Cursed Tellers, Compelling Tales—The Endurance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Alone—alone—all—all—alone Upon the wide, wide sea— And God will not take pity on My soul in agony!
WHO IS MEANT TO give voice to these lines, which comprise a late entry in the journal of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (Journals, vol.2 p. 573)? Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” had been one of her favorite poems since the poet had recited it in her father’s study, so Shelley may simply have meant to reanimate the seafaring protagonist. These lines also speak for many of her own literary creations, including the main characters in her most popular novel, Frankenstein. Captain Robert Walton knew the poem well, attributing “passionate enthusiasm, for the dangerous mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets” (p. 18). Coleridge’s mariner experiences the utter desolation of being the last living soul on board his ship, and comes to sense that he is living under a ban that deprives him of human company; Shelley’s mariner, too, mourns his isolated state, and desperately longs for a sympathetic friend. Victor Frankenstein also decries the pain of living his nightmare existence, as his loved ones die off one by one. But it is the monster who most deeply feels the utter misery of an enforced solitary existence. Declaring itself “godless” and “wretched” in the final scene, the creature is the living embodiment of these four bleak lines as it is carried out of human earshot and off the pages of Frankenstein by icy waves.
Even in her journal, Mary Shelley used fiction and foils to explore her innermost feelings. By her mid-twenties, the lonely misery of Coleridge’s mariner was all too familiar to her. Nothing in her life seemed to endure. Her mother had died as a result of giving birth to her; her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide about a month after Mary’s nineteenth birthday (and two months before Percy Shelley’s first wife killed herself) ; four of her five conceptions ended tragically, the last a
near-fatal miscarriage; her husband, Percy, was drowned in 1822, six years after their marriage, and their friend Byron died two years later. Later attempts at romance (such as her interest in Aubrey Beauclerk) and even friendship (with Jane Williams, for example) tended to be short- lived, or simply ended disastrously. She outlived every major Romantic writer and attended the funerals of almost every one of her loved ones. As early as age twenty-six, she wrote, “The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 542).
Her urgent desire to “enrol myself on the page of fame” (p. 6) was quashed upon the death of Percy, her great love and literary mentor. His loss made her surviving son all the more precious to her, and as their financial problems persisted Mary turned to writing for money rather than literary reputation. Many of Frankenstein’s readers are surprised to discover that Shelley wrote steadily through her life, producing six novels after her first, Frankenstein, two verse plays, two travel works, several biographies, translations, children’s stories, and edited works. In addition, she composed numerous essays, poems, and reviews and more than two dozen short stories. Most of the major writings suffered from unfavorable comparisons to Frankenstein; several of them received negative reviews or were cited as morally corrupt (The Last Man was even banned in some European countries). Most of her work has been long out of print, and until about forty years ago, Mary was not given serious consideration as a writer. She seems to have anticipated the potential uselessness of her literary labors relatively early in her career: “What folly is it in me to write trash nobody will read,” she complained in her journal in 1825. “All my many pages—future waste paper—surely I am a fool” (Journals, vol. 2, p. 489).
What did endure was her waking nightmare: Frankenstein. First published in 1818 when she was in her late teens, the novel is her only work to remain in print since its first publication. Frankenstein has lived on as Shelley’s self-proclaimed “hideous progeny” despite efforts to take it away from her by attributing its authorship to her husband. It has survived more than a century of academic scorn and neglect, gaining a place on college syllabi only in the 1960s. It is a tale that possesses the compelling quality of the ancient mariner’s saga, a story that nearly two centuries of readers have confirmed they “cannot choose but hear.”
“… go forth and prosper …”
Werewolves, vampires, witches, and warlocks have been the stuff of folklore, legend, and nightmare for centuries, yet none have so haunted the public imagination as the monster created by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816. From the start, we have been eager to help the monster live off of the page, to interpret the tale for ourselves. Within five years of the novel’s initial publication, the first of what would eventually be more than ninety dramatizations of Frankenstein appeared onstage. Shelley herself went to see one of the thirty-seven performances of Presumption that played in London in 1823. Lumbering violently and uttering inarticulate groans, the monster attracted record numbers of theatergoers, as well as a series of protests by the London Society for the Prevention of Vice. Mary was pleased and “much amused” by Thomas Cooke’s attempts to portray the monster, and even made a favorable note about the playbill to her friend Leigh Hunt. “In the list of dramatis personae came,—by Mr. T Cooke: this nameless mode of naming the unameable [sic] is rather good,” she wrote on September 11 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378).
