Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  When Mary arrived in Risor, she found two hundred dwellings crouched along the U-shaped harbor. The historic white houses and rustic charm did not impress her, however. She could see only desolation: “To be born here was to be bastilled by nature,” she complained, using her favorite image for being trapped, the Revolution still on her mind. For many years, what happened next was a mystery, but a recently discovered letter from Mary to the Danish foreign minister, Count Andreas Peter Bernstorff, details her meeting with the missing ship’s captain: “Elefsen [sic] waited on me, and, as we were alone, behaved in the humblest manner, wished that the affair had never happened, though he assured me that I never should be able to bring the proofs forward sufficient to convict him. He enlarged on the expense we must run into—appealed to my humanity and assured me that he could not now return the money.” Faced with Ellefson’s resistance, Mary asked the foreign minister for help in extracting some kind of settlement from Ellefson, but, though everyone was convinced of his guilt, no reparations were ever made.

  Not surprisingly, Mary was downcast when she left Risor. She had liked Ellefson when he had stayed with them in Le Havre and felt personally betrayed by his behavior. She also suspected that now that they had final proof of the theft, Imlay would redouble his efforts to earn back the money he had lost and would declare that the dream of a life together in America was impossible. As she prepared to depart, she observed gloomily: “The clouds begin to gather, and summer disappears almost before it has ripened the fruit of autumn.”

  Discouraged though she was, as she sailed back toward Sweden, Mary allowed herself to hope that Imlay would appreciate her efforts. Maybe their time apart would have given him time to reflect on his behavior and, instead of being disappointed at the loss of the silver, maybe he would at last realize that his commercial enterprises were not worth the effort. After all, despite his exertions (and hers), he had lost his investment. Maybe this would help him remember what was really important in life. Love. Family. Herself. His daughter. She even allowed herself to dream that he would propose beginning again. She could see their future so clearly, as though it had already come true. Together they would enjoy a new life, reveling in their love and rejoicing in Fanny. She had not forgotten the tranquillity she had felt in the Scandinavian countryside, nor the satisfaction she had experienced in filling pages of her journal with her reflections. Nevertheless, though she had made peace with herself, at least temporarily, her feelings for Gilbert came rushing back when she contemplated her reunion with her child and the return home.

  Faced with the dispiriting fact that Mary had succumbed once again to Imlay, biographers have variously painted her as pathetic, self-deluded, foolish, and weak. But a century later Freud would explain how the past haunts the present, how unconscious forces shape an individual’s interpretation of the world. For Mary, Gilbert’s rejection had become wrapped up with the disappointments and suffering of her past. Her mother’s neglect, her father’s drunkenness, the loss of Fanny Blood, Fuseli’s rejection, and the attacks she had sustained for her ideas had all become entangled with his loss. She did not have the tools to understand that her pain was not all caused by Imlay and was instead an understandable response to a lifetime of painful experiences. With admirable courage and resourcefulness, she had already done more than most, effecting a partial self-cure through introspection and writing, but her time in Scandinavia was not enough to heal her entirely. Paradoxically, the strength she had gained had only intensified her resolve to regain Imlay’s love. She was a better philosopher than he was. In their battles, her points were accurate and ethically superior. She would make him return to her, she decided. She would win the case against him, and in so doing she would win his love again.

  CHAPTER 25

  MARY SHELLEY: “THE MIND OF A WOMAN”

  [ 1819 ]

  the long, stifling days after William’s death, Mary spent hours alone, gripped by a paralysis that prevented her from picking up her pen or even reading. The distance she and Shelley had bridged five months earlier now gaped like a chasm. The servants, Milly and the woman they had hired to do the heavy cleaning, laughed and chattered as though the world were still intact. Outside, the warblers and orioles chirped until the day’s heat grew too intense. At night Mary, Claire, and Shelley sat in the garden, gazing at the stars. One evening there was a little flurry when Milly thought she had discovered a comet; Shelley, amused, said she would “make a stir, like a great astronomer.”

  But what Mary remembered most about these terrible days was the sameness, the silence. Later, she would regret that she could not see Shelley was mourning in his own way and that he felt abandoned, too. Not only had he lost his son, but in his mind, the woman he loved had disappeared. In her place was a tablet of grief, pale as stone.

  In the first weeks after their move from Rome, Shelley poured himself into finishing Prometheus Unbound. His Prometheus was a hero who braved the gods to steal fire for humans, giving men the ability to progress, improve, and ultimately transcend their bestial conditions. This was a direct contradiction of Mary’s Frankenstein, which she had subtitled The Modern Prometheus. To Mary, Prometheus (Frankenstein) was an antihero: his quest for knowledge was disastrous; his ambition led to death.

  Pessimism versus optimism; despair versus hope; Mary versus Shelley. They stood on opposite sides of tragedy, their conflict filtering through all aspects of their marriage, shaping not only how they coped with their losses but how they approached each other and their work. If one were unaware of the couple’s philosophical fault line, it would be possible to view their books as unrelated rather than as part of a marital debate. Shelley’s poem celebrates the powers of human invention; Mary’s novel warns against the consequences of unchecked ambition. But when put together, Prometheus Unbound emerges as Shelley’s response to The Modern Prometheus, his side of their argument, through which he holds out for hope against his wife’s despair.

