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Please, analyze and quote the text of the novel only, as your primary source. Do not use any secondary sources or critical essays available online (remember that I always run the plagiarism check through Turnitin). In case you need to review anything related to the essay structure, format and analysis, please refer to the Optional Module on Writing, included after Module Six. This optional module contains the most important information about essay writing from my English 1 class. Regardless of how pressured you might feel, I strongly urge you to refrain from any online borrowing of sources or writing chatbots. I have just completed a course on detecting chatbot writing and I will review each essay carefully. Do not rob your critical and analytical thinking by relying on other sources. Your honesty and creativity, based on the specifics of our class, are the most important tools for success. If you want to support your analysis by a secondary source from a scholarly article, you may use a few short quotes only from the essays available within the book itself – Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein. Focus on analysis and avoid any plot summary, repetitions or “empty speech”.
Your essay should be 4 pages long and formatted according to the same MLA guidelines as posted in our Optional Writing Module, as well as in student essay samples. In addition to the entire module dedicated to essay structure and writing, I have also included a few Frankenstein essay samples by my previous students. Everything you might need to review in relation to planning, outlining, writing and formatting your essay is covered on our Canvas page.
Choose one of the following topics for your essay. Remember that you will have to focus the topic of your choice into your own, precise thesis. After your introductory paragraph, each body paragraph should focus on one major point in support of your thesis, and then analyze that point by offering evidence only from the text of Frankenstein –quotes and/or paraphrased evidence. Always aim for clarity and precision. Avoid over-generalized or generic statements, “universal truths” and plot summary. We all know the events in the novel. I am interested in your opinion, interpretation, and your ability to analyze Frankenstein, supported by the specific evidence that you consider important.
Is Frankenstein a condemnation of blind ambition and extreme pursuit of “scientific” achievement without regard for consequences and ethical implications? Victor Frankenstein’s own reflections on his career would seem to imply as much. Is he right? Is this what the author wants us to think? Include specific evidence from the novel.
Mary Shelley is careful to outline the progression of the Creature’s awareness, beginning with his earliest sense impressions. This progression seems to duplicate the stages of infant, child, and general human development. Does this account tell us anything important about what it means to be human? How does this relate to his journey from complete innocence to revenge and guilt? Include specific evidence from the novel.
How should we pursue knowledge according to Shelley? Include specific evidence from the novel.
Frankenstein may seem to endorse the common modem sociological premise that antisocial or criminal behavior is conditioned by rage, which in turn is induced by society’s rejection of its marginal members. Does the novel give clear support to this sociological premise? Remember to include specific evidence from the novel.
After Frankenstein’s decision not to create a female mate for the Creature, the latter vows to avenge himself on Frankenstein on his wedding day. Through all the long months during which Frankenstein broods over this threat, it never occurs to him that Elizabeth, and not he himself may be the intended victim. What do you make of his rather incredible lapse of imagination? What is wrong with Victor? Include specific evidence from the novel.
Do Victor and the Creature appear as doubles, two sides of the same mind? Does it seem that Victor, in some way, complies with the Creature’s acts of revenge? Include specific evidence from the novel.
Victor had many opportunities to organize the capture of the Creature and destroy him earlier to prevent more death around him. Why doesn’t he do that? Is he able to? Include specific evidence from the novel.
How do the notions of extreme enterprise, blind ambition, pursuit of power and fame, reflect some of the fundamental ideas within patriarchal structure, hierarchical social order and European views of the world in the 19th century, according to Frankenstein? Include specific evidence from the novel.
Choose a submission type, I attached the book for quotes
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Silberberg 1
Mitchell Silberberg
Professor Engelmann
English 2
25 April 2018
Blindness in Great Vision: A Study of Frankenstein
A sea captain battles a mighty gale for control of his ship. Icebergs encroach, bringing
subzero temperatures. The smell of a storm fills the noses of the crew. Fishermen and explorers
at sea battle not only the elements but also their internal selves. Their morals and attitudes shape
their reality and a crew must be able to work together in order to survive. The same situation
occurs in civilized society. Individuals’ intentions and actions affect the greater whole; so, they
must correct or temper themselves. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the overly ambitious
explorer Robert Walton risks his and his crew’s lives in the name of polar discovery. He pushes
on despite their being surrounded by dangerous icebergs since his true goal is dearer to him than
life itself – glory. Besides for Walton’s voyage, another extreme enterprise takes place. Victor
Frankenstein, a genius scientist, ambitiously endeavors and succeeds in creating new life.
