The Lady and Her Monsters

by Roseanne Montillo

  In the 1818 edition, Victor Frankenstein decides on a course of action based on his own whims and desires. Having a mind of his own, he chooses to commit a terrible act against nature and the gods—he learns all he can about alchemical actions; learns all about galvanism; raids cemeteries; builds a creature; abandons it; does not provide for it, either physically or mentally; and in the end he even suggests to Captain Walton that he should take care of the creature after his own death. In essence, all that happened is the direct result of Victor’s own actions. But in the 1831 version, Mary Shelley not only mollified her position but actually shifted it: Victor Frankenstein is not responsible for his actions; fate is. His steps were predestined by a creator. Thus, he’s no longer a creature with thinking capabilities, but rather, more of a puppet simply performing tasks that have been set out for him. In this way, what he does and the results of those steps become more forgivable. He is not entirely to blame.

  Once again, this was not by mere chance. Mary felt that she was no longer a participant in her own life, but rather someone who simply followed a previously written plan. How else could she explain all that had happened? All those who had perished? It had to have been fate.

  The introduction also served another purpose. She wrote it, she said, to answer those who often asked her how such a young girl could have come up with this tale and where she’d gotten the idea. In practical details, she explained how the story came to be, writing at length about her so-called waking dream. She was often pestered with those questions from skeptical inquirers who wanted to get to the bottom of how a teenager entangled in a relationship with a married man could have written a book that was becoming a classic.

  Thus she told of Villa Diodati, of the ghost story competition, of the conversations about reanimating the dead, of going to bed during a stormy night and coming face-to-face with Victor and his fiend.

  There was no one to contradict Mary, no one to say the events she was describing had not taken place or hadn’t taken place in the sequence she remembered. Thus, in the 1831 version of Frankenstein, she managed to do several things: not only to create the myth of Frankenstein—a mad scientist creates a terrifying monster that he unleashes on the world with deadly consequences—but also to give the world another story, the legend of how Frankenstein the book was created, that of the author meeting her muse.

  EPILOGUE

  Though you seek to bury me,

  Yet will you continuously resurrect me!

  Once I am unbound, I am unbounded!

  FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND

  The early days of April 2004 were gray and somewhat chilly in New York City, giving little indication that spring had begun. Despite the somber atmosphere, a group of family members dressed in warm clothes had gathered early one morning in Central Park, whispering to one another and linking arms together for support. There was nothing peculiar-looking about them; they appeared to be a group of quiet tourists taking in the sights before the whole of the city woke up. They clutched enormous Starbucks coffee cups in their hands, holding them tightly as if they were trying to transfer the warmth into their limbs.

  But the paper cups did not hold foamy lattes or the latest overpriced coffee concoction. They were filled with human ashes.

  Not long before this morning, the patriarch of the family, Alistair Cooke, had died after a long battle with lung cancer, which had eventually spread to his bones. Having reached the remarkable age of ninety-six, following a famed career as a broadcaster and longtime host of Masterpiece Theatre, he left behind specific instructions about how he wanted his body dealt with after his death. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered along Central Park, a place he had gazed at from his rent-controlled apartment on Fifth Avenue and that he had come to adore in his adoptive home of New York City.

  When the end came, on March 30, there was little else for the family to do but to request the assistance of New York Mortuary Services. An employee of the firm appeared hours later to remove the body and took it away for the procedure. The ashes were then returned to the family two days later, and together the relatives began to discuss how to fulfill the request.

  Although aware of a local city law prohibiting the scattering of human remains in public places, the family gathered that April morning, coffee cups in hand, and with ceremonious gestures they hoped no one would notice, relegated the ashes to the elements.

  The family members then returned to their homes, some in New York and others around the country. Cooke’s daughter, Susan, who lived in Vermont, began to find solace in her work as a minister for her community. It must have been comforting for her to think of her father not so much as the frail old man he had become toward the end, but as the spiritual being he had morphed into after his death.

  Eighteen months after Cooke’s death, the family reunited again, this time in Susan’s home in Vermont to celebrate the approaching Christmas season. The region was so still then, and its many lakes were frozen and enchanting. From Susan’s home, it was possible to see the distant mountain peaks covered with a snow so fine it seemed nearly transparent. The quiet of this austere landscape had a certain beauty and tranquility that was comforting. That is, until the telephone rang.

  As Susan picked up the receiver, she was surprised to hear a woman’s voice asking about her father. He had been famous in this country and abroad, and he had a large following that still made its presence known. Perhaps this woman was a fan who had not heard of his passing or a writer working on a piece wishing for an anecdote or a quote. But as it turned out, she was Patricia O’Brien, a detective from the New York Major Case Squad, and she was investigating, among other things, the death of Susan’s father. Susan explained that Cooke had died of cancer, but the detective made it clear she was interested not in the way he’d died but in the way his body had been disposed of afterward and how his remains had been handled.

  The detective said she had been investigating fraud in a funeral home in Brooklyn and had come across Alistair Cooke’s death certificate as well as other documents about his death and the handling of his body after the pickup.

