DEIDRE SHAUNA LYNCH
CHAPTER EIGHT
The (Dis)locations of Romantic Nationalism: Shelley, Staël, and the Home-Schooling of Monsters
In 1829 and 1830 Mary Shelley wrote a number of letters to John Murray in which she proposed to write a life of Germaine de Staël for his publishing house’s Family Library series. Murray did not grant Shelley the commission. It took ten more years for Shelley’s interest in the woman writer whose Swiss salon had welcomed many English expatriates and Shelleyan associates to find belated but truncated expression: in 1839 Shelley included a short biography of Staël in the second volume of her Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers.1 It is hard to imagine why Shelley assumed that Staël’s story could be turned to edifying ends in British parlors. It was, in fact, a story distinctively short on home virtues “aux Anglais,” chronicling, instead, a program of erotic cosmopolitanism that saw Staël bear five children (four out of wedlock) by four different fathers of three different nationalities. Contemplating the prospect of Staël’s inclusion in his Family Library, Murray might well, one imagines, have echoed Mr. Edgermond, the character in Staël’s Corinne, who, when befuddled by that heroine’s ways of going public, queries her lover in the following terms: “[A]s lovable as [she] is, I think like Thomas Walpole: what do you do with that at home? [que fait-on de cela à la maison?] And as you know, home is everything in our country.”2
That Shelley could be so oblivious to the peculiar tangle of family and literary values that dictated the relocation of culture in the Romantic period—that dictated, as I shall demonstrate, literature’s simultaneous repatriation and domestication—is puzzling. And yet this chapter on Shelley and Staël, and on the ambivalent arguments that both novelists carry on with the nineteenth century’s accelerating nationalization of culture, will take its cue from that obliviousness.
Shelley’s misstep has something to teach us. In our postmodern era, when “internationalism” is “in distress,” her category error might prompt us to reexamine the domestic framework literary history has used to normalize and naturalize a set of historically contingent arrangements for textual transmission.3 It might prompt us to acknowledge the existence of alternative ways of imagining the genesis and the place of art than those writ large within the insular institution of the Family Library. In an essay entitled “A Home for Art,” Mary A. Favret asks us to consider how contemporary academic practice perpetuates, Romantically, an identification of aesthetic and domestic space. I want to add the concept of the nation to Favret’s list of the premises that we construct in order to keep “poetry away from the pressure of human bodies, locked in safe cabinets, at an imaginary distance from the noise of history.”4 If our current ways of, for instance, reading women’s novels under the sign of “domestic fiction” reassert this isomorphism between place, culture, and nation, the way the novels of Staël and Shelley jointly disarticulate “mother” from “nature” and “mother” from “country” suggests, by contrast, that the lessons of Romanticism do not have to be those obtained through home schooling.5
Of course, Romantic ideas about the family and an accompanying determination to see works of literature as homegrown, domestic products set the terms on which Shelley, for one, is ushered into literary history.6 As befits a national subject and a “proper lady” (Mary Poovey’s term), Shelley is wont to figure even in revised Romanticist canons and curricula as somebody’s wife and as, in her words, “the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity.”7 And indeed, making her novels into display cases (or reliquaries) for quotations from the works of Percy Shelley and the Lake Poets, mournfully advertising her Gothic indebtedness to the kin and compatriots who predecease her, Shelley can look as if she herself relishes her role as the curator of the family library and relishes this responsibility for the family heirlooms of the national literature.
And yet Shelley’s misapprehension of the terms on which a woman writer might legitimately claim a place within the literary tradition has ample precedent in the novel that inaugurated her career. Cataloging the faults of Frankenstein in 1818, John Wilson Croker, a reviewer for the Quarterly Review, laments the proofs this text tendered, most explicitly in its dedication, that “Mr. Godwin is patriarch of a literary family.” When, however, he turns to the episode, at the midpoint of the novel, in which Shelley depicts the schooling both of Safie, “the fair Arabian,” and of the monster, who eavesdrops on her language training, Croker abandons genealogical inquiry. In that episode in the De Laceys’ cottage, the setting, or so it has appeared to many readers, for the novel’s chief object lesson in what Percy Shelley’s preface calls “the amiableness of domestic affection” (12), Croker is aghast to discover, not a family library, but instead, he sputters, “the Greco-Anglico-Germanico-Gallico-Arabic library of a Swabian hut.”8 To see Frankenstein as centered, literally, on a multilingual, transnational pedagogy—on acts of translation (those acts that must have transpired in order for the monolingual monster to be able to read his library of Plutarch, Goethe, and Milton) and of imitation (of the sort that ties Ruins of Empires to the “eastern authors” and renders it a suitable schoolbook for Safie’s French lessons [116])—obliges us to reposition Shelley within the system of literary relations.
If, as my juxtaposition of these passages from Croker intimates, the introjection of the foreign into the domestic that transpires in this episode of Frankenstein subverts that book’s relation to a paternal origin, then perhaps, conversely, it might also make it easier to envision atlases of the novel that bypass the national setting and paths of literary transmission that bypass bloodlines. Accounting for how Frankenstein comments on the language learning that ushers the citizen-subject into national communities—an acculturation that, in the creature’s case, fails drastically—means, I shall propose here, attending to the pedagogic legacy of Staël’s Corinne (1807) and Delphine (1802) within Shelley’s text. This means, in turn, locating these two novelists within an alter-space for feminine solidarities and understanding their relations in terms that depend neither on received, patrilineal notions of literary influence nor on those concepts of a “women’s tradition” in which to write as a woman entails thinking back through one’s mother.9 In my reading, significant relations cannot be blood relations. Indeed, I shall also propose that to read Staël and Shelley together, across borderlines and lines of descent, is to recognize in both a legacy that promotes artificial reproduction. Frankenstein, besides (famously) pitting “maternal nature” against the unhallowed arts that underestimate her claims (92), also (less famously) dissociates motherhood from concepts of an organic nature so as to relocate it within the technological domain.10 While it writes back to and for Corinne and Delphine, Frankenstein aligns mothering with what, thinking of the fictive technologies that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century states used to create their subjects, we might call letters of naturalization.
Shelley learned a lesson in geopolitics from Staël, one also found within much of the queer theory that has remarked the imbrication of the (seemingly “natural”) categories of national affiliation and sexual attachment. Staël was Shelley’s model for a style of thought that could denature and disarticulate the bonds of blood, habitation, patriotism, companionship, and succor, as Eve Sedgwick puts it, “from the lockstep of their unanimity in the system called ‘the family.’ ”11 Let us begin, however, with the more celebrated lesson, familial and more familiar, that Staël taught to early-nineteenth-century culture. The fame of De l’Allemagne (1810), especially, rested on the protocols for literary legitimacy that it set into place when it argued, as a contemporary reviewer put it, that “poetry and eloquence may and in some measure must be national.” Staël’s recommendation in that work of Romanticism over classicism takes shape in some measure as a call for a reterritorializing of literature, a canonizing of that writing that was homegrown, “ayant ses racines dans notre propre sol” [with roots in our own soil].12 Her metaphor, the word propre particularly, suggests how the new arrangement of the discursive field that brought into view a series of distinct, discrete, and, only on those terms, expressive national literatures had an equivalent within those Enlightenment and Revolutionary geographies and theories of government that emphasized in new ways the necessity of un-confounding national territories and so enclosing states “as a peasant would enclose its field.”13 Over the course of the eighteenth century national borders were “purified” and “rationalized.” National affiliation became in unprecedented ways a matter of location. An older apparatus of political obligation that had emphasized not, as now, the territorial but rather the political bond between king and subject, a jurisdictional sovereignty that was affirmed in the oaths of allegiance taken by both individuals and corporate groups, fell into abeyance.
