Why hasn't Mary Shelley been given the
respect she deserves?
Shelley’s
Frankenstein has spoken to technological and cultural anxieties from
the Enlightenment to #MeToo. But its author’s achievements have too
often been dismissed or treated with skepticism
Mary Shelley’
husband Percy was above all a creature of his own cultural moment,
and nothing dates like a zeitgeist. Yet Mary’s Frankenstein comes
out of just the same heady cultural and political nexus as her
husband’s verse, and her novel has continued to fascinate us. Two
hundred years after its publication in January 1818, it still speaks
to us directly as a myth about contemporary life. It has inspired
film adaptations across genres, from the comedy caper Abbott and
Costello Meet Frankenstein to the quasi-rock opera The Rocky Horror
Picture Show and sci-fi classics such as Blade Runner. Then there’s
the apparently endless schlock and kitsch in comics and cosplay
(where fans dress up as their favorite fictional characters). It has
become the go-to journalistic shorthand for technological
interventions in human biology or medical science: Dr Frankenstein
and his creature make their way in the mainstream of modern life.
They reappear in our fantasies and nightmares more consistently than
most fictional or historical characters. Now we can expect a slew of
new Frankensteins, as everyone’s favorite scar-faced shuffling
giant and his creator are remade for a new time.
Mary has been much
researched, all too often in terms of whether she was good or bad for
Percy. But she hadn’t been placed at the center of her own story
since Miranda Seymour’s magisterial biography in 2000. I wanted to
discover a Mary Shelley for our times: to find the girl behind the
book, and to reconstruct what writing it must have been like. Her
story is every bit as archetypal as that of Mary’s two most famous
characters – her life and relationships with men couldn’t be more
relevant for our #MeToo era. Mary was just 18 when she had the idea
for Frankenstein; 19 when she finished writing the book. How could a
teenager come up with not one but two enduring archetypes: the
scientist obsessed by blue-sky research and unable to see it has
ethical and social consequences, and the near human he creates?
It’s an
astonishing achievement, and even more so when we remember that,
being a girl, Mary wasn’t educated in the same way as many of her
Romantic writing peers. Unlike Percy, she had no Eton nor Oxford, but
had lessons in the home schoolroom and a grim six months at Miss
Pettman’s Ladies’ School in Ramsgate, and learned from browsing
the books in her father’s library. Her parents were two of the most
notorious radicals of her day: her mother, who died of complications
11 days after her birth, was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman; her father was the political
philosopher and novelist William Godwin. He may have been a proponent
of anarchism but he upheld many contemporary conventions at home.
Once Mary eloped with Percy at the age of 16, for example, the former
apostle of free love cut off his daughter until she was respectably
married.
So how on earth did
Mary create her precocious masterpiece? One answer given by readers
and critics down the years is that she didn’t. On its first,
anonymous appearance reviewers surmised that this novel of ideas was
written by someone close to Godwin, but not that the author might be
his daughter. Percy, as son-in-law, was credited instead. Even in
recent years Percy’s corrections, visible in the Frankenstein
notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on
as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In
fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realized that Percy did
rather less than any line editor working in publishing today.
A second skeptical
response to Mary’s astonishing achievement disparages her more
slyly, suggesting that the archetypes of Frankenstein and his
creature aren’t in fact original. Such skeptics cite the classical
myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who creates a lover for himself, or the
half-human figure of Caliban in The Tempest. Both were part of the
early 19th-century cultural canon and, growing up in a literary
household, Mary will have been aware of them.
But her own
creations differ from both, and it’s these different qualities that
speak so vividly to us today. Pygmalion, at least in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, doesn’t set out to create a human, he simply falls
in love with one of his own creations. The goddess Aphrodite is so
touched by this that she brings the sculpture to life for him. George
Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion retells this parable about
artistic vanity. His story about Henry Higgins, the linguist who
makes a young lady out of a street flower-seller but does so for his
own benefit not hers, remains familiar today in Lerner and Loewe’s
version, the musical My Fair Lady.
A statue also turns
into a woman in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, when the figure
of King Leontes’ much-mourned wife comes to life. Every
16th-century grammar school boy got a smattering of classical
education; the young Shakespeare is likely to have encountered the
Pygmalion myth in his Stratford-upon-Avon classroom. Thus The Tempest
echoes another classical myth in which the Minotaur, like fellow
island-dweller Caliban, is the hideous offspring of a human mother
and a supernatural father and lords it over his island until subdued
by an arriving hero.