A familiar yet ever-evolving presence on the Victorian stage, the monster also haunted the pages of newspapers and journals. Political cartoonists used Shelley’s monster as the representation of the “pure evil” of Irish nationalists, labor reformers, and other favored subjects of controversy ; it was often depicted as an oversized, rough-and-ready, weapon-wielding hooligan. In Annals of the New York Stage, George Odell notes that audiences were entertained with photographic “illusions” of the monster as early as the 1870s. And the cinema was barely ten years old before the Edison Film Company presented their version of the story, with Charles Ogle portraying a long-haired, confused-looking giant. Virtually every year since that film’s appearance in 1910, another version of Frankenstein has been released somewhere in the world—though the most enduring image of the monster was the one created by Boris Karloff in James Whale’s 1931 classic. The creature’s huge, square head, oversized frame, and undersized suit jacket still inform most people’s idea of what Shelley’s monster “really” looks like.
As strange and various as the interpretations of the creature have been, the monster has retained a surprisingly human quality. Even in its most melodramatic portrayals, its innate mortality is made apparent; whether
through a certain-softness in the eyes, a wistfulness or longing in its expression, or a desperate helplessness in its movements, the creature has always come across as much more than a stock horror device. In fact, several film adaptations have avoided the use of heavy makeup and props that audiences have come to expect. Life Without a Soul ( 1915) stars a human-looking, flesh-toned monster; and in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), actor Robert De Niro, who is certainly neither ugly nor of great stature, did not wear the conventional green face paint and restored the monster’s eloquent powers of speech.
Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s monster was given a shadowy and elusive physical presence by its creator. It moves through the story faster than the eye can follow it, descending glaciers “with greater speed than the flight of an eagle” (p. 130) or rowing “with an arrowy swiftness” (p. 150) . The blurriness of the scenes in which the monster appears allows us to create his image for ourselves and helps explain why it has inspired so many adaptations and reinterpretations. Certainly, too, both Milton’s Satan and Shelley’s creature have been made more interesting, resonant, and frightening because they have human qualities. The monster possesses familiar impulses to seek knowledge and companionship, and these pique our curiosity and awaken our sympathies. Its complex emotions, intelligence, and ability to plan vengeful tactics awaken greater fears than the stumbling and grunting of a mindless beast. A closer look at Shelley’s singular description of the monster’s features reveals its likeness to a newborn infant rather than a “fiend” or “demon”: Consider its “shrivelled complexion,” “watery eyes,” and “yellow skin [that] scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” (p. 51) . The emotional range of De Niro’s monster, the gentle childish expression in Karloff’s eyes, even the actor Cooke’s “seeking as it were for support—his trying to grasp at the sounds he heard” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 378), suggest that we have sensed the monster’s humanity all along.
Another trend in the way the monster has been reinterpreted is equally suggestive. Movie titles such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) , and Dracula Vs. Frankenstein (1971) testify to the fact that the monster has taken on the name of his creator in popular culture. In Frankenstein, the monster is called plenty of names by his creator, from at best “the accomplishment of my toils” to “wretch,” “miserable monster,” and “filthy daemon”; significantly,
Victor never blesses his progeny with his own last name. Our identity of the creature as the title character does, of course, shift the focus from man to monster, reversing Shelley’s intention. Reading the book, we realize that Frankenstein‘s lack of recognizing the creature as his own— in essence, not giving the monster his name—is the monster’s root problem. Is it our instinctive human sympathy for the anonymous being that has influenced us to name him? Is it our recognition of similarities and ties between “father” and “son,” our defensiveness regarding family values? Or is it simply our interest in convenience, our compelling need to label and sort?
Our confusion of creator and created, as well as our interest in depicting the creature’s human side, indicate an unconscious acknowledgment of a common and powerful reading of Frankenstein: that the monster and his creator are two halves of the same being who together as one represent the self divided, a mind in dramatic conflict with itself. Walton notes to his sister the possibility of living a “double existence” (pp. 24—25), bringing to mind his and Frankenstein’s struggles between their creative and self-destructive energies. The monster/ creator conflation most forcefully conveys this idea of humanity’s conflicting impulses to create and destroy, to love and hate. Shelley could not have chosen a subject with more relevance to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers than humankind’s own potential inhumanity to itself. Our ambitions have led us to the point where we, too, can accomplish what Victor did in his laboratory that dreary night in November: artificially create life. But will our plan to clone living organisms or produce life in test tubes have dire repercussions ? We build glorious temples to progress and technology, monumental structures that soar toward the heavens; and yet in a single September morning, the World Trade Center was leveled—proving once again that man is his own worst enemy.
