Introduction
Reading Matilda steeps one deeper and deeper into the effects of loneliness. Mary Shelley, through the eponymous character, presents us with the emotional landscape of a young girl constantly struggling with familial strife and loneliness. As one reads, they cannot help but empathize with the way that all of the moments of happiness in her life seem to be overshadowed by events that serve to take the happiness she once had and twist it. One constantly recurring theme is that of loneliness. Separated from family, relationships and society, she is forced over and over into seclusion, something the book explores from a heartrending light.
Development
Early Isolation
Her life was fated to be tragic from the moment she was born. Her father, a happy and intelligent man, absolutely adored his wife, and was devastated when what should have been an incredible moment, the birth of their daughter, ended in catastrophe. Due to complications from the birth, the mother passes away, leaving the father completely distraught. In his anguish, he runs off to his own adventures, unable to bear the sight of their child as it reminds him too much of her. This is the first loneliness that she experiences, that of being abandoned by her own father. As a child, she is given to the care of her aunt, an older, miserly woman who doesn’t have much affection. So Matilda spends her early years sequestered away, cut off from all of society, living with a woman who looked after her from a sense of duty not love. She falls in love with the vast land of nature around her, but would weep when she realized she had no one to share it with.
It is made clear from the very beginning of the book that this will not have a happy ending. She is a girl constantly alone and cut off from the world, and you can see it constricting her and affecting her from the first years of her youth. This early isolation forces her natural affections and emotions deeper, concentrating and suppressing them. It becomes a driving force in her life, a point that she cannot overlook and that permeates everything she does. The intensity of her emotions plays with her expectations and desires, setting her up for an even deeper fall in the coming events. A question subconsciously seems to be running through her mind, “If I am alone and not being shown love, am I incapable of being loved?”
Reunion and Separation
At sixteen, Mathilda’s long-absent father reaches out to reunite, filling her with joy as she eagerly joins him, craving the affection she lacked under her cold aunt’s care. He sees his wife in her, and Mathilda becomes wholly absorbed in his affection. However, this newfound happiness falters when her aunt, her only childhood companion despite their emotional distance, falls ill and dies, deepening Mathilda’s isolation. In her home in London, tensions arise as a young man’s frequent visits unsettle her father, who becomes more and more distant. Confused and desperate to reclaim his love, she is blindsided when he abruptly announces their move to the country, where he lived with her mother. At the family estate in the country, they continue in this state of unhappiness for a year, with Matilda becoming more and more anxious to win back her father’s love. This comes to the point where she gets on her knees and begs him to tell her what is wrong. After begging her not to ask, finally the truth comes out; he has fallen in love with his own daughter. This revelation sends Matilda reeling, and she runs from her father and locks herself in her room. Her father, returning to the house, and seeing that Matilda has spurned him, writes her a letter saying goodbye for forever. Matilda realizes he plans to kill himself, and chases after him, only to arrive at the scene of his death
The heights of her joy when she first reunites with her father seem limitless, she cannot get enough of his love. The months they spent together before he grew distant had filled her very soul, giving her a fulfillment and satisfaction that she had never conceived of. But this all comes crashing down even further when she loses the affection of her father, and she plumbs the depths of her misery when she loses him twice, once when the revelation drives a wedge between them, and then again at his death. She is once more alone, but now she has realized something new; Love can bring loneliness to new depths, for now you miss what you know you once had.
Failed Connection
After the death of her father, she takes it upon herself to remove herself from the rest of society. With the money she has, she buys herself a small property in the middle of nowhere with a single servant. Despite desiring to live by herself, she attracts the attention of a man named Woodville. Woodville himself is struggling with grief from the death of his fiance, and is drawn to Matilda, a youthful girl obviously well to do living in the uninhabited countryside. They begin to grow closer, with both being able to pour out their feelings and frustrations to each other, but with Matilda never telling him the cause of her sorrow. She begins to become dependent on him, and is thrown into a tizzy when he fails to show up one day. She then conspires with him to have them both commit suicide together so they can be free of their pain. But Woodville refuses, saying that while he is distraught, he doesn’t wish to take his own life, convincing her not to follow through with her plan.
Here we start to see the full effect of her loneliness coming to play. Seclusion is what she desired, she feels that the sin of her father has forever marked her and she is unfit for civilization. As she says, “I must shrink before the eye of man lest he should read my father’s guilt in my glazed eyes: I must be silent lest my faltering voice should betray unimagined horrors.” In this lies the key to her loneliness, a barricade to protect herself and the memory of her father. It is now self-imposed; where before it had been a loneliness forced due to circumstance, now it is a thing she seeks of her own accord. And even with someone who becomes her friend due to their shared sorrow, she finds herself unable to bare these deepest parts of her soul, choosing loneliness despite the fact that she now has the opportunity to share the load. She discovers a new torture, the need of having someone close, yet being unable to part for the loneliness she has imposed upon herself. Now willing to embrace the thing that had once sickened her, she attempts suicide, even if it doesn’t go as she planned
Final Solitude
Woodville can only stay so long; she is left fully alone when necessity dictates that Woodville go see his ailing mother. He tries to get her to take heart and have hope before he leaves, leaving her with a message of peace. She walks him to the place where he needs to leave, but then wanders and gets lost on the way back. Exposed to the elements, the rain and bitter cold wipes away all that remains of her feeble frame. Destroyed in both body and soul, she barely makes it back to her cottage. Her servant finds her sick and covered in wet clothes, and she never fully recovers. As the months pass, she grows closer to death, and on her deathbed, writes this story as her final words, wishing Woodville goodbye.
At the end of the story, we are given one last look at the way that Matilda perceives her own loneliness. She allows herself to go back to the embrace of Mother Nature, her friend from the earliest years of her life. This solitude harkens back to that of her first, but everything has changed. She went from a girl who so desperately wanted to be freed from her loneliness but was kept quieted away, to a girl who quieted herself away so she wouldn’t have to suffer the dread of others knowing the reason for her loneliness. And in her final days, she relishes death, believing that she will finally no longer be alone once she passes to the other side.
Conclusion
Matilda, through the writing of a young woman only twenty one herself, gives the story of a woman struggling with mental health, an experience very important in our time. While it may not be the most profound or the most intensive in its analysis of a young woman’s struggles, it is honest and relevant. It shows how someone that age would truly see herself, and touches deeply on the crippling effects that loneliness can have on a sensitive soul. Matilda goes from naive to cynical, at one point grasping for relationships, at the next eschewing them. Emotion is not able to just be locked away, time and time again it shows that it is still there, lurking under the surface. The question “If I am alone and not being shown love, am I incapable of being loved?”, seems to find no definitive answer, yet on her deathbed she has the hope she will finally receive what she has longed for. Through a gripping narrative and a heartbreaking story, Mary Shelley shows us the cost of loneliness and lack of love, especially on the most vulnerable, the young.