  Of course, Prometheus Unbound is much more than that, but when read in this way it reveals just how distant Mary and Shelley had become. At the time Mary wrote Frankenstein, Shelley had not fully agreed with his wife’s outlook. Instead, he had found it interesting, even alluring. Now her dark outlook seemed dangerous. To his wife’s claim that human beings could not be trusted to manage their own creations, Shelley argued that disease and disaster could be eradicated by human ingenuity. In her novel, Prometheus (Frankenstein) destroys everyone he loves. In his poem, Prometheus saves the world.

  By the beginning of July the couple had lost patience with each other. Although Shelley had felt stronger in Naples, his old health complaints were back. Haunted by the fatal diagnosis he had received in England, he remained certain that his time was running out and wrote with a kind of frantic desperation, seeking consolation in the idea that his poetry might live on after his death. Mary, on the other hand, wanted to stop time, or, better yet, turn the clock back. She wanted her children alive and sleeping in their beds. Regret ruled the day. As did second-guessing. Had she traded her children’s health for Shelley’s? If so, it was too steep a price. Her children had loved her utterly, whereas he was remote, self-absorbed, and inaccessible. If only she could join them on the other side. Her mother’s ghost might be there, too, waiting to comfort her grieving daughter.

  Much as she wanted to die, Mary was four and a half months pregnant and would never condemn her unborn child to death. Even if she had not been pregnant, she had been too heavily indoctrinated by Godwin’s stern teachings to succumb to suicide. She managed to write a few letters, but only to lament her situation. “May you…never know what it is to loose [sic] two only & lovely children in one year—to watch their dying moments—& then at last to be left childless & forever miserable,” she wrote to Marianne Hunt.

  Finally, in August, at Shelley’s urging, Mary grudgingly picked up her pen and began to write in her journal. First she quoted an old poem of Shelley’s, written after the suicides of Fanny and Harriet:

&nbs
p; We look on the past, & stare aghast

  On the ghosts with aspects strange & wild

  .   .   .   .   .   .

  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.

  The lines seemed prescient; she did feel like a “tomb,” a marker for the dead. To some extent, she had been raised by Godwin to experience herself this way—she was, after all, the bearer of her dead mother’s name—but now these feelings of loss were sharp, unendurable. She was haunted by ghosts she loved. Loath though she was to indulge in what she termed a Clairmont display of feeling, she allowed herself a rare outburst:

  Wednesday 4th [August 1819]

  I begin my [third] journal on Shelley’s birthday—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 to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.

  The act of writing these few words, bitter as they were, helped Mary remember the solace she had always found in her diary. It was the first step in her journey back to life. Each day she returned to writing, little by little, and almost immediately after this entry, a heroine named Matilda arrived in her imagination, fully conceived, trailing a story behind her that in many ways was more frightening than Frankenstein.

  Mary sketched out the new novel with astonishing rapidity, the gloom of the plot reflecting her desolation. The motherless Matilda discovers that her father harbors an incestuous love for her; he kills himself, then she, too, dies, of self-inflicted consumption, uttering, “A little patience, and all will be over.” Mary italicized these words, as they are the deathbed words spoken by Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft’s mother, and the mother in Wollstonecraft’s last novel, Maria. Matilda’s death unites Matilda with her dead father, but Matilda’s words also link her to her author and her author’s mother.

  Incest, as Shelley’s poetry had already shown, was a common Romantic theme. Indeed, while Mary was writing about Matilda, Shelley was upstairs working on a tale of father/daughter incest, a play he would call The Cenci, based on a historical story he and Mary had discovered together. Beatrice Cenci was a beautiful young girl, famous in Italian history for killing her father after he raped her. The Shelleys had seen her portrait in Rome at the Palazzo Colonna, where Shelley had been struck by her resemblance to Mary. Like Mary, Beatrice was “pale,” with a “large and clear” forehead. She seemed “sad and stricken down in spirit.…Her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lusterless, but beautifully tender and serene.” Alone, he had made a pilgrimage to the dark, fortresslike Palazzo Cenci in the Piazza delle Cinque Scole, near the Tiber River.

  But Mary’s take on incest was entirely different from Shelley’s. She was intent on exploring the parallels between herself and her fictional creation. Both she and Matilda lose their mothers in childbirth and both lose their fathers; however, Matilda’s father kills himself because he loves her too much, whereas Mary’s father cut her off because of her love affair with Shelley. For Mary, who had felt rejected by her father when Mary-Jane entered their lives, and again after she ran away with Shelley, the idea of a father loving his daughter too much was undoubtedly a gratifying fantasy. But it was also an apt psychological representation of Mary’s own experience. Over the course of their life together, despite no actual sexual relations, Godwin had indeed played the psychic role of the disappointed lover, outraged at being displaced by Shelley.

  Ultimately, like the creature in Frankenstein, Matilda decides it is she who is monstrous, when in actuality it is her parent who is the true monster. For what, after all, is Matilda’s crime, or, for that matter, the creature’s? No child can be held accountable for his or her own birth, and so Mary placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the fathers even as she pointed to the faulty (and tragic) logic of children.

