Shelley's Goddess Maternity, Language, Subjectivity

by Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth

• ISBN13: 9780195073843
• ISBN10: 0195073843
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-10-29
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The subject of Gelpi's new book is the importance of the mother-infant relationship in Percy Bysshe Shelly's poetry and life. However, her book also uses Shelley as a touchstone by which to examine the rich historical and theoretical issues relevant to motherhood in the Romantic period. Gelpi offers a detailed account of the historical rise in attention paid to mothering, the changing cultural attitudes towards the role of the mother, and the resulting effect on the nature of family life. She further discusses the psychoanalytic, Marxist, and developmental approaches to the mother/infant relationship, particularly to the connection each makes between that relationship and the acquisition of language. By combining psychoanalytic, poststructuralist and feminist theory with extensive biographical material on Shelley and information on the position of mothers in England after 1790, Gelpi offers an important reassessment of Shelley's avowed feminism and the failure of his utopian vision.

Author Biography

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi is Professor of English at Stanford University. She has written or edited several books including Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature (1965), Adrienne Rich's Poetry (1975), and Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideologies (1982).

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. xix
The Nurse's Soul
Infancy Narratives	p. 3
The Lacanian-Kristevan Narrative	p. 5
The Interpersonal Narrative	p. 17
Notes	p. 31
Her Destined Sphere	p. 35
Maternity Eroticized	p. 43
The Mother-Educator	p. 60
The Mother God(dess)	p. 72
Notes	p. 80
Queen of the Field Place Hive	p. 83
Strategies of Infant Desire	p. 87
A Mother-Son Alliance	p. 105
Comus at Field Place	p. 120
Notes	p. 130
Re-Membering the Mother
Seeing Through Mirrors (Prometheus Unbound, Act I)	p. 137
Notes	p. 168
The Source of Desire Seeks the End of Desire (Prometheus Unbound, Act II)	p. 170
The Gaze of Soul-Making (Scene i)	p. 170
The Caverns of Thought (Scenes i and ii)	p. 188
Ritual Descent (Scenes iii and iv)	p. 204
Prometheus/Adonis and the Mother Goddess (Scene v)	p. 222
Notes	p. 229
"Where the Split Began" (Prometheus Unbound, Act III)	p. 236
The Rape of Thetis (Scene i)	p. 237
Utopian Paradigms (Scene ii)	p. 243
Mother and Son (Scene iii)	p. 245
The Dipsas of Desire (Scene iv)	p. 260
Notes	p. 265
Conclusion	p. 267
Works Cited	p. 274
Index	p. 288
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