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On the bicentenary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein―a feminist view

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n the 1818 “Preface” to Frankenstein the poet Percy B. Shelley claimed that the purpose of his wife Mary’s famous novel was not “the condemnation of a man playing God but the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affections, and the excellence of human virtue” (12).

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published anonymously in 1818

and revised for its third edition in 1831. The novel – widely adapted to theatre and cinema – is not concerned with the supernatural but with the future, so much so, that many critics define it as an early work of science fiction. Now, on the bicentenary of its publication, it is also associated with education, environment, responsibility and crime – the crime Doctor Victor Frankenstein commits against society and family.

Mary Shelley was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft – the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She had an unconventional education and was raised by her father on Wollstonecraft’s programme of a rational female education within an unavoidable patriarchal system. In 1816, on the shores of Lake Geneva, three men – Polidori, her husband and Lord Byron–

insisted every morning on the fact that she should write a tale of terror, that of a human being produced by science, not by a woman.

Strange as it may be, Mary Shelley and her circle were well aware of Luigi Galvani’s discoveries and the public debate known as the “Vitalist Debate” which argued that life was the product of some extra essential force or the assemblage of the parts of the body. In 1814 William Lawrence, the Shelleys’ personal physician, defended the position that electricity was needed to explain vitality.

The framing of the novel’s narrative is four letters that scientist Captain Robert Walton writes to her

Mary Shelley and her circle were well aware of Luigi Galvani’s discoveries

sister Margaret from the North Pole.

In his fourth letter, he sees two figures in the ice, the second of which is the agonizing Victor Frankenstein who gradually disintegrates when he tries to pursue and escape from the “monster” he has created. The creature was born benevolent but became a violent and aggressive monster because he was miserable. As he realizes he is not loved by his “father,” he murders Victor’s brother, the child William and begs his maker to create a female mate for him. As Victor does not succeed, the creature murders his wife on their wedding night. Despite these terrible facts, nobody judges the actions of these characters or if what they say or do is good or evil.

Scholars such as Peter Kitson have associated the novel to the French Revolution and argue that the monster “is a metaphor for the violent actions of the revolutionary masses” (390). Political violence and the individuals’ responsibility for their crimes against society are powerful topics, but it is the feminist perspective that strikes me.

Anne Mellor states that the work is “a feminist text in which male science, in the person of Victor, usurps the female voice of giving

birth” (49). The three male voices of the novel –Walton, Victor and the monster– try to silence women but Shelley revitalizes the female word by associating it with nature and the crime committed against it. In this period of manly adventure and scientific experimentation, Shelley’s feminist view shows the monster as Victor’s masculine self, while exposing the feminine and the maternal in his paranoia to highlight the masculine as perfect. By intentionally marginalizing the feminine and clearly condemning patriarchy, the author reveals the male space as a site of insecurity “recommending the pleasures of domesticity” (Schoene-Harwood 18).

God and Victor are male mothers and the monster embodies the grotesque in a man. As Berthold Schoene-Harwood remarks, “one of the main objectives of Men’s Studies … consists of helping men to re-equip themselves with ‘the lost language of emotion or introspection’” (ix) and this is, in my view, what Shelley means to transmit by talking about men imposing their voices: to enhance the fact that Victor’s, Walton’s and the monster’s voices are somehow female.

M. Teresa González Mínguez Profesora de Inglés

WORKS CITED:

Kitson, Peter J. “Romantic period, 1780-1832.” Paul Poplawski ed., English Literature in Context. Cambridge: CUP, 2008. 306-402.

Mellor, Anne K. ed. Romanticism and Gender. New York: Routledge, 1993.

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Schoene-Harwood, Berthold. Writing Men. Literary Masculinities from Frankenstein to the New Man. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.

1818.

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.

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Mary Shelley’s Biography

daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein.

M

ary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and the first child of the philosopher, novelist and journalist William Godwin.

Her mother died of puerperal fever shortly after she was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay. A year after Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute.

Mary’s earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William Godwin’s housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise the children by himself, he cast about for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary

Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own: Charles and Claire. Most of Godwin’s friends disliked his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and quarrelsome; but Godwin was devoted to her, and the marriage was a success. Mary Godwin, on the other hand, came to detest her stepmother.

Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel

Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. Godwin admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary Wollstonecraft’s philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but Mary Godwin nonetheless received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her father’s children’s books on Roman and Greek history in manuscript. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate.

Her father described her at age 15 as “singularly bold, somewhat impe-

AUTHORSHIP OF FRANKESTEIN rious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.”

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy’s child. Over

Shelley and her husband collaborated on the story but the extent of Percy’s contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics.

There are differences in the 1818, 1823 and 1831 editions the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born

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ffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour. According to Jane Shelley,

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Shelley and her husband collaborated on the story but the extent of Percy’s contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics. There are differences in the 1818, 1823 and 1831 editions and Mary Shelley wrote, “I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world.” She wrote that the preface to the first edition was Percy’s work “as far as I can recollect.” James Rieger concluded Percy’s “assistance at every point in the book’s manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator”, while Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only “made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text.” Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy’s contributions to the book “were no more than what most publishers’ editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other’s works in progress.”

Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father; but Percy and Jane, judging the graveyard at St Pancras to be “dreadful”, chose to bury her instead at St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley’s death, the Shelleys opened her boxdesk. Inside they found locks of her dead children’s hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.

LAST YEARS OF MARY SHELLEY Mary Shelley’s last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suIván Martín Hernán 1º Bach A

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