Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein

In the period between 1815 and 1820, Mary Shelley wrote her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, as well as its companion piece, Mathilda, a tragic incest narrative that was confiscated by her father, William Godwin, and left unpublished until 1959. She also gave birth to four-and lost three-children.In this hybrid text, Rachel Feder interprets Frankenstein and Mathilda within a series of provocative frameworks including Shelley’s experiences of motherhood and maternal loss, twentieth-century feminists’ interests in and attachments to Mary Shelley, and the critic’s own experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood. Harvester of Hearts explores how Mary Shelley’s exchanges with her children-in utero, in birth, in life, and in death-infuse her literary creations. Drawing on the archives of feminist scholarship, Feder theorizes “elective affinities,” a term she borrows from Goethe to interrogate how the personal attachments of literary critics shape our sense of literary history. Feder blurs the distinctions between intellectual, bodily, literary, and personal history, reanimating the classical feminist discourse on Frankenstein by stepping into the frame.The result-at once an experimental book of literary criticism, a performative foray into feminist praxis, and a deeply personal lyric essay-not only locates Mary Shelley’s monsters within the folds of maternal identity but also illuminates the connections between the literary and the quotidian.

Reviews of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein

"Both galvanic charge and complex comfort, Rachel Feder's Harvester of Hearts brings the case home to herself: the case of Mary Shelley, of maternal erasure; of monstrosity; the ongoing shock of women thinking, writing, pregnant, birthing, mothering, forgetting, remembering, together and apart. This is criticism as care, essay as inquiry, book as gift."–Maureen N. McLane, New York University, author of My Poets "Intensely lyrical language energizes Harvester of Hearts throughout, electrifying a work sensitive to the varieties of motherhood and writing: forgetting, erasure, monstrosity, self, romance, suspicion, and elective affinities, to name only some." –Eric G. Wilson, author of How to Make a Soul: The Wisdom of John Keats