The meanings of culture underwent a related metamorphosis. Staël and the thinkers assembled at her salons—Chateaubriand, Humboldt, the Schlegels—contributed significantly to the shift that saw culture cease to designate in the first instance a process of cultivation typically thought to unfold through commercial and social exchange, a lateral diffusion of ideas and artifacts.14 Reinvented, reoriented toward newly charismatic concepts of the mother tongue and the ancestral dead and toward the modes of self-authentication and remembrance those totems sponsor, culture came to signify a heritage that was transmitted in a vertical descent from each generation to its successors and that was, like the nation, localized in a particular plot of “classic ground” or of “literary landscape.” And so in some ways culture, along with the nation (whose limits were, Continental advocates of the idea of “natural frontiers” asserted, prefigured in the very contours of the terrain), came to be assimilated to nature. The idea of the state of nature lost its leverage in accounts of the politically possible, Martin Thom writes in his account of the post-Revolutionary transformation of ideas of collective life, but, as the ultimate “repository of value,” nature came then to be relocated inside the body politic. Earlier narratives of collective life, recounting the assembly of the people and their ratifying of the contract that would usher them from a state of nature and into civil society, were jettisoned in this era. (This involved, as Thom points out, extirpating, in turn, the escape routes that had once been open to individuals who wished to secede from the contract and cast off citizenship; instead, a confining principle of nationality blocked their access to that zone of natural, unconditional liberty that had once glimmered in the distance before and beyond civic life.) In the meantime, in conformity to the new conviction that the nation must extend back to prehistory, that the tribe always precedes the individual, and that there never was or could be a time before ethnic belonging, nature supplied each nation with its ontological guarantee.15
When in De l’Allemagne Staël calls for recognition to be extended to those works of imagination that both express and also, more problematically, help underwrite the new earthed identities of this age of national cultures, she furthers these redefinitions. This, as I have noted, was her chief legacy to a discipline of literary studies that in the nineteenth century was increasingly reordered along national lines. The “Romanticization” of literature that Staël’s aesthetics commends took shape both as a naturalization of literature—a return to origins, “notre propre sol”—and a familialization. To be Romantic, according to the lessons offered in her aesthetic texts, was in part to see reading and writing as the occasions on which one rehearsed local attachments and practiced ancestor worship; occasions, that is, for a renewal of what Staël’s English contemporary Coleridge would call, in his guise as a spokesman for an identity politics that naturalized the nation-state by casting it in the image of the family, “the true historical feeling, the feeling of being a historical people, generation linked to generation.”16
De l’Allemagne argues in these terms for the centrality of romance to Romanticism. By engaging with medieval narratives of chivalry, modern literature would recover its status as the expression of what was native to this place and this culture. Through commemoration, paradoxically enough, it would recover its originality. Similarly, when Staël sets her heroine Corinne to her bardic work within a landscape of ruins and graves, she appears to be intent on literalizing what is figurative in these new axiologies of national cultures. If Italy is a privileged location for poetry in Corinne, it is because buildings crumbling into ruin may be seen as marking a reconciliation between human culture and the nature into which it devolves and because graves are where the land and the people belonging to it really do become one. At the same time that she transports her Scottish peer, Oswald Lord Nelvil, to Italy, there to fall in love with her heroine, Staël in Corinne also transports to the warm south the fantasies of a natural (oral) poetry and a natural landscape that might be a library that readers had earlier encountered in the Ossianic publications of the Scots James Macpherson (1760–) and in the novelist Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). With this transfer, Staël perfects the modernized mode of presentation that was to remake the European nation as an “old country” and a body politic that granted the dead pride of place.17
However, Staël qualifies her allegiance to such organicism and nativism, and does so most within her fictions at those moments when she reminds us of the familial frame in which a national literature was, as such, meant to be (re)produced. The memories that enthrall the Highland bard Ossian are triggered in part by local associations. Nature, speaking in stones, provides the mnemonic; the bardic voice that “remains, like a blast, that roars, lonely, on a sea-surrounded rock” can, while it echoes nature, raise the ghosts of the family dead whom it commemorates on the very spots on which they died.18 But the other trigger that sets Ossian remembering and reciting his tale of times of old is the presence of Malvina, the young woman who was left bereft years before by the death of her betrothed, Oscar, the warrior who was the bard’s only son. Arranging for his readers to find their double in this female figure who has forsaken her own past and family in order to help Ossian remember his, Macpherson enlists the domestic affections in the cause of cultural transmission. Malvina, as her name suggests, plays Miranda to Ossian’s Prospero, and as with Miranda, her charisma is that she both appears to have no life apart from the virtual one she obtains through listening to Ossian’s tales and appears to have had no life prior to this filial one led at the site of bardic production. Images of Staël’s Corinne, and of Staël as Corinne, that picture the improvisatrice with harp in hand, seated atop a rocky promontory, recycle this Ossianic iconography of the inspired and inspiring helpmate-student-muse. They capitalize on the fact that Corinne is a figure who combines Malvina and Ossian in one. To portray her in this mode not only ratifies the bardic collaboration between poet and place but also, albeit only via the naturalization that permits Malvina to view Ossian’s ancestral dead as her own, works to align woman and place. Staël’s novels, by contrast, exploit the paradoxes that at once structure and are concealed by such fantasies. They acknowledge that the kinship arrangement propping up the Romantic effort to make a national literature and a literary nation that will link “generation … to generation” hinges on the dis-placement of women—on exogamous exchange. Her narratives use the exogamous storyline of daughterhood, the storyline of extradition and naturalization, to disestablish the bloodlines and the national tradition that the exchange of women is supposed to establish.
Writ large in the tableaux imaging Ossian’s history lessons to Malvina is the pledge that a daughter, or even a daughter-in-law, might bear the word—might serve the culture as its vehicle for the transmission of home truths. But the figure who sustains the patrilineal order is not the daughter who is never, as Jane Austen’s Emma aims never to be, “banished from home.” It is the daughter who is. (Recast for the Revolutionary era, the version of the Sappho myth that, as a crucial subtext for Corinne, portrays the woman poet as a political exile merely extends to the geopolitical register the potential for banishment that defines the daughter’s relation to both “her” father’s house and fatherland.)19 As Staël pursues the Romantic project of writing home, she everywhere betrays her awareness of how members of that gender most identified with home count as “ ‘stranger[s] [étrangère(s)] … on paternal soil” (Corinne 353/499).
Accounts of Staël’s contribution to Romantic nationalism—the very words nationality and romanticism make their first appearance in English in John Murray’s 1813 translation of De l’Allemagne—cannot help but call attention to such entanglements of the domestic and the foreign. They do so each time they remark that ironic twist in intellectual history that sees the codes of cultural nationalism originate with a “foreign” woman.20
Staël’s subtitle to her 1807 novel identifies woman and nation: Corinne or Italy. Yet a woman like Corinne (or, for that matter, like Staël herself, since she seems to have calculatedly fashioned her salon persona in her heroine’s image) is ill suited to the requirements of that idiom of civic allegory that, after the late eighteenth century, made a generic national symbol out of the beautiful matron. Appearing on recruiting posters and postage stamps, this iconography was set up to mobilize for the nation the libidinal energies of citizens who would see in this “mother” the charismatic image of, to echo Staël’s opening account of how Corinne appears to the poetry-loving audience that crowns her on the Capitol, their “common bond” (25).
