Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Mary Shelley and the Birth of Frankenstein
I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818, Vol. I, Chapter III
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) writes at a white-hot heat when she leads her readers breathlessly through the scene of Victor Frankenstein's creation of a monster. Like Victor, she may have been trembling with her eyeballs starting from their sockets as she committed to page — and thus to life — a being whose very existence was blasphemous. Unlike Victor, she was not a privileged male student but a young woman, unmarried but living with her married lover, a renegade against decency in the eyes of many of her contemporaries.
The story of Frankenstein's conception — and it is appropriate to think of it as being conceived and birthed, as the novel itself is an obsessive rumination on what it means to create and sustain life — is almost as legendary and well-known as the story contained within the novel itself. But it is worth retelling, and its cast of characters is every bit as fascinating as the gods and monsters of Gothic fiction.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), the privileged golden child of a Member of Parliament, attended Eton (where he was known as "mad Shelley" for his science experiments and unconventional attitudes) and University College Oxford. He published his first novel (a Gothic tale called Zastrozzi) at age eighteen and followed it with the incendiary pamphlet "The Necessity of Atheism" (1811), for which he was expelled from Oxford. At age nineteen, he married his sister's friend Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a London coffeehouse proprietor. Shortly after, he struck up a correspondence with Mary's father, William Godwin, whose work on political philosophy he admired. It was not until he wrote Godwin for a second time that the older man responded. Perhaps it was Percy's description of himself a "the son of a man of fortune in Sussex" and "heir by entail to an estate of 6,000 £ per an" (Klinger xxix) that piqued Godwin's interest. He not only became a mentor and surrogate father by correspondence to Percy but also began accepting loans from the young man — who could little afford to give them, despite his lofty promises.
Percy and Mary met for the first time in November of 1812 but neither wrote about the meeting. Their friendship began in earnest in 1814; Mary was now sixteen, and Percy was dodging bailiffs, creditors, and financial obligations, and would dine with the Godwins to avoid being seen in public. Shelley was disappointed by the lack of intellectual rigor in his wife Harriet, and in the Godwin household, he found everything he could want in a companion. Godwin described his daughter as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty" (Klinger xxxvii).
Despite the fact that Percy was married and his wife pregnant (though he claimed it was by another man), Mary and Percy consummated their passion, choosing to follow the principles of free love espoused by Mary's parents and the radical Romantic ideals of Shelley, and on July 28, 1814, they left England to tour Europe. The rather miserable journey culminated with Mary giving birth to Percy's child, a girl who survived only two weeks. On March 19, 1815, Mary recorded in her journal, "Dreamt that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. Awake and find no baby." The dream is often cited as one of the inspirations for Frankenstein, and indeed the story is haunted by the ghosts of dead infants. In January of 1824, Mary gave birth to a son, William — the same name as Victor Frankenstein's beloved younger brother who is murdered by the monster. In one of the great ironies of literary history, Mary Shelley's young William and her daughter Clara (born in 1817) died shortly after the publication of her first novel, a cruel substitution (the babies' lives for the life of the book and its monster) that mirrors in reality the somewhat surreal logic of Mary's story. Of course infant mortality was high in the early nineteenth century, but Mary's life in particular was strewn by the tragedy of tiny lives vanquished before they began, a situation made more terrible by Mary's constant awareness that her own birth had ended the life of her famous and brilliant mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein is pervaded by a sense of the cost of creation. And although latter-day critics and film adaptations have made much of the dangers of creating life in the lab, Mary herself was all too aware of the dangers of creating life in the normal way — and that one life can too often cost another. In the novel, one character after another perishes until in the end, it is really only the monster — life created by Mary's own imaginative powers rather than by her body — who survives, "borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance," persisting just out of reach on the edges of imagination so long as people continue to read the book.
Mary and Percy were joined on their journey — and indeed kept company throughout much of their marriage — by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont (1798–1879). Claire was the illegitimate daughter of Mary's stepmother Mary-Jane and a man who Mary-Jane called "Charles Clairmont" (though in 2010, his identity was revealed by historical research to be John Lethbridge). Claire is perhaps the underdog of the great narrative of Frankenstein's birth. Although after two hundred years, critics are (by and large) finally able to acknowledge that Mary was a genius, they have not been so kind to Claire. Many biographical sources treat Claire as a gadfly — an annoying parasite who flitted around her betters as they thought great thoughts and wrote great works. To be fair, there is evidence that she was a bit of a beautiful pest, with a tendency to be overly dramatic and demanding of attention. In 1836, Mary looked back on her journeys with Claire and wrote, "Now, I would not go to Paradise with her for a companion — she poisoned my life when young. ... But years ago my idea of Heaven was a world without Claire — of course these feelings are altered — but she has still the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being" (Mellor 34). In an 1817 letter, Byron described her as "that odd-headed girl" who "[came] prancing to [me] at all hours of the night" (Klinger xlv).
