A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  “Yet I cannot ask you to renounce your country and friends to fulfil this task; and now that you are returning to England, you will have little chance of meeting with him. But the consideration of these points, and the well balancing of what you may esteem your duties, I leave to you; my judgment and ideas are already disturbed by the near approach of death. I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.

  “That he should live to be an instrument of mischief disturbs me; in other respects, this hour, when I momentarily expect my release, is the only happy one which I have enjoyed for several years. The forms of the beloved dead flit before me, and I hasten to their arms. Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.”

  His voice became fainter as he spoke, and at length, exhausted by his effort, he sank into silence. About half an hour afterwards he attempted again to speak but was unable; he pressed my hand feebly, and his eyes closed forever, while the irradiation of a gentle smile passed away from his lips.

  Margaret, what comment can I make on the untimely extinction of this glorious spirit? What can I say that will enable you to understand the depth of my sorrow? All that I should express would be inadequate and feeble. My tears flow; my mind is overshadowed by a cloud of disappointment. But I journey towards England, and I may there find consolation.

  I am interrupted. What do these sounds portend? It is midnight; the breeze blows fairly, and the watch on deck scarcely stir. Again there is a sound as of a human voice, but hoarser; it comes from the cabin where the remains of Frankenstein still lie. I must arise and examine. Good night, my sister.

  Great God! what a scene has just taken place! I am yet dizzy with the remembrance of it. I hardly know whether I shall have the power to detail it; yet the tale which I have recorded would be incomplete without this final and wonderful catastrophe.

  I entered the cabin where lay the remains of my ill-fated and admirable friend. Over him hung a form which I cannot find words to describe—gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy. When he heard the sound of my approach, he ceased to utter exclamations of grief and horror and sprung towards the window. Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness. I shut my eyes involuntarily and endeavoured to recollect what were my duties with regard to this destroyer. I called on him to stay.

  He paused, looking on me with wonder, and again turning towards the lifeless form of his creator, he seemed to forget my presence, and every feature and gesture seemed instigated by the wildest rage of some uncontrollable passion.

  “That is also my victim!” he exclaimed. “In his murder my crimes are consummated; the miserable series of my being is wound to its close! Oh, Frankenstein! Generous and self-devoted being! What does it avail that I now ask thee to pardon me? I, who irretrievably destroyed thee by destroying all thou lovedst. Alas! He is cold, he cannot answer me.”

  His voice seemed suffocated, and my first impulses, which had suggested to me the duty of obeying the dying request of my friend in destroying his enemy, were now suspended by a mixture of curiosity and compassion. I approached this tremendous being; I dared not again raise my eyes to his face, there was something so scaring and unearthly in his ugliness. I attempted to speak, but the words died away on my lips. The monster continued to utter wild and incoherent self-reproaches. At length I gathered resolution to address him in a pause of the tempest of his passion. “Your repentance,” I said, “is now superfluous. If you had listened to the voice of conscience and heeded the stings of remorse before you had urged your diabolical vengeance to this extremity, Frankenstein would yet have lived.”

  “And do you dream?” said the demon. “Do you think that I was then dead to agony and remorse? He,” he continued, pointing to the corpse, “he suffered not in the consummation of the deed. Oh! Not the ten-thousandth portion of the anguish that was mine during the lingering detail of its execution. A frightful selfishness hurried me on, while my heart was poisoned with remorse. Think you that the groans of Clerval were music to my ears? My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture such as you cannot even imagine.

  “After the murder of Clerval I returned to Switzerland, heart-broken and overcome. I pitied Frankenstein; my pity amounted to horror; I abhorred myself. But when I discovered that he, the author at once of my existence and of its unspeakable torments, dared to hope for happiness, that while he accumulated wretchedness and despair upon me he sought his own enjoyment in feelings and passions from the indulgence of which I was forever barred, then impotent envy and bitter indignation filled me with an insatiable thirst for vengeance. I recollected my threat and resolved that it should be accomplished. I knew that I was preparing for myself a deadly torture, but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse which I detested yet could not disobey. Yet when she died! Nay, then I was not miserable. I had cast off all feeling, subdued all anguish, to riot in the excess of my despair. Evil thenceforth became my good. Urged thus far, I had no choice but to adapt my nature to an element which I had willingly chosen. The completion of my demoniacal design became an insatiable passion. And now it is ended; there is my last victim!”

  I was at first touched by the expressions of his misery; yet, when I called to mind what Frankenstein had said of his powers of eloquence and persuasion, and when I again cast my eyes on the lifeless form of my friend, indignation was rekindled within me. “Wretch!” I said. “It is well that you come here to whine over the desolation that you have made. You throw a torch into a pile of buildings, and when they are consumed, you sit among the ruins and lament the fall. Hypocritical fiend! If he whom you mourn still lived, still would he be the object, again would be become the prey, of your accursed vengeance. It is not pity that you feel; you lament only because the victim of your malignity is withdrawn from your power.”