Foolishly though, he does not create any fail safes to prevent his creature from wreaking havoc.
The creature despises his creator and murders Victor’s loved ones. Walton’s and Victor’s
intentions for extreme enterprise, blind ambition, and pursuit of power and fame are
manifestations of their excessive pride. In looking at Frankenstein, one must examine these
manifestations in Walton’s polar expedition and Victor’s secluded experimentation to find that
elitist worldviews and social structures corrupt the lives of everyone touched by them.
Walton’s blind ambition and desire for glory negatively affect his life and the lives of his
crew and sister. Before beginning his journey, he tells his sister Margaret that he hopes to, “tread
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a land never before imprinted by the foot of man” (Shelley 7). Countless numbers of people
share this innocent goal with Walton, but he naively believes that, “sailing over a calm sea, we
may be wafted to a land surpassing wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on
the habitable globe” (7). His hopes for discovery are beautiful, yet he has not prepared enough to
follow through. For instance, the ocean had by this time, the 19th century, been known as a
dangerous and life-threatening place. Previous explorers of the Arctic told the world of the
dangers lie there. Walton and his crew experience this danger when they are, “still surrounded by
mountains of ice, still in imminent danger of being crushed in their conflict. The cold is
excessive, and many of my unfortunate comrades have already found a grave amidst this scene
of desolation” (154). Walton’s blind ambition for his enterprise and pursuit of fame lead to the
deaths of his fellow crewmates. This is one of the horrible outcomes blind ambition can have.
The archetype of the forest or the desert relate to this. If one walks unprepared into a chaotic
unknown, then one should expect anything and everything to happen to them.
In the meantime, Walton’s blind ambition can act unbridled since he carries elitism
within himself. In one letter, he repeatedly tells his sister about his need for a friend. He claims,
“I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a
capacious min, whose tastes are like my own,” (10). It is natural for a person to desire
companionship; in fact, friends are usually similar in most regards. Here, Walton’s claim is
faultless. Soon after though, he praises his lieutenant, “a man of wonderful courage and
enterprise; he is madly desirous of glory. He is an Englishman, . . . a person of an excellent
disposition,” (11). Walton reveals his true self in this complement by contradicting his previous
claim that he desires a friend. Even in his own eyes, the lieutenant is a man of good quality and
should be worthy of Walton’s friendship. Walton sees himself as a self-taught man and better
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than his fellow crewmen since, “I was passionately fond of reading . . . I often worked harder
than the common sailors during the day, and devoted my nights to the study of mathematics, the
theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science” (8). Here, the reader sees Walton is
an elitist since he sees the other sailors as lesser than him. This elitism allowed for his ambition
to go unchecked and lead to the death of his crewmates. Elitism also lead to his failure in the end
when he proclaims, “I have consented to return, if we are not destroyed. Thus are my hopes
lasted by cowardice and indecision. I come back ignorant and disappointed” (155). Walton’s
hierarchy worldview did not allow him to lead a safe mission. His elitism harmed one other
person too, his sister Margaret. One of his first statements in the letters is, “an enterprise which
you have regarded with such evil forebodings” (7). He patriarchally ignores that she must wait
painfully for him while he lives dangerously. In the end, Walton’s foul intentions ruin his
mission and negatively impact his crew and sister.
Victor’s blind ambition and power hunger tinge his experimentation, wrecking his life
and the lives of Elizabeth and the creature. Long before his life-giving experiments, Victor lives
a privileged life in Geneva since his, “ancestors had been for many years counsellors and
syndics; and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation” (18). He
is the descendent of politicians who, back then, lived a far better life than commoners. He lives
proudly as their descendent. This was the start of Victor’s elitism. He spends years in school
studying multiple subjects, but his study of alchemy “appeared to me treasure known to few
beside myself;” (22). He thinks of himself as special, unique among the masses for studying
alchemy. Once he gets older, he enters university and later, “made some discoveries in the
improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at
the university. . . . my residence there being no long conducive to my improvements” (31). He
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was an advanced and successful student, yet he takes too much pride from it. Victor decides that
the university is beneath him and that he should leave. His pride quickly grows into hubris when
he begins thinking of himself as a god. Before he creates the creature, he says, “death appeared
to me ideal [imaginary] bounds, which I should first break through . . . A new species would
bless me as its creator and source;” (33). His god complex empowers his elitism, which in turn
empowers his power hunger and blind ambition. A god should be allowed to do whatever he/she
wants without any consequences. No god, Victor does not see the dangerous potential of his
experiment and gets affected by his experiment and its product, the creature. For instance,
Victor’s “cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with
confinement” (33). Not only is his physical health depleted, but also his mental and spiritual
health. Victor calls his experiment “the great object, which swallowed up every habit of my
nature,” (34) because he completely devotes himself to the enterprise. He loses his old self and
loves in the process of creating the creature. For example, Victor no longer “watch[es] the
blossom or the expanding leaves – sights which before always yielded supreme delight,” (35).
