"Something not yet made good"

Byron's Cain, Godwin, and Mary Shelley's Falkner

Tilottama Rajan

pp. 84-101

in: Matthew A. Green, Piya Pal-Lapinski (eds), Byron and the politics of freedom and terror, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstract

In 1837 Mary Shelley published her last novel, Falkner, laying to rest the wound of a Byronic Romanticism, in which Byron figures and is inextricably linked to her father, William Godwin.¹ For Godwin had already invented Byron in misanthropic, brooding personalities like Falkland and Fleetwood. Shelley's novel does not follow the Victorian turn against Byron detailed by Andrew Elfenbein, in which the development from an "immature Byronic phase to a sober, adult, "Victorian" phase" becomes one of the century's "master narratives' of transition.² She wants to make her peace with the inoperative community of Romanticism as part of a care of the self, a care of her self, evident in her editing and archiving of its male celebrities: Godwin, Shelley, Byron. In Falkner, she therefore revisits both her bitter dis-figuration of the father-daughter relationship as incest in Mathilda (1819),³ and Godwin's exposure of the "wounded masculine" of patriarchy in Deloraine (1833).

Cited authors

Shelley Mary