Chels

When I was 13, my English teacher recommended I read Mary Shelley’s Mathilda (sometimes published as Matilda). I’d always been a big reader – he recommended the novella because I had read and loved Frankenstein – but I was only at the beginning of my relationship with adult literature. Perhaps it was a bit adventurous for what was likely one of the first five adult books I read, but I’m glad that he took my interest in literature seriously, and steered me towards difficult stories.

I read Mathilda during the summer holidays between year 8 and year 9, on my Kindle, alongside both Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility – so I spent six weeks immersed in early 19th century language and ideals. Where all three were equally accessible in terms of writing and vocabulary, Austen’s works were certainly easier for me to grasp in terms of themes. That’s not to say that her works are simple, I’d just had some experience reading stories focused on class, gender, and romance, and less so on Mathilda’s incest and suicide themes. Still, that isn’t to say I learned nothing from Mathilda. I may not have fully grasped all of the themes, but I knew that I enjoyed the writing (and I continue to gravitate towards early 19th century literature).

I ended up buying a physical copy of Mathilda earlier this year to get free delivery on a book order, and when I realised it had been 13 years since I first read the novella, I decided I would read it during the summer holidays to see how my engagement with the story would have shifted – after all, I’ve doubled in age; since then I’ve studied literature from GCSEs to postgraduate level, I’ve engaged with more of Mary Shelley’s works, and in general I have so much more lived experience. 

The Gothic

There were two key shortcomings of my first reading of Mathilda. The first was my misunderstanding of the Gothic. Perhaps not a misunderstanding, but a lack of education (I wouldn’t study gothic horror literature until the following school year). I knew that Mary Shelley wrote Gothic fiction, but all I’d previously read was Frankenstein, so I assumed that ‘gothic’ referred to the kind of horror that Frankenstein encompasses; the monster figure, the spooky atmospheres, and the fear of the unknown, and while that’s partially true, it’s not the only definition of the Gothic. So, when Mathilda featured no supernatural creatures and no eerie settings, I thought it couldn’t be gothic. 

Mathilda deals with isolation, death, and moral taboo, and while there is a focus on setting, there’s no horror to be found in the houses. Mathilda’s mother, like Shelley’s, dies a few days after giving birth – a common theme in Shelley’s work, likely influenced by her own mother’s death. While Shelley’s father raised her along with her stepmother, Mathilda’s father flees their family home, leaving his infant to be cared for by his sister, her Aunt, who isn’t neglectful, but isn’t affectionate either. They relocate from London to Scotland; over a few short months, Mathilda loses both of her parents, and the home she was born in. Later in the novella Mathilda reflects on her childhood as ‘confined to nature and books’; while Mathilda wasn’t isolated the way that many Gothic protagonists are, she was still denied much of the socialisation she needed.

The real social transgressions come when Mathilda turns sixteen, and her father returns to her life. She is, of course, delighted to meet her father, and his presence is a source of joy for her. He had abandoned the family because he couldn’t bear to see her face, which would surely be too much like her mother’s, and Mathilda readily forgives her father.

‘The voice of affection was so new to me that I hung with delight upon words when he told me what he had felt concerning me during these long years of apparent forgetfulness.’

He speaks openly of her mother, and bonds quickly with his daughter. A few months later, though, Mathilda’s aunt dies, and she and her father return to their London home. Again, they enjoy one another’s company until Mathilda is approached by suitors, at which point her father’s behaviour changes completely.

It transpires that Mathilda’s father has developed incestuous desires for her. The nature of the desires are unclear – while Shelley was not afraid to explore transgressive topics, 19th century sensibilities still meant that there was a level of censorship and vagueness to social taboos.

What we do know, however, is Mathilda’s responses to her father. She was disgusted by his confession, though at times her feelings became conflicted – she wished to solve the problem so that their relationship could return to the way it once was, but she also wished to never see him again. Her response to her father’s confession brings us as close to conventional Gothic horror as the novella reaches:

‘After the first moments of speechless agony I felt her fangs on my heart: I tore my hair; I raved aloud; at one moment in pity for his sufferings I would have clasped my father in my arms; and then starting back with horror I spurned him with my foot; I felt as if stung by a serpent, as if scourged by a whip of scorpions […]’. At this point in her life, Mathilda’s father is her only living family, the only person she has a friendship with, and to lose him would be to isolate herself, but at the same time, she cannot stand to be near him. In a way, Mathilda is cursed.

Following the confession, Mathilda’s father leaves in the night, writing her a letter (more on that later) before fleeing to his final fate – he commits suicide shortly before Mathilda reaches him. Mathilda’s response to his death sums up the crux of the novella, and, in a way, my own shifting response.

‘Why is it that I feel no horror? Are these circumstances not dreadful?’

The story is tragic, and while it isn’t traditional horror, it is almost frightening. Mathilda is a young girl with no family, no real socialisation, having to navigate such a complex situation, and a social taboo at that – it’s not the kind of thing she could speak with an acquaintance about. 

In fact, Mathilda is only recounting her story in a letter to a friend, Woodville, as she is certain she’s about to die herself, despite only being in her early 20s, her body is frail and she is weak, and she’d previously tried to convince Woodville, who was grieving the loss of his wife, to take poison with her.

Mathilda says:

‘In truth I am in love with death; no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attire than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapped in their shroud: is it not my marriage dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal mental union we shall never part.’

Not only has Mathilda come to see herself in her mother’s place (as her father does), this also reflects Shelley’s attitudes to marriage. It’s clear from her writing, both fictional and non-fictional, that she feared marriage and parenthood – while many of her characters die in childbirth, marriage and death are also connected in her stories. Elizabeth Lavenza is killed on her wedding night, and Mathilda associates the two. 

Interpretations

The second pitfall is something I’ve had to actively work towards fixing – it’s perhaps a product of my neurodivergent literal thinking, but in the case of Mathilda, I was still very new to reading adult literature, and very new to studying literature, so my ability to understand deeper meanings hadn’t really developed. I was guilty of taking characters at face value. Not in the sense of ‘the curtains were just blue for the sake of it’, but in the assumption that a character couldn’t lie, or manipulate the truth (or another character), without it being explicitly clear to the reader. My issue lay in my interpretation of Mathilda and her father’s relationship.

Where Mathilda often tried to justify her father’s actions, or where her father blamed her, I understood their relationship to be mutually transgressive. Of course, upon reread, I was better able to comprehend their relationship.

In summary, Mathilda’s father is terrible. She introduces his history – while he was two years younger than Mathilda’s mother, he was significantly more educated than him, and she is described as innocent, and naive when it came to his affection for her. Mathilda, too, spent her life isolated from her peers, and her own emotions were shared not with companions, but with ‘inanimate objects’.

It’s quite clear that Mathilda’s father sees her mother in her – from his insistence, on their arrival in London, that she should read Dante to him, beginning from the point her mother last read, though he reflects and changes his mind. Mathilda still reads to him, but he permits her to choose her own book. He even confirms this feeling in his final letter to Mathilda, saying ‘Diana died to give her birth; her mother’s spirit was transferred into her frame, and she ought to be as Diana to me.’ To him, Mathilda is an extension of, and a replacement for, the wife that he lost in childbirth.

Her father is violent. When Mathilda attempts to restore their friendship (the term she uses to describe their relationship prior to his confession), he became angry. 

‘What do you mean? You know not what you mean. Why do you bring me out, and torture me, and tempt me, and kill me -”

He blames Mathilda for ‘tempting’ him, and the catalyst for his confession is his apparent jealousy at the attention she’s given by suitors. Mathilda, therefore, feels in part to blame for his death as part of her conflicted response. She reflects:

‘But my father; my beloved and most wretched father?’

Mathilda may only be a short novella, but it’s incredibly impactful. I’m glad that I read it at 13, but I’m even more glad that I returned to it at 26. Perhaps I can make it a tradition – every 13 years. Perhaps my experience reading it will be different again at 39… Let’s hope I don’t forget.