Mary’s journal stops after she wrote the date for the fourth of June. By then she must have known that the doctor could not save her son. Little Willmouse died at noon on June 7, a victim of the malaria epidemic that was sweeping Rome. Mary may have thought of the lines she wrote in Frankenstein: “William is dead!—that sweet child, whose smiles delighted and warmed my heart, who was so gentle, yet so gay.” He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. Amelia Curran was asked to set a small stone pyramid over William’s grave—but even that tender gesture would bring another more crushing revelation to Mary three years later.
With Willmouse’s death, Mary felt her happiness had ended. They soon left Rome for Leghorn with Mary clutching the painting of William that Amelia Curran had made. She wrote to Amelia on June 27, saying that she could think of nothing else but her dead child. “I am going to write another stupid letter to you—yet what can I do—I no sooner take up my pen than my thoughts run away with me —& I cannot guide it except about one subject & that I must avoid.” Mary asked about the tomb for William that Amelia had promised to decorate: “near which I shall lie one day & care not—for my own sake—how soon—I shall never recover [from] that blow—I feel it more now than at Rome—the thought never leaves me for a single moment—Everything on earth has lost its interest to me.”
On June 29, Mary wrote to Leigh Hunt’s wife, Marianne: “I never know one moments ease from the wretchedness & despair that possesses me. . . . I feel that I am no[t] fit for any thing & therefore not fit to live . . . William was so good so beautiful so entirely attached to me—To the last moment almost he was in such abounding health & spirits.”
Percy also mourned his son. He wrote to Thomas Peacock on June 8, “Yesterday after an illness of only a few days my little William died. There was no hope from the moment of the attack. You will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not write to them—It is a great exertion to me to write this & it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should neve[r] recover any cheerfulness again —.” He more easily found expression for his grief in poetry.
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid, —
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art not—if a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother’s grief and mine.
Where are thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;—
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion —
William’s death plunged Mary into such sorrow and depression that it destroyed some of her feelings toward her husband. She withdrew emotionally and transformed her grief into anger against him—a silent, separating coldness that reflected the way Godwin had punished her. Percy’s carelessness and egotism, which had once marked him as a poet unlike other men, now seemed merely cruel and selfish to her. Mary found it hard to be interested in lovemaking at such a time.
Her depression may have, on the other hand, actually increased Percy’s ardor. In a poem he wrote—keeping it secret from her—he described her “Mourning in thy robe of pride, / Desolation—deified!” He urged her to make the most of the moment in sensual delight:
Ha! thy frozen pulses flutter
With a love thou darest not utter,
. . . Kiss me;—oh! thy lips are cold;
Round my neck thine arms enfold —
They are soft, but chill and dead;
And thy tears upon my head
Burn like points of frozen lead.
Yet he never addressed Mary’s needs and the causes of her sorrow, and in another poem he wrote—this one specifically for her eyes—he complained about them.
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one —
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
It is almost superfluous to say that William Godwin acted at his worst during this, the saddest moment of his daughter’s life. Despite her tragedy, he was determined to manipulate her to get money out of her husband. On learning of William’s death, Godwin wrote Mary two letters; the first is lost; Shelley may have destroyed it. But we can gauge its contents by a reference to it in a letter Percy sent to Leigh Hunt:
We cannot yet come home. Poor Mary’s spirits continue dreadfully depressed. And I cannot expose her to Godwin in this state. I wrote to this hard-hearted person, (the first letter I had written for a year), on account of the terrible state of her mind, and to entreat him to try to soothe her in his next letter. The very next letter, received yesterday, and addressed to her, called her husband (me) “a disgraceful and flagrant person” tried to persuade her that I was under great engagements to give him more money (after having given him £4,700), and urged her if she ever wished a connection to continue between him and her to force me to get money for him.—He cannot persuade her that I am what I am not, nor place a shade of enmity between her and me—but he heaps on her misery, still misery.—I have not yet shewn her the letter—but I must.
After Godwin heard about Mary’s depression, he wrote her that if she persisted in her “selfishness and ill humour,” those people close to her “will finally cease to love” her. Once again, Godwin threatened what she always feared most, the same punishment he had used in her childhood: the withdrawal of love.
The kindest view of Godwin is that he was appealing to Mary’s higher nature, urging her to assuage her grief through stoicism. It is difficult, however, to find any sensitivity in his words when he scolds her, “I had thought you to be ranked among those noble spirits that do honour to our nature. Oh! what a falling off is here! . . . you have lost a child; and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, and all that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of three years old is dead!”
A year later Percy would warn Godwin about the effect his letters had on Mary: “Your letters,” he wrote, “from their style and spirit . . . never fail to produce an appalling effect on her frame.”
