by Mary Shelley
The only problem was the weather, as 1816 was known as the year without a summer. The preceding year, a volcano had erupted in Indonesia, spewing thick ash into the atmosphere and disrupting weather patterns in Europe, Asia, and even North America. The Yangtze overflowed. Red snow fell in Italy. Famine swept from Moscow to New York. Grain froze and corn withered.14
In Switzerland, the weather was unseasonably cold and stormy, and after weeks of rain, the young people were restless. At last Byron challenged his friends to see who could write the scariest ghost story. He was tired of reading the same unremarkable tales. Surely, someone in their midst could do better.15
Byron and Shelley tried their hands at this exercise, but soon went back to their other projects. Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, wrote the draft of a story that would become The Vampyre, one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s famous tale Dracula. But it was Mary who struck gold. The first sentence she wrote, “It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed,” seemed to unleash all that would come next, as though the story were waiting to spill on the page.16 She spent the next two years extending and revising the story, publishing the novel in 1818, when she was only twenty years old.
When Mary showed Percy the first pages, Shelley encouraged her to extend the story, and she continued writing the first draft when they returned to England that fall. Drawing on her own experiences as a child whose mother had died after giving birth, whose father had rejected her, and whose society had condemned her for living with the man she loved, she added a brilliant plot twist, the surprise that would set her story apart from others and make her one of the most famous authors in English literary history; instead of regarding his handiwork with pride, her young inventor rejected his creation, abandoning his “completed man” in horror.
If another Romantic poet, like Shelley or Byron, had written this story, it seems unlikely that either would have devised such a scenario. In fact, in the works they began that summer, Byron’s Manfred and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Prometheus Unbound, both poets invented creator protagonists whose abilities make them seem heroic. But Mary was ambivalent about the prospect of men creating life. She had given birth to a child she loved, but she had also lost a baby, and lost her own mother as a result of childbirth. If men could control life and death, she would not have suffered these tragedies. On the other hand, she wondered what would happen to the role of women if it were possible to create life via artificial methods.17 She was also concerned about what would happen to God, or the idea of God, the mysterious, even mystical power behind nature.
Haunted by these concerns, Mary stopped writing from the point of view of the creator and switched her vantage point to that of the created. Not once did she call him a monster, refusing to reinforce Frankenstein’s prejudices and asking readers to use their own judgment in assessing the creature’s behavior.
Rejected by the human beings he meets, Victor Frankenstein’s creature laments that he is alone in the world, and sets forth to find the father who has abandoned him. But when the creature finds his father, the young scientist pushes his “son” away, just as Godwin had pushed Mary away. Outraged and hurt, the creature says, “If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion.” He declares that he will continue his campaign of vicious reprisals unless his creator makes him a female companion: “I am alone and miserable. Man will not associate with me, but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not deny herself to me. This being you must create.”18
By depicting the creature’s suffering in such palpable detail, Mary asks the reader to sympathize with him. In her hands, he becomes an abandoned child, gone wrong because of the ill treatment of his creator.
Mary’s attention to the creature’s point of view turns her novel from a tale of the supernatural to a complicated psychological study. She moves from exploring the creative power of humankind—a favorite theme of Shelley and Byron—to plumbing the depths of human nature. Frankenstein is not simply the story of a brilliant inventor and his invention; it is the story of what happens after the act of creation. What are the consequences of Victor Frankenstein’s invention? What are his responsibilities? What happens to everyone else as a result of his creation? And most important of all, what happens to his neglected creation, the creature?
That fall Mary, Shelley, and Claire moved to Bath, where Mary continued to work on her novel. Claire was pregnant with Byron’s baby, and true to form, local gossips assumed that Shelley was the father. Ostracized and hated by their neighbors, Mary immersed herself in her story. She added a new character, Robert Walton, an arctic explorer searching for the north pole, who recounts Frankenstein’s story in a series of letters to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville, providing the reader with another version of the tale.
Like Frankenstein, Walton is obsessed with proving his own genius, acting against the wishes of his beloved sister, who has “evil forebodings” about his endeavor. When at last Walton turns back from his quest, his decision offers a hopeful alternative to the disastrous choices made by Frankenstein and the creature. Walton despairs over his lost glory, but knows that his sister will be relieved that he has survived. The sole voice of reason in the novel, Margaret emerges as an important character, though her words are heard only indirectly, through the letters of her brother, a structural echo of the role most women were forced to play in the lives of men. Her opposition to her brother’s ambition is an important counterpoint to the selfishness of the male characters, reminding the reader of the importance of love and relationships. Margaret’s significance, and the closeness the author felt to her, is underscored by the fact that Mary gave Margaret the initials she would have if she were married to Shelley: MWS.
