This year marks the bicentenary of Frankenstein , the tale of a mad scientist who created life, which spooked readers when it was first published, anonymously. Once the writer’s identity was revealed, people found it even more “horrible” that it was written by a woman, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley (1797-1851). Girls were expected to behave in a certain manner, to keep house and bear children.
But Mary Shelley, daughter of the radical Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote AVindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, would have nothing of that. Though Wollstonecraft died 10 days after giving birth, her mother’s life and work, especially the idea that women were not lesser beings, influenced Mary Shelley and her writing.
The story goes that Mary and the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley’s husband , were caught in a particularly cold winter in Switzerland in 1816, and decided to hold a contest on who could write the scariest ghost story among them.
Dread tissue
As historian Charlotte Gordon writes in her introduction to Frankenstein, the 1818 Text , “...it was Mary who struck gold. The first sentence she wrote, ‘It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed...’ seemed to unleash all that would come next, as though the story were waiting to spill on the page.” For the next two years, gently prodded by her poet husband, she refurbished and expanded the story, and published it in 1818, when she was 21.
The initial pages are in epistolary form, with Captain Robert Walton, an explorer to the North Pole, telling his sister Margaret about the voyage. He writes how the crew one day spots a “gigantic” figure on a dog sled (in letter number four) and then rescues a frozen man named Victor Frankenstein, who recovers to recount the story of his life as a cautionary tale in 24 chapters in the first person.
“I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.” And with these words, Victor Frankenstein begins to narrate his extraordinary tale. He talks about his happy childhood, the leaning towards natural philosophy and chemistry, and how he finds a way to reanimate dead tissue. But parts of the body are difficult to replicate, and his creation is eight feet tall, far from beautiful, his skin barely hiding the muscle, tissue, and blood vessels.
Frankenstein is repulsed, and rejects his creation, who is not named in the novel; instead, “it” is addressed variously as “monster”, “fiend”, “wretch”, “demon” and so forth. The rejection moves the “son” to wail: “If I have no ties and no affections, hatred and vice must be my portion.” As Gordon points out, in the hands of Mary Shelley, the creature becomes an abandoned child, “gone wrong because of the ill-treatment of his creator.” Through the story, Mary Shelley explores both the heights and depths of human nature; its power and weakness.
The author looks back at one classic each fortnight.
