The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Of course, Mary needed no other goad than her intelligence and social conscience, for the real-life circumstances of women were reason enough to protest. Women had very restricted opportunities. Indeed a married woman had no rights after her wedding; her very being and legal existence was incorporated into that of her husband. Britain’s Matrimonial Act of 1770 called for the prosecution as witches “all women . . . that shall . . . impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty’s subjects by means of scent, paints . . . false hair . . . high shoes, or bolstered hips.” Many people had little sympathy for the cause of women’s rights, for they saw the humiliations inflicted on them as the will of God.

  Socially, women were hemmed in by the customs and standards society set for the “Proper Lady,” as a twentieth-century scholar, Mary Poovey, has called the ideal woman of that time. Etiquette books, intended for the young and for those who wished to “improve” themselves, described precisely how women should act. Women of the aristocracy were not limited by these values, but for the rest of women—particularly the middle class—they were essential to respectability. The ideal of the Proper Lady strongly handicapped ambitious women like Mary, for it ranked the virtues of modesty and moderation higher than any talent or ability. It even held in low esteem women who indulged in vigorous activities; sports of any kind were denied to them. The Proper Lady could only entertain herself by activities such as sewing, piano playing, singing, needlework, and painting. Modesty was carried to extremes, for no proper woman could admit to sexual urges. The double standard of sexual morality was everywhere the norm; for a woman to lose her virginity outside of marriage was equivalent to dishonor—but men were expected to seduce them if they could. In the words of an eighteenth-century text for the education of young women: “This [virginity] lost, every thing that is dear and valuable to a woman, is lost along with it; the peace of her own mind, the love of her friends, the esteem of the world, the enjoyment of present pleasure, and all hopes of future happiness.”

  Encouraged by Joseph Johnson, Mary used her newfound fame to take up the cudgels for her sex. Thoughts rushed from her brain as she wrote her magnum opus in just six weeks. Mary handed A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to the printer in January 1792. In it, she launched a frontal attack on the Proper Lady and defined as “negative virtues” such Proper Lady ideals as patience and docility. She urged women to demand their rights and declared that she wanted to “rouse my sex from the flowery bed, on which they supinely sleep life away.” Wollstonecraft declared that women were human beings before they were women, and they were entitled to equal civil and political rights as well as opportunity for education and economic advancement. “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves,” she wrote. She boldly criticized no less an exalted personage than Rousseau for his notions of female inferiority.

  Mary asserted that the differences between men and women were mainly the result of upbringing and education, not of biology. She insisted that women had the same capacity for learning that men did and she wanted girls to have equal opportunity for learning and education, preferably in coeducational schools outside the home. Recognizing the connection between equality and becoming financially independent, she insisted that girls be encouraged to aim for success in the professions.

  Perhaps because of her own mixed feelings, Mary played down the importance of sexual relations, advocating friendship between men and women, rather than passion. (She was soon to change these views.) She constantly struggled with the conflict between her need for love and her desire to dominate —“to be first.” Moreover, she wanted the respect and rewards that society gave to the Proper Lady, though she refused to abide by the standards that society demanded in return. In short, she wished to have it both ways.

  With the publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she reached the height of her fame. It became an immediate bestseller and made Wollstonecraft one of the most famous women in Europe. French, German, and Italian versions appeared. (The sister-in-law of Abigail Adams, wife of the man who would become the second president of the United States, demanded that Abigail buy her a copy when she accompanied her husband to London.) Not all the attention was favorable. Hannah More, a prolific writer of pious plays, stories, and poetry, wrote to Horace Walpole: “I have been much pestered to read the Rights of Women [sic] but am invincibly resolved not to do it . . . there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title. How many ways there are of being ridiculous! I am sure I have as much liberty as I can make a good use of, now I am an old maid, and when I was a young one, I had, I dare say, more than was good for me.”

  By 1792 Wollstonecraft had changed her appearance again, allowing her hair to assume its natural curl and cutting it in a fringe in the latest French style. Her new relaxed clothing reflected French revolutionary sensibility, as well as medical approval: Erasmus Darwin had written that less restrictive clothing styles were good for one’s health, prompting many relieved Englishwomen to cast off their stays.

  Mary’s newfound fame had not lessened her obsession with Fuseli. In a desperate move, she went to his home and asked his wife to allow her to live there in a kind of ménage à trois. Despite Mary’s willingness to take second place for once in her life, Sophia rejected her offer and warned her never to visit the house again.

  Crushed, Mary wrote to Joseph Johnson, “I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! . . . There is certainly a great defect in my mind—my wayward heart creates its own misery—Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child—long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.” Ironically, Mary’s daughter would have to suffer the same “threesome” problem with her husband, Percy Shelley.