Meanwhile, Victor thinks himself an elite who can ignore the pain of others. He
dishonors the dead and hurts living creatures when he “dabbled among the unhallowed daps of
the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?” (33). Not long after these
atrocities, Victor succeeds in completing his creation; but, “the beauty of the dream vanished.
And breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure . . . I rushed out of the
room,” (36). At the moment of his greatest success, Victor experiences at the same time his
greatest failure. His supposedly perfect creation is foul to him, causing him to abandon it. The
creature suffers from this parental abandonment. It wants to know Victor. It fails in befriending
Victor and takes revenge. Victor’s blind ambition and pursuit for glory allow for the creature to
Silberberg 5
murder Elizabeth. Victor knows that the creature approaches him and Elizabeth yet leaves her
unprotected. He goes by himself to wait for and kill the creature; but, he then hears “a shrill and
dreadful scream . . . She was there, lifeless and inanimate,” (140). His second blind ambition of
putting down the creature fails when he leaves Elizabeth vulnerable. She is soon murdered by the
creature. Grief stricken, Victor goes to hunt down the creature in the Arctic and meets Walton
there. Victor, weak and decrepit, dies in Walton’s care. Soon after, the creature arrives and
proclaims, “Polluted by crimes, and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in
death?” (161). Besides for harming himself, Victor’s experiment ends up harming everyone
touched by him. The elitism born out of his blind ambition and prideful power hunger directly
caused his demise.
The tragic failures of Walton’s polar exploration and Victor’s life-giving experimentation
shatter their lives. Each is left without a satisfying victory. The icebergs force Walton to return to
England. The birth of the creature destroys Victor’s health, kills Elizabeth, and pains the
creature. The hierarchal worldview Walton and Victor share, elitism, is the source of their
problems. Elitism gives way to dangerous enterprises, patriarchy, and eurocentrism. It also
allows for individuals to act in ways which imbalances the natural order in life. The excess pride
and ambition both men had brought them to their respective downfalls. If they had treated others
as their equals, then they and those they affected might have lived a more peaceful life.
Silberberg 6
Works Cited:
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York City, Norton, 1996.
A NORTON CRITICAL EDITION
Mary Shelley
FRANKENSTEIN
THE 1818 TEXT
CONTEXTS
CRITICISM
Second Edition
Edited by
J. PAUL HUNTER
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, EMERITUS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
The Editor
List of Illustrations
Introduction
The Text of Frankenstein
MAP: Geneva and Its Environs
Title page (1818)
Dedication (1818)
Preface
Frankenstein
Contexts
CIRCUMSTANCE, INFLUENCE, COMPOSITION, REVISION
Mary Shelley • Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831)
John William Polidori • Letter Prefaced to The Vampyre (1819)
M. K. Joseph • The Composition of Frankenstein
Chris Baldick • [Assembling Frankenstein]
Richard Holmes • [Mary Shelley and the Power of Contemporary Science]
Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall • [The Significance of Place: Ingolstadt]
Charles E. Robinson • Texts in Search of an Editor: Reflections on The Frankenstein Notebooks
and on Editorial Authority
Anne K. Mellor • Choosing a Text of Frankenstein to Teach
RECEPTION, IMPACT, ADAPTATION
Percy Bysshe Shelley • On Frankenstein
[John Croker] • From the Quarterly Review (January 1818)
Sir Walter Scott • From Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (March 1818)
Edinburgh Magazine • [On Frankenstein] (March 1818)
Gentleman’s Magazine • [On Frankenstein] (April 1818)
Knight’s Quarterly • [On Frankenstein] (August–November 1824)
Hugh Reginald Haweis • Introduction to the Routledge World Library Edition (1886)
Chris Baldick • [The Reception of Frankenstein]
William St. Clair • [Frankenstein’s Impact]
Susan Tyler Hitchcock • [The Monster Lives On]
Elizabeth Young • [Frankenstein as Historical Metaphor]
David Pirie • Approaches to Frankenstein [in Film]
SOURCES, INFLUENCES, ANALOGUES
