The world of these writings is a generous, but not a frictionless one. Lorna is sceptical of both puritanism and realism in just about equal measures. Both overlap with the claustrophilia of women’s personal lives. The point of writing is not to reproduce the world, but to change it. Women, she argues, have enough problems with reproduction without being locked into it as an aesthetic mode as well. And she is also suspicious of the exclusionary mechanisms of canon-making. She champions outsiders, writers who (as she used to put it) ‘have no reason to exist’, who invent themselves. The most important task of criticism for her is the act of finding a vocabulary for the value of those who are awkward and hard to define, like Elizabeth Smart, for example, whose writerly career, says Lorna, safety-pinning two reproductive functions in one phrase, ‘came to a sticky end in low mimetic prose, and babies’. Yet she still feels, despite the slenderness of her œuvre, that Smart’s prodigal, high lyricism, her offence to the quotidian, has a chance of being read when other, more plausible writers are not. Outsiders count.
Lorna’s critical prejudices embrace anything writerly that she feels gets women out of the jails of biology, sex and gender. She’s on the watch for ‘stickiness’, reproduction, fake authenticity, false being, instrumentality, and bad faith. The positive values that support this running critique come in various forms, but are usually performative, theatrical versions of ‘inauthenticity’: camp, pastiche, carnivalesque, perverse, decadent, even self-destructive or contradictory gestures. She was attracted by the idea, long before Queer Theory, that all women ‘are’ female impersonators.
Agency in the world, above all, is what she is committed to in these writings, and a resistance to myths of propriety and self-absorption. All writing for her was a form of ‘doing’, not talking about it. Or talking about the possibility of talking about it. The postponement of the object of knowledge, she observes in her pieces on Shere Hite and Linda Grant, has infected the space of mediatised culture: ‘privatised emotions [lead] further into therapy-speak, and oral and masturbatory culture, of which the Hite reports are themselves a part’. Before all, she abhors ‘loss of nerve’. The test of theory is the production of real (i.e. particular, different) things – they always bite back the theoretical hand.
The consistent feature of Lorna’s proliferation of roles between Grub Street and Academe is her knowingness about her own potentially divided position. She writes for what’s left of the common reader in us. She mimes, performs, re-presents the manoeuvres of her authors, not to ‘reproduce’ them, but to expose them for contemplation. Her convictions cross the line between authors and readers, and all theory to her, even the most shrinkingly narcissistic, is a form of (political) practice, which conforms to the same rules as any other species of persuasive writing, including fiction, where much of the thinking gets done. Cultural space is not like physical space: in writing you can (and need to) be in more than one place at once. There’s always more room than you think. She’s instinctively against identity politics from the start, because it literalises cultural space. Her appreciative piece on Susan Gubar’s 1999 Critical Condition demonstrates the nature of this retreat: ‘Has “What is to be done?” been replaced by “Who am I?” she asks, and the answer must be partly yes.’ Her response to Gubar’s remarks about the factionalising of women in the academy is characteristic of what Lorna stands for: ‘There is room to live intellectually, in other words, without having to compete over who’s more marginal than whom.’
Like many another thought in this heartening body of work, it’s a good place to start.
Sharon & Victor Sage, 2003
Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley JANE DUNN
JANE DUNN’S TITLE SETS out the glaring problem for Mary Shelley’s biographers: that she exists more as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as Shelley’s satellite, than as her own focus of interest. For much of her life she was, even to herself, a lesser light, so that although we know a lot about her, the information hasn’t ever quite added up.
Her other relationships, too, were oblique, filtered through Shelley: (Byron, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams); and after his death the pattern if anything intensified: with her fantasy-relation to Washington Irving and her indiscreet letters to the blackmailing Gatteschi look very like sad attempts to re-create scenes from the drama of her marriage. She was, as Jane Dunn says, intensely lonely for most of her 53 years, precisely because of her talent for intimacy.
She had of course, other talents: ‘my dreams,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.’ For once (or almost twice, if you count The Last Man, the only other of her novels with something of this force) she contrived to build the contradictions of her experience – her agonies about parenthood as child and mother (or indeed, both simultaneously), the depressing human debris that surrounded her passionate marriage – into a fantasy that would dominate other people’s imaginations.
Frankenstein toiling away in his charnel-house laboratory (‘my workshop of filthy creation’) grew out of what was for her a natural association of creativity with destruction. There were the circumstances of her own birth, which killed her mother; then her father’s chilly and increasingly groundless and absurd performance of the role of ‘great man’ (‘You have it in your power,’ he wrote once to a prospective second wife, ‘to give me new life … to raise me from the grave in which my heart is buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the best-known men of the age’). Her first assignations with Shelley took place round her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard; and the way he seems to have talked of rejecting his first wife, Harriet – ‘I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’ – reveals a truly Frankensteinish capacity to switch from enthusiastic consciousness-raising to revulsion.
By the time Mary finished the first draft of the book, Harriet’s suicide had lent a more literal horror to Shelley’s cruel metaphor (‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote years later in her journal, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death’). Her half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstone-craft’s illegitimate daughter, put an apologetic end to her drab, unwanted existence with an overdose of laudanum, leaving nothing to identify her body but her mother’s initials on her stays. Further shades of the charnel-house were supplied by the death (the year before) of Mary’s first child: the way she talks about the book (‘my hideous progeny’ and so on) shows that she made that connection too.
Her own life, for the moment, was going well (was, in other words, only routinely precarious, dogged with money worries, begging letters from Godwin, and Shelley’s relation to Claire) and that seems to have enabled her to create the elaborate mythic mix of loneliness, guilt and innocent outrage that makes the novel such a splendid focus for everyone’s nightmares.
Usually, though, and almost always in the long years of her widowhood (she was 24 when Shelley died), her complex