  She said the funeral home had not completed the cremation, as the family had requested, but rather, the corpse had been crudely dismembered by a band of so-called body snatchers and cutters. The body parts were later skinned and the remaining bones sold to various companies that cleaned them and processed them, eventually shipping them to different hospitals across the country, where they were implanted into patients undergoing a variety of medical procedures, such as joint replacement, heart valve surgery, skin grafts for burn victims, sports injuries, and even cosmetic procedures. Though Cooke had been old and terminal, new documents had been drawn up for him, with a new age listed, as well as a new cause of death. Having taken what they needed from him, the funeral home had cremated the rest, possibly with the remains of other bodies. The detective could not be sure whether the Cooke family had received their father’s ashes or someone else’s, or, for that matter, whether they were human ashes at all.

  In retrospect, Susan had had a funny feeling upon opening those coffee cups so many months ago. As she inserted her fingers into them, the ashes had seemed a little too fine, like talcum powder. She had been told that human remains were grittier, made so by tiny, almost invisible shreds of bone still in them. Susan had reasoned that perhaps New York’s mortuaries used bigger, hotter, more modern ovens that completely pulverized a body. She had quickly put it out of her mind.

  But as she heard this news about her father, she turned from the sadness she felt upon hearing what his body, albeit dead, had endured to what might have occurred to those who had unwittingly become the recipients of his body parts: Cooke’s bones had been too old, too brittle, and most especially, too riddled with disease.

  Outside her window, the landscape no longer appeared so benign. If anything, the dark clouds hanging overhead must have seemed ominous, as if they were something dark and corrupted, about ready to burst open.


  Though England passed the Anatomy Act in 1832, following the Burke and Hare episode as well as the murders committed in London by Bishop and Williams, America’s laws on such matters were implemented on a state-by-state basis, beginning with Massachusetts in 1831. The commonwealth’s regulations gave medical schools the right to use the bodies of the unclaimed for dissections. These bodies included the ones left in hospitals, workhouses, and tenement houses, and usually belonged to the poor whose families could not afford a burial. Other states quickly followed Massachusetts’s lead, in essence blunting the need for body snatchers.

  But as the next three or four decades rolled by, new medical schools sprang up across the country, leading to more students wanting to become doctors, thus increasing the demand for more bodies. As such, the body snatchers entered the business again with abandon. When lawmakers became aware of this, they passed new laws designed to prevent a case similar to Burke and Hare’s from occurring in America.

  By the 1920s, most states had strict laws that regulated the appropriation of corpses for medical use, restricting it to bodies left unclaimed in hospitals, in workhouses, or on the streets. These laws were supposed to allow schools to continue their practices by providing them with enough cadavers; prevent body snatchers from embarking on their ghoulish, if profitable, enterprises; and prevent people from fearing that their bodies would be disinterred and sold to the highest bidder, or, worse, killed and sold to the highest bidder.

  Few in recent decades believed that such individuals still existed. But as Alistair Cooke’s case showed, body snatchers are still alive and doing well. The band of cutters who defiled Cooke’s body—later found, arrested, and convicted—was no better than its counterpart of centuries ago. Granted, their retrieval methods had morphed, their skills had developed and progressed with time, they had learned to blend with the rest of the community, but their goal remained the same: to profit from the dead. They saw nothing unusual in this and saw mortuaries as simply a place where they could cash in.

  During her time, Mary Shelley prophesied this despoiling of and profiting from the dead. In Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein says, “A Church yard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life.” He saw the corpses as a means to an end (to make the creature and become a creator).

  That Shelley understood this in the early 1800s was no fluke. The soirées her father, William Godwin, threw every Sunday afternoon provided an opportunity to discuss the latest experiments involving corpses. Certainly poetry and philosophy were also discussed, but a great deal of time was spent talking about electricity and galvanization, both of which used corpses for their experiments. Anthony Carlisle, Godwin’s friend, witnessed several attempts at the galvanization of bodies, including, it is believed, that of George Foster by Giovanni Aldini, which Carlisle talked about often. Humphry Davy, who was a regular at the Godwins’ home, was also a regular user of the latest electrical machines of the era and became notorious throughout the London community for his flamboyant experiments.

  And the closest one to Mary, Percy Shelley, knew all too well the effects of voltaic electricity and the experimentations happening on dead bodies; he spoke to her of his days with his cousin Charles Grove, roaming the halls of the hospital where he worked. In this way, by being surrounded by these men and hearing their stories, Mary came to learn the value the dead had to the living. She was also able to make an educated guess that the demand for dead bodies would not really wane over time, but would increase.

  As Mary Shelley returned to London after her husband’s death in the early 1820s, such ideas were no longer center stage in her life. Although still interested in the philosophical debates that had captured Percy Shelley’s and her father’s imagination, she was focused on more tangible ordeals. Still guilt-ridden over the suffering Percy had endured just before his death, she was now without money and without many friends, a fact that pained her. She continued to correspond with Isabella Baxter Booth, the childhood girlfriend whom she had met while visiting Scotland.

