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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Sexual mores were also undergoing a revolution. By 1793, so many traditions had been thrown out the window that it seemed nothing was now taboo. Helen Maria, for example, lived with a married Englishman, John Hurford Stone, and yet visitors still crowded into her drawing room for her Sunday evening parties. Madame de Staël, another important hostess, was pregnant with her lover’s child. Joseph Johnson’s good friend Thomas Christie, cofounder of the Analytical Review (the journal that still employed Mary as a staff writer), had moved to Paris and was now embroiled in ongoing conflicts between his wife, Rebecca, and an aggrieved mistress who had borne his child. Most Parisians, having watched their world turn upside down, found it hard to take marital vows seriously. Of course, adultery had been common enough before the Revolution, but affairs had generally been conducted with discretion. Now the old morality was seen as evidence of the corruption of the old regime; people rushed in and out of love affairs, explaining their behavior as an expression of the new freedom. Political and sexual liberty appeared to travel hand in hand, just as Mary had always hoped they would. This was what she had envisioned in her Rights of Woman: if the will of the people could overcome the tyranny of kings, the bonds of unequal marriages could be broken. Men could learn to view women as worthy partners. And women could find their own moral strength and philosophical capacities. Most of all, people would be free to follow their hearts.

  Mary’s embrace of revolutionary morals squared with her analysis of marriage in Rights of Woman. When she had criticized the relationship between men and women, Mary had not intended to argue against sex, nor had she intended to argue against love. Rather, she had meant to expose the dangers for women in a society in which the balance of power was skewed in favor of husbands, fathers, and brothers, in which men had the legal sanction and economic power to victimize women. There could only be true love, she believed, if the partners were equal, and so the Revolution gave her new hope, not only for the relations between men and women in general, but for herself. Perhaps in this new world she could have a meaningful relationship with a man. Perhaps she would no longer have to content herself with the sort of “spiritual” union she had attempted to achieve with Fuseli.

  Certainly, men seemed to find Mary far more attractive in Paris than they had in London. They flocked to her, flattering her and inviting her to theatrical events, parties, and private dinners in their lodgings. One of her suitors, Count Gustav von Schlabrendorf, a wealthy Silesian, remembered Mary’s “charming grace. Her face, so full of expression, presented a style of beauty beyond that of merely regular features. There was fascination in her look, her voice, and her movement.” He called her simply “the noblest purest and most intelligent woman I have ever met.” These flirtations helped her set aside thoughts of Fuseli, but they also demonstrated how far she had traveled from England, where her unconventional manners and attitudes had frightened most men away. Here, it was precisely her originality that attracted everyone, men and women alike, even though she was far from being the most radical woman in Paris.

  The notorious Olympe de Gouges, for example, had just published her Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen), which made far more outrageous claims than Mary’s Rights of Woman. “Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights,” de Gouges proclaimed.

  The forward thrust of the Revolution had allowed the thirty-seven-year-old de Gouges to dream of an equity between the sexes that had seemed impossible to Mary only a few years earlier. De Gouges called on “mothers, daughters, and sisters” to create their own national assembly; promoted the education of girls, divorce rights for women, and homes for unwed mothers; and proposed reforms that included “legal sexual equality, admission for women to all occupations, and the suppression of the dowry system through a state-provided alternative.” Having been forced to marry a man she did not love when she was only seventeen, de Gouges declared, “the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of woman are perpetual male tyranny.” On a darker note, she added that if “a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform.”

  Mary never met de Gouges, but was well aware of her calls for reform, since, in the spring of 1793, many of de Gouges’s radical ideas seemed on the verge of being adopted, at least in Paris. The marquis de Condorcet, a moderate leader, even recruited Mary to help the National Convention devise a plan for the education of women.