Mary’s three-pronged narrative, her Russian doll technique of nesting one story inside another, provides the reader with three different versions of the same set of events. This was a daring departure from the didactic novelists of the preceding generations (such as Samuel Richardson and her own father), and it gave Mary the opportunity to create a complex narrative that asked far more of her readers than a simple parable against the dangers of invention. Careful not to weight the story in favor of either the creator or the creature, Mary conjured a sense of moral suspension in which the conventional questions—who’s the hero? who’s the villain?—no longer apply. The creature and Walton undermine Frankenstein’s version of events, allowing us to see what he never acknowledges: that he was at fault because he did not provide his creation with love or an education. Monsters, says Mary, are of our own making.19
Mary dedicated Frankenstein to her father in an effort to win back his affection. But the book was largely an expression of longing for her mother. Like the creature, she too had been deserted. As the creature declares, “I was alone. . . . [My creator] had abandoned me.”20 Her father had turned his back on her. She had no mother. She was sure that if Wollstonecraft had lived, she would never have severed their relationship as Godwin had. By spelling out the consequences of Frankenstein’s rejection of his son, she was able to demonstrate the tragedy that ensues when parents do not love and guide their children. Even Victor feels guilty about his own failure, confessing that he has not fulfilled “the duties of a creator towards his creature.”21 In a world without loving relationships, havoc reigns and evil triumphs.22
Mary’s concern about the abandonment of children derived from her own experiences, but it also stemmed from a belief that she shared with other Romantics: that children were “Nature’s Priests.” Not only should adults protect children, but adults should look to children for wisdom, balance, and spiritual health. The Romantics believed that children who were abused by society would become corrupted and damaged, and grow into violent, unstable adults, just as the creature does in Frankenstein.23
Mary sustained two devastating blows while writing Frankenstein: the suicides of her half sister Fanny and Harriet Shelley, Percy’s fi
rst wife. These tragedies drove home what Mary already knew: unmarried mothers and illegitimate children were hated by society just like Frankenstein’s creature. Wollstonecraft became an outcast when she had Fanny. Fanny became an outcast the moment she was born. This was profoundly unjust, Mary believed. Fanny was an innocent child. Her mother, too, was innocent. All Wollstonecraft had done was fall in love; she should not have been ostracized. Neither, for that matter, should she. Her crime was nothing more than loving Shelley.24 She worried about Claire and Claire’s child, soon to join this unfortunate club of outcast women and rejected children.
As for Harriet, her death was an even more complicated burden to bear. She had become pregnant by another man and had killed herself, unable to face life with an illegitimate child, and Mary faulted herself for participating in Harriet’s ruin by running away with Shelley. Now Harriet had joined the pantheon of women rejected by the world.
Ironically, Mary was the beneficiary of Harriet’s death, as now she and Shelley could marry, which they did in December 1816. Mary was pregnant again, and she worked as quickly as she could to finish the novel, writing the final paragraphs in March 1817. That winter, she read accounts of the abuses suffered by slaves on sugar plantations in Jamaica and based some of the creature’s hardships on these stories. One might think that after pouring her sense of outrage over societal injustice into the novel, she would have felt a sense a relief when the draft was finally completed. However, she had nightmares of “the dead being alive”: her baby girl, Fanny, her mother, and, most terrifying, Harriet, her hair streaming, staring at the woman who had stolen her husband.25
Mary spent the summer of 1817 readying the novel for publication, creating a fair copy of the manuscript that is the basis for this edition. She finished right before she gave birth in September. The significance of the novel’s gestation was not lost on Mary. She frequently referred to the book as her “offspring” and linked the story to her own birth. The tale begins “Dec 11, 17—” and ends in “September 17—.” Mary Wollstonecraft conceived in early December 1796 and gave birth to Mary on August 30, 1797, dying on September 10, 1797.26
By connecting Frankenstein to her own genesis, Mary hints at the many ties she felt to the novel. Like the creature, she felt abandoned by her creator and rejected by society. Like Frankenstein, she felt compelled to create. Her own birth had caused the death of her mother, but it had also brought life to her characters. Since the novel is framed by Walton’s letters to Margaret, whose initials were now the same as Mary’s (MWS), it is as though she wrote the tale for herself, becoming both author and audience, creator and created, mother and daughter, inventor and destroyer.27
When she and Shelley sent Frankenstein to publishers, it was rejected by two prestigious firms, and it was not until August that Lackington’s, an undistinguished house with a list of hack writers, agreed to a small print run of five hundred copies, using the cheapest materials available.28 The novel was published in January 1818, and in one of the great ironies of publishing history, Frankenstein would earn no royalties. Sales were so weak that there was no indication it would become one of the best-selling English novels of all time.
