Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  In later years, Mary said that it took her a long time to come up with an idea, and that when the idea did arrive, it came in the form of a nightmare:

  I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.

  This dream synopsis does indeed encapsulate the plot of what would soon become Mary’s most famous work, her novel Frankenstein. These are her own words, and so on the face of it there seems little reason to question her account of her story’s genesis—except that both Shelley and Polidori had a different version of what happened and both men were writing closer to the time. In the preface to the first edition, Shelley makes no mention of Mary’s struggling to come up with an idea. Nor does he mention her dream. All he says is that the group of friends “agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.” Polidori’s diary supports Shelley’s account. Even though he was often unreliable, with Mary he was usually spot-on, and in his journal, he records that everyone except himself got right down to work. He makes no mention of any difficulties on Mary’s part, casting doubt on her version, since if she were having trouble, it seems likely he would have noticed, given his obsessive surveillance of her daily activities. Besides, it would have been a point of connection between them, one he would have been delighted to share.

  Accordingly, Mary’s story about the composition of Frankenstein is probably just that, a story, a fiction tacked onto her larger fiction, another layer in a many-layered book. She made this claim in 1831, in the preface to a new edition of the novel. More than fifteen years had passed since Geneva and she faced enormous financial and social pressures. The knowledge that a woman had written Frankenstein was so shocking in many circles that it hurt the book’s sales and Mary herself was ostracized, albeit in part because of her scandalous romantic history. In the early nineteenth century, women artists were by definition monstrous. Despite the best efforts of Wollstonecraft and her fellow radicals, society still believed that women were supposed to create babies, not art. If Mary could improve her sales and her reputation by being self-effacing, then it made sense to distance herself from the novel’s inception and say that she had not consciously created the story, that she was neither a genius nor particularly talented:

  When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.

  However, buried within this self-deprecation was another, prouder claim. Like Coleridge, who had given a vivid account of the hallucination that led to Kubla Khan, his famous fragment of a poem published in the fall of 1816, Mary was asserting her qualifications as a true artist. A dream vision could only reinforce one’s Romantic credentials. Dreams were unbidden; you could not force them into existence. But dreams were not particularly democratic, either. They did not come to just anyone, at least not the kind of extraordinary dream Mary was describing. Artists. Poets. These were the true prophets, the ones with the most profound vision. Thus at the same time that she was downplaying her initiative, trying as a female writer to have her work accepted, she was also asserting her identity as an artist. No self-respecting Romantic writer (with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe) would ever have admitted (as Poe did with The Raven) that his work was the result of a careful intellectual process, a cold and pedestrian endeavor of plotting and outlining. Sudden bursts of inspiration, visitations from spirits in the night—these were the true sources of art to Mary and her friends.

  With everyone hard at work, Claire grew irritable. She wasn’t trying to write a story. She was hurt that Byron continued to avoid her and that when he did pay her attention, it was usually destructive. He teased and ridiculed her. This treatment was painful in and of itself, but it was made even more so by the fact that he treated Mary so differently. He listened admiringly when she spoke and respected her intelligence and her scholarship. He had not stopped sleeping with Claire, because, as he later told a friend, she threw herself at him and he was not about to say no to her advances, even though he had no real affection for her.

  This was typical Byron: he rarely thought about Claire or her feelings, being more drawn to Shelley than to anyone else, including Mary. His earliest love affairs had been with his male schoolmates (“Thyrza,” the subject of the poem Mary had inscribed in her copy of Queen Mab, was actually a boy), and throughout the course of his life he had many male lovers. One of his motivations for leaving England was to have homosexual affairs without facing the dangers of prosecution; such relationships were still illegal in England, punishable by death. Shelley’s poetic sensibility, fits of hysteria, and brilliant ideas intrigued him; he respected his erudition and commitment to poetry; and he was entertained by the younger poet’s spouting of atheistic principles.

  For Shelley, the relationship was more complicated. The more time he spent with Byron, the less he seemed able to write. It was Mary who had the simplest relationship with the older poet: they shared a pessimistic streak, both regarding human beings as inherently selfish. His lordship had discovered he trusted Mary’s literary judgment and liked to read his work to her, often asking for suggestions. Sometimes, Mary complied, honored to be asked, but she had her own work and a baby to look after, not to mention the constant task of fending off Polidori, who continued to pursue her.

  On the night of the eighteenth, the group reconvened at the Villa Diodati. It was still stormy and the drawing room was even darker than usual. Toward midnight, they “really began to talk ghostly”—of spirits, ghouls, and hauntings. They wondered aloud whether the dead could come back to life, and why Mary’s dead baby continued to appear in her dreams.

  Byron recited his favorite poem of Coleridge’s, Christabel, which was a favorite of Mary’s, too. In Christabel, an innocent young maiden—the Christabel of the title—meets a beautiful lady in the forest. She takes this mysterious lady home, watches her undress, and is entranced with her beauty. But just as it seems that a sexual encounter might ensue, she discovers the woman is horribly disfigured and is actually a witch.

