by Muriel Spark
I would also trace, in her emotional and intellectual attitudes, the influence of her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; whilst the effect of Shelley on her life I would show to be manifest in the idealisation and ennoblement with which she invested her own tragic situation, and in the ruthless pursuit of her vocation after Shelley’s death.
It has been said that Mary Shelley lapsed into the conventional salon habituée. This, I would argue, is questionable, since an attentive examination of her letters would indicate that her social activities were undertaken simply to further her literary ambitions, and that never was she misled in the matter of basic values. Her letters show, too, an intellectual breadth remarkable in a woman of her times, or indeed, of any time; despite her essential femininity – and she was often frivolous and flirtatious – she handled Shelley’s romantic fluctuations with composure and not a little humour.
Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been an ardent feminist who, although she was at pains to set forth her theories on the rights of women, was herself temperamentally unsuited to the application of her doctrines. It was her daughter, Mary Shelley, who realised these ideals by a natural acceptance of her status as a creature the equal of, yet different from, the male of her times.
[written 1950]
* Reissued in 2013 by Carcanet Press, with a new introduction by Michael Schmidt and including Muriel Spark’s original ‘Proposal…’, reproduced here.
Mary Shelley: Wife to a Genius
A hundred years ago, on the first of February, 1851, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley died, aged fifty-four. She had started life with some unique advantages and some commonplace disadvantages. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were both famous literary figures of the day. People like Lamb, Hazlitt and Coleridge were among the old familiar faces of her childhood, and she heard a rendering of The Ancient Mariner from the poet’s own lips. These were her initial advantages. Of the disadvantages the most unfortunate was the death of her mother in giving her birth, and then the advent of Godwin’s second wife. It was probably partly because her home life was so distasteful that Godwin’s daughter eloped with the most unique advantage offered by the Godwin ménage. This was the poet Shelley whom she later married.
Being Shelley’s wife was a mixed blessing, he being a genius. On the whole, Mary Shelley counted it a blessing, with a conviction which increased throughout her long widowhood. At the same time, this talented, sensitive, reserved woman suffered keenly from a sense that she was unpopular; for the most part she was justified in this belief. It was the sensitivity and the reserve (as often is the case) which made her unpopular, but some of her acquaintance resented her talent – or at least the use to which she put it after Shelley’s death. It was remembered that her father Godwin was the rationalist philosopher whose principal work, Political Justice, had made him the idol of the Progressives. It was remembered that her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was the perpetrator of The Rights of Women and of a passionate, one-sided love affair the documents of which had been placed on record for the more exclusive spirits of enlightenment to exult in. It was remembered still more of Mary Shelley that she was Shelley’s widow, and he in turn was then remembered rather for his libertarian views than for his poetry. These were the things that Mary Shelley’s friends considered when they considered her. They observed she was not visibly warm and passionate like her mother; that she was neither an advocate for the rights of women nor of men. They looked upon her, in fact, as a reactionary; and this is still often said of her in various ways.
My own admiration for Mary Shelley is based on her quite exceptional writings; as for her personality, those very qualities seem now to commend her, which made her unpopular in her time. I mean, of course, unpopular among the small group of lesser intellectuals who exalted Shelley for the wrong reasons. Other eminent or talented people whom she met after Shelley’s death – the poet Beddoes was one of them – held her and her work in great respect, if they did not offer her close friendships. What I like about her, then, is that she had the strength of character to reject what she thought immoderate in the doctrines in which she had been scrupulously educated. Mary Shelley’s life was unusually beset all along with frustration, disappointment and tragedy. In her widowhood she had to support herself and her son Percy by her writing. Yet she refused to mitigate her hardships by turning out propaganda for the family ‘cause’. It would have secured her many friends and relieved her bitter loneliness had she done so. But she even refused to defend herself against criticisms on this score. She did, however, record her case privately and at length in her diary; the following few sentences of which are representative:
… with regard to ‘the good cause’ – the cause of the advancement of freedom and knowledge, of the rights of women, etc. – I am not a person of opinions. That my parents and Shelley were of the former class, makes me respect it. I respect such when joined to real disinterestedness, toleration, and a clear understanding. My accusers, after such as these, appear to be mere drivellers. For myself, I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow creatures, and see all in the present course, tending to the same, and rejoice, but I am not for violent extremes, which only bring on an injurious reaction.
This is plain sense. But though she did not respect her accusers, she felt bitter about their attitude to her:
To hang back, as I do, brings a penalty. I was nursed and fed with a love of glory. To be something great and good was the precept given me by my Father: Shelley reiterated it… If I had raved and ranted about what I did not understand; had I adopted a set of opinions, and propagated them with enthusiasm; had I been careless of attack, and eager for notoriety; then the party to which I belonged had gathered round me, and I had not been alone. But since I had lost Shelley I have no wish to ally myself to the Radicals – they are full of repulsion to me – violent without any sense of Justice – selfish in the extreme – talking without knowledge – rude, envious and insolent – I wish to have nothing to do with them.
