Matilda (novella)

Mary Shelley wrote the short novel "Matilda" in 1819, but it was not published until 1959. It was initially entitled "Fields of Fancy", a story about father-daughter incest, where a female character begins to tell her story of misery to Diotima, and in the midst of that story, the story of Matilda is told. Shelley created her novel as a story of misery within another story of misery, however, in the end she chose to remove this framework, thus emphasizing the incestuous nature of the sufferings.

Related Topics:
Mary Shelley - Diotima

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In "Writing and Re-writing Incest in Mary Shelley's Matilda." Keats-Shelley Journal 45 (1996) Margaret Davenport Garrets comments on the novella, that Matilda could be seen as a rewriting of the ancient incest myth, and that Mary Shelly thus speaks of the problem of love between a woman and a man, when it takes place in a cultural environment where the woman thinks of herself as morally inferior being and knowing that society expects her to be protected by a male- be it father, brother or husband. Thus the story can be seen as a metaphore for what happens when a woman, ignorant of all consequences, follows her own heart while being dependant on her male benefactor.

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