Soon he has collected enough parts to arrange into a body. His egotism shows again as he describes his expectations: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.
“Pursuing these reflections,” Victor continues, “I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” Here, Mary takes Victor’s dream a step farther to pursue one of her own fantasies: the idea that her first baby could—even now—be brought to life again.
All of Victor’s research is done in the utmost secrecy; this, along with the language Mary used to describe his work, indicated that there is something shameful about his experiment. Victor asks,
Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? . . . I collected bones from charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather a cell, at the very top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation. . . . The dissecting room and the slaughterhouse furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased. I brought my work near to a conclusion.
Secrecy about a shameful matter must have been much on Mary’s mind that summer. Just before Shelley and Byron left on their boat trip, Claire apparently confessed to Shelley the secret of her pregnancy, and who the father was. Shelley, as Claire hoped, conveyed the news to Byron. Byron’s reaction can only be guessed at, but while on that same trip Shelley took the time to change his will, leaving some twelve thousand pounds to Claire and “any person she may name.” Mary had apparently not been informed of Claire’s condition (though one wonders if she might not have guessed the truth), and later Byron, Shelley, and Claire would gather to discuss the custody and care of the child—pointedly excluding Mary.
We now come to the “dreary night of November.” The “dull yellow eye of the creature” opens, and after two years of work, Victor sees the results of his labor and runs away. In doing so, he utterly fails in his role as the creator, the parent, of the monster. Victor runs from his laboratory to his bedroom and throws himself on his bed, where he has a most disturbing dream. “I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel.” This image was directly inspired by one of the ghost stories Byron had read earlier, but Mary heightened it to include the incestuous angle and the transformation of one’s beloved. Creation and death are linked in Frankenstein’s dream, in Mary’s novel, and in Mary’s life. Her own birth accompanied the death of her mother, and her own motherhood accompanied the death of her child.
In the novel, it is just at this moment that Victor opens his eyes and sees the creature holding up the curtain of the bed. Here Mary was adapting an image that she could have seen often in her childhood, for the scene almost duplicates an illustration that William Blake did for one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s children’s books. In Blake’s copperplate engraving, there are two people lying on the bed—the children of the male figure who looks down on them. Living with him in debtor’s prison, they have caught a fever and died. Earlier, the man’s wife and other children had also perished in morbid circumstances. In the engraving, the man’s dog—his only remaining companion—licks at his hand. Later, the dog is shot by a passing gentleman whose horse was frightened by it. It was not a happy story, and the illustration must have stuck in Mary’s mind.
Again Victor responds to the creature’s mute appeal for affection by running away. Ironically, at the culmination of his research, the moment of his triumph, all Victor’s pleasure in life ends. He becomes sick and never again is gratified by anything. Instead the product of his knowledge—his creation—leads to the deaths of those he loves. The monster disappears from Victor’s account at this point in the story, and Victor tries to forget him, although of course the reader turns the pages waiting for his return.
Victor is nursed back to health by his good friend Henry Clerval, also a student at Ingolstadt. Clerval, the better side of Shelley, is generous and clear-eyed. “[H]is conversation was full of imagination,” Victor relates, “and very often, in imitation of the Persian and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion.” After several months of recovery, Victor receives a letter from his cousin Elizabeth, who persuades him to return home to Geneva. Before he can do so, however, a letter from his father informs him of the murder of Victor’s younger brother William, strangled in Plainpalais Park, the place where revolutionaries had held executions in Geneva.
Readers must ask why Mary gave the first victim in her novel a name that had so many references for her. William was, first of all, the name of her beloved father, her original teacher. It was the name she herself would have borne, had she been the boy her parents expected. Later, that name went to her half-brother, the son her despised stepmother was able to give to Mary’s father. Finally, and most astonishing, it was the name of Mary’s own baby, then nursing at her breast. The William in the novel is even described as looking the same way Mary’s son looked: “with sweet laughing blue eyes, dark eye-lashes, and curling hair. When he smiles, two little dimples appear on each cheek, which are rosy with health.” Which of these Williams did Mary have in mind as she envisioned the monster’s huge, powerful hands closing around his throat, choking the life out of him? Whatever the answer (and it may be all four), the fictional moment certainly reflects the intensity of Mary’s emotional conflicts.