  Even more notorious was the thirty-year-old Théroigne de Méricourt, whom Mary had met while having dinner with Thomas Paine at his elegant hotel at 63 Faubourg Saint-Denis. Theatrical and impulsive, de Méricourt had swaggered in with dueling pistols attached to her belt and a sword at her waist. Famous for her outlandish behavior, she did not want to discuss the rights of women, she wanted to act on them, preferably with her sword. A courtesan and opera singer before the Revolution, de Méricourt had discarded the trappings of the coquette—the frilly low-cut dresses and lacy bonnets—and wore instead a severe white riding habit and a round-brimmed hat, the closest she could come to dressing like a man without wearing trousers. She refused to bathe, regarding personal hygiene as a reminder of the days when she had to please men in order to survive. Every day she attended the meetings of the National Convention, eager to “play the role of a man,” she said, “because I had always been extremely humiliated by the servitude and prejudices under which the pride of men holds my oppressed sex.” More extreme than either Mary or Olympe, Théroigne was thrilled with the death of the king, urging women to revolt against the tyranny of all men. “Let us raise ourselves to the height of our destinies,” she declared; “let us break our chains!”

  In April, Mary attended a party at the Christies’ house. She was grateful to Thomas Christie for his support of her work at the Analytical Review and knew that Johnson thought highly of him. She did not condemn him for his adultery, but she did feel sorry for his wife, Rebecca. The two women had become close friends. Rebecca, a gentle and empathetic listener, valued Mary’s intelligence and warmth. On this particular evening, Mary was soon at the center of the throng, laughing, interrupting, and arguing fervently about the future of the Revolution with the flashes of insight and wit that everyone always remarked upon, entirely unaware of a handsome young American named Gilbert Imlay eyeing her from across the room.

  With her chestnut hair falling out of its pins, her flush of energy, and her voluptuous figure, Mary seemed to Imlay to be eminently desirable. It would be his mission, he decided, to get her to notice him. She was different from any female he had ever met, and that was no small feat, since he had known many. Too many, he sometimes thought. Women seemed to thrive on suffocating him, smothering him. But this independent woman appeared to value her freedom as much as he valued his, which meant that a liaison with her would be an unmitigated delight with no guilt involved. For the time being, though, he contented himself with watching her in action: beautiful, intelligent, and full of life.

  Mary Wollstonecraft, in an etching and aquatint after physionotrace, early nineteenth century. (illustration ill.21)

  CHAPTER 17

  MARY SHELLEY: RETRIBUTION

  [ 1816–1817 ]

  found a house for himself, Mary, and Claire near the center of Bath, at 5 Abbey Churchyard. From the front window, Mary could see bonneted ladies tripping up and down the street, visiting shops, paying calls on neighbors—and pointedly ignoring their household. Claire was too heartbroken to care; she sat at their writing desk scrawling letter after letter to Byron, pleading with him to return, writing him, “I shall love you to the end of my life & nobody else.”

  It was a rainy autumn, but the gloomy weather did not deter Shelley and Mary from going for long walks in the drizzle. They also enjoyed cozy afternoons, which Shelley immortalized in a letter to Byron: “Mary is reading over the fire; our cat and kitten are sleeping under the sofa; and little Willy is just gone to sleep.” But when
Shelley was in London battling his father over his inheritance, Mary felt bereft. To distract herself, she attended lectures at Bath’s Literary and Philosophical Society Rooms, took drawing lessons, studied Greek verbs, and worked on finishing Frankenstein.

  She had decided to make the narrative longer by adding a new character, Robert Walton, an arctic explorer, who is searching for the North Pole. Walton befriends Dr. Frankenstein and recounts Frankenstein’s story in a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville, providing the reader with another version of the young scientist’s tale. Like Frankenstein, Walton is obsessed with proving his own genius, but Frankenstein cautions the young explorer: “Seek happiness in tranquillity, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.” His sister also warns Walton against giving in to his ambition, and at last Walton chooses to listen, saving his own life and that of his men by turning back from his hunt for the North Pole.

