Writers are often asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” Fifteen years later, Mary remembered quite specifically how the idea of Frankenstein had come to her. On June 22, Byron and Shelley were planning to go on a long trip around the lake together. Though Mary made no objection to being left behind, it was another reminder that the men preferred to discuss intellectual matters with each other, rather than with her. That night, perhaps for the last time in a week or so, the group gathered again at the Villa Diodati, but instead of ghost stories, Byron and Shelley resumed their discussions of great things—“various philosophical doctrines”—while Mary, the daughter of a philosopher, remained “a devout but nearly silent listener.”
According to Mary, one of the topics that night was “the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated.” Of particular interest was an experiment said to have been performed by Erasmus Darwin. Darwin, someone said during the discussion at Villa Diodati, had “preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion.” It isn’t clear just what might have impelled Darwin to try to preserve pasta in a glass case, or what the “extraordinary means” were that caused it to move. Mary seemed aware of possible doubts when she wrote later about that evening, for she inserted the remark, “I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him.”
Listening to the conversation, Mary slipped into one of those silent reveries that took her deep within herself. “Perhaps,” she recalled thinking, “a corpse would be re-animated.” Galvanism had indicated such things were possible. Then she carried her speculations to the next level, where art began to grow. “Perhaps,” she mused, “the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”
The conversation at the villa continued long into the night, “and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest,” wrote Mary. But late as it was, she could not sleep. “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.” Though the room was pitch black, she closed her eyes tightly. That did not shut out her “mental vision,” and she saw the figure of a man, a “pale student of unhallowed arts,” whose name she did not yet know, “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.” It lived.
In Mary’s vision, the “artist” responsible for this creation was terrified by “his odious handywork.” He fled, hoping that the process he had set in motion would cease by itself, that “the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade . . . that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse.” Like Mary, the creator of the monster retreated to bed. Unlike her, he found refuge in sleep, “but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”
Just the thought of it startled her and as she opened her own eyes, terror-stricken, Mary half expected to find the monstrous creature standing over her. She looked around the darkened room where she slept, trying to fasten on something real. “I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around,” she recalled fifteen years later. “I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.” But the “hideous phantom” would not leave her mind. She tried to think of something else . . . “my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night.”
Then she realized what had happened: “I have found it!” she exclaimed to the darkness.
Frankenstein.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“A HIDEOUS PHANTOM”
DidI request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? DidI solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
—Paradise Lost,John Milton, 1667
THE MORNING AFTER her “waking vision,” Mary was able to announce that she had “thought of a story.” She needed no further inspiration, but promptly sat down at her work table and started to write. “It was on a dreary night of November,” were her first words (in the voice of Victor Frankenstein), “that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.” (This would eventually be the opening of chapter 4 in the 1818 edition and chapter 5 of the 1831 revised version of Mary’s Frankenstein.) In character as Victor, she described the creation of the monster in terms similar to her vision.
With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
The agelong dream of humanity has been realized, and death has been conquered. Yet Victor realizes almost at once that his creation is a “catastrophe.” He had gathered human parts from dissecting rooms and charnel houses with the intention of producing a perfect creature—and now it is evident that he has desperately failed. It is, he tells the reader, beyond his ability to describe
the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form. His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a more pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.
The words flowed easily. Mary had formed the basic idea of her story, and at this point she intended that it be only a short one. The scientist Victor Frankenstein discovers the mystery of life, the secret of animation. He constructs and brings to life a creature of immense size, but the nameless monster’s distorted features and terrifying proportions isolate the creature from the rest of the world. People see only his ugliness and do not realize that he has tender inner feelings. Frankenstein himself is revolted by his creation, and rejects it, leaving it to his own devices. The creature goes out into the world, seeking love from his fellow creatures but doomed not to find it.
The eighteen-year-old author, in her first attempt at fiction, had just created two characters that would be more enduring than any other fictional creations of her time.
