The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Godwin did not even mention the wedding in his journal. One of his chief objections to marriage was “co-habitation,” the necessity for husband and wife to live together, denying “peace and privacy” to both. The newlyweds avoided that by continuing to occupy two residences. Though Mary and three-year-old Fanny, who called Godwin “Papa,” moved into his home, Godwin maintained a separate office up the street where he could work privately during the day. Mary insisted that Godwin was still free to eat out with anyone he chose and that she was free to raise her children as she wished. They continued to communicate frequently by letter. Such was their answer to the problem of marriage “monopoly.”

  Meanwhile the two looked forward to the baby; they were sure it would be a boy and planned to name him William. Mary regained the enjoyment in motherhood and married life that she had experienced so briefly with Imlay. She wrote to Godwin in June 1797, “I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie. Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you for ever.”

  The weather during that summer of 1797 was freakish; the strange phenomena would not be equaled until 1816. England experienced terrific storms that had been spawned by volcanic activity in the South American Andes. Unusually high tides struck the English coast, flooding the low-lying areas. The land was plagued by storms in which the lightning was so severe it seemed “to threaten the earth with universal conflagration.” On the night of August 14, a comet appeared over London, bathing the city with its glow for the next eleven clear nights of calm weather. Mary and William called the comet their child’s friendly star.

  Since Mary’s first pregnancy had gone well, she had no fears about this one. When she felt the onset of labor pains in the early morning of August 30th, she called Mrs. Blenkinsop, the midwife in charge of the famous Westminster Lying-In Hospital. She sent the first of several notes up the street to Godwin, informing him of her condition: “I have no doubt of seeing the animal [as she referred to the baby] today; but must wait for Mrs. Blenkinsop to guess at the hour. . . . I wish I had a novel, or some book of sheer amusement, to excite curiosity, and while away the time—Have you any thing of the kind?”

  Mary’s final note to Godwin reads, “Mrs. Blenkinsop tells me that I am in the most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery—But that I must have a little patience”—it ends there, without a period at the end, or even her signature. Whether Mary was aware she was quoting her mother’s last words, cannot be known. In any case, they were the last she herself would ever put on paper.

  Wollstonecraft had a slow and painful labor, but a baby girl was born late that night. At three in the morning of the next day, William was told to find a doctor, for the placenta had not come out. When the doctor arrived, he had to take the placenta out by hand, for it had broken into pieces. With no painkillers the pain was excruciating; Mrs. Blenkinsop had to hold Mary’s shoulders while the doctor worked for hours. Because he did not sterilize his hands or equipment, the doctor’s treatment caused an infection that would kill Mary eleven days later.

  For the first few days, a weakened Mary nursed her newborn, determined that her child should receive the maternal nurturing that she herself had not. By the end of a week Mary’s strength had further declined and she suffered a fit of shivers that were so violent that the bed shook. When her condition worsened, the doctors believed that too much milk was the problem. The baby and Fanny were put in the care of Maria Reveley, a neighbor. Puppies were applied to Mary’s breasts to draw off the milk; the doctors hoped that this might stimulate her womb to contract so the rest of the placenta could be expelled. By the time a surgeon came, hoping to remove the last parts of the placenta, Mary was too weak for surgery. Godwin stayed with her in the final days, giving her wine to ease her pain. “Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven,” she murmured at one point. “You mean, my dear,” he replied, “that your symptoms are a little easier.” He was at her bedside when she died September 10. He entered in his diary only the words, “20 minutes before 8” followed by a long series of dashes. For once, words failed him.

  Five days later, he was still too distraught to go to her funeral. She was buried in the churchyard at St. Pancras, where she had been married five months earlier. Godwin wrote to a close friend: “I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. Do not—if you can help it—exhort me or console me.”

  The political and literary journals of the time noted the obvious irony that Mary Wollstonecraft, the advocate of equality between the sexes, died as a result of giving birth. As the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review pointed out, her manner of death marked the differences between the sexes and pointed out the “destiny of woman.” This kind of vicious reaction only underscored the effect Mary had wrought. She had challenged many of the prejudices of society in her short but productive life—doing so at great cost to herself. Her life and courage would be a source of inspiration and pride for her daughter, who would grow up with a name fraught with significance, reflecting both of her famous parents. The daughter, like her mother, would challenge propriety and pay a high price. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was aware from childhood that her birth was responsible for the death of her mother. This trauma and guilt would be one of the central factors in her life, and would find an outlet in Frankenstein.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “NOBODY’S LITTLE GIRL BUT PAPA’S”

  Reaching the cascade . . . my soul was hurried by the falls into a new train of reflections. The impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrent from the dark cavities which mocked the exploring eye, produced an equal activity in my mind: my thoughts darted from earth to heaven, and I asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery . . . my soul rose, with renewed dignity, above its cares—grasping at immortality . . . I stretched out my hand to eternity, bounding over the dark speck of life to come.”

  —Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark,

  Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796

  MARY GODWIN WAS the “dark speck of life to come.” She started life with a loss and it left her with an unsatisfied need for love, for her father was incapable of that kind of nurturing. Instead, she learned in the most intimate manner that birth and creation can be fraught with dire consequences.