It was difficult for her to turn her back on the Progressive set; it was more difficult still to enter another set. She was not very clear, in any case, about what she wanted of life – her statement only makes it clear what she did not want. If asked what she wanted, she would have answered, ‘friends, society’, but though she often lamented the lack of these, her notions of society were very vague, and she had no positive ideas about the type of people she wanted to make friends with. Shelley’s friends, Hogg, Jane Williams, and even Hunt and Trelawney, all failed her in varying degrees. The upper-middle-class, recalling the scandal of her elopement with Shelley, Harriet Shelley’s suicide, Shelley’s atheism, etc., would have nothing to do with her. She would have despised them anyway; serious, studious and intelligent as she was.
Many have observed that her diaries and letters give the effect of a singularly dissatisfied temperament. They do give this effect, though her diaries and letters are not the whole story; they tell only of her somewhat disordered, though genuinely exacting, outward existence. She had opportunities for marriage after Shelley’s death, but could not bring herself to consider anyone not of Shelley’s stature. She had intimated that she would consider Washington Irving, whom she had met; but when he learned of this he did not seem interested. Prosper Mérimée, however, who sent her an amorous letter, received a polite snub. She turned down Trelawney with emphasis.
It is true that she had a melancholy nature, and she knew it. But she would have had to be extremely optimistic not to have been affected by the extraordinary disasters that beset her. Three out of her four children died in infancy. Then Shelley’s death was followed by a long struggle to educate their son Percy, whom she sent to Harrow and Cambridge. The meanness of Shelley’s father towards her is well known; a small allowance was granted her as a loan on account of Shelley’s inheritance. This fell due when Sir Timothy died, he having lingered till it was too late for Mary Shelley to benefit from it. In the few remaining years
of her life, when for the first time she was relieved from financial anxiety, she was subjected to a series of blackmails that finally wrecked her. Even Percy was a disappointment. He was a good, dull son whom she dragged all over Europe in an effort to launch him in society. But Shelley’s son bought a trumpet to play on while his mother was visiting the art galleries; pined for England and a sight of ‘the new flying machine’, and on his return talked and thought of entering Parliament. He finally gave up the idea, married a nice girl who had some money, and settled down to do practically nothing.
Was Mary Shelley’s life a failure, then? She would have denied this. The eight years she spent with Shelley were constantly in her mind – too constantly, and in too idealised a form for her own peace, perhaps, but this memory was her chief consolation. But there is another, very important factor in her life, which her letters and diaries do not reveal, and which commentators on Mary Shelley are apt to forget. That is, her constant creative activity. She was well aware that her life was not turning out as she had hoped; but she loved, and lived in, her work when her power was at its height, and before her life encroached altogether upon it. As early as 1834, when she was looking through the pages of her diary she wrote, ‘It has struck me what a very imperfect picture…these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being a record of my feelings, and not of my imagination…’
The record of her imagination is to be found in its most successful forms in her novels Frankenstein and The Last Man (a work which deserves to be better known). Frankenstein, the first English novel in which a scientific theme had been combined with the Gothic horror convention, made Mary Shelley’s name as a writer, and was highly and lengthily applauded by Sir Walter Scott in Blackwood’s. The book is now an English classic, and even pre-war film-goers will remember the story of the scientist who, discovering the principle of life, created a monster who pursued him to ruin. It is a horrifying interpretation of science as man’s destroyer, an anticipation of what we now know in our own time.
Mary Shelley was in her teens when she wrote Frankenstein, which was inspired by conversations between Shelley and Byron. But it was not until after both Shelley and Byron were dead that her very fine work The Last Man was written. This is an amazingly powerful story about a plague which gradually spreads across the earth, annihilating all but one man. None of her subsequent novels and stories approach these two books for imaginative strength. The themes alone outweigh their many artistic defects; they are remarkable works, greatly neglected by students of nineteenth-century fiction.
Apart from the valuable and extensive notes written by Mary Shelley when she edited Shelley’s complete poems in 1839, her writing declined. She lost her creative will; she lost vigour; in her search for ‘life’ and a nebulous ‘society’, she lost her vision of life and society. (That she did have this vision, is clear from her admirable handling of vast social issues in The Last Man.) Outward circumstance partly contributed to this condition, but also there was the fact that she could never formulate, or even follow instinctively, any positive philosophy. The themes of her novels bear this out – they show her strong and lucid intellect moving slowly towards negative conclusions.
[1951]
Frankenstein and The Last Man
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was [for many years after her death] best known as the second wife of the poet Shelley; and she was remembered also as the child of that exceptional couple – William Godwin the rationalist philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the passionate, not-so-rational reasoner on behalf of the Rights of Women. It is [still] as well to remember these facts, for they help to explain the most memorable thing [now recognised] about Mary Shelley: she was the author of two remarkable novels, one being the well-known Frankenstein and the other, [for many years] hardly known at all, The Last Man. She wrote other books, of course, besides editing Shelley’s poems with extensive notes, but in these two novels she did something in English fiction which had not been done before; and that was to combine rational and natural (as distinct from supernatural) themes with the imaginative elements of Gothic fiction. She initiated, in these books, that fictional species which H.G. Wells made popular in his early novels, and which he called ‘fantasies of possibility’ and we call science fiction.
