Beneath the lamp the lady bowed,
And slowly rolled her eyes around;
Then drawing in her breath aloud
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast;
Her silken robe, and inner vest
Dropt to her feet, and in full view,
Behold! her bosom and half her side —
Hideous, deformed, and pale of hue —
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel![2]
The others were much shaken by the suddenness and violence of Shelley’s outburst, and it was Polidori who went to Shelley and treated him in his capacity as a doctor. He managed to calm him, and with considerable tact succeeded in extracting the story of Shelley’s hallucination. ‘Threw water in his face, and after gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which taking hold of his mind, horrified him.’ Polidori continued to talk to Shelley, as he lay on a couch recovering, and several of Shelley’s persistent fears were candidly revealed in these unguarded minutes. Polidori recorded: ‘ — He married; and a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he could to induce her to love him in turn. He is surrounded by friends who feed upon him, and draw upon him as their banker. Once, having hired a house, a man wanted to make him pay more, and came trying to bully him, and at last challenged him. Shelley refused, and was knocked down; coolly said that would not gain him his object, and was knocked down again.’23
The emotional pressures resulting from Shelley’s communal attempts are clear from Dr Polidori’s notes, and it seems that he had at least partly succeeded in ‘interpreting’ Shelley’s hallucination in terms of the social and sexual contradictions in Shelley’s life. But there is no episode in Shelley’s career that exactly matches the last incident. Shelley seems to have been trying to explain how he felt continually persecuted at places like Keswick, Lynmouth, Tremadoc and Kentish Town. Above all, he was trying to indicate to Polidori his absolute refusal to indulge in physical violence; a refusal that Polidori vaguely realized denied some important element in his temperament. Later, because of an incident during a sailing race, Polidori, who was himself extremely hot-tempered, threatened to challenge Shelley to a duel, until Byron intervened to say that he would accept any challenge on Shelley’s behalf. Polidori withdrew, as Byron had intended; but perhaps Byron would have done better to leave Shelley to deal with the matter himself.
Polidori later made use of this ‘fit of fantasy’, as Byron called it, in the ghost story he wrote, adapted from one thrown aside by Byron. It was published in 1819 as a pamphlet with a lurid woodcut, The Vampyre. Byron commented on this gothic tale in a letter to Murray in the same year, to the effect that Shelley ‘certainly had the fit of phantasy which Polidori describes, though not exactly as he describes it’.24 But at the time, writing from the Diodati to his publisher he was more puzzled; he could not understand what had got into Shelley, ‘for he don’t want courage’. The friendship between him and Shelley had not yet broken the barriers of gentlemanly good form.
Nonetheless Shelley’s ‘fit’ did not stop Byron going off alone with Shelley four days later on a sailing trip round the lake. The weather had improved on the 19th, and the Shelleys had gone back to more regular residence at Montalègre. The late night talks still continued at the Diodati, and it was probably on one of those days before Shelley’s departure that Mary experienced the awful nightmare that gave her the central idea for her own, most famous story: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Her description of how this occurred, though clearly formalized for the occasion of her preface, is a classic example of the way in which the heightened consciousness of terror, which Shelley had so often played upon, was transmuted into creative inspiration. Mary had managed this, where neither Harriet nor Claire had survived the stress.
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. When I placed me head on my pillow I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie.[3] I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion . . . . His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken. He would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade, that this thing which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter . . . . He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold, the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.
I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still: the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.[4] I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story — my tiresome, unlucky ghost story! Oh! If I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!
Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. ‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre that haunted my midnight pillow.’ On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words ‘It was on a dreary night of November’, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.25
The first words that Mary wrote now correspond to the opening of the fifth chapter of Frankenstein as it was finally completed, and describes Dr Frankenstein’s awakening of the monster. The setting is the German university town of Ingolstadt, known mainly to the Shelleys as the birthplace of the Illuminist conspiracy, a suggestive hint.
Mary later described how Shelley had urged her to develop the full implications of the story into a novel: ‘but for his incitement it would have never taken the form in which it was presented to the world’. She worked on the book steadily through the rest of the summer, and began to redraft it after they had returned to England during the winter. In its theme and settings, if not its actual plot-line, the book is closely related to the circumstances of Mary’s private life with Shelley and sometimes the resemblances are uncanny.
