Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form. His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected
his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath;
his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a more pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more
horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set,
his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.
The words flowed easily. Mary had formed the basic idea of her story, and at this point she intended that it be only a short
one. The scientist Victor Frankenstein discovers the mystery of life, the secret of animation. He constructs and brings to
life a creature of immense size, but the nameless monster’s distorted features and terrifying proportions isolate the creature
from the rest of the world. People see only his ugliness and do not realize that he has tender inner feelings. Frankenstein
himself is revolted by his creation, and rejects it, leaving it to his own devices. The creature goes out into the world,
seeking love from his fellow creatures but doomed not to find it.
The eighteen-year-old author, in her first attempt at fiction, had just created two characters that would be more enduring
than any other fictional creations of her time.
Shelley was off boating with Byron while Mary was writing the first pages of her book. From June 22 to 30, the two poets toured
Lake Geneva and its surrounding villages, seeing the literary sites and discussing poetry. Byron wanted to see the places
that appeared in his favorite Rousseau novel,
Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
. The book was written in epistolatory form, in this case a series of passionate love letters. Rousseau’s heroine, Julie,
was seduced by her tutor Saint-Preux. Pregnant, the young girl is given in marriage to a friend of her father. Her new husband
is generous enough to invite the tutor to come live with them in a ménage à trois. One can see why Shelley, who was reading
the novel on this trip, liked this book. The existence of the happy threesome, living at the chateau of Clarens, is ended
by Julie’s death from pleurisy, which she contracted while saving her children from drowning. The book had an enormous popular
success throughout Europe; like Byron, its author was suspected of portraying scenes from his own life (as the tutor) in his
work.
Polidori, still hobbled by his ankle injury, was left behind. Byron was glad to be rid of both him and Claire, whom he now
found to be a tremendous nuisance. (Byron had even tried unsuccessfully to bar Claire from the villa.) There was, of course,
no thought of inviting Mary on the trip: the great men were sharing great thoughts.
The two poets had much in common. Both were rebels from the English upper class who had gone to the best schools. They both
denounced the English government of the time as reactionary and felt that they had been driven into exile by the rumors of
scandal in their lives. But the differences between them were even more stark. Byron was a peer of the realm who had a seat
in the House of Lords. Shelley was of the landed gentry, and thus not as distinguished. But while Shelley cared little for
his social position, Byron really did. He was, after all,
Lord
Byron. The more embarrassing difference for Shelley was that he had published only two obscure poems (even
Queen Mab
was little known), while Byron was the most renowned poet in the world at the time. Though Byron flouted convention, he was
in favor of its continued existence, while Shelley believed that the world could—and should—really be changed. Shelley wrote
to his friend Thomas Love Peacock that Lord Byron “is an exceedingly interesting person and as such is it not to be regretted
that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds.” Being called “mad” by Shelley was a
distinction indeed.
Shelley and Byron stopped at Clarens and saw through the window of the novel’s inn the famous grove
(le bosquet de Julie)
where Julie read her love letters. Byron complained that the monks had cut down the trees, forgetting that it had been an
incident from a novel rather than reality. Before arriving there, the poets had experienced a real-life danger that could
have come straight from Rousseau’s novel. They were on a boat near Meillerie, on the south shore of the lake, when waves broke
the rudder, causing the boat nearly to capsize. According to Shelley it was “precisely in the spot where Julie and her lover
were nearly overset, and St. Preux was tempted to plunge with her into the lake.” Shelley, though he loved boats, could not
swim, so Byron offered to bring him to shore, which was not far away. But Shelley refused, responding to a crisis as he customarily
did—with passive acceptance. According to a later account, he seated “himself quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings
at each end firmly in his hands, declared his determination to go down in that position, without a struggle.” The wind finally
did blow their boat to shore, but Shelley felt ashamed at his helplessness and by Byron’s generosity. “I knew that my companion
would have attempted to save me,” he wrote Peacock, “and I was overcome with humiliation.”
The incident only added to Shelley’s blue mood. He was having a very dry spell creatively and had hoped this trip might unblock
him. He found inspiration when the two poets reached Montreux and visited the Castle of Chillon, originally built in the ninth
century. Descending into its dungeons, no longer used, Shelley and Byron saw on the walls “a multitude of names,” scrawled
by prisoners “of whom now no memory remains,” Shelley wrote. He also noticed “a beam, now black and rotten, on which prisoners
were hung in secret. I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight
of man to exercise over man.” The thought of prisoners struggling to preserve their lost identities stuck with Shelley, and
Mary later wrote that he conceived the idea for his poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” while on this trip. In it, Shelley
reminisces about his decision to become a poet. Almost as if reassuring himself, he wrote,
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave . . .
Byron had no problem finding inspiration, and in his fashion he seized directly on what he had seen and experienced. One of
those who had been imprisoned at the castle in the sixteenth century was the Swiss patriot François Bonivard. In a hotel where
he and Shelley were staying, Byron tossed off a sonnet in tribute to him, and for good measure wrote
The Prisoner of Chillon,
a poem nearly four hundred lines long. No wonder Shelley felt intimidated.
