It’s very late, two, possibly three in the morning. The incessant rain taps at the window panes, dripping from the eaves, flooding the garden below. It’s been raining like this for days. Mary Shelley lies awake in bed, staring at the ceiling of their rented Swiss villa, listening to the rain. She pictures Byron at dinner hours before, dressed ostentatiously in a red velvet waistcoat “Have you thought of a story?” he had singled her out again. “Not yet,” she had muttered again, staring down at her plate. A ghost story. The challenge had thrilled her and yet… nothing. She could think of absolutely nothing. As the rain continues its ceaseless dripping, Mary closes her eyes. Suddenly, a scene begins to take shape, a nightmare really. But surely she is still awake. In this waking dream, Mary envisions her ghost story at last, a story much bigger than she could have ever imagined. That night, Mary Shelley dreams up Frankenstein, a story almost everyone on Earth, regardless of time or place is at least a little familiar with. But who was Mary Shelley, the creator? Who was she to bear such a creature? How did she manage to embody all that horror, that pain, that grotesque abnormality, gothic morbidity? Well, the more you know about the life of Mary Shelley, the more it all makes sense. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Happy Spooktober! Just like last year, all October long I’ll be coming at you with spooky episodes which is so much fun. Last Spooktober I mentioned Mary Shelley sort of in passing and I was like “I’ll have to do an episode on her” and then I never did. And some of you were not happy with me. But I just ran out of October Sundays and I really wanted to save her for Spooktober, honor her with a Spooktober slot. So I saved her for an entire year. I think she would have wanted it that way. I have touched on the world of Mary Shelley a little bit though. We’ve actually met some of her acquaintances already. In the Theodosia Burr episode I mentioned that Aaron Burr had read the book “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” by early feminist author Mary Wallstonecraft and that it had influenced the way he raised his daughter, Theodosia. Well Mary Wallstonecraft was Mary Shelley’s mother. And Aaron Burr actually visited her family home at one point. Way back in episode 3 about Ada Lovelace, inventor of computer programming a century before the first computer, I talked quite a bit about her scandalous father, Lord Byron, who also happened to be a famous poet. I didn’t have too many nice things to say about him. Well he makes a reappearance in this episode as well and I still don’t have too many nice things to say about him. So, both of these scandalous fathers from past episodes had connections to Mary Shelley.
And if you’ve watched the show Bridgerton at all, then you are quite familiar with the world that Mary Shelley lived in, more specifically, Regency era London. They may as well write her into that show. She would have been the right age and everything. And actually, her life reads like a scandalous historical drama. Lady Whistledown would have a field day with Mary Shelley. Honestly, Mary is like too risque for Bridgerton. But if you have seen that show, then you know how incredibly strict societal expectations were for women at the time to maintain this virgin, innocent, pure appearance. Like, just being caught speaking to a man alone, without a chaperone present was enough to ruin you socially. Ok, keep that in mind as you learn about the antics of a young Mary Shelley.
But, to be fair, I don’t think Mary really bought all that much into societal expectations of her or really cared what people thought of her. And when you look at who her parents were, that makes a lot of sense. Mary Wallstonecraft Godwin, as she was called at birth, was born in London in 1797. Her mother, as I mentioned earlier, was Mary Wallstonecraft, a feminist philosopher, writer, and educator. Her father was William Godwin, a philosopher, novelist, and journalist. Godwin came up with the concept of philosophical anarchism. According to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he argued in his 1793 book Political Justice that quote “government is a corrupting force in society, perpetuating dependence and ignorance, but that it will be rendered increasingly unnecessary and powerless by the gradual spread of knowledge and the expansion of the human understanding. Politics will be displaced by an enlarged personal morality as truth conquers error and mind subordinates matter,” end quote. So basically, he believed that government would become obsolete as humans became better and better and smarter and smarter. So both of her parents really disregarded societal constructs of the time, the patriarchy, the government.