The Book of Genesis • [Biblical Account of Creation]
John Milton • From Paradise Lost
Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mont Blanc (1816)
• [The Sea of Ice] (1817)
• Mutability
George Gordon, Lord Byron • Prometheus
• Darkness
• From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816)
Charles Lamb • The Old Familiar Faces
Criticism
George Levine • Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism
Ellen Moers • Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar • Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve
Mary Poovey • “My Hideous Progeny”: The Lady and the Monster
Anne K. Mellor • Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein
Peter Brooks • What Is a Monster? (According to Frankenstein)
Bette London • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Spectacle of Masculinity
Marilyn Butler • Frankenstein and Radical Science
Lawrence Lipking • Frankenstein, the True Story; or, Rousseau Judges Jean-Jacques
Garrett Stewart • In the Absence of Audience: Of Reading and Dread in Mary Shelley
James A. W. Heffernan • Looking at the Monster: Frankenstein and Film
Patrick Brantlinger • The Reading Monster
Jonathan Bate • [Frankenstein and the State of Nature]
Anne K. Mellor • Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the Yellow Peril
Jane Goodall • Electrical Romanticism
Christa Knellwolf • Geographic Boundaries and Inner Space: Frankenstein, Scientific Exploration,
and the Quest for the Absolute
Mary Shelley: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography
Copyright
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. Also Publishes
The Editor
J. PAUL HUNTER is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus at
the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s
Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe; Occasional
Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance; and Before Novels:
The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. He is author of
the first nine editions of The Norton Introduction to Poetry and the long-time
co-editor of The Norton Introduction to Literature and New Worlds of
Literature.
Illustrations
MAP: Geneva and Its Environs
Title page (1818)
Dedication (1818)
The Brummagem Frankenstein (1866)
The Russian Frankenstein (1854)
“Our Frankenstein” (1900)
Film still from Young Frankenstein
1831 Frontispiece
Introduction
I
It is almost two hundred years since Frankenstein was first published, and it
has now become a standard text in the literary canon, one of the world’s most
popular, widely read, and celebrated novels. It is also one of the most
thoroughly studied and analyzed texts, making it ideal for the college or
university classroom in which critical reading, cultural analysis, or literary
history are at stake. Its history as a text is, however, more complicated than
most, in part because its central narrative of creative overreaching and bitter
disillusionment in a sense outgrew the novel itself and became a kind of
independent trope or “myth” that invaded other art forms—plays, cartoons,
advertisements, comic books, conversations, films. Frankenstein (the name)
became a kind of all-purpose watchword for creativity gone wrong and
monstrosity gone wild. Just about everyone, even people who do not read at
all, knows the basic plot situation and its grotesque outcome: an ambitious
and talented young scientist seeks and finds the secret of life itself, and he
creates from assorted excavated body parts a giant adult being who turns out
to be an ugly and savage (although sensitive) monster. And it is perhaps
significant that, as often as not, casual observers confuse the creator with the
created: in the novel, the scientist is named Frankenstein and his monster is
nameless, but in popular lore the creature often takes on the name of the
creator, as if there were no differences in the monstrosity of outcomes. In one
sense, then, the story of Frankenstein now transcends the novel it came from
—but only because its origins in the novel itself are so richly suggestive and
evocative of larger issues and so resonant about the ambition and fallings-
short of the human condition. Frankenstein is, in one way of putting it, larger
than itself, a text that prompts not just close reading but the pursuit of
extended intellectual and cultural implication.