The description of Dr Frankenstein’s education developing from alchemical and magical interests in authors such as Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, to a more strictly scientific concentration on ‘natural philosophy’, galvanism and anatomy is deliberately intended to parallel Shelley’s own story of his intellectual development from romance to philosophy, as told for example in his introductory letters to Godwin of 1812.26 The monster’s first murder, of Frankenstein’s baby brother, who is called William, takes place on the Plainpalais which Shelley and Mary had visited twice in May.27 The central confrontation between Frankenstein and his ghastly creation, when the monster demands a wife to compensate him for his rejection by human society, is staged on the Mer de Glace, at Chamonix, which Mary, Shelley and Claire visited in July.28 Dr Frankenstein’s second laboratory, where he builds and then destroys the second, female monster — thus breaking his pact and putting both himself and the monster under a similar curse — is located in Scotland where Mary had spent much of her late childhood.29 The books on which the monster educates himself are Goethe’s Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives and Milton’s Paradise Lost.30 The descent of the Rhine by boat of Frankenstein and his bosom friend Clerval (who is also murdered) recalls their journeyings of 1814.31 The many other boating scenes reflect impressions of Shelley and Mary o
n the water, not least perhaps the tranquil journey across the lake through the twilight to Evian, on the eve before the monster murders Frankenstein’s bride, Elizabeth.32 The monster’s leering face through the window of the Inn after the murder, and Frankenstein’s distraught attempt to shoot it, is an obvious reference to what Shelley had told Mary of the assassination attempt at Tan-yr-allt in 1813.33
Mary’s most brilliant structural innovation in the book is the way in which, after the murder of Elizabeth, she reverses the roles of pursuer and pursued, It is now Frankenstein who pursues the monster. This creates a doppelgänger theme, in which Frankenstein and his creation are made to form antagonistic parts of a single spiritual entity. The theme of demonic pursuit had become by then a central image in Shelley’s poetry. Frankenstein’s obsessional pursuit of the monster into the Arctic wastes, with which the book both begins and ends, reflects in mood and imagery much of the reversal and pursuit of narcissistic ideals which Shelley had studied in Alastor. It also draws heavily, with an explicit reference in Chapter 5, on Shelley’s favourite poem by Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner’. Like these two poems, Frankenstein is a study in spiritual isolation, and the monster sometimes seems to be an almost programmatic attempt to present the kaka-daimon of Shelley’s poem, the evil spirit of solitude itself.
The plotting of Frankenstein, like that of Alastor, turns on the destructive effects of the perversion of the sexual forces which bring people together and hold them within a human community. The creation of the monster himself is undertaken by Frankenstein at Ingolstadt in an inhuman and obsessional mood. He perversely rejects the appeals of his cousin Elizabeth, the beloved friend of his childhood, who he nevertheless passionately desires to marry. His father explicitly warns him against the destructive effect of such intense and specialized studies. The moment after he has rushed from the laboratory, having seen the appalling sight of the monster coming to life, he tries to shield himself in sleep, only to dream a ghastly and symbolic incident. ‘I slept indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams. 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 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. I started from my sleep with horror.’34
When Frankenstein meets the monster again, in the great confrontation at Chamonix, the monster makes the demand which controls the rest of the story: ‘You must create a female for me with whom I can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary for my being. This alone you can do, and I demand it as a right which you must not refuse to concede.’ Frankenstein at first recognizes this right, and does make the female monster in his Scottish laboratory. But then, in the presence of the monster, he tears the body apart just before completion. The monster’s response, when he has recovered from his howls of anguish and despair, is simple: ‘Remember — I will be with you on your wedding night.’ This threat is duly carried out during the grim scene at Evian, where Elizabeth is throttled on her bridal bed. Thus both creator and created destroy each other’s hopes of sexual happiness, and with that their links with human society are shattered. Both become outcasts and pariahs, tortured equally by the knowledge of what they have done, and the desire to be revenged for what they have lost. It is a gloomy denouement, and one wonders at it all the more remembering that Mary was only just 19 at the time of writing.
The core of the book dramatizes that mythic projection of the condition of exile which was already becoming a major preoccupation of Shelley’s. When at the Mer de Glace the monster appeals to its master for help and understanding, Mary states with an extraordinary premonition the theme which was to dominate so much of Shelley’s later poetry in Italy. ‘Oh Frankenstein . . . Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.’ To which Frankenstein replies, answering for authority and society, ‘Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies.’35
Shelley was well aware of the many autobiographical influences which shaped Mary’s book, besides the night of terror at Montalègre which saw its inception. Their experiences in England; his own poetry; Mary’s relationship with her father; their continued readings of Godwin’s own novels of pursuit, especially Caleb Williams; all played an important part. But in writing, anonymously, the preface to the novel a year later, and in reviewing it for the magazines under his own name, he made only passing references to these, and concentrated once again on the central issues of spiritual solitariness and social ostracism. Of the monster’s crimes, he wrote in his review that they were, ‘the children, as it were, of Necessity and Human Nature. In this the direct moral of the book consists . . . . Treat a person ill and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; let one being be selected for whatever cause as the refuse of his kind — divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations — malevolence and selfishness.’ It is impossible to believe that he was not thinking at least partly of himself when he added, ‘It is thus that too often in society those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed by neglect and solitude of heart into a scourge and a curse.’36 Implicitly, Shelley accepted his own identification as Frankenstein’s monster.
