Mary Shelley, Mathilda

This is an example of fiction with autobiographical content.  It was probably written between Aug 4 and September 12, 1819, but when Mary presented it to her father, William Godwin, he was horrified by the content, incest and suicide (we can consider the irony of the latter), and suppressed its publication.  Luckily, he was not so horrified that he threw it into the fire.  The work was first published in 1959.

Here is one article on the biographical elements: Elizabeth Nitchie, "Mary Shelley's "Mathilda": An unpublished story and its biographical significance," Studies in Philology 40.3 (1943): 447-62
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172624
(You will need to be on campus or have your login for this.)

Take a look, if you can, at the introduction especially of
James Phelan, Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethic of Character Narration (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 2005).
He emphasizes the complexities that occur between the "I" who narrates and the "I" who is the character in the text.  There is a very good chapter on Harrison's The Kiss, but we can talk about these ideas in relation to Shelley's "Mathilda."

Thinking about the questions of unreliable narration and ethical and cultural framework that Phelan raises, we can ask about the narrative purpose behind Shelley's text.  In particular, I want to start near the end with a passage that is perhaps the nexus of this autobiographical fiction, which focuses as well on the individual and collective function of memory:

Again and again I have passed over in my remembrance the different
scenes of my short life: if the world is a stage and I merely an actor
on it my part has been strange, and, alas! tragical. Almost from
infancy I was deprived of all the testimonies of affection which
children generally receive; I was thrown entirely upon my own
resources, and I enjoyed what I may almost call unnatural pleasures,
for they were dreams and not realities. The earth was to me a magic
lantern and I [a] gazer, and a listener but no actor; but then came
the transporting and soul-reviving era of my existence: my father
returned and I could pour my warm affections on a human heart; there
was a new sun and a new earth created to me; the waters of existence
sparkled: joy! joy! but, alas! what grief! My bliss was more rapid
than the progress of a sunbeam on a mountain, which discloses its
glades & woods, and then leaves it dark & blank; to my happiness
followed madness and agony, closed by despair.

This was the drama of my life which I have now depicted upon paper.
During three months I have been employed in this task. The memory of
sorrow has brought tears; the memory of happiness a warm glow the
lively shadow of that joy. Now my tears are dried; the glow has faded
from my cheeks, and with a few words of farewell to you, Woodville, I
close my work: the last that I shall perform.

(pp. 208-209)
--> What is MS highlighting here about the way art shapes human life?  What about the way culture does?  What about memory?
--> Why is Woodville important as audience in this text?  To what extent is he present throughout and where does he recede?  What would be the difference if the narrator told her story (Mary Shelley's story?) without the presence of Woodville?
--> Are there any signs here of narrator unreliability?  What narrative structures are at work?  Do they detract from or add to the "truth" of the autobiographical component of the story?
--> Who is the direct audience?  What is the purpose of the passage and the piece as a whole?