  Mary escaped this humiliation by going to France in December 1792, arriving as the Revolution was entering a new, more radical phase: France was now at war with Prussia and Austria, and by a narrow margin the Revolutionary Convention had sentenced King Louis XVI to death, something that shocked even many of the original revolutionaries. Yet publicly, the situation seemed calm, even joyous. The common people felt they had triumphed. Dr. John Moore, an Englishman who lived in Paris at this time, reported,

  The public walks are crowded with men, women, and children, of all conditions, with the most gay, unconcerned countenances imaginable. A stranger just come to Paris . . . would naturally imagine from the frisky behaviour and cheerful faces of the company he meets that this day was a continuation of a series of days appointed for dissipation, mirth, and enjoyment. He could not possibly imagine that the ground he is walking over [had been] . . . covered with the bodies of slaughtered men; or that the gay lively people he saw were so lately overwhelmed with sorrow and dismay.

  Mary’s fame preceded her, and she soon made friends among the small English community in Paris, where she found many involved in love affairs. A freer attitude toward sex was part of the spirit of the revolution. Nuns and priests were encouraged to marry, for celibacy was regarded as unhealthy; unmarried mothers were helped rather than blamed; women argued for their right to divorce their husbands. Mary also found kindred spirits among the Girondists, members of the more moderate revolutionary faction who often met at the Jacobin Club, particularly the wife of a Girondist government minister, Madame Roland, who was one of the social and intellectual leaders of revolutionary Paris.

  But danger loomed. In January 1793, the king was guillotined, an act that led to a declaration of war from England and Spain, countries whose monarchs felt their own necks threatened. In France, foreigners now began to encounter hostile stares; the government told landlords and innkeepers to report any suspicious activity, especially by English and Spanish residents. Mary’s friends whispered stories of people being taken from their homes by revolutionary guards in the middle of the night. She slept with a burning candle in her room, fearful of what might happen.

  In these tense circumstan
ces Mary met the American Gilbert Imlay, who would bring a personal revolution into her life. Mary was thirty-three and Imlay a bachelor of thirty-nine. Born in New Jersey, he had fought in the American Revolution and was now a businessman and writer. Tall, handsome, and skilled at seduction and flattery, he could claim literary kinship with Mary, for he was the author of a book, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, and at the time she met him, he was completing a novel, later published as The Emigrants. He told Mary openly that he had lived with other women and that he intended never to marry. Mary’s fame as well as her attractiveness and lively spirit were attractions that led him to court her.

  As Mary learned more about his business interests, Imlay took on a romantic image. He was involved in a shady project to organize a French expedition against the Spanish colony in Louisiana, and he may also have been engaged in smuggling goods through the blockade that Britain, now openly hostile to the French government, maintained off the coast of France. Mary began to idealize him as a model of Rousseauian simplicity, as Europeans liked to imagine Americans (a pattern set by Benjamin Franklin’s wearing animal skins and posing as a frontiersman during his visits to France). Besides, she was growing older and the humiliation she suffered over Fuseli led her to overlook Imlay’s faults. By April, the two were always together and they soon consummated their love. According to her, she experienced orgasm—what she called “suffusion”—for the first time.

  The pace of events in France pushed the relationship along. After the king’s head fell, no one was safe, and the Revolution began to turn on its own. In May and June, the Girondists were rounded up; Mary’s close friend Madame Roland was among those arrested. To protect herself, Mary moved to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. Here, in the summer months of 1793, she and Gilbert enjoyed the height of their affair. Now infatuated, Mary wanted to make the relationship permanent, but Imlay suddenly departed for the port of Le Havre to carry out one of his shady business deals. Not wishing to be alone, Mary moved back to Paris, where conditions were even more dangerous than before. Robespierre, the most radical French leader, had come to power and instituted the phase of the Revolution known as the Terror. Madame Roland was one of thousands of former supporters of the Revolution who now went to the guillotine. All British citizens fell under suspicion, and to protect Mary, Imlay had registered her as his wife and an American citizen. In October, the English who had remained in Paris—including many of Mary’s friends—were placed under arrest, but Mary was protected by her new status.

  Imlay was still spending much of his time in Le Havre, and Mary now realized she was pregnant: “I have felt some gentle twitches,” she wrote Imlay, “which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care.—This thought has . . . produced an overflowing of tenderness toward you.” Meanwhile Mary worked on a new book, A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, further endangering herself, for even her new citizenship status would not protect her if the work were to be discovered. She walked to the Place de la Revolution daily and witnessed the guillotine in action. When she expressed her horror at the gruesome sight, others in the crowd warned her to be silent.

  Her days were taken up with writing: in her letters to Imlay she poured out her feelings: “I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you.” She hinted that she wished an invitation to join him in Le Havre. Receiving none, she acted on her own, finding a carriage and driver to make the journey. There, on May 14, she gave birth to a daughter. Mary named the girl Fanny after her closest friend, Fanny Blood. Imlay signed the birth certificate, still claiming he and Mary were married.