Victor starts for home to grieve with his family. As he is approaching Geneva, flashes of lightning signal the onset of a storm over the Jura mountains. “While I watched the storm,” Victor says,
so beautiful yet terrific, I wandered on with a hasty step. This noble war in the sky elevated my spirits; I clasped my hands, and exclaimed aloud, “William, dear angel! this is thy funeral, this thy dirge!” As I said these words, I perceived in the gloom a figure which stole from behind a clump of trees near me; I stood fixed, gazing intently; I could not be mistaken. A flash of lightning illuminated the object, and discovered its shape plainly to me; its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity, instantly informed me that it was the wretch, the filthy daemon to whom I had given life. What did he there? Could he be (I shuddered at the conception) the murderer of my brother? No sooner did that idea cross my imagination, than I was forced to lean against a tree for support. The figure passed me quickly, and I lost it in the gloom. Nothing in human shape could have destroyed that fair child. He was the murderer! I could not doubt it.
Victor realizes something else too: he shared the guilt of murdering his innocent younger brother. “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.” With these words, Victor Frankenstein realizes that the creature is his doppelgänger—an insight that seems to have extended to readers and audiences, for today the name “Frankenstein” is popularly applied not only to the creator, but to the monster, who is never named in the book.
The full title of Mary’s novel was to be Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus. The figure of Prometheus, the rebellious Titan who stole fire to help humankind
and then was punished by the gods, preoccupied all the writers that summer in Geneva. One of the books the Godwins had published when Mary was a child was a collection of classical myths; Mary’s favorite had been the Prometheus story, a variant of which had the Titan molding a man from clay and using fire to breathe life into his creation. Shelley had been reading aloud from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, translating from the Greek as he went along. Two years later, he would begin writing his continuation of the story, Prometheus Unbound, in which Prometheus—a figure Shelley identified with—is freed from the punishment to which Zeus has condemned him and is hailed as the savior of the human race.
Byron’s much shorter poem, “Prometheus,” written in the summer of 1816, was probably inspired by Percy’s reading of the Aeschylus play. His attitude is one of defiant resignation to fate:
Thou art a symbol and a sign
To Mortals of their fate and force;
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter’d recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.
Mary was interested in yet another interpretation of Prometheus—the myth as told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, which she had read the year before. Prometheus here was a figure who brought humans into life:
Whether with particles of heavenly fire,
The God of Nature did his soul inspire;
Or Earth, but new divided from the sky,
And, pliant, still retain’d th’ ethereal energy;
Which wise Prometheus temper’d into paste,
And mix’t with living streams, the godlike image cast . . .
From such rude principles our form began;
And earth was metamorphosed into Man.
Here, Prometheus forms a man from clay and animal parts and stirs it into life with “particles of heavenly fire” he has stolen from the chariot of the sun. In Frankenstein, Mary would employ the vocabulary of science, but the spark of life would effectively remain the same.
In late July, Mary, Percy, and Claire decided to go on a trip to Chamonix to view the spectacular scenery of mountains and glaciers. (Byron turned down their invitation, apparently not wishing to give Claire the opportunity to put him in a compromising position.) The trip had all the hallmarks of a Shelley brainstorm, because it was certain to be dangerous, and completely unsuitable for the pregnant Claire to embark on. The rainy weather had swelled the Arve river, which they would cross, to the point of flooding. Many of the roads in the region were washed out and there was an ever-present danger of avalanches because of wide temperature swings. At dusk the local residents built bonfires to protect their crops because even though it was late July, the nighttime temperature dropped close to freezing—all part of the odd weather that summer.
The threesome set out on July 21 on horseback. Baby William, at least, was spared the journey, remaining at home with his nursemaid. Shelley wrote, “The day was cloudless & exceedingly hot, the Alps are perpetually in sight, & as we advance, the mountains which form their outskirts closed in around us. We passed a bridge over a river which discharges itself into the Arve. The Arve itself much swollen by the rains, flows constantly on the right of the road.” They passed through some little towns and the scenery became more “savage” and “colossal.”
The next day they switched to mules, for they were heading into ever-higher regions. Mary wrote, “[T]his appeared the most beautiful part of our journey—the river foamed far below & the rocks & glaciers towered above—the mighty pines filled the vale & sometimes obstructed our view. We then entered the Valley of Chamounix [sic] which was much wider than that we had just left.” There, they had their first sight of a glacier, the Glacier des Bossons, and Mary commented on the strange shapes the vast ice sheet took. “[A]s we went along,” she added, “we heard a sound like the rolling of distant thunder & beheld an avelanche [sic] rush down the ravine of the rock.” Everything she was seeing would be both inspiration and material for the book she was writing.
Signing the register at the inn where they stayed that night, Shelley wrote “atheist” in Greek after his name; for good measure, he listed his destination as “l’enfer,” or hell. A later traveler, an English clergyman, noted this “horrid avowal of atheism,” and mentioned it in a book he wrote about his trip through the region in the same month. Later yet, Byron was accused of having written the damning identifications, and a literary hubbub ensued, with accusations and corrections filling the pages of English magazines. People did not take such things lightly.
