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, Author 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 “Author’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 “Author’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.