How Frankenstein Was Born and Why It Matters
I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. ––Mary Shelley
Frankenstein's mother Mary was destined for literary greatness. At least this is what most people in her day believed –– including herself. She was the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two literary giants celebrated for their radical philosophies.
Motherless just 10 days after she was born in 1797, Mary grew into a lonely, bookish child who adored her father. Neither Godwin nor Mary ever recovered from Wollstonecraft's death. Father and daughter consoled themselves by dreaming about Mary’s future. How could it be anything but great? Mary was, after all, the progeny of two of England’s most thrilling writers and thinkers.
Godwin taught little Mary how to read using Wollstonecraft's headstone in St. Pancras churchyard as a primer. When he remarried, Wollstonecraft's gravesite became one of Mary's favorite places to read. Mary and Percy Shelley often went there to read her mother's books to each other in the early days of their courtship. And it was on her mother’s gravesite that Mary first declared her undying love for Percy, and (legend has it) “knew” him for the first time.
Percy Shelley, who had steeped himself in the work of both of Mary's parents, first visited the Godwin household when Mary was sixteen years old. Mary was visiting friends in Scotland at the time. When she returned home, Godwin instructed her to be on her best behavior in Percy’s presence.
This was because her father wanted Percy to loan the family money. The Godwins were deep in debt, and Mary's father believed Percy was the family’s last hope for escaping financial ruin. Little did Godwin know that by inviting Percy to dine with his family, he had set in motion a chain of events that would lead to the birth of a famously ugly creature who stalks the Western imagination to this day.
Godwin needn't have counseled Mary about pleasing Percy. That was easy. She was the daughter of Percy's idols –– an intelligent, poised, and beautiful daughter at that. Her greenish eyes and pale oval face were complemented by curly reddish-blonde hair that her stepsister Claire Clairmont once compared to “autumnal foliage when played upon by the rays of the setting sun.” Mary was all of this –– and she was intrigued by Percy.
Percy was handsome, the eldest son of a baronet, a radical like her parents, and an artist who liked wearing his shirts open, exposing his chest. “Wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that has just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground” was how Percy’s friend and biographer Thomas Hogg described him around this time.
Mary and Percy felt their mutual attraction at once.
Their romantic relationship was initially a secret. This was because Percy was already married to a young woman named Harriet. Although Harriet and Percy did not share a home, they had a child together and another on the way. Knowing this, Godwin and Mary’s stepmother Mary-Jane tried to put the kibosh on Mary and Percy's relationship. This surprised the young lovers, since Godwin and Wollstonecraft had, during Wollstonecraft's lifetime, been well-known advocates for what was then called “free love.”
Parental opposition combined with their longing to live together prompted Mary and Percy to run away to France, a place they imagined would smile upon them as two young radicals in love. They took Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont with them.
Infuriated by their elopement, both families retaliated against the lovers. Godwin instructed his family to have nothing more to do with Mary, though he continued negotiating with Percy for loans. Mary's stepmother Mary-Jane wrote letters to friends, acquaintances, and family members accusing Mary of corrupting Claire. Percy's wife Harriet emptied their joint bank account, and wrote letters to her own friends and family blaming the entire Godwin family for ruining her life. She amplified the scandalous nature of the affair by claiming that Godwin had sold his two daughters to Percy for £1500. (The story was easy to believe since Percy had indeed loaned Godwin £1500 just before he eloped with Mary.)
Although both Mary and Percy abhorred bourgeois values and customs, they found life as renegades difficult to bear. Mary, alienated from her beloved father, was in the midst of a difficult pregnancy. Mary and Percy were no longer allowed in polite society. And even worse, they were broke. The only person who could bring an end to their financial misery was Percy’s father. He, however, was livid –– even more livid than when Percy was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for espousing atheism. So, the lovers spent the early months of their relationship writing letters to acquaintances begging for money, avoiding creditors, and moving from one awful lodging to another.
Mary had another problem: her stepsister Claire. In the Godwin household, Claire had competed with Mary for Godwin’s attention. Now Claire sought attention from Percy. Claire believed she was in love with him. Mary feared that Percy loved Claire back. Mary knew that he believed in free love, and that he had had affairs during Harriet’s pregnancies. Mary also knew that Percy liked to be the center of attention, and that Claire enjoyed giving Percy attention.
Because of her pregnancy, Mary needed rest. Lots of it. While she rested, Percy and Claire would take long walks. While Mary slept alone, Percy and Claire would stay up late talking. The situation worried Mary. Percy was worried too, so he asked his college friend Thomas Hogg to initiate an affair. Mary rebuffed Thomas's sexual advances at first, though eventually promised Thomas and Percy that she would consider taking Thomas as a lover after the baby was born.
And then something terrible happened. Their baby girl, born eight week premature, died when she was only 13 days old. Mary was plagued by guilt. Percy, who was generally useless in a crisis, could not console her. Neither could Thomas, though he tried harder than Percy did. Each night the baby haunted Mary's dreams. A journal entry from this time reads:
Dream that my little baby came to life again –– that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived –– I awake & find no baby –– I think about the little thing all day.
