When the hero of Ferdinand von Loeben\u27s 1 808 novel Guido sees a sample of handwriting in Sanskrit he remarks,  languages have always seemed to me to be lost holy children who cover the whole world in search of their mother  (p. 62). Guido\u27s observation could stand as a paraphrase of Percy Shelley\u27s lifelong interest in language, mediated as it was by his equally compelling obsessions with maternity and subjectivity. And we are fortunate to have these three concerns brought together by Barbara Gelpi\u27s Shelley\u27s Goddess

Hoeveler, Diane

English

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Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of1-1-1993Review of Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language andSubjectivity by Barbara Charlesworth GelpiDiane HoevelerMarquette University, diane.hoeveler@marquette.eduPublished version. Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 3 (December 1993): 365-368. DOI:10.2307/2933654. © 1993 University of California Press. Used with permission.Shelley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity.  by Barbara Charlesworth GelpiReview by: Diane Long HoevelerNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, No. 3 (Dec., 1993), pp. 365-368Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933654 .Accessed: 12/11/2012 15:09Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. .University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNineteenth-Century Literature.http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.203 on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:09:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS 365 campaign of extirpation and enclosure of Native American popula- tions, making the Far West safe for tourism. Greenfield early on establishes a central paradigm, the image of a "discoverer" standing on a height and surveying the pristine beauty of a "new" land, empty of civilized people-often of any people. This is a valid icon, one that may be traced back to Filson's Rousseauistic ac- count of Daniel Boone's "discovery" of Kentucky, and it has its epiphanic equivalent in "Ktaadn." But it is an image that gives particu- lar point to the traditional image of Custer at the Little Big Horn, standing on a hilltop with sword and pistol in the center of a circle of recumbent white soldiers, while below the vista is filled with hundreds of examples of "the red face of man." This is my image, not Green- field's, but it does help to put the discovery narrative into its larger context, one acutely relevant to his emphasis on the tragic fate of the Indian. As a hilltop prospect it provides a terminus, of sorts, to the impetus of discovery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much as Custer's death provided warrant for the final stage of warfare against the Plains Indians. To my mind Custer, not Thoreau, provides the ultimate example, validating by his death a historical sequence to which Thoreau's Maine journeys were at best marginal if not tangen- tial. It is a sequence of such clear and definable parts, of such impetus and historical sweep, as to reduce to the dimensions of the dust on Custer's boots the fashionable notion of "guilt" entertained by academ- ics of a post-Vietnam and antideterministic persuasion. In striving to escape the present moment, Thoreau removed himself from what is now history; and in following his example, so do we. JOHN SEELYE University of Florida BARBARA CHARLESWORTH GELPI, Shel- ley's Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1993. Pp. xx + 311. $45 cloth; $19.95 paper. When the hero of Ferdinand von Loeben's 1 808 novel Guido sees a sample of handwriting in Sanskrit he remarks, "lan- guages have always seemed to me to be lost holy children who cover the whole world in search of their mother" (p. 62). Guido's observation could stand as a paraphrase of Percy Shelley's lifelong interest in lan- guage, mediated as it was by his equally compelling obsessions with This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.203 on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:09:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions366 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE maternity and subjectivity. And we are fortunate to have these three concerns brought together by Barbara Gelpi's Shelley's Goddess. For the first time, we have an exploration of late-eighteenth- and early- nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood, Lacanian and Kristevan narratives of subjectivity, a discussion of the interpersonal theories of Daniel Stern, and a historical overview of the life of Shelley's mother, Elizabeth. This rather cumbersome and disparate theoretical edifice supports three long chapters that closely examine the mother and permutations of her presence in Shelley's major work, Prometheus Un- bound. While I cannot help but admire the obvious energy and exten- sive scholarship evidenced in this volume, I am less sanguine about the methods and tone of the author. The strongest sections of the volume are "Her Destined Sphere" and "Queen of the Field Place Hive," the second and third chapters of Part I, "The Nurse's Soul." In "Her Destined Sphere" we have a suc- cinct overview of the medical, popular, educational, and journalistic sources that buttressed the newly emerging maternal ideology. While valuable, this section is less original than it might be to readers who are already familiar with the same argument developed with a great deal more sophistication by Friedrich A. Kittler in Discourse Networks, I 8oo/ i900 (1985; trans. 19go). "Queen of the Field Place Hive" brings to- gether all of the scanty historical evidence we have about Elizabeth Pilford Shelley. Most interesting here are Gelpi's forays into interpret- ing Shelley's relationship with his mother, father, and sisters. Although one always senses the neurotic eros in Shelley's poetry, it is helpful to have the letters and childhood incidents brought together to trace clearly his "own identification with the feminine maternal" (p. 98). While I found Gelpi strongest in her ability to read as a biographi- cal critic, I found her less convincing when she actually read Prometheus Unbound. Or rather, I found her too timid or hesitant about drawing out the obvious psychoanalytical implications of the introductory mate- rial she had spent three chapters developing. According to her argu- ment, Shelley was engaged in this work in a massive imaginative strug- gle to destroy his own father and both become and marry his mother and sisters. When she confronts the power of his neurosis directly (p. 226) she is more