The poets returned to Lake Geneva on June 30. Mary showed Percy what she had written, and he encouraged her to continue. During
the next three weeks, she further developed her characters and plot. Many of the names that she gave her characters were taken
from her own family, friends, or other associations. Percy had used Victor as a nom de plume for some of his youthful poems,
and “the Victor” with a capital
V,
is also frequently used in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
to refer to God. The name Frankenstein had possibly come from the castle that Mary may have seen on her elopement trip two
years earlier. She may also have been inspired by Benjamin Franklin, whose experiments with electricity were well known. Strikingly,
Mary chose to call Victor Frankenstein’s younger brother William, a name charged with emotions for her. Victor Frankenstein’s
cousin, whom he marries, was called Elizabeth—the name of both Shelley’s favorite sister and his mother.
In the novel, Victor is the son of Adolphus Frankenstein, a government official in Geneva; Adolphus’s wife, Caroline, is a
much younger woman who had been the daughter of one of Adolphus’s friends. (Like several of the relationships in the book,
this one had uncomfortable undertones of incest.) When Victor is three, his family takes in a young, orphaned cousin named
Elizabeth, who his parents hope will be Victor’s future wife. They grow up feeling like brother and sister. Victor’s mother
then dies as a result of nursing Elizabeth through an illness, which she herself contracts.
Like Percy, the young Victor becomes interested in the works of such alchemists as Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and
Paracelsus. The traditional quest of alchemy was to find the philosopher’s stone—a substance that would turn base metals into
gold, and the alchemists’ scientific pursuits included what today would be called chemistry. One day, when Victor is fifteen,
he sees lightning strike a beautiful old oak tree during a terrible thunderstorm, much like those Mary had experienced that
summer. The sudden destruction of this huge and powerful object draws Victor’s attention to the forces that modern science
might unshackle. “I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning.” Victor says. “He replied,
‘Electricity;’ describing at the same time the various effects of that power. He constructed a small electrical machine, and
exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds.” From
this point, Victor Frankenstein will devote all his energies toward studying electricity and other natural forces.
When Victor is seventeen, he goes to study at the university at Ingolstadt. Mary’s choice of this city was significant: it
was known for being the center of the Illuminati, a secret society dedicated to revolution and improvement of the human race.
It was rumored that the members carried out experiments intended to discover the secret of immortality. Young Percy Shelley
had read of the Illuminati in his “blue books” of Gothic lore and adventure. Both he and Mary had also read Godwin’s novel
St. Leon,
set near Ingolstadt, about an alchemist who receives not only the philosopher’s stone but an elixir of immortality.
At Ingolstadt, Victor too becomes fascinated with the forces that generate life, and he throws himself into his studies so
completely that he loses interest in everything else. Though his mother, on her deathbed, had joined Elizabeth’s and Victor’s
hands together as a sign they should marry, Victor makes no effort to return to Geneva to see his family or his fiancée. Uncovering
the mystery of life subsumes all his other desires.
In creating Victor, Mary was borrowing a stock figure from folklore and Gothic novels—the sorcerer or alchemist who relentlessly
seeks knowledge that should best remain hidden. Her innovation, however, was to turn the man of magic into a man of science,
employing the brilliant insight that both magic and science promised the same things. “Whence, I often asked myself,” Victor
recalls, “did the principle of life proceed?” To answer this question he begins to study decay and death, “forced to spend
days and nights in vaults and charnel houses.” Victor exhausts himself in
examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life,
until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that
. . . I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated. . . . After days and nights of incredible labour
and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing
animation upon lifeless matter.
Deftly, Mary avoids the problem of explaining what this “cause of generation” is; sufficient to state in suitably ornate prose
that Victor has found it.
Armed with this knowledge, Victor sets out to build a creature of parts before animating it. He flatters himself that he is
working for the good of humanity rather than his own glory. Impatience, however, sows the seeds of his failure. “As the minuteness
of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic
stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.”
Soon he has collected enough parts to arrange into a body. His egotism shows again as he describes his expectations: “A new
species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father
could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
“Pursuing these reflections,” Victor continues, “I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might
in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.”
Here, Mary takes Victor’s dream a step farther to pursue one of her
own
fantasies: the idea that her first baby could—even now—be brought to life again.
All of Victor’s research is done in the utmost secrecy; this, along with the language Mary used to describe his work, indicated
that there is something shameful about his experiment. Victor asks,
Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living
animal to animate the lifeless clay? . . . I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the
tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather a cell, at the very top of the house, and separated
from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation. . . . The dissecting room
and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation,
whilst still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased. I brought my work near to a conclusion.
Secrecy about a shameful matter must have been much on Mary’s mind that summer. Just before Shelley and Byron left on their
boat trip, Claire apparently confessed to Shelley the secret of her pregnancy, and who the father was. Shelley, as Claire
hoped, conveyed the news to Byron. Byron’s reaction can only be guessed at, but while on that same trip Shelley took the time
to change his will, leaving some twelve thousand pounds to Claire and “any person she may name.” Mary had apparently not been
informed of Claire’s condition (though one wonders if she might not have guessed the truth), and later Byron, Shelley, and
Claire would gather to discuss the custody and care of the child—pointedly excluding Mary.