However, for a woman to be Britannia, Kathleen ni Houlihan (personification of nationalist, Gaelic Ireland), or Italy, the fantasy that casts her as “the synecdoche of an unchanging cultural space” would in some sense have to be true.21 Corinne’s story line of loss makes a different point, as it adamantly dissociates fidelity to the father from fidelity to the nation. This heroine can become Italy only contingently, and only, in the first instance, by refusing an inheritance and betraying a family trust. For this fantasy to be true it would equally have to be the case that the girl-child had only one parent, that is, was possessed of a pedigree whose purity was guaranteed by its derivation from a unique, absolutely coherent and singular source. That fantasy of monogenesis, in which it would not take two to tango, is belied thoroughly by the genetic and geopolitical circumstances we confront with Corinne, the daughter of an Englishman and a Roman woman, and with Léonce, the hero of Delphine, born of a Spanish mother and a French father, as well as with Shelley’s Elizabeth Lavenza. (In the 1831 edition of her novel Shelley supplies that bride of Frankenstein with a revised biography in which she figures as the offspring of a Milanese nobleman and a German woman; this miscegenated genealogy positions Elizabeth as the legitimate literary heir to the Staëlian protagonist.) Corinne, we should note as well, then, is also adamant about dissociating the nation from a matrilineal principle. Corinne cannot be both Italy and her father’s daughter. But neither can she be both Italy and also her mother’s daughter, for that fidelity to a maternal origin should entail reproducing her mother’s mothering. Yet this heroine’s family history—and especially the fate of her nameless Roman mother, who in her erotic life had been a poor observer of national boundaries—seems to suggest that expatriation, and perhaps not just from one’s native land but also from the land of the living, is the inevitable correlative of the capacity to mother.22
The critics who found Staël’s heroine loathsome proved blind to the monstrous aspects of those (Frankensteinian) fantasies of parthenogenesis that they faulted Corinne for betraying—those fantasies, shadowing nations’ genealogical narratives, about the child who would be the clone of the father, about the intergenerational transmission of an unadulterated genetic capital and national character. These critics nevertheless did see monsters, but that was when they contemplated Staël’s presentation of the contrasting situation of genetic hybridity. Hence one reviewer’s vehement repudiation of Corinne on the quasi-eugenicist grounds that a heroine who unites “Italian and French voluptuousness with English virtue” represents “a physical impossibility.”23
This complaint perhaps registers the suspicion that Staëlian genetic engineering makes a travesty of just that exogamy that it may on first glance seem to resemble. Of course, the complainant might also be responding to the crossbreeding of national literary traditions that structures Corinne—to the way this protagonist reincarnates, simultaneously, the heroines of Rousseau and Lafayette, on the one hand, and of Frances Burney, on the other24—as well as to the way Staël in this novel confers a strange portability on a poetics designed in the first instance to provide those Ossianic testimonies to the genius of the place and the locality of culture. And indeed there is something startling about the aplomb with which Staël, in so explicitly imitating Macpherson and Morgan, renders the bardic generic, as if it were a kind of tool kit that could be disassembled and reproduced anywhere. There is something startling, that is, about how she reinvents it as a medium that enacts its own iterability and proclaims its status as the currency of transcultural exchange.
Corinne is a “national heroine without a nation.”25 The figure standing behind such a heroine, as Staël’s Delphine stands behind her Corinne, is the woman who, as Delphine puts it, remains outside “that chain of affection [that] from century to century, binds families together.”26 Delphine identifies her own self in this quotation from Staël’s earlier novel of tragic love, as she outlines not just the affective but also what would soon be the legal condition of a woman without parents, husband, or children. In 1804 the Code Napoleon, institutionalizing the practices that preceded it, formally made women’s nationality a function of their relationship to the men whose dependents they were. While nations were naturalized, and while histories were written that made nations seem, as they loomed out of a now immemorial past, inevitable, transcendent, and timeless, the nationality of women was made a contingent and unstable thing. Under the new civil code of France—and later, as other governments brought their conditions for national belonging into line with these conditions, under the civil codes of the European powers generally—a woman’s nationality followed her husband’s. The woman who married a foreigner became a foreigner. Those arrangements subordinated women’s political relationship to the state to private relationships inside the family. The state in the meantime expanded its jurisdiction to include the future, a future requiring populating. Increasingly, it concerned itself with the erotic lives of its subjects, establishing the populationist policies and the institutions for the policing of families that would promote this new match between Eros and Polis.27
The coupling of exile with the renunciation of erotic satisfaction that structures Delphine’s story line is mandated by these arrangements. Delphine begins as a novel about giving, about the anomalous power that this orphaned, childless, widowed heroine has to give herself in love and also, since her wealth enables her to supply the dowry for her cousin, Matilde, to give another woman away in marriage; it rapidly becomes a novel about giving up, as Delphine sacrifices everything to ensure Léonce, who has married Matilde despite his feelings for Delphine, “the happiness of domestic bonds” (199). In this heroine’s homelessness—and namelessness—in the last two parts of her story, we read Staël’s acknowledgment of the new felicific calculus that dictated that it was only by first belonging to a family that one could enjoy the happiness of belonging to the larger group called the nation and of participating in those shared commitments and loyalties that make individuals one another’s fellow citizens.
Thus the disorientation we suffer as we read the epistolary novel’s concluding sequence. Part 5 chronicles Delphine’s flight from the Ile de France to the Swiss convent in which she means to mourn the loss of Léonce. She travels incognito and “at random” on “foreign soil” (347/1:735), crossing and recrossing the threshold of the Abbaye du Paradis and the boundaries that divide Switzerland both from France and from the Austrian Empire. Staël makes it hard for her readers too to get their bearings. Presenting us in this section and the next with a sequence of letters that have been sent from Madrid, Lausanne, Montpellier, and so forth, she asks us to infer the whereabouts of her hero, her heroine, and the latter’s jealous persecutor, the royalist refugee M. Valorbe, and to do this while we are ourselves being wrenched from nation to nation by each new letter and each new superscription. It is 1792, and war is commencing. If, on the one hand, military aggression dictates that the differences between groups should harden, that the clarifying work of inclusion and exclusion enacted by concepts of the native and the foreign should be carried out with even greater energy than usual, on the other hand, over the course of this sequence those borders that Delphine is said to be crossing come to seem fortuitously, randomly positioned. In Staël’s hands the map of Europe comes to seem vulnerable to perpetual, haphazard redesigning. In this last part of the novel, nature—natural frontiers—guarantees nothing. An asylum can transform itself, with phantasmagoric speed, into enemy territory. Delphine can traverse a border freely (as when she leaves the convent and goes to the aid of M. Valorbe, imprisoned for his debts in a German border town), only to find that same border nightmarishly impassible when she reverses the direction of her journey.
Staël inaugurates the plot of Delphine with the assault that interrupts Léonce’s journey across the mountain frontier between Spain and France and that makes it seem for a while as though the border town of Bayonne will be this badly injured hero’s final resting place. In symmetrical fashion, in the novel’s concluding transmontane sequence it is as if Delphine finds herself in her native place by tarrying at or on borders, rather than traversing them. Thanks to the Gothic fictions of eighteenth-century Britain, the Pyrenees and the Alps were for readers of 1802 immediately recognizable as highly literary locations. (The Alps, of course, were of biographical as well as literary importance for Staël, who, Parisian-born, was in spite of her wishes and the law of the jus soli deemed Swiss.) But it is not only because, as has often been claimed, the Gothic romance collects examples of sublime landscapes that this novelistic tradition is preoccupied with the mountain ranges that were the period’s prime examples of nations’ natural frontiers, of the evidence that national divisions were providentially guaranteed. It is also because, one might venture, the Gothic romance is dedicated to tracing the ways that the fictions of law—the institution of coverture, for instance—and the writing of history jointly exile women to a “twilight zone of being,” that “phantom state” and “enclave of fiction” that we visit with authors such as Sophia Lee, Ann Radcliffe, and Eliza Parsons, in which Gothic women literalize the association in English law of the marriage state and civil death and live on, inside haunted houses that aren’t really their homes, and in spite of rumors of their decease, as ghosts of their former selves. For this reason, the Gothic works to expose the lack of fit between the borders that recorded history recognizes and the borders that it does not, namely, those borders that delimit a territory of female experience that is “the negative space of history’s tableau.” Certainly, the second half of Delphine cultivates the uncanny in recognizably Gothic ways, blurring the lines dividing the dead from the living.28 In the language of self-abjection that Staël specializes in for this novel, Delphine describes herself as dead. She makes her final foray into a Parisian social world that is now intent on shunning her and reports that “it was my ghost strolling among the living; I could imagine the pleasures stirring them no better than if I had been contemplating the concerns of the earth from the realm of the dead” (342/1:727).
