Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
The
Literary Gazette
’s obituary read, “It is not . . . as the authoress even of
Frankenstein
that she derives her most enduring and endearing title to our affection, but as the faithful and devoted wife of Percy Bysshe
Shelley.” Mary had attained the respectability that she so desperately desired—but at the cost of her own individuality and
personal achievement. Her mother would have been horrified. Time has of course overturned this verdict. Today her creature
and her creation are better known than any work by anyone else in the Diodati circle.
Mary wanted to be buried next to her parents, but Jane and Percy Florence felt St. Peter’s Churchyard at Bournemouth was more
pleasant, so they had the bodies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved there as well. There was a hitch when the rector of the
church refused to allow the two notorious radicals to be buried in consecrated ground. Jane Shelley—
Lady
Shelley—appeared in a carriage, followed by two horse-drawn hearses, and announced she would wait there until the rector
opened the gates. He did. Mary at last rested between her two famous parents, who, bound by the English earth, could no longer
abandon their little girl.
C
laire Clairmont moved from place to place, seldom returning to England, finding work as a governess or a companion. She never
married, although men continued to be attracted to her—including Trelawny, who proposed to her twice. Having been the lover
of the real Lord Byron, she could not accept the ersatz one.
Claire never forgave Byron and even felt resentful toward Mary for remaining friendly with him after Allegra’s death. “Were
the fairest Paradise offered to me upon the condition of his [Byron’s] sharing it, I would refuse it,” Claire wrote to Mary,
for “there could be nothing but misery in the presence of the person who so wantonly willfully destroyed my Allegra.” Mary
had evidently tried to console Claire by mentioning that Willmouse, like Allegra, had also fallen victim to the unhealthy
climate. Claire responded, “you were a mere girl at that time . . . with no one to warn you of the effects of climate, bestowing
every care a mother’s heart could devise, and most guiltless: He [Byron] was old and wicked and laid a plan to get rid of
his child in a way that should be certain and yet not expose him to the blame of the world.”
Claire liked to imagine that her daughter had not really died but had been kept hidden in a convent by Byron out of spite.
Over time, she may have come to believe it. Trelawny reproved her in an 1869 letter:
If I was in Italy I would cure you of your wild fancy regarding Allegra: I would go to the Convent—and select some plausible
cranky old dried-up hanger-on of the convent about the age your child would now be, fifty-two, with a story and documents
properly drawn up, and bring her to you—she should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein—I cannot conceive a greater
horror than an old man or woman that I had never seen for forty-three years claiming me as Father.
Mary herself did not escape Claire’s criticism, for Claire never lost faith in Percy Shelley’s ideals and believed that Mary
had. She wrote,
She [Mary] has compromised all the nobler parts of her nature and has sneaked in upon any terms she could get into society
although she full well knew she could meet with nothing there but depravity. Others still cling round the image and memory
of Shelley—his ardent youth, his exalted being, his simplicity and enthusiasm . . . but she has forsaken even the memory for
the pitiful pleasure of trifling with trifles, and has exchanged the sole thought of his being for a share in the corruptions
of society. Would to God she could perish without note or remembrance, so the brightness of his name might not be darkened
by the corruptions she sheds upon it.
Mary was at times equally unforgiving. In an 1836 letter to Trelawny, she wrote: “Claire always harps upon my desertion of
her—as if I could desert one I never clung to—we were never friends.” Repeating what Claire had written her about Byron not
long before, she added,
Now, I would not go to Paradise, with her for a companion—she poisoned my life when young—that is over now—but as we never
loved each other, why these eternal complaints to me of me. I respect her now much —& pity her deeply—but years ago my idea
of Heaven was a world without a Claire—of course these feelings are altered—but she has still the faculty of making me more
uncomfortable than any human being—a faculty she, unconsciously perhaps, never fails to exert whenever I see her.
