-82.
42. Several aspects of
Britzman's "psychoanalytic studies of learning and not
learning," the subtitle to Novel Education,
resonate with the life/writings of Shelley: recognition of
how "cathetic loyalty" impedes rational or psycho-analysis
(14); the fact that the "novel" aspect in psychoanalytic
discourse is that it "allows for and welcomes its own
incoherence for what it does not know, namely its own means
of representation" (20); the definition (de Certeau's) of
fiction as a "knowledge jeopardized and wounded by its
otherness (the affect)" (210); the role of fancy and
phantasy in a "pedagogical fact" (158-60).
43. See especially the
footnote in Godwin's Essay on Sepulchres that
makes an analogy between "progress" in the world and in
school by way of explaining his assertion that "the world
forever is, and in some degree for ever must be, in its
infancy" (14n10).
44. At the end of
Memoirs, Godwin specifies as what "I have for ever
lost" through the untimely death of Wollstonecraft the
redesigning of his mind that was in a preliminary stage
through his daily proximity to the intellectual tact that
characterized her mind. "This light was lent to me for a
very short period, and is now extinguished for ever"
(141).
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