This is Corinne’s language also. The female genius inherits the ghostliness that was the portion of the abandoned woman of the earlier novel.29 More precisely, Staël’s novel seems to suggest that to be a woman of genius is already to be a ghost: as we learn belatedly, it was only by dying to the world, by allowing her English stepmother to circulate a report of her death, and by renouncing the use of the patronym by which she was known by her contemporaries, that Corinne could devise a way to use her talents—to become a Corinne. When, late in the novel, Corinne travels, in quest of news of Oswald, back to the Britain she had abandoned years before, and when she acts out her exilic condition and wanders through the grounds of her father’s Scottish estate without daring to announce herself, she unwittingly haunts her half-sister: “one would have thought ghosts were roaming”; Lucile Edgermond “was convinced that her sister’s image had appeared walking toward their father’s grave to reproach her for forgetting it” (354/499, 355/501).30
Corinne’s return defies Lady Edgermond’s effort to control the map of Europe, an effort that has Gothic precedent in that it makes Britain, the stepdaughter’s fatherland but now for the expatriate Corinne a prohibited no-man’s-land, into the equivalent of the locked chamber of the Gothic tyrant’s castle. Her reappearance on the Edgermond estate in fact turns the topography of the fatherland inside out (and so it is that, as the narrator informs us, the ground gives way beneath her feet—“la terre manquait sous ses pas” [353/499]). The woman who should be within the home is outside, and the man whom she seeks, within. Corinne’s haunting ungenders a conventional gendering of space, making her follow in the footsteps both of the demonic antagonist of a masculine tradition of “outsider Gothic” and, as Alliston observes, of Nemours from La Princesse de Clèves, “the male intruder whose desire leads him to trespass on another man’s property.” Ironically, in her guise as apparition, Corinne at the same time helps to authorize the paternal will (for Lucile, this “image” of the half-sister she presumes dead is a mnemonic for lessons in filiopiety she is in fact at little risk of forgetting).31
Shelley’s creature reincarnates these Staëlian specters, transposing them from a figurative to a literal, and emphatically embodied, register. Victor Frankenstein’s genetic engineering raises ghosts. When Victor assembles a conglomerate of the scraps of the dissecting room under one skin and thereby materializes his monstrous conception of laboratory-made new life, the dead walk. But unlike Corinne, who is complicitous with the transmission of paternal plots and properties, the ghost who stalks through Shelley’s novel, and across borders—wantonly roaming, as Croker complained, “through Germany and France, to Scotland, Ireland, and England … [and] to the most inaccessible point of the earth”—is not exactly one (indeed, it is not one) who does the bidding of the forefathers.32 On the one hand, the book has as its master discourse of interpretation the effort to reconnect the novel object to its source, an effort that the monster enacts as he brings a paternity suit against Victor on his own behalf and that novel readers enact as they respond to the invitation tendered by Shelley’s 1831 preface and try to move back from the text to its author in order to speculate about how “a young girl” came to “think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea” (5). But such attempts to make a singular author, authority, or origin monopolize meaningfulness are, on the other hand, repeatedly countered by the revelation of how thoroughly plural that origin is, how thoroughly different from itself.
In Frankenstein the attempt to bring interpretation home by locating a source seems always to end in an encounter with foreignness. Commenting on how the creature appears to have too many selves under its skin, Pamela Clemit writes that “constructed out of arbitrary bits and pieces, fragmented relics of the past, it defeats the very idea of a coherent tradition.” And, similarly, the farther we read in the 1831 preface and the more we know about the ghost-story contest at the Villa Diodati, the conversations between Lord Byron and Percy Shelley to which Mary was a “devout but nearly silent listener” (7), and the “volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into the French” that “fell into [their] hands” (6), the more opaque authorial intent comes to seem and the less certain we are that we agree with Shelley’s seeming truism (itself a quotation, “in Sanchean phrase”) that “every thing must have a beginning” (8, emphasis mine).33 Beginnings proliferate in the preface. The novel, like the body of the creature (so unlike what Victor intended it to be), is a composite that refracts authorial intent and mediates difference.34
This dissemination that renders the book and the creature no one’s offspring dictates how each will stand in relation to geopolitical boundaries, as well as to the institutions of authorship and paternal will. Identifying a flaw in the education he received while eavesdropping on and “imitating” the lessons that took place in the De Laceys’ cottage, the monster admits, “I had a very confused idea of kingdoms, wide extents of country” (125). A failure when it comes to the geopolitical idiom proper to an age of nations, he has in these language lessons learned French while in Germany. If the center of Frankenstein, the monster’s autobiographical narrative, has as its generative locale the Swabian hut, home to the Greco-Anglico-Germanico-Gallico-Arabic library that no doubt does nothing but exacerbate a reader’s geographical confusion, England is first positioned, disconcertingly enough for an English audience, at the outer edge of the novel; it is the destination (never glimpsed by this audience) of the letters Walton sends to his sister, which compose the outermost frame in this series of frame tales. Indeed, there is a second sense in which the creature learns French in the novel’s central episode, another way in which Shelley at this point breaks faith with her contemporaries’ sense of national and literary origins. At this point the creature learns to be a Staëlian hero/ine. The monster’s position outside the cottage—eavesdropping on the education given to Safie, listening to the music she and her sister-in-law provide for their menfolk, Felix and his blind father, looking in at all the sympathetic exchanges denied to him—seems to repeat that of Corinne when she haunts her father’s estate. The domestic idyll that the monster stages for Victor Frankenstein when he recounts how he spied on this family circle (a circle the more tightly knit because the De Laceys were in collective exile from France) is, furthermore, a new version of a similar Staëlian object lesson in what it means to lead “life fixed in [one’s] family’s bosom” (Delphine, 229). When Delphine takes us to a cottage as full of music as Shelley’s Swabian hut, we discover the original for the creature’s envious account of a schoolroom-home. The letter at the center of Staël’s novel, in which Léonce comes to recognize his own exile from the domestic affections, describes the visit that he and Delphine paid to the peasant’s house—situated, he writes, in a “lost corner of the earth” (232)—where the blind M. Belmont and the wife who sacrificed her place in society for him together tutor their children.
As the product of Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in imitating life and usurping the prerogatives that Victor himself ascribes to “maternal nature,” the creature has begun his existence already alienated. Not to be born but to be made is, as the etymology of nation (from natio) suggests, native nowhere. A misfit of this sort strains against the system of familial, civic, and territorial categories that human beings have developed to identify one another and to speak themselves. This is the point that the correspondences between Shelley’s and Staël’s texts bring home. Always something less than a subject, the creature stalks through the landscape of Shelley’s novel as a figure (on being sighted, he is described as “a figure of a man” [e.g., 95]). What Victor as scientist seems to have achieved in communicating life is (as Shelley’s choice of the word communicate suggests) what a novelist achieves in animating a character: in this “figure” he has personified an effect of reading. Might the creature be seen as a personification of metaphor particularly, in its guise as the figure that un-grounds meaning, the figure of transport? In this case it would be fitting that Alpine borderlands (where, as Percy Shelley put it in remarks on Frankenstein, “the head turns giddy, and the ground seems to fail under our feet”) are the sole approximation of a native habitat that the creature can claim. Victor notes that “he bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution” (98).35
Since he lacks the means to insert himself into the patrilineal scheme (Delphine’s “chain of affection,” which reappears in Frankenstein as “the chain of existence and events” [143]), since he inherits and owns nothing that he could pass down, not even a name, what is the creature’s relation to the apparatus of citizenship that organizes the nineteenth-century nation-state? Which nation? When the creature comes to him with his plea for fellowship, Mr. De Lacey senior, possibly pleased to be hearing a French without German accents, asks him whether he is his “countryman” (129). He gets no response. This conversational dead end could represent Shelley’s quiet joke at the expense of the nostalgic émigré, a figure whose avidity for news from home is notorious. But it would be premature to propose that nationalisms’ modes of organizing and delimiting communities (émigré nationalisms’ ways of doing so included) are a laughing matter for her novel. Notably, although Frankenstein and the novels of Staël do allude to the happy freedom that the creature and his destined bride, Delphine and Léonce, and Corinne and Oswald might find should they escape Europe for what each text refers to as “the wilds” of the New World, and although through this allusion Shelley and Staël do keep in circulation the Enlightenment notions of the state of nature and of the legitimacy of political secession that were during their lives rapidly being eclipsed by “a confining principle of nationality,” these visions of nontragic endings of course prove no more than visions.36 Frankenstein, I hinted earlier, is less resigned than Corinne is to the idea that the dead who walk must walk for the father. It is less intent than the earlier novel on imagining even the “unhallowed arts” (Victor’s phrase) of a woman who refuses the patronym as operating to restore the father’s image.37 (Corinne, of course, uses her artistic talent to repair Oswald’s miniature of his father after it has been damaged. As others have noted, it is as if her retracing of the lines of the painting dictates that her lover will retrace his steps back to his fatherland and the wife his father had chosen for him.) But even while Frankenstein problematizes the authority of origins in the manner I describe above, it also in its own way inherits and in turn passes on the old Gothic plot of malign legacies and intergenerational resemblance and repetition, the plot about the sins of the fathers.
