Transcending The Boundaries An Analysis Of Primary Female Images In Mary Shelley's Novels

As a newly discovered literary figure, Mary W. G. Shelley has drawn much attention from Western critics in recent years, but has attracted too little attention from the scholars in China. Though not an explicit moralist, Mary Shelley nonetheless made clear the debilitating and often tragic results of Romantic idealism and obsessive individualism throughout her works. The progress of her insight into women's lives can be traced roughly in the representative female images she created in her major novels.At the beginning of her serious writing career and her life with Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley created a lovely and courageous Arabian woman, Safie in her well-known Gothic science fiction Frankenstein. Safie's resolution and courage to transgress the boundaries of language, distance, race and gender, her determination to resist injustice set a sharp contrast with those other submissive female figures in the novel who confined themselves in the spiritual"haram".But to make a choice of one's own was just the first step, the turbulent life of exile and disaster Mary Shelley then suffered forced her to realize the power and cruelty of the reality. However, adversities just sharpened her pen. In her next work Matilda, Shelley rewrote the myth of the banishment of Eve from Eden through the heroine Mathilda. But her original work was regarded as unfit to be published because of the"disgusting"themes: incest and patricide.Then Mary Shelley sought to express her new insight in historical novel and created two bewitching heroines, Euthanasia and Beatrice, in the story of the fourteenth-century prince of Lucca, Castruccio. In rewriting these two women's doomed pursuit and sufferings, Mary Shelley announced her boldest moral condemnation of the gendered world in her time.Mary Shelley's personal life became even worse afterwards as Percy Shelley drowned in the summer of 1822. Yet she managed to survive and gradually came to realize the real strength of women. In her last two"domestic"novels, she created independent and intellectual young women Fanny and Elizabeth, and bestowed them new hope and means to counter against the dangers of a world dominated by egocentrism and self-indulgence: the pursuit of universal justice based on sympathy, straightforward fidelity and forgiveness to Others and to one's Self without neglecting the right to resist tyranny as the all-encompassing cause for individuals of either sex.With this shared cause, as Mary Shelley wished and suggested in her final fiction, the daughter(s) and the son(s) may be able to work together to find out the truth behind the veil of social norms, to vindicate justice and true virtue, and to defy together the injustice in any forms.