The summer of 1819 was one of the lowest points in Mary’s life. Although only twenty-two, she had experienced enough tragedy and loss for a lifetime. Her experiences led to thoughts of suicide, and probably only the fact that she was again pregnant kept her going. News of the success of Frankenstein may have raised her spirits a bit. In August, five months after the publication of the book, Thomas Love Peacock wrote Shelley, “I went to the Egham races. I met on the course a great number of my old acquaintance, by the reading portion of whom I was asked a multitude of questions concerning Frankenstein and its author. It seems to be universally known and read. The criticism of the Quarterly, though unfriendly, contained many admissions of its merit, and must on the whole have done it service.” As a postscript to a letter Percy sent to Peacock in July, Mary asked, “What has been the fate of the 2 vessels that sailed for the north pole?” indicating that her curiosity about the scientific background of her novel was still alive.
Mary began to deal with her grief the only way she was able to—by writing. On the fourth of August, she began two new projects. One was a new journal, in a new book. “I begin my journal on Shelley’s birthday,” she wrote. “We have now lived five years together & if all the events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy—but to have won & then cruelly have lost the associations of four
years is not an accident that the human mind can bend without much suffering.”
At the top of the page, Mary had written from memory a Shelley poem that seemed to reflect her awareness that she needed to put the past behind her:
That time is gone for ever—child —
Those hours are frozen forever
We look on the past, & stare aghast
On the ghosts with aspects strange & wild
Of the hopes whom thou & I beguiled
To death in life’s dark river.
The waves we gazed on then rolled by
Their stream is unreturning
We two yet stand, in a lonely land,
Like tombs to mark the memory
Of joys & griefs that fade & flee
In the light of life’s dim morning.
Willmouse had died but perhaps even worse, the original William, Mary’s father, threatened to withhold his love from her. So, on the same day that Mary began a new journal, she started to write a novel in which she would reclaim that love. In something like five weeks, she completed Mathilda, her most personal book. It dealt with the topic of father-daughter incest. Perhaps she was inspired by Shelley, who was putting the finishing touches on a play, The Cenci, about a historical Italian family that had practiced incest. He had originally heard the story while they were visiting the Gisbornes; at the time Percy suggested Mary write a novel on the subject. Then in April, in a museum in Rome, the Shelleys and Claire had seen a portrait of the daughter of the Cenci family, Beatrice. Claire, who probably knew of Byron’s affair with his half-sister, wrote Byron, “I am sorely afraid to say that in the elder Cenci [the father] you may behold yourself in twenty years hence but if I live Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.” So the topic was much on everyone’s mind.
Mary’s new novel was again told by a first-person narrator. Mathilda was a woman whose mother had died “a few days after my birth.” Her father, overcome with grief, left Mathilda to be raised by her cold, unfeeling aunt. The theme of abandonment is here as in Frankenstein, for it resonated with the deepest feelings of Mary’s own life. Mary skewers Godwin with this description of the father in the novel:
He was a sincere and sympathizing friend—but he had met with none who superior or equal to himself could aid him in unfolding his mind, or make him seek for fresh stores of thought by exhausting the old ones. He felt himself superior in quickness of judgement to those around him . . . he became at the same time dogmatic and yet fearful of not coinciding with the only sentiments he could consider orthodox . . . at the same time that he strode with a triumphant stride over the rest of the world, he cowered, with self disguised lowliness, to his own party.
Mathilda’s father returns sixteen years later and finds that his daughter is willing to forgive him. They move to London, but when a young man courts Mathilda, her father discovers, to his horror, his own attraction to her—a sexual rather than a paternal love. At first he treats her coldly, trying to suppress his desires, but she is shattered by his abrupt change in attitude. When Mathilda confronts him, he confesses what his true feelings are. She is horrified: “One idea rushed on my mind: never, never may I speak to him again.” (The worst punishment she could imagine, obviously.) In shame, the father leaves a very long suicide note (“. . . rise from under my blighting influence as no flower so sweet ever did rise from beneath so much evil”). He then drowns himself.
Mathilda goes to Scotland, where she lives for two years in virtual isolation, feeling suicidal. Then she meets a young man, a Poet with a capital P, named Woodville, who encourages her to have a more positive approach to life. Woodville, clearly modeled after Shelley, is depicted as if Mary were trying to remind herself why she originally loved the man who was her husband:
His genius was transcendant [sic], and when it rose as a bright star in the east all eyes were turned towards it in admiration . . . He was glorious from his youth. Every one loved him; no shadow of envy or hate cast even from the meanest mind ever fell upon him. . . . His heart was simple like a child, unstained by arrogance or vanity . . . To bestow on your fellow men is a Godlike attribute—So indeed it is and as such not one fit for mortality;—the giver like Adam and Prometheus, must pay the penalty of rising above his nature by being the martyr to his own excellence.