Mary Wollstonecraft met William Godwin at a London dinner party in 1791. Godwin later wrote that they were quote “mutually displeased with each other.” Jill Lepore writes of their meeting in a New Yorker article quote “they were the smartest people in the room, and they couldn’t help arguing all evening,” end quote. But they did see eye to eye on some things. Neither of them really believed in marriage or monogamy or anything like that. They parted ways that night. Mary ended up having an affair with an American stock market guy named Gilbert Imlay and became pregnant. She wrote to Imlay to inform him quote “I am nourishing a creature,” end quote. That’s what she said. That’s how she told him she was pregnant. She had a baby girl that she named Fanny and then the Imlay guy completely abandoned her. She meets back up with Godwin in 1796 and the two, who remember don’t really believe in marriage, become sort of unofficial lovers. She gets pregnant again, this time with the baby that will become Mary Shelley, and the two decide to get married after all, for the sake of the baby. It’s just easier that way in this society. They didn’t exactly make things easy for unwed mothers or their children.
In 1797, Mary Wallstonecraft gave birth to a baby girl who was named Mary Wallstonecraft Godwin (not Shelley yet). But sadly, she died of a fever, infection, 11 days after giving birth. If you listened to my childbirth episode a few weeks ago, then you know how incredibly common this was. Mary Wallstonecraft gave birth to Mary Shelley during that window of time I talked about when male doctors started getting involved in childbirth and pushing the traditional female midwives out. And this was a problem because, first of all they had no idea how to deliver babies, that was not something that men had traditionally done or even been privy to. And second, we didn’t yet know about germs. And these male doctors were doing other things, tending to the sick, performing surgery, and autopsies, yes, cutting open dead bodies. And they were not washing their hands. And then they were delivering babies. In Mary Wallstonecraft’s case, the doctor used dirty hands to remove parts of her placenta which led to a fatal infection that killed her 11 days later.
So, poor William Godwin is now stuck with this new baby plus his step daughter Fanny Imlay who is like 3 years old and he’s also terrible with money. He’s perpetually in debt and he’s just really struggling. When Mary is 4 years old, her father gets remarried to a woman named Mary Jane Clairmont. Yes there are a lot of Marys in this story. Mary Jane Clairmont already has two children of her own, Charles and Claire. Mary does not get along with her stepmother at all who was often described as quick tempered and quarrelsome. A 19th century biography about William Godwin suggests that this is because Mary Jane Clairmont favored her own children, Charles and Claire, over her step children Fanny and Mary. So we have a bit of a Cinderella, evil stepmother thing happening here.
Despite never technically meeting her mother, I mean she was only 11 days old when she died, Mary was raised absolutely adoring her. She visited her grave often in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church in London. It is said she learned her letters by tracing the writing on the tombstones in that graveyard. Which is good because she didn’t have a ton of formal schooling otherwise. I mean she wasn’t like sent to a school, even though Charles and Claire were, clear favoritism. But Mary was highly educated by her father, a governess, and a daily tutor at home. It’s safe to say that, despite not going to school, she was far more educated than most girls of her time. She had full access to her father’s library and read all of her mother’s books and she read the memoirs that her father wrote about her mother and she just really idolized her, spending much of her time visiting her grave in that churchyard. She was also exposed to a lot of revolutionary thinkers and literary geniuses of the day who came to visit her father.
Enter Percy Shelley. Percy was a writer who would eventually gain fame as one of the big English romantic poets, though not in his lifetime. Others in his genre include Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, etc. I read all these guys stuff in a British Literature class in college and it was painful. Not my jam. But Percy wasn’t just a fancy poet, he also had strong philosophical convictions that got him into some trouble. For example, he was kicked out of Oxford and disowned by his father for being an atheist and for having radical economic views that he mostly got from reading William Godwin’s book Political Justice. At that point he left his pregnant wife at home and sought out William Godwin himself who was his intellectual hero. He stayed with Godwin for sometime, sort of adopting him as like a substitute father. And of course he met Godwin’s daughter, Mary, who was only 15 at the time. So what is Godwin getting out of this arrangement with Percy? Well Percy had promised to help him pay off his debt. But the problem with that was, Percy didn’t actually have any money. His wealthy family had completely cut him off financially. After months of empty promises, Percy was finally like “eh, I know I said I’d pay off your debts but I’m actually completely broke. I will be taking your daughter though.”