Clearly, neither is
a precursor for Mary’s ambitious young doctor who wants to create
the perfect human, but fails to do so. In fact, Frankenstein is one
of the great novels of failure, taking its place somewhere between
Cervantes’s rambling 17th-century masterpiece, Don Quixote (which
Mary read while she was working on her novel) and Hemingway’s 1952
novella, The Old Man and the Sea. In both these books, though,
failure is viewed with compassion, in the context of human dignity
and ideals. Frankenstein, on the other hand, portrays it as the
destructive result of overreaching. Mary’s portrait of failure as
the dark heart of hubris is couched in terms so strong they seem
almost religious. Sure enough, this idealistic young daughter of a
former dissenting minister believed that right and wrong were a
matter of fact, not just opinion.
Yet Frankenstein’s
passionate appeal for justice is moving, not sermonizing. Mary never
had the chance to be a prig. Even as she was writing what became her
first novel, years of the harsh censure of a woman’s private life
that today would be referred to as “slut-shaming” had begun. She
had been ostracized by family and friends for running off with Percy,
a married man, and was subjected to sniggering speculation by male
acquaintances. The couple married after Percy’s first wife,
Harriet, took her own life, but were regarded as so disreputable
that, in an unprecedented decision, they were refused custody of
Percy’s children from his first marriage. In future years, Mary
would sit through a sermon preached against her, find her husband
viewed as fair game by other women, and her in-laws would campaign to
take away her surviving child.
Even so, sincere and
engaging as it may be, her moral stance is not what makes
Frankenstein feel so contemporary. Nor does its early 19th-century
technology. Mary imagined first a combination of math and alchemy –
and then electricity in her revised 1832 edition – animating her
patchwork corpse. Neither really resonates in today’s age of
biochemical breakthroughs and genetic engineering. The laboratory
electrocution scene first imagined in James Whale’s classic 1931
film of Frankenstein now seems fabulously kitsch.
But in the novel,
myth powers technology and not the other way around. Frankenstein
shows us that aspiration and progress are indistinguishable from
hubris – until something goes wrong, when suddenly we see all too
clearly what was reasonable endeavor and what overreaching. By the
time she wrote her classic, Mary was aware that the man she had
married was an emotional and philosophical overreacher. For all his
family wealth, Percy was often in debt. And his timing was
staggeringly poor: even during her first pregnancy he had pressured
17-year-old Mary to sleep with his best friend in pursuit of free
love, while his own long-running romantic involvement with Mary’s
stepsister had started at the time of the couple’s elopement.
Moreover, for a soi-disant writer, remarkably little of his work had
been published; Mary spent a lot of time fair copying it to send to
publishers.
But Frankenstein is
no memoir. The question it asks, “How far is too far?”, is at the
very heart of modernity. The Romantics, Mary among them, “leaned
in” to progress. The great historian Eric Hobsbawm called the
period from the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 to the
outbreak of the first world war “the long 19th century”.
Published early in this classical era of modernity, Mary’s novel
still helps us define its terms today. Shorthand for the way we
experience ourselves within a world of increasing man-made
complexity, “modernity” is both positive and negative, signaling
hope for progress as well as our fear of change. Frankenstein
identifies the mismatch between human experience and what we are
expected to become as technology and science advance.
As well as being
emotionally expressive, Frankenstein was informed by contemporary
intellectual debate. In 1816, when Mary started writing it, the study
of natural phenomena wasn’t yet a proper profession; the term
“scientist” had yet to be invented. Amateur speculation could be
cutting-edge. Those who were professional gave fashionable public
lectures, which encouraged more amateur participation. When Mary was
in her teens, these lecturers included her father’s friend, the
chemist and inventor Sir Humphry Davy; the Italian physicist and
philosopher Dr Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini, each of
whom gave demonstrations of how to pass an electric current through
the nerves of a dead body.
Her times seem so
right for Mary’s novel that I was briefly tempted by a third
response to the puzzle of how Frankenstein came into being: a very
young woman simply, rather artlessly, channelled whatever was going
on in her social and cultural milieu into her book. Of course this
reduces cultural history to the folk wisdom that “everyone’s got
a book in them”, and ignores the labor and technique entailed in
producing a work that is publishable – not to mention a great one.
Yet it’s fascinating how frequently female writers do incur this
reaction. Think of the widespread reception of that towering
20th-century writer Sylvia Plath – no less a trans formative poet
than her husband Ted Hughes – as simply expressing her feelings.
