Byron was expecting other guests. On the eighteenth, Shelley went to the villa and met Matthew Gregory Lewis, popularly known as “Monk” from the title of his most famous novel. The Monk, written when the author was only nineteen, featured the sensational sexual adventures of a Capuchin monk, who initially loses his virginity to a young novice, actually a woman disguised as a man. The book continues through rape, matricide, and incest, until finally the monk sells his soul to the devil, who as usual gets the better of the bargain. Even for a Gothic novel, The Monk was unusually lurid; in one of its most famous scenes, the central character rapes a virgin who turns out to be his sister while they are in a vault surrounded by rotting bodies.
Lewis was an heir to a West Indian fortune and traveled with a large retinue of Jamaican servants in livery. At times Byron was less than charitable about him, characterizing him as “a good man—a clever man—but a bore.” Nevertheless, he had invited Lewis to visit, partially because he was nearly as notorious as Byron himself, though he lacked Byron’s sublime talent.
At Diodati Lewis recited for them his own translation of portions of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s drama Faust. Shelley also recorded that he, Lewis, and Byron discussed ghosts, and whether they were real. Shelley was the only one who believed in the spectral, though the other two pointed out to him “that none could believe in Ghosts without also believing in God.” Shelley refused to recognize the conflict with his atheism. Lewis then told five ghost stories, which Shelley summarized in the journal he and Mary were keeping. Though all were interesting tales, it does not appear that Mary drew inspiration for her novel from them.
Mary was hard at work, now creating her monster, one of the loneliest characters in literature. Not long after the publication of Frankenstein, a stage production of the story appeared in London. Setting a precedent that most have followed in adapting it for stage and screen since then, the monster is given no lines. He never speaks. In the novel, however, he is one of the three narrators who tell parts of the story from their own viewpoints, a complex structure that foreshadows modern artistic experiments. The monster has a chance to explain himself in the way Mary knew best: with words. That such a young writer could construct such a sophisticated narrative was, in retrospect, unsurprising. Copying Byron’s manuscripts, though a tedious chore, had brought Mary very close to the elements that he forged into great poetry, and the poem that was Byron’s primary focus—the third canto of Childe Harold—was one of his finest works. Mary also brought to her own writing an enormous body of reading and contacts with some of the leading minds of the British Isles. Her active life since eloping with Shelley two years earlier had stimulated her intellectually while raising deep questions and insecurities in her psyche. Her writing gained power and maturity in the process.
And of course, though by nature quiet and retiring, Mary brought to her work a ferocious ambition to succeed. She had known for a long time that she wanted to be a writer like her parents. Shelley, whatever else his faults, had encouraged her in that goal; as Mary wrote, Shelley “was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame.”
The novel’s power stems from the monster’s ability to make the reader understand and sympathize with its plight. Mary knew its feelings well, for its life story parallels her own. First, the creature has no mother. Victor has eliminated women from the creation process, substituting the forces of science. The creature’s first experience is thus not the tender touch and nurturing breast of a mother, but instead Victor’s horror and rejection. Born with an adult body but the mind of an infant, the creature resembles Rousseau’s natural man—he is naturally good. He commits evil acts because of bad nurturing, just as in Godwin’s analysis of society. Now, Mary is saying through her fiction what she could not possibly have said to her father: she was a victim of bad nurturing as well. Abandoned at birth, the creature says, “No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses.” Through her creation, the monster, Mary is expressing her own fears and rages.
In the novel, the monster educates himself by hiding in a shed attached to a cabin in Germany, where a French-speaking family named De Lacey is living—a blind man and his two grown children, Felix and Agatha. The monster learns to speak and even to read from watching and listening to the De Laceys through cracks in the wall. In the same way, Mary had learned by listening to the intellectual conversations in her father’s house. Later, Percy read whole books to her. Listening became her style of learning; most recently she had employed it when sitting quietly while Shelley and Byron talked.
The monster, from his hiding place, discovers the power of speech: it can produce emotions—happiness, joy, love. The emotions were positive ones, because the De Laceys were a happy family, despite their poverty. In much the same way, Mary had witnessed a secure and happy home life during the two years when she visited the Baxters in Scotland, also as an outsider.
One day, a new person enters the scene: Safie, an Arabian woman who is apparently to become Felix’s wife. Felix teaches her to speak French, increasing the monster’s verbal skills at the same time. He reads and explains to her the Comte de Volney’s The Ruins of Empires, a kind of world tour of civilization. Profoundly antireligious, Volney’s work had been a major influence on Shelley’s composition of Queen Mab. (Godwin, for some reason, disliked the book.) By chance, the monster finds in the woods a case containing three other books: Plutarch’s Lives, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. The creature reads them, learning about civilization, sentiment, and morality from books. These are crucial texts, for they had a vital influence on Romanticism, on Mary, and on the monster himself. The creature admits later that he believed Paradise Lost, Milton’s great poem (some, including Byron, ranked it above Shakespeare’s plays) to be “a true history.” He comprehends that he was intended to be like Milton’s Adam, “but his state,” he says, “was far different from mine. . . . He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature . . . but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.” Instead, he turns to Satan, “for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose in me.”