How this novel (and this story) came to be is a complex tale in itself, and
it can be very briefly or quite lengthily told: there are many subtleties and
ambiguities in the process of its creation. The brief version, incomplete and
imperfect but suggestive of both the popular, potboiler appeal and the larger
seriousness of major scientific, social, literary, and philosophical issues,
involves the occasion and moment of the novel’s origin. According to its
author and to anecdotes from her companions at the time of initial
conception, (see pp. 165–70) it sprang from a proposal to engage in a storywriting contest. The situation was this. The author—later to be known as
Mary Shelley but then just eighteen years old, already the mother of two
children (one of whom had died in infancy), unmarried and still known by
her maiden name, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin—was traveling in the Swiss
alps. Her companions were her lover and soon-to-be husband (the already
celebrated poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was still married to someone
else), her infant son William, and her troubled and impulsive stepsister,
Claire Clairmont. In the late spring of 1816, they settled into a modest house
in the mountains near Geneva—and also near the villa where an even more
famous (though just as controversial) poet, Lord Byron, had settled more
luxuriously with his personal physician and companion, Dr. John William
Polidori. The two groups quickly merged and for weeks spent nearly all their
waking hours together, often sailing on Lake Geneva (see map, p. 2) by day,
and reading and conversing together in the evenings and on days when the
weather was unsettled. And it was often unsettled that summer, the coldest
and most consistently stormy European summer on record. Later, when
annual charts could be compared, 1816 became famous as “the year without a
summer.” Those conversations were apparently animated and often informed
by wide and adventurous reading—of English and ancient classics, of
scientific discovery and speculation, of British and European social politics.
Byron and Percy Shelley were the acknowledged leaders in the
conversations; they were both bold in their ideas and manner, and they were
newly friends and getting to know each other’s interests and range. Mary—
younger, rather quiet, and natively less assertive and argumentative—could
nevertheless hold her own on most topics: she was a voracious and retentive
reader. The conversations seem to have ranged widely, often guided by
individual reading and the kinds of popular topics taken up in current
periodicals. We don’t know in detail what they talked about day by day; but
there are indications that they may have debated the nature and origins of life
itself and perhaps discussed the myth of Prometheus in its several forms—
years before Percy would interpret it lengthily in Prometheus Unbound and
some while before it left its imprint as subtitle and suggestive allusion on
Mary’s first significant work.
On some of those inclement nights, they read German ghost stories. One
night in late May or early June, someone (perhaps Byron) suggested that they
engage in a ghost-story-writing contest—in competition with the stories they
were reading and with each other. The rules were loose, but the stories were
to involve the supernatural in some way. As a contest, it wasn’t much of a
success. Percy apparently lost interest quickly and Byron not long after,
though a fragment of what he wrote became attached later to one of his
poems, Mazeppa. Polidori seems to have conceived at first a strange Gothic
tale that Mary found ludicrous, though his own accounts differ from Mary’s
(see p. 169 [Polidori] and pp. 165–69 [Mary]), but then, characteristically, he
piggybacked on a Byron idea and went on to publish a vampire story under
Byron’s name. Claire Claremont seems never even to have begun her story.
The only significant result was Frankenstein, published nineteen months later
anonymously, but with broad hints that it might be by Percy Shelley or
Byron. Early reviewers assumed that it was written by a man.
Besides the competition, conversation, and human stimulation of that
summer of origins, there is also a set of creative issues involving place,
setting, and tone, a question of the influence of surroundings, location, visual
spectacle, and atmosphere. Mary seems to have been acutely responsive to
visual stimuli and especially to the influence of scenery, place-sensitivity,
climate, nature’s moods, and the breathtaking vistas of remote natural scenery
that find their way into the brooding landscapes and Gothic tones the novel
pursues and projects in its Scots and Arctic scenes as well as its more
dominant continental ones. To be sure, Mary meticulously casts these actual
settings in historical terms—she is very careful, for example, to project
Victor Frankenstein’s scientific training at Ingolstadt back into the eighteenth
century, repeatedly dating letters “17—” so as to place the action of the novel
at a time when that university not only still existed but operated as one of the
major European symbols of radical experimental science. (The university was
in fact closed by the authorities in 1800 because of its associations with the
new science and related radical ideas.) But the larger question of mood and
spectacle has less to do with probability and representation than with
projecting a sense of wonder and sometimes of impending doom. We now
know, thanks to climate scientists of the early twentieth century, what the
assembled party shivering in Switzerland could not have then even wildly
suspected—that the cold and gloomy summer of 1816 was part of a global
phenomenon, the spreading of a cloud of volcanic ash over much of Europe
and North America from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia half a year earlier
—a phenomenon that meant that significant parts of the earth were deprived
of sunshine for very long periods, so that the spectacular, sublime craggy
beauties of the lightning-illuminated Alps mixed with invasive mountain
gloom and mood-altering spells of hazy light and uncertain perception. Mary
chose well the wild and untamed mid-European setting for her tale of
discovery and uncertainty, and it was one of those strokes of creative fortune
that the Romantic taste for the picturesque, the sublime, the striking, and the
haunting led not only to recognizable actual settings but also to projected
imaginations in remote, exotic, unexplored northern climes still elusive to all
but the most daring explorers. No wonder the nearby Sea of Ice (see the cover
reproduction of an 1823–24 painting and Percy Shelley’s description on p.