  “Oh, it is not thus—not thus,” interrupted the being. “Yet such must be the impression conveyed to you by what appears to be the purport of my actions. Yet I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

  “You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fe
llowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

  “But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. 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. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.

  “Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being and accomplish that which must be done, but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

  “Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of humankind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction, that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hadst not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine, for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them forever.

  “But soon,” he cried with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace, or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

  He sprang from the cabin window as he said this, upon the ice raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

  1 Christopher Small. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 1972), pp 96–100.

  2 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 221–297.

  3 Noel Carrol, “Nightmare and the Horror Film: the Symbolic Biology of Fantastic Beings,” Film Quarterly (Spring 1981) p. 21.

  4 Radu Florescu, In Search of Frankenstein (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975).

  5 See Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (London: Liverwright, 1971).

  6 Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Essex: Tower Bridge, 1951), p. 138.

  7 Ellen Moers, Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), pp. 90–100.

  8 Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) pp. 68–69.

  9 Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”

  10 The moon.

  11 Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Works by Mary Shelley

  The two best scholarly editions of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus are by James Rieger, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974 (1818 text) and M. K. Joseph, London: Oxford University Press, 1969 (1831 text). Other modern editions of Mary Shelley’s writings are The Last Man, ed. Hugh J. Luke, Jr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965; Mathilda, ed. Elizabeth Nitchie, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959; Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976; The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944; The Journal of Mary W. Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947. Other works not available in modern editions are Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). Mary Shelley also wrote dramas, poems, travel books, and short biographical sketches.

  Biographical and Critical Studies

  Bigland, Eileen. Mary Shelley. London: Cassell, 1959.

  Church, Richard. Mary Shelley (1797–1851). New York: Viking, 1928.

  Gerson, Noel B. Daughter of Earth and Water: A Biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

  Grylls, R. Glynn. Mary Shelley: A Biography. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.

  Leighton, Margaret. Shelley’s Mary: The Life of Mary Godwin Shelley. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1973.

  Marshall, Mrs. Julian (Florence). The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 2 Vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1889.

  Nitchie, Elizabeth. Mary Shelley: Author of Frankenstein. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953.

  Norman, Sylvia. “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” Shelley and His Circle. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

  Spark, Muriel. Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Hadleigh, Essex: Tower Bridge, 1951.

  Walling, William. Mary Shelley. New York: Twayne, 1972.

  Discussions of Frankenstein

  Aldiss, Brian W. The Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973.

  Birkhead, Edith. The Tale of Terror. New York: Dutton, 1920.

  Bloom, Harold. “Frankenstein, or the New Prometheus.” Partisan Review 32 (1965): 611–8.

  Cude, Wilfrid. “Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus: A Study in the Ethics of Scientific Creativity.” Dalhousie Review 52 (1972): 212–25.

  Douglas, Drake. Horror! New York: Macmillan, 1966.

  Fleck, P. D. “Mary Shelley’s Notes to Shelley’s Poems and Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism 6 (1967): 226–54.

  Florescu, Radu. In Search of Frankenstein. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975.

  Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

  Goldberg, M. A. “Moral and Myth in Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein.” Keats-Shelley Journal 8 (1959): 27–38.

  Kiely, Robert. The Romantic Novel in England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972.

  Levine, George and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

  Lovell, Ernest J. Jr. “Byron and the Byronic Hero in the No
vels of Mary Shelley.” University of Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 158–83.

  Massey, Irving. The Gaping Pig. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

  Mays, Milton A. “Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Black Theodicy.” Southern Humanities Review 3 (1969): 146–53.

  McKinney, John. “Nietzsche and the Frankenstein Creature.” Dalhousie Review 41 (1962): 40–8.

  Miyoshi, Masao. The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

  Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976.

  Nelson, Lowry, Jr. “Night Thoughts on the Gothic Novel.” The Yale Review 52 (1963): 236–57.

  Peck, Walter Edwin. “The Biographical Element in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” PMLA 38 (1923): 196–219.

  Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.

  Pollin, Burton R. “Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein.” Comparative Literature 17 (1965): 97–108.

  Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony, Trans. Angus Davidson. London: Oxford University Press, 1933.

  Rieger, James. “Dr. Polidori and the Genesis of Frankenstein.” Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 461–72.

  Scholes, Robert and Eric S. Rabkin. Science Fiction: History, Science, Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

  Small, Christopher, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”—Tracing the Myth. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.

  Swingle, L. J. “Frankenstein’s Monster and Its Romantic Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in English Romanticism.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 15 (1973): 51–6.