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 scepticism
Gallery: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – in facts and figures
I became fascinated by Mary Shelley and her most famous novel
because of her husband. Back in 2011, I found myself trying to make sense of
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry. It was a tricky assignment. 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 favourite 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 favourite scar-faced
shuffling giant and his creator are remade for a new time.
How did Shelley create her
great work? Some critics have claimed that she didn’t
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 centre 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?
Science and suspenders …
Shelley’s vision lives on in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).
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Science and suspenders … Shelley’s themes live on in The Rocky Horror
Picture Show (1975). Photograph: 20th Century-Fox/Everett /Rex Features
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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
realised that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing
today.
A second sceptical 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 sceptics 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.
Kicking up a storm … Michael
Clark as the half-human Caliban in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 retelling of The Tempest,
Prospero’s Books. Mary Shelley would have been aware of Shakespeare’s play.
Photograph: Allstar/Channel Four
Kicking up a storm … Michael Clark as the half-human Caliban in
Peter Greenaway’s 1991 retelling of The Tempest, Prospero’s Books. Photograph:
Allstar/Channel Four
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
sermonising. 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
ostracised 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.
Ostracised for her relationships, held back as a writer … Mary
Shelley. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London
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 maths 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 endeavour 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, signalling 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.
The making of a woman … Rex
Harrison, Audrey Hepburn and Wilfrid Hyde-White in My Fair Lady (1964).
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Creating human perfection … Rex Harrison, Audrey Hepburn and Wilfrid
Hyde-White in My Fair Lady (1964). Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar
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 labour 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 transformative 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, synthesise a number of apparently unrelated ideas, exactly as
Mary’s story does.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom Shelley resembled a ‘surrendered
wife’. Photograph: The Bodleian Libraries of the Un/PA
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.
Shelley’s monster embodies
her fears about giving birth to the perfect human
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.
Karloff in The Bride of
Frankenstein.
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Chain reaction … Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Photograph:
Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock
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.
What Frankenstein means now
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.
Published on 18 January, Fiona Sampson’s In Search of Mary Shelley:
The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein (Profile, £18.99) is a Guardian Bookshop One to
Watch. To order a copy for £13.99 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333
6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. It is also serialised on
Radio 4’s Book of the Week from 15-19 January.
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