In similar fashion, he learns about such concepts as honor, justice, and correct behavior from Plutarch’s Lives—a series of biographies of great figures from Greece and Rome. Finally, the monster arrives at his understanding of passion and emotion from The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe’s wildly popular 1774 novel that inspired a wave of suicides by young people, emulating the book’s hero, who shoots himself because of a tragic love affair. The books fire the monster with certainty that he knows how life should be lived, but as he proceeds through the world he finds that these ideals do not always conform with reality. Books alone were not adequate preparation for life—as Mary was herself discovering. And by pointing this out, she was pointing a finger at those, like her father and Shelley, who sometimes insisted otherwise.
Mary used a quote from Paradise Lost as the epigraph of the novel, a question that Adam asks God in Milton’s poem; implicitly, Victor’s creature asks it of his creator in Mary’s novel:
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
On the next page, Mary wrote “To William Godwin.”
The monster now reads some notes he took from Victor’s laboratory when he left Ingolstadt. They describe the process of his creation and the monstrous nature of his looks. He is filled with hatred for his creator —“the minutest description of my odious and loathsome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors. . . . I sickened as I read. ‘Hateful day when I received life!’ I exclaimed in agony. ‘Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?’” As a child, Mary too had read her father’s memorial to her mother, and thus knew much about their courtship and perhaps even her own c
onception—intimate, personal details that are kept from most children. In portraying the monster’s anger, she made the same judgment that critics of Godwin’s intended tribute did: some things are better kept secret.
When the three younger members of the De Lacey household go out for a walk, the monster decides to attempt human contact. He knows that he is ugly, but since the father of the De Lacey family cannot see, that will not matter. Given this handicap, the old man experiences the “real” monster, the one who is a thinking, sensitive being. They converse, and the monster tries to convey his secret. Unfortunately, the three sighted members of the household return and drive him away because they are horrified by the way he looks. Mary knew that her identity as the child of Godwin and Wollstonecraft had also often masked her individuality. Even Shelley, she must have suspected, loved her not for who she was but for who her parents were.
Shattered, the monster returns to his creator with a demand: he wants Victor to make him a female counterpart, someone who will love and cherish him. Victor begins the project, but before he finishes, thinks better of it and destroys the female creature. He hears the sound of footsteps where he is working and the monster appears. He threatens Victor: “Remember, I shall be with you on your wedding night.” Egocentric Victor imagines this to be a threat against himself.
The monster gets his revenge by killing those Victor loves—just as Victor has destroyed the female that the monster would have loved. First he brings about the death of Victor’s friend, Henry Clerval. Victor now makes the mistake of thinking that he will be the creature’s next target. On his wedding night, he leaves his bride Elizabeth alone while he searches for the monster. He misses the obvious: that Elizabeth is the intended victim. He hears her scream, and rushes back to their room: “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair. Every where I turn I see the same figure—her bloodless arms and relaxed form flung by the murderer on its bridal bier.”
Victor faints (as Shelley was in the habit of doing in times of stress), but then recovers to see a new, horrifying vision:
While I still hung over her in the agony of despair, I happened to look up. The windows of the room had before been darkened; and I felt a kind of panic on seeing the pale yellow light of the moon illuminate the chamber. The shutters had been thrown back; and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure of the most hideous and abhorred. A grin was on the face of the monster; he seemed to jeer, as with his fiendish finger he pointed towards the corpse of my wife.
The scene strongly recalls Nightmare, the painting by Henry Fuseli, Mary’s mother’s lover, with the creature playing the role the horse had in the picture.
Victor now devotes himself to the destruction of the monster he has created. In some ways, the rest of Mary’s story resembles Godwin’s own, most famous, novel, Caleb Williams. In that book two men, master and servant, alternately pursue and flee each other in a life-and-death struggle. At the core of the conflict in Frankenstein is a cri de coeur by the monster. “All men hate the wretched,” he says, “how then must I be hated, who are miserable beyond all living things! Yet you my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature.” As William Godwin was currently spurning his daughter.
On August 28, Byron and Shelley had a final sail together and a long walk along the harbor. Byron gave Shelley the printer’s copies of his poems, collected in a red leather quarto volume, which Shelley promised to deliver to Byron’s publisher. They included some of his finest poetry—canto 3 of Childe Harold, “Darkness,” “Prometheus,” The Prisoner of Chillon, “The Dream,” “Monody on the Death of Sheridan,” and “Stanzas to Augusta.” The next day the Shelley household packed up and was off to Geneva and the trip home.
