Section V: The Age of Revolutions

Revolutions Sheltering in Place with Mary Shelley

Dr. Roberta Barker, Associate Professor of Theatre; Assistant Dean Academic of FASS, Dalhousie

The “year without a summer” proved that sheltering in place can result in tremendous creativity: many great poems and not one but two novels, Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, were begun at Villa Diodati that year.

“In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter IV

One of the many remarkable things about Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus is that it was begun while its author was more or less sheltering in place. Along with her lover (and later husband), the poet Percy Shelley, the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They were joined by Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairemont; the most celebrated poet and ‘bad boy’ of the Romantic era, Lord Byron; and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. It should have been a glorious summer holiday with a group of glamorous and gifted young people, but natural catastrophe intervened.

Thanks to the eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia in April 1815, 1816 came to be known as “the year without a summer.” Even in Europe, halfway around the world from Mount Tamboro, cold rain fell all year long as the sun was obscured by clouds of volcanic ash. Global disaster ensued. Crops failed and most of the agricultural work force went jobless, with many dying of disease or starvation. For the privileged young people hunkered down at Villa Diodati, these dire economic threats remained relatively distant. Still, the rain and cold kept them locked together indoors—and locked in their own inner turmoil. Mary and Percy’s first daughter had died the previous spring after only a few weeks of life, plunging Mary into deep sadness. Byron and Claire Clairemont began an affair, but he did not return her passionate love for him; she was left pregnant and in crisis, while he too sank into depression. At about the same time as Mary began writing Frankenstein, Byron wrote a poem called “Darkness” that evokes the gloom of the summer-without-summer:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.

Like Frankenstein, this poem was born into a world rather like our own. The “year without a summer” proved that sheltering in place can result in tremendous creativity: many great poems and not one but two novels, Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, were begun at Villa Diodati that year. But in the midst of this disaster Mary Godwin and her companions also experienced sadness, struggle, and a desire to escape from the “darkness” of their troubles into the “light” of the everyday world.

Perhaps it was this situation, at least in part, that shaped Mary’s decision to make the protagonist of her novel a scientist—or, as the early nineteenth century in which she was writing put it, a natural philosopher—who longs to control and transform nature. As a young man, Victor Frankenstein is utterly devastated by the death of his mother from infectious scarlet fever. He describes the loss of a loved one as a “most irreparable evil,” a kind of outrage against humanity (72). So, he sets out to remedy the situation by becoming “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (79). His vision is the elimination of mortality itself. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds,” he declares, “which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (80). Frankenstein’s mammoth ambitions reflect those of many of his real-life contemporaries in the so-called “age of revolutions.” Whether through scientific exploration, creative endeavor, or radical political change, nineteenth-century thinkers from Maximilien Robespierre and Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley’s mother) to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche sought to dispel human darkness and bring about a brave new world.

Yet Frankenstein suggests that the solution to humanity’s problems may not lie in such innovations. As he strives to bend nature to his will, Frankenstein isolates himself even more severely than Mary Shelley and her companions were isolated by the fallout from Mount Tambora. He stops writing to his family, stops speaking to his teachers and friends. He describes himself working “[i]n a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments” (81). He loathes his own work, an act of “filthy creation” in which he stitches together the limbs of the dead to order make a new being without the participation of any other human (81). When he finally succeeds in his goal, he finds his Creature so hideous that cannot feel any compassion for it. He flees from the work of his hands. Abandoned and desolate, seeking love everywhere and finding only rejection, the Creature eventually comes to perceive violence as his only way of communicating with his Creator. By trying to prevent death, Victor Frankenstein ends by bringing about the destruction of everything he loves.

Frankenstein, one of the great masterpieces of world fiction, has been read in many ways by readers in many times and places. But for our time and place, one of its most striking messages may lie in the emphasis it places on the vital need for fellowship, understanding, and compassion. Faced with her era’s many revolutionary solutions to the huge problems posed by disease, disaster, inequality, and conflict, Mary Shelley saw clearly the challenges inherent in human efforts to control nature, destroy mortality, and radically transform the world. If these efforts are undertaken in a spirit that fosters isolation and division rather than companionship and sympathy, the cure may be more harmful than the disease. Trapped in isolation by natural disaster and recovering from an experience of profound loss, Shelley wrote a novel in which the isolation that human beings create for themselves turns out to be the greatest evil of all. As she sheltered in place on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, she created a warning for the future—and a plea for compassion that still speaks urgently across time.