MARY
SHELLEY
The daughter of the two great
intellectual rebels of the 1790s, William Godwin
and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley (née Godwin) was born on 30 August
Bereft of his companion, Godwin dealt
with his affliction in the only way he knew, by intellectual reasoning and
reflection. The day after her funeral, he began to sort through Mary Wollstonecraft's papers, and by 24 September he had started working on the story of
her life. His loving tribute to her, published in January 1798 as the Memoirs
of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is a sensitive but
full and factual account of the life and writings of his wife, including
Wollstonecraft's infatuation with the painter Henry Fuseli; her affair with
American speculator and former officer in the American Revolutionary Army,
Gilbert Imlay, the father of her illegitimate daughter, Fanny; and her two
unsuccessful attempts at taking her own life. Godwin's noble intention was to
immortalize his wife, whom he considered to be a "person of eminent
merit." Instead of expressing admiration, however, the public condemned
Wollstonecraft as licentious, and read her attempted suicides in terms of her
lack of religious convictions. When Godwin had declared in the Memoirs
that "There are not many individuals with whose character the public
welfare and improvement are more intimately connected" than his subject,
he could not have predicted how accurately and with what irony this statement
would become true. For at least the next hundred years the feminist cause was
to suffer setback after setback because of society's association of sexual
promiscuity with those who advocated the rights of women. In the index to the Anti-Jacobin
Review of 1798, for example, "See Mary Wollstonecraft" is the only entry listed under "Prostitution," and the
Wollstonecraft listing ends with a cross-reference to "Prostitution."
Such was the complex and ambiguous heritage Mary Shelley received from her
mother. She was to grow up with what Anne K. Mellor had described as a
"powerful and ever-to-be frustrated need to be mothered," as well as
with the realization that the parent she had never known was both celebrated as
a pioneer reformer of woman's rights and education, and castigated as an "unsex'd female."
Godwin immediately became the chief
object of her affections, as he was her primary caretaker for the first three
years of her life. Having studied progressive educational authorities, from
Jean-Jacques Rousseau to his contemporaries, Godwin also attempted to adopt
many of Wollstonecraft's child-care practices. Precocious, sensitive, and
spirited, Mary became his favorite child. He called
her "pretty little Mary" and relished evidence of her superiority
over Fanny. He supervised their early schooling and took them on various
excursions--to Pope's Grotto at Twickenham, to theatrical pantomimes, and to
dinners with his friends James Marshall
and Charles and Mary Lamb.
Mary Shelley 's attachment to her father was to become
intense and long lasting.
The idyll ended when the Godwin's
housekeeper and governess, Louisa Jones, left their residence, The Polygon,
with one of Godwin's more tempestuous and irresponsible protégés, George Dyson.
Godwin had been looking for a wife since 1798 and met Mary Jane Clairmont on 5 May 1801. Susceptible to her flattery,
Godwin immediately saw in "Mrs." Clairmont--a
self-proclaimed "widow," with a six-year-old son, Charles, and a
four-year-old daughter, Jane--the ideal helpmate and mother. Young Mary Shelley 's stepmother was in reality Mary Jane Vial,
spinster, who had lived with expatriate mercantile families in
Mary Shelley 's
relationship with her stepmother was strained. The new Mrs. Godwin resented
Mary's intense affection for her father and was jealous of the special interest
visitors showed in the product of the union between the two most radical
thinkers of the day. Not only did she demand that Mary do household chores, she
constantly encroached on Mary's privacy, opening her letters and limiting her
access to Godwin. Nor did she encourage Mary's intellectual development or love
of reading. While her daughter, Jane (who later called herself Claire), was
sent to boarding school to learn French, Mary never received any formal
education. She learned to read from Louisa Jones, Godwin, and his wife, and
followed Godwin's advice that the proper way to study was to read two or three
books simultaneously. Fortunately, she had access to her father's excellent
library, as well as to the political, philosophical, scientific, or literary
conversations that Godwin conducted with such visitors as William Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Holcroft, John Johnson, Humphry Davy, Horne Tooke, and
William Hazlitt. For example, on 24 August 1806 Mary and Jane
hid under the parlor sofa to hear Coleridge recite "The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner," a poem which later haunted both Frankenstein
(1818) and Falkner (1837).