Because Mary and Percy had been canoodling for a while now, meeting each other in secret at, you guessed it, her mother’s grave? Maybe you didn’t guess that. But that was like her go to spot, after all. That’s where she hung out. Girl is pretty goth. I never identified as goth in my youth. I was always more goth adjacent. I mean I was the secretary of a Harry Potter Fanatics club in middle school and several of the members identified as Slytherin. I was always more of a Ravenclaw. But yeah, goth adjacent. So anyway, Mary starts meeting Percy in the graveyard. It was there in 1814 when Mary was 16 and Percy was 21 and married, that they declared their love for each other. And, apparently, according to rumors, it was there on her mother’s grave, that Mary lost her virginity to Percy. Yeah. And you know I Snopesed that and their conclusion is quote “unlike many rumors, this one may be true,” end quote. According to Charlotte Gordon who wrote the book Romantic Outlaws about Mary and her mother, it is traditionally accepted among Shelley scholars that the two quote “consummated their relationship at the grave of Wollstonecraft at Saint Pancras church in London,” end quote. Gordon says quote “According to a letter Percy wrote, it’s there she declared her love for him. We don’t know how far they went. But they always referred to that day as his birthday,” end quote. I don’t know how I feel about it. But, then again, I was only ever goth adjacent so there you go.
Now, her father, Godwin, did not approve. He’s already super mad that Percy backed out of his promises to get him out of debt. Now he’s swooping in for his daughter and he’s married and he has a kid with another on the way. Percy is not who Godwin would have chosen for his daughter. He’s not having it. So the two run away together. They go to France and they take Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont with them who is like a year younger than Mary. So they’re gallivanting around France and Switzerland but the problem is, they don’t actually have any money. So they only make it like 2 months before they’re forced to return to England. And, although everything was fun and fancy free on this little rendezvous, when they get back to reality, it’s not good. Mary is pregnant, they have no money, and her father won’t have anything to do with them. The three, Mary, Percy, and Claire manage to move into lodgings in Somers Town which is in London but Percy often has to leave home for short periods of time to avoid creditors who are tracking him down to pay off his debt which he can’t pay. Now, to make things worse, okay so Mary just turned 17, she is pregnant with Percy’s baby, Percy is still married to his wife, a woman named Harriet, although he doesn’t see all that much of her. Harriet is also pregnant, yeah, with Percy’s baby, their second kid together. This is such a soap opera. Harriet gives birth to a son just a few months after Percy and Mary return from their little elopement in France and Percy is overjoyed. On top of that, he’s definitely romantically involved with Claire Clairemont too. And all of this had to be a hard pill for Mary to swallow. I mean, how could it not be. But, I mean, if you don’t believe in marriage or monogamy, if you’re in the camp of free love, you don’t really get to complain, despite the sting.
So things already aren’t great for Mary but then they get worse. In February of 1815, she gives birth to a baby girl two months early. And, just to satisfy my own curiosity I did the math there. June 1814 is when Mary and Percy supposedly consummated their love on her mother’s grave. February 1815 is seven months after that, remember the baby was born 2 months early so, I think this is the grave baby y’all. For 10 days after that, Mary records in her diary quote “nurse the baby, read,” cause she did this. She just like wrote down everything she did every day. So these are her postpartum activities “nurse the baby, read.” But then on the 11th day she writes quote “I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. Find my baby dead.” She wrote in a letter to a friend quote “My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now,” end quote. Later she wrote in her diary quote “Dream 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,” end quote. And I’m so struck by this. Not just because it’s so incredibly sad, truly every parent’s worst nightmare. I’m struck by it because of the weird way that it mirrors her own experience with her own mother who died 11 days after she was born. It’s like she’s reliving it except this time as the mother. 11 days.
