어머니의 흔적: 메리 울스튼크래프트 고드윈 셸리의 경우

Abstract

This thesis starts with two premises. Firstly, Mary Shelley owed her literary achievement to what Harold Bloom called "the anxiety of influence." It is not too far-fetched to presume that Mary Shelley was under the heavy pressure of "proving herself worthy of her parentage," being the daughter of two of the most illustrious English writers, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. The second premise of the thesis is that the mother-daughter relationship between these two Marys can be traced meaningfully in no other way than in the impersonal and intertextual way, considering that their personal contacts lasted only eleven days. With these premises, I compared The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798) with Frankenstein (1818) in order to explore to what extent the daughter was influenced by her mother and how far the daughter surpassed the mother as a novelist. The most conspicuous influence of Maria on Frankenstein is detected in the characterization of Monster. Besides, there is a secondary protagonist who forms a rivalry with and threatens the dignity of the title hero(ine) in both novels. It also can't be coincident that both authors juxtapose the title hero(ine)'s first-person narrative with the secondary protagonist's first-person narrative, indicating what the title hero(ine) says is not all true. The similarity between these novels, however, stops here. Though Shelley learned much from her mother on how to frame a novel and what to assert, she was well aware that an author needs to say in a tacit way what lays him/her vulnerable to public censure. Shelley didn't repeat her mother's mistake of speaking too frankly of such a highly reprehensible act of the deconstruction of family, hiding the very kernel of the subject in the frame of fantasy and equivocating the final message in the juxtaposition of relative and conflicting points of view. When Frankenstein tears the body of the would-be mother of a new species into pieces, it is Shelley herself that denies the body of the mother. With the mother dead and buried at sea, Shelley was born again as a superior author.