Despite a wildly fluctuating
income--based largely on the Juvenile Library of M.J. Godwin and Company, a
publishing enterprise devised by Mrs. Godwin--the physical needs of the
children were provided. Mary's favorite pastime as a
child was to "write stories," and in 1808 her thirty-nine-quatrain
reworking of Charles Dibdin's five-stanza song Mounseer Nongtongpaw
was published by the Godwin Juvenile Library. This version became so popular
that it was republished in
On her return to
By June 1814 Shelley was dining with
the Godwins almost every day. Chaperoned by Jane,
Mary and Percy went for daily walks, sometimes to St. Pancras Church to visit
Wollstonecraft's grave, where Mary had earlier gone to read her mother's works.
Inevitably, on 26 June, they declared their love for each other. Percy saw Mary
as a "child of love and light," and in his dedicatory stanza for The
Revolt of Islam (1817) wrote of her: "They saw that thou wert lovely from thy birth, / Of
glorious parents, thou aspiring Child." Upon discovering the relationship,
Godwin, while still accepting Percy Shelley's
money, forbade him from visiting the house. Mary tried to obey her father's
injunction, but Percy's attempted suicide soon convinced Mary of the strength
of his love, and on 28 July 1814 she fled with him to
Recollecting her years with Percy,
Mary wrote in her journal on 19 December 1822: "France--Poverty--a few
days of solitude & some uneasiness--A tranquil residence in a beautiful
spot--Switzerland--Bath--Marlow--Milan--The Baths of
Lucca--Este--Venice--Rome--Naples--Rome & misery--Leghorn--Florence
Pisa--Solitude The Williams--The Baths--Pisa--These are the heads of
chapters--each containing a tale, romantic beyond romance." The eight
years Mary and Percy Shelley
spent together were indeed characterized by romance and melodrama. During this
period Mary and Percy, both extremely idealistic, lived on love--because of
extended negotiations over the disposition of the estate of Percy's
grandfather--without money, constantly moving from one placed to another. Mary
gave birth to four children, only one of whom survived to adulthood. The first,
a girl, was born prematurely and died eleven days later in 1815; William, born
in 1816, died of malaria in 1819; Clara Everina, born
in 1817, perished from dysentery the next year; Percy Florence, born in 1819,
died in
Before Mary Shelley wrote her most
popular novel, she published History
of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and
Holland, with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of
the Glaciers of Chamouni (1817),
which was based on journal entries and long letters home to Fanny. For this
work Mary had as a literary model her mother's Letters Written
during a Short Residence in
In 1815, shortly after the death of
her first baby, Shelley recorded a dream that may or may not have had a direct
influence on the plot of Frankenstein. On 19 March 1815 she recorded in
her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again--that it had
only been cold & that we rubbed it before the fire & it lived."
Her anxieties about motherhood and the inability to give life may have led her
to write the tale of the aspiring scientist who succeeds in creating a being by
unnatural methods. For example, Frankenstein's act has been read, by Robert Kiely and Margaret Homans among
others, as an attempt to usurp the power of the woman and to circumvent normal
heterosexual procreation.
In Frankenstein, Shelley dramatizes
some of her ambivalent feelings about the proto-Victorian ideology of
motherhood. As Mary Poovey has argued, Shelley
desired to conform to the ideals of what a proper wife and mother should be,
but her attachment to Percy, who was still legally married to Harriet, and the
ménage à trois with Jane Clairmont
(who over the next five years changed her name three times, from Jane to Clara
to Clare and finally to Claire) involved her in an unconventional, if not
romantically original, domestic arrangement. Condemned by her beloved father,
who believed that she "had been guilty of a crime," the
seventeen-year-old Mary, not yet a wife and no longer a mother, was insecure
and increasingly dependent on Percy for emotional support and familial commitment.
He, on the other hand, caught up in his excited passions, was eager to live out
his theory of "free love," encouraging Claire's affections. In the
early part of 1815 Percy's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg came to stay with Mary,
Percy, and Claire for six weeks, during which time Percy urged Mary, despite
her reluctance, to reciprocate Hogg's sexual overtures.