But Claire is a figure who should not be dismissed from the Frankenstein narrative. She was intelligent and well-read (reading Rousseau, Shakespeare, and Mary Wollstonecraft while she sailed with Mary and Percy throughout Europe) and could clearly hold her own with a group of geniuses. She outlived all of the other participants in the story, long enough to condemn the practices of the Romantic circle who passed her around with little care for her own feelings. After a hedonistic youth, she turned to Catholicism. Fragments of her unpublished memoirs, now held in the New York Public Library, describe her thoughts: "Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England ... become monsters" (Hay 308). One of the poets of whom she speaks in Percy Shelley, who may have been her lover and to whom she may have borne a child given up for adoption, though evidence of the extent of their physical relationship is lost in rumors, gossip, and the silences of the historical record. Certainly, she, Mary, and Percy all saw themselves — sometimes quite happily — as a triangle, and despite Mary's later unkind words about Claire, they were extremely close, to the point that they may well have shared Percy's physical affections. Like many teenage girls, Mary and Claire seemed to adore and loathe one another in equal measure — and beneath all that love and hate was a fearsome competitiveness that began when Claire was unable to attract any attention or affection from Mary's father and Mary feared that her place of privilege would be supplanted. Particularly important to the conception of Frankenstein is the fact that Mary would often frighten and delight Claire with horror stories. Mary's journal records nights in which she would make monstrous faces and tell blood-soaked tales. In a sense, Claire was Mary's first audience for her horror stories, and their shared delight in fright is a prelude to a long history of women's readership of the Gothic, horror, science fiction, and crime — all genres in which women are too often overlooked as both creators and consumers. It is also worth noting that Claire might have written a ghost story as well. In his letters, Percy describes offering a novel written by Claire to several publishers — who declined it — at the same time he was shopping Frankenstein. This never-published novel is unknown and could possibly have been something produced from the ghost story competition.
The other "monster" of whom Claire speaks — and, like Percy, one of the inspirations for (or perhaps more aptly, fathers to) Frankenstein — is George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), who at the time Frankenstein was conceived, was perhaps the most infamous man in Europe. Even today, his life is so mythically resonant that his name has become an adjective: Byronic, defined as "alluringly dark, mysterious, or moody." All of the streams of his biography join to create a thundering river of the Romantic figure — sympathetic and alluring but also cruel and perhaps dancing ever so dangerously on the border of sanity. His parentage is the stuff of a shilling shocker; he was the son of the rapacious and brutal Captain John "Mad Jack" Byron and his second wife, the aristocratic Catherine Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His school days were littered with lovers both male and female, and he allegedly kept a tame bear in his room at Trinity College, Cambridge.
From 1809 to 1811, Byron escaped debts, a nagging mother, and the corpses of scandalous romantic liaisons by touring the Mediterranean, and his sexual escapades have become the stuff of rumor and legend, including an intimate relationship with the fourteen-year-old Athenian boy Nicolo Giraud and an attempt to purchase the sexual favors of a twelve-year-old girl, who Byron immortalized in The Maid of Athens. He achieved almost overnight fame with the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812. His literary celebrity grew with the publication of his "Oriental Tales," such as The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (both published in 1813). Most infamously, he was rumored to have had a passionate affair with his half sister Augusta Leigh, whose daughter Medora was suspected to have been fathered by Byron. Byron's overnight fame was soon transmuted into infamy.
Byron's fluid, open, and intense sexuality are significant in that all of our latter-day assumptions about nineteenth-century "lady novelists" (most of which were formed by the Victorian era) must be thrown out the window when we discuss Mary Shelley and her novels. One of the reasons why the Frankenstein myth has so persistently appealed to outsiders and sexual renegades is that Mary was one herself, and the circle of friends who inspired Frankenstein were certainly considered sexual deviants in their own age if not — depending on who you ask — our own. The playful decadent excesses of the "sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania" in the 1975 musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show are in some respects natural outgrowths of the Byronic circle in which Mary Shelley moved and thrived. The intense connection between Mary and Byron is often overlooked in discussions of the group dynamic. Mary seems to have been much less under the magnetic sway of Byron than was her husband, and Byron treated her as a friend and intellectual equal. They shared, more than the others in the group, a view of human selfishness that often swerved into pessimism and a view of the uncaring cosmos that tread dangerously near nihilism. Byron sought Mary out as a reader and critic of his own work and admired her as a formidable talent.
There is one more point about Byron worth noting in regard to Frankenstein: he had a club foot — or some other similar deformity — that caused him to have a limp and chronic pain in his right foot. Although this may seem like a relatively minor problem today, it dominated Byron's psyche and caused him untold psychological agony. His mental view of himself as a Napoleonic genius was marred by this imperfection. He tried to hide it with special shoes, but he also nicknamed himself "le diable boiteux" (the limping devil) — simultaneously disavowing and embracing this monstrosity (and it should be noted that birth defects at this time were most certainly considered to be monstrous — or even a reflection of sin — in the popular culture of the day). Byron's foot and his response to it may have influenced Mary's creation of the monster. Most film versions of Frankenstein, following the precedent set by the direction of James Whale in 1931, depict the monster's ugliness as relative — in the eyes of the beholder. But Mary Shelley's novel proposes that ugliness is immutable and eternal. Everyone who the creature encounters — even innocent little William — turns in disgust and horror from his deformity. The gentle cottagers whom the monster so admires also run shrieking from him when they finally see his face.
In 1816, Byron fled England, never to return. His wife, Annabella Milbanke, considered him insane and separated from him, taking their daughter Ada. Ada (later the Countess of Lovelace) became a mathematician, a field of study encouraged by her mother to stave off the insanity of her father that might be lurking in her bloodline. She became a pioneer of computer technology with her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine and was the author of the first computer program. Byron's chosen point of exile, the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, Switzerland, was where the powerful personalities that inspired Frankenstein converged in the summer of 1816.
The impetus for the convergence of forces was, to use modern parlance, a hookup between Claire Clairmont and Lord Byron. Claire had introduced herself to Byron in London in March of 1816; she was a fangirl of the literary celebrity and concocted a pretense of seeking advice about an acting career. Mary met him as well and was impressed by his gentleness. He managed to impregnate Claire and then was done with her. But she was not done with him. Were it not for Claire's determination to reunite with her lover, there probably would be no Frankenstein.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Frankenstein 200"
by .
Copyright © 2018 The Trustees of Indiana University.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
