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Running Head 1
Literature Insights
General Editor: Charles Moseley
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Essaka Joshua
Cursed, cursed
creator!
Why did I live?
Publication Data
© Essaka Joshua, 2007
The Author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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ISBN 978-1-84760-017-2
Mary Shelley: ‘Frankenstein’
Essaka Joshua
Bibliographical Entry:
Joshua, Essaka. Mary Shelley: ‘Frankenstein’. Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks,
2007
A Note on the Author
Essaka Joshua took her BA and MA at Oxford University and her PhD at the University of Birmingham, where she is now a lecturer in the department of English. She
has published several articles on Romantic and Victorian literature, including studies
of Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Charlotte Brontë,
Charlotte Smith, and George Bernard Shaw. Dr Joshua is the author of Pygmalion
and Galatea: The History of a Narrative in English Literature (Ashgate, 2001), and
a textbook on The Remains of the Day (First and Best, 2004). Her book The Romantics and the May Day Tradition is forthcoming (Ashgate, 2007), and she is currently
working on a British Academy funded study of the cultural and academic significance of Göttingen University in the 1820s.
Contents
A Note on the Author
Part 1: Life, Times, Contexts and Themes
1.1 Biography and Literary Career
1.2 The Author’s Literary Strategy
1.3 The 1818 text and the 1831 text: the differences
1.4 Literary Context
1.5 The Cult of Sensibility
1.6 The Jacobin novel
1.7 The Gothic Novel
1.8 William Godwin
1.9 Paradise Lost
1.10 Prometheus and Pygmalion
1.11 Historical and Socio-Political Context
Part 2. The Three Narratives
2.1 The Letters
2.2 Victor Frankenstein
2.3 The Creature
2.4 Female Characters
Part 3: Critical Responses
Annotated Bibliography of Further Reading
Appendices: Hyperlinked Material
Part 1: Life, Times, Contexts and Themes
1.1 Biography and Literary Career
Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on 30 August 1797 in London,
the daughter of two of the most important radical writers of the late eighteenth century.
Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), wrote the landmark feminist work A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which argues for the moral and practical value of educating women. Mary did not know her mother, who died a few days
after giving birth to her. Her father, the political philosopher William Godwin (1756–
1836), is now best known for his novel Caleb Williams (1794), which has important similarities to Frankenstein, and also for his political study Enquiry Concerning
Political Justice (1793) which asserts the importance of equality and social change
stopping short of revolution. Political Justice was extremely influential not only on
his daughter but also on many important writers of the time, like the ‘Lake Poets’,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey.
Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin were an unorthodox couple. Theirs was
an age of revolution: France and Britain were at war and the French Revolution, the
ideas of which they supported, thundered through Europe changing societies, morals
and lives. Godwin had well-publicised (and, to some, scandalous) views against the
institution of marriage, maintaining that it forced women into dependence on men
and to rely, for their survival, on the generosity of their husbands and male relatives.
Wollstonecraft was of the same opinion, suggesting that marriage was a form of
slavery which oppressed women. So they themslves flouted convention by not marrying until after Mary was pregnant. Nevertheless, the pressures of society were such
that they felt the need to conform to protect Wollstonecraft’s reputation. The couple
compromised with a form of marriage that allowed them to keep the independence
they had been used to when single, but whether this would have worked will never
be known, as five months later Wollstonecraft died. In spite of Godwin’s heart-felt
biography of his late wife, her reputation suffered nonetheless, and her name was
synonymous with disgrace for over a hundred years after her death.
Frankenstein Great things were expected of their daughter by the forward-thinking radical writers of her day. Mary was very aware of the literary fame of her parents and had literary ambitions herself. In 1814, when she was 16, she fell in love with the poet and
radical sympathiser Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). In July of that year Mary and
Percy, who was already married to someone else, eloped to the Continent, returning
to England once the fuss had died down. Godwin greatly disapproved of his daughter running off in this way, but there was little he could do as Shelley often gave
him money to help finance his research. The pair were able to marry in 1816, when
Shelley’s abandoned wife drowned herself.
In 1815, Mary gave birth, prematurely, to a daughter, who died a few days later.
The loss deeply affected her. In the next year she gave birth to a son, William, leaving England for Geneva once she had recovered. It was here, in June 1816, that she
began to write Frankenstein, completing it in May 1817. She had a daughter, Clara,
in September 1817, and this has interested psychoanalytic critics who see the loss of
the first child and Mary’s third pregnancy as significant for the subject matter of the
novel — creation.
The novel owes much to an informal ghost story-telling contest given in Lord
Byron’s house, the Villa Diodati, near Geneva. Gothic literature was popular at the
time, and the guests entertained each other by inventing frightening stories. The novel
was more than a spur of the moment tale, however. In 1817, Mary expanded it, incorporating ideas about philosophy, morality and social justice, and dedicated it to her
father. Frankenstein was first published, without her name, in January 1818. Some
thought that Percy Shelley had written it. Mary gave her reasons for not revealing her
authorship in a letter to Sir Walter Scott, who reviewed the novel. She writes that she
was
anxious to prevent your continuing in the mistake of supposing Mr Shelley guilty
of a juvenile attempt of mine; to which – from its being written at an early age, I
abstained from putting my name – and from respect to those persons from whom I
bear it. I have therefore kept it concealed except from a few friends.