Indeed, think today of the US poet Sharon Olds, forced for years to
equivocate over whether material in her Pulitzer prize-winning work
is autobiographical lest she be similarly dismissed. The question is
not how did Mary write Frankenstein, but why is it so hard to believe
that she did? After all, she herself left a portrait of the kind of
thinking she enjoyed: the leaping, near-intuitive intellect she gives
her Dr Frankenstein. Just the sort of “aha!” that can suddenly,
and brilliantly, synthesize a number of apparently unrelated ideas,
exactly as Mary’s story does.
Everything we know
about her writing process – and we know a lot, thanks to her
journal and letters – tells us it was consciously literary,
painstakingly crafted. Even its famous trigger was literary. After
they had spent an evening in June 1816 reading ghost stories
together, Lord Byron set a group of his guests at Villa Diodati, on
the banks of Lake Geneva, a writing competition. As Mary recalled:
“‘We will each write a ghost story,’ said Lord Byron … I
busied myself to think of a story, a story to rival those which had
excited us to this task.” Meanwhile the men in the room – Percy,
and either Byron or Byron’s doctor John William Polidori – were
having a serious talk about “the principles of life”. It seems to
have occurred to no one that Mary, having already given birth twice
and lost her first child at 12 days old, probably knew more about
such “principles” than anyone else present.
But everything the
teenage mother didn’t feel entitled to mention in Byron’s salon
fuels her novel. Mary completed much of Frankenstein while living in
Bath, at a time when Percy was often absent. It was a tempestuous
year in which both her half-sister Fanny and Harriet Shelley killed
themselves, her stepsister’s daughter with Byron was born, Mary got
married and was pregnant for the third time. It’s no surprise the
novel is so full of human insight and understanding: maternal
anxieties about creating a perfect human; fears of ugliness,
lovelessness and rejection; an analysis of what it is to be
unmothered and alone in the world.
These are universal
themes and, by August 1818, the book “seems to be universally
read”, as their writer friend Thomas Love Peacock reported to Mary
and Percy. But Mary wasn’t basking in this success. She had already
followed Percy into political exile in Europe, and within a year she
would suffer the deaths of both her children. Dragged from pillar to
post by the charismatic, unreliable man to whom she was committed,
even while he became increasingly unfaithful to her, she would, until
Percy’s death in 1822, resemble nothing so much as a “surrendered
wife”.
It’s impossible to
tell the story of her life without at every turn being aware of the
fact that Mary was a female writer. Widowed just before turning 25,
she discovered that most friends would have nothing to do with
someone they saw as a cross between a mere poet’s mistress and the
killjoy who cramped his style. She returned to London and spent the
next two decades eking out an allowance for her surviving child that
her father-in-law loaned her. Sir Timothy Shelley’s own eldest
child was illegitimate, but he never accepted Mary – who had lived
and had two children with Percy before she married him – into the
Shelley family.
Still, a dogged
survivor and a consummate professional, Mary supported herself, and
saw her son through Harrow and Oxford, by her writing, the great bulk
of which had to be done anonymously. The archives are full of her
unsuccessful attempts to pitch to publishers. It’s hard to imagine
a male author who had experienced similar popular and critical
success being so consistently knocked back. But Mary had the bad luck
not to have started her writing life under a masculine pseudonym.
Notorious in literary circles because of her relationship with Percy,
she never enjoyed the freedoms of her slightly younger
contemporaries, the Brontës and George Eliot. After Frankenstein,
she was not read purely as a writer, but always judged as a woman.
In a revealing
journal entry from 21 October 1838, when she was 41, Mary tried to
reconcile the feeling that “To be something great and good was the
precept given me” with her failure to write radical philosophy in
“the good cause”. “My total friendlessness, my horror of
pushing, and inability to put myself forward unless led, cherished
and supported, all this has sunk me.” Forced to feel inferior by
the double standards stacked against her, yet ashamed of her failure
to achieve all a man could without those handicaps: Mary feels
absolutely contemporary. We find her today in debates about the
Women’s prize for fiction, in magazine articles comparing the
fortunes of male and female writers, in the horrors of the casting
couch.
Frankenstein shows
us how failure and hubris are two sides of the same coin. Mary’s
life reveals the tremendous hubris it took for this teenaged girl to
give birth to two of the most enduring and influential myths of our
time.