Shelley was off boating with Byron while Mary was writing the first pages of her book. From June 22 to 30, the two poets toured Lake Geneva and its surrounding villages, seeing the literary sites and discussing poetry. Byron wanted to see the places that appeared in his favorite Rousseau novel, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse. The book was written in epistolatory form, in this case a series of passionate love letters. Rousseau’s heroine, Julie, was seduced by her tutor Saint-Preux. Pregnant, the young girl is given in marriage to a friend of her father. Her new husband is generous enough to invite the tutor to come live with them in a ménage à trois. One can see why Shelley, who was reading the novel on this trip, liked this book. The existence of the happy threesome, living at the chateau of Clarens, is ended by Julie’s death from pleurisy, which she contracted while saving her children from drowning. The book had an enormous popular success throughout Europe; like Byron, its author was suspected of portraying scenes from his own life (as the tutor) in his work.
Polidori, still hobbled
by his ankle injury, was left behind. Byron was glad to be rid of both him and Claire, whom he now found to be a tremendous nuisance. (Byron had even tried unsuccessfully to bar Claire from the villa.) There was, of course, no thought of inviting Mary on the trip: the great men were sharing great thoughts.
The two poets had much in common. Both were rebels from the English upper class who had gone to the best schools. They both denounced the English government of the time as reactionary and felt that they had been driven into exile by the rumors of scandal in their lives. But the differences between them were even more stark. Byron was a peer of the realm who had a seat in the House of Lords. Shelley was of the landed gentry, and thus not as distinguished. But while Shelley cared little for his social position, Byron really did. He was, after all, Lord Byron. The more embarrassing difference for Shelley was that he had published only two obscure poems (even Queen Mab was little known), while Byron was the most renowned poet in the world at the time. Though Byron flouted convention, he was in favor of its continued existence, while Shelley believed that the world could—and should—really be changed. Shelley wrote to his friend Thomas Love Peacock that Lord Byron “is an exceedingly interesting person and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds.” Being called “mad” by Shelley was a distinction indeed.
Shelley and Byron stopped at Clarens and saw through the window of the novel’s inn the famous grove (le bosquet de Julie) where Julie read her love letters. Byron complained that the monks had cut down the trees, forgetting that it had been an incident from a novel rather than reality. Before arriving there, the poets had experienced a real-life danger that could have come straight from Rousseau’s novel. They were on a boat near Meillerie, on the south shore of the lake, when waves broke the rudder, causing the boat nearly to capsize. According to Shelley it was “precisely in the spot where Julie and her lover were nearly overset, and St. Preux was tempted to plunge with her into the lake.” Shelley, though he loved boats, could not swim, so Byron offered to bring him to shore, which was not far away. But Shelley refused, responding to a crisis as he customarily did—with passive acceptance. According to a later account, he seated “himself quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings at each end firmly in his hands, declared his determination to go down in that position, without a struggle.” The wind finally did blow their boat to shore, but Shelley felt ashamed at his helplessness and by Byron’s generosity. “I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me,” he wrote Peacock, “and I was overcome with humiliation.”
The incident only added to Shelley’s blue mood. He was having a very dry spell creatively and had hoped this trip might unblock him. He found inspiration when the two poets reached Montreux and visited the Castle of Chillon, originally built in the ninth century. Descending into its dungeons, no longer used, Shelley and Byron saw on the walls “a multitude of names,” scrawled by prisoners “of whom now no memory remains,” Shelley wrote. He also noticed “a beam, now black and rotten, on which prisoners were hung in secret. I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man.” The thought of prisoners struggling to preserve their lost identities stuck with Shelley, and Mary later wrote that he conceived the idea for his poem “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” while on this trip. In it, Shelley reminisces about his decision to become a poet. Almost as if reassuring himself, he wrote,
I vowed that I would dedicate my powers
To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow?
With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours
Each from his voiceless grave . . .
