‘Rending the Veil of Mortal Frailty’: Queen Mab (1813)

Abstract

This chapter, focusing on Queen Mab (1813), argues that Shelley’s early vision of death is informed by a distinct amalgam of Platonic dualism and Lucretian atomism. It also argues that Shelley’s vision of this period is also inflected with eighteenth-century French Materialism (especially the work of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach). This reading of Queen Mab establishes that Shelley’s claims relating to death in 1813 are bold and assured: time and again, Shelley argues that death is the process by which the immortal soul is untethered from the mortal body and that the mortal body is subject to a process of decay that reintegrates its constituent parts with the natural world. This chapter also argues that Shelley shares a common, in fact radical, aim of Lucretius in writing Queen Mab: to loosen the ‘tight knots of religion’ and ‘to set free the minds of men’ (NU, IV. 6–7).