Woodville’s fiancée has died a few months earlier, but after meeting Mathilda his spirits rise. “He soon took great interest in me, and sometimes forgot his own grief to sit beside me and endeavour to cheer me.” Being with him is good for Mathilda too: “Woodville for ever tried to lead me to the contemplation of what is beautiful and happy in the world.” In a spasm of despondency, however, she proposes to him one day that they commit suicide together—she even prepares the laudanum. He explains to her all the reasons for living, persuading her that they must do so. Some of these sound like arguments Mary must have made to herself during her periods of depression.
While Woodville is away nursing his sick mother, Mathilda contracts tuberculosis. Knowing she has only a short time to live, she devotes her last energies to writing the manuscript that is this novel. The pain of Mary’s own life emerges. Mathilda writes as she prepares to die: “I am alone . . . the blight of misfortune has passed over me and withered me; I know that I am about to die and I feel happy—joyous.—I feel my pulse; it beats fast; I place my thin hand on my cheek; it burns; there is a slight, quick spirit within me that is now emitting its last sparks. I shall never see the snows of another winter.” As the book ends, the dying Mathilda’s thoughts return to her father. “I go from this world where he is no longer and soon I shall meet him in another.”
Mary sent the manuscript to Godwin in 1820. Maria Gisborne, who brought it to him, told Mary that he had found the subject “disgusting and detestable.” Though his daughter had sent it to him to publish, Godwin put the manuscript away—a gesture made all the more remarkable because he would have been sure to make money on the book’s publication, given the success of Frankenstein. It is, however, hard to see how Godwin could have reacted otherwise. The only question that remains is how conscious Mary was of the feelings toward Godwin that prompted her to write Mathilda. Those emotions were clear enough to others; no one in the Shelley family ever attempted to publish this work, and though Mary was to write and publish several more novels during her lifetime, it took Mathilda almost 150 years to see print.
Percy was also hard at work. In Rome, he had spent much of his energies writing a poem that would retell the Prometheus myth from a more optimistic perspective, one that would reflect the Godwinian vision of humankind continually progressing. Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is a very long verse play that deals with the triumph of good and love over evil, his attempt to write a work comparable to Paradise Lost. Though Percy chose the same model as Mary did in her book, the two Shelleys came to completely different interpretations of the myth. Percy persisted in his vision of a society ever moving toward greater and greater perfection, foretelling a future utopian society that was brought about by Prometheus’s sacrifices. Mary had come to a different conclusion, one which grew stronger over the years. She saw the folly of man’s attempts at immortality and overweening ambition and found them to be destructive rather than constructive urges. The Promethean figure in her work—Dr. Frankenstein—destroys himself and those he loves while failing in his quest to help humanity. In arriving at that insight, Mary was intellectually outgrowing both her models for Dr. Frankenstein: her father and her husband.
As the time drew near for Mary to give birth, the Shelleys traveled to Florence so that she could have the best possible medical care. Dr. Bell was to be there and Mary wanted to make sure that she had a safe delivery. But when her time came, Bell was sick and unavailable. On November 12, Mary had an easy two-hour labor before her “small but healthy, and pretty” baby appeared. The son was named Percy Florence Shelley; just as Mary had given her first son her father’s name, she named this one after her husband. He was baptized in a church—this must have been a
t Mary’s insistence—and his middle name came from the city where he was born.
For Mary the arrival of another son brought a small end to her suffering, but she never completely recovered from the deaths of Clara and William. She still avoided emotional commitment with her husband and even to a degree with her new baby because of her strong fear that he would be taken from her as well. She expressed these feelings to Marianne Hunt: “he is my only one and although he is so healthy and promising that for the life of me I cannot fear yet it is a bitter thought that all should be risked on one, yet how much sweeter than to be childless as I was for 5 hateful months.” Mary’s fear of losing a child was so great that she blistered her feet by walking vigorously to encourage her milk production so that she could nourish the infant. Percy wrote that his wife’s life, “after the frightful events of the last two years . . . seems wholly to be bound up” in her new son’s. Mary watched over Percy Florence for hours, even while he was sleeping.
In Florence Shelley wrote perhaps his most popular poem, Ode to the West Wind, which indicates that he too was trying to come out of his misery.
O Wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.
The poem ends with the immortal lines
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
That optimistic spirit of the poem would prove to be misplaced.
CHAPTER TEN
A DOSE FOR POOR POLIDORI
Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!
—The Vampyre, Dr. John Polidori, 1819
THE SAME YEAR that Mary lost her two children, 1819, saw the publication of Dr. John Polidori’s tale The Vampyre, the second of the modern myths created at the Villa Diodati in the haunted summer of 1816. The vampire figure was not new. It had long been the subject of legends and folklore before it was used in fiction in the nineteenth century. The belief that some dead people rose from the grave and fed on the blood of the living was widespread; such stories are found in Chinese and Japanese traditions as well. Nor was belief in vampires limited only to the ignorant. Rousseau, who did not believe in them, nevertheless had written, “If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?” The Roman Catholic Church had recognized the existence of vampires in the fifteenth century.
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