Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion —
William’s death plunged Mary into such sorrow and depression that it destroyed some of her feelings toward her husband. She
withdrew emotionally and transformed her grief into anger against him—a silent, separating coldness that reflected the way
Godwin had punished her. Percy’s carelessness and egotism, which had once marked him as a poet unlike other men, now seemed
merely cruel and selfish to her. Mary found it hard to be interested in lovemaking at such a time.
Her depression may have, on the other hand, actually increased Percy’s ardor. In a poem he wrote—keeping it secret from her—he
described her “Mourning in thy robe of pride, / Desolation—deified!” He urged her to make the most of the moment in sensual
delight:
Ha! thy frozen pulses flutter
With a love thou darest not utter,
. . . Kiss me;—oh! thy lips are cold;
Round my neck thine arms enfold —
They are soft, but chill and dead;
And thy tears upon my head
Burn like points of frozen lead.
Yet he never addressed Mary’s needs and the causes of her sorrow, and in another poem he wrote—this one specifically for her
eyes—he complained about them.
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one —
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
It is almost superfluous to say that William Godwin acted at his worst during this, the saddest moment of his daughter’s life.
Despite her tragedy, he was determined to manipulate her to get money out of her husband. On learning of William’s death,
Godwin wrote Mary two letters; the first is lost; Shelley may have destroyed it. But we can gauge its contents by a reference
to it in a letter Percy sent to Leigh Hunt:
We cannot yet come home. Poor Mary’s spirits continue dreadfully depressed. And I cannot expose her to Godwin in this state.
I wrote to this hard-hearted person, (the first letter I had written for a year), on account of the terrible state of her
mind, and to entreat him to try to soothe her in his next letter. The very next letter, received yesterday, and addressed
to her, called her husband (me) “a disgraceful and flagrant person” tried to persuade her that I was under great engagements
to give him
more
money (after having given him £4,700), and urged her if she ever wished a connection to continue between him and her to force
me to get money for him.—He cannot persuade her that I am what I am not, nor place a shade of enmity between her and me—but
he heaps on her misery, still misery.—I have not yet shewn her the letter—but I must.
After Godwin heard about Mary’s depression, he wrote her that if she persisted in her “selfishness and ill humour,” those
people close to her “will finally cease to love” her. Once again, Godwin threatened what she always feared most, the same
punishment he had used in her childhood: the withdrawal of love.
The kindest view of Godwin is that he was appealing to Mary’s higher nature, urging her to assuage her grief through stoicism.
It is difficult, however, to find any sensitivity in his words when he scolds her, “I had thought you to be ranked among those
noble spirits that do honour to our nature. Oh! what a falling off is here! . . . you have lost a child; and all the rest
of the world, all that is beautiful, and all that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of three years
old is dead!”
A year later Percy would warn Godwin about the effect his letters had on Mary: “Your letters,” he wrote, “from their style
and spirit . . . never fail to produce an appalling effect on her frame.”
The summer of 1819 was one of the lowest points in Mary’s life. Although only twenty-two, she had experienced enough tragedy
and loss for a lifetime. Her experiences led to thoughts of suicide, and probably only the fact that she was again pregnant
kept her going. News of the success of
Frankenstein
may have raised her spirits a bit. In August, five months after the publication of the book, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Shelley,
“I went to the Egham races. I met on the course a great number of my old acquaintance, by the reading portion of whom I was
asked a multitude of questions concerning
Frankenstein
and its author. It seems to be universally known and read. The criticism of the
Quarterly,
though unfriendly, contained many admissions of its merit, and must on the whole have done it service.” As a postscript to
a letter Percy sent to Peacock in July, Mary asked, “What has been the fate of the 2 vessels that sailed for the north pole?”
indicating that her curiosity about the scientific background of her novel was still alive.
Mary began to deal with her grief the only way she was able to—by writing. On the fourth of August, she began two new projects.
One was a new journal, in a new book. “I begin my journal on Shelley’s birthday,” she wrote. “We have now lived five years
together & if all the events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy—but to have won & then cruelly have lost
the associations of four years is not an accident that the human mind can bend without much suffering.”
At the top of the page, Mary had written from memory a Shelley poem that seemed to reflect her awareness that she needed to
put the past behind her:
That time is gone for ever—child —
Those hours are frozen forever
We look on the past, & stare aghast
On the ghosts with aspects strange & wild
Of the hopes whom thou & I beguiled
To death in life’s dark river.
The waves we gazed on then rolled by
Their stream is unreturning
We two yet stand, in a lonely land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of joys & griefs that fade & flee
In the light of life’s dim morning.
Willmouse had died but perhaps even worse, the original William, Mary’s father, threatened to withhold his love from her.
So, on the same day that Mary began a new journal, she started to write a novel in which she would reclaim that love. In something
like five weeks, she completed
Mathilda,
her most personal book. It dealt with the topic of father-daughter incest. Perhaps she was inspired by Shelley, who was putting
the finishing touches on a play,
The Cenci,
about a historical Italian family that had practiced incest. He had originally heard the story while they were visiting the
Gisbornes; at the time Percy suggested Mary write a novel on the subject. Then in April, in a museum in Rome, the Shelleys
and Claire had seen a portrait of the daughter of the Cenci family, Beatrice. Claire, who probably knew of Byron’s affair
with his half-sister, wrote Byron, “I am sorely afraid to say that in the elder Cenci [the father] you may behold yourself
in twenty years hence but if I live Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.” So the topic was much on everyone’s mind.
