The Lady and Her Monsters

by Roseanne Montillo

  During their journey across the channel from England to France, they were caught in a severe thunderstorm that churned up the seas. Crossing torrid waters had always caused Mary to become violently nauseous and this time was no different. But scholars have speculated that Mary might have been suffering the initial pangs of morning sickness, due to early pregnancy.

  The Godwins always claimed that Mary and Shelley’s sexual relationship began after their elopement (when Percy had officially, if not legally, left his wife), but Mary and Percy’s works and diaries indicate that the affair had become intimate weeks earlier, in, of all places, St. Pancras Churchyard. Surrounded by tall, old weeping willows and ancient tombstones—including Mary Wollstonecraft’s—the churchyard gave them the privacy they sought, away from any watchful eyes. And if Jane had chaperoned on those occasions, as she always did, she could have stood watch to make certain no one was around while they went about their business, and made herself scarce when asked. She said she was most often sent away once they reached the cemetery.

  “They always sent me to walk some distance away,” Jane later wrote, “alleging that they wished to talk philosophical subjects and that I did not like or know anything about those subjects.”

  As the boat bobbed from side to side and the three of them clung to one another, Mary’s nausea got worse. And when they disembarked, Mary seemed to become deeply frustrated, her snide remarks including insults to the locals. She compared them unfavorably to the English by scrutinizing their clothing, manners, looks, and general attitudes, declaring, while in Calais, that “unfortunately the manners are not English.” Her behavior could have been due to the storm’s severity, her physical discomfort, or Jane’s presence, but whatever the reason, it was noticeable to everyone.

  France was experiencing the same vicious heat wave, but at least in Paris they were able to stroll along the wide boulevards and lush green gardens like tourists, though even there they waited for a sum of money that would set them “free from a kind of imprisonment which [they] found very irksome.” Percy knew that when he abandoned his wife, he would not be able to count on his family’s financial support for this new adventure. Mary, as well as Jane, had no money of her own to contribute to the party. Shelley continued to be in contact with his mother and sisters, who, not only then but throughout his life, offered the little support they could. Once again, he wrote to them and awaited whatever they could send, however minimal.

  Eager to leave the city as soon as the money arrived, they conceived a plan that was not only romantic but silly and delusional: they decided “to walk through France.” The idea that three young people—two teenage girls burdened by long frocks, one of them probably pregnant, and a frail-looking man who was no more than a boy himself—could cross an entire country on foot in the middle of summer must have seemed ludicrous even to them. They bought a donkey to carry their supplies and planned to take turns riding him during the journey. But this donkey was skinny and feeble and could not even carry their provisions. The animal’s legs buckled when weight was placed upon it. Still, undeterred, they departed.

  Mary delighted in the natural views. Despite the people, the heat, the trudging on foot along pebbled roads and through ruined villages, she still clung to the notion that beauty might be found in the natural surroundings they encountered. “A rocky hill rose abruptly on one side, on the top of which stood a ruined citadel with extensive walls and hives,” she recalled at one point. “Lower down but beyond, was the cathedral, and the whole formed a scene for a painting.”

  Given Mary’s love of landscapes, it’s not surprising that Frankenstein, aside from the deep philosophical questions and debates it raised, always managed to astound its readers also with its depiction of the natural world that surrounded its characters. In it, in the loneliness and isolation of the thick Swiss and German forests, the characters always find time to revere their landscape, to bask, while exploring nature, in the idea of something bigger and beyond them, something that, not unlike a forest, was at once as forbidden as it was eager to be penetrated. But Mary, Percy, and Jane did not find beauty in everything they passed; desolate walkways, lonely towns, and barren villages ruined by war seemed to quiet their spirits and sour their moods.

  That gloominess was lifted upon crossing the border into Switzerland. Mary wrote, “The scenery of this day’s journey was divine, exhibiting piney mountains, barren roads, and spots of verdure surpassing the imagination.” True, the landscape was magnificent, but there must have been a different reason as to why Mary felt, at first, so profoundly attracted to the land: this was the country her mother had wished to spend time in. Their primary goal was to make “a journey toward the lake of Uri, and seek in that romantic and interesting country some cottage where [they] might dwell in solitude.” Their plans were once again thwarted by money, or the lack of it. They finally accepted that neither of their families was sending anything and they had better return to England.

  To do so, they had to pass Lucerne, which was dominated by a lake of the same name, and that is where Mary began collecting local tales. Aside from offering natural beauty, Lucerne was also ripe with old legends and stories. “The summits of several of the mountains that enclose the lake to the south are covered by eternal glaciers,” she wrote. “On one of these, opposite the Brunen, they tell the story of a priest and his mistress, who, flying from persecution, inhabited a cottage at the foot of the snows. One winter night an avalanche overwhelmed them, but their plaintive voices are still heard in stormy nights, calling for succor from the peasants.”

  The fact that she described this short tale not only shows her interest in folklore and the stories of a particular region, but also displays her propensity to use what she had heard in her own work and to mold the tales in order to make them fit her needs.