In Frankenstein, Shelley exhibits a remarkable ability to anticipate and develop questions and themes peculiarly relevant to her future readers, thereby ensuring its endurance for almost 200 years. To understand why and how this ability developed, we must take a closer look at her life, times, and psychological state. Certainly, Frankenstein details a fascinating experiment, introduces us to vivid characters, and takes us to gorgeous, exotic places. But this text, written by a teenager, also addresses fundamental contemporary questions regarding “otherness”
and society’s superficial evaluations of character based on appearance, as well as modern concerns about parental responsibility and the harmful effects of absenteeism. Anticipating the alienation of everyday life, Robert Walton and the monster speak to those of us who now live our lives in front of screens of various kinds—computer, television, and film. Other readers may feel stabs of recognition when confronting Victor, a perfectionist workaholic who sacrifices love and friendship in the name of ambition. Frankenstein is a nineteenth-century literary classic, but it is also fully engaged in many of the most profound philosophical, psychological, social, and spiritual questions of modern existence.
“… the spirit of the age …”
The endurance of Frankenstein has much to do with the particular circumstances under which the text was written: the moment in history and place in time of its creation, as well as the particular background and preparations of its creator. In the years leading up to the story’s conception on a June evening in 1816, Europe and America experienced a profound shift in sensibility that initiated the modern era. Romanticism had its beginnings in the democratic idealism that inspired the French and American Revolutions, and in the progressive thought that brought on the industrial and scientific revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though most historians cite the movement’s end-dates as somewhere around the mid-nineteenth century, the strength and appeal of the “spirit of the age” (as identified by Percy Shelley in A Defence of Poetry) continue to affect our present political, social, and intellectual lives. Those exemplifying the spirit during Shelley’s time railed against authoritarian government, conservative morality, classical models, personal insincerity, and moderate, “safe” behavior. In the arts, Romantics brought into their work a new emphasis on individualism, personal feelings, and expression, as exemplified by Goya’s Black Paintings and Cho-pin’s Preludes; a focus on emotional, subjective response rather than the objectivity and intellect favored during the Age of Reason, which can be detected in the difference between Beethoven’s earliest and later works; a celebration of spontaneous expressive intensity, seen in Turner’s oil paintings and heard in Bellini’s operas; and a keen interest in the exotic and erotic, as in Delacroix’s scenes inspired by his North African travels.
In Britain, the literary response to the movement was particularly intense. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were strongly affected by the spirit of change in France and America and envisioned nothing less than “the regeneration of the human race,” according to poet laureate Robert Southey. “That was the period of theory and enthusiasm,” wrote Mary Shelley in her unfinished biography of her father. “Man had been reigned over long by fear and law, he was now to be governed by truth and justice” (Sunstein, pp. 15- 16). “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” announced William Wordsworth, who along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge would redefine the art of poetry in Lyrical Ballads (1798). Artists are often unaware of “movements” as they are happening or are hesitant to recognize their placement in a particular “era” or “period”; what distinguished British Romantic writers is their self-conscious recognition of a powerful creative force energizing themselves and fellow artists. “Great spirits now on earth are sojourning,” Keats wrote to a friend in 1816. “These, these will give the world another heart / And other pulses: hear ye not the hum / Of mighty workings?”
As the child of two exemplars of the Romantic spirit of reform and revolution, wife of one of the five most recognized names in Romantic poetry, friend of Byron, Hunt, Lamb, and several other representative Romantic writers, Mary was British Romanticism’s heir apparent. The most progressive currents of Romantic thought and art ran through her veins and electrified her everyday life. Her father, William Godwin, was a former minister turned atheist and radical philosopher; he preached his faith in human beings as rational creatures who did not need institutions or laws to exist peaceably, and expounded these anarchist views in such works as An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin believed that man is not born evil but becomes vicious through circumstances that are usually set up by those wielding political power. The time was imminent to challenge traditional social order and “things as they are” (the original title of his novel Caleb Williams [1794]) and to set up a society of independent-thinking individuals. The effect of his writings was enormous on Mary, who eventually dedicated Frankenstein to “William Godwin, Writer of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, Etc.” Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after Mary’s birth in 1797, but her spirit was very much alive in radical political circles as well as the Godwin household. (Crushed by his wife’s untimely
death, Godwin published Memoirs of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 and idealized her the next year in St. Leon.) In addition to writing Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1793) and several other texts promoting educational reform for women, Wollstonecraft published two great human rights manifestos: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1791) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Considered the first great work of feminism, the latter document asserted that women constitute an oppressed class cutting across the standard social hierarchy; the discussion of the indignities and injustices suffered by women is rendered with real passion and articulateness. The monster’s pleas for justice in Frankenstein derive much of their eloquence and even some of their language from Wollstonecraft’s well- known work.
