Abstrakt
Mary Shelley's Matilda (1819) reveals an evident reliance on metaphor for both forming feeling and feeling form. Shelley makes use of the aesthetics of her literary precursors and the explanatory, expositional rhetoric of the new sciences, to reform feeling as autonomous and affective.
Hence, feeling and form become an indistinguishable, emergently entwined experience, so much so, that cognitive frames and rhetorical representations reappropriate the language of the senses, to possibly find expression for the consequent excesses of introspection under empiricist epistemology. The identity of the titular character Matilda is bound up with the effacement of auto-biography, the performance of the confessional narrative, and the parameters of epistolary form, while attempting to transform her sensations and emotions from conduit metaphors, such as thinking and observing, towards metaphors of affect.
In this way, the text traverses the possibilities of affect and moves away from the duality of subject-object towards the primacy of relation. From this, the ontological priority of the subject is denied, in an attempt to broach the autonomy of experience and the affectivity of writing.
Building upon personal and historical readings, I aim to reinforce previous scholarship on the text's pyscho-biographical aspects while offering a dynamic reading that focuses on the literary techniques of the novella, thus highlighting the inability of the cognitive subject to communicate its psychological states and its evident dependence on rhetoric in forming feeling. As an origin narrative that doubles as a mythologising of the romantic self, the text urges an "I-You" encounter through the relationship of writer and reader, or even of actor and audience, to recover the lost analogic function of metaphor which seeks participation in the order of words and things.