SOURCE: “The Law of the (Nameless) Father: Mary Shelley's Mathilda and the Incest Taboo,” in The Politics of Survivorship: Incest, Women's Literature, and Feminist Theory, New York University Press, 1996, pp. 53-89.

In the following essay, Champagne discusses Mathilda as an example of incest narratives that were consistently suppressed because of their de-centered vision of paternity.

Society expressly forbids that which society brings about.

—Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship

British romanticism, a literary movement spanning the years from 1790 to 1830, is the only canon to remain almost wholly resistant to feminist challenges. Still represented by six male poets (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley), romanticism is really the last bastion of male canonicity. Both a celebration of individualism and a place-keeper in intellectual history, marking the historical moment when subjectivity and perception became privileged terms, romanticism contains within its...