Growing up in the Godwin household, Mary was granted immediate access to her parents’ radical intellectual circles. Coleridge and Wordsworth discussed their theories of poetry; the scientist Sir Humphry Davy elaborated upon his chemical experiments; Aaron Burr, vice president of the United States, visited with the Godwins and spoke of the goals of democracy. Mary was introduced to the painter Joseph Turner, the musician Muzio Clementi, and the revolutionaries Helen Maria Williams and Lady Mount Cashell. A bright child and voracious reader, she was inspired by what she heard, and she devoured an incredibly diverse selection of books. Her reading list for 1815, for example, lists seventy-six works—among them, Rousseau’s Confessions (1782), D‘Israeli’s Despotism; or, The Fall of the Jesuits (1811), Robertson’s History of America (1777), Henri-Dietrich’s Systeme de la nature (in French; 1770), and her father’s Life of Chaucer (1803). It is no wonder that the monster’s seminal reading—Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, all three also on Mary’s 1815 list—are works spanning centuries, continents, and subject matter.
Though Wollstonecraft and Godwin both wrote novels, their talents as fiction writers were greatly subordinate to their skills as philosophers and essayists. Mary’s reading lists indicate her interest in studying and exploring the literary arts, perhaps as her way of finding her own niche in this multitalented family. Like many young women her age, she particularly enjoyed the relatively new genre of Gothic literature: Before the age of twenty, she read Beckford’s Vathek (1787), Radcliffe’s
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and Monk Lewis’s Tales of Terror (1799). As a teenager she also read Pamela (1741) and Clarissa (1747), by Samuel Richardson, and several other epistolary novels, plus a number of the novels of sentiment by Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding. Meeting Percy Shelley in 1812 intensified her interest in poetry as well; in the years preceding the writing of Frankenstein, she pored through the collected works of many of the poets she had first encountered in her father’s study.
By the time Mary reached age eighteen, then, she was very familiar with many of the philosophic, social, scientific, political, and literary issues of Romanticism, the first modern era. Though Frankenstein exhibits some of the problems of the shotgun approach to writing a book (the subplot involving Justine’s trial for murder, an obvious nod to Godwin’s Political Justice, seems disconnected and underdeveloped, while the attempts at poetic landscape description are often drawn out), the novel successfully synthesizes much of the knowledge and “spirit of the age” that informed her existence. By combining never-before- combined ingredients from her diverse readings, Shelley broke from established tradition and even concocted a new literary recipe known today as science fiction. Clearly, her intellectual inheritance and education had well prepared her to create a work as provocative and enduring as Frankenstein.
“… offspring of my happy days …”
But the creation of Frankenstein was also a matter of amazing and irre producible timing in terms of Shelley’s personal growth. When she picked up her pen in the summer of 1816, she was carrying a formidable load of psychic baggage along with that dense body of knowledge. By Mary’s early teens, strong tensions developed in her relationships with her father and stepmother, made visible by her rebellious behavior and terrible skin rashes. Her adoration of her father placed her in competition with her stepmother, and to keep peace Godwin shipped her off to boarding schools and foster homes in Scotland. Separated from her beloved yet domineering father for months at a time, Mary developed an independent spirit and creative receptivity that enabled her to elope with a married man in her sixteenth year.
Percy Shelley was, of course, no ordinary lover. Handsome, charismatic, brilliant, and idealistic, the poet had been a guest at her father’s house many times and was greatly esteemed by the hard-to- please Godwin. Taking cues from her father, Mary listened to Shelley’s discussions of radical politics and free love, and the pretty, auburn-haired daughter of the great philosopher captured the poet’s imagination as well. Convinced by Shelley that true love knew no law, determined to practice the unconventional social and artistic principles that had shaped her existence thus far, Mary left her father’s house a month before her seventeenth birthday. The couple lived on the road, and from hand to mouth. Neither set of parents approved of their union. They toured Europe, wrote daily, exchanged ideas with revolutionaries and progressive thinkers, and had two children within two years. They finally rested at Byron’s Villa Diodati in Switzerland for a few months in 1816.
Mary’s adoration for Shelley knew no boundaries, and she clung to him tightly as he danced her through this breathless, passionate lifestyle. Her put her through many emotional trials as a less-than-faithful partner and less-than-caring father, but he also recognized her artistic potential and encouraged her to write. Energized by her declaration of independence from her father, inspired by Shelley’s faith in her ability, and eager to please him at all costs, Mary must have felt that much was at stake when she pledged to write a ghost story on the night of June 16 (a story she relates with some embellishment, but great flair, in the 1831 “Writer’s Introduction” to Frankenstein). Her half-sister Claire, Shelley, Byron, and Byron’s physician, John Polidori, had all agreed to do so as well, but Mary was the only one of the group who actually finished her tale. (Polidori ultimately incorporated Byron’s idea for his story in The Vampyre: A Tale [1819].) A discussion between Byron and Shelley on the “nature and principle of life” captured the young mother’s interest, and she began working on a story about a student who created a “hideous phantasm” of a human being. Shelley encouraged Mary to expand the tale, and with his assistance (plus the relatively stable home life they shared living in Marlow, England, in 1817), she completed her first novel and published it in January 1818.
