Mathilda

“ I could only relieve my transports by tears, tears of unmingled joy. He had returned, and he wrote to know whether my aunt would come to London or whether he should visit her in Scotland. How delicious to me were the words of his letter that concerned me: “I cannot tell you,” it said, “how ardently I desire to see my Mathilda. I look on her as the creature who will form the happiness of my future life: she is all that exists on earth that interests me. ”

“ To this life, miserable father, I devote thee!—Go!—Be thy days passed with savages, and thy nights under the cope of heaven! Be thy limbs worn and thy heart chilled, and all youth be dead within thee! Let thy hairs be as snow; thy walk trembling and thy voice have lost its mellow tones! Let the liquid lustre of thine eyes be quenched; and then return to me, return to thy Mathilda, thy child, who may then be clasped in thy loved arms, while thy heart beats with sinless emotion. ”

“ My child, if after this life I am permitted to see you again, if pain can purify the heart, mine will be pure: if remorse may expiate guilt, I shall be guiltless.
[“] I have been at the door of your chamber: every thing is silent. You sleep. Do you indeed sleep, Mathilda? Spirits of Good, behold the tears of my earnest prayer! Bless my child! Protect her from the selfish among her fellow creatures: protect her from the agonies of passion, and the despair of disappointment! Peace, Hope and Love be thy guardians, oh, thou soul of my soul: thou in whom I breathe! ”

“ This one little house was always very full with Miss Mathilda, an under servant, stray dogs and cats and Anna's voice that scolded, managed, grumbled all day long.
"Sallie! can't I leave you alone a minute but you must run to the door to see the butcher boy come down the street and there is Miss Mathilda calling for her shoes. Can I do everything while you go around always thinking about nothing at all? If I ain't after you every minute you would be forgetting all the time, and I take all this pains, and when you come to me you was as ragged as a buzzard and as dirty as a dog. ”

“ In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda’s history is set in a fanciful framework. The author is transported by the fairy Fantasia to the Elysian Fields, where she listens to the discourse of Diotima and meets Mathilda. Mathilda tells her story, which closes with her death. In the final draft this unrealistic and largely irrelevant framework is discarded: Mathilda, whose death is approaching, writes out for her friend Woodville the full details of her tragic history which she had never had the courage to tell him in person. ”

“ S. MATHILDA, EMPRESS. (A.D. 968.)
[Roman Martyrology. Authority:—The Life drawn up by order of the emperor Henry, her grandson.]
The father of the empress Mathilda was Dietrich, count of Ringelheim, a descendant of the famous Witikind, prince of the Saxons, who had maintained so long and stubborn a resistance against Charlemagne. Her mother, Reinhild, was of royal Danish and Frisian blood. In her childhood Mathilda was entrusted to the tender care of her grandmother Hedwig, who had quitted the world, and had become abbess of Erfurt. ”

“ Moira had considered Mathilda not at all in the swift, sudden, almost cyclonic romance with Hal Blaydon, no more indeed than in any of her flirtations. There had been many others, of all ages, from her own up to fifty, and she had vaguely realized that when her choice was made, if she made a choice, her mother would have to be counted in. At times during the past week of incredible magic, she had feared the possibility of a clash between them, owing to the good Episcopalian views, to which Mathilda still clung, despite the advanced and advancing habits of thought that surrounded her. ”

“ The last references to the story are after Shelley’s death in an unpublished journal entry and two of Mary’s letters. In her journal for October 27, 1822, she told of the solace for her misery she had once found in writing Mathilda. In one letter to Mrs. Gisborne she compared the journey of herself and Jane to Pisa and Leghorn to get news of Shelley and Williams to that of Mathilda in search of her father, “driving— (like Matilda) , towards the sea to learn if we were to be for ever doomed to misery.” ”

“ He was, Mathilda thought, more attentive to her than many an enamoured husband, and she admired him for it.
The idea of moving to the country at first frightened Ellen, with that pitiful fear which all dependents have of impending change. What will become of them, they ask themselves, in the general forgetfulness?—and a hundred misgivings and imagined instances of dissatisfaction on the part of their masters throng their minds. ”

“ Blaydon smoked his cigar in silence, while she finished her second black coffee and leaned back in her chair swinging a tiny foot of which she was proud. In the shimmering, palpable light, shot with many colours, Mathilda’s face and hair were [77] still amazingly pretty. There were many who would have accepted the kind of slavery that marriage with her would have entailed, and some among them who had no need for her money. But she was not thinking of that. The arts of vanity had ceased to be a conscious lure; they were the essentials of well-bred self-cultivation. ”

“ In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda speaks as one who has already died.
[74] Cf. Shelley’s emphasis on hope and its association with love in all his work. When Mary wrote Mathilda she knew Queen Mab (see Part VIII, ll. 50-57, and Part IX, ll. 207-208) , the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound. The fourth act was written in the winter of 1819, but Demogorgon’s words may already have been at least adumbrated before the beginning of November:
To love and bear, to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates. ”

“ As for the Lady Mathilda, what I tell you is that her favour may be gained by means of the singer's gift, such as Master Klingsohr possesses. I began by making light of your singing, to show you your own lack of skill. But the fact that you begin to see your own shortcomings when I give you some inklings of the true craft is sufficient to prove that you are possessed of good dispositions. Who knows? You may be destined to tread in Master Klingsohr's footsteps, and then you may sue for the Lady Mathilda's favour with some reasonable hope of success. So make yourself ready ”

“ Mathilda too is the unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, “a sacred horror”; like him, she finds a measure of peace as she is about to die.
[5] The addition of “the precious memorials ... gratitude towards you,” by its suggestion of the relationship between Mathilda and Woodville, serves to justify the detailed narration. ”

