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Book Review: In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein by Fiona Sampson

Pegasus Books, 2018

ISBN-13: 978-1681777528

Available: Hardcover, used paperback, Kindle edition,

 

We know Mary Shelley as the daughter of revolutionary writers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and muse and wife to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who as a teenage girl who wrote Frankenstein, but beyond the anecdote of the challenge to write a ghost story issued one night at the Villa Diodati. But we don’t really KNOW her, beyond the facts of her life.  Somehow, her own life and thoughts have been passed over in favor of her companions, and we have been mostly left with the myth of Frankenstein’s creation, and the many permutations of her novel that have capitalized on it.

In this biography, Fiona Sampson aims to capture the “real” Mary, through her letters, journals, and publications, those of her friends, family, and colleagues, and recreating the context of the time she lived in and how that affected her, from the reading she chose, to the effects of changing climate and the development of electricity.  During the short time she was with Shelley, Mary was pregnant five times. Three of her children died at a young age, and she miscarried a fourth. During the same time period, her half-sister Fanny and Percy’s legitimate wife Harriet both committed suicide.  Intense and intellectual to begin with, Mary dealt with difficult emotions like grief and guilt as well as physical problems while still taking responsibility for the mercurial Shelley’s welfare, and completing and publishing a book. These are the facts of Mary’s life with Shelley, but Mary’s life did not end when