Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  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.

  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 Author 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 a
nd 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).