Months later, after Percy and Mary were able to take some time alone to nurture their relationship, Mary became pregnant with their second child, William. Life was easier by then, in large part because Percy had inherited an income from his grandfather of £1000 a year. The money allowed the lovers to lease a mansion in Bishopsgate and hire staff. And it was here that William was born. The money also allowed Percy to rent a small cottage in Devon for Claire, easing household tensions.
At Bishopsgate, Mary and Percy were able to resume their intellectual routines. They spent hours each day studying, hiking, and talking about philosophy, poetry, and the artist's power to transform society. Ideas from these conversations would find their way into Percy’s Defense of Poetry and Mary’s Frankenstein.
As cozy as Bishopsgate was had Mary and Percy stayed there, Frankenstein might never have been written. As many readers know, Mary wrote the core of her masterpiece in the Swiss Alps. She was there because of a scheme concocted by her stepsister Claire.
After her sojourn in Devon, Claire set her sights on Lord Byron. Like Shelly, Lord Byron was a poet and a radical. He was handsome too. Unlike Shelly, Lord Byron was famous –– infamous really. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know”: that’s how his erstwhile lover Lady Caroline Lamb described him.
Byron was also lonely, cast out because of his repugnant behavior from a social world he had once dominated. Claire, who longed to live a glamorous life, wrote Byron flattering letters, making much of her connections to Godwin, Percy, and Mary and representing herself as a political radical and artist. Byron welcomed her attentions, and soon took Claire as his lover.
Unfortunately for Claire, Byron grew bored with her. Fortunately for literary history, Claire devised a plan to rekindle their relationship: she, Mary, and Percy and baby William would spend the summer of 1816 in Geneva. Claire knew Byron had already made arrangements to be there. She also knew that he liked the idea of getting to know Mary and Percy. Mary and Percy liked the idea of living in Geneva and getting to know Byron.
In Geneva, Byron rented the Villa Diodati on the shores of the lake. He lived there with his physician John Polidori and his pets –– a monkey, peacock, falcon, several cats and dogs, and a crow. Percy rented a chalet nearby for himself, Mary, Claire, baby William, and William's nurse.
The atmosphere at the villa buzzed with creative and sexual energies, as well as frustration. Percy and Byron, who had never met, soon became inseparable –– a development neither Claire nor Mary had anticipated. John became enamored of Mary, though she was not enamored of him. And Claire continued to pursue Byron. Nobody was very interested in John.
(Ignored often that summer, John had plenty of time to take notes. This was a good thing, since John had been secretly employed by Byron's publisher John Murray to keep records of the infamous trio's activities. Murray thought these records could become fodder for a salacious best-seller. Were it not for John's journal, we would not know as much as we know about the party's time together that summer.)
The summer of 1816 is now known as “the year without summer.” Around the world, heavy rains, dark days, and freezing weather led to near-famine conditions, disease outbreaks, and mass migration. It was a volcanic winter, though nobody knew that at the time. In April of the previous year, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora had erupted, creating tsunamis and whirlwinds and blotting out the sun. It was the deadliest volcanic eruption in history. Entire villages were destroyed. Plants and animals were poisoned. Almost 100,000 people died in Indonesia alone. For four months, ash and sulphur dioxide spewed toward the stratosphere where it remained for years, disrupting global weather patterns. Some people believed the world was ending.
In Switzerland that summer, days were short and storms frequent and fierce. Bad weather and a dread of interacting with scandalized English tourists kept the party indoors. So, they spent a good part of most evenings talking philosophy by candlelight and lightening flashes as thunder shook the villa’s windows.
One evening, to spark conversation, John read aloud from notes he had taken years earlier during a series of lectures by Percy’s physician, William Lawrence. It was Lawrence who introduced the term "biology" into the English language, defining it as "the science of life." In the lectures attended by John, Lawrence put forth the strict-materialist claim that life is simply the body operating as a body. Human beings are made of physical things like bone, muscles, and blood. There is nothing “super-added.”
Lawrence's lectures were part of a public debate on the nature of life and the existence of the soul. We now call it The Vitality Debate. Lawrence’s former teacher, John Abernethy, spoke for the other side.
In contrast to Lawrence, Abernethy maintained that human life existed independently of the body. In other words, Abernethy believed that humans had souls. In the court of public opinion, Abernethy won the debate. Lawrence's claims were deemed vile. He was forced to resign his post (until he recanted).
Like Lawrence’s detractors, Percy saw the physician’s ideas as support for atheism. Unlike Lawrence’s detractors Percy was intrigued by this. Could it be that nature, rather than God, “created” human beings? Could it be that humans created God? Percy thought yes. Byron and Mary weren’t so sure.
The questions at the core of the debate –– What is the nature of life? What distinguishes the living from the dead, the animate from the inanimate? –– are the vital force that animates Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. Indeed, it doesn't take much to see Frankenstein's lonely creature as a figure for artificial intelligence. Indeed, Frankenstein continues to resonate with readers because it speaks to the ethical implications of any science-fueled quest to augment human capabilities.
While modern readers may find the science in Frankenstein fanciful, contemporary readers admired Frankenstein for having –– to quote from a review of the first edition –– “an air of reality attached to it, by being connected with the favourite projects and passions of the times.”