  They spent the next three months together, happy ones for Mary as she basked in the feeling of being wife and mother. She and Imlay talked of settling in America, but by this time he was growing tired of playing at marriage and his finances required attention. He told Mary he had to go to London on business. She returned to Paris, which was safer now that Robespierre had himself become a victim of the guillotine and the Terror was over.

  Mary suffered through a very cold winter, waiting for Imlay to return but receiving nothing but excuses. Her own letters became more insistent, and she wrote to him much as she had earlier to Jane Arden. On January 9, 1795, she told him, “I do not chuse to be a secondary object.” Little Fanny was a demanding child, although caring for her distracted Mary from allowing despair to overwhelm her. Finally she decided to return to England, writing Imlay from Paris, “My soul is weary,—I am sick at heart.” When Mary reached London in April, she and Fanny and a French maid moved into a house Imlay rented for them, but he was cold to her; he had taken a new mistress, a pretty actress. After he told Mary frankly that he did not want to live with her and Fanny as a husband and father, Mary attempted suicide by taking laudanum. It was a cry for help, for she had sent suicide notes to both Imlay and her mentor Johnson. In Mary’s novel Maria, when the heroine is deserted by her lover, she also takes laudanum, but a vision of the fictional Maria’s baby girl makes her vomit the poison. In real life, Imlay, who had received Mary’s suicide note in time, came to revive her.

  As in her affair with Fuseli, Mary was blinded by her passion, still hoping to save her relationship with Imlay despite all indications that it was over. He was planning to go on a business trip to Scandinavia and she volunteered to take his place. Perhaps wishing to get rid of her, he agreed, giving her some assignments to carry out. She set off with Fanny and her nursemaid, visiting Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and then continuing on to Germany. During this trip she kept writing to Imlay, hoping to revive his feelings for her. At the same time, she analyzed herself keenly:

  Love is a want [need] of my heart. Aiming at tranquility, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul. . . . Despair, since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid . . . the desire of regaining peace (do you understand me?) has made me forget the respect due to my own emotions—sacred emotions, that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy—and shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.

  When she returned, she found Imlay was now openly living with another woman. Mary’s humiliation was now both complete and public. She again sought escape through suicide—this time with more determination. She wrote to Imlay, “I would encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last. I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek.” On a rainy afternoon in October 1795, Mary carried out her plan. She rented a boat and rowed herself up the Thames to the Putney Bridge, which she had learned was less crowded than Battersea Bridge, the closest span to her flat. Leaving the boat, she walked back and forth along the bridge in the pouring rain to make sure that her clothes were so wet that she would sink under the waters. As she threw herself into the dark cold river, she expected death to embrace her kindly, the way Goethe had described it in The Sorrows of Young Werther: “I do not shudder to take the cold and fatal cup.” (Werther was a bestseller that had prompted many suicides throughout Europe and was later to be one of the books that the monster reads in Frankenstein.) But as water filled Mary’s lungs, she began to choke and was in pain before losing consciousness. A man who had seen her leap off the bridge jumped in and saved her. He took her to a tavern, where a doctor revived her. Death, apparently, would not accept her sacrifice.

  Imlay offered financial help but Mary was too proud to accept it. She saw Imlay for the last time in 1796 and wrote to him the next day, “I part with you in peace.” She resumed her writing career to earn her keep and get on with her life. From the Scandinavian trip came a charming book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The act of writing it gave her some respite from the turmoil that raged within her, and she began to come to grips with Imlay’s true character, realizing that the relationship could never have worked out the way she had wanted. Perhaps most importantly, Letters won the heart of Willi
am Godwin, whom Mary would meet a second time, with happier results than the first.

  William Godwin described himself accurately as “bold and adventurous in opinions, not in life.” Though not as well known today as he once was, Godwin was one of the most important radical thinkers of his time. His courage did not extend to his relations with women, and it was only after becoming involved with Mary that he explored the intricacies of love. Their short life together provided for each of them the emotional and intellectual companionship that they had lacked. For their daughter Mary Shelley, who never knew her mother, their mutual affection was an ideal that continually inspired her fiction and her own desires.

  Godwin was born March 3, 1756, in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire Fens—a bleak area where the North Sea constantly threatens to overwhelm the land. He was the son and grandson of clergymen—so-called Dissenters who were stricter in their beliefs than the members of the Church of England. This devout religious background created an emotional rigidity that made William more comfortable with books than with the love and affection of other people. It fostered his shyness and coldness and did long-term psychological damage that he would pass on to his daughter.

  William was the seventh of thirteen children, many of whom did not survive to adulthood. His father, John Godwin, was the minister of the Wisbech Independent Chapel and took in paying pupils to supplement his meager income. Because of the large family, William got little attention even as a young child. He was sent to a wet nurse for the first two years of his life and later, like Mary Wollstonecraft, was to fault his parents for this neglect. His formative years were marked by poverty and a dreary existence. They put a chill into his soul that would never leave him.