That the creature becomes the serial murderer of Victor Frankenstein’s loved ones suggests, especially to him, the omnipotence of that plot: it suggests how he is fated to lose his innocence and, just like Victor before him, “sport … with life” (96). As much as a mournful, guilt-ridden Staëlian heroine, the creature ends up haunted by “his” dead—and by the end of the novel and his killing spree, there are dead who “belong” to him. Perhaps the guilt staves off what in a new nationalist, historicist age might by definition be a greater terror, that of not being haunted, of “ceasing to feel the weight of past generations in one’s bones.”38
As I have suggested, the monstrosity that puts the creature outside the common order of nature exiles him likewise from the categories of family and nation. In this way Shelley arranges for the creature to reiterate the question Staël’s heroines pose as they plead for sympathy. What relations (in a double sense of that term)—that is, what kinds of stories, what provisions for an audience, what arrangements for recognition by others who are equals, and what sense of groundedness—are available to those outside the chain of affections? Rather than supplying the answer that this leading question demands (“none”), we might instead follow Bruce Robbins’s lead and, altering the terms, envision models of coalition different from the inclusion-exclusion structures of the nation and family and ask why we assume that either structure represents affection’s “natural home.” Setting out to redeem cosmopolitanism, Robbins has us rethink the way we transfer to the nation the warmth, inevitability, and inviolability that we associate with the familial sphere. Robbins complicates that transfer—familiar since Edmund Burke attacked the Jacobins’ universalist rhetoric with the claim that “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon, is the first principle … of public affections”—as he observes that feeling “extends no less naturally beyond the nation than up to the nation’s borders.” Robbins also speculates on whether it might be possible to find an alternative to the narrative of moral and affective development assumed by the Burkean account, that account in which the child begins by loving only its particular parents and moves on to its other relatives, then the local group, then the nation, and only then—but perhaps never—humanity in the abstract. Couldn’t one develop a moral code in which it would be easier to couple love and internationalism if one acknowledged that individuals’ affinities for the particular are as much the objects of social construction and social contest—and, especially when we remember the generational and other unhappinesses to which families are liable, are finally as unnatural—as those other forms of commitment that might at first strike us as abstract, estranged from everyday experience, and, in a word, bloodless? Why assume that for culture to count as authentic, as a plausible object of love, it must be transmitted vertically along bloodlines? Why subordinate the “other” relations that contribute to the formation of children’s individual and cultural identities—those between, for instance, siblings and peers—to filial love?39
Indeed, for centuries states have, in Frankensteinian style, indulged in the genetic engineering that rescripts “natural” relations. One prerogative of the British Home Office has been to send and receive the “letters of naturalization” (in France these are lettres de naturalité) that by overwriting the principles of jus soli (citizenship by birthplace) and jus sanguinis (citizenship by family) work to transform aliens into natives, “children of the kingdom.” And, as Benedict Anderson’s work suggests, letters of naturalization in a broader sense of the term that would include such artifacts of print capitalism as the novel must be seen not simply as supplements to the identity of a nation “born out of the dark, unconscious continuities of inherited culture” but instead as that identity’s source.40 Nations in this account are paper bodies, imagined before they are experienced. The bonds of affiliation that make a nation are not found in nature but made by books. And the success of their post-Romantic efforts to monopolize natural feeling notwithstanding, nations are no more grounded in the realm of the particular and the palpable—and in this sense as well no more natural—than Frankenstein’s footloose creature.
Furthermore, as Robbins asks while he engages Anderson’s story of how print capitalism’s combination of technological and social innovation made it possible to extend the scale on which community could be imagined, why follow the example of Imagined Communities and assume that such a process comes “to a halt once it has produced national culture”?41 The most remarkable feature of Frankenstein may be its reluctance to heed that stop sign. The novel goes to great lengths to separate not only artificial reproduction (Victor’s practice of unhallowed arts) but also sexual reproduction from inviolate national spaces. In the scenes of home life that Percy Shelley wanted readers to take to heart parenting repeatedly crosses national lines, especially after Mary’s 1831 revisions. Bride of a Frenchman who is in exile in Germany, Safie begins her life as the product of another mixed marriage, contracted between her Turkish father and Christian Arab mother (119–20). Adoption that is the result of international travel brings Elizabeth Lavenza, first encountered as the nursling of an Italian peasant, into the Frankenstein home, where Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein raises the orphan to be Victor’s cousin-sister and her own substitute. The novel’s stories of courtship and marriage, Frances Ferguson observes, make “the standard means through which a new family is created and continued,” namely, the woman’s departure from her father’s household and her entry into her husband’s, look “strangely monstrous.” This is one way Shelley undermines from the outset any contrast we might wish to establish between the creature’s natal alienation and human beings’ capacity to call some place and some social circle home. If in fact Victor commences his autobiographical narrative by wielding his genealogical capital—“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics; and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation” (31)—the details of the story following this beginning belie this confidence about origins. Victor, it turns out, is born far outside Geneva’s gates, at Naples, while his footloose parents take the Grand Tour (33); and Victor Frankenstein senior’s retirement from public life, and the fact that the story casts such retirement as prerequisite for paternity, trouble models in which citizenship entails a distinctively public exercise of virtue.42
Because Frankenstein defines exile as the inevitable, primordial condition, the family affairs in the novel unfold as often as not through letters of naturalization. The novel demotes sexual reproduction, positioning it as one means of homemaking among others. Long before Victor sets up his workshop of filthy creation, the Frankensteins have set the transmission of a family resemblance at odds not just with the inheritance of nationality but also with the preservation of a bloodline.
If Victor’s experimentation remakes fatherhood as an oddly literal and embodied business—if his flagrantly visible physical symptoms during the weeks leading up to the creature’s animation controvert Freud’s claim in Moses and Monotheism that the recognition of fatherhood depends on a faith in things unseen and represents the triumph of intellectuality over sensuality—by contrast, mothering, when Victor describes his home life, seems to entail abstraction, imagination, and metaphorical substitution.43 It is apt that when he returns home after communicating life to his monster Victor’s reintroduction to his family is inaugurated by the sight of two family pictures in his father’s library. Over the mantelpiece is a full-scale portrait of Caroline Beaufort Frankenstein, imaged kneeling by the coffin of her dead father, and below it is a miniature of William, her murdered son (75). To acknowledge the scandalous suggestion that this arrangement of big and little family pictures in the family library conveys—to note how with this display of three generations of specimens of nature morte Shelley makes it seem as though a reproduction could reproduce, as if one artistic conception might generate the next—is to begin to enrich our sense of the central conflict in the novel. It is not straightforwardly between (maternal) nature and (masculine) technology. Instead, the novel stages a “rivalry of artificial seminations,” “a contest between ways of reproducing nature [variously, the scientist’s, the novelist’s, and the artist’s] which denies natural reproduction altogether.”44 To recognize this is also to rethink how Shelley figures women. In some measure, to be a mother in her novel is to be a beautiful image (artwork) and not a living woman. (A prime source of the novel’s horrors, this of course is the logic that dictates that, with the monster’s murderous assistance, Shelley’s prose will exhibit a series of lovely corpses.) Caroline, tellingly, is painted twice. But while she lives, Caroline contrives to copy herself. At her instigation, the Frankenstein family procures its daughters by unnatural rather than sexual means. Caroline, as I have noted, selects Elizabeth, who first enters the novel as an image, as, in Victor’s words, “a pictured cherub” and “apparition” (34), to be her substitute. She also creates another virtual image of herself when she connives to have Justine admitted into the family as servant-cum-daughter and sponsors that “imitat[ion]” of her own “phraseology and manners” that will be the short-lived Justine’s life’s work (64). (Subsequent to Caroline’s death, Elizabeth describes Justine as if she were her foster mother’s funeral effigy: “her mien and her expressions continually remind of my dear aunt” [64].)45
As others have observed, to note how Caroline makes nurture substitute for nature is to glimpse a precedent for her scientist son’s determination to imitate life—for Victor’s indulgence in what the creature, who is made up from secondhand parts and receives his education at second hand, describes as the unauthorized, derivative copying that makes him but a copy of a copy. “God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance” (126–27). The creature, in this account, does more than embody Victor’s masculine presumption: his existence also testifies to the son’s assimilation of lessons learned at the mother’s knee. But I wish to think about Justine and Elizabeth as copies for a second reason, so as to reopen discussion of the allegory of authorship that Frankenstein offers and so as to install this model of a woman-to-woman transmission of culture, and attendant disruption of paternal privilege, at the center of that discussion.46 What happens if, rather than focusing exclusively on Victor’s creation of a monstrous progeny, one acknowledges that Shelley might likewise be discussing artistic inspiration and creation when she gives this account of Caroline’s parenting—Caroline’s way not just of making babies but also of, in effect, deploying letters of naturalization so as to make them up?
