The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein

by Kiersten White

  “You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured, wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were for ever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal when all human kind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.

  “But it is true that I am a wretch. I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me; but your abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself. I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart in which the imagination of it was conceived, and long for the moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination will haunt my thoughts no more.

  “Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man’s death is needed to consummate the series of my being, and accomplish that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall quit your vessel on the ice-raft which brought me thither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness. Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer, and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death?

  “Farewell! I leave you, and in you the last of human kind whom these eyes will ever behold. Farewell, Frankenstein! If thou wert yet alive, and yet cherished a desire of revenge against me, it would be better satiated in my life than in my destruction. But it was not so; thou didst seek my extinction that I might not cause greater wretchedness; and if yet, in some mode unknown to me, thou hast not ceased to think and feel, thou wouldst not desire against me a vengeance greater than that which I feel. Blasted as thou wert, my agony was still superior to thine; for the bitter sting of remorse will not cease to rankle in my wounds until death shall close them for ever.

  “But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

  He sprung from the cabin-window, as he said this, upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.

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  MARY SHELLEY

  Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher and novelist. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, a renowned feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died of sepsis ten days after giving birth to her. Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, their next-door neighbor, when Mary was four, and she was raised in an extended family that included a stepsister, Jane, and a half sister, Fanny Imlay. Largely self-educated—a source of some mortification to her—she was made aware from an early age that she was destined for, if not greatness, a respectable writing career. Her father founded a publishing company that he operated out of their house, and frequent visitors included Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Harriet; the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in their living room very late one night. Mary and Jane, ignoring their curfew, hid behind the couch to listen.

  She spent part of her early teens in the Scottish countryside with family friends. On one return from Scotland to London, in May 1814, three months before her seventeenth birthday, she fell in love with Shelley. They eloped to France, accompanied by Jane. Godwin, despite lifelong professions of his belief in free love, protested; on their first day abroad, in Calais, “a fat lady…arrived,” Shelley wrote, in a diary he and Mary kept jointly, “who said that I had run away with her daughter.” Mrs. Godwin could not persuade either girl to go back to London with her, and left alone after a night’s argument. Mary, Shelley, and Jane (who now called herself “Claire”) went to Paris and continued on to Switzerland by mule, returning in September to London, where they rented an apartment. Shelley continued intermittently to see Harriet, who was pregnant with their second child.

  Shelley had to hide from bill collectors through the fall and winter, and apart from various clandestine assignations, Mary saw very little of him. Early in 1815 she began an affair with a lawyer, friend, and creditor, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Shelley, who had become involved with Claire, approved of the liaison. On February 22, 1815, while Shelley was away, Mary give birth prematurely to her first child, a girl, who died twelve days later, shortly after Hogg had helped Mary and the infant move to a different apartment. Mary became pregnant again almost immediately by Shelley; her second child, William, was born on January 24, 1816.

  In the spring of 1816 Mary, Shelley, William, and Claire set up house near Lake Geneva, below the Villa Diodati, which was occupied by the poet Lord Byron, with whom Claire had had a brief affair earlier in the year, and whose child she eventually bore. It was a rainy summer, and they spent long nights with Byron and Polidori, his doctor, talking about the supernatural and science, and challenging one another to write ghost stories. One such conversation in mid-June—mostly about galvanism being used to reanimate a corpse—stretched almost until dawn, and when Mary finally got to bed, she dreamed a student built a human being and—as she put it—woke him up with machinery. The dream inspired her first novel, Frankenstein. Its composition was interrupted by a move back to England, intermittent sickness from a third pregnancy, and the suicides of her half sister Fanny and of Harriet Shelley, in October and November, respectively. Har
riet, also pregnant by Shelley, drowned herself in the Serpentine.

  Mary married Shelley on December 30, 1816. Five months later she finished Frankenstein, and on September 2, 1817, she gave birth to her third child, Clara, and published Journal of a Six Weeks’ Tour, a travel book. Frankenstein was published on January 1, 1818, and immediately became a bestseller, although she never made much money from it.

  Several months later the Shelleys moved permanently to Italy. On September 24, 1818, Clara died in Venice, of an illness that originated with a tooth infection; on June 7, 1819, William died in Rome of malaria while Mary was expecting her fourth child. Consumed by feelings of hopelessness, she wrote Matilda, a melodramatic novel whose theme is father-daughter incest. Her father, who, having become destitute, had begun to beg money from her, advised her not to publish it, and she agreed. On November 12, 1819, she gave birth to a son, Percy, in Florence. The following year she began work on a medieval Italian romance, Valperga, intending to donate royalties to her father, and became pregnant for the fifth time. She suffered a miscarriage in June 1821.

  Shelley drowned in a storm on July 8, 1822, in the bay of Spezzia. His body washed ashore about ten days later and was cremated on the beach in the presence of Mary; the poet, critic, and essayist Leigh Hunt; Edward John Trelawny, a friend of the Shelleys’ from Cornwall; and Byron, who asked for the skull. Hunt, remembering how Byron had treated the skull of a Franciscan monk found in a Spanish abbey—he made it into an ashtray—declined to see the great Romantic poet’s skull thus treated, and refused. Trelawny snatched Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre, causing permanent damage to his hand, and gave it to Mary, who carried it in her purse, some say, for the rest of her life. She buried Shelley’s ashes in Rome and returned to England.

  Valperga was published in 1823 and, in the following year, the Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which Mary edited. In the next few years she briefly considered two essentially loveless marriages to Americans—the actor-dramatist John Howard Payne and the writer Washington Irving—but ultimately rejected both men. In 1826 she published The Last Man, a tragic-ironic novel in the Gothic tradition that fused fantasy and realism and whose three central characters are based loosely on herself, Shelley, and Byron. She contracted smallpox in 1828.

  The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, a historical novel, was published in 1830, and in 1831, she revised Frankenstein for republication. Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia commissioned a series of biographical and critical essays on Italian, French, and Spanish writers in 1832 that were published separately as Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain & Portugal (1835) and Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838). A semiautobiographical novel, Lodore, was published in 1835.

  Her last novel, Falkner, partially an attempt to absolve Shelley of charges of causing Harriet’s suicide, was published in 1837; its eponymous hero was based on Trelawny. She released Shelley’s Poetical Works and Letters in 1839. Thereafter she underwent periods of severe illness, with recoveries spent on the Continent with her son, Percy, and his friends. Her last book was Rambles in Germany and Italy. She died on February 21, 1851, in London after a series of strokes, and was buried in Bournemouth.

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  Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, & To Build a Fire

  Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & The Wilderness Hunter

  Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons

  Isaak Walton and Charles Cotton, The Compleat Angler

  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

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