Four and a half years later, Mary’s personal and writing lives were irrevocably altered. Her final pregnancy ended in a near-fatal miscarriage in June 18 2 2; the next month, any hope of having another child with Shelley ended with his accidental and untimely death. The love of her
life, as well as her creative inspiration and publishing liaison, was gone. Protracted negotiations with Sir Timothy, Shelley’s disapproving father, resulted in only a modest living allowance for her son, Percy. So Mary was forced to write for other reasons besides developing and fulfilling her aesthetic ideals. Indeed, many of her later works are notably less ambitious and innovative than Frankenstein. The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance (1830) is a three-volume historical fiction in the style of Sir Walter Scott, who made a small fortune as a novelist in the 1810s and 1820s. Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837) are domestic fictions that recycle many of the conventions of that genre; in both novels, Mary reused literary techniques, such as flashbacks and multiple viewpoints, that she had more creatively employed in Frankenstein.
That is not to say Frankenstein stands in Shelley’s canon as the only original and provocative work. The Last Man (1826), for example, caught the attention of early Shelleyan critics like Elizabeth Nitchie and Muriel Spark, and has been offered in several new editions since 1965. The novel’s theme is as monumental and ambitious as Frankenstein’s: the complete annihilation of the world’s population from the eyes of its single survivor, Lionel Verney. Mary wrestles with many of the themes of Frankenstein, including the disruptive nature of human desire and the psychological burden of family relationships. But The Last Man does not reiterate Frankenstein in any way; where her first novel allowed for a dim hope for humankind in the relenting figure of Robert Walton, The Last Man is bleak and hopeless in its indictment of humanity’s weakness and doom. Mary’s sense of isolation after the deaths of her husband, children, and friends clearly color this dark work, giving its proto- existentialism an authentic and close feel.
“… the corpse of my dead mother in my arms …”
Though Shelley put much of herself into the creation of works like The Last Man, there is still reason to consider Frankenstein her favored child. It is her first singular creative effort—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) was begun earlier but had its start in a journal kept by her husband and herself. Unlike Valperga (1823), a historical novel set in thirteenth-century Tuscany, Frankenstein is set in a place and time she knew and loved: the Scottish Highlands that had inspired her as a girl, and the French and Swiss countryside that she had explored with Shelley.
Frankenstein was also the only enduring literary work she created while married to Percy. Mary herself seems to have thought of the text in this way: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she announced at the end of the “Writer’s Introduction” of 1831 (p. 9). Victor, too, made analogies between the labors of the writer and the creator, describing himself as the “miserable origin and author” (p. 90) of the catastrophic scenario. Mary would have been pleased by the description in her obituary of Frankenstein as “the parent of whole generations” of literary descendants (Sunstein, p. 384) .
Mary’s use of the word “progeny” betrays the fact that two concerns preoccupied her while writing and later reediting Frankenstein: children and motherhood. In 1815 , Mary (still a Godwin) gave birth to a daughter who did not live long enough to acquire a name. “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived … awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day—not in good spirits,” she wrote on March 19, two weeks after the baby’s death (Journals, vol. 1, p. 70). The death of her first child continued to haunt her every spring, leaving such a dark taint on the season of renewal that Mary declared to her half-sister, Claire: “Spring is our unlucky season” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 226). By the time Mary began writing Frankenstein in July 1816, she was nursing her second child, William. Though he was healthy, Mary’s anxieties regarding the child seem to have worked their way into Frankenstein: Victor’s young brother William meets a horrible death while Victor and Clerval engage in a walking tour of Ingolstadt’s environs.
Considering how insecure Mary was about her creative and reproductive capabilities, Frankenstein can be read as “a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth,” according to Ellen Moers in the ground-breaking study Literary Women (1976). In the novel, Victor learns the hard way of the consequences of usurping the female progenitive role. As he labors to create his monster, Victor experiences pain and insecurities that are typical of pregnancy’s gestation period; his shock at seeing his deformed and hideous progeny at birth must have been shared by most nineteenth-century women, in their ignorance and fear of the birth process. Most powerful of all (and the subject of most of the novel) are his feelings of depression and detachment after the actual birth. Even in our time, postpartum depression remains a misunderstood and often misdiagnosed condition; for Shelley in 1818 to depict the
negative consequences of this disease left untreated was a revolutionary act. “The idea that a mother can loathe, fear, and reject her baby has until recently been one of the most repressed of psychological insights,” writes Barbara Johnson in “My Monster/My Self,” another important feminist essay. “What is threatening about [Frankenstein] is the way in which its critique of the role of the mother touches on primitive terrors of the mother’s rejection of the child” (Johnson in Bloom, p. 61) . As a writer who was also a mother (a rare combination in nineteenth-century England, as Johnson points out), Shelley broke down long-standing rules of propriety by retelling the myth of origins from the female point of view.
