An Incestuous Story Containing No Incest

Incest was prominent in fictional family structures in the late eighteenth- early nineteenth-century as “sons are exhorted to see their parents' female wards as sisters; older men adopt paternal stances to young, unprotected women; and servants love their masters as children ideally love their parents” (Shaffer 67). Father-daughter incest is the most widely reported and thus, the most common form of incest known in fictional works. However, some stories do choose to elaborate on mother-son or sibling incest instead of the patriarchal original structure of father-daughter love. Mary Shelly, author of Mathilda, wasn’t unique in writing the story of a so-called incestuous relationship between father and daughter, but certainly made it clear that her two main characters, Mathilda and her father, do not at any point have intercourse. Mathilda is considered an incestuous novel but it seems that both characters only have a deep, extreme love for one another not resulting from a physical relationship together, but lack of personal ones and contact with society.

Mathilda’s personal relationship with her father and love for him in that father-figure role, which is expressed through her narration about her life in first person, seems to grow from her familiarization of him being involved with her after being absent from her life for sixteen years. “Familiarization comes closest to incest when parental-filial or sibling love shifts at least on one side to romantic or sexualized love” (Shaffer 72). Mathilda’s father is the one in the family’s relationship to change the dynamics when he confesses his love for her instead of to her. The difference in his confessing love for her and to her is this: confessing love to someone is the equal of telling them how you feel in terms of the family, or an otherwise understood, intimate relationship, while confessing love for someone is to announce for the first time to them that you have feelings of intimacy in mind for your relationship. At what point do the lines of “familiarization and incest blur”? (Shaffer 73).

Sanchez-Eppler acknowledges that “the incestuous patterns suggested and disguised by these stories can provide at most only elusive access to actual behaviors” (Sanchez-Eppler 8). Though a disconcerting realization, Sanchez-Eppler is correct that only the actual members of an incestuous relationship, no matter the kind, can relay the occurrences to others outside it. However, she argues in her article that these inappropriate moments between family members were caused mainly by alcohol and that the children, mostly young, preadolescent girls, acted as a salve to their father’s rage and abuse by volunteering for the intimate though wrongful relationship as a substitute for the sort of love they should be receiving.

The story Mathilda shows one example of the diverse situations of incest and that those who believe that the daughter is the general insinuator for romantic love aren’t always right in their assumptions. Mathilda’s father, in contrast to Sanchez-Eppler’s essay, isn’t a drunkard but a sorrowful man still mourning the loss of his wife almost two decades later and eventually misplaces his romantic feelings onto his daughter after comparing her to his deceased wife, Diana. Mathilda isn’t a young, preadolescent girl, but for the time and culture, the proper age a woman would begin searching suitors for a husband. She also doesn’t strive for her father to desire her. In fact, she doesn’t realize that she reciprocates his love in the same way until after his death and the guilt she feels for the rest of her short life is the result of never being able to tell him so.

“My eyes were seldom raised and often filled with tears; no song; no smiles; no careless motion that might bespeak a mind intent on what surrounded it – I was gathered up into myself – a selfish solitary creature ever pondering on my regrets and faded hopes (Shelley 1362-1363).

Sanchez-Eppler makes a good point about desire and innocence in conjunction with incestuous relationships when she says that “a ‘monstrous’ sexual attraction to children, however strenuously denied and demonized, nevertheless informs nineteenth-century conceptions of desire, domesticity, and even of innocence itself” (Sanchez-Eppler 8). Mathilda did indeed desire to know her father for the majority of her life and often dreamed of him and meeting him while she was being raised by her aunt. The innocence that would have been from a basic family connection became fantasized in her mind, and we later learn his too, as she dreams about scenarios in which she runs away to find him.

The exploration of innocence, desire, and domestic responsibility through Mathilda’s narrative allows us to enter a world otherwise unknown, unless we have participated in such relationships ourselves, and see the delicate balance of parenthood, or lack thereof, during that time. Mathilda’s distant relationship with her aunt as an infant then young girl, including the sparse physical contact, made the connection with her father extreme once it occurs and it is evident that “love was clearly the best way to rule the home” (Sanchez-Eppler 4).

But where does society come into the picture of incest for Mathilda? The death of her mother and immediate departure of her father leaves Mathilda in her aunt’s care; an aunt who decides to return to her own home in the country because “she had too long lived alone and undisturbed” and therefore “took (Mathilda) with her to her Scotch estate” (Shelley 1314). Mathilda learns to entertain herself because her aunt refuses to let her play with the village children for fear of Mathilda developing an accent so she plays alone in the woods for majority of her days until she begins receiving tutoring from the neighbor. This removal from society and lack of visitation between her and other people outside of her aunt and servants makes Mathilda desperate for companionship. When her father arrives in her life, Mathilda experiences, for the first time, a true relationship with another human being. “And now I began to live. All around me was changed from a dull uniformity to the brightest scene of joy and delight” (Shelley 1345). Mathilda’s father even moves her to London with him and back into society after the aunt’s death.