  She used the story in the first edition of the Frankenstein tale, where the legend she had heard now read: “I have seen this lake agitated by a tempest, when the wind tore up whirlwinds of water, and gave you an idea of what the water-spout must be on the great ocean, and the waves dash with fury the base of the mountain, where the priest and his mistress were overwhelmed by an avalanche and where their dying voices are still said to be heard amid the pauses of the nightly wind.”

  As they traveled, and what money they had began to run out, it became obvious that they couldn’t afford to take a coach. As it was, water offered the best solution for a return to London, most specifically, the Rhine River.

  With their dream of a romantic elopement dashed, Mary’s mood darkened even further, and she became almost remorseless in what she said to the people she encountered. As they left Switzerland behind, she could not help making one last jab: “The Swiss appeared to us then, and experience had confirmed our opinion, a people slow of comprehension and of action,” she wrote. “But habit has made them unfit for slavery, and they would, I have little doubt, make a brave defense against any invader of their freedom.”

  On August 28, the Shelley party boarded a boat on the Rhine.

  At any other time, traveling along the sublime beauty of the Rhine would have been a magnificent experience. Travel on Europe’s major rivers became quite common during the second half of the eighteenth century, among not only the wealthy but also those wishing to move up the ladder of prosperity. Some took such journeys for the simple pleasure of viewing the panoramic landscapes, but others were transporting goods from one end of the country to the other. Still others were taken in not only by the natural beauty that fanned across their eyes, but by the histories they encountered. The Rhine in particular, rushing from the Alps and snaking along its path to the North Sea, crossed boundaries steeped in myths, legends, and fables. All of those were surrounded by landscapes that varied remarkably and could display at once a patchwork of gentle vineyards rising up the slopes of a hill or the ugly turns of the Via Mala, the Evil Way, so called because the extraordinary gorge bearing the same name narrowed at a certain point before plunging malevolentl
y into the river.

  Some travelers might have learned the legend that surrounded the Rhine, that of the Lorelei, and journeyed down the river’s harrowing waterways in the hopes of debunking it. Lorelei was a German girl who had learned of her lover’s unfaithfulness. Soon thereafter, she committed suicide by jumping into the river, where, upon her death, she was immediately turned into a mermaid. From then on she spent her days on a rock near St. Goar, chanting a melodious tune that so enraptured sailors passing by that they eagerly rowed toward her. Unfortunately, the sadness from her voice pulled them too close and they rowed toward their deaths, because the rock she sat upon was located in the deepest and most impenetrable portion of the river. The legend became well known not only in Germany, but also throughout Europe, especially upon the publication of Heinrich Heine’s poem of the same name, “The Loreley,” which read in part:

  A song of mysterious power

  That lovely maiden sings

  The boatman in his small skiff is

  Seized by a turbulent love,

  No longer he marks where the cliff is

  He looks to the mountains above.

  I think the waves must fling him

  Against the reefs nearby

  And that did with her singing

  The lovely Loreley

  Nearly two centuries later Sylvia Plath would become entranced with the legend, writing: “Of your ice-hearted calling / Drunkenness of the great depths / O river, I see drifting / Deep in your flux of silver / Those great goddesses of peace / Stone, stone, ferry me down.

  Mary Godwin seemed chilled by her various traveling companions and thought little of them: “Our companions on this voyage were of the meanest class, smoked prodigiously, and were exceedingly disgusting,” she wrote, seemingly repelled. “There were only four passengers besides ourselves, three of these were students of the Strasburg University: Schwitz, a rather handsome, good tempered young man; Hoff, a kind of shapeless animal, with a heavy, ugly, German face; and Schneider, who was nearly an idiot, and in whom his companions were always playing a thousand tricks.”

  The area they were cruising along had been vividly described by Lord Byron and was now coming to life before their very eyes. Aside from viewing their surroundings, they also spent time reading from a book of Mary Wollstonecraft’s they had carried with them. Soon they passed “a ruined tower with its desolate windows [that] stood in the summit of another hill that jutted into the river.”

  On September 2, they reached the city of Mannheim. As soon as they docked, Jane wrote in her diary: “We arrive at Manheim early in the morning—breakfast there. The town is clean and good. We proceeded towards Mayence with an unfavorable wind. Towards evening the batelier rests just as the wind changes in our favor. Mary and Shelley walk for three hours; they are alone.”

  Famously, those three hours Mary and Percy spent alone in that particular geographical area have, through the passage of time and more careful reading, given rise to much speculation, because the stopover would have given them time on their own, away from the ever-present Jane, and time to explore their surroundings, most especially those small towns and castles lining the lower banks of the Rhine. One such town was Nieder-Beerbach, on whose summit, barely visible from the water’s edge, stood the famed, or infamous, Burg Frankenstein.

  “What’s in a name?” Mary Shelley wrote years later in a book titled Rambles in Germany and Italy. “It applies to things known; to things unknown, a name is often everything: on me it has a powerful effect; and many hours of extreme pleasure have derived their zest from a name.”

