Mary Shelley (1797-1851), the Last Woman

Read the information at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley and note the highlights of Mary Shelley’s life in the Mary Shelley Reader chronology (xv-xx). Read “Recollections of Italy” (255). Note the clever “frame” that Shelley uses for this lovely series of recollections, particularly of Tuscany. How does the speaker “show” the superior Italian character and landscape without sounding like a travelogue? Note that Percy Shelley figures into the memoir as the “friend” of Malville (261-262). What does Malville say about the adventurous traveler, bent on experiencing the true Italian spirit and flavor without indulging in the typical “traveler abroad” tourist scene? Describe her ideal English traveler. Read Shelley’s Preface to Rambles in Germany and Italy (382), written a few years before her death. How has Italy changed over the years, according to Shelley? What remains constant in Shelley’s writing about Italy? Read “The Bride of Modern Italy” (263), a satire on Emilia Viviani, who was smitten with Percy Shelley, causing Mary considerable anxiety for a time. Read “On Ghosts” (334). Shelley laments the modern propensity to explain and rationalize all phenomena, yet she believes there are spiritual events that can’t be explained away. How, when all is said and done, does Shelley, both an admirer of scientific rationalism and Romantic free-spiritedness, explain ghost tales? Read the following letters and be able to explain what they reveal about the times and about Mary, Percy, and their extraordinary love story: To Percy (390), To Scott (391), To Isabella Hoppner (392), To Maria Gisborne (395), To Leigh Hunt (403), To Everina Wollstonecraft (411), and To Edward Moxon (414). Note particularly Mary’s account of Percy’s death.

Frankenstein (1818) and the Art of Revisioning

Note again the information about the Byronic hero at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero and about the phenomenon that became Frankenstein at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein. Also, note some of the visuals, including the chateau, Villa Diodotte, on Lake Geneva where Frankenstein was written (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_birth.html and http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_modern_1.html). Read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Determine the influence of Radcliffe on Shelley’s Gothic Romance, and note how she expands the literary vehicle, utilizing the conventions of the Gothic genre for her own purposes. Like Radcliffe, Shelley is opportunistic in her employment of the genre, particularly in applying many of the Godwinian ideas found in her father’s Political Justice (see a discussion of Political Justice, a work deeply influenced by Rousseau, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin). As you read, look for references to Godwin’s ideas about the justice system and about organized religion. What Godwinian (Rousseauean) ideas do you find about natural man (“noble savage”), education, and the vicissitudes and potentially negative aspects of social institutions? What does the experience that the Monster has with the French family say about how our “prejudices are schooled by society”? What turns the Monster into a monster? How does Shelley deal with the motif of unbridled passion and “going beyond the bourn”? Describe how Victor Frankenstein is a Byronic hero? How is the book a revisioning of Milton’s Paradise Lost? Look for references to Milton in the book? How can Frankenstein be read as a “birth” myth? How is this birth myth associated with authorship and the artist (in this case, a female artist, Mary Shelley, whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft was reviled as an author)? How can the book be read as a psychodrama illuminating the motherless condition of its author and her estrangement from her famous father? Finally, notice the wonderful narrative technique that Shelley uses in order to create a “willing suspension of disbelief” as we read this farfetched and extraordinary tale.

Frankenstein, ostensibly a gothic horror tale and written as a competition between Mary Shelley and Lord Byron (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_birth.html), is one of the great philosophic gold mines of the Romantic period. The novel tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant, romantic personality who attempts the "God-like" endeavor of creating life. Frankenstein thus is a framed in the mold of the Byronic hero. How so?

1) Rebel, individualist, not bound by society's rules;

2) Sensitive to Nature, especially the grandiose;

3) Alienated because of guilt (67);

4) Goes beyond the borne (chapter 3 in volume 1).

Victor Frankenstein knows he is not of the "common herd." The Byronic hero, in short, is demonic! (Note Walton's description of Victor in the last pages of the book.)

What is the Romantic connection/similarity between Walton and Frankenstein? Walton too has demonic drive—to discover a NW passage through the Pole to the East (15-16). But there is a difference between Walton and Frankenstein—what? (Walton gives up his demonic quest for his sailors, because he doesn’t lose his humanity in his monomaniacal quest beyond the bourn)

The narrative structure of the book is calculated by Shelley to achieve a sense of verisimilitude, what Coleridge call a “willing suspension of disbelief”; it is thus a rather complex structure, with levels of narration within levels and a variety of points of view. Explain the 3-tiered narrative structure. (Letters and journals of Walton, who narrates Frankenstein's story, who narrates the monster's story—see page 155.)

Rejected by his creator, the Monster flees into the forest. As he becomes aware of his natural surroundings and the human world around him, what comparison or analogy is Shelley making concerning his "education"? (A la Rousseau, Godwin and Locke’s associationism, the Monster is the child/noble savage, naturally good but society renders him evil, see chapter 2 in volume 2.)

