Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour Grove Press, 655 pp., $35 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN SHELLEY clinched her name in history at the very beginning of her womanhood. She was born in 1797 and at the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley. At the age of nineteen she wrote “Frankenstein.” She never did anything else as memorable. But she was always a thoroughly admirable individual, and she lived a hard life. A decade before her death in 1851 at age fifty-three, she wrote in her journal that her youth had been “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, . . . but Shelley died & I was alone–my father from age & domestic circumstances & other things could not me faire valoir–none else noticed me.” 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.” 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 amendment–I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me.” 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). But they are also the words of a resolute woman who had constantly stayed true to her course of self-improvement. 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. She earned her living from novels, travel books, children’s stories, essays, translations, and biographies. And “self denial & disappointment & self controul” were part of an education acquired in the face of adversities that few of us experience. Mary Shelley was motherless, husbandless, and essentially fatherless for most of her life. She was even sometimes friendless, as many of her “friends” used her for her name and then betrayed her. THEY COULD DO SO, because she was famous from the moment she was born. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, 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 encyclopedistes were demanding for men. Mary’s father was William Godwin, the author of “An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice.” Although he was “rational” to the point of frigidity, Mary adored him, and the house was always full of interesting people. 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. 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. 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.” Shelley himself was interested in her because of her parents. In 1801, Godwin remarried. His second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, was “a troublemaker and a liar” who preferred her own children. (Although even she made a contribution to the family bibliography. Her translation of Johann David Wyss’s “The Swiss Family Robinson” was the standard English text for many years.) But the family’s troubles really began with the next generation. 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. Wollstonecraft’s other daughter, Fanny, was constitutionally depressed and ordered by their stepmother to be the household servant. She committed suicide. Shelley’s first wife Harriet, whom he left for Mary, committed suicide as well. Shelley himself was a thoughtless husband who did as he pleased while Mary struggled to run the household. Three of their four children died in childhood. Shelley drowned in a suicidally careless boat trip when Mary was only twenty-five. 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 L100 a year (one-tenth of what he had given Shelley). Offers of marriage were made, but not by those to whom she could “give the treasure of my heart.” Finally, Sir Timothy threatened to withdraw even his minuscule support if she produced any writing about Shelley or her life with him. 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. Through all these adversities, Mary remained “sedate, composed” with the “maturity of a forty-year-old.” Even her daughter-in-law declared that it was Mary rather than Mary’s son Percy to whom she had “lost her heart.” “To live with Mary Shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel,” Lady Jane Shelley declared to a later biographer. “Perfect unselfishness, selflessness indeed, characterized her at all times.” By the time Lady Jane said this, Mary was long dead, and her daughter-in-law was the keeper of the Shelley flame. 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 menage a trois with her half-sister and whomever else Shelley chose to invite to practice his politicized “free love.” As the Romantic era segued into the Victorian era, the radical beliefs of Wollstonecraft, 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. MARY’S LITERARY output was prodigious and learned. 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. It has been estimated she made on the average L50 a year from her work, barely enough to send Percy to Harrow as befitted the offspring of gentry (his grandfather would not contribute). Of all her output, only “Frankenstein” remains well known. Frankenstein’s monster quickly became a powerful allusion and subject for shows and theater. Comic books, movies, and television have carried its popularity into modern times. 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. 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. 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”; it is “about Victor [but] also about what his monstrous masculinity does to women”; it denounces “the ‘hideous progeny’ of the first phase of industrial capitalism”; it has remained popular because of “its representation of concerns at the center of Anglo-American culture”; for Mary Shelley, composing it was “a form of matricide, of killing the Symbolic mother subordinated to father or husband.” THE INCEPTION of “Frankenstein”
is well known. 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.” He and Byron quickly forgot their “ghostly visions,” leaving only “Frankenstein” to emerge from the storytelling session. 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. That night, Mary recalled, “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 say–with shut eyes, but acute mental vision.” Miranda Seymour is not very interesting on Mary Shelley’s writings. 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. Scattered throughout the biography are mutually exclusive and self-parodic interpretations of the novel. 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. Mary Shelley was indeed very young, and it is an immature production. Dr. 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. In fact, a fair amount of the novel is taken up with the intolerance he encounters because of his looks. It seems Victor, although he had “selected his [creation’s] features as beautiful,” had ended up making his creation look like a “demoniacal corpse.” 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.” Horrified, Victor falls into “nervous fever,” while his creation roams the neighborhood looking for someone who will love him. All reject the monster. He only “desired love and fellowship,” but he “was still spurned.” 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. 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. Dr. Frankenstein’s last words to the world are as thoroughly confused as the whole story. 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. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.” ONE COULD GO on and on, listing the novel’s shortcomings. The creaking prose and the undifferentiated speech of the characters are particularly maddening. And yet there is a reason “Frankenstein” was popular from its first publication. It’s not a great novel in its prose, its motivation, its character types, or even in its plot. But Mary Shelley created first-rate images. She had an understanding of fable, and she created a genuine myth. 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.” 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.” Nor the monster’s first learning, “with pleasure, that fire gave light as well as heat.” Nor the monster’s learning to speak by listening to cottagers with “gentle manners” whom he “longed to join.” 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.” 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. . . . He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish. I shall no longer see the sun or stars, or feel the winds play on my cheeks. Light, feeling, and sense, will pass away; and in this condition must I find my happiness.” Unfortunately for Mary Shelley, her latest biographer is not a myth maker. Miranda Seymour’s prose is abominable–not because it is ungrammatical or awkward, but because she insists upon telling us in the most awful banalities what the persons in her biography were thinking. 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.” 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 unironically. Seymour does the same to Mary Shelley. 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.” (In other words, it wasn’t in her diary, but Seymour wants Mary to have the proper feelings and insists upon using clich to render them.) 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. 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.” Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University.