Mary was super depressed after losing this baby which she never even had a chance to name. But she became pregnant again very soon after and gave birth to a healthy boy less than a year later that they named William after her father. Around this same time, Percy’s grandfather died and he inherited some money so they weren’t dirt poor anymore, for now at least, and in May of 1816 they use some of that money to rent a villa in Geneva, Switzerland to go on a vacation of sorts, Percy, 18 year old Mary, the 4 month old baby William, and of course their third wheel, Claire Clairmont. During this trip, Mary is referred to as Mrs. Shelley although, they are not in fact married at this point. Percy is still married to Harriet who is off I assume taking care of their two children alone. They are joined in Geneva by none other than Lord Byron, the poet, and his physician John William Polidori who would go on to become a writer himself and is actually credited with inventing the vampire genre of fantasy fiction when he published the short story The Vampyre in 1819. And Lord Byron is there because he’s basically been run out of England by his scorned wife, Ada’s mother, who is threatening to ruin his reputation by exposing all of his scandalous love affairs. So he’s on the run. He’s exiled himself. Episode 3 has more on that.
So we have this group of young literary geniuses on vacation together. But the weather is not cooperating. Mary wrote quote “It proved a wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house,” end quote. There was more to it than just bad weather though. A year before, a volcano had erupted in Indonesia and this caused abnormal weather for the next three years with the most extreme effects that summer of 1816 which is often referred to as the year without a summer. This is called a volcanic winter. The volcano releases sulfur dioxide and ash into the atmosphere which leads to temporary global cooling. So this summer was much colder than it should have been and it also caused near constant rain. So they’re cooped up for most of the time, bored. And this is when Byron proposes that they each write a ghost story to pass the time. They’re each going to write a ghost story and share it with the group as like entertainment. Yes, this is when Polidori thought up the Vampyre. But Mary is struggling. She just can’t think of anything good and I’m sure there’s a lot of pressure. These guys are such brilliant writers, how can she possibly compete with them. But then, one night, it hits her. As she’s lying awake in bed, unable to sleep, she is struck with what she refers to as a waking dream. She described it quote “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world,” end quote. And just like that, on a rainy, sleepless summer night in Geneva, Frankenstein was born.
The full title is Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus and it was only meant to be a short story, but with Percy urging her on, Mary ended up turning it into a full novel. The New York Library summarizes the book quote “Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, framed by three levels of narrative. Adventurer Captain Walton opens the novel with his journey to the North Pole in search of fame through scientific prowess. Walton's crew rescues scientist Victor Frankenstein, who has been attempting to locate the escaped Being of his creation. Victor relates the stories of his upbringing, personal tragedies, and eventual creation of the Creature. His narrative is situated alongside a warning for Walton to avoid seeking scientific fame, lest similar disasters befall him. The third narrative is that of the Creature himself: this functions as a defense, not only for the Creature's actions, but also for the Creature's right to exist, interact with the world, and respond to social stimuli. The Creature's narrative is intelligent and relates his sad attempts at connection with humans, and later, his desire and demand for Frankenstein to create a female companion,” end quote. So basically Victor Frankenstein made a monster by stitching together pieces of corpses and bringing it back to life. And of course it doesn’t go well, the monster starts killing people that Victor loves, his brother, his friend, his wife. But you know what’s really crazy and like a huge misconception? The monster is not Frankenstein. The monster has no name. The man who made the monster is Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein. But these days, people refer to the monster as Frankenstein and that’s not correct. The monster was never given a name. Mary remarked about this quote “This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good,” end quote. And Jill Lepore makes deeper connections in her article for the New Yorker writing quote “[Mary] herself had no name of her own. Like the creature pieced together from cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, her name was an assemblage of parts: the name of her mother, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the philosopher William Godwin, grafted onto that of her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, as if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley were the sum of her relations, bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh,” end quote. Frankenstein was published in 1818 without an author listed. But Percy had written the preface and so most people assumed that he had authored the whole book. Mary’s name wasn’t added as the author until the second edition was published 5 years later. And still many people refused to believe that she had written it. Actually to this day there are some that argue that Percy played such a large role in editing that he should be given credit for the book. Fiona Sampson who wrote the biography “In Search of Mary Shelley” said quote “Why hasn't Mary Shelley gotten the respect she deserves? 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," end quote. I’m not surprised at all though that people wanted to give Percy credit. He’s a man. She’s a woman. This is early 19th century London. Women were not seen as intelligent enough to be able to produce something like Frankenstein.