The novel's vivid invocation of the era's "favourite projects and passions" owes something to the fact that on the night that Mary’s friends took sides in the Vitality Debate they also discussed Galvanism, a contemporary field of scientific research that birthed modern-day electrophysiology.
As Giovanni Aldini (the nephew of Luigi Galvini) explained in his 1804 An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, the goal of Galvanism as a field was to demonstrate that humans could “command the vital powers” by sending “an energetic fluid” through “the nervous and muscular systems."
In January of the previous year, Aldini had seemed to have done just that. He applied electrical stimuli to the corpse of George Forster, a man who had just been executed by hanging for murder. The Times reported what happened:
On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.
Aldini’s demonstrations fueled public anxiety over accidental live burial, and seemed to support the notion that "death can be cured." The quotation comes from the French Encyclopédie, which stated that there were two states of death: “incomplete” and “absolute.” The English also regarded death as having two states: “apparent” and “absolute.” The Royal Humane Society (initially called the “Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned”) taught people how to resuscitate the apparently dead, and paid people for doing so successfully. In Mary Shelly's lifetime, death and life were not regarded as distinct categories. The three questions in many people's minds were these: How do you know if someone is absolutely dead? Is it possible for humans to flip the switch between life and death? Can death really be cured?
In her 1831 preface, Mary reports being “a devout but nearly silent listener” during most late night conversations at the villa. Hours after the Nature of Life conversation, however, Mary rehearsed what would become her tour de force response to these conversations in a nightmare vision which she also describes in the preface:
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. . . . His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken . . . . 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.
This is Mary's "hideous progeny" as an infant. Unlike her avatar, Victor Frankenstein, Mary did not "rush away" from her creation. She nurtured it into a ghost story that spoke to "the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror.” Finally, she transformed it into a science fiction novel and tragedy designed to move her readers to pity as well as fear.
Of course, conversations at the villa influenced this process. Chances are, however, that these conversations alone would not have ignited Mary’s creative spark. What did?
A contest. A contest that gave rise not just to Shelley's masterpiece, but also to Count Dracula.
Lord Byron suggested a "ghost story" contest as a diversion. Cooped up for days and nights on end, the friends found themselves growing irritable. Claire was not invited to play. Byron and Percy abandoned their stories early on. Mary and John were the only ones to write complete stories.
John's story expanded upon a fragment of a story that Byron had written. At its center was a new kind of literary character: a handsome, aristocratic vampire modeled after Lord Byron. Older vampire tales featured unattractive peasant vampires.
John's version, fueled as it was by his anger toward Byron, proved more durable. Its legacy lives on in Bram Stoker's Dracula, its adaptations, and re-imaginings –– including Stephen King's Salem's Lot, Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire and its sequels, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight saga, and Charlain Harris's True Blood saga.
Still, it was Mary's ghost story that garnered the most excitement at the villa. Percy encouraged her to expand it. She did.
And as she did she tapped into her grief over her father’s abandonment of her, her anguish over the death of her child, and her rage toward society –– a rage that intensified as the gap between her perception of herself as a passionate woman dedicated to liberty for all and others' perception of her as a sexually-profligate, cold-hearted home wrecker grew ever wider. Mary drew from her guilt over the suicides of Percy's wife Harriet and her half-sister Fanny. And finally, to give these personal concerns sociopolitical resonance, she drew from her understanding of contemporary debates regarding the mechanisms of social cohesion, stratification, and alienation.
It took nine months for Mary to create Frankenstein's final draft.
Its first reviewers were bewildered and repulsed. They favored books whose moral lessons and ideological investments were easy to grasp. Frankenstein did not offer such comforts.
The novel's failure to provide interpretive guidance was duly noted in both favorable and unfavorable reviews. For example, the reviewer for the The Quarterly Review complained that the novel "inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality." The reviewer for La Belle Assemblée wondered why the novel's moral was so difficult to discern: "Should not an author, who has a moral end in view, point out rather that application which may be more generally understood?"
In contrast to these old-fashioned responses, Sir Walter Scott, one of Mary's favorite novelists, praised Frankenstein's ability "to open new trains and channels of thought." This is why we still read Frankenstein. Its refusal to take sides has kept it relevant for 200 years.
Who is the novel's hero? For some readers it is Walton. Others regard Frankenstein as the novel's hero. For others it is the creature. Who is to blame for the death and destruction the novel recounts? Does the creature ever fulfill his promise to kill himself? What does the novel mean? The debate continues to this day.
Why is Frankenstein's inconclusiveness key to its living legacy? I provide a more detailed answer elsewhere.
Here's the gist: Frankenstein's refusal to take sides is important because it allows the novel to teach readers to see beyond categories, to connect with the humanity inside each of us. In short: Frankenstein gives readers an empathy workout.
Empathy strengthening: I can’t think of a better thing to practice in 2019.
Further Reading:
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon
"Listen to My Tale: Multi-Level Structure, Narrative Sense Making, and the Inassimilable in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" by Criscillia Benford
"The Science of Life and Death in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" by Sharon Ruston