FRANKENSTEIN'S BRIDE
Hilary Bailey
FRANKENSTEIN OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS
Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
©1995, 2007 by Hilary Bailey
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First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster Ltd, 1995 Copyright Hilary Bailey, 1995
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, Hilary Frankenstein's bride / Hilary Bailey.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1992-4 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Monsters—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A3186F73 2007 823'.914—dc22
2007020746
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
CH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENT
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
C H A P T E R 1
C H A P T E R 2
C H A P T E R 3
C H A P T E R 4
C H A P T E R 5
C H A P T E R 6
C H A P T E R 7
C H A P T E R 8
C H A P T E R 9
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FRANKENSTEIN'S BRIDE
Hilary Bailey
Hilary Bailey was born in 1936 and was educated at thirteen schools before attending Newham College, Cambridge. Married with children, she entered the strange, uneasy world of sixties science fiction, writing some twenty tales of imagination which were published in Britain, the USA, France and Germany. She has edited the magazine New Worlds and has regularly reviewed modern fiction for the Guardian. Her first novel was published in 1975 and she has since written ten novels and a short biography.
Also by Hilary Bailey
Polly Put the Kettle On
Mrs. Mulvaney
Hannie Richards
All The Days of My Life
Vera Brittain (Biography)
As Time Goes By
A Stranger to Herself
In Search of Love, Money and Revenge
The Cry From Street to Street
Cassandra
The Strange Adventures of Charlotte Holmes
“YOU MUST CREATE A FEMALE FOR ME. . .”
“As I proceeded in my labor it became every day more horrible and irksome to me.
“Three years before I had created a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated my heart and filled it forever with bitterest remorse. I was now about to form another being of whose disposition I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness.
“I thought, with a sensation of madness, of creating another like to him and, trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.”
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley 1818
Frankenstein and Mary Shelley
Hilary Bailey
AT DAWN ON APRIL 23, 1816, Lord Byron, then twenty-eight and already a celebrated poet, left London with his doctor/companion, twenty-one-year-old John William Polidori and headed, fast, in his coach, for the port of Dover and a boat to France. He was leaving under a cloud of debt and scandal, with creditors at his heels. He had just signed papers legally separating from the wife he had married just over a year earlier. There was a child, a daughter. He had been reluctant to sign (money was involved), but gave way to threats made by his wife's family that if he did not they would reveal his homosexual acts, then punishable by law, and his incestuous affair with his half-sister. Then came the money problems—a legacy expected to go to his wife (which would then have belonged to Byron) had been left to her mother. As soon as his many creditors knew about her inheritance, they descended in force. Thus the flight—they would have no power over him once he was out of the country.
Ten days later a similar fleeing party set off for Dover. This consisted of the (less well-known) twenty-four-year-old poet Percy Shelley and his lover, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin. Mary was the daughter of the radical William Godwin and the feminist writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died when Mary was born. With them, too, was Mary's step-sister, Claire Clairmont, the daughter of Godwin's second wife, and Shelley and Mary's eighteen-month-old son. Ten days earlier—on the same day Byron fled—a court judgement concerning family money had gone against Shelley, who was heavily in debt. Shelley's father, Sir Timothy, had been in constant conflict with his eldest son and heir for many years. Shelley was a declared atheist and radical. He did not believe in private property. At twenty-one, he had eloped with a sixteen-year-old girl, married her and then, only two years later, abandoned her to elope with sixteen-year-old Mary Godwin. What made this situation worse from Sir Timothy's point of view was that Harriet Shelley's second child, born after Shelley left her, was a boy, and therefore the heir to his lands and title if Shelley died young. In spite these concerns, though, Sir Timothy granted his wayward son £1,000 a year—enough to live well, but not enough to pay his massive debts.
Shelley and Byron planned to meet in Geneva, although the two men did not know each other. In addition to their many similarities—age, social class, radical politics, literary interests, financial, legal and marriage problems—they had something else in common. Only two months before the flight Mary's step-sister, Claire, had thrown herself at Byron and captured him. The consequences would be disastrous, but for the time being Claire was happy to be orchestrating the meeting between the two men she loved.
The poets met and liked each other. Not long after they rented two houses on the shore of Lake Geneva. Byron's house, the Villa Diodati, stood on a height and was more imposing than the Shelleys', whose house was lower down, on the shore of the lake. The two houses connected by a path through an olive grove.