So they spend the whole summer of 1816 in Switzerland and then they go back to England. But this sort of reckless, carefree living means scandal pretty much follows them wherever they go. Because now Claire Clairmont is pregnant and it’s believed to be Lord Byron’s child. Although, it could just as easily be Percy’s. But they all seem to agree that it’s Byron’s. They’re trying to cover up the pregnancy, keep it a secret. Because the life of an unwed mother at this time, like I said, horrible. No life at all. And in the meantime, Mary’s half sister, Fanny Imlay commits suicide. She was found on October 10th in a room at an inn with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. Exactly two months after that, on December 10th, Percy’s estranged wife Harriet commits suicide. She’s found drowned in the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park in London. She was actually pregnant at the time but it apparently was not Percy’s child this time. So, yeah, super sad, super tragic. Not all that uncommon at the time unfortunately. Unwed mothers and mothers who had been abandoned by their husbands and then conceived out of wedlock as in Harriet’s case, quite often committed suicide in Regency era England. Charlotte Gordon who wrote that book about Mary and her mother told Snopes quote “Suicide was such an epidemic during that time period that London issued a reward for fishing young women out of the Thames,” end quote. This is what happens when women have no voice, no power, no control over their own lives, their own bodies. This is why equal representation in government and other positions of power is so so important. Why a panel of elderly white men shouldn’t be making all of the decisions all the time. We’ve come a long way. There’s a ways to go yet.
At this point, Percy tries to get custody of the two children he had with Harriet. I don’t know why he suddenly cares about them now. But Harriet’s family ain’t having it. Percy’s lawyer tells him that if he were married, he would have a better chance of getting custody. So he and Mary finally offically get married on December 30th 1816. Mary is still only 19 years old and if you’re under 21, you have to have a parent or guardian's permission to get married. She’s also pregnant again at this point. And Mary’s father, William Godwin, although he had basically disowned her when she ran off to France with Percy, he gave his consent for them to marry. And the marriage seems to repair her relationship with her family. Both her father and her step-mother are present at the wedding. But, it didn’t help. A few months later, the courts ruled that Percy was morally unfit to be given custody of his children and they were placed with a clergyman’s family which is like a priest. I don’t really get why Harriet’s family was like “no you can’t have them. But we don’t want them either.” Also around this time, Claire Clairmont gives birth to Byron’s baby, a girl she names Alba, and in August of 1817, Mary has a daughter named Clara.
In March of 1818, they decide to leave England again. Percy is still way in debt, he’s trying to avoid being thrown in debtor’s prison plus their reputations are in shambles theri because of all the pre-marital stuff. So they go to Italy. That’s where Byron is in self-exile. And they take Claire Clairmont and her one year old daughter, Alba, with them. They’ve agreed to hand Alba over to Byron. He says he’s going to raise her as long as Claire agrees to have nothing more to do with her. Which, I’m like, ummm heck no. Dude, you’re not even raising your other kid. And he doesn’t raise Alba either. He puts her in a convent where she later dies of typhus at the age of 5. Speaking of dead children, gosh that’s horrible sorry. There’s a lot of them in this story though. Both of Mary and Percy’s children, William who was 3 and Clara who was barely one, die while they are in Italy. Mary also gives birth to their fourth child, the only one who will survive to adulthood, Percy Florence. But she is devastated by the loss of her children, as anyone would be, and she carries that grief with her for the rest of her life.