Byron had no problem finding inspiration, and in his fashion he seized directly on what he had seen and experienced. One of those who had been imprisoned at the castle in the sixteenth century was the Swiss patriot François Bonivard. In a hotel where he and Shelley were staying, Byron tossed off a sonnet in tribute to him, and for good measure wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, a poem nearly four hundred lines long. No wonder Shelley felt intimidated.
The poets returned to Lake Geneva on June 30. Mary showed Percy what she had written, and he encouraged her to continue. During the next three weeks, she further developed her characters and plot. Many of the names that she gave her characters were taken from her own family, friends, or other associations. Percy had used Victor as a nom de plume for some of his youthful poems, and “the Victor” with a capital V, is also frequently used in Milton’s Paradise Lost to refer to God. The name Frankenstein had possibly come from the castle that Mary may have seen on her elopement trip two years earlier. She may also have been inspired by Benjamin Franklin, whose experiments with electricity were well known. Strikingly, Mary chose to call Victor Frankenstein’s younger brother William, a name charged with emotions for her. Victor Frankenstein’s cousin, whom he marries, was called Elizabeth—the name of both Shelley’s favorite sister and his mother.
In the novel, Victor is the son of Adolphus Frankenstein, a government official in Geneva; Adolphus’s wife, Caroline, is a much younger woman who had been the daughter of one of Adolphus’s friends. (Like several of the relationships in the book, this one had uncomfortable undertones of incest.) When Victor is three, his family takes in a young, orphaned cousin named Elizabeth, who his parents hope will be Victor’s future wife. They grow up feeling like brother and sister. Victor’s mother then dies as a result of nursing Elizabeth through an illness, which she herself contracts.
Like Percy, the young Victor becomes interested in the works of such alchemists as Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus. The traditional quest of alchemy was to find the philosopher’s stone—a substance that would turn base metals into gold, and the alchemists’ scientific pursuits included what today would be called chemistry. One day, when Victor is fifteen, he sees lightning strike a beautiful old oak tree during a terrible thunderstorm, much like those Mary had experienced that summer. The sudden destruction of this huge and powerful object draws Victor’s attention to the forces that modern science might unshackle. “I eagerly inquired of my father the nature and origin of thunder and lightning.” Victor says. “He replied, ‘Electricity;’ describing at the same time the various effects of that power. He constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds.” From this point, Victor Frankenstein will devote all his energies toward studying electricity and other natural forces.
When Victor is seventeen, he goes to study at the university at Ingolstadt. Mary’s choice of this city was significant: it was known for being the center of the Illuminati, a secret society dedicated to revolution and improvement of the human race. It was rumored that the members carried out experiments intended to discover the secret of immortality. Young Percy Shelley had read of the Illuminati in his “blue books” of Gothic lore and adventure. Both he and Mary had also read Godwin’s novel St. Leon, set near Ingolstadt, about an alchemist who receives not only the philosopher’s stone but an elixir of immortality.
At Ingolstadt, Victor too becomes fascinated with the forces that generate life, and he throws himself into his studies so completely that he loses interest in everything else. Though his mother, on her deathbed, had joined Elizabeth’s and Victor’s hands together as a sign they should marry, Victor makes no effort to return to Geneva to see his family or his fiancée. Uncovering the mystery of life subsumes all his other desires.
In creating Victor, Mary was borrowing a stock figure from folklore and Gothic novels—the sorcerer or alchemist who relentlessly seeks knowledge that should best remain hidden. Her innovation, however, was to turn the man of magic into a man of science, employing the brilliant insight that both magic and science promised the same things. “Whence, I often asked myself,” Victor recalls, “did the principle of life proceed
?” To answer this question he begins to study decay and death, “forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel houses.” Victor exhausts himself in
examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that . . . I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated. . . . After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.
Deftly, Mary avoids the problem of explaining what this “cause of generation” is; sufficient to state in suitably ornate prose that Victor has found it.
Armed with this knowledge, Victor sets out to build a creature of parts before animating it. He flatters himself that he is working for the good of humanity rather than his own glory. Impatience, however, sows the seeds of his failure. “As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature; that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionately large.”
The Monsters Page 18