‘Beauty is as we see it’: Female Perception of Aesthetic Experience in Mary W. Shelley’s The Mourner(1829)

• Irene Repiso Rodríguez ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• Localización: Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain / coord. por Francisco Gallardo del Puerto, María del Carmen Camus Camus, Jesús Ángel González López, 2022, ISBN 978-84-19024-15-2, págs. 212-217
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro (pdf)
• Resumen

  • The aim of this article is to show how Mary W. Shelley’s tale “The Mourner” (1929) challenges the traditional idea of female beauty and moral values that the gift-book The Keepsake promoted. Aesthetically, the tragic plot already evidences a noteworthy inadequacy to the undertone of such gift-book and the drawings that decorate it (Turner’s drawings of a peaceful Virginia Water). Furthermore, instead of perpetuating the eighteenth-century gender systematization of the aesthetic categories of the beautiful and sublime, I will explain how this tale follows the Romantic approach of aesthetic ambiguity as it includes male and female characters who do not only experience both the beautiful and sublime, but also embody attributes related to both categories. Finally, I will interpret how this tale enriches the corpus of Romantic literature as it introduces female concerns in the plot, such as female dependence and vulnerability, as well as a communal attitude towards Nature.