So they hop around Italy for a few years staying here and there, never really settling down anywhere. Mary described it as quote “a country which memory painted as paradise.” In 1822, Mary suffers a miscarriage and loses so much blood that she almost dies. Percy has her sit in an ice bath while they wait for the doctor which they are told probably saved her life. But Percy and Mary’s relationship is rocky at this point. He’s having affairs with any woman that will have him and she’s super depressed. He doesn’t really seem to care. He’s having fun. The summer of 1822, he gets a sailboat. He wants to sail. He sails down the coast with a friend of his to visit another friend for a few days and then they head back. But they never make it. Mary gets a letter a week later from the friend they were going to visit that reads quote “pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious,” end quote. But of course he hadn’t gotten home. Mary would later tell a friend quote “The paper fell from me. I trembled all over.” Ten days later Percy’s body, along with the two men he was with, washed up on shore. Byron and two other friends cremated them right there on the beach like funeral pyre style. Which seems weird. I thought you had to like turn dead bodies over to authorities, do an autopsy, something. But no, they just burnt them on the beach. Mary was devastated at the loss of her beloved husband. It was just her and little Percy now. Friends later gave her some of his ashes, and a chunk that had rolled away from the funeral pyre that they assumed to be his heart. And she happily took them and kept them in a silk bag in her desk drawer for the rest of her life along with locks of all of her dead children’s hair, her son Percy would later discover after her death. In just true goth fashion. Queen of goth.
After that, Mary went back to England and stayed busy. She wrote several more novels and she started editing and promoting Percy’s poetry, working on getting it published. Because Percy Shelley was not a famous poet in his lifetime. He was just a romantic literary playboy sleeping around and taking Italian sailboat rides and scrawling poems in notebooks when he had the time. Percy didn’t become a famous poet, one of the most famous poets, until after his death and that’s thanks in large part to Mary’s efforts to promote and publish his poems. Mary finally starts to earn some money from her writing now and she uses it mostly to help women in desperate situations. She financially assisted a woman named Georgiana Paul when her husband cut her off after accusing her of adultery. And she helped two friends, Isabel Robinson and Mary Diana Dods, run away together to France, disguising Dods as a man and helping them get fake passports so that they could live as husband and wife in France. Mary never remarried, but maintained a close relationship with her son Percy Florence and his family after he married. Starting in 1839 though, when she was 42 years old, she started suffering from terrible headaches and paralysis in different parts of her body. And this would go on worsening for the next 12 years until she died in 1851 at the age of 53 of what doctors assumed to be a cancerous brain tumor. She wanted to be buried next to her mother in the graveyard at Saint Pancras but her son refused. He called it quote “dreadful” and buried her instead at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth. But, like come on, give the woman her dying wish. She loved that graveyard. She practically grew up in that graveyard. Learned to read, learned other things. I vote we relocate Mary Shelley’s remains to where she actually wanted to spend eternity.
Now let’s talk about Frankenstein because it truly is remarkable, especially considering it was written by an 18 year old girl with very little formal education. Even Mary’s father, William Godwin remarked that it was quote “the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of.” It was published when she was twenty, actually written even younger than that, he goes on “You are now five and twenty. And, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading and cultivated your mind in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?” end quote. Frankenstein is often thought of as having defined the science fiction genre. It was groundbreaking, awe inspiring, then and now.
When you think about Frankenstein. Picture Frankenstein, well Frankenstein’s monster. He’s green right? Big, green, with this like cylinder shaped flat top head, bolts in his neck. You’re picturing the version of the monster from the 1931 film Frankenstein where he’s played by actor Boris Karloff. That’s the monster everyone imagines. But that monster is quite different from the monster Mary Shelley dreamt up. In her book, the monster can speak, he can read, he’s well read, she lists the books he has read, he can write. He’s very intelligent, reflective, he’s having an existential crisis. She makes you feel sympathy for the monster. She makes you feel sympathy for Victor Frankenstein as well but even more so for the monster. He has his own narrative, he speaks his mind, he expresses his pain, his torment. But in the 1931 Boris Karloff version we’re all so familiar with, the monster doesn’t even speak. He just sort of grunts and kills people. He’s greatly reduced from what Mary wrote him to be. Lepore says in her article quote “the monster—prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel—was no longer merely nameless but all but speechless, too, as if what Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, an agony unutterable,” end quote. And Mary did seem to try to avoid having to explain herself, having to explain where these wild ideas came from, how she thought up such a tale. She didn’t put her name on the book for the first five years and after she came out as the author, she maintained that the story had come to her in a dream, writing in the introduction of an 1831 edition of the book quote “How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea” and she goes on to say that the book had been a mere transcript of that dream, releasing herself from the responsibility of having willingly thought it up.
