“Rolled round in earth’s Diurnal course”: Mary Shelley, Romantic Science, and Suicide as Natural Death

Abstract: In Mathilda (1959; written in 1819), the eponymous protagonist desires a so-called “natural death,” a double entendre I use to indicate human death in natural surroundings and especially through the use of nature to effectuate it, particularly in the context of suicide. With reference to the work of Hume and Goethe, as well as geology and vitalism, which advance the notion that auto-destruction is natural and observable all around us, I will show that Shelley develops the idea that humans who kill themselves may be viewed as succumbing to an innate process, rather than aberrantly acting à rebours , against nature.