"My Hideous Progeny" : Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and the Father-Daughter Relationship is a study of the influence of William Godwin on his daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. "My Hideous Progeny" explores Godwin's unsettling psychological legacy - and his generous intellectual gifts - to his daughter. The relationship between Mary Shelley and her father illustrates a typical pattern of female development and a typical course of father-daughter relationships over a lifetime.

Mary Shelley's response to her father's influence is unforgettably portrayed in the figure of the father in the pages of her novels.

William Godwin, a radical political philosopher and novelist, brought up the daughter he had with his lover Mary Wollstonecraft to be a thinker and writer. Unusual for the times, he trained her in literature, history, and the powers of the rational mind. Yet as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin grew into womanhood, her once supportive father rejected her. He distanced himself from her physically and emotionally during her adolescence, perhaps because of the incestuous feelings her developing womanhood called up.

After Mary Godwin eloped to France at age sixteen with the married, atheistic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Godwin refused to speak with his daughter for almost two years. After Percy Shelley's death by drowning, Godwin changed once again: he relied on Mary Shelley heavily for emotional comfort and sustenance, and made it clear he wanted her continued financial support. Mary Shelley and her father maintained an intimate, troubled relationship until the day he died.

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William Godwin's influence on Mary Shelley pervades her novels, especially in the figure of the father. Her first two novels, Frankenstein and Mathilda, are both energized by the question of father-daughter incest. In Frankenstein, the spurned, abandoned monster can be viewed as a figure for a child made loathsome by the father's incestuous desire. Mary Shelley uses Frankenstein to chart the way a daughter can vent her rage on the figure of the father and eventually gain control over him.

Mathilda focuses more directly than Frankenstein on the question of father-daughter incest; it is remarkable for its vivid portrayal of the ambivalent emotions of incest victims.