  Walton’s decision offers a hopeful alternative to the disastrous choices made by Frankenstein and the creature. Although Walton sees himself as a failure for surrendering his quest, he is actually depicted as a hero by Mary for freeing his sailors and listening to his sister. Unlike Frankenstein, Walton proves himself able to protect those who are close to him. In part this is because Walton has learned from Frankenstein’s story—but his change of heart also stems from his relationship with Margaret, who has cautioned him against his voyage from the beginning. Interestingly, despite the importance of her viewpoint, Margaret appears in the story only indirectly, through the letters of her brother—a structural echo of the role most women were forced to play in the lives of men, one step removed, distanced from the action. But invisible though Margaret is, her cautionary words are crucial for creating a counterpoint to the unchecked ambition of the male characters. And Walton’s letters to Margaret add an invaluable commentary on the central drama: what matters most, Mary implies through Margaret, is not the quest, not the search for knowledge or justice, but the relationships we have with those we love. The importance of Margaret’s character is underscored by the fact that Mary gave Margaret the initials she would have if she were married to Shelley: MWS.

  Mary’s three-pronged narrative, her Russian doll technique of nesting one story inside another, provides the reader with three different versions of the same set of events. This was a daring departure from the didactic novelists of the preceding generation (such as Samuel Richardson and her own father) and it gave Mary the opportunity to create a complex narrative that asked far more of her readers than if she had written a simple parable against the dangers of invention. Careful not to weight the story in favor of either the creator or the created, Mary conjured a sense of moral suspension in which the conventional questions—Who’s the hero? Who’s the villain? Who’s right? Who’s wrong?—no longer applied. The creature and Walton undermine Frankenstein’s version of events, allowing us to see what he never acknowledges: that he was at fault because he did not provide his creation with love or an education. Monsters, says Mary, are of our own making.

  Mary dedicated Frankenstein to her father in yet another effort to win back his affection. But the book was also an expression of longing for her mother, a longing that had been intensified by Godwin’s harsh treatment. Mary was sure that if Wollstonecraft had lived, she would never have severed their relationship as Godwin had, and as Frankenstein had with his creature. Now that she was a mother herself, she could not imagine cutting herself off from a child.

  Fathers, though, seemed able to reject their children without even a backward glance. Or so it seemed to Mary in the fall of 1816 as day after day, Godwin maintained his flinty silence. She poured her sorrow and outrage into her novel by spelling out the consequences of Frankenstein’s rejection of his son. Like Mary, the creature has only a father, and his father fails him, leading the creature to seek murderous revenge. In a world without mothers, she suggests, havoc reigns and evil triumphs.

  For Mary, there was only so much solace to be had from writing a book and attending public lectures. She continued to miss Shelley. Claire’s situation was a terrible reminder of the vulnerable position all unmarried mothers faced. Always, she worried that Shelley would abandon her and never return. The only contact she had with Skinner Street was through Fanny. Never a particularly cheerful correspondent, Fanny had been penning increasingly melancholy letters. On September 26, she wrote to tell them the Wollstonecraft aunts, Everina and Eliza, had rejected her request to join them in Ireland. These prim ladies thought Fanny’s connection to Mary and Shelley would damage their reputation. A week later, Fanny wrote again, delivering an angry message from Godwin: Mary should push Shelley to help him financially. How could Godwin write books if he had to keep doing menial jobs to earn money?

  Unfortunately, Mary’s responses to Fanny have been lost, but that she was exasperated by her sister and Godwin’s requests is clear from her journal. On October 4, she noted that she had received a “stupid letter from F.” But poor Fanny was through with belonging nowhere, of being wanted by no one. Each household castigated her for her relationship with the other; each used her as a weapon and a go-between. The Godwins, particularly “Mamma,” wanted Fanny to deliver hurtful messages to Mary, and Mary retorted in kind. In a last desperate appeal, Fanny seems to have tried to switch camps. On one of his trips to London, Shelley saw Fanny, and it appears she asked if she might come live with them in Bath. But if that was the case, Shelley refused. He did not want the Godwins to find out about Claire’s pregnancy, and neither Mary nor Claire trusted Fanny to keep the secret. A few months later he would write a poignant poem of regret:

  Her voice did quiver as we parted,

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From which it came, and I departed

  Heeding not the word then spoken.

