Creaturely interruptions: forgetting and remembering animals in the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

<p dir="ltr"><b>Forgetting and Remembering Animals in the Writing of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft</b></p><p dir="ltr">Mary Shelley’s <i>Frankenstein </i>is haunted by a dialectic between human forgetfulness and animal memory. While it is Victor Frankenstein who literally ‘re-members’ the bodies of both human and non-human animals into not quite human form, it is the creature himself who <i>remembers </i>these animals through his own consciousness. Victor’s disregard for animal experience contrasts starkly with the creature’s non-human perspective, and a conflict between Victor’s forgetfulness and the creature’s remembering forms a central tension of the novel. Shelley’s later writing remains preoccupied with human forgetfulness of animal experience, and close scrutiny of her corpus reveals an almost ever-present dialectic between forgotten and remembered animals. This dialectic is, in part, Shelley’s response to an implicit yet central tension throughout the writing of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.</p><p dir="ltr">Wollstonecraft’s political writing relies on a framework of human exceptionalism; she insists on an ontological distance between humans and animals in her demand for women to be recognised as human subjects. Yet the animals that feature throughout her work form a curious sub-text to the points made on the surface of her writing, entering her narratives at unexpected moments and troubling her arguments from within. Taking up the overlooked animals that haunt her mother’s writing, Shelley voices a much more openly ambiguous engagement with the relationship between human and non-human life. In both women’s writing, it becomes clear that human society is premised on an apparently necessary and inevitable forgetting of animal experience. Unbidden memories of animals serve as crucial interruptive moments, briefly disrupting social frameworks and narrative trajectories. This thesis charts the moments of animal interruption in both women’s writing, tracing a movement between the forgetting and remembering of animals throughout their work.</p><p dir="ltr"><i>Creaturely Interruptions </i>sits at an intersection between Animal Studies and Memory Studies. Recent work in Memory Studies has traced a long tradition in which memory is understood to play an essential role in the construction of human identity, with Suzanne Nalbantian noting how a “remembering human subject” is recognisable throughout Western literary history. I argue that this “remembering human subject” is frequently characterised by a <i>forgetfulness </i>of animal being. In this respect, I join many critics who have drawn attention to the complex reassessments of both animal and human ontology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, drawing particular influence from Jane Spencer’s examination of the position of animals in eighteenth-century feminist writing. Taking up Spencer’s contention that animals “articulate, even as they complicate … feminist thought,” I explore how memories of forgotten animals both complicate and accentuate Shelley’s and Wollstonecraft’s feminist concerns. Considering the preoccupation with <i>attention </i>in eighteenth-century understandings of memory, I turn to Anat Pick’s emphasis on the necessity of the “attentive gaze” in human/animal relationships in order to examine how both writers engage with animal memories. Shelley’s writing in particular urges readers to <i>pay attention </i>to these momentary surfacings of memory, a challenge that <i>Creaturely Interruptions </i>directly responds to. Paying attention to the animals that their texts refuse to forget illuminates each writer’s interrogation of the place of animals within human society.</p>