  From childhood, Mary turned inward to find consolation, as a way of dealing with the emotional chaos she often felt. The unspoken fear that her birth had caused her mother’s death would give great urgency to Mary’s need to create a new, perfect human being to take her place. Like Mary, both Victor Frankenstein and his monster would be motherless.

  Godwin’s background and temperament had not prepared him for being a parent, especially a single one, and he realized it. His fears and doubts show in a letter to a friend, Anthony Carlisle: “One of my wife’s books now lies near me but I avoid opening it. I took up a book on the education of children, but that impressed me too forcibly with my forlorn and disabled state with respect to the two poor animals left under my protection, and I threw it aside. . . . If you have any . . . consolation in store for me, be at pains to bestow it.”

  The first act Godwin was able to perform with his newborn daughter was a scientific one—at least, in terms of the science of the day. Before Mary was three weeks old, Godwin had her examined by a physiognomist named Nicholson, a practitioner of the Lavater method. Mr. Nicholson reported from assessing Mary’s face that she “possessed considerable memory and intelligence” and her eyes, forehead, and eyebrows showed a “quick sensibility, irritable, scarcely irascible.” Her mouth, which Mr. Nicholson found “too much employed” (she was crying), did indicate “the outlines of intelligence. She was displeased, and it denoted much more of resigned vexation than either scorn or rage.”

  G
odwin finally dealt with his wife’s death by deciding to recount her life story. This was the family way: write, write, write in the face of adversity. The day after Wollstonecraft’s funeral, he began to sort through her papers. Before the end of the month, Godwin had begun to write what he believed would be a loving and candid re-creation of his late wife’s life. He saw it as an act of dedication to her memory that would also serve as an expression of his deepest feelings. Godwin was inspired by the autobiography of a man both he and his wife had admired: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But Rousseau’s famous Confessions was the brutally frank account of a man writing about his own life. Godwin was relating the life story of another person, and he would go farther than most readers thought he decently should have.

  Using collected letters and notes, Godwin described all of Mary’s lovers, with a candor that ignored common delicacy. He sought letters from those other lovers; one was Henry Fuseli, who opened a drawer and showed him a bundle of Mary’s correspondence but then slammed it shut, saying, “Damn you, that is all that you will see of them.” Besides Mary’s love life, Godwin discussed her suicide attempts and pregnancies, and praised her rejection of Christianity. (This was not actually true; she had retained her faith in the Church of England.) The intensity of Godwin’s sorrow is reflected in the great detail he devotes in the Memoirs to his daughter’s birth and his wife’s death. Writing in a white heat, he finished the manuscript in less than three months; it was published in January 1798.

  Godwin’s painfully candid Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” caused a sensation. His revelations about Mary Wollstonecraft’s love affairs with other men caused a scandal in the increasingly conservative England. The Tory press had a field day, calling Mary a whore and Godwin a pimp. The European Magazine wrote that the Memoirs would be read “with disgust by every female who had pretensions to delicacy; with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality; and with indignation by anyone who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion.” Even more biting was the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, which summed up its editors’ feelings about the book with this ditty:

  For Mary verily would wear the breeches

  God help poor silly men from such usurping b——s.

  Richard Polwhele, a poet and clergyman, in his antifeminist poem The Unsex’d Females, gave voice to sentiments that many people felt but refrained from saying: “I cannot but think that the Hand of Providence is visible in her life, her death, and in the Memoirs themselves. As she was given up to her ‘heart’s lusts,’ and let ‘to follow her own imaginations,’ that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct might be manifested to the world.” Others were appalled that Godwin could expose his dead wife to such scorn. Wollstonecraft’s friend William Roscoe wrote:

  Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life,

  As daughter, sister, parent, friend and wife

  But harder still in death thy fate we own,

  Mourn’d by thy Godwin—with a heart of stone.

  Wollstonecraft’s reputation would remain tarnished by Godwin’s Memoirs until the middle of the twentieth century. Wollstonecraft’s ideas of equality were so severely mocked by critics of Godwin’s intended memorial that subsequently feminists would choose narrower goals, such as suffrage for women, rather than the broad demand for equal rights that Wollstonecraft had recommended. Though her daughter did not read the criticisms at the time they were published, she became aware of them, and even suffered personally. The Memoirs and her mother’s reputation for immoral sexual behavior gave little Mary an unsavory notoriety even as a child. The world truly was aware of her before she was aware of the world.

  Godwin was truly shocked by the response to his tribute, and it deepened his sorrow and depression over his wife’s death. Having enjoyed his marriage, and wanting to find a mother for his two children, Godwin began to court a Mrs. Elwes, a widow, in the spring of 1799. His attentions cooled when he learned that his neighbor Maria Reveley’s husband had died, and Godwin proposed to her. Though she had enjoyed caring for the children, she had no desire to marry Godwin. When he shifted his attentions back to Mrs. Elwes, she also turned him down. Next he tried to revive a friendship with the writer Elizabeth Inchbald by sending her an advance copy of his novel St. Leon with a note asking to visit her. She answered that she could only see him in company. “While I retain the memory of all your good qualities,” she wrote, “I trust you will allow me not to forget your bad ones.” This was hardly the response that Godwin had hoped for; worse yet, she enclosed an unfavorable critique of the book. Godwin was crushed—so depressed that he could barely go outside. He wrote in his journal, “This day I was desirous of calling on someone, to learn more exactly the character of the book, but had not the courage . . . to look an acquaintance in the face.”

