The Monsters

by Dorothy Hoobler

  Jane came from an unusual background that fit right in with the Godwin/Shelley tradition. She was one of nine illegitimate children of the banker Thomas Gibson. When she was twenty-one, she made a good marriage for herself: to Charles Robert St. John, the son of a viscount. Even Charles’s titled family was checkered with illegitimacy, however. His father had fifteen children in all—only four legitimate, including Charles—by several women including his half-sister. (Shades of Byron.) Charles himself had earlier fathered an illegitimate son, who became Jane’s ward when her husband died in 1844. (Mary Shelley called the young man a “relative” of Jane’s former husband.) This irregular background made Jane, like Mary, yearn for respectability.

  As it happened, Jane liked boating, as did Percy Florence. One thing led to another and they were married in June 1848, making Jane “Lady Shelley,” a title she wore with pride until her death in 1899. The marriage was childless and yet happy—an oddly appropriate counterpoint to the link between creation and danger that existed in Mary’s life and work. The association was in many ways another threesome, but one in which Mary was the centerpiece. They moved into Field Place, and Mary chose as her bedroom the very one her husband Percy had as a boy. Percy Florence was elected to Parliament and received a knighthood—respectability at last. As far as anybody knows, this son and grandson of four radical and creative individuals never had an original thought in his life.

  Jane gave her mother-in-law the unconditional love Mary had yearned for but had failed to find as daughter, lover, and wife. Now Mary had a confidante and assistant in the work of reassembling a new, perfect creature from the parts of Percy Shelley. In service to this goal, there would be a few casualties. In the official version of Shelley and Mary’s life together—issued by Jane in 1882—poor first wife Harriet was defamed as unfaithful and crazy. Mary, it was alleged, had only agreed to run off with him (a tale too well known to be denied) after Percy and Harriet had agreed to a formal separation. Percy was turned into a kind of saint, with a room at Field Place furnished as a shrine devoted to him. It was a far cry from when Sir Timothy was alive and had forbidden Percy’s name to be spoken in the house.

  Documents that could reflect poorly on the family were hunted down, removed from archives, and destroyed. Mary’s journal was combed through and the past revised. After a biographer of Henry Fuseli used the letters Mary Wollstonecraft had written her lover years before—the letters that Godwin had seen but not been allowed to read—Percy Florence Shelley purchased them; they are nowhere to be found today. Claire Clairmont’s letters to Mary often refer to those Mary wrote in return, all now missing. The Shelleys initially cooperated with Hogg, who wanted to write a biography of his old friend, but when they saw how candid he planned to be, they withdrew their support. They also refused to cooperate with Trelawny, though he produced his book anyway; lack of facts was never a deterrent to his telling a good story.

  Mary’s happy life with her loving son and daughter-in-law lasted less than three years. She had long suffered from psychosomatic illnesses—headaches, nervous stomach, and depression. In December 1850 she began to experience a mysterious paralysis. The younger Shelleys wanted Mary to leave Field Place and move to Boscombe by the sea with them. However, she preferred to take up her old residence in London, where a doctor diagnosed a tumor of the brain. She died, her son and daughter-in-law at her bedside, on February 1, 1851, at the age of fifty-three. Years earlier Mary had written Maria Gisborne about Shelley, “Goodnight—I will go look at the stars, they are eternal; so is he—so am I.” Now that was true.

  The Literary Gazette’s obituary read, “It is not . . . as the authoress even of Frankenstein that she derives her most enduring and endearing title to our affection, but as the faithful and devoted wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Mary had attained the respectability that she so desperately desired—but at the cost of her own individuality and personal achievement. Her mother would have been horrified. Time has of course overturned this verdict. Today her creature and her creation are better known than any work by anyone else in the Diodati circle.

  Mary wanted to be buried next to her parents, but Jane and Percy Florence felt St. Peter’s Churchyard at Bournemouth was more pleasant, so they had the bodies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft moved there as well. There was a hitch when the rector of the church refused to allow the two notorious radicals to be buried in consecrated ground. Jane Shelley—Lady Shelley—appeared in a carriage, followed by two horse-drawn hearses, and announced she would wait there until the rector opened the gates. He did. Mary at last rested between her two famous parents, who, bound by the English earth, could no longer abandon their little girl.

  Claire Clairmont moved from place to place, seldom returning to England, finding work as a governess or a companion. She never married, although men continued to be attracted to her—including Trelawny, who proposed to her twice. Having been the lover of the real Lord Byron, she could not accept the ersatz one.

  Claire never forgave Byron and even felt resentful toward Mary for remaining friendly with him after Allegra’s death. “Were the fairest Paradise offered to me upon the condition of his [Byron’s] sharing it, I would refuse it,” Claire wrote to Mary, for “there could be nothing but misery in the presence of the person who so wantonly willfully destroyed my Allegra.” Mary had evidently tried to console Claire by mentioning that Willmouse, like Allegra, had also fallen victim to the unhealthy climate. Claire responded, “you were a mere girl at that time . . . with no one to warn you of the effects of climate, bestowing every care a mother’s heart could devise, and most guiltless: He [Byron] was old and wicked and laid a plan to get rid of his child in a way that should be certain and yet not expose him to the blame of the world.”

  Claire liked to imagine that her daughter had not really died but had been kept hidden in a convent by Byron out of spite. Over time, she may have come to believe it. Trelawny reproved her in an 1869 letter:

  If I was in Italy I would cure you of your wild fancy regarding Allegra: I would go to the Convent—and select some plausible cranky old dried-up hanger-on of the convent about the age your child would now be, fifty-two, with a story and documents properly drawn up, and bring her to you—she should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein—I cannot conceive a greater horror than an old man or woman that I had never seen for forty-three years claiming me as Father.

  Mary herself did not escape Claire’s criticism, for Claire never lost faith in Percy Shelley’s ideals and believed that Mary had. She wrote,

  She [Mary] has compromised all the nobler parts of her nature and has sneaked in upon any terms she could get into society although she full well knew she could meet with nothing there but depravity. Others still cling round the image and memory of Shelley—his ardent youth, his exalted being, his simplicity and enthusiasm . . . but she has forsaken even the memory for the pitiful pleasure of trifling with trifles, and has exchanged the sole thought of his being for a share in the corruptions of society. Would to God she could perish without note or remembrance, so the brightness of his name might not be darkened by the corruptions she sheds upon it.

  Mary was at times equally unforgiving. In an 1836 letter to Trelawny, she wrote: “Claire always harps upon my desertion of her—as if I could desert one I never clung to—we were never friends.” Repeating what Claire had written her about Byron not long before, she added,

  Now, I would not go to Paradise, with her for a companion—she poisoned my life when young—that is over now—but as we never loved each other, why these eternal complaints to me of me. I respect her now much —& pity her deeply—but years ago my idea of Heaven was a world without a Claire—of course these feelings are altered—but she has still the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being—a faculty she, unconsciously perhaps, never fails to exert whenever I see her.

  While Mary was living at Field Place with Percy Florence and Jane, Claire came to visit; it would be the last time she would see Mar
y. Mary’s bitterness, long suppressed, suddenly broke to the surface. Before the visit, Lady Shelley had offered to leave them alone, for she had met Claire earlier and disliked her. However, as she recalled, Mary cried out, “Don’t go, dear; don’t leave me alone with her. She has been the bane of my life ever since I was two!”

  Late in her life, Claire lived in her niece’s house in Florence, giving occasional interviews to English and American journalists who learned of her association with the great poets. In 1873, William Rossetti, a nephew of John Polidori, at Trelawny’s request called to see some letters that Claire had supposedly been offering for sale. Rumors varied as to the nature of the correspondence, but since Claire had known both Shelley and Byron well, it was thought they might contain interesting material. Rossetti had difficulty in gaining admission to the house, but when he did he found “a slender and pallid old lady . . . with dark and expressive eyes.” She was now an invalid due to a recent fall. He did not get the letters.

  Edward Silsbee, a Boston art critic who worshipped Shelley, learned about the documents. He was so desperate to get his hands on them that he rented a room in the house where Claire and her niece lived. His hope was that when Claire, now quite old and in poor health, would die, he could persuade the niece to give or sell him the papers. Claire did indeed die, but the niece told Silsbee that he could only get the papers if he married her. He wasn’t willing to go quite that far. A young American writer, traveling in Italy, heard the story of Silsbee’s obsession and turned it into a novel. The writer could not have been more different from the Romantics Shelley and Bryon; he was Henry James, and the novel was The Aspern Papers.

  “I would willingly think that my memory may not be lost in oblivion as my life has been,” Claire wrote as the end neared. She died at eighty-one in 1879, and was buried in a churchyard near Florence. An inscription on her grave read, “She passed her life in sufferings, expiating not only her faults but also her virtues.” She had suffered much for love, but it was her passion that makes her memorable. Though no story written by Claire ever appeared in print, her memory not only survives, but thrives: her journal and her letters have been edited and published in recent years. She was the one who brought the monsters of Diodati together. If she had never sent those persistent seductive letters to Byron, then Frankenstein would never have been written.

  In her final years, Claire had converted to Roman Catholicism, her mother’s religion. An English philosopher and essayist, William Graham, went to see her when she was eighty. He described her as a “lovely old lady: the eyes were still bright and sparkled at times with irony and fun; the complexion clear as at eighteen, and the lovely white hair as beautiful in its way as the glossy black tresses of youth must have been; the slender willowy figure had remained unaltered, as though time itself had held that sacred and passed by.” He asked her about the Roman Catholicism and she said that it brought her comfort. When he asked Claire what she thought Shelley would think of her conversion, she replied, “I think Shelley would have forgiven me anything; and I am not sure that the thought of him did not lead to the thought of Christ.” After Graham asked whether she had loved Shelley, Claire answered, “With all my heart and soul.”

  A year after Mary’s death, her son went through her desk and found the journal that she had kept with Shelley in their 1814 elopement year. With it was a folded copy of one of Shelley’s last poems, Adonais. Unwrapping the paper, Percy Florence found that it contained the charred remains of Shelley’s heart, which Mary had kept with her all those years. It was something that she might have felt she would need if she were ever to put her lover back together again—as she had.

  The monsters of Diodati have never been more alive than they are today. Both the vampire and Victor Frankenstein’s creature are familiar figures in popular culture, found as animated cartoons, toys, puppets, and breakfast cereals; appearing in video games, television programs, comic books, movies, plays, Broadway musicals, and even a German ballet. Their fame has spread worldwide. To a great extent, this familarity sprang from their depiction in two American motion pictures, both made in 1931: director James Whale’s Frankenstein, in which the monster was played by then-unknown English actor Henry Pratt, who adopted the screen name Boris Karloff; and Tod Browning’s Dracula, in which Bela Lugosi played the vampire aristocrat who had been the title character in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. (Lugosi had created the role in a Broadway play four years earlier.) Karloff and Lugosi’s portrayals—aided by makeup artists and costume designers—gave the monster and the vampire the outward forms by which they are now universally recognized. Whale was clearly influenced by the 1920 movie The Golem, directed by Paul Wegener (who also played the title role), which retold the medieval legend of Rabbi Judah Löw ben Bezulel creating a huge humanlike creature to protect the Jews of Prague from persecution. Though it has been asserted that Mary Shelley was inspired by the golem story, there is no evidence that she knew of it—though she certainly would have approved of the rabbi’s method of bringing the creature to life: by placing a strip of paper bearing God’s name into a pendant on its chest. Mary was very fond of the power of words.

  It is appropriate that Frankenstein’s creature and the vampire have seemed to thrive in tandem (more than once appearing in the same motion picture), for they represent opposite sides of the same image / reality dichotomy. Mary Shelley’s monster is a being who longs for love and a connection to the human community, from which he is cut off because of his monstrous appearance. The vampire, whether Lord Ruthven, Count Dracula, or Anne Rice’s Lestat, is physically attractive, sophisticated, even sexy—traits that conceal the decay and evil within. In short, he is the reverse of Frankenstein’s creation. If anything, the stage and screen adaptations of Mary Shelley’s novel have further heightened the monster’s plight, for usually they have made him mute as well as ugly—they deny him the ability to explain himself, as he does in the novel. Feeling unloved, misunderstood, unjustly rejected are universal human experiences. Who has not felt the desire to be loved for ourselves alone? Who has not also thought that if we could show our true selves to the world, if we could only make people understand us, the result would be acceptance and affection?

  Children in particular seem to love the monster; why else would a cereal manufacturer produce “Frankenberry”? Mary’s creature—clumsy, unable to express himself, constantly getting into trouble—was made to feel unloved first of all by the person who created him. To children, he is a kindred spirit. To young Mary Godwin, a motherless child, a heartbroken girl whose persona was molded and stitched together by men of cold and selfish genius, such an unloved being was found not just on the pages of her book, but in the mirror.

  The vampire, on the other hand, is the man we love to hate. Polidori felt all the emotions that Mary’s monster feels, and he blamed his troubles on the person he most hoped to impress: Byron. Byron responded to Polidori’s admiration with cruelty and ridicule. Supremely talented and handsome, Byron had within him something deeply ugly that made it difficult for him to reciprocate others’ love. The idea that a beautiful person can be evil was not a new one: Polidori carried it a step farther, showing us that the appeal of beauty was stronger than the revulsion caused by evil. Byron’s own heroes were tortured men who had a dark secret; Polidori showed that dark secret to be that they—and Byron himself—drew love and life from others, while giving nothing in return. The fascination we feel for the vampire comes from the fact that even though we know he is horrifying, we cannot resist admiring him.

  Seldom, if ever, has a literary contest been as successful as the one prompted by Byron’s challenge. It is rare for anyone to create a character, a novel, a work of art that has universal appeal. Mary Shelley and Dr. Polidori both did, striking a nerve in audiences that reverberates even today. In the final analysis, Mary’s achievement was greater than Polidori’s, for she had an even larger theme: the danger of science. The word “Frankenstein” today is virtually synonymous with the caricatu
re of the mad scientist whose experiments get out of control. The story of Victor’s quest to create a living being embodies issues that remain controversial today. What is life? What is a human being? How far can—or should—science go in prolonging, changing, or even creating life? Modern science has brought those possibilities out of the realm of imagination and into reality. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, cloning, stem-cell medical procedures, sentient robots, and even abortion all evoke the same questions Mary Shelley raised. The power of her story rests on the crucial premise that a human has dared to create life in a laboratory, and that the creature he brought to life has human characteristics: it not only thinks, but it also has emotions. At the heart of the book is the mystery of creativity and its consequences, something that concerned—even, at times, tormented—all five of the people at Villa Diodati. In their outsized passions, their remarkable talents, their distorted personal lives, their never-satisfied yearning for love—they were all monsters.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations used in the notes:

  BLJ: Marchand, Leslie A., ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals (London: John Murray, 1973-1979).

  CC: Stocking, Marion Kingston, ed., The Clairmont Correspondence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995).

  F1818: Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 1818 edition, ed. Marilyn Butler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  F1831: Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 1831 edition, ed. Johanna M. Smith (Boston: Bedford Books, 1992).

  JCC: Stocking, Marion Kingston, ed., The Journals of Claire Clairmont (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

  JMWS: Feldman, Paula R., and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds. The Journals of Mary Shelley,1814-1844 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).

  LMW: Wardle, Ralph M., ed., Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979).