Frankenstein's Creator

...Nor our last glimpse of the monster giving up thought of revenge and resolving to "seek the most northern extremity of the globe" where he will collect his funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, where its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been...

...And "self denial & disappointment & self con-troul" were part of an education acquired in the face of adversities that few of us experience...

...Victor Frankenstein's creature is portrayed as both a destructive fiend and a misunderstood lover of humanity who just wants a girlfriend like any other young man...

...and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish...

...Nor the monster killing Victor's child so that the child's death "will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him...

...Indeed, Frankenstein's reputation has also never been higher in academe, and it is now available in the Bedford series of Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism—a sure indication of its placement in the canon...

...Miranda Seymour's prose is abom-inable—not because it is ungrammati-cal or awkward, but because she insists upon telling us in the most awful banalities what the persons in her biography were thinking...

...By the time Lady Jane said this, Mary was long dead, and her daughter-in-law was the keeper of the Shelley flame...

...She knew Aaron Burr in disgrace and poverty, befriended by her father, and she heard half the intelligentsia of England arguing the country's problems long before she met Shelley and Byron...

...They could do so, because she was famous from the moment she was born...

...I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed...

...She earned her living from novels, travel books, children's stories, essays, translations, and biographies...

...Mary Shelley was indeed very young, and it is an immature production...

...But she was always a thoroughly admirable individual, and she lived a hard life...

...His second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, was "a troublemaker and a liar" who preferred her own children...

...Frankenstein's last words to the world are as thoroughly confused as the whole story...

...for Mary Shelley, composing it was "a form of matricide, of killing the Symbolic mother subordinated to father or husband...

...Shelley wrote in his preface to the 1818 edition that "two other friends . . . and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence...

...Following a tradition established in the eighteenth century, Frankenstein is a novel written in the form of letters— which makes the horrors within it at once disturbing and remote...

...According to Seymour, Byron must have speculated, "If a convent could turn his strong-willed child into a young lady with half his Teresa's charm, he would feel well satisfied...

...Miranda Seymour is not very interesting on Mary Shelley's writings...

...Through all these adversities, Mary remained "sedate, composed" with the "maturity of a forty-year-old...

...Three of their four children died in childhood...

...But they are also the words of a resolute woman who had constantly stayed true to her course of self-improvement...

...Mary's father was William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice...

...Mary Shelley seems to consider Victor Frankenstein as both a creative scientist and mad schemer who "in a fit of enthusiastic madness" succeeded in creating "a rational creature" whose "happiness and well-being" he failed to look after...

...nursed and fed with a love of glory," and that "To be something great and good was a precept given me by my father: Shelley reiterated it...

...A decade before her death in 1851 at age fifty-three, she wrote in her journal that her youth had been Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...The creaking prose and the undifferentiated speech of the characters are particularly maddening...

...At the age of nineteen she wrote Frankenstein...

...Mary Shelley was motherless, husbandless, and essentially fatherless for most of her life...

...With these words from her later years, she may be repudiating the radical principles she had known during her upbringing and marriage (principles rejected by almost all who had witnessed the horrors of the French Revolution...

...He only "desired love and fellowship," but he "was still spurned...

...It's there one finds the usual fashionable and silly critiques, all in the service of the post-structuralist conviction that the text is indeterminate and undecidable: Frankenstein is "a complex treatise on situational ethics...

...But Lady Jane's was not an incorrect description of one who had to live with persistent gossip about her sexual life (in fact, she belonged entirely to Shelley) because she had eloped at sixteen with a married man to set up a ménage à trois with her half-sister and whomever else Shelley chose to invite to practice his politicized "free love...

...I say—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision...

...She never did anything else as memorable...

...Nor can one forget "the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing . . . with superhuman speed . . . over the crevices in the ice, among which [Victor] had walked with caution...

...She was even sometimes friendless, as many of her "friends" used her for her name and then betrayed her...

...During the years after Shelley's death in 1822, as Mary struggled to support herself and her son, she came to realize that she could "see things pretty clearly, but cannot demonstrate them," and "had not argumentative powers...

...Mary's literary output was prodigious and learned...

...It is damnable to put this sort of prose in the mouth of Byron—one of the finest stylists in English and a man who never used a meretricious phrase unironi-cally...

...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...

...Sir Timothy had taken it into his head that Mary had been responsible for his estrangement from Shelley—although his radical poet son had been provoking him long before Mary came along...

...Shelley himself was interested in her because of her parents...

...Shelley drowned in a suici-dally careless boat trip when Mary was only twenty-five...

...To live with Mary Shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel," Lady Jane Shelley declared to a later biographer...

...It seems Victor, although he had "selected his [creation's] features as beautiful," had ended up making his creation look like a "demoniacal corpse...

...She was born in 1797 and at the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley...

...In other words, it wasn't in her diary, but Seymour wants Mary to have the proper feelings and insists upon using cliché to render them...

...But the family's troubles really began with the next generation...

...Shelley's first wife Harriet, whom he left for Mary, committed suicide as well...

...He is dead who called me into being...

...Yet why do I say this...

...Full as it is of useful and potentially arresting detail, Mary Shelley is ultimately unreadable, so relentlessly does Seymour make everyone sound like a Cosmo girl...

...In 1801, Godwin remarried...

...During her youth, Mary heard Coleridge read his just-written "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" in her father's parlor, hung with a portrait of her mother...

...Of all her output, only Frankenstein remains well known...