Claire left a letter for Byron, writing, “My dreadful fear is lest you quite forget me.” She cautions him as a wife might have, “One thing I do entreat you to remember & beware of any excess in wine,” but then returns to her wounded mode, “now don’t laugh or smile in your little proud way for it is very wrong for you to read this merrily which I write in tears. . . . I shall love you to the end of my life.”
When the travelers reached the port of Le Havre, Mary must have reflected that this was the birthplace of her half-sister. Here it was that Mary Wollstonecraft had given birth to Fanny Imlay, had hoped to find happiness with Gilbert Imlay. A melancholy thought to return home on. Mary’s summer of creative inspiration was over.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I SHALL BE NO MORE . . .”
He sprung from the cabin-window . . . upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.
— Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1818
WITH THE WORDS ABOVE, Mary ended her masterpiece. Her monster disappears into the Arctic mists, his ultimate fate unexplained. The creature had promised to do himself in, saying,
Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall . . . seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.
But he still might be out there.
The ending the monster chose—the one Mary chose for him—echoed Mary’s life in the four months after she, Percy, and Claire returned to England. Two suicides weeks apart shattered Mary’s peace of mind, and the family’s reaction to both was oddly inappropriate. The first death was kept as secret as possible; the note left behind indicated a wish to be forgotten, and that was granted to the extent that even the body was abandoned. The second death resulted in what should otherwise have been a joyous occasion; in almost obscene haste, Mary and Percy would celebrate their wedding.
By allowing the readers of her novel to think that the monster might still be alive, continuing his lonely search for love and understanding, Mary permitted herself to think that perhaps those who had willingly left life behind also—somewhere, somehow—lived. She had, as challenged, written a ghost story after all.
The Shelley party arrived back in England on September 8, 1816, landing at Portsmouth instead of London via the Thames—for Claire, now showing her pregnancy, could not risk appearing in London. (Victor Frankenstein would also leave the British Isles from this port, avoiding London because he cannot bear recalling the times that he shared there with the now-murdered Henry Clerval.) Shelley went on to London to try to clear up his financial affairs. Claire and Mary set out for Bath, a fashionable resort town where the pregnant Claire would be among strangers. She assumed the title “Mrs.” when they found lodgings.
Soon Percy joined them. Even from a distance he tried to get Byron to assume financial responsibility for Claire, but without success. Mary was disturbed that Shelley and Claire had kept from her the secret of Claire’s pregnancy for so long. Feeling shunted into the position of outsider, Mary would include secrecy among the sins that Victor Frankenstein committed in his pursuit of forbidden knowledge.
In Bath, Mary took art lessons and started reading the novels of Samuel Richardson—Pamela, Clarissa,and Sir Charles Grandison. She was considering ways to lengthen Frankenstein so that it could be published as a novel and these epistolatory novels, told in the form of a series of letters, probably influenced her. In Clarissa, Richardson presents events from multiple points of view, and Mary would frame her novel in a similar way, adding not only length but additional complexity and nuance. Another book from Mary’s September reading was Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel. It must have been fun to read for anyone, like Mary, who knew Byron.
Mary and Claire had informed the Godwins they were staying at Bath for Claire’s health. Fanny—quiet, melancholy eldest child of the family, who seemed always to b
lend into the background—had written Mary two letters in late September and October. In one, she urged her half-sister to persuade Shelley to give more money to Godwin, for “it is of the utmost consequence for his own [Godwin’s] and the world’s sake that he should finish his novel and is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?” Godwin had already been informed that the money Shelley expected to get from his grandfather’s estate was being held up, and Mary noted in her journal, “stupid letter from F.”
Fanny was the only child in the Godwin household with no natural parent living there, and although Godwin had treated her as his own, she often felt lonely and isolated. She also suffered because she was caught in her position of emissary between the Godwins and the runaways Mary and Claire. On October 9, a depressed Fanny left London and went to Bristol, which was not far from Bath. From here she wrote two letters. One, to Godwin, read in part, “I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.” This worried Godwin enough that it actually propelled him into action: he went to Bristol to look for her. At the same time, Mary and Percy received another letter, which has been destroyed. Mary wrote in her journal, “In the evening a very alarming letter comes from Fanny—Shelley goes immediately to Bristol—we sit up for him until two in the morning when he returns but brings no particular news.” Later inserted in the same day’s entry are the grim words “Fanny died this night.”
In a seaside hotel at Swansea, Fanny had taken an overdose of laudanum, the poison of choice of her mother. She left a suicide note on the table next to her body, which read, “I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as . . . [here the signature was torn off].” There would be eerie echoes of this note in Mary’s novel. In the monster’s final speech, he tells of his intended suicide with the words, “when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.”
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