Having in mind how she creates a topography of gender that serves as a vehicle for critiquing prevailing masculine concepts of history, this paper examines Mary Shelley’s second novel Valperga from the standpoint of the complex relationship between history and gender and tries to explore the ways in which she incorporated it into her hybrid narrative form. First, we shall see how Shelley reproduces the ideology of her literary culture by melding the conventionally masculine genre of history with the culturally feminized sentimental novel of the period and how, by rejecting both extremes, she adopts a hybrid, ungendered narrative form for her novel. We will also see, in so doing, how Shelley advocates a new feminist history that is more than a simple rejection of masculine values in favor of the feminine. Instead, the new historical model that powerfully emerges in Valperga through the combination of Euthanasia as the moral center and the hybrid form of the novel itself is one which recombines separate gender categories into a single and unified whole that retains the qualities of each. Finally, we will see how Valperga confirms itself as a text that has essentially “ungendered” its own form, especially though the interaction of history and fiction, which undercuts the gendering of these literary forms,. That is, this paper asserts that by integrating the masculine and the feminine, the hybrid text of Valperga formally reinforces the underlying ideology of the novel, which, in keeping with the ideology of many women writers of the Romantic period, resists a model of oppositional polarity.

Having in mind how she creates a topography of gender that serves as a vehicle for critiquing prevailing masculine concepts of history, this paper examines Mary Shelley’s second novel Valperga from the standpoint of the complex relationship between history and gender and tries to explore the ways in which she incorporated it into her hybrid narrative form. First, we shall see how Shelley reproduces the ideology of her literary culture by melding the conventionally masculine genre of history with the culturally feminized sentimental novel of the period and how, by rejecting both extremes, she adopts a hybrid, ungendered narrative form for her novel. We will also see, in so doing, how Shelley advocates a new feminist history that is more than a simple rejection of masculine values in favor of the feminine. Instead, the new historical model that powerfully emerges in Valperga through the combination of Euthanasia as the moral center and the hybrid form of the novel itself is one which recombines separate gender categories into a single and unified whole that retains the qualities of each. Finally, we will see how Valperga confirms itself as a text that has essentially “ungendered” its own form, especially though the interaction of history and fiction, which undercuts the gendering of these literary forms,. That is, this paper asserts that by integrating the masculine and the feminine, the hybrid text of Valperga formally reinforces the underlying ideology of the novel, which, in keeping with the ideology of many women writers of the Romantic period, resists a model of oppositional polarity.

Mary Shelley, gender, history, the hybrid, feminist history, ideology