Ultimately, it was the stage versions of the book that made the story famous. In nineteenth-century England playwrights were allowed to borrow freely from novels without crediting the original author. In the hands of adapters, Mary’s multifaceted creation often became one-dimensional. Another odd development was that over time Mary’s hubristic Dr. Frankenstein almost completely disappeared from public awareness; by the 1840s, the word Frankenstein had become synonymous with monster. To the public, Mary’s name became inextricably entwined with that of a murderous fiend. As her fame grew, the many layers and multiple perspectives of the novel were gradually forgotten.29
After she published Frankenstein, Mary went on to write five more novels, as well as many short stories and works of nonfiction. In 1831, she returned to her first novel, revising and extending the text, making the story darker and even more dystopian.
In the introduction, she declared that she had struggled to come up with the idea for the novel. It was not until she had a dream of a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” that she could begin writing.30 However, there is no evidence to suggest that this was true. At no point had she or any of her friends or family mentioned any difficulties in the composition of the novel. Indeed, from the records of those who were there, and from reviewing the notebooks in which Mary wrote the novel, all the evidence suggests that she composed the novel with uncommon fluency and speed. Why, then, would she say that she had difficulty coming up with an idea?
The most likely answer is that Mary wanted to distance herself from the inception of a work that critics had called perverse and immoral.31 Indeed, her story about the composition of Frankenstein is probably just that: another layer of fiction in a many-layered book. More than fifteen years had passed since she had written the first edition of Frankenstein, both Byron and Shelley were dead, and she faced enormous financial and social pressures as a single mother. She was well aware that women artists were considered monstrous, as women were supposed to create babies, not art. If she could improve her sales and her reputation by saying that she had not consciously created the story, she would do so, inventing a tale that would deflect the criticism she faced when people learned that she was the author of Frankenstein. Gifted storyteller that she was, she described her “dream” with the kind of telling details that make it seem real:
When I placed my 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.32
But buried within Mary’s apparent self-deprecation is another, prouder claim. Like the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had given a vivid account of the hallucination that led to “Kubla Khan,” his famous fragment of a poem published in the fall of 1816, Mary was asserting her qualifications as a true poet. A dream vision was the marker of a true Romantic artist. Extraordinary dreams were not democratic; only great artists received visions. Thus, at the same time that she downplayed her own initiative, she also asserted her credentials as an artist.33
For years, the 1831 edition was the more popular version, but recently, many students and teachers have elected to read the 1818 edition, as it is in this first version that the reader can encounter the younger Mary Shelley. In 1818, Mary wrote with the speed and candor of youth. She had yet to lose three of the children she bore and to endure the loss of her husband in a tragic accident at sea. In this version, she allows Victor the freedom to choose whether to pursue his ambition. Here, when he makes the wrong choice, it is his own decision that brings about his downfall; as with a character in a Greek tragedy, his actions determine his future. However, despite their differences, there is one constant in both versions. In both 1818 and 1831, Mary emphasized the dangers of ambition. As Frankenstein warns Walton, “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”34
Frankenstein is famous for being the first science fiction novel, as well as being a tale of psychological horror. But what is often overlooked is how the novel upholds the legacy of Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. At first glance, Frankenstein may not seem to have much in common with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, nor does it seem to share many of Wollstonecraft’s ideals, but one can detect Wollstonecraft’s influence from the missing elements of the novel. Where are the powerful female characters? With the exception of Margaret Saville, the women are unable to exert any influence over the men in the story. Ultimately, the absence of strong women holds the key to Frankenstein’s main themes. When women are not allowed to have a voice, or to play important roles in society, Mary implies,
loss ensues. Unchecked male ambition will lead to destruction, injustice, and devastation.
Frankenstein is the story of one man’s obsession with the creation of life, and his subsequent abandonment of his creation. It is a study of guilt and innocence, creativity and destruction. But it is also a cautionary tale. By fearing the stranger, by abusing the vulnerable and the outcast, society creates its own monsters.
CHARLOTTE GORDON
NOTES
1. John Wilson Croker, review of Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Quarterly Review 18 (January [delayed until June 12] 1818): 379–85, reproduced in “Reviews,” Romantic Circles, Mary Shelley Chronology and Resource Site, https://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews/qrrev.html.
2. Viscount Dillon to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS), March 18, 1829, in Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1889), 197. See also Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws (New York: Random House, 2015), 499–500.
3. Gordon, Romantic Outlaws, xvii.
4. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London: 1774), quoted in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, ed. Anne Mellor, Longman Cultural Editions (Pearson, 2007), 124.
5. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 105–6.
6. Gordon, Romantic Outlaws, 172.
7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 65.