299) became a kind of analogical “source” for the scenes of northern
exploration that the narrator Walton experiences at the start and end of the
novel.
II
Behind the immediate occasion and stimulation of the circumstances and
setting of Frankenstein’s origins are many cumulative situations and
experiences of Mary’s earlier life. Two sets of influences in particular can be
isolated as having a notable impact on what and how she wrote. One involves
the intensity, complexity, and volatility of family relationships in Mary’s own
life; the other involves her ambitious, adventurous, and voracious reading.
The first suggests much about the human issues and interactions that
preoccupy the themes of her novel; the second helps us define and isolate
some of the ideas and concepts behind the themes of the novel—themes that
include (among others) creativity, ambition, responsibility, duty, family,
friendship, authority, education, and social integrity.
Mary had been writing stories and poems since she was a little girl, very
much encouraged in her reading and writing by her famous father. Both her
father and mother were not only published, popular authors but celebrated
controversialists with disciples of their own; both wrote novels (among other
things) but were best known for their radical politics and libertine social
views, especially on love and marriage. The mother, Mary Wollstonecraft,
had been reared in a repressive and abusive family where girls hardly
mattered, and she became an articulate and outspoken proto-feminist whose
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792) were both praised and vilified, as was her novel Mary
(1790). The father, William Godwin, who had grown up in a conservative
and devout dissenting household, also rebelled against his upbringing and
became a leading radical political theorist, fiery in his rhetoric and widely
consulted and deeply involved in arguments in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. His Enquiry Concerning political Justice (1793) was a
revolutionary bible for some and an incendiary provocation for others, and
his novel, Caleb Williams (1794), was a kind of fictionalized version of his
philosophy. Godwin and Wollstonecraft were drawn together—she in her late
30s, he just over 40—by their common views and very quickly became lovers
after meeting in the winter of 1796–97; the future author of Frankenstein was
conceived shortly thereafter, and before she was born they married, much to
the consternation of some of their friends who felt they had compromised
their critique of the oppressiveness of legal institutions such as marriage. But
the marriage was short-lived, and the infant Mary was never to get to know
her mother: Mary Wollstonecraft died of childbirth complications just eleven
days after Mary was born.
Godwin was a supportive father and genuinely encouraged Mary’s
independence and creativity, but he was feckless in his own emotional and
financial affairs—seemingly always out of money and in serious debt, and
pretty much helpless in sorting out personal relationships. Not long after the
death of Mary Wollstonecraft he married again and took into his household,
with his new wife, her two illegitimate children, including a three-year-old
daughter, Claire Claremont (who eighteen years later was part of the ghoststory contest in Switzerland). And there was yet another “family” member,
Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter from a previous
relationship, who had been taken into the household when Godwin and
Wollstonecraft married. Still further, in 1803 when Mary was nearly six, an
addition of the new Godwin union was born, a new half brother for Mary,
William Godwin Jr. So “family” here was a kind of loose and uncertain unit.
The new Mrs. Godwin was crude and unpredictable and offered nothing of
the intellectual stimulus of her brief predecessor. Young Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin (she who was to become Mary Shelley) had ideas, ideals, and
aspirations to follow rather than human role models, and her childhood had
more clear intellectual directions than emotional ones. If there was a life
lesson to be learned from Mary’s growing-up years, it was about flexibility
and pragmatic responses to circumstances rather than stability and personal
security.
And the family she herself began to establish in 1814 with Percy Shelley
reflected and replicated in some ways Mary’s own childhood: boldly
dedicated to intellectual and emotional exploration and speculation,
somewhat peripatetic and unpredictable, tolerant of periodic company and
lively conversation but fundamentally sedentary and reflective. In the man
who became her lover when she was sixteen and her husband at nineteen, she
found a fearsome intellect and creative talent, an adventurous explorer both
physically and mentally, and a firm holder of lofty ideas and attitudes. His
temperament was even more complicated than that of either of her parents—
someone who could be an inspiring guide and tutor on matters of philosophy,
history, politics, and aesthetics, but whose human impulsiveness and
volatility helped settle and clarify her own greater solidity and steadier
judgment. Mary Shelley in her early adulthood and motherhood did not
always project a sense of cuddly maternity, but she was caring and patient in
her character and temperament and in some ways was to her husband as
much a steady and stable parent and counselor as she was lover and
adventurer.