To acknowledge this, I wish to contend, is to re-see textual relations in ways that undermine the patrilineal structure and domestic framework of our literary histories because it is to see how Shelley casts her authorship as the consequence of her textual fostering by a foreign woman. Pointing to Shelley as a negative object lesson in the power of a patriarchal literary tradition, of an arrangement that gives women less than full citizenship in the republic of letters, feminist criticism has demonstrated brilliantly, if pessimistically, how the book-baby (the “monstrous progeny”) that is Frankenstein “literalizes the literalization of male literature.” (This is how Margaret Homans puts it as she considers how, given a normative account of women as the vessels for embodying and realizing male ideas, the monster, as he wanders about the woods of Germany carrying his male-authored library as well as the scientific journal Victor kept prior to his creation, must be seen as perversely enacting a female fate: he is quite precisely “bearing the words” that recount his origin.)47 But while she rescripts familial and national relations both within and through the novel, Shelley is also casting Frankenstein as the realization of Staël’s alternative vision of how to probate a textual inheritance. For scenes in which Staël depicts the learning of foreign languages, scenes of home schooling that make home into a way of going outside, provide the script for Justine’s imitation of Caroline’s “phraseology and manners” as well as for the creature’s imitation of Safie’s French lessons, read out of the book that the abbé Volney wrote in “imitation of eastern authors.”
It is to that script of “imitation” that Shelley imitates that I turn in concluding. Staël’s writings on aesthetics, I noted above, provided one template for narratives identifying the Romantic movement with a rupture with the mimetic tradition. The turn from neoclassical practices of imitation that is at stake in Romanticism enables, according to this familiar story line, a (redemptive) return to origins and, since Romantic originality is easily harnessed to nationalist ends, the recovery of native, vernacular powers. De l’Allemagne may, with its talk of how Romantic literature is “chez nous indigène,” be aligned with Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, which had cautioned five decades earlier that “an Imitator is a transplanter of laurels, which sometimes die on removal, always languish in a foreign soil.”48 However, if we admit that De l’Allemagne advocates, in cosmopolitan fashion, literary change inside France, and if we consult the discussion of novel writing that occupies Staël’s preface to Delphine, the originality that Staël values comes to seem an affair paradoxically dependent on cross-cultural exchanges and border violations. Each text proposes that it is through the emulation of foreign examples that a purely native literature may be acquired. For instance, the preface argues that only by transcending the prejudices that prevent them from studying any subject but themselves, only by reading novels that originate beyond the borders of the nation (especially English and German novels), will the French in the nineteenth century produce a literature possessed of “a character all its own” (6/1:85). And Corinne, when it allegorizes authorship, makes authorial self-expression, even by Shakespeare, Romantic uber-author and epitome of original genius, depend on the author’s relocation to what one might punningly call the bilingual state. By translating Romeo and Juliet into Italian (and so providing herself with a star vehicle), Corinne, we are told, is repatriating a play written “with the southern imagination.” She returns it to its “native tongue” [sa langue maternelle] (126/194).
As if complying with a logic that, in Staël’s novel too, dictates a literalization of literature, art’s imitation by nature, Corinne’s half-sister Lucile names the daughter who is born to her and Oswald Juliette. Staëlian genetic engineering contrives it so that this British child is the living souvenir of Corinne’s Shakespearean performance, the incarnation of her translation. With her dark eyes and hair, Juliette is made in Corinne’s Italian image. And when she retraces the Italian journey her father took years before her birth and, arriving in Florence, begins language and music lessons with her aunt, the scene of schooling that follows is described in ekphrastic terms, that is, precisely as a scene. “[Juliette] was holding a lyre-shaped harp made for her size, in the same way that Corinne held it, and her little arms and pretty expression imitated Corinne perfectly. It was like seeing a beautiful painting in miniature” [la miniature d’un beau tableau] (411/575).
As this description suggests, Juliette also keeps alive the memory of that “binge of mimesis” that distinguishes the closing days of Corinne’s career. This is when the novel complicates its initial staging of the paragone and so complicates the modeling of international relations and gender relations that such assessments of the rivalry between visual (representational) and verbal (rhetorical) arts had sponsored at least since the time of Lessing’s Laocoön. (As W. J. T. Mitchell notes in his account of the language of eighteenth-century aesthetics, such efforts to determine the boundaries between poetry and pictures and between writing and speech customarily proceeded with reference to national borders, as if aesthetics functioned as a kind of European boundary commission. They also proceeded by way of claims about the masculinity and femininity of poems and images, as if the genres had to be segregated because the genders did.)49
One symptom of that complication is the way that Corinne the improvisatrice becomes, her bardic work and distaste for “cold letters” (268) notwithstanding, associated more and more as the novel unfolds with arts of imitation and with the visible, cases in point being her restoration of the miniature imaging old Lord Nelvil and her choice to write her life story for Oswald (who, for his part, despite his former habits of silence and reserve, manages to tell his). Pictures proliferate in the last part of Corinne, as, referring to images, spectacles, and apparitions, the language of Staël’s narrator exhibits a growing propensity for a pictorialism that, as in the narratives of Frankenstein, with their references to these terms, has the effect of making originals appear as visions and so like reproductions themselves. The tableau vivant that the dying Corinne arranges from a distance, when by making Juliette her double she takes a Gothic revenge on Oswald and the paternal literary order, marks the culminating stage in this process. And, as others have argued, it is troubling how Corinne here replays the Gothic father’s power of self-replication, by the book even: how she gets even with the imperatives of patrilineal inheritance and English nationalism by imitating what we would rather see her resist.50 But what is also notable is how these mutations in the novel’s ordering of the genres also entail a slide that makes the oral tradition with which the bardophilic Corinne is fascinated strangely different from itself. I am thinking of how the sound of language in this part of the novel becomes subject to the iteration, quotation, and dislocation that in the history of the novel are associated with letters, with novels of epistolary intrigue; how the improvised, unscripted speech of the bard—so important to cultural nationalism’s memory work because its immediacy seemed to guarantee the locality and locatedness of the word and of communities mediated by words—becomes here deracinated and portable, a token of desire.
Let me refer to a language lesson that transpires in Staël’s earlier, epistolary novel so as to suggest how the aural desire and oral imitation of this episode might trouble the linguistic nationalisms of an era obsessed with the locality of the mother tongue and intent on using nostalgic reconstructions of an originary speech as “a machine for re-creating context.”51 In the letter she writes on arriving in Switzerland and taking up residence in the Abbaye du Paradis, Delphine describes her fascination with the abbess, who, she has learned, is Léonce’s maternal aunt. Her description of Mme de Ternan seems to reverse the orders of the generations as it insists on how the aunt takes after the nephew; it registers a significant challenge to patrilineal protocol in noting that the nephew was named for the aunt (christened Léontine); and, as Delphine outlines the educational program she will pursue in the convent, it denatures speech, making the mother tongue an object detachable from the maternal body. “When she speaks, she has the slight Spanish accent that, as you know, lends such grace and nobility to Léonce’s speech…. As I live with her, I shall learn all the words she pronounces as Léonce does; all the impressions that reinforce the traces of her resemblance to him” (363/1:770). At home in England, Oswald makes a discovery about the imitability of speech that resembles Delphine’s. “Occasionally, Oswald indulged in the pleasure of using Corinne’s expressions to explain her ideas; he enjoyed listening to himself when he borrowed her language” (387/544). At the end of her life Corinne makes Oswald’s discovery in reverse: her enjoyment of her language depends on her lending it out. As the narrator makes clear, it is not so much the plaintive content but the medium that is the message in what the novel calls, misleadingly in fact, “Corinne’s Last Song”; when, at this point, Staël restages Corinne’s laureate performance and so conducts the narrative, full circle, back to its euphoric opening, it is the “touching” discrepancy between the verses that Corinne has written out and the body of the young girl who has been recruited to speak them that gives this heroine pleasure (415). Self-expression depends in this instance on language’s availability to others, the iterability that enables its passage across bodily boundaries.