  The room was silent as Byron spoke, but when he came to the climactic stanza:

  Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,

  And slowly rolled her eyes around;

  Then drawing in her breath aloud

  Like one that shuddered, she unbound

  The cincture from beneath her breast;

  Her silken robe, and inner vest

  Dropt to her feet, and in full view,

  Behold! Her bosom and half her side—

  Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue—

  Shelley terrified everyone by suddenly “shrieking and putting his hands to his head.” Polidori described the scene that ensued with a doctor’s eye for detail:

  [Shelley] ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S, & suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind, horrified him.

  Eyes instead of nipples. Breasts that could see. This strange image did not come from Coleridge’s poem—at least not directly.

  On the one hand, it seems clear that this was an almost entirely unconscious event as Shelley was overwhelmed, rendered helpless by the power of his vision. Yet it is also possible to trace the origin of Shelley’s vision to a story that Mary had once told him: Coleridge’s initial plan was to place eyes on the lady’s breasts, but at the last moment he had retreated, deciding that this was too horrific an image. Thus Shelley’s grotesque vision of Mary actually came from Mary, though he was probably unaware of this.

  Polidori, who was unaware of Mary’s role in Shelley’s nightmare vision, was so struck by the poet’s “fit of fantasy,” as Byro
n called it, that he used a version of it for his own story, The Vampyre, which he published in 1819. This immensely popular work would inspire many others, most famously Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The rest of the party, however, was less inspired than shaken. No one thought that Shelley’s terror was insignificant because it had stemmed from his imagination. To believe so would have been a slur against the powers of the mind; nothing could be more real or more terrible than what the self had created. Shelley had seen what he had seen. The group had seen him see it.

  Four days after his Christabel vision, the weather broke, and Shelley urged Byron to accompany him on an adventure to see more of Rousseau’s old haunts. Despite Rousseau’s shortsighted view of women and their education, both men still felt that the dead philosopher was one of the great spokesmen for freedom. With Shelley away, Mary began to write her story in earnest, “so possessed” by her mad creator, Victor Frankenstein, that she felt “a thrill of fear.” The first sentence she wrote—“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man compleated [sic]”—seemed to unleash all that would come next, as though the story were waiting to spill onto the page. Outside the shuttered windows she could hear the wind driving across the lake while she imagined a pale young scholar manufacturing a man out of body parts stolen from graveyards and butcher shops, drawing on her memories of the slaughterhouses and meat markets near Skinner Street to build her story, as well as the legend of Konrad Dippel from their visit to Castle Frankenstein.

  After eight days of touring the lake, Shelley came back from his trip and told Mary that he and Byron had barely survived a sudden squall that had blown down from the mountains. They had taken down the sails of their little boat and gripped the sides, waiting to capsize. Fortunately, the wind had eventually subsided and they continued on their way without mishap. Shelley could not swim and his fear was that Byron, a superb swimmer, would risk his life trying to save him, which would have been a true embarrassment. Stories like this make one wonder why the sailing-obsessed Shelley never learned to swim and why his friends did not insist he learn. A summer on the shores of Lake Geneva would appear to have been a perfect opportunity.

  Having almost lost the man she loved, Mary found the themes of Frankenstein even more compelling. When she showed Shelley the pages she had written, he urged her to develop them into a longer story. Encouraged, Mary allowed herself to imagine Frankenstein more fully, tapping into her own experiences as a child whose mother had died after giving birth, whose father had rejected her, and whose society had condemned her for living with the man she loved. She explored her interior life—her rage, her hurt, her pride—and at length added the brilliant plot twist, the surprise that would set her story apart from others and would make her one of the most famous authors in English literary history: instead of regarding his handiwork with pride, she had her young inventor be repelled by his creation, abandoning his “compleated man” in horror. If Shelley or Byron had written this story, it seems unlikely that either would have—or could have—imagined such a scenario. In fact, in the works they began that summer, Byron’s Manfred and Shelley’s Mont Blanc and Prometheus Unbound, both poets invented creator protagonists whose abilities made them seem heroic. But Mary was ambivalent about the prospect of men creating life. She had given birth to a toddler she loved, but she had also lost a baby, and lost her own mother as a result of childbirth. If men could control life (and death), then she would not have suffered these tragedies. On the other hand, she wondered what would happen to the special role of women if it was possible to create life via artificial methods. She was also concerned about what would happen to God, or the idea of God, the mysterious, even mystical power behind Nature. Haunted by these worries, Mary stopped writing from the point of view of the creator and switched her vantage point to that of the created, sending Dr. Frankenstein’s creature in search of his father. But when the creature finds Frankenstein, instead of a happy reunion, the young scientist pushes him away, just as Godwin had pushed Mary away. Enraged and hurt, the creature murders all the people Frankenstein loves, from his best friend to his bride. Mary’s story had evolved from a tale of the supernatural to a complicated psychological study with multiple perspectives. She had moved from exploring the creative power of humankind—a favorite theme of Shelley and Byron—to plumbing the depths of human nature.