As they proceeded up the slopes of Montanvert (“Green Mountain,” something of a misnomer that summer), they saw signs of nature’s destructive power. “Nothing can be more desolate than the ascent of this mountain,” wrote Mary. “[T]he trees in many places have been torn away by avelanches [sic] and some half leaning over others intermingled with stones present the appearance of vast & dreadful desolation.” The rain fell in torrents, soaking them to the skin, and they decided to turn back. On the way, Shelley fell, hurt his knee, and fainted. Finally they managed to stagger back to the inn, where Mary took the opportunity to work on her novel. On July 24 she noted, “I . . . write my story,” the first reference to Frankenstein in her journal.
The next day was even more fruitful for literary inspiration. They reached the summit of Montanvert, from which they looked down on the Mer de Glace (“Sea of Ice”), an immense glacier. As Mary described it: “This is the most desolate place in the world—iced mountains surround it—no sign of vegetation appears except on the place from which [we] view the scene—we went on the ice—It is traversed by irregular crevices whose sides of ice appear blue while the surface is of a dirty white.” Mary recorded that she was “pleased and astonish[ed]” by the lonely, barren spot. It matched her mood, for it was in this “world of ice” that she would set the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his creature. Here the monster, as emotionally desolate as the landscape, would force his creator to listen to the story of his struggle to become loved.
Heavy rains made the travelers decide to return to their lakeside villa. Two days later, on July 27, they reached the Villa Diodati, talked till midnight with Byron, and then returned to their own cottage. Mary wrote, “kiss our babe & go to bed.”
The following day, Mary noted that it had been exactly two years “since Shelley’s & my union.” This anniversary may have prompted Mary to add a detail that advanced the plot of her book and gave new insight into the monster: He demands that Victor Frankenstein create a mate for him to end his isolation.
Mary also was getting ready for Percy’s birthday. On the first of August she made him a balloon, presumably from cloth or paper. Shelley was fond of such toys; he and Harriet had once used small hot-air balloons to randomly distribute copies of one of his revolutionary tracts. The next day, Mary went to Geneva with Percy to buy him another present, a telescope. On August 4, Shelley turned twenty-four. He and Mary went out in the boat and she read to him the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid—an interesting choice, for it tells the story of Dido, whose love for Aeneas is doomed because he leaves her. A high wind ruined the balloon launch; the source of the hot air that was intended to cause it to rise instead set the balloon on fire.
That was symbolic of the general mood, for two days earlier several things had happened that would cast a pall over the rest of the summer. First, a letter arrived with the unwelcome news that Sir Timothy Shelley was making it difficult for his son to receive money that Percy had expected as part of the settlement of his grandfather’s will
. This meant Mary, Claire, and Percy would soon have to return to England, instead of continuing on the extensive European tour they had planned.
The same day, Byron called Claire and Percy to a meeting at the Villa Diodati. It was made clear that Mary was not included in the invitation, as noted in her journal. Byron’s purpose was to declare that his affair with Claire was over. He accused her of not being sexually passionate and he appears also to have been annoyed by her Godwinian beliefs. These were obviously pretexts; the truth was, he was tired of her and because, unlike Lady Caroline Lamb, Claire had no powerful friends, he could dismiss her easily.
Except, of course, for the fact that she was carrying his child, and that was the topic of the discussion. Byron wanted to put the child in someone else’s care—he suggested his half-sister Augusta, of all people—but Claire persuaded him to promise to raise the child himself, implicitly acknowledging it as his own. Its birth was to remain secret so that Claire would escape the disgrace. Particularly important to Claire was the need to conceal the illegitimate baby from her mother. Byron agreed that the child should stay with him at least until it was seven. Claire could visit as the “aunt” of the child, which would not hurt her reputation, but it was understood that Claire would never be part of the Byron household.
Percy and Claire could no longer keep the situation a secret from Mary, who could not have been pleased, for the new agreement with Byron entrapped the others, as Claire could not be left alone during her pregnancy. Nevertheless, they decided to remain at the lake a while longer before starting back to England. Mary took the opportunity to continue working on her novel. In the evenings they still often went to Byron’s. On August 13, however, something happened to change that. Mary wrote in her journal “. . . afterwards we all go up to Diodati,” and then underneath she added the single word “war.” She never again went to Byron’s villa, though Shelley and Claire did. What happened is impossible to say, but there was clearly some argument that alienated her.
The Monsters Page 19