I think that we are close here to the idiosyncratic style of language learning that is modeled by Shelley’s monster, whose schooling at the De Lacey cottage elides the distinction between the phonetic and the alphabetic (as Maureen McLane notes, the monster does not acquire his first language, French, by purely oral means, but relies as well on a book): such an elision suggests that language is always already alphabetized, a denatured combinatoire, for it casts the native speech at the novel’s center as reinvented transcription.52 Another way to specify the nature of this schooling is to note that the monster learns his first language as if it were a second. If the ideas of the mother tongue embraced with such enthusiasm in the new Europe of nations are mobilized the better to bind people’s affections to their country of origin, bilingualism (advocated in De l’Allemagne because “il est amusante de prononcer des mots étrangers: on écoute comme si c’était un autre qui parlât” [it is pleasing to pronounce foreign words: one listens as if it were some one else who was speaking])53 works altogether differently. It makes speech into something neither here nor there. The lessons in a second language that Juliette receives from Corinne, like the ones her mother before her received (lessons that for Lucile made her half-sister as much beloved as if she were her “second mother”), invent relations in all senses of that term (“Bilingual wit,” Doris Sommer writes, “attest[s] to the kind of intelligence that invents relationships where there had been none”).54 They carve out an extraterritorial space for feminine solidarities. And what readings of the ending of Corinne as a revenge fantasy that merely reinstalls a Gothic law of fathers can underestimate is the extent to which first Lucile and then her daughter are active participants in their fostering by Corinne. Juliette, after all, resembles Corinne because during her confinement Lucile is “absorbed with memories of her sister” (386). By endowing Lucile with an unconfinable imagination, Staël locates the reproduction of culture outside nature and the confines of the nation-state, in the circulation of languages among women. To transgress the boundaries of nationalist literary histories, traverse the Channel, and reconstruct Shelley’s ways of entering into this circuit is to realize that such artificial insemination represents both the content and the form of Staël’s pedagogic legacy.
Notes
Correspondence and conversation with Carolyn Dever, Logan Esdale, Ina Ferris, and Tom Keirstead helped me write this chapter: my thanks to them and to the anonymous readers for the Princeton University Press for their assistance.
1. Mary Shelley to John Murray, 18 November 1829, 5 March, 25 May, 9 August 1830, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty Bennett, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 2:89, 105, 110, 113. Bennett observes that Prosper Merimée cautioned Shelley about the difficulties that would get in the way of describing Staël’s erotic life “plainly aux Anglais” (89 n. 3). See also Mrs. Shelley et al., Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840): a 45-page biography of Staël concludes vol. 2.
2. Madame [Anne-Louise-Germaine] de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. and ed. Avriel Goldberger (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 133; and idem, Corinne ou l’Italie, ed. Simone Balayé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 204. Subsequent references are to these editions and appear parenthetically in the text.
3. Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999).
4. Mary A. Favret, “A Home for Art: Painting, Poetry, and Domestic Interiors,” in At the Limits of Romanticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 78.
5. Indeed, each novelist contrives to pay homage to the previous century’s epistolary fiction, a genre that, notwithstanding its reputation as a crucible for the invention of privacy, had a significant investment in the idea that literacy might bring into being new formations of intimacy, communities whose lingua franca would be sentiment and whose memberships would extend beyond the boundaries of home and of nation. The epistolarity that links Delphine and Frankenstein suggests, that is, that Staël and Shelley might with some justice be said to favor correspondence courses and distance learning.
6. Courses on “the Shelley Circle,” for example, circumscribe those processes of literary exchange that we now call Romanticism, naturalizing a notion of Romantic intertextuality as a family affair.
7. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology and Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Mary Shelley, “Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition (1831),” in Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 5. Subsequent references to Frankenstein are to this edition, based on the revised 1831 text of the novel, and appear parenthetically in the text.
8. [John Wilson Croker], review of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Quarterly Review 18 (1818): 382, 380.
9. I receive assistance in this project from April Alliston’s description of how critical attention to women’s correspondences can unsettle customary ways of construing literary influence: “What I am plotting here is neither the map of a lost mother country nor the visible line of a tradition, but rather the readable lines of women’s correspondence, which invite its readers, strange heirs—strangers and therefore heirs—to break the frames of maternal inheritance” (Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], 17). See also Nanora Sweet’s rereading of the salon in the Romantic period—Staël’s salon at Coppet among others—as a site of language learning that provided nineteenth-century women with routes from the parlor to the international arena, bypassing the national altogether: “ ‘Lorenzo’s’ Liverpool and ‘Corinne’s’ Coppet: The Italianate Salon and Romantic Education,” in Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. Thomas Pfau and Robert F. Gleckner (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 244–60.
Previous discussions of Staël and Shelley have focused on the Englishwoman’s later fictions: see Doris Y. Kadish, Politicizing Gender: Narrative Strategies in the Aftermath of the French Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 15–36 (on The Last Man); and Karri Lokke, “Sibylline Leaves: Mary Shelley’s Valperga and the Legacy of Corinne,” in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. Gregory Maertz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 157–73.
10. Mary A. Favret, “A Woman Writes the Fiction of Science: The Body in Frankenstein,” Genders 4 (1992): 61. Reading Favret’s essay helped me immensely in composing my own.
11. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 4. See also Andrew Parker et al., eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992).
12. James Mackintosh, review of On Germany, by Madame de Staël, Edinburgh Review, October 1813, quoted in Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, “Staël’s Germany and the Beginnings of an American National Literature,” in Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders, ed. Madelyn Gutwirth et al. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 143–44; Germaine de Staël, De l’Allemagne, intro. Simone Balayé (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1968), 214.
13. I quote Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 95. For a parallel account of how the nationalism of the Republic led the state to promote the teaching of French in the provinces, in an effort to assure “l’unité de l’idiome,” see Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une Politique de la langue: La Révolution française et les patois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), esp. 160–68.
14. For much of the early modern period the translatio imperii et studii, for instance, had supplied a classic means of talking about that diffusion, providing a narrative framework that could be mobilized to tell the universal story of worldly refinement and material progress anytime and anywhere. On the shift from cultivation to culture see David Hill Radcliffe, “Ossian and the Genres of Culture,” Studies in Romanticism 31, no. 2 (1992): 213–32; and for the role of the Coppet salon, Martin Thom, Republics, Nations, and Tribes (London: Verso, 1995), esp. pt. 3.
15. Thom, Republics, Nations, and Tribes, 33–34.
16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, quoted in David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 62.
17. On how cultural nationalisms of this era were shaped around memories (authentic, false, or appropriated from others) of oral traditions and the bards who preserved them, see Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Staël’s ability to mobilize the glamour of the Celtic fringe and apply it to new ends in other climes makes her useful in her turn for novelists on the other side of the Channel. Thus, as George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver will recognize, in the episode of The Mill on the Floss in which Maggie proves an unpliable student and Philip Wakem, who provides those reading lessons, proves an untrustworthy teacher, the Staëlian heroine repeatedly reappears in Scott’s fiction as that dark, passionate heroine whose various avatars, in one Waverley novel after another, must be renounced by the heroes. They instead marry the blonde counterparts of those dark unhappy ones, sacrificing ardor to the claims of prudential morality and the security of real property (see George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, ed. George S. Haight [Oxford: Clarendon, 1980], 261–71, 285–96; and Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels, with New Essays on Scott [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 54–82).
18. The quotation is from James Macpherson’s “The Songs of Selma,” in The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 170.
19. On Sappho’s transformation in this era see Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 158–66. On expatriation and marriage in Staël, see Claire Garry-Boussel, “Les Conduites spatiales des personnages masculins dans les écrits fictionnels de Mme de Staël,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 10, no. 4 (1998): 483–99.
20. See the discussion of this irony in John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s De l’Allemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
21. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 142. See also Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism, and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (summer 1993): 61–80; and Deidre Lynch, “Domesticating Fictions and Nationalizing Women: Edmund Burke, Property, and the Reproduction of Englishness,” in Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, ed. Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 40–71.