  The original beginning of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s hand. “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man compleated.” (illustration ill.20)

  Everyone in the small group sensed that Mary had struck gold. In the grip of imaginative composition, she devoted herself to her manuscript as much as she was able. Far from being intimidated by her accomplished male companions, she took heart from the idea that in becoming an author she was living up to her literary heritage. Shelley had given up entirely on the ghost story idea and returned to his own work. Byron, too, had turned to other projects. But Mary’s story had influenced them more than they realized or would ever acknowledge. The poems both men worked on that summer also explore the power of human invention for good or evil, freedom versus enslavement, and the majesty of Nature. This shared focus was a tribute to the importance of their literary friendship. For the rest of their lives, all three would turn to each other for inspiration and confirmation, competition and revelation.

  THE TRIP AROUND THE lake had not eased Shelley’s restlessness, and within a few weeks of his return, he made plans for a journey with Mary and Claire to the then-remote Alpine village of Chamonix, with its famous glacier, the Mer de Glace, at the foot of Mont Blanc. Mary, knowing it would be unwise to bring her child on this expedition and that Shelley would not be eager to have William as a traveling companion, regretfully kissed her “pretty babe” goodbye, leaving him with Elise. On July 21, they traveled up into the high country, shivering in their cloaks and marveling at the rivers of ice and fields of snow. The journey was dangerous, with floods and avalanches, but the trio made it safely across the Alps. Although she longed for her little boy, Mary was stimulated by the strangeness of the setting.

  In general, the other English visitors to Chamonix were a pious crew, eager to bear witness to God’s glory as evidenced by the glacier and Mont Blanc. Fifty years later, the poet Algernon Swinburne would observe how the entries in the hotel register were “fervid with ghostly grease and rancid religion.” Annoyed at the many Christian testimonials in the hotel’s guest book, Shelley wrote in Greek that he was a “Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist.” Under “Destination,” he wrote, “L’enfer.” He relished shocking his fellow tourists and would make similar declarations in hotel registers throughout the Alps.

  These entries quickly became notorious. The Greek was no barrier for other British travelers of the day, who shared Shelley’s classical education and could easily decipher his firmly printed letters. Certainly he could not have come up with more incendiary terms. His declaration of atheism was perhaps the worst offense, but a “democrat” was synonymous with a revolutionary, while a “philanthropist” (a lover of men) seemed like a reference to Shelley’s irregular love affairs—proof at last to his enemies that Shelley was truly immoral. Even Byron was shocked at his young friend’s indiscretion, and when he visited the region a few months later, he crossed out all such entries he could find. Fortunately for history, if not for Shelley’s reputation among his contemporaries, Byron missed the Chamonix register, and so these three words would haunt the poet for the rest of his life.

  The travelers hiked the glacier and were astonished at the immensity of the mountain that shadowed their hotel. One day it rained so hard they were forced to stay inside, and Mary pored over her notebook, deciding that one of the climactic scenes between Dr. Frankenstein and his creature would take place on the Mer de Glace. “[The view of the glacier] filled me with a sublime ecstasy,” Frankenstein says, his sentence sounding remarkably as if it was lifted straight from his creator’s journal.

  When they returned to Geneva on July 27, Mary worked o
n extending her story even further: she had Frankenstein swear revenge and chase the creature, the hunted becoming the hunter, the hunter becoming the quarry. She also played with baby William, walked with Polidori, studied Greek with Shelley, and occasionally commented on early drafts of Byron’s new poems. The world seemed to be opening up for her, just as she had always hoped it would.

  For Claire, the opposite was true; she had discovered she was pregnant by Byron, and though at first she hoped this would bind the reluctant poet to her, Byron—who was heartily sick of Claire—saw no reason to step forward with either financial or emotional assistance. She had enjoyed the privilege of having sex with him. What else did she want? Shelley tried to persuade Byron to help Claire, but he was recalcitrant, unsure the child was his. He had heard the rumor that Shelley had also slept with Claire, and, rebel though he was, Byron regarded Shelley’s relationship with both sisters—no matter how ambiguous—as unorthodox and foolish.

  Realizing that Claire’s situation was desperate, Shelley settled an allowance on her and the unborn child, an act that Byron regarded as further evidence of the baby’s true paternity. Things might have stalled here, but Shelley persisted, and at length he managed to convince Byron to acknowledge the baby as his. Ironically, this was a concession that made the famous poet even less supportive of Claire; although he had never evinced any interest in the other illegitimate children he must have fathered over the years, Shelley’s interference made Byron suddenly proprietary. He did not want his progeny raised by bohemians, he declared, and announced his intention of placing the child in the aristocratic care of his half sister—and putative lover—Augusta. Claire was appalled at this proposal (a reaction that made sense, especially if she had in fact been forced to give up her first child or had lost it). She protested so vigorously that Shelley persuaded Byron to let her care for the infant herself, posing as the baby’s aunt to protect herself (and Byron) from further scandal. Byron agreed, with the caveat that he could send for the child whenever he wanted.