While Mary was living at Field Place with Percy Florence and Jane, Claire came to visit; it would be the last time she would
see Mary. Mary’s bitterness, long suppressed, suddenly broke to the surface. Before the visit, Lady Shelley had offered to
leave them alone, for she had met Claire earlier and disliked her. However, as she recalled, Mary cried out, “Don’t go, dear;
don’t leave me alone with her. She has been the bane of my life ever since I was two!”
Late in her life, Claire lived in her niece’s house in Florence, giving occasional interviews to English and American journalists
who learned of her association with the great poets. In 1873, William Rossetti, a nephew of John Polidori, at Trelawny’s request
called to see some letters that Claire had supposedly been offering for sale. Rumors varied as to the nature of the correspondence,
but since Claire had known both Shelley and Byron well, it was thought they might contain interesting material. Rossetti had
difficulty in gaining admission to the house, but when he did he found “a slender and pallid old lady . . . with dark and
expressive eyes.” She was now an invalid due to a recent fall. He did not get the letters.
Edward Silsbee, a Boston art critic who worshipped Shelley, learned about the documents. He was so desperate to get his hands
on them that he rented a room in the house where Claire and her niece lived. His hope was that when Claire, now quite old
and in poor health, would die, he could persuade the niece to give or sell him the papers. Claire did indeed die, but the
niece told Silsbee that he could only get the papers if he married her. He wasn’t willing to go quite that far. A young American
writer, traveling in Italy, heard the story of Silsbee’s obsession and turned it into a novel. The writer could not have been
more different from the Romantics Shelley and Bryon; he was Henry James, and the novel was
The Aspern Papers
.
“I would willingly think that my memory may not be lost in oblivion as my life has been,” Claire wrote as the end neared.
She died at eighty-one in 1879, and was buried in a churchyard near Florence. An inscription on her grave read, “She passed
her life in sufferings, expiating not only her faults but also her virtues.” She had suffered much for love, but it was her
passion that makes her memorable. Though no story written by Claire ever appeared in print, her memory not only survives,
but thrives: her journal and her letters have been edited and published in recent years. She was the one who brought the monsters
of Diodati together. If she had never sent those persistent seductive letters to Byron, then
Frankenstein
would never have been written.
In her final years, Claire had converted to Roman Catholicism, her mother’s religion. An English philosopher and essayist,
William Graham, went to see her when she was eighty. He described her as a “lovely old lady: the eyes were still bright and
sparkled at times with irony and fun; the complexion clear as at eighteen, and the lovely white hair as beautiful in its way
as the glossy black tresses of youth must have been; the slender willowy figure had remained unaltered, as though time itself
had held that sacred and passed by.” He asked her about the Roman Catholicism and she said that it brought her comfort. When
he asked Claire what she thought Shelley would think of her conversion, she replied, “I think Shelley would have forgiven
me anything; and I am not sure that the thought of him did not lead to the thought of Christ.” After Graham asked whether
she had loved Shelley, Claire answered, “With all my heart and soul.”
A
year after Mary’s death, her son went through her desk and found the journal that she had kept with Shelley in their 1814
elopement year. With it was a folded copy of one of Shelley’s last poems,
Adonais
. Unwrapping the paper, Percy Florence found that it contained the charred remains of Shelley’s heart, which Mary had kept
with her all those years. It was something that she might have felt she would need if she were ever to put her lover back
together again—as she had.
T
he monsters of Diodati have never been more alive than they are today. Both the vampire and Victor Frankenstein’s creature
are familiar figures in popular culture, found as animated cartoons, toys, puppets, and breakfast cereals; appearing in video
games, television programs, comic books, movies, plays, Broadway musicals, and even a German ballet. Their fame has spread
worldwide. To a great extent, this familarity sprang from their depiction in two American motion pictures, both made in 1931:
director James Whale’s
Frankenstein,
in which the monster was played by then-unknown English actor Henry Pratt, who adopted the screen name Boris Karloff; and
Tod Browning’s
Dracula,
in which Bela Lugosi played the vampire aristocrat who had been the title character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. (Lugosi
had created the role in a Broadway play four years earlier.) Karloff and Lugosi’s portrayals—aided by makeup artists and costume
designers—gave the monster and the vampire the outward forms by which they are now universally recognized. Whale was clearly
influenced by the 1920 movie
The Golem,
directed by Paul Wegener (who also played the title role), which retold the medieval legend of Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezulel
creating a huge humanlike creature to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution. Though it has been asserted that Mary Shelley
was inspired by the golem story, there is no evidence that she knew of it—though she certainly would have approved of the
rabbi’s method of bringing the creature to life: by placing a strip of paper bearing God’s name into a pendant on its chest.