Who are the Delaceys, and how do they fit into this picture of the Monster's education? Who are Felix, Safie, Agatha, and old Delacey? What is their story? What does their beauty point out to the Monster? (He begins to understand his ugliness.) Why is old Delacey not at first frightened of the Monster when the Monster at last reveals himself? (He is blind.) What is Shelley's point about our judgment of others?

In search of his creator, the Monster at length reaches Geneva. Whom does he encounter and kill? (William, Frankenstein's younger brother is killed.) Who is blamed for the murder? (Justine is arrested.) Here we have Godwin's iconoclastic indictment of social institutions: the law which is blind and unfair, and religion which preys upon the poor and weak (64).

Five Critical Interpretations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_modern_1.html):

I. New Critical Interpretation renders a “close reading” and interpretation of the book, thus following T. S. Eliot's critical ideas in "Tradition and Individual Talent" and other twentieth-century Modernists, such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren. This interpretation sees Frankenstein as a retelling of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

a. Monster = Adam after the Fall, cast out of Eden by his Creator, while Victor Frankenstein = God;

b. Monster = Satan, the fallen Angel, again rejected and cast aside by his Creator. Mary Shelley, as a Romantic would have been sympathetic with Satan, her portrayal of Monster is thus sympathetic (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_modern_2.html#paradise).

Note the many references to Paradise Lost in the book:

1. Note the Monster’s references to himself on pages 73-74.

2. Note the Monster’s reading of Milton (95-96).

3. Satan imagery and imagery of the Inferno are sprinkled through out the novel.

II. Psychoanalytic interpretation finds the Monster to be the alter-ego of Frankenstein, in

effect his doppelganger, representative of the dark side of the human soul—the Dionysian

struggling against the Apollonian. The monster is for all of us our dark side revealed in dreams.

III. Freudian/Feminist Interpretation is provided by Knoepflmacher in "Thoughts on the Aggression of Daughters" in The Endurance of Frankenstein. This interpretation portrays the novel as manifestation of a daughter's feelings of rejection: on being abandoned by her mother whom she never saw but revered and on being rejected after her marriage by father who painstakingly educated her and whom she admired and tried to please. Frankenstein is thus a novel of “rejecting fathers and absent mothers." In this interpretation, Mary Shelley, rejected by her creators, is both raging Monster and the yielding, obedient Elizabeth. Note the Freudian significance of the Monster’s killing William (also the name of Godwin's only son by his second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, who supplanted Mary Wollstonecraft in his daughter’s eyes. Note too that Mary Godwin tried to be “a son for her father,” excelling in all her studies above the rest of his children.

Associated with this Freudian/feminist interpretation is Knoephflmacher’s idea that Mary Shelley spent her life trying to please men, yet feeling that she never quite measured up to their values and expectations. Knoepflmacher notes that when the gothic “contest” commenced between Byron and Mary Shelley, Byron became "annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished [his] uncongenial task," as Mary said. Thus she was left to finish a work in a genre not wholly respected by either her husband or his friend. Her feelings of the inadequacy of her art—and some hostility toward the men around her who denigrated it—are revealed later, Knoepflmacher writes, where she apologizes for "so very hideous" a production as Frankenstein—her "hideous progeny," as she references the book (see http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frank_modern_2.html#preface). Knoepflmacher concludes that for Mary Shelley the novel was an indictment of the patriarchy.

IV. Gynocritical/Deconstructionist Interpretation (see http://faculty.pittstate.edu/~knichols/monster.html) looks at Frankenstein as not simply a revision of Paradise Lost but an indictment against the misogynist intent of Milton’s epic. Mary Shelley early on understood the patriarchy’s view and venom against the female artist, her artist mother Mary Wollstonecraft called a “monster,” a "philosophic wanton," and a “hyena in petticoats.” In the patriarchy’s mind, female art was an aberration; the female artist, whose works are deformed, is a literary monster. In this interpretation, then the Monster = Eve. For a full discussion see Gilbert and Gubar’s Mad Woman in the Attic (222-224).

V. Feminist Interpretation as posited in Ellen Moers' "Female Gothic" (The Endurance of Frankenstein) believes that Frankenstein is a uniquely female myth—a reflection of Shelley's deep hurt involved in the birth and death of her children, birth in particular being a somewhat taboo subject in her day. Thus her writing about the subject of birth is subverted and indirect. Moers notes that Shelley was "pregnant at 16 and almost constantly for the next 5 years, yet not a secure mother." In February 1815, she gave birth to a daughter who died in March. "Find my baby dead. A miserable day,” she wrote in a terse entry in her journal. She also records painful dreams of her dead child. In April 1815, she was pregnant again, eight weeks after the birth of her first child. In October, her sister Fanny (Wollstonecraft’s first child) committed suicide, and in December, a pregnant and despondent Harriett Westbrook drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. In January 1816, she gave birth to a son, William, who would later die. Claire Clairmont was pregnant during this time with Byron's child. In June 1816, she began Frankenstein. Thus, Moers contents, when Frankenstein was written, death and birth "were as hideously intermixed in the life of Mary Shelley as in Frankenstein's 'workshop of filthy creation.’”