  For Shelley, on the other hand, incest was an opportunity to expose the corruption of institutions and the men at their helm. In Count Cenci, Beatrice’s father, a cruel historical tyrant, Shelley found the perfect emblem for unchecked paternalistic power. Unlike Mary, he did not explore the psychology of the main characters. He glossed over Beatrice’s inner life, using her story to convey his angry defiance of oppression and to articulate his philosophy, derived from Godwin, that the liberty of the individual is a necessary component of a virtuous state. Beatrice is a heroine because she defeats the evil ruler.

  To Mary, what mattered most was precisely what Shelley had skipped over: the feelings of the victim, the woman’s inner life—the themes her mother had focused on in her books. In Matilda, good and evil seep into each other so that all of the characters wander around in a fog of moral gray. Matilda’s external world is curiously empty. Not once does she refer to church or state, the evil institutional forces that rule Shelley’s Cenci. Her tragedy results from her relationship with her father, not from the corruption of power. That Mary was aware of her differences with her husband becomes clear at the end of the novel, when she introduces another character, a young man named Woodville, who bears a striking resemblance to Shelley. Woodville and Matilda become fast friends, but, strangely, not paramours. Matilda does not want Woodville to fall in love with her; she wants him to merge with her despair, just as Mary wanted Shelley to join her in her grief. But Woodville refuses and instead scrutinizes Matilda from afar, leading her to exclaim:

  I am, I thought, a tragedy; a character that he comes to see me act: now and then he gives me my cue that I may make a speech more to his purpose; perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure.…He takes all the profit and I bear all the burthen.

  In fictional form, Mary articulated her rage at Shelley’s desertion. Instead of supporting her, Shelley had stepped back and was studying her, using her as a model for Beatrice. In a retaliatory swipe, Mary has Matilda beg Woodville to die with her, and when he refuses, because one day he might be able to do something to improve the world, Matilda sinks to her death, her words expressing her (and her author’s) feeling of betrayal:

  Farewell Woodville, the turf will soon be green on my grave; and the violets will bloom on it. There is my hope and expectation; yours are in this world; may they be fulfilled.

  One can almost picture Mary writing these words in the garden while Shelley was out walking with her stepsister or up on the rooftop in his glass cell. Although it is understandable that Woodville (Shelley) would choose life over death, for Matilda (Mary), this choice represented a rejection, a focus on the outside world rather than on the woman he loved. To Mary, it seemed that Shelley was more interested in the fictional Beatrice than in her. The other way to see it, which did not make her feel any better, was that he was making her, his own wife, into a fictional character. Besides, it was not fair. Neither Mary nor her fictional alter ego had the same set of choices as Shelley or Woodville; the world was not open to them as it was to men.

  AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER the unhappy entourage moved to Florence to be near their favorite physician, Dr. Bell, so he could oversee the birth and watch over Shelley’s health. Still, it was difficult to leave Livorno; the Gisbornes had been valiant mainstays that summer, propping them up in their dejection. As the Shelleys rolled down the pitted dirt road, departing from the villa for the last time, the Gisbornes’ dog, Oscar, bounded alongside, his tail wagging goodbye. The servant Giuseppe had to “catch him up in his arms to stop his course,” Maria later reported in a letter to Shelley. For several days, the dog was inconsolable. He howled “piteously” at dinnertime and “scratch[ed] with all his might at the door of [the Shelleys’] abandoned house.”

  “Poor Oscar!” Shelley responded. “I feel a kind of remorse to think of the unequal love with which two animated beings regard each other, when I experience no such sensations for
him as those which he manifested for us. His importunate regret is however a type of ours as regards you. Our memory—if you will accept so humble a metaphor—is forever scratching at the door of your absence.”

  They settled into modest lodgings in a rooming house near Santa Maria Novella on the Via Valfonde. The other lodgers were a predictable mix of middlebrow tourists: maiden ladies, widows, and members of the clergy, not unlike the clientele so aptly described a hundred years later by E. M. Forster in his novel A Room with a View. Meals were included in the price, but dining at the rooming house’s long table was an awkward experience, as the other English visitors regarded the notorious Shelley trio with polite horror.

  Mary remained melancholy that fall. She took an immediate dislike to their landlady and did not accompany Shelley on his gallery visits, instead staying at home, resting, reading, and working on Matilda. Claire continued her vocal training and began to study French, so Shelley mainly toured the sights alone. One of his favorite walks was outside the city walls, where he spent hours “watching the leaves and the rising and falling of the Arno.”

  Although he had tried to distance himself from Mary’s despair, Shelley had grown increasingly depressed as summer turned to fall. He was preoccupied by an attack on his “personal character” that had appeared in a review of The Revolt of Islam in The Quarterly Review. The most reputable journal of the era, the Quarterly was widely read, and its articles carried considerable weight, which made its criticism even harder to stomach. It had become common knowledge that Shelley had inscribed “Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist” in the Chamonix register, and the reviewer spent the bulk of the article on Shelley’s immorality, his radical politics, and his stance against religion: