Falconer (Mary Shelley)
Falkner is the last novel by the romantic author Mary Shelley . It appeared in 1837.
Like Mary Shelley's novel Lodore (1835), Falkner tells of the upbringing of a young woman by a tyrannical father figure. As a six-year-old orphan, Elizabeth Raby prevents Rupert Falkner's suicide. Falkner then adopted her and would like to raise her in such a way that she corresponds in an exemplary manner to the moral standards of her time. As a young woman, Elizabeth Raby falls in love with Gerald Neville, whose mother has unintentionally driven Falkner to her death years earlier. After Falkner is accused of murdering Neville's mother, Elisabeth prevents the two men from destroying one another. Instead, there is a reconciliation between the two. Falkner is the only novel by Mary Shelley in which the virtues of the female heroine ultimately prevail.
"Falkner" was cited by literary scholars along with the novel " Lodore " as evidence that Mary Shelley was increasingly turning to conservative views. However, Shelley expert Betty Bennett has argued that Falconer is just as grappling with power and political responsibility as her previous novels. The literary scholar Mary Poovey has come to the conclusion in her analysis that Mary Shelley Falkner wrote, among other things, to verbalize the conflict with her own father. Mary Shelley's father was the social philosopher and founder of political anarchism William Godwin. For example, although he campaigned for free love in his major early work, he vehemently opposed his daughter's extramarital relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley .
Critics today do not see a feminist novel in Falkner , nor is the novel counted among the main works, although she herself was convinced that it was her best. The novel is mainly criticized for its two-dimensional characterization.
proof
Individual evidence
literature
- Allen, Graham. "Public and Private Fidelity: Mary Shelley's 'Life of William Godwin' and Falkner ". Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner . Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
- Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 080185976X .
- Bennett, Betty T. "Not This Time, Victor ': Mary Shelley's Reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner ". Mary Shelley in Her Times . Eds Betty T. Bennett, Betty T. and Stuart Curran. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
- Bunnell, Charlene E. "The Illusion of 'Great Expectations': Manners and Morals in Mary Shelley's Lodore and Falkner ". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein": Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth . Eds. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997.
- Ellis, Kate Ferguson. " Falconers and Other Fictions". The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley . Ed. Esther Schor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521007704 .
- Hopkins, Lisa. "'A Medea, in More Senses than the More Obvious One': Motherhood in Mary Shelley's Lodore and Falkner ". Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2002): 383-405.
- Jowell, Sharon L. "Mary Shelley's Mothers: The Weak, the Absent, and the Silent in Lodore and Falkner ". European Romantic Review 8.3 (1997): 298-322.
- Poovey, Mary . The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN 0226675289 .
- Saunders, Julia. "Rehabilitating the Family in Mary Shelley's Falconers ". Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner . Eds. Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Nora Crook. New York, NY: Macmillan; St. Martin's, 2000.
- Sites, Melissa. "Utopian Domesticity as Social Reform in Mary Shelley's Falconers ". Keats-Shelley Journal 54 (2005): 148-72.