But Frankenstein is not just a tale of the consequences of giving birth to hideous progeny; it is also concerned with the feelings of guilt, betrayal, and loneliness experienced by the hideous progeny itself. Suffering from an infection brought on when pieces of placenta remained in her uterus, Mary Wollstonecraft died in great pain on September 10, 1797, eleven days after Mary’s birth. The event is described in detail by Godwin in the last chapter of Memoirs of the Writer of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “The loss of the world in this admirable woman, I leave to other men to collect; my own I well know, nor can it be improper to describe it,” wrote Godwin toward the end of his highly emotional account. “This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!” Godwin carried a torch for Mary Wollstonecraft the rest of his life: Though he remarried and remained with his second wife for thirty-five years, his wish to be buried with Wollstonecraft was fulfilled upon his death in 1836.
If it was not enough bearing the same name as her celebrated mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was constantly reminded of her maternal heritage by Godwin and his friends. Mary was strongly encouraged to fulfill her literary legacy at an early age; at fifteen, she wrote a satiric poem entitled “Mounseer Nongtongpaw” that Godwin had published. On her birthday, Godwin planned family visits to Wollstonecraft’s grave; one celebration was held among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, as he lectured on great men and women. Visitors to the Godwin household asked Mary to stand beneath John Opie’s portrait of a pregnant Wollstonecraft, and even Mary’s future husband, Percy, was “from the first very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage” (p. 6). Mary responded to these pressures with enthusiasm and great
aspirations, reading her mother’s works over and over and even “com muning” with her at Wollstonecraft’s gravesite in St. Pancras churchyard. “The memory of my Mother has always been the pride & delight of my life; & the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness I have enjoyed,” Mary wrote in 1827. “Her greatness of soul & my father[‘s] high talents have perpetually reminded me that I ought to degenerate as little as I could from those from whom I derived my being” (Letters, vol. 2, pp. 3-4).
Frankenstein, then, can be read as Mary’s attempt to fulfill her intellectual inheritance from Wollstonecraft. In order for mother to live on through daughter, daughter must produce a work that meets the spectacular standards of Wollstonecraft’s biggest supporters, herself, and the grieving love of her life, her father. The work must also compensate for Mary’s horrific crime: the murder of her namesake. Mary probably wished that she, like Victor, might find out how to bestow life on dead things; she must have also suffered from nightmares like his vision of “the corpse of my dead mother … I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel” (pp. 51-52). Shelley’s overwhelming sense of guilt over her mother’s death made her feel like a fiend. Indeed, if we look beyond the protective, shroud-like narratives of Robert Walton and Frankenstein to the heart of the novel, we hear Mary speaking through the voice of the monster. Like Mary, it is born into a dysfunctional family with one parent missing; it desperately craves the attention and affection of the remaining parent; and ultimately it is responsible for the death of the one who gave it life. “I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin,” the monster wails, looking at the dead body of his creator. “You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself” (p. 196). The monster—and Mary‘s—punishment for this murder is life itself, and the constant realization that they will never live up to parental expectations.
Godwin’s undying love for his wife, along with his demands on Mary to prove herself worthy of her namesake, also engendered a complex and problematic father-daughter relationship. Shelley admitted to her “excessive & romantic attachment to my Father” (Letters, vol. 2, p. 215)
—the result of the projection of Godwin’s love for Mary Senior onto Mary Junior, perhaps, or Mary’s willing assumption of her mother’s role in the family. The incest theme was a new and provocative ingredient in
many of the Gothic novels Mary enjoyed, which may help explain why she herself included so many incestuous relationships in her works; nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid recognizing autobiographical elements of the passionate father-daughter relationship in Mathilda (1819) or the May-December romance of Caroline Beaufort and her guardian, Alphonse Frankenstein. Love for a father was declared “the first and the most religious tie” in Valperga, (vol. 1, p. 199); Ethel Lodore’s “earliest feeling was love of her father” (Lodore, vol. 1, p. 30). And in Frankenstein, the creature’s sexually suggestive warning “I will be with you on your wedding-night” comes true: The monster enters the honeymoon suite and leaves Elizabeth “lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed” (p. 173). In obliterating the object of Frankenstein’s affection, the monster may be acting out Mary’s own jealous feelings toward her stepmother.