  On October 8, Fanny slipped out of the Skinner Street house in her Sunday best and headed out of London. She mailed two farewells from Bristol, a “very alarming” letter to Mary that has since been lost or destroyed, and one to Godwin in which she told her stepfather that she wanted to “depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.” Godwin, fearing the worst, traveled to Bristol and then Bath, hunting for her. Shelley, too, immediately set off. But Fanny had covered her tracks and was long gone by the time the men came looking.

  Shelley did not give up, however. He raced to Bristol, where he discovered that Fanny had traveled to Swansea, a coastal resort in Wales. When he arrived there on October 11, he found that “the worst” had happened. The local newspaper, the Cambrian, reported that a young woman’s body had been discovered in the Mackworth Arms. She had been wearing stays with the initials MW—her mother’s.

  After interviewing the people at the inn, Shelley pieced together what had happened. Fanny had told the chambermaid not to bother her and locked herself in her room. Here she wrote a brief suicide note, took an overdose of laudanum, and lay down on the bed to die. Her intention, she said, was to end the life “of a being whose birth was unfortunate and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare.” Her use of the word “unfortunate” is a sad echo of her mother, who had referred to Fanny as “unfortunate” in a note she wrote when she, too, had been in the grips of despair.

  Hoping to disguise Fanny’s identity, Shelley destroyed her signature on the suicide note. In a tragic gesture, Godwin wrote his first message to Mary since Mary had run away: “Go not to Swansea, disturb not the silent dead; do nothing to destroy the obscurity she so much desired.” Both Shelley and Godwin were motivated by the desire to protect Fanny from societal condemnation. In 1816, suicide was considered a crime. No one wanted her to be buried at a crossroads, the usual fate of suicides, and no one wanted more scandal associated with the family. When people asked about her, the Godwins said she had died of a severe cold on her way to visit her aunts.

/>   If Fanny wanted to punish her family, she had succeeded. But instead of accepting responsibility for their mistakes, Godwin and Mary-Jane declared that Fanny had died because of her hopeless love for Shelley, and Shelley and Mary blamed Mary-Jane for her focus on her own daughter and her neglect of Fanny. Only Claire was not guilt-ridden; nor was she particularly heartbroken. She and Fanny had not been close. If the girl wanted to end her life, that was her business. Claire knew that Wollstonecraft, like many Enlightenment figures, had believed that suicide was an honorable option, and this gave Fanny’s actions legitimacy in Claire’s eyes. If you were tired of being dependent on those who regarded you as a burden, why not kill yourself?

  But Mary could not share Claire’s equanimity. She was plagued with regrets: if only she had reached out to her sister, if only she had not left her behind, if only she had paid more attention to her. She should not have been impatient with Fanny’s passivity; she should have empathized more with her position as an unwanted daughter in the Godwin household. Mary herself was vulnerable, and she knew it. Their mother had struggled with depression. Godwin had acknowledged this legacy by teaching the two girls that they should guard against their dark moods and stamp out the tendency to brood. Fanny had lost a battle that Mary continued to fight.

  In December, Mary was still shaken, writing Shelley that she was “much agitated” and felt guilty for not offering Fanny “a proper assylum [sic].” Yet she continued to work on Frankenstein. When Shelley was there, she gave him the manuscript so he could read it at night. Shelley made comments in the margins, corrected Mary’s grammar, and, with her permission, rewrote some phrases, making her sentences more formal. In Mary’s original version, Walton observes that Frankenstein’s story is “peculiarly interesting,” but at Shelley’s suggestion, Mary changed Walton’s words to “almost as imposing and interesting as truth.” They also tinkered with the original first sentence, changing “I beheld my man compleated” to “I beheld the accomplishments of my toils.” Mary allowed Shelley to insert philosophical and political observations in a few key chapters. In chapter 8 (volume 1), he tacked in a brief passage explaining how the Swiss democratic tradition was superior to the governments of France and England, and in chapter 4 (volume 1), he wrote a paragraph on the influence of Agrippa and Paracelsus on modern science.