Percy Shelley’s direct influence on the writing of Frankenstein is
palpable but nevertheless debatable in its precise effects and importance. In
late manuscript stages he offered alternative wordings and often rewrote
lengthy passages or created whole sentences and paragraphs that ended up in
the finished novel. (The manuscript of his emendations is preserved in Lord
Abinger’s collection [now housed at the Bodleian Library, Oxford] and has
been meticulously sorted into accessible and readable form by Charles E.
Robinson and published by the Bodleian Library in 2008.) Once it was
popular to argue that he seriously “improved” the manuscript—his word
choices were often more lofty, abstract, and consciously “literary” while
Mary’s were more simple and direct—, but critical opinion now has shifted
toward recognizing Mary’s more down-to-earth language and her ability to
enrich the directness and texture of the story more simply. Scholarly debates
about the nature of Percy’s contribution (or diminution) show every sign of
continuing briskly, and this kind of textual disagreement about influence at a
high scholarly level is part of a larger set of scholarly and critical questions
about what Mary did with her heritage from her human guides, especially her
parents and Percy Shelley. (For a useful account of Mary’s intellectual and
emotional debts, see the essay by Chris Baldick p. 173. And for a detailed
analysis of the whole Godwin-Shelley nexus, see William St. Clair’s
excellent biography of the two families, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The
Biography of a Family [London: Faber, 1989].)
One can see in the text of Frankenstein many traces of the political and
educational ideas of Percy Shelley as well as of her parents—certainly there
is constant parading and questioning of contemporary cultural and
educational assumptions and practices. But the utopian optimism that
sometimes characterizes their writings seems often in question in Mary’s
work, and in Frankenstein the issue of individual responsibility for one’s
choices is always in play; guilt plays a lot larger role in Mary’s thinking and
feeling than it does in her teachers’. A lot of theological and philosophical
issues in Frankenstein remain ambiguous and uncertain, and if “family” is a
helpful guide to the nature and range of many of the issues in the novel, the
firm predictable positions of her mother, father, and husband are not
necessarily always echoed in Mary’s own bold and open explorations of
issues about education, power, and the uses of imagination. In her adaptations
of inherited Enlightenment ideas, there is more darkness and uncertainty, a
lot more for readers to have to sort out for themselves. The many critical
disagreements that characterize the essays gathered at the back of this volume
suggest that many issues in Frankenstein remain unsettled, debatable, or
capable of fresh interpretation. Frankenstein is the kind of text that opens
outward rather than closing in upon itself.
Add one more haunting factor to Mary’s experiences of “family”:
untimely and gruesome death. Not only did her mother die in bearing Mary
herself—dramatic enough in itself to emblazon on her consciousness a
continuing emotional association of birth and death—but a number of other
deaths rudely intruded on Mary’s early life before she came to write
Frankenstein. Her first child, a daughter, was born prematurely in 1815 and
died within a few days. (And her second child—an infant when Frankenstein
was being conceived and written—died at the age of three a year after the
novel was published.) Even more hauntingly there were two dramatic
suicides in the extended family: Mary’s half sister, Fanny Imlay, took her
own life in the fall of 1816; and later that winter Percy Shelley’s first wife,
Harriet, drowned herself in the Serpentine in London; her body was not found
for weeks. And then, four years after Frankenstein was published, Percy
himself drowned in an accident in Italy. It is no wonder that vitality and its
opposites preyed on Mary’s thinking and that disaster in her novel seems to
follow from initiative and creativity.
III
Like her family relationships, Mary’s reading is a better guide to her
curiosity, topicality, and range of interests than to her own beliefs and
considered opinions or to her own comparative writing artistry. In other
words, the outreach of her reading tells us a lot about her interests and desires
but not necessarily her commitments and conclusions. Obviously, she was
guided in her early intellectual and creative choices by her parents’ directions
(and she found a mostly kindred soul in Percy Shelley); but she did not just
read authors and books she agreed wit