Shelley’s extremely close ties with her parents were felt by her even to her death, when she was buried beside them as she had requested. But the inscription on her gravestone—“Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Daughter of Wilm & Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Widow of the late Percy Shelley”—indicates that there were three major influences on her life and work. Frankenstein is a testament to the influence of Shelley the poet, as well as Shelley the man. Though the character of Victor possesses some of Godwin’s traits and some of Mary’s own creative anxieties, he is most obviously modeled on Percy Shelley (and the similarity grows as Mary revises her text in 1831). The poet shares the scientist’s creativity, intensity, and passion; significantly, both were also self-absorbed partners who maintained dominant roles in their relationships and were capable of putting their love second to other interests. In Frankenstein, Elizabeth suffers separation anxiety from Victor, writes him letters that are never returned, hints of her jealousy of other women (Justine, she writes, was “a great favorite of yours”; (p. 58), and eventually dies because Victor’s attentions are focused elsewhere. Despite Mary’s apparent openness to her husband’s ideas of free love and multiple partners, she reacted strongly to rumors of his affairs; for example, she was “shocked beyond all measure” after hearing of Shelley and Claire Clairmont’s alleged love child in 1821 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 204). Percy also disappointed Mary in his lack of interest in their children. “I fancy your affection will encrease [sic] for [William] when he has a nursery to himself and only comes to you just dressed and in
good humor,” she writes to him during one of their several separations in 1816 (Letters, vol. 1, p. 23). Significantly, Percy seems to have been oblivious to his faults as an ego-driven lover and neglectful parent and did not even recognize these flaws in Victor’s character. Instead, Victor is described as “the victim” —not the perpetrator—of evil in his review of Frankenstein, published posthumously in the Athenaeum in November 1832.
“… listen to me, Frankenstein …”
Was Mary herself conscious of how much of herself and her experience she was using to create Frankenstein? The careful “Chinese box” construction of the narratives would suggest so. As we read further into the story, we must unfold several protective outer layers to get to the heart of Frankenstein and to Shelley herself. We first meet the quiet, receptive Margaret Saville, a representation of Mary Shelley’s most public persona; we are then prepared to encounter her at a more profound level, in the loneliness of Walton; when we get to Victor’s narrative, we are reading about Mary’s deep-rooted questions regarding herself as creator. In revealing these levels of her personality, Shelley prepares us
—and herself—for the revelation of her “core:” the guilt-ridden, affection-craving creature who desperately seeks an acceptance it does not seem to find.
Mary consciously obscured her presence in the text in another way: She asked her husband for help with editorial revisions. With Percy assisting in the final draft and also in the publication of Frankenstein, it is no wonder that many thought that he had written the work. Since the cover and title page of the 1818 text did not include an author’s name, only the dedication to Godwin—and the literary grapevine—helped indicate possible authorship. In his lengthy review for Blackwoods in late 1818, Sir Walter Scott quotes from Shelley’s poem “Mutability” to demonstrate that “the author possesses the same facility in expressing himself in verse as in prose.” Even into the twentieth century, critics have continued to assume Percy’s importance in the shaping of this text: James Rieger’s 1982 introduction to Frankenstein concludes with the claim that Percy Shelley’s “assistance at every point in the book’s manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator” (p. xviii).
Shelley purposefully hid her own voice behind her husband’s linguistic persona; bringing it forward again has been a long and arduous critical task. Even after her status as the author of Frankenstein was confirmed, many critics had a hard time taking her seriously as an artist in her own right. In the 1964 entry to Masterplots, the only critique that many students of the novel would read in the decade 1965—1975, the anonymous contributor describes Frankenstein as a “wholly incredible story told with little skill.” He also contends that “Mary Shelley would be remembered if she had written nothing, for she was the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley under romantic and scandalous circumstances.” More recently, Brendan Hennessey wrote in The Gothic Novel: “The power and vitality of Frankenstein derive partly from the fact that Mary Shelley did not quite know what she was doing” (p. 21). It has been the job of Shelley’s recent critics to establish that she did. Some have even established that her famous husband is responsible for some of the text’s weaknesses, as Anne Mellor details in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (pp. 58- 68, 219-224).
“… with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!”
When Mary edited Frankenstein for republication in Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels Series in 1831, she seems to have caught and altered many of the self-revealing details in the text. To avoid the suggestion of incest, the new Elizabeth is changed from Victor’s blood cousin to an aristocratic Milanese foundling, rescued by Caroline Beaufort from a poverty-stricken life. (It is interesting that Elizabeth and Victor continue to use the term “cousin” as an endearment in the 1831 text). The descriptions of Elizabeth in 1831 are also more generic and idealized than those of 1818, when Elizabeth was more closely modeled on Mary’s own physical features and qualities. In the original text, Elizabeth is described as a complex, intelligent, yet fragile child: “Although she was lively and animated, her feelings were strong and deep,” as Victor describes his cousin. “Her hazel eyes, although as lively as a bird‘s, possessed an attractive softness.” Startled, perhaps, by the image of herself in the earlier text, Shelley reintroduced Elizabeth as a blue-eyed, blonde “heaven-sent” being in 1831 (p. 30).