But what does Frankenstein mean? That’s the thing. It means so many things. There are so many different interpretations. Recently, it’s served as a cautionary tale for scientists and inventors. This take on it was especially prevalent after the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Victor Frankenstein has been likened to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the monster to the bomb. Frankenstein and Oppenheimer expressed similar horror after witnessing what their creations had done. More recently, it’s been applied to Silicon valley creators of robots and artificial intelligence. But these are very masculine interpretations of the story. Feminists who have studied Frankenstein, see the monster as a motherless child. They see this scenario as the consequences of not taking care of the children, as a way of highlighting the importance of women in society. And we know Mary Shelley felt this way. She read her feminist mother’s books over and over again. In one of them Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, her mother wrote quote “I conceive it to be the duty of every rational creature to attend to its offspring,” end quote. And then that has me spiraling on all of the child loss Mary experienced, three dead babies and a miscarraige, and the grief, and the unavoidable guilt she must have felt and she herself having been a motherless child.
Some make connections between Frankenstein and the French Revolution in the late 1700s which had definitely influenced her parents philosophical and political views. Her father was pro anarchy. He believed the government was becoming obsolete, that the people were evolving, advancing to the point of being able to rule themselves. Lepore writes quote “Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men’s bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or a king over his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when he described feudalism as a “ferocious monster.” The creature, born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he has become a villain,” end quote. But others point to another revolution entirely, the Haitian Revolution, when enslaved people in Haiti successfully overthrew the system. Many believe Frankenstein is actually commentary on the institution of slavery. Mary and Percy, and her parents, they were all known abolitionists. We know they even refused to eat sugar because of how much they morally opposed how it was produced on plantations run by slave labor. Many liken Frankenstein’s monster to an enslaved person. And, when you compare the thoughts of Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist and author who escaped from slavery, to that of the monster, they are eerily similar. Douglass wrote quote “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” Frankenstein’s monster says quote “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched outcast I was,” end quote. Douglass quote “I often found myself regretting my own existence, and wishing myself dead,” end quote. The monster quote “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live?” end quote. Lepore writes quote “Among the many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley’s novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for creating the monster—usurping the power of God, and of women—or for failing to love, care for, and educate him. The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. Much of “Frankenstein” participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns is not the one in France but the one in Haiti,” end quote. Whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed. That is such a deeply complicated question. Should Oppenheimer have held himself personally responsible for all those deaths in Japan? For the future threat of atomic warfare? Should descendents of enslavers hold themselves responsible for the institution of slavery, for all of the damage that it did? For the shockwaves it sent out? Where do we draw the line?
Mary Shelley was very familiar with consequences. If you look at the sort of antics she and Percy got up to in their youth, they just did whatever they wanted. Extramarital affairs, running off to other countries, spending all their money, going into debt, sailing off into the Italian sunset. Expectations be damned, reputations be damned. And all of these actions were followed by severe consequences, pregnancies, families disowning them, creditors hunting them down, loved ones committing suicide, drowning in a storm off the coast of Italy, “agony unutterable.” Mary was very familiar with consequences. And when we experience consequences, we want to cast blame. But I don’t think Frankenstein was really about blame. Like I said before, it forces us to sympathize with both Frankenstein (the man) and the monster. We’re not meant to blame Victor Frankenstein, we’re only meant to learn from his mistakes. Blame is futile, counterproductive even. We shouldn’t be asking “whose fault is it?” that only serves to divide us. We should be asking “how do we fix it?”
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Information used in this episode was sourced from The New Yorker, New York State Library, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Jstor, biography.com, Snopes, and Wikipedia. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
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