Beyond the Picturesque and the Sublime

Mary Shelley's Approach to Nature in the Novels Frankenstein and Lodore

Abstract

It is somewhat striking that Mary Shelley’s moment of high personal cre-ativity, the summer of 1816, should have coincided with a climatic ca-tastrophe of world-wide proportions, the eruption of the Indonesian vol-cano Tambora.¹9One could be tempted to associate the ravages caused by the creature with the deaths provoked by the “year without a summer” in which Frankenstein was written. In fact, Mary Shelley’s fiction – perhaps because of the climactic changes she witnessed – reveals a complex ap-proach to the natural world that invites an ecocritical reading. This may be, however, this paper takes up Ralph Pite’s invitation to re-contextual-ize any ecocritical approach by taking into consideration the complex ap-proaches to nature, theoretical and practical, that were available to a nine-teenth-century female writer. As he claims, “In order to have an ecological literature, we need to develop an ecological idea of reading both for history and for texts. For the Romantics to be green, we will need to read them in a green way” (359). As a woman who travelled extensively throughout Eu-rope, Mary Shelley noted in her diaries and letters the changing landscape that caught her imagination. This article claims that these impressions played an important role in shaping her fiction. By focusing on two novels,Frankenstein (1818) a nd Lodore (1835), situated respectively at the begin-ning and at the end of her narrative production, this article will outline the evolution of Shelley’s discourse on nature and the landscape.