Mary was very fond of the power of words.
It is appropriate that Frankenstein’s creature and the vampire have seemed to thrive in tandem (more than once appearing in
the same motion picture), for they represent opposite sides of the same image / reality dichotomy. Mary Shelley’s monster
is a being who longs for love and a connection to the human community, from which he is cut off because of his monstrous appearance.
The vampire, whether Lord Ruthven, Count Dracula, or Anne Rice’s Lestat, is physically attractive, sophisticated, even sexy—traits
that conceal the decay and evil within. In short, he is the reverse of Frankenstein’s creation. If anything, the stage and
screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel have further heightened the monster’s plight, for usually they have made him mute
as well as ugly—they deny him the ability to explain himself, as he does in the novel. Feeling unloved, misunderstood, unjustly
rejected are universal human experiences. Who has not felt the desire to be loved for ourselves alone? Who has not also thought
that if we could show our true selves to the world, if we could only make people
understand
us, the result would be acceptance and affection?
Children in particular seem to love the monster; why else would a cereal manufacturer produce “Frankenberry”? Mary’s creature—clumsy,
unable to express himself, constantly getting into trouble—was made to feel unloved first of all by the person who created
him. To children, he is a kindred spirit. To young Mary Godwin, a motherless child, a heartbroken girl whose persona was molded
and stitched together by men of cold and selfish genius, such an unloved being was found not just on the pages of her book,
but in the mirror.
The vampire, on the other hand, is the man we love to hate. Polidori felt all the emotions that Mary’s monster feels, and
he blamed his troubles on the person he most hoped to impress: Byron. Byron responded to Polidori’s admiration with cruelty
and ridicule. Supremely talented and handsome, Byron had within him something deeply ugly that made it difficult for him to
reciprocate others’ love. The idea that a beautiful person can be evil was not a new one: Polidori carried it a step farther,
showing us that the appeal of beauty was stronger than the revulsion caused by evil. Byron’s own heroes were tortured men
who had a dark secret; Polidori showed that dark secret to be that they—and Byron himself—drew love and life from others,
while giving nothing in return. The fascination we feel for the vampire comes from the fact that even though we know he is
horrifying, we cannot resist admiring him.
Seldom, if ever, has a literary contest been as successful as the one prompted by Byron’s challenge. It is rare for anyone
to create a character, a novel, a work of art that has universal appeal. Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori both did, striking
a nerve in audiences that reverberates even today. In the final analysis, Mary’s achievement was greater than Polidori’s,
for she had an even larger theme: the danger of science. The word “Frankenstein” today is virtually synonymous with the caricature
of the mad scientist whose experiments get out of control. The story of Victor’s quest to create a living being embodies issues
that remain controversial today. What is life? What is a human being? How far can—or should—science go in prolonging, changing,
or even creating life? Modern science has brought those possibilities out of the realm of imagination and into reality. Artificial
intelligence, genetic engineering, cloning, stem-cell medical procedures, sentient robots, and even abortion all evoke the
same questions Mary Shelley raised. The power of her story rests on the crucial premise that a human has dared to create life
in a laboratory, and that the creature he brought to life has human characteristics: it not only thinks, but it also has emotions.
At the heart of the book is the mystery of creativity and its consequences, something that concerned—even, at times, tormented—all
five of the people at Villa Diodati. In their outsized passions, their remarkable talents, their distorted personal lives,
their never-satisfied yearning for love—they were all monsters.