By June the weather was very bad—a climatic change had affected most of Europe, due to far-off volcanic eruption. The group was forced to stay indoors a great deal while storms raged outside. They passed their evenings in speculative, semi-philosophical talk. They spoke of the origins of life; they read ghost stories. But the atmosphere deteriorated. Shelley had a frighte
ning hallucination. Byron began to tire of Claire.
Then, one evening after dinner, Byron suggested everyone should write a ghost story. He began his own tale but abandoned it after a few pages. (It was later finished by his doctor, John Polidori.) But Mary, in June 1816, began Frankenstein. At the end of summer the party split up. Shelley returned to England to continue the fight about his grandfather's will, taking with him the now-pregnant Claire, a copy of Byron's completed long narrative poem, Childe Harold, for his publisher and, of course, Mary, who now had the early chapters of Frankenstein in her portable writing desk. Byron left for Italy. The Villa Diodati group would not meet again for two years.
Mary wrote on doggedly throughout a year of crisis, completing her book in May of the following year, when six months pregnant. The book was published in November 1817 and received much attention.
Most of us are so familiar with the images of the iconic film that we think we know what the book, Frankenstein, is like—but we don't. The book has a circular movement. We begin with letters from an English sea captain to his sister telling her that, with his ship iced in somewhere in Arctic zones, he has seen a huge figure in a sleigh traveling fast in the distance. He and his crew then rescue a man in a second sleigh, about to perish of cold. Asked what he is doing out there, alone on the ice, the traveler, Victor Frankenstein, replies, “To seek one who fled from me.” The end of the book completes the story in the Arctic, but the bulk of the narrative is the tale Frankenstein tells the ship's captain, Captain Walton, about the events leading up to his pursuit of the monster, his own creation, over the ice.
He explains to Walton how he grew up in a good family in Switzerland, became, in his teens, a passionate student of chemistry and other sciences and, finally, discovered the secret of imparting life. He constructs, from body parts from the dissecting room and the mortuary, a disfigured creature, eight feet tall. Then, horrified, he immediately abandons his creation, whom he calls “a wretch,” “a miserable monster.”
Frankenstein tells Walton of his effort to forget his creation until, suddenly, his much-loved little brother is killed. Frankenstein knows the murderer is his own creation, his monster, but he is too ashamed to confess and allows a trusted servant of the family to be accused and convicted of the crime. Then the monster confronts him, saying that he killed the child by accident. Deformed and terrifying in his appearance, he has had to live as a fugitive, and only by cunning and accident has managed to understand something of the world and learned how to speak.
He reproaches Frankenstein. “Remember that I am thy crea-ture: I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
This is the voice of William Godwin's daughter and Percy Shelley's wife, telling us it is cruelty that deforms the human heart; well treated, we could all be good.
In fact, Victor Frankenstein repudiates and denounces his creation again and again. Throughout the book all the arguments are on the monster's side, all the aggression and denial on Frankenstein's. When his creature offers to go to a far country and live quietly there, if Frankenstein will make him a wife, Frankenstein delays and then, having created his female monster, destroys it. Breaks the deal, in fact. The consequences, of course, are awful.
The idea we have of Frankenstein's monster, how we even use the term in everyday speech, is about a scientist creating a destructive force he cannot control. What Mary Shelley is saying is more complex.
There are two extraordinary things about the writing of Frankenstein. One: how did a young woman two months short of her nineteenth birthday manage to produce a work that has lasted for two hundred years, as a book, a play, a film, a cartoon. And the other: where did the book come from?
As far as the first question is concerned, one thing is certain. Mary Shelley, as an aspiring author, would not have suffered from lack of confidence. Her mother had been a writer. Some years before her birth, her father, having completed his influential Political Justice, followed it with a commercially successful popular novel, Caleb Williams. During Mary's childhood, William Godwin had become a publisher and her stepmother, Mary Anne Clairmont, had opened a bookshop to help with the precarious family finances. The whole family—Fanny, who was Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary herself, her stepmother's two children, Claire and Charles, and the Godwin son, all lived above the shop. Mary had been brought up among books and writers, had been well educated for a girl of her times and had not been subjected to discrimination on grounds of her sex. Great things had always been expected of her. She would have had no inhibitions about taking up her pen.