  Writing to her, Mary told Isabella about her desperation and disappointments: “When I think of my melancholy return to England . . . ,” Mary wrote to Isabella some years later, “of the natural interest one would suppose a young widow with an infant son—the heir of a good fortune might inspire—& the solitude & friendlessness of my position . . . not a human being wd hold out a finger—nay . . . show the inexpensive kindness of an invitation or a kind glance.”

  Instead of attending lectures on electricity and galvanization, as she had done with Percy and Claire, she threw herself into writing, not only her own original works, but the revisions of the works of her husband, Percy Shelley. She had promised that upon his death, she would bring his poetry to publication, and she achieved that goal in 1839, when the four-volume Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the two-volume Essays, Letters, and the one-volume Poetical Works were published. But while she worked arduously on this task, her health deteriorated. Not infrequently, intense headaches plagued her, and she was often confined to her bed. She attributed these to the mental strains she had subjected herself to and believed they would pass.

  With the publication of Percy’s works, several things happened: not only was her guilt eased, but her financial situation also improved. With some money at her disposal, she could now set out for her beloved Italy.

  As a young woman, her desire had been to gain financial independence and to live in Italy, perhaps permanently. Unfortunately that did not happen for almost twenty years, but now it was possible, in the company of her grown son, Percy Florence. Percy was by then attending Trinity College, which he had entered in the fall of 1837, something that delighted and relieved Mary, as she had come to think that Percy Florence had no aptitude or passion for anything. Those who knew them both, but most especially those who had come to know Percy Florence, had also wondered where his distinctions lay, because it was not clear what his talents were, if he had any.

  The barrister Henry Crabb Robinson, who bumped into mother and son in 1839, was struck by the fact that Percy Florence possessed his father’s beauty but not much else. Crabb wrote in his diary: “Mrs. Shelley came in, and with her son, a loutish-looking youth, quite unworthy of his external appearance [of] his distinguished literary ancestors. If talent descends, what ought he not be, he who is of the blood of Godwin, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and Mrs. Shelley.” But then he added what others had already reported, “Of his moral character is highly spoken of. Of his abilities nothing is said.”

  Percy Florence also inherited his father’s love of the sea and sailing, which did not please Mary. Even so, Percy continued to sail, becoming good enough at it to win several regattas. On an earlier trip to Italy, he had dragged his mother, frightened and whimpering, into a boat and out on a sea undulating with waves.

  During the years between 1840 and 1843, Mary, Percy Florence, and several of his school friends finally embarked on their much-talked-about trip to Italy. They tracked through Germany once again, a country she had despised as a youth while traveling with Percy and Claire Clairmont and that she now reviled even more. She nitpicked about the service and the servants, the dingy dining halls, the dirt that greeted them. Her disposition soured even more as they crossed the Brenner Pass; a steady drizzle and dismal fog embraced the town there. It was only the thought of reaching her beloved Italy that kept her going. And on arriving on its soil, she drank deeply from the landscape, which seemed to welcome her as it had once welcomed her and Percy.

  As they neared Venice, she could not help but relive her earlier entrance into the city, the one where her daughter, Clara, had died. She recalled the child clutched to her breast, gasping for air in the sweltering carriage as they rushed to meet her husband. But years had now passed, decades, and she decided she should not “dwell on the sad circumstances” of her first views of the city, when “death hovered over the scene.”

  But despite her best intentions, the events that occurred so long ago were
still as fresh as ever, and a mountaintop, a crumpled road, a lone tree, had the power to ignite those inner, fetid passions. Even a shadow, the sun moving across the horizon and peeking through a window, which then cast a light on an object on the table in her home, had the power to remind her of days gone by, of those whom she had loved. In those moments she found that her “nerves . . . [were] strung to their utmost tension by the endurance of pain, or the far severer infliction of mental anguish.” But she vowed to think only of the happiness of being in Italy.

  She was certainly not surprised to find Venice as unappealing as she had years ago. The buildings, old and crumbling, did not charm her. As she stood by the windows of her room watching twilight fall over the city, the sun setting behind some nameless palazzo whose shadow melted into the murky canals, she had to steal a glance below at the narrow passageways, or farther away, toward the Rialto, and there, in those shadowy places, imagine her husband returning to her after a day spent with Lord Byron. The view had not changed in the least, she reasoned, “but as the Poet says—the difference is to me!”

  It was in Rome that the full force of her past, and its losses, came to her. There were so many places where, she said, “the treasures of my youth lie buried.” She arrived there during Holy Week, a particularly austere time for Catholic Italy, and the solemnity of the city overwhelmed her. The mournful hymns sung in all the churches were “solemn, pathetic, religious,” though they seemed to echo her own deep-seated grief, elevating it to something like spiritual rapture. Sitting in those churches mourning the lost and the losses, she knew Percy Shelley would have understood.

  Throughout the trip, Mary was faced with the memories of her lost youth and the lives that had gone with it. She became so overwhelmed she began having relentless headaches. They had started in 1839, and she had believed they were a part of the creative process—she had worked too hard, stressed too much over the publication of the poems; the pressure in her head would abate when the work ended. But as time passed, it became obvious that something more insidious was occurring.