convincing than when she brings in other critics and commentators, which she does to an extent that detracts from the full implications of her own position. As I said, there is much of value and a sharp intellect at work in this volume, but I found certain areas of concern, and I delineate those here. There is no denying the fact that Gelpi consciously presents herself as a politically correct late-twentieth-century liberal feminist This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.203 on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:09:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS 367 trying to recuperate an early-nineteenth-century, nonfeminist white male poet. Her continual special pleadings for Shelley, dressed up as Lacanian or Kristevan, smack at times as "apologizing" for Shelley. I found such a critical stance intrusive and awkward. Shelley does not need to be repackaged to make him palatable for us; nor do we need to be told that Prometheus Unbound "takes white masculinity not only as the human norm but as the only fully operative subjectivity" (p. 230). We need to understand Shelley's vision and accept it within the historical and cultural constraints that we all know existed then. I also had reservations about the scope of this volume. While the introductory sections are psychologically and historically expansive, they are used to support a close reading of one figure in one poem. The author tells us that she is wary of generalization (p. viii), but surely the "infancy narratives" and the maternal ideologies she has charted were applicable to more writers than one. As Kittler's book so powerfully reveals, the equation "Woman = Nature = Mother" provided the theo- retical underpinnings of European Romanticism as well as the entire "discourse network" it spawned throughout the nineteenth century. As I mentioned earlier, this book is very heavy on the use of other critics and commentators on Prometheus Unbound. For instance, Mar- cuse is used as a commentator on the poem although there is no evi- dence that he ever read it (p. 162). Even more worrisome is the use of secondary sources to explain primary sources readily available in En- glish. For instance, we do not get Gelpi grappling with Lacan; we get Lacan via Kaja Silverman, or we get Kristeva via Andrea Nye. The very heavy use of secondary and tertiary sources added to my sense of unease in reading the theoretical sections of this book. Too many mir- rors are mirroring. We are also told, in the preface, that the author has worked on this volume for a number of years and shifted her interests during the course of her work. One of the traces of that long labor is what I might call the eccentric reading. I found myself particularly puzzled by the lengthy discussion of the Sumerian figure of Dumuzi, beloved of the goddess Inanna, as a precursor of Adonis, who was then a precursor for Prometheus. This particular Sumerian shepherd, as Gelpi admits, was not discovered by scholars until thirty years after Shelley's death (p. 235), so why use him in a historically causal chain leading to Shel- ley's creation of Prometheus? Even more eccentric to my tastes was the graph showing where visual, aural, and tactile synonyms occurred within the text of Prometheus Unbound (p. 232). Done by a "computer program to chart patterns of imagery," it is the sort of postindustrial artifact hat I could not help feeling that Shelley himself would disdain. This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.203 on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:09:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions368 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE Aside from these reservations, I have recommended Shelley's God- dess to students and colleagues alike. While I might quibble with the author about her methodology and tone, I applaud her efforts to examine closely the psychological milieux in which Shelley lived and wrote his most important work. DIANE LONG HOEVELER Marquette University S U S A N F R A I M A N, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development. New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1993. Pp. xvii + 189. $35. L Y N P Y K E T T, The "Improper" Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing. New York: Rout- ledge, 1992. Pp. xii + 235. $49.95. Susan Fraiman's Unbecoming Women attempts to answer the familiar question "Is there a female Bildungsroman?" by studying patterns of deformation and discontinuity in nineteenth- century novels about women. Her chief response to this question is that women's novels are consistently set in relation to conventional narra- tive paradigms of development as well as to a network of often contra- dictory alternatives to them, which marks these novels with a variety of contradictions and discontinuities. Fraiman thus demonstrates the loss of critical distance involved in any simple equation drawn between gender and genre. She also raises important questions about the rela- tionship between women's novels of development and the Bildungsro- man tradition as it has been constructed by critical commentary. In purely theoretical terms, Fraiman tries to avoid monolithic resolutions of the "female Bildungsroman" question by uncoupling these two terms. Yet Fraiman's theoretical framework is not really the strong point of her work, for in the course of theorizing the gender/ genre conundrum she has a tendency precisely to reify this relation- ship. She assumes, for example, that there is a self-evident, unified Bildung plot that women novelists have systematically resisted. This forces her to formalize a familiar set of gendered oppositions in order to describe the developmental fictions of women writers: male and female novels of development are slotted into predictable polarities of homogeneity/heterogeneity, linearity/discontinuity, or coherence/con- tradiction. While there may be some conceptual value to this pattern of oppositions, and while Fraiman does try to qualify it, it is odd to This content downloaded by the authorized user from 192.168.82.203 on Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:09:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review of \u3cem\u3eShelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language and Subjectivity\u3c/em\u3e by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

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Review of \u3cem\u3eShelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language and Subjectivity\u3c/em\u3e by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi

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