“ Woodville is an idealized Shelley.
Like Mathilda Mary was a woman of strong passions and affections which she often hid from the world under a placid appearance. Like Mathilda’s, Mary’s mother had died a few days after giving her birth. Like Mathilda she spent part of her girlhood in Scotland. Like Mathilda she met and loved a poet of “exceeding beauty,” and—also like Mathilda—in that sad year she had treated him ill, having become “captious and unreasonable” in her sorrow. Mathilda’s loneliness, grief, and remorse can be paralleled in Mary’s later journal and in “The Choice.” ”

“ But one day you will all meet how soon entirely depends upon yourself—It is by the acquirement of wisdom and the loss of the selfishness that is now attached to the sole feeling that possesses you that you will at last mingle in that universal world of which we all now make a divided part.” Diotima urges Mathilda to tell her story, and she, hoping that by doing so she will break the bonds that weigh heavily upon her, proceeds to “tell this history of strange woe.” ”

“ I was breathless with emotion, and I paused fixing my earnest eyes on my father, after I had dashed away the intrusive tears that dimmed them. He did not raise his, but after a short silence he replied to me in a low voice: “You are indeed presumptuous, Mathilda, presumptuous and very rash. In the heart of one like me there are secret thoughts working, and secret tortures which you ought not to seek to discover. I cannot tell you how it adds to my grief to know that I am the cause of uneasiness to you ”

“ In F of F—A this account of her plans is addressed to Diotima, and Mathilda’s excuse for not detailing them is that they are too trivial to interest spirits no longer on earth; this is the only intrusion of the framework into Mathilda’s narrative in The Fields of Fancy. Mathilda’s refusal to recount her stratagems, though the omission is a welcome one to the reader, may represent the flagging of Mary’s invention. Similarly in Frankenstein she offers excuses for not explaining how the Monster was brought to life. ”

“ If the reader can accept Mathilda on her own terms, he will find not only biographical interest in her story but also intrinsic merits: a feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often vigorous and precise. ”

“ The first of them I shall spend in New York studying. The next I want to spend in Paris, and I want you to come with me, dear. How about it? And then—married in Paris, and the Sorbonne or some German University for Hal. Isn’t that a glorious programme? He really didn’t plan all of it.”
“No, I imagine not,” laughed Mathilda. “He would probably have planned it as I would, by beginning with the end. But I shan’t oppose you. I’ve never opposed you much, Moira, not even when I might have done so with justice. And the reason is that I have always wanted to live to see one completely happy person. ”

“ Although the main narrative, that of the father’s incestuous love for his daughter, his suicide, and Mathilda’s consequent withdrawal from society to a lonely heath, is not in any real sense autobiographical, many elements in it are drawn from reality. The three main characters are clearly Mary herself, Godwin, and Shelley, and their relations can easily be reassorted to correspond with actuality. ”

“ The reference to Diana, with the father’s rationalization of his love for Mathilda, is in S-R fr but not in F of F—A.
[38] In F of F—A this is followed by a series of other gloomy concessive clauses which have been scored out to the advantage of the text.
[39] This paragraph has been greatly improved by the omission of elaborate over-statement; e.g., “to pray for mercy & respite from my fear” (F of F—A) becomes merely “to pray.”
[40] This paragraph about the Steward is added in Mathilda. In F of F—A he is called a servant and his name is Harry. See note 29. ”

“ Thomas Medwin, indeed, thought that the story which she was writing in 1819 was specifically based on Myrrha. That she was thinking of that tragedy while writing Mathilda is evident from her effective use of it at one of the crises in the tale. And perhaps she was remembering her own handling of the theme when she wrote the biographical sketch of Alfieri for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, “inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. ”

“ He took his lute down from the wall, strung it with fresh strings, and went forth into the fair spring weather which had just commenced. Then he felt powerfully impelled towards the region of the Wartburg; and when he saw the towers of the castle shining in the distance, and reflected that he would never see Mathilda more--that his life would never be anything but a hopeless longing; that Wolfframb had won the peerless lady by the power of song--all his lovely visions of hope sank away into gloomy night, and the deathly pangs of despair and jealousy pierced his heart. ”

“ At this point four sheets are cut out of the notebook. They are evidently those with pages numbered 217 to 223 which are among the S-R fr. They contain the conclusion of the story, ending, as does F of F—B with Mathilda’s words spoken to Diotima in the Elysian Fields: “I am here, not with my father, but listening to lessons of wisdom, which will one day bring me to him when we shall never part. THE END.” Some passages are scored out, but not this final sentence. Tenses are changed from past to future. The name Herbert is changed to Woodville. ”

“ Then, when this paragraph was added, the figure, noticeably changed, was included here.
[19] Here the MS of F of F—B breaks off to resume only with the meeting of Mathilda and Woodville.
[20] At the end of the story (p. 79) Mathilda says, “Death is too terrible an object for the living.” Mary was thinking of the deaths of her two children.
[21] Mary had read the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius in 1817 and she had made an Italian translation, the MS of which is now in the Library of Congress. See Journal, pp. 79, 85-86.
[22] The end of this paragraph gave Mary much trouble. ”

“ Later in the play Lelia attempts to seduce her father—possibly a reason for Mary’s selection of the lines.
[26] At this point (f. 56 of the notebook) begins a long passage, continuing through Chapter V, in which Mary’s emotional disturbance in writing about the change in Mathilda’s father (representing both Shelley and Godwin?) shows itself on the pages of the MS. They look more like the rough draft than the fair copy. There are numerous slips of the pen, corrections in phrasing and sentence structure, dashes instead of other marks of punctuation, a large blot of ink on f. ”