  Godwin’s declining fame and influence brought about a loss of self-confidence that led to the deterioration of his health. The first symptoms were seen at Johnson’s dinner parties, where he would drop off to sleep or lose consciousness. It was the onset of narcolepsy, which would worsen over the years. During an attack, he would lose control of his muscles, his jaw would drop, his legs lose their strength, and then he would crumple into sleep. He had the first of these fits in February 1800, and they would recur sporadically for the rest of his life.

  Some of his old friends now were shunning him for political reasons. The French Revolution which he so admired had mutated into an aggressive nationalistic crusade. French troops were fighting successfully all over Europe, and in England as well as other countries, revolutionary supporters such as Godwin were reviled. Godwin was spat on in the street—to many English, he represented atheism, sexual immorality, and treason.

  He was no less hard on himself than others were. In 1798, he made a personal assessment of his character:

  I am tormented about the opinion others may entertain of me; fearful of intruding myself, and cooperating in my own humiliation . . . and by my fear producing the thing I fear. . . . This, and perhaps only this, renders me often cold, uninviting and unconciliating in society. . . . My nervous character . . . often deprives me of self possession, when I should repel injury or correct what I disapprove. Experience of this renders me, in the first case a frightened fool, and in the last a passionate ass.

  Godwin hired a female housekeeper to take care of the children while he was working. His friend James Marshall, who often served as Godwin’s secretary and literary agent, took the place of a parent when Godwin was away on long trips. Godwin tried to keep in touch with his family through letters. On one occasion he wrote to Marshall:

  Their talking about me, as you say they do, makes me wish to be with them, and will probably have some effect in inducing me to shorten my visit. It is the first time I have been seriously separated from them since they lost their mother. . . . Tell Mary I will not give her away, and she shall be nobody’s little girl but papa’s. Papa is gone away, but papa will very soon come back again.

  As Mary grew from infancy to childhood, she desperately wanted to please her father and resented his offering any attention to others. His method of disciplining her when he disapproved of her behavior was to retreat into a calm silence. Such treatment devastated Mary. Craving affection, she received coldness. Later, in her most personal novel, Mathilda, written at a time of loss and desolation in her private life, she would portray an incestuous father-daughter relationship. Mathilda’s mother died a few days after her birth, intensifying the relationship between father and daughter, which appears to have been close to wish fulfillment.

  When Mary was four, Godwin found a second wife—or rather, she found him. At the time, the Godwins lived at the Polygon, a recently built housing development on the outskirts of London. The community was a set of balconied houses on the edge of a field. One day in 1801, Godwin’s new next-door neighbor, an attractive woman in her mid-thirties nam
ed Mary Jane Clairmont, called to him from her balcony: “Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin?” What man could resist?

  Clairmont was a bit of a mystery woman. She called herself a widow, but the identity (and fate) of her two children’s father or fathers is uncertain. Even her last name is in doubt—she registered herself under two different names when she and Godwin were married. Clairmont had a three-year-old daughter named Clara Mary Jane; this child would later call herself Claire. Mrs. Clairmont also had a son about Fanny’s age named Charles. Charles was apparently the son of Karl Gaulis, a Swiss, but Clara Mary Jane may have had a different father. In later life Claire tried many times to find out the secrets of her birth, apparently without success.

  Godwin was quite a catch for Mary Jane Clairmont, and she soon reeled him in. They were married in a church, apparently the bride’s decision, in December of that year. James Marshall was the only witness present. The new Mrs. Godwin soon expelled him from the household.

  Four-year-old Mary was devastated by her father’s remarriage. She resented having to share his love with another and was jealous of her new mother. Moreover, there were obvious signs of the new bond between husband and wife: Jane was soon pregnant. Their first child was stillborn, but that was followed by a second child, born March 28, 1803. He was christened William—the namesake that William Godwin had expected from his first wife, the boy that little Mary had not been.

  In Mary’s eyes, Jane Clairmont would always compete with her mother’s ghost. The two women were very different people—Wollstonecraft was emotional, almost manic-depressive, but Clairmont was shrewd and competent, ambitious, and a manager. She proved to have a head for business, but lacked warmth, at least toward her stepchildren. Many of Godwin’s friends shared his daughter’s dislike for her new mother. The children’s book author Charles Lamb referred to her as the “widow with green spectacles,” comparing her to Robespierre, who was also noted for wearing tinted eyeglasses. Usually generous in his opinions, Lamb called her “That damn’d infernal bitch Mrs. Godwin.” Another visitor was more unkind, calling her “a pustule of vanity.”