Mathilda’s subconscious connects this new relationship with her father to interaction, travel, attention from others, and the busy society itself as her father dotes on her and for the first time she feels truly loved by a parent figure. On the other hand, Mathilda’s father experiences a satisfying connection with a woman for the first time in sixteen years. A woman that resembles his deceased wife, shares his likeness in activities, and in turn gives him the devotion he had been lacking while traveling the globe trying to forget her and his past. Mathilda hasn’t ever experienced the feeling of love before and assumes that this relationship with her father is normal, which it seems to be until his confession. He however, knows that his feelings are inappropriate after realizing his jealousy of one of Mathilda’s suitors. He removes himself from the situation by leaving Mathilda in the city and returning to the home he shared with his wife. “He informed me that he had determined to go to Yorkshire first alone, and that I should follow him in a fortnight” (Shelley 1349).

Upon following her father, Mathilda learns that his condition has worsened. She gives him time to heal then grows perplexed when he still hasn’t pursued a connection with her like he had the first few months of their knowing each other. This second removal completely from society puts Mathilda back to where she was at the start of the novel, dependent on one family member and having contact with them alone in addition to the household servants. Mathilda decides after this move back to nature that she needs a relationship with another human being now that she has experienced one. “Mathilda, hoping to remedy a coldness and moroseness in her father she does not understand, urges him to share his sorrow with her” (Garrett 45). This moment ironically foreshadows his death shortly after this moment and her death only a few years later. Asking him to express his feelings, Mathilda says, “do not fear! Speak that word; it will bring peace, not death” though the next time we see her father in the story, it is a view of his corpse (Shelley 1352). Upon the confession, Mathilda is horrified at first and cries but then begins to pity her father and how his feelings torment him. Looking down at him she recollects herself and realizes what her pity means.

“Yes it was despair I felt; for the first time that phantom seized me; the first and only time for it has never since left me--After the first moments of speechless agony I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back with horror I spurned him with my foot; I felt as if stung by a serpent, as if scourged by a whip of scorpions which drove me…” (Shelley 1353).

It is important to note here that no physical contact has occurred between them through-out the story. This stinging Mathilda feels isn’t a sexual innuendo but genuine shock that her one decent familial relationship with her one remaining parent is from this moment no longer innocent love but a driving passion. The phantom she references as seizing her is acknowledgement of her father’s feelings. Leaving her father in misery, Mathilda retires to her room for the night to cry waking up after dreaming of his impending death to discover his letter apologizing to her.

The move to London from her aunt’s house with her father is Mathilda’s first interaction with society and this second removal to nature is the main reason she cares for her father so much and eventually realizes that she loves him back, though not in a sexual way. This loss of society and then the loss of her father, builds her need for him and her dependence on his connection with her. “The story of Mathilda provides Mary Shelley with a framework for exploring the theme of the moral responsibilities one has to one’s beloved” (Garrett 45). Mathilda’s father obviously doesn’t have these feelings of moral responsibilities because he finds it so easy to leave her with a relative and travel in an attempt to forget his wife and sorrow.

Garrett’s essay focuses mainly on what a woman’s role in a love relationship is compared to what it should be. She used Mary Shelley herself as an example of how the sadness and deaths during her lifetime affected her stories, Mathilda included. Using the grief of her own miscarriages as a channel, Shelley explored parent-child relationships and the love that grows from them and what could occur if family situations were adjusted. One of these such adjustments is shown in her story of Mathilda as a child grows up with no love from a parent or other relative and is then overwhelmed with the first experience.

Since Mathilda’s father left her as an infant her natural feelings were intensified as she dreamed of him. After meeting him and feeling the extreme love he professes, his suicide affects her drastically and she retires to where no one knows her. “I must shrink before the eye of man lest he should read my father’s guilt in my glazed eyes: I must be silent lest my faltering voice should betray unimagined horrors” (Shelley 1360). It is her father’s guilt and his unimagined horrors that change her view on love and scar her until her death five years later at age twenty two. She claims that by going to live surrounded by nature again heals her soul a little bit because she can cry or rage in solitude and be returned to peace.

Though no physical contact is ever made between Mathilda and her father in the duration of the story, we see their love as it morphs from imagination, to reality, to a memory. The love Mathilda and her father share is in fact a deep romantic love but not incestual because no intercourse occurs between them. Only those in the relationship however, know the true function of it. Mathilda’s innocence is changed to desire only after her father’s confession and suicide. The grief of the novel is stemmed from Shelley’s own personal tragedies and allows her to explore the balance of a parent-child relationship. Shelley also considers how society plays a role in raising children and the ways that affected her characters relationship. The lack of personal connections with anyone of significance or even townspeople is what awakens this intense love between father and daughter but since neither character has actual physical contact with the other in an intimate way, Mathilda is not an incestuous novel.