“How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein: I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity: but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow-creatures, who owe me nothing? they spurn and hate me. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me … Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me…. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they may be, to speak in their own defence before they are condembed … Cursed, cursed creator: Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?” — Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s creature to his creator
In the above passage please note the similarity to the quote in the headline, which Mary wrote in her journal in 1832.
It’s her birthday today.
As legend has it: In May of 1916, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his not-wife Mary Godwin went to Geneva. Along for the ride (for months and years) was Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister. Shelley had a fantasy of living in a collective type of group marriage, and Mary agreed, in a way, but was not happy about the omnipresent Claire, with whom she did not get along. Nevertheless, the trio went to spend the summer with the notorious Lord Byron. Shelley and Mary were a scandalous pair: after all, Shelley was still married, and he and Mary literally ran off together without getting hitched. But Lord Byron was famous, as in FAMOUS famous, whereas Shelley was – if not well-known, then at least not AS well-known as Byron. Byron was an absolute SCANDAL. Shelley, Mary and Claire were also scandalous, traveling around Europe together. Meanwhile, Claire got pregnant by Lord Byron, and really fell apart because of it. Byron wouldn’t acknowledge the child, until he did, and he took the child away and put her into a convent. I mean, I could go on. It’s endlessly fascinating.
So. Onto the legend. The legend of the birth of Frankenstein. Mary Godwin wasn’t just some amoeba who had no ambition until that one stormy night of inspiration. She had ambition. She was extremely well read. She had already written a book about her travels through war-torn Europe. She was the daughter of two very famous parents, atheist/revolutionary book publisher William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist revolutionary who died giving birth to Mary. Mary Godwin was a nepo baby.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Before he got to know Mary, Percy Shelley was one of William Godwin’s many acolytes, those drawn to Godwin for his radical ideas. This was all well and good but the constantly cash-poor Godwin hoped Shelley would support him financially. Godwin somehow got it into his head that Shelley would pay all his debts. Forever? It is weird. Shelley came from wealth, of course – although I don’t even know what that means in this case, English aristocracy being what it is – but he didn’t have cash laying around, he wasn’t some famous guy who tossed money at his friends. He also ran afowl of his father, due to scandalous views like atheism, etc., so his inheritance wasn’t a done deal. So there’s this weird clingy older man assuming this much younger guy would bankroll him. In the meantime, Percy met Godwin’s daughter, Mary, and before you knew it, he was courting her, much of this (very brief) courtship taking place standing at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s mother. You can’t make this up. Shelley was married at the time, too! His wife Harriet was pregnant, TOO! But he ran away with Mary anyway. Mary was 17.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Of course William Godwin was scandalized, but his reaction was tempered by his desire for Shelley’s money. Godwin felt Shelley promised to support him (did he, though?). Also, Mary’s attitude was, essentially, “Seriously, Dad, you should not be surprised at my behavior. You and my mother didn’t believe in marriage or any state institutions, and I don’t either. You taught me well, right?”
At any rate, Shelley and Mary (and poor hang-along Claire) ran away to Europe together. Rumors swirled around them, depraved stuff. Orgies, incest. In 1816, as mentioned, they traveled to Geneva to meet up with Lord Byron, who had rented a villa with his friend, physician John William Polidori. The intervening centuries have blurred some of the specifics: it seems like Shelley must have been famous, but he really wasn’t. He was more famous for his scandals than for his poetry (at that time). Byron, on the other hand, was famous, as famous for his poetry as for his self-inventing fiery mercurial personality. Mary and Shelley were eager to get close to this celebrated man. Claire got too close. And paid the price.
Mary loved the summer at Lake Geneva. There was a lot of just hanging around, and reading, and reading out loud, nights by the fire. 1816 was known as “the year without a summer”, due to the eruption of Mount Tamboro, a volcano in Indonesia, the previous year. The summer of 1816 was cold and rainy. The group couldn’t do what they would normally do during warm summer months: traipse around, swim, bask in the sun, hike, have picnics, go boating, etc. They were mostly housebound. One could argue “the year without a summer” had something to do with Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Normal summer pursuits were barred to her.
The beautifully weird group Rasputina, a staple of my listening in late-90s New York, wrote a song called “1816, The Year Without a Summer”, including the lyrics:
You remember 1816 as the year without a summer
June 1816, a sudden snowstorm blankets all the countryside
So Mary Shelley had to stay inside and she wrote Frankenstein
Oh, 1816 was the year without a summer
The group was simpatico, albeit with disturbing undercurrents. They were radical, politically and socially, and they were all interested in things like science and new technology. They would stay up at night talking about these things, the philosophies around change, the dangers of unfettered science, anxieties about what man was doing to the environment. On one stormy night, Lord Byron had an idea: they should each write a ghost story, to be shared with the group. Shelley, Byron and Polidori dashed theirs off, but Mary was stuck. She couldn’t think of anything. Maybe somewhere she knew what she wanted to write was going to be HUGE and she had to mentally prepare. All of the conversations they’d had that summer swirled through her mind. Every morning, everyone would ask her, “Have you written a story yet?”
In her famous preface to the re-issue of Frankenstein, she described the genesis, the “a-ha” moment of getting The Idea.
Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by before we retired to rest. 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. 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. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Craetor of the world. 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, and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench forever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. 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. 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 frighttened that night!
Swiftly 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 which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story.
I go into all of this – at length – in my upcoming book – out on October 28 – about Guillermo del Toro’s film Frankenstein.
Mary Shelley made it into the history books with her first novel. Sci-fi owes her the greatest deepest debt. She wrote other novels. She always wrote. Her personal life, her anxieties, her crushing depression, her all-too-short and tumultuous life with Shelley, all show up and inform her books. Percy Shelley died young. Mary Shelley spent the rest of her life organizing his papers and publishing full editions of his work. It was her life’s mission to get his work out into the world, to solidify his reputation. It worked.
Mary, however, needed no help of this kind. She made it into the history books all on her own. At the age of 19.
The mind boggles.
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