  Following Mary’s own words, it could be said that the name of Victor Frankenstein had not come about by mere coincidence, chance, nor in one of her waking dreams, as she always claimed. Rather, she had given her character’s name much thought and consideration. But Frankenstein was not a popular name, especially not in England, so where had she heard of it? One theory, originally put forth by the historian Radu Florescu, suggests that during that three-hour walk, she got the inspiration not only for the name, but for the book’s basic narrative thread as well.

  Centuries before Mary Shelley brought the name into the limelight, the surname of Frankenstein had already been tied to both fact and fiction, most particularly in the German region of the Rhineland. The real Frankenstein family had settled in a formidable castle overlooking the Darmstadt region, where their deeds, famous and infamous, began to be recorded in the annals of history.

  The castle itself rose behind unbridgeable mountains, its outline shivering against the gray sky that most often covered the region. In the mid-1400s, the castle was the site of much bloodshed when a member of the family was locked in mortal combat with an enemy of unusual fortitude and cunning, with a deep understanding of psychological warfare. The enemy, intent on overtaking Burg Frankenstein, had successfully overthrown other families in the past. Known for his brutality, Vlad the Impaler and his doings provided, in part, inspiration for another gothic masterpiece: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  Within the church located at the bottom of the castle, a brass relief revealed the figure and gory tale of an additional Frankenstein family member, Sir George Frankenstein, a knight who had lived in the burg in the sixteenth century. Sir George’s death had thrown the family name from the historical to the legendary, for his mythical battle had been fought not against an enemy of the mortal kind, but of the supernatural: a fire-spewing dragon. It was said that following a fierce battle, Sir George managed to pierce the dragon’s heart with his lance, but not before the dragon’s tail found an opening in Sir George’s armor and inflicted a deadly wound.

  Did Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin hear those stories? Certainly, while the boat was docked in the area, those three hours away from Jane might have offered an excuse and opportunity for exploring the surroundings. While the time frame might not have been enough to allow them to hike up to the castle, it still could have given them ample time to visit the adjacent village of Nieder-Beerbach and to talk to its inhabitants. In the shadows of the thick forests, the people might have told them the mythical legends populating their woods and castles, and if this occurred, both, Shelley in particular, with his fascination with the occult and the mystical, would have eagerly listened on. Continuing on that thread, if they remained long enough to hear about the Frankensteins’ bloody battles against Vlad the Impaler and of Sir George Frankenstein slaying the dragon, then they most certainly would have heard about the castle’s most notorious inhabitant, Johann Konrad Dippel, a man who, strangely enough, bore a striking similarity to Victor Frankenstein, and to an extent, to Percy Shelley as well.

  Johann Konrad Dippel was related to the Frankensteins not by blood but, in a sense, by birth. He was born in Burg Frankenstein on August 10, 1673. Because of that detail, Dippel always felt a strange affinity to the family, at times going so far as to declare himself a Frankenstein. In reality he was the son not of nobility but of a Lutheran clergyman whose intent upon Johann’s birth was to make of him a clergyman, thus continuing the family’s long-standing tradition. Though he actually ended up studying theology at Giessen as his father had wished, it became painfully obvious that Johann from a young age possessed doubts about his father’s religious convictions and would not make the perfect clergyman, nor even a mediocre one.

  While at Giessen his ideas and individual thoughts were further tested by the theologian and historian Gottfried Arnold, who was, during Dippel’s attendance, a professor of church history. Unlike his father, whose religious views were strict, Dippel must have noticed in Arnold a more flexible idea of church doctrine, divinity, and mysticism. And whether it was Arnold’s influence or the freedom he felt at being away from home, Dippel’s own ideas morphed.

  Soon he left Giessen for Wittenberg, and later for Strasbourg. Even though there was no doubt that Dippel was creative and of unusual intelligence, his personal traits seemed to rub people the wrong way and eventually were a hindrance. His excitability for the subjects he spoke of
often gave rise to what some considered loud and uncalled-for displays of emotions and passions. He became fond of debating those of opposing views, and those debates could either be verbal tongue-lashings or actual physical duels. One such duel at Strasbourg caused him to flee the city, as sparring against a man with a different opinion, he killed him. Rumors also persisted that he had begun to raid the cemeteries in search of bodies, although there was no proof of that. Again he scuttled away in the middle of the night and returned to Giessen.

  When Dippel was at Giessen, the study of alchemy was being undertaken in earnest. During that period, the alchemists were busily trying to find the mythical philosopher’s stone. For centuries this had been thought to be a substance that would turn base metals, like lead, into gold, but more importantly, it would prolong life. Dippel had no experience in the art of transmutation, but he felt that one way to gain such experience was to read the works of those who had come before him. One such work was Raymond Lully’s Experimenta. Dippel must have found in Lully a certain understanding, for his texts were a blend of theology and philosophy, of faith and logic, all of which, Lully believed, when merged together could obliterate the mysteries of the supernatural world and give it more rational meaning.

  This divinity-based alchemy made sense for someone like Dippel, a new philosopher and inquirer into the bigger questions of life, someone who had studied theology and was, in addition, the son of a clergyman. It made so much sense, he willingly indebted himself to buy new equipment and build a state-of-the-art alchemical laboratory for himself.