Neil Gray
Mathilda (1820) – The Abyss of Guilt and the Horror of the Self
If Frankenstein was Mary Shelley’s grand, thunderous statement on the dangers of scientific ambition, then Mathilda is her whispered, devastating confession about the failures of the human heart. Written just two years after the publication of her magnum opus, this 1820 novella is the missing, necessary link in her dark triumvirate, the crucible where the concepts of isolation, abandonment, and moral contamination are forged into their most acute, most painful, and most uncompromising form.
To analyze Mathilda is to confront Mary Shelley at her most emotionally vulnerable and intellectually vicious. The narrative deliberately strips away the spectacle of electricity and stitched-up bodies, removing the grand, apocalyptic scale that will later define The Last Man. Instead, Shelley holds a terrifying magnifying glass up to the most sacred of human institutions—the family—and reveals that the capacity for monstrous, destructive ego resides not in a laboratory or a parliament, but in the intimate, suffocating confines of the domestic sphere. Mathilda is not a gentle piece of melancholic literature; it is a foundational work of psychological horror, proving beyond all doubt that the self-imposed exile of the soul is a terminal condition, a fate more crushing than any physical death.
I. The Anatomy of a Confession: A Narrative of Terminal Despair
The genius of Mathilda begins not with its plot, but with its structure. The entire novella is presented as a posthumous confession, a desperate, final document written by the eponymous narrator as she waits for death on a remote, desolate heath. This is a literary technique that immediately suffocates the reader with finality and inescapable dread. We are not observing a horror unfold; we are reading the meticulously detailed suicide note of a soul already consumed by its own moral wound.
The choice of the confessional, epistolary style is crucial. It immediately signals that the struggle is internal, a dialogue of self-judgement. Shelley casts the reader not as a sympathetic audience from whom Mathilda seeks comfort, but as the final, passive witness to an unendurable psychological burden. Mathilda is not seeking absolution or external forgiveness; she is performing a brutal, internal moral reckoning before she is extinguished.
This structure stands in stark contrast to the narratives of her greater works. While Frankenstein used external frames (Walton’s letters) and The Last Man uses the historical document (Verney’s journal) to provide distance, Mathilda offers none. It plunges the reader directly into the terminal interiority of the protagonist. Shelley insists on the reader bearing the full weight of the narrator’s guilt. The silence that follows the final page of the novella is intended to be absolute and terrifying, reflecting a world where redemption is simply impossible. This structural move firmly places Mathilda as a progenitor of the modern Trauma Narrative, where the act of narration is itself a final, desperate attempt to manage an unmanageable psychological catastrophe.
II. The Incestuous Plague: Moral Violation and Absolute Rejection
Mathilda’s tragedy is rooted in the most primal of human relationships: that between father and child. The narrative begins with a secondary tragedy: the death of Mathilda’s mother in childbirth. This event immediately establishes the destructive pattern that defines the novella. The father, unable to cope with his grief, retreats into a deep, guilt-ridden isolation for sixteen years. This initial, profound emotional abandonment sets the stage for the moral catastrophe to come.
When the father finally re-enters Mathilda’s life, his repressed emotion is warped and amplified, leading to the “unspeakable sin”—a destructive, incestuous desire for his daughter. Shelley’s decision to center the horror on incest is not mere sensationalism; it is the ultimate expression of moral contamination and violation of natural order, a theme she began to explore in Frankenstein.
The Violation of Sanctuary: The father’s crime destroys the domestic sanctuary, proving that the family, intended to be the core of human safety and love, is the most vulnerable point of attack. If Victor’s ambition destroyed the public world of science and reason, the father’s obsession destroys the private world of intimacy and trust. The safe haven collapses from within.
The Contagion of Guilt: Mathilda’s tragedy begins not with her own sin, but with her father’s act of moral transgression. Yet, when he finally confesses his desire, Mathilda’s immediate, catastrophic reaction is to feel overwhelming guilt and shame herself. She internalizes the blame, believing she is somehow tainted or responsible for this “unnatural passion.” She writes:
I was too well convinced of the perversity of my unhappy destiny.”
This internalized victim-blaming highlights Shelley’s critique of the patriarchal system, where the woman, even as a victim, is assigned the moral weight of the male’s crime, making her an emotional and social pariah.
The father, unable to live with the truth of his passion and its subsequent rejection, commits suicide by drowning. This is his final, most monstrous act of abandonment. He confesses his sin and then flees the consequence, leaving Mathilda to shoulder its unbearable weight alone. This act is the emotional equivalent of Victor Frankenstein’s flight from the Creature: both men, driven by excessive ego and fear, run from the unbearable reality of their creation or their crime, forcing the innocent to carry the burden of the morally corrupt. The father escapes, but Mathilda is left perpetually damned by the lingering echo of his desire and her own perceived culpability.
III. The Destruction of Female Agency and The Patriarchal Trap
As the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Shelley utilizes Mathilda to deliver a profound, piercing critique of 19th-century patriarchy and the precarious, subordinate state of the unprotected woman.
The father’s crime is the ultimate assertion of ownership, power, and control. His desire, his need, is what defines Mathilda’s entire existence, stripping her of any individual identity or autonomy. Her own feelings, aspirations, and self-image are rendered irrelevant by the magnitude of his transgression.
The Mother’s Absence as Structural Weakness: The fact that Mathilda is motherless and left vulnerable is not incidental; it is a structural critique. It reinforces the Romantic-era fear of the orphaned, unprotected woman, whose fate is entirely determined by the whims, moral status, and financial capability of the men who surround her. There is no maternal guidance, no female advocate, and therefore no safe, external space for Mathilda to process her trauma outside of her own judgment. She is trapped by the very architecture of her life.