Frankenstein, like those early books by Wells, is a novel of scientific speculation, in which the germ of prophecy necessarily resides; and while The Last Man isn’t concerned with science, it perpetuates the central prophetic idea of Frankenstein. Wells later came to the conclusion that fiction is not a suitable vehicle for prophecy, but I think he had something more literal in mind than I have when I suggest that Frankenstein and The Last Man belong to prophetic fiction. What Wells meant was the sort of hit-or-miss gamble of conjecture that enabled him to prophesy television as early as 1898, but which also led him to announce that ‘long before the year A.D. 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound’. Mary Shelley also tried her hand at this sort of thing. In The Last Man, published in 1826, she describes the Royal Family as adopting the name of Windsor; but her calculations were out when she said that by the end of the twenty-first century a sailing-balloon would be the swiftest means of travel, plying between London and Scotland in only forty-eight hours.
This isn’t the type of prophecy I mean. Mary Shelley had a certain intuitive far-sightedness by which she anticipated the ultimate conclusions to which the ideas of her epoch were heading – an epoch in which fixed religious beliefs had been shaken by eighteenth-century rationalism, and were now being challenged by science and progress.
Her association by birth with Godwin and by marriage with his disciple Shelley were, of course, conditioning factors to her way of thought. She was educated to think according to the principles of her father’s monumental work, Political Justice, and to approach all ideas with rigid logic. But she was also gifted with a fertile imagination, well-nurtured by Shelley, and she was embarrassed by a pessimistic temperament. Her thought was pragmatical where Shelley’s was abstract. These factors combined, in her work, to produce something far removed from Godwinism. In fact, as I shall try to show, Frankenstein and The Last Man are unconscious satires of Godwin’s brand of humanism.
Frankenstein carries the glorification of man by man to its rational extreme. That had been Godwin’s aim in Political Justice where his theories evolved from his belief in the perfectibility of man. But his daughter showed that the rational extension of a theory isn’t necessarily, in practice, the inevitable one; she showed how far the simplicity of a theory fell short of the complexity of man. Her conclusions were arrived at imaginatively, but because she used a rational method to demonstrate them, her critique of rationalism was cogent. There are many improbabilities in Frankenstein but nothing that could not be explained by natural processes; the horror of Gothicism is there, but none of its supernatural devices. In The Last Man, this blend of horror and realism is employed too; and there the humanist concept is made to lose all meaning. Both novels are prophetic in an implicit and allegorical sense; by which I mean also that the strictures of Godwinism implied in them are proved to have been sound. But to get at these implications I should like to look briefly at the stories themselves.
The story of Frankenstein occurred to Mary Shelley, when, still in her teens, she visited Switzerland with Shelley. They had Byron for a neighbour, and ‘many and long’ she tells us, ‘were the conversations between Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener’. They spoke of some ghost stories they had been reading and also discussed recent scientific theories. These two topics, Mary Shelley says, formed the direct inspiration of Frankenstein; and in fact, these talks contained all that was needed for the Gothic-rational synthesis she afterwards brought about.
The story tells how Frankenstein, while a young student, discovers the principle of life and dedicates himself to manufacture a human creature. There was plenty of scope in this situation for harro
wing-up the reader. The narrative is invested with the murk and mist – it reaches the fever-pitch – of Gothic atmospherics, as Frankenstein records his task of assembling the component parts of the body. All of which, however, is directed towards other ends than just the raising of a shudder, as Gothic fiction had tended to do. The effect here is to show the incongruity between Frankenstein, an educated, civilised being, and the desperate lengths he is prepared to go to realise his ambition. To assemble the body, he tells us,
I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave … tortured the living animal to lifeless clay … I collected bones from charnel-houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame … The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials …
Frankenstein, then, creates this being, a man who breathes and moves. Only then are the consequences apparent to him; the scientist feels an abrupt revulsion when he sees what a hideous monster he has brought to life.
The theme, from this point, is one of pursuit, in which Frankenstein and his Monster alternately occupy the roles of hunter and hunted; until finally pursuit becomes the obsession of both. The Monster, stalked by Frankenstein across the frozen Arctic, urges and even sustains his creator for the chase, by leaving messages to say where food can be found, or to warn Frankenstein to wrap himself in furs.
Now the notable thing about Frankenstein, is that after the creation of his Monster, his own character changes. No longer detached, no longer following a way of life he has ordered for himself, Frankenstein becomes a weak, vacillating figure. He is, in fact, no longer free, but is bound to the Monster, as the Monster is to him, by a relationship which renders Frankenstein at once master and slave. Master, in his role of creator, yet slave in that a portion of his faculties are lost to him, and embodied in his creature. Frankenstein says,