...Although even she made a contribution to the family bibliography...

...Comic books, movies, and television have carried its popularity into modern times...

...Wollstonecraft's other daughter, Fanny, was constitutionally depressed and ordered by their stepmother to be the household servant...

...But she concluded, as befits a descendant of Calvinists, that "we are sent here to educate ourselves & that self denial & disappointment & self controul are a part of our education—that it is not by taking away all restraining law that our improvement is to be achieved—& though many things need great amend-ment—I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me...

...Feeling "the bitterness of disappointment," he realized that "no mortal could support the horror of that countenance" with its "yellow skin," "shriveled complexion," and "straight black lips...

...it is "about Victor [but] also about what his monstrous masculinity does to women...

...Unfortunately for Mary Shelley, her latest biographer is not a myth maker...

...And her father-in-law, a rich man, kept her and her one surviving child, Percy, his only legitimate grandchild, on an allowance of only £100 a year (one-tenth of what he had given Shelley...

...And yet there is a reason Frankenstein was popular from its first publication...

...Nor the monster's first learning, "with pleasure, that fire gave light as well as heat...

...it has remained popular because of "its representation of concerns at the center of Anglo-American culture...

...Mary Jane's daughter, Claire Clairmont, was an incipient paranoiac who was drawn into the circle of Shelley and Byron— and then blamed Mary for her troubles with the poets...

...Although he was "rational" to the point of frigidity, Mary adored him, and the house was always full of interesting people...

...Preposterous as is the scene where Victor discovers his monster's "unearthly ugliness," no one can forget the "dreary night of November" when Victor "beheld the accomplishment of [his] toils...

...Horrified, Victor falls into "nervous fever," while his creation roams the neighborhood looking for someone who will love him...

...It hardly needs to be said that this is about as far as one can get from the interesting and admirable Mary Shelley—a woman who knew that "self denial & disappointment & self controul are a part of our education...

...and in this condition must I find my happiness...

...Seymour does the same to Mary Shelley...

...I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks...

...Nor the monster's learning to speak by listening to cottagers with "gentle manners" whom he "longed to join...

...As a child she was pointed out as "the offspring of a remarkable union," and was "shown off to visitors as Mary Wollstonecraft in the making and brought into the parlour to listen to the conversation of her father and his friends...

...Frankenstein's monster quickly became a powerful allusion and subject for shows and theater...

...Her translation of Johanna Spyri's The Swiss Family Robinson was the standard English text for many years...

...The inception of Frankenstein is well known...

...Finally, Sir Timothy threatened to withdraw even his minuscule support if she produced any writing about Shelley or her life with him...

...She writes, for example, that if Mary "cried a little at the thought of leaving behind the father she loved and worried for so much, she was not going to admit such weakness to her diary...

...That night, Mary recalled, "when I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think...

...Her mother, Mary Woll-stonecraft, who died giving birth to her, was the celebrated author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a text acclaimed in England, France, Germany, and the United States as demanding the same rights for women that the encyclopédistes were demanding for men...

...He advises us to "seek happiness in tranquillity" and "avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries...

...But the truth of the matter is that Frankenstein is not great literature, and one is hard put to make a coherent whole out of it...

...In fact, a fair amount of the novel is taken up with the intolerance he encounters because of his looks...

...She committed suicide...

...Her notion of how fiction works is perfunctory at best, and she believes Frankenstein is "a great work because we can read what we will from it"—which Seymour then proceeds to do...

...It's not a great novel in its prose, its motivation, its character types, or even in its plot...

...In an exhaustive probing of all the available documents, Miranda Seymour's new biography, Mary Shelley, shows Mary continually acquiring new languages and new subjects...

...Perfect unselfishness, selflessness indeed, characterized her at all times...

...One could go on and on, listing the novel's shortcomings...

...She had an understanding of fable, and she created a genuine myth...

...Scattered throughout the biography are mutually exclusive and self-parodic interpretations of the novel...

...but Shelley died & I was alone—my father from age & domestic circumstances & other things could not me faire valoir—none else noticed me...

...All reject the monster...

...But Mary Shelley created first-rate images...

...As the Romantic era segued into the Victorian era, the radical beliefs of Woll-stonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley grew less attractive, and Mary paid for not lying about the fact that Shelley had been her lover before she became his wife...

...But the popular take on the creature as a violent monster is quite different from the creature Mary Shelley meant to recount, and her more complex story has lately received the attention of scholars...

...Shelley himself was a thoughtless husband who did as he pleased while Mary struggled to run the household...

...He and Byron quickly forgot their "ghostly visions," leaving only Frankenstein to emerge from the storytelling session...

...it denounces "the 'hideous progeny' of the first phase of industrial capitalism...

...Even her daughter-in-law declared that it was Mary rather than Mary's son Percy to whom she had "lost her heart...

...But like all the second rank of writers of her day, she was paid poorly, and she did not have the sort of modern copyright in Frankenstein that would have given her a steady income...

...In the 1831 third edition, Mary claimed the others had immediately started writing, but she was without a theme until she had a dream after hearing Byron and Shelley discuss how life could be generated, based on Erasmus Darwin's success in causing a piece of vermicelli to move and Galvani's experiments of making dead animals twitch their limbs...

...It has been estimated she made on the average £50 a year from her work, barely enough to send Percy to Harrow as befitted the offspring of gentry (his grandfather would not contribute...

...Offers of marriage were made, but not by those to whom she could "give the treasure of my heart...

...Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away...