Transatlantic Loops and Urban Alienation in Mary Shelley’s Lodore

Abstract

Lodore, the novel Mary Shelley published in 1835, comprises two tales provocatively sutured between the first and second volumes. The opening section enacts the eponymous aristocrat’s self-exile in America, while the subsequent volumes relate the long rapprochement between Lodore’s daughter, Ethel, and her mother, Cornelia. Although current treatments of the novel foreground the theme of female education, contrasting Ethel’s paternally dependent instruction with the more progressive upbringing of Fanny Derham, my own Atlantic reading of Lodore disrupts this emphasis on what the narrative calls “sexual education.”¹ As a whole, I contend, the text stands as Shelley’s intervention in her country’s post-Waterloo crisis of identity, for in moving from the wilderness of the Illinois territory to the environs of London, it offers not only a private tale of tortured familial relations, but also Shelley’s meditation on the multivalent challenges to representation that agitated England in the 1820s and 1830s. Taken together, the transatlantic rhythms of the first volume and the repatriation of Lodore’s daughter ask us to consider the role of displacement in national identity and collective belonging. Thus, the personal experience of separation is put to astute political use, one that offers a new rendering of the Atlantic as a usable conceptual space in the Anglo-American imaginary.