On the afternoon of Sunday, 23 June, Shelley, Byron and their boatman set out on a leisurely sailing tour of Leman, heading eastwards towards Evian. The tour took eight days, and despite uneven weather, including one unpleasantly dangerous storm, and another day of unbroken rain, it was a great success. Shelley was reading Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloise for most of the journey, which, being set around the various lakeside villages, turned the trip for him into something of a literary pilgrimage. The ‘ghostly visions’, as he called them in the preface to Frankenstein, gave way to sentimental ones. ‘Meillerie, the castle of Chillon, Clarens, the mountains of La Valaise and Savoy, present themselves to the imagination as monuments of things that were once familiar, and of beings that were once dear to it. They were created indeed by one mind, but a mind so powerfully bright as to cast a shade of falsehood on the records that are called reality.’
Shelley was unusually subdued in the elder poet’s presence. While Byron absorbed his impressions apparently without effort into Childe Harold and the ‘Prisoner of Chillon’, Shelley was content to keep a mild, sightseer’s diary-letter, which he subsequently posted to Peacock.37 In the evenings they talked for hours about each other’s childhood, but neither kept a written record of what was said. Yet it changed the formal friendship into the beginning of a real intimacy. Byron was delighted to be free from the company of both Claire and Polidori, and once in the middle of a beautiful wood he broke out, ‘Thank God Polidori is not here.’ Shelley also felt freed, and at Evian, surprisingly, he turned his attention to a number of business letters to Godwin and London lawyers that he had been putting off for weeks. He rapidly wrote and dispatched them, and Godwin received a cheque for five pounds, under the name of ‘Martin’. Byron, according to his normal practice, rarely got up much before midday, while Shelley liked to rise soon after dawn, and explore the various sites of the romance between Julie and St Preux. He walked reverently along the ‘terraced roads’ and through the groves where they had wandered. He gathered a nosegay of wild flowers at St Gingoux, and at Clarens he was delighted when their landlady pointed out the ‘bosquet de Julie’ from the window of their lodgings.
Another memorial of Rousseau was more dramatic. Their boat was caught in a squall off the rocks of St Gingoux and nearly swamped, as Shelley wrote afterwards with
ill-disguised satisfaction, ‘precisely in the spot where Julie and her lover were nearly overset, and where St Preux was tempted to plunge with her into the lake.’ Twenty-five years later, Moore, in his Life of Byron described how Shelley imperiously refused his companion’s offer to save him, as Shelley could not swim: ‘Shelley positively refused; and seating himself quietly upon a locker, and grasping the rings at each end firmly in his hands, declared his determination to go down in that position, without a struggle.’38
But the incident had been coloured up. At the time, Shelley himself noted that when the rudder broke, and the waves began to fall into the boat, ‘My companion, an excellent swimmer, took off his coat, I did the same, and we sat with our arms crossed, every instant expecting to be swamped.’ Nothing seems to have been spoken between them until afterwards, though Shelley was painfully conscious that Byron knew he could not swim. ‘I felt in this near prospect of death a mixture of sensations, among which terror entered though but subordinately. My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I knew that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome with humiliation . . . .’ Byron himself observed Shelley’s coolness, and merely commented to Murray that since the boat was so near the rocks he himself ran ‘no risk’. The most extraordinary thing is that after this incident, Shelley did not ask Byron to teach him to swim.
At Chillon, Shelley counted the columns in the dungeon, noted the depth of the lake, the dates of the graffiti on the walls, and gazed up in horror at the black and rotten hanging beam which has since been replaced by a stouter, but less suggestive timber. ‘I never saw a monument more terrible of that cold and inhuman tyranny, which it has been the delight of man to exercise over man,’ he noted sententiously. Byron carved his name abstractedly on a column, while listening to the guide’s tale of François Bonivard. Bonivard was imprisoned in the dungeons for rebelling against Duke Charles III of Savoy in the sixteenth century. Byron brooded on the story. Two days later, on 28 June, they were detained at Ouchy by rainy weather, and Byron scribbled off the fourteen stanzas of his ‘Prisoner of Chillon’, emphatically casting himself into Bonivard’s predicament, and reaching the curiously bitter and ironic denouement:
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 51