Falkner (novel)

"Falkner" (1837) is the last novel published by the Romantic writer Mary Shelley.

Like Shelley's novel "Lodore" (1835), "Falkner" charts a young woman's education under a tyrannical father figure. [Bennett, 98; Poovey, 164. Poovey notes several tyrannical fathers in "Falkner" who take the place of lost mothers.] As a six-year-old orphan, Elizabeth Raby prevents Rupert Falkner from committing suicide; Falkner then adopts her and brings her up to be a model of virtue. However, she falls in love with Gerald Neville, whose mother Falkner had unintentionally driven to her death years before. When Falkner is finally acquitted of murdering Neville's mother, Elizabeth's female values subdue the destructive impulses of the two men she loves, who are reconciled and unite with Elizabeth in domestic harmony. "Falkner" is the only one of Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs. [Ellis, 152–53.] In critic Kate Ferguson Ellis's view, the novel’s resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures. [Ellis, 159–61.]

Critics have until recently cited "Lodore" and "Falkner" as evidence of a conservative retrenchment by Shelley. In 1984, Mary Poovey identified the retreat of Mary Shelley’s reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic. [Sites, 82.] As with "Lodore", contemporary critics reviewed the novel as a romance, overlooking its political subtext and noting its moral issues as purely familial. Betty Bennett argues, however, that "Falkner" is as much concerned with power and political responsibility as Shelley's previous novels. [Bennett, 103–04.] Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote "Falkner" to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum. [Poovey, 161.] Critics view "Falkner" neither as notably feminist, [Ellis, 161. Ellis points out that Shelley's belief in the social superiority of mothers might be interpreted as non-egalitarian.] nor as one of Mary Shelley's strongest novels, though she herself believed it could be her best. The novel has been criticised for its two-dimensional characterisation. ["The identifying moral qualities of her characters appear immediately, and the 'roundness' that Forster praised as being 'capable of surprising in a convincing way' and which the novel as a genre has cultivated, is nowhere to be found." Ellis, 151.] In Bennett's view, "Lodore" and "Falkner" represent fusions of the psychological social novel with the educational novel, resulting not in romances but instead in narratives of destabilization: the heroic protagonists are educated women who strive to create a world of justice and universal love". [Bennett, 104.]

Notes

Bibliography

*Allen, Graham. "Public and Private Fidelity: Mary Shelley's 'Life of William Godwin' and "Falkner". "Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner". Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
*Bennett, Betty T. "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction". Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 080185976X.
*Bennett, Betty T. "'Not This Time, Victor': Mary Shelley's Reversioning of Elizabeth, from "Frankenstein" to "Falkner". "Mary Shelley in Her Times". Eds Betty T. Bennett, Betty T. and Stuart Curran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
*Bunnell, Charlene E. "The Illusion of 'Great Expectations': Manners and Morals in Mary Shelley's "Lodore" and "Falkner". "Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein": Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth". Eds. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.
*Ellis, Kate Ferguson. "Falkner" and other fictions". "The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley". Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704.
*Hopkins, Lisa. "'A Medea, in More Senses than the More Obvious One': Motherhood in Mary Shelley's "Lodore" and "Falkner". "Eighteenth-Century Novel" 2 (2002): 383-405.
*Jowell, Sharon L. "Mary Shelley's Mothers: The Weak, the Absent, and the Silent in "Lodore" and "Falkner". "European Romantic Review" 8.3 (1997): 298-322.
*Poovey, Mary. "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen". Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN 0226675289.
*Saunders, Julia. "Rehabilitating the Family in Mary Shelley's "Falkner". "Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner". Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
*Sites, Melissa. "Utopian Domesticity as Social Reform in Mary Shelley's "Falkner". "Keats-Shelley Journal" 54 (2005): 148-72.