Though Claire continued in Mary and
Percy's household until 1820, she was temporarily diverted by an affair with George Gordon, Lord Byron, during the spring of 1816. Persuading Percy and Mary to accompany her
to Switzerland to meet Byron, Claire set off with the Shelleys
in early May 1816 and eventually moved into a chalet on the banks of Lake
Geneva, within walking distance from Villa Diodati,
where Byron
and his physician, Dr. John William Polidori, were staying. Byron
and Percy became close friends, sailing together on the lake and having
literary and philosophical discussions in the evenings. Both Mary and Percy
found Byron
fascinating and intriguing. He was handsome, capricious, cynical, and radiated
an intellectual energy. Mellor surmises that "The intellectual and erotic
stimulation of [Percy] Shelley's
and Byron's
combined presence, together with her deep-seated anxieties and insecurities,
once again erupted into Mary's consciousness as a waking dream or
nightmare," becoming "the most famous dream in literary
history."
In the 1831 edition of Frankenstein Mary Shelley 's
introduction explains how she, "then a young girl, came to think of and to
dilate upon so very hideous an idea." On a rainy evening in June 1816,
they all gathered at the fireside to read aloud Fantasmagoriana,
ou Recueil d'histoires d'apparitions de
spectres, revenants, fantômes, etc. (1812), a
French translation of a German book of ghost stories. At Byron's
suggestion, they each agreed to write a horror story. The next day Byron
read the beginning of his tale, Shelley "commenced one founded on the
experiences of his early life," and Polidori had
"some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for
peeping through a key-hole." Mary wanted to think of a story "which
would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake thrilling
horror--one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and
quicken the beatings of the heart." The others dropped their stories, but
kept asking Mary: "Have you thought of a story?" to which she had to
reply with "a mortifying negative." Finally, one night, after a
discussion among Byron, Polidori, and Percy Shelley
concerning galvanism and Erasmus Darwin's
success in causing a piece of a vermicello to
move voluntarily, she fell into a reverie of waking dream where she saw
"the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put
together." She felt the terror for the artist who endeavored
"to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" by
giving the "spark of life" to a "hideous corpse." Next
morning, after the poets went off sailing, she started work on what was to
become chapter 4 of Frankenstein, which begins, "It was on a dreary
night of November...."
Encouraged by Percy, Mary developed
the little ghost story into a novel, which she finished in May of 1817 at
Marlow and published in March 1818. To those who have not read the book, the
name Frankenstein is often associated with the monster rather than its creator.
The mistake is perhaps not altogether erroneous, for as many critics point out
the creature and his maker are doubles of one another, or doppelgängers.
Their relationship is similar to that between the head and the heart, or the
intellect and the emotion. The conception of the divided self--the idea that
the civilized man or woman contains within a monstrous, destructive
force--emerges as the creature echoes both Frankenstein's and narrator Robert
Walton's loneliness: all three wish for a friend or companion. Frankenstein and
his monster alternately pursue and flee from one another. Like fragments of a
mind in conflict with itself, they represent polar opposites which are not
reconciled, and which destroy each other at the end. For example, the creature
enacts the repressed desires of its maker, alleviating Victor Frankenstein's
fear of sexuality by murdering his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza,
on their wedding night. Identities merge, as Frankenstein frequently takes
responsibility for the creature's action: for instance, after the deaths of the
children William and Justine, both of which were caused by the creature,
Frankenstein admits they were "the first hapless victims to [his]
unhallowed arts."
In a recent reading of Frankenstein , Mellor demonstrates a link between
events, dates, and names in the novel and those in Mary Shelley 's life. Mellor
argues that the novel is born out of a "doubled fear, the fear of a woman
that she may not be able to bear a healthy normal child and the fear of a
putative author that she may not be able to write.... the book is her created
self as well as her child." Dated 11 December 17--to 12 September 17--,
the letters that form the narration of the novel--from Walton to his sister
Margaret Walton Saville (whose initials are those of
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley )--are written during a period similar in duration
to Mary Shelley 's third pregnancy, during which she wrote Frankenstein.
Mellor discovered that the day and date on which Walton first sees the
creature, Monday, 31 July, had coincided in 1797, the year in which Mary
Shelley was born. This fact and other internal evidence led Mellor to conclude
that the novel ends on 12 September 1797, two days after Mary Wollstonecraft's death: " Mary Shelley thus symbolically fused her book's
beginning and ending with her own--Victor Frankenstein's death, the Monster's
promised suicide, and her mother's death from puerperal fever can all be seen
as the consequence of the same creation, the birth of Mary Godwin
the author."
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