Why is Frankenstein the book it is? The answer is complicated. It is a mixture of conventional forms, scientific and political theory, the author's background and the author's thoughts about her life. It is not a simple book. It is a tapestry. Basically, the book is a Gothic novel, based on the then-popular genre involving old houses, mad monks, terrified heroines and specters. The big difference is that Mary Shelley was a child of reason, and lived with Shelley, a man passionately—and unusually, for his time—interested in science. Even as a boy his enthusiasm led him to wire a doorknob at school to give his housemaster, literally, a shock—not bad, considering the discovery of electricity had only been made twenty years earlier and its practical uses were a generation away. Eventually, after several other experiments, the school made him pack up his chemistry books and send them home.
Nevertheless, his clear-eyed interest in science did not fail. At Diodati, for example, he had his young son vaccinated against smallpox by Byron's doctor, even though immunization was a fairly new process and was still regarded with fear and suspicion by many.
Possibly the evening discussions at the Villa Diodati about the origins of life were led by Shelley. Possibly the ghost stories were Byron's, for he was a man for whom science held little interest—at the time, it was considered a subject scarcely fit for a gentleman. Mary Shelley's “ghost” story, as proposed by Byron, contains no elements of the supernatural. Instead, Victor Frankenstein, perhaps thanks to Shelley, uses science to create his creature.
Yet it is not science that turns Frankenstein's creation into a monster. It is a man—Frankenstein, his creator.
Still, there are Byronic shadows in Frankenstein, echoes of the gloomy romantic hero, lonely, doomed, set apart from others by some secret sin. In fact, as Mary wrote the opening chapters of Frankenstein Byron was completing his long poem, Childe Harold, the hero of which was just such a man. But in Frankenstein it is unclear whether Victor Frankenstein or his creation represents the doomed hero. During the course of the book each, in his own way, becomes solitary, despairing and exiled.
There are religious elements in the book. It would have been impossible to avoid them. Even though the Godwins were freethinkers their whole society was permeated with Christian thought. Laws, morality, the books they read, the paintings they saw, even the language they spoke were influenced by religion. So when the creature calls himself Frankenstein's “Adam,” acknowledging himself as created and Frankenstein as his creator, we know—and Mary Shelley knew—without saying so, that we are in a place of awe. Frankenstein has taken on the role of God. He has created life.
On the other hand, Mary Shelley does not stress this vision. What she seems to be saying about the relationship between the creator and created appears to have as much to do with politics as religion. Her background was radical. Her father was a supporter of the French Revolution (and the American War of Inde-pendence). Her mother had actually been in France during the revolution and was author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women. If ever there was a red-diaper baby it was Mary Godwin, then living with Shelley, a man who was libertarian to the core. Frankenstein tells us that science can have as much influence on people's lives as God, that man can improve himself and others by effort,
that, as Rousseau asserted, man in a state of nature is virtuous—it is civilization, with its greed, rules and regulations, which perverts natural virtue.
The two central ideas modern readers have drawn from the Frankenstein story—one about a frightening, wicked figure more powerful than we are, the other about the mad scientist loosing evil on the world—may tell us more about ourselves than about Mary Shelley.
And yet—and yet—what readers get from books is sometimes an underlying message, one the writer was unaware of as he or she wrote. Historically, Mary was an heir of the French Revolution, which both her parents had ardently supported. But liberty, equality and fraternity had ended in the Terror and led indirectly to the rise of Napoleon and fifteen years of European war. When Mary and Shelley—and her sister—eloped in 1814, they found themselves in a France half-destroyed by the conflict.
There are lessons parents impart, and there are lessons children learn for themselves. The two do not always mesh. The sight of maimed veterans of the war with Napoleon begging in London streets, the spectacle of a ruined and starving France, might have been more influential than any number of lectures. Perhaps in Frankenstein Mary Shelley was saying: beware of what you loose into the world, whether it is an idea or a monster. Perhaps she was quietly turning herself, page by page as she wrote, from a liberal into a conservative.
Apart from that, Mary had been living with Shelley for two years when she began to write. During those years she had seen her first child die after living for only ten days. Scandal, debt and alienation from her family had become part of her life. Marriage seemed at that time to be out of the question. Shelley's principles were against exclusivity in sexual relations. He believed in free love. She must have wondered sometimes what would happen to her and her small son if Shelley left or died. And she must have known, just as she started to write, that her stepsister, Claire, was probably carrying Byron's child. Byron and Shelley, men with status and money behind them, whatever their present difficulties, spoke in large terms and Mary, as an intellectual, could understand them. But there must have been times when as a woman, a mother, without family backing, she feared the future.
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