The novel was accompanied by an anonymous preface by the author’s husband, who
had read the manuscript carefully in its early stages making suggestions for better
turns of phrase, but not interfering substantially. Mary altered the novel slightly in
Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson, eds. The Mary Shelley Reader: Containing Frankenstein,
Mathilda, Tales and Stories, Essays and Reviews, and Letters (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 392.
Frankenstein 1831, after her husband had died in a boating accident in 1822, and added an introduction of her own. The 1831 edition is the version that is usually studied today.
Mary continued to write novels and short stories after Frankenstein was published, mainly to earn money to support her family whose financial worries worsened after Percy’s death. She published Mathilda (1819), Valperga (1821), The Last
Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Falkner (1836), and an important edition of her
husband’s poetry in 1839. Mary died in London, aged 53, and is buried in St Peter’s
Churchyard, Bournemouth.
1.2 The Author’s Literary Strategy
Frankenstein is introduced by two interesting and illuminating documents: the 1818
preface and the author’s introduction of 1831. The preface belongs the first edition
and was written anonymously by Percy Shelley. He writes it from the perspective of
the author, and describes some of the scientific sources of the novel. He explains that
although the idea of making a man by artificial means may seem to be in the realms of
the imagination or fantasy, it is based on the theories of Erasmus Darwin and German
physiological writers. Thus the novel belongs to two genres: the Gothic novel and
what later would be called ‘science fiction’. The Preface asserts that the aim of the
novel was not simply that of the sensational and fashionable Gothic fiction, to entertain and frighten, but, rather, to demonstrate ‘the amiableness of domestic affection,
and the excellence of universal virtue’. By this Shelley means that the love that exists
within the family, and general virtuous behaviour, is central. Frankenstein is as much
a novel about morality as it is about science. The preface concludes with a suggestion
that the dramatic Swiss landscape inspired the author’s writing.
The introduction first appeared in the third (1831) edition, published in a series
called ‘Standard Novels’. By this time the novel had become exceedingly popular,
and Mary Shelley wrote this herself. The 1831 introduction is far more anecdotal than
Percy Shelley’s earlier preface and is written to answer a question the author was
often asked: ‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Maurice Hindle (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1995), 12.
All references to Frankenstein are taken from this edition unless otherwise stated, and will be referenced in brackets in the main body of the study.
The 1831 version is sometimes referred to as the second edition, because the real second edition,
published in 1823, was merely a reprint of the first edition with the words ‘new edition’ placed on
them. Shelley did not make any alterations to her text until 1831, and so the third edition is the true
second edition.
Frankenstein hideous an idea?’ (5). She was indeed young, being eighteen when she began writing and nineteen when it was finished. Mary says she was interested in writing from
a young age, often being inspired by ‘waking dreams’ or day-dreams – an important
Romantic form of inspiration for writing.
There was in fact great interest in the powers of the mind at this time: psychology
was in its infancy and Romantic writers in particular were interested in the images
and stories the mind could produce while in different states of consciousness, or
under the influence of drugs such as opium. They were very intrigued by unconscious
invention and dream-vision. ‘Unconscious invention’ occurs when a writer is able to
write, or use their imagination whilst not being conscious of it. William Blake, for
instance, claimed that the whole of his poem Milton was ‘given’ to him, and that he
merely wrote it out. This is an important feature of Romantic writing because it marks
out the writer, most usually a poet, as an exceptional and gifted person. The writer
shows that his inspiration is pure by effortlessly producing his or her work.
Mary says that the loneliness of the Scottish countryside where she spent some
of her youth fuelled her imagination – William Wordsworth made similar claims
about the influence of the Lake District on his poetry in his major work The Prelude
(1805/1850). Mary then goes on to describe the house party at Byron’s villa. The
weather was bad, so the guests read some Gothic tales which had been translated
from German into French. At Byron’s suggestion the group agreed to write a ghost
story each. Byron came up with only a fragment, Percy Shelley composed something
based on ‘the experiences of his early life’ (7), Dr Polidori ‘had some terrible idea
about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole’ (7)
and Mary, determined to write the best story, set about thinking of a topic that ‘would
speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror – one to make
the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the
heart’ (7–8). It took her a while, but eventually she hit upon an idea inspired by past
discussions with Byron and Shelley about the work of Erasmus Darwin and Luigi
Galvani, who had suggested that it might be possible to give life to a dead animal.
Mary thought it best to sleep on the idea, but recalls that she was kept awake by
her imagination:
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 saw – with shut eyes, but acute mental vision – I saw the pale student
of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hide-
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