The thirty-something Mary Shelley who revised Frankenstein was sad der, wiser, more emotionally protective, and less politically radical than the teenager who wrote the original story. By 1831, she had lost her husband, two more children, and several friends; she had abandoned hope of receiving needed support from her parents or in-laws (in fact, Godwin often asked Mary for help with his finances); she had faced alone the wrath of the public, which condemned her for her lifestyle choices and even invented racy stories about her involvement with a “League of Incest.” All this had shocked her into a state of submission, and the new Frankenstein was bound to reflect the new Mary Shelley. For example, in 1818 Victor possessed free will or the capacity for meaningful moral choice; it was his decision whether or not to pursue his quest for the “principle of life,” to care for the monster, or to protect Elizabeth. In 1831 such choice is denied to him; he is the pawn of forces beyond his knowledge or control. Describing his eventual turn from the study of mathematics to the chemical sciences, Frankenstein speaks of “destiny” and fate “hanging in the stars”: “Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin” (p. 3 7 ) .
Shelley’s increasing self-doubt was complicated by her loss of faith in her parents’ ideals and teachings. Though Mary retained the novel’s dedication to her father in 1831, she removed or toned down several passages that pushed his radical politics: Justine’s final moments originally included Elizabeth’s didactic pronouncements of arguments from Political Justice; she removed these in 1831 and allowed Justine to speak of her own personal courage and resolution (p. 78). Likewise, the shaping influence of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, especially its raillery against women’s “passive obedience” in chapter 2, is much less evident in the 1831 incarnation of Elizabeth. In 1818 Shelley implies that Elizabeth took part with Victor in schooling and possessed an intellect that was different, yet just as active, as her cousin’s: Victor describes the world as “a secret, which I desired to discover” while for Elizabeth it was “a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.” In the revision, Elizabeth is presented to Victor as a “present” rather than an equal (p. 31), and she inspires rather than engages in Victor’s studies: “The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine- dedicated lamp in our peaceful home” (p. 33).
Shelley addresses the changes she made to her original text at the end of her 1831 “Writer’s Introduction.” These alterations, she writes, “are entirely confined to such parts as are mere adjuncts to the story, leaving the core and substance of it untouched” (p. 10). Mary had changed over fifteen years, and parts of the text changed with her; but she herself recognized that the “core” of Frankenstein had a life of its own and an existence separate from hers. And she was content to leave it at that. Bidding her hideous progeny to “go forth and prosper,” Mary Shelley ventured through her last twenty years without ever turning back to the text again.
He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
But the reader may have a harder time closing the book. There is something unsettling about the way the story ends—a lack of closure that points to a sequel that was never written (at least by Mary herself) . We are left wondering about the mysteriously silent Margaret Saville; did she ever receive these letters or see her brother again? Will Walton relinquish his quest and deny Frankenstein’s final request to destroy the monster? If he does indeed return to civilization, can we wholly approve of this decision? Frankenstein’s very last words resonate for his more ambitious listeners: His attempt and failure are necessary and contributory to eventual success. The point is to persevere, to dwell in possibility. Whether Walton chooses to acknowledge human limitations or defy them and why his letters drop off when they do are questions left for the reader to ponder. As she has throughout the novel, Shelley in the end has allowed for a provocative discourse of open-ended indeterminacy rather than moral didacticism.
And what of the monster who is borne away, yet never dies? It’s difficult to imagine that a creature as sociable as the monster would leave society forever, or that a being who values its existence so highly would exterminate itself. If we take what we have seen from the monster already as example, it is evident that what keeps him going is the need to tell his tale. To De Lacey, to Frankenstein, to Walton, and perhaps to anyone he meets in the future, the monster reveals his physical form and discloses his soul, searching for the human sympathy he has lost hope in finding. Like the ancient mariner, the monster knows no release from the
telling of his tale. And he continues to find those who are compelled to listen.
I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; The moment that his face I see
I know the man that must hear me— To him my tale I teach.
Karen Karbiener received a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and teaches at New York University. She has taught courses on British and American Romanticism, as well as the connections between poetry, music, and the visual arts, at Columbia, the Cooper Union, and Colby College. Her publications include essays on transatlantic cultural influence, forgotten women poets, and Romantic opera.
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man, Did I solicit thee From darkness to promote me?
PARADISE LOST, X, 743-745
TO
WILLIAM GODWIN
Writer of Political Justice, Caleb Williams, &c.
THESE VOLUMES
Are respectfully inscribed BY
THE AUTHOR
