Challenging sympathy in Mary Shelley’s fiction: Frankenstein, Mathilda, and ‘The Mourner’

Abstract

Abstract Several critics have noted Mary Shelley’s engagement with the medico-philosophical concept of sympathy in Frankenstein (1818) and, to a lesser extent, in Mathilda (written 1819; published 1959), but no one has observed that these texts – and I would add her critically neglected short-story ‘The Mourner’ (1830) to the mix – work together to explore sympathy as problematic, both between characters and in terms of readerly affect. Unusually for the Romantic period, when sympathy was almost always viewed as positive, all three of these texts show how and when sympathy can go too far and become destructive, travel beyond the bounds of social norms, or even become dangerous. These fictions should be understood as a triad that tests popular notions about sympathy as unproblematically good, showing that the challenge of sympathy is an intellectual problem Shelley investigates for over a decade in her fiction.