Institutional Isolation and Social Death: Mathilda is legally and socially trapped. Her ruin is not merely emotional; it is systemic. Her only escape from the “taint” of her family name and her experience is to literally disappear from society. Shelley demonstrates that for a woman in this era, a serious sexual or moral violation, even if she is the victim, equates to a social death sentence. Mathilda’s physical exile—her retreat to the desolate heath—is therefore both a desperate, self-inflicted quarantine and a necessary action to maintain moral distance from a corrupting, unforgiving world. She trades a life of public shunning for a death of private despair.
The novella thus operates as a terrifying, intimate companion piece to Frankenstein, demonstrating that the ambitious, self-interested male ego—whether manifested in scientific pursuit or illicit familial desire—is the engine of isolation and destruction for all others caught in its path. The moral failures of men create the prisons in which women are forced to live and die.
IV. Romanticism Betrayed: The Psychological Arctic
In Mathilda, the landscape is merely a mirror for the protagonist’s interior world. Mathilda’s final decision is to retreat from all human contact, choosing an absolutely desolate existence on a remote, unspecified heath. She sheds her name, her identity, and all connection to society. She literally flees the world to die in a self-imposed prison.
This act is Shelley’s ultimate statement on the corrosive, terminal power of guilt. The external world—whether it is the beauty of the countryside or the well-meaning intervention of her companion Woodville—offers no solace. Mathilda rejects all attempts at intervention, convinced that her moral contamination is infectious and must be quarantined. She writes:
I am a poison that the earth yields not for good, but for destruction.”
This is the language of existential doom, a conviction that she is genetically, irrevocably flawed.
Crucially, this relentless pessimism constitutes a direct, devastating critique of her Romantic contemporaries, especially her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his close friend, Lord Byron.
The Subversion of Nature: Romantics like P.B. Shelley viewed Nature as a source of spiritual balm, transcendence, and healing. They believed that immersion in the sublime wilderness could purge psychological pain. Mary Shelley subverts this entirely. For Mathilda, the vastness of the natural world only highlights her own crushing insignificance and the unshakeable reality of her incurable despair. She finds no relief in art, no comfort in memory, and no promise of future grace. Nature, for Mathilda, is cold and indifferent, a fitting stage for her solitary annihilation.
The De-Romanticizing of Guilt: Lord Byron famously embodied the Byronic hero: the brooding, charismatic, guilt-ridden outcast whose moral darkness only made him more alluring. Mathilda strips this romantic veneer entirely. Mathilda’s exile isn’t noble or poetic; it’s a desolate, pathetic, and terminal reality. Shelley proves that guilt, far from being a source of dramatic inspiration, is purely destructive, consuming the individual until nothing remains but a waiting corpse.
This uncompromising bleakness is crucial; it establishes Shelley’s unique, dark vision of humanity and directly anticipates the ultimate societal bleakness of The Last Man.
V. The Continuous Thesis: Isolation as the Terminal Condition
The arc of Mathilda firmly solidifies the central, continuous thesis that runs through Shelley’s three major works: human failure, driven by ego and abandonment, inevitably leads to isolation and annihilation.
Frankenstein (1818): Scientific Hubris (Victor plays God). Victor flees the Creature. Creature wanders the Arctic, dying alone.
Mathilda (1820): Emotional Hubris (Father’s incestuous desire). Father commits suicide. Mathilda lives and dies alone on a desolate heath.
The Last Man (1826): Political Hubris (Societies fail to unite). Humanity is abandoned by Life (the Plague).
The emotional trajectory of Mathilda is a haunting synthesis of both Victor and the Creature. Like Victor, she suffers the overwhelming guilt of a moral catastrophe; yet, like the Creature, she is the ultimate victim of abandonment, left wandering the desolate edges of the world with no hope of community. This dual identity—perpetrator of her own self-destruction and victim of paternal sin—makes her story arguably the most profound examination of Shelley’s personal anxieties, born from a lifetime of loss.
By making the horror intensely private, Mathilda makes the eventual, total horror of The Last Man feel terrifyingly personal. If the failure of one man can ruin a soul, what chance does society have when the pressure is global? Mathilda proves that the seeds of self-destruction are already planted deep within the human heart.
VI. Literary Legacy: Progenitor of Psychological Horror
Mathilda is a testament to Mary Shelley’s unparalleled ability to innovate within the horror tradition. By refusing to externalize the source of fear—there is no ghost, no monster, no curse—she invents a refined, intellectualized terror.
This is a novel of the Uncanny (Unheimlich): The horror is derived from something that should be familiar and safe (the father-daughter bond) suddenly becoming terrifying and foreign. The familiar space of the home becomes the psychological space of the tomb. This technique is a foundational precursor to modern psychological thrillers and domestic suspense, proving that the greatest threats often come from the most trusted sources.
Her unflinching depiction of trauma, grief, and suicidal despair was too radical for her time. The novella was suppressed by P.B. Shelley and was not published until 1959—over a century after it was written. This suppression itself confirms the novella’s explosive content. The Victorian era, obsessed with domestic purity and moral propriety, could not handle this direct assault on the sanctity of the family.
Mathilda is the ultimate proof that annihilation does not require a monster or a pandemic; it merely requires one person to inflict a wound so deep that the victim is forced to quarantine herself from all hope. This novella is the necessary, searing preamble to The Last Man, demonstrating that human moral failure guarantees destruction, whether that destruction comes from a mad scientist, a violating father, or a global plague. Mathilda’s final, desolate confession is Mary Shelley’s most intimate, powerful statement: if we cannot manage to love and protect our own, then we have already sentenced ourselves to die alone.