22. See Alliston’s discussion of Corinne in Virtue’s Faults, esp. 195–205.
23. Anonymous review of Corinne, or Italy, by Madame de Staël, Anti-Jacobin Review 32 (April 1809): 456. Compare the worries about interbreeding expressed in the Gazette de France, 27 May 1807, when it draws a parallel between Corinne, a woman “who has the talents and qualities of a man” and should therefore “not be counted as a woman,” and “a rose bush that bears laurel leaves” and should therefore not “be counted as one of its kind” (quoted in Margaret Waller, The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993], 60; the translation is Waller’s).
24. Another key text is Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754), whose plot Corinne retraces and whose truth it verifies. Corinne says to Oswald that when he returns home his countrymen “will tell you … that every Englishman in the world has loved Italian women in the course of his travels and forgotten them when he got back” (310).
25. I owe the phrase “national heroine without a nation” to conversations with Ina Ferris and the opportunity to see something of her forthcoming Unsettled Subjects: The Romantic National Tale and British Discourse on Ireland.
26. The quotation from Delphine appears in Germaine de Staël, Delphine, trans. Avriel H. Goldberger (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 379; and in Madame de Staël, Delphine, ed. Simone Balayé and Lucia Omacini, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 1:802. Subsequent references to Delphine are to these editions and appear parenthetically in the text.
27. McClintock, “Family Feuds,” 65. On populationist policies, see DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 186–87; the essays in pt. 3 of Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities; and Ruth Perry, “Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): 204–34. For an account of how French politicians in the Thermidorean and Directorial eras paved the way for the 1804 code by casting the family rather than the individual as the bedrock of the modern state, see Suzanne Desan, “Reconstituting the Social after the Terror: Family, Property, and the Law in Popular Politics,” Past and Present, no. 164 (August 1999): 81–121. My thanks to Keith Luria for this reference, and I am grateful as well to his fellow French historians Jeremy Popkin and Rod Phillips for helping me to understand the implications of these legal transformations.
28. On Staël’s engagement with Britain’s Gothic tradition, see also Alliston, Virtue’s Faults. The phrase “twilight zone of being” is E. J. Clery’s; I borrow it from her discussion of how the female Gothic exposes the phantasmagoric dimensions of English property law (The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 120). I also draw here on accounts Jayne Elizabeth Lewis and Richard Maxwell have offered of the tomblike, womblike space that Sophia Lee invented in her 1783–85 novel The Recess, which provides Lee with a site from which public history may be rewritten (see Lewis’s Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation [London: Routledge, 1998], 137–38; and Maxwell’s chapter in this volume). Ann Radcliffe makes the perilous journey through the smuggler-infested mountain ranges that separate nations a trademark of her fiction (see The Mysteries of Udolpho [1794] particularly, but see also The Romance of the Forest [1791], in which the hero abandons his regiment just as it begins its duty at a frontier post in the Pyrenees and the heroine’s escape route takes her across the Alpine border between France and the duchy of Savoy). On natural frontiers, see Denis Richet, “Natural Borders,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Daniel Nordman, “Des limites d’état aux frontières nationales,” in Les Lieux de mémoire, ed. Pierre Nora, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 2, pt. 2:35–61.
29. Corinne’s talents are equivalent to the anomalous legal and fiscal independence that Delphine has as a widow.
30. On Scotland as “a state of haunting rather than a state of being on the [eighteenth-century] map of national character,” see April Alliston, “Of Haunted Highlands: Mapping a Geography of Gender in the Margins of Europe,” in Maertz, Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age, 55–78, quotation on 73.
31. Alliston, Virtue’s Faults, 205. On outsider versus insider Gothic, see Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
32. Croker, review of Frankenstein, 381.
33. Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 166. On the form of the novel, and for a compelling account of the status of “origins” according to Shelley’s Introduction, see Mary A. Favret, “The Letters of Frankenstein,” Genre 20 (spring 1987): 3–24.
34. Shelley anticipates Edward Said’s Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) in understanding textuality as the displacement of relations linked by familial analogy. Where formerly one found “father and son, the image, the process of genesis, a story,” modernism, Said asserts, foregrounds, not those dynastic or mimetic relations that privilege a paternal origin or a source, but instead discontinuities and processes of paragenesis (66). Said’s discussion of novels’ treatment of notions of origin and filiation would have been considerably enriched, and differently periodized, had he attended to novels by women.
35. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Remarks on Frankenstein,” quoted in Favret, “Letters of Frankenstein,” 20. See Maureen Noelle McLane’s “Literate Species: Populations, ‘Humanities,’ and Frankenstein” (ELH 63, no. 4 [1996]: 959–88) for a superb discussion of the creature as natally alienated, without a native place.
36. The quotation is from Thom, Republics, Nations, and Tribes, 34.
37. Corinne, by contrast, although it breaks out of the confines of the sentimental novel to include the entire European continent, invents a world that can seem merely to “replicat[e] the repressive constraints of the family circle” (Waller, Male Malady, 68; see also Margaret Cohen, “Melancholia, Mania, and the Reproduction of the Dead Father,” in The Novel’s Seductions: Staël’s “Corinne” in Critical Inquiry, ed. Karyna Szmurlo [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1999], 95–113).
38. I owe this insight to Patricia Yaeger’s meditations on mourning in “Consuming Trauma; or, the Pleasures of Merely Circulating,” Journal X 2 (1997): 236.
39. I draw here on Robbins, Feeling Global, 151, 19–20, 170; and Angelika Bammer, “Mother Tongues and Other Strangers: Writing ‘Family’ across Cultural Divides,” in Bammer, ed., Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 90–109. The quotation is from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 136.
40. Robbins, Feeling Global, 148–51, 21.
41. Ibid., 21. See also Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
42. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 109. At this point in my reading of Shelley I depart from Maureen McLane’s account. Taking Victor’s assertion about his secure natal relation to the state at face value, she assumes that there is a natural relation to the nation that the fact of the monster’s existence violates (“Literate Species,” 966–67).
43. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 23:113.
44. Favret, “A Woman Writes the Fiction of Science,” 51, 61. Importantly, Favret insists that when we redefine the terms of the novel’s conflict in this way, we are not suspending the possibility of a feminist reading of Frankenstein: “by removing the debate from natural to only unnatural productions we intensify the issue of gender difference” (51).
45. See Johanna M. Smith’s discussion of Frankensteinian parenting in her Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism edition of Shelley’s novel, “ ‘Cooped Up’ with ‘Sad Trash’: Domesticity and the Sciences in Frankenstein,” in Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Smith (Boston: Bedford Books, 2000), 313–33; and Frances Ferguson, “The Nuclear Sublime,” diacritics 14 (1981): 4–10.
46. For a representative sample of discussions of authorship in Frankenstein see Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 129–62; Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 100–119; Favret, “Letters of Frankenstein”; Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 213–47; and David E. Musselwhite, Partings Welded Together: Politics and Desire in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Methuen, 1987), 43–74.
47. Homans, Bearing the Word, 117. See also ibid., 115: “Shelley’s novel literalizes romantic imagination…. Shelley criticizes [texts such as Alastor and Paradise Lost] by enacting them, and because enactment or embodiment is both the desire and the fear of such texts, the mode of her criticism matters…. [I]n the ideology of postromantic culture, it is part of a woman’s duty to transcribe and give form to men’s words, just as it is her duty to give form to their desire, or birth to their seed, no matter how ambivalently men may view the results of such projects.”
48. Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918), 7.
49. On this “binge of mimesis,” see Cohen, “Melancholia, Mania, and the Reproduction of the Dead Father,” 112; and on the paragone as international competition as well as an occasion for reestablishing the boundaries between genders, see W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 105, 109. See also the description of the lovers’ tour of the artistic masterpieces collected in Rome (Corinne, 146): “Oswald and Corinne disagreed, but their differences here as in everything else had to do with differences of nations, climates, and religions.”
50. See Cohen, “Melancholia, Mania, and the Reproduction of the Dead Father”; Joan DeJean, “Staël’s Corinne: The Novel’s Other Dilemma,” reprinted in Szmurlo, The Novel’s Seductions, 126; and Alliston, Virtue’s Faults, 213.
51. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 122.
52. McLane, “Literate Species,” 973.
53. Staël, De l’Allemagne, 197, my translation.
54. Doris Sommer, “Be-longing and Bi-lingual States,” diacritics 29 (1999): 95.