SOURCE: “‘Knew shame, and knew desire’: Ambivalence as Structure in Mary Shelley's Mathilda,” in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997, pp. 115-29.

In the following essay, Himes offers a comparison of the sources Shelley used to compose Mathilda.

“Such is my name, and such my tale,           Confessor—to thy secret ear,           I breathe the sorrows I bewail, And thank thee for the generous tear This glazing eye could never shed.” 

—Lord Byron, “The Giaour” (1813)

Mathilda is an arresting, riveting work, strange in its representation of incestuous love yet believable in its evocation of forbidden desire. The tightly confined internal and external spaces of and around the title character, who is the scriptor of this confessional work, force the reader to participate with Mathilda in the text. The reader cannot objectively receive the novel but must engage with Mathilda in her psychological landscape, and that...