Mary’s new novel was again told by a first-person narrator. Mathilda was a woman whose mother had died “a few days after my
birth.” Her father, overcome with grief, left Mathilda to be raised by her cold, unfeeling aunt. The theme of abandonment
is here as in
Frankenstein,
for it resonated with the deepest feelings of Mary’s own life. Mary skewers Godwin with this description of the father in
the novel:
He was a sincere and sympathizing friend—but he had met with none who superior or equal to himself could aid him in unfolding
his mind, or make him seek for fresh stores of thought by exhausting the old ones. He felt himself superior in quickness of
judgement to those around him . . . he became at the same time dogmatic and yet fearful of not coinciding with the only sentiments
he could consider orthodox . . . at the same time that he strode with a triumphant stride over the rest of the world, he cowered,
with self disguised lowliness, to his own party.
Mathilda’s father returns sixteen years later and finds that his daughter is willing to forgive him. They move to London,
but when a young man courts Mathilda, her father discovers, to his horror, his own attraction to her—a sexual rather than
a paternal love. At first he treats her coldly, trying to suppress his desires, but she is shattered by his abrupt change
in attitude. When Mathilda confronts him, he confesses what his true feelings are. She is horrified: “One idea rushed on my
mind: never, never may I speak to him again.” (The worst punishment she could imagine, obviously.) In shame, the father leaves
a very long suicide note (“. . . rise from under my blighting influence as no flower so sweet ever did rise from beneath so
much evil”). He then drowns himself.
Mathilda goes to Scotland, where she lives for two years in virtual isolation, feeling suicidal. Then she meets a young man,
a Poet with a capital P, named Woodville, who encourages her to have a more positive approach to life. Woodville, clearly
modeled after Shelley, is depicted as if Mary were trying to remind herself why she originally loved the man who was her husband:
His genius was transcendant [
sic
], and when it rose as a bright star in the east all eyes were turned towards it in admiration . . . He was glorious from
his youth. Every one loved him; no shadow of envy or hate cast even from the meanest mind ever fell upon him. . . . His heart
was simple like a child, unstained by arrogance or vanity . . . To bestow on your fellow men is a Godlike attribute—So indeed
it is and as such not one fit for mortality;—the giver like Adam and Prometheus, must pay the penalty of rising above his
nature by being the martyr to his own excellence.
Woodville’s fiancée has died a few months earlier, but after meeting Mathilda his spirits rise. “He soon took great interest
in me, and sometimes forgot his own grief to sit beside me and endeavour to cheer me.” Being with him is good for Mathilda
too: “Woodville for ever tried to lead me to the contemplation of what is beautiful and happy in the world.” In a spasm of
despondency, however, she proposes to him one day that they commit suicide together—she even prepares the laudanum. He explains
to her all the reasons for living, persuading her that they must do so. Some of these sound like arguments Mary must have
made to herself during her periods of depression.
While Woodville is away nursing his sick mother, Mathilda contracts tuberculosis. Knowing she has only a short time to live,
she devotes her last energies to writing the manuscript that is this novel. The pain of Mary’s own life emerges. Mathilda
writes as she prepares to die: “I am alone . . . the blight of misfortune has passed over me and withered me; I know that
I am about to die and I feel happy—joyous.—I feel my pulse; it beats fast; I place my thin hand on my cheek; it burns; there
is a slight, quick spirit within me that is now emitting its last sparks. I shall never see the snows of another winter.”
As the book ends, the dying Mathilda’s thoughts return to her father. “I go from this world where he is no longer and soon
I shall meet him in another.”
Mary sent the manuscript to Godwin in 1820. Maria Gisborne, who brought it to him, told Mary that he had found the subject
“disgusting and detestable.” Though his daughter had sent it to him to publish, Godwin put the manuscript away—a gesture made
all the more remarkable because he would have been sure to make money on the book’s publication, given the success of
Frankenstein
. It is, however, hard to see how Godwin could have reacted otherwise. The only question that remains is how conscious Mary
was of the feelings toward Godwin that prompted her to write
Mathilda
. Those emotions were clear enough to others; no one in the Shelley family ever attempted to publish this work, and though
Mary was to write and publish several more novels during her lifetime, it took
Mathilda
almost 150 years to see print.
Percy was also hard at work. In Rome, he had spent much of his energies writing a poem that would retell the Prometheus myth
from a more optimistic perspective, one that would reflect the Godwinian vision of humankind continually progressing. Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound
is a very long verse play that deals with the triumph of good and love over evil, his attempt to write a work comparable
to
Paradise Lost
. Though Percy chose the same model as Mary did in her book, the two Shelleys came to completely different interpretations
of the myth. Percy persisted in his vision of a society ever moving toward greater and greater perfection, foretelling a future
utopian society that was brought about by Prometheus’s sacrifices. Mary had come to a different conclusion, one which grew
stronger over the years. She saw the folly of man’s attempts at immortality and overweening ambition and found them to be
destructive rather than constructive urges. The Promethean figure in her work—Dr. Frankenstein—destroys himself and those
he loves while failing in his quest to help humanity. In arriving at that insight, Mary was intellectually outgrowing both
her models for Dr. Frankenstein: her father and her husband.
As the time drew near for Mary to give birth, the Shelleys traveled to Florence so that she could have the best possible medical
care. Dr. Bell was to be there and Mary wanted to make sure that she had a safe delivery. But when her time came, Bell was
sick and unavailable. On November 12, Mary had an easy two-hour labor before her “small but healthy, and pretty” baby appeared.
The son was named Percy Florence Shelley; just as Mary had given her first son her father’s name, she named this one after
her husband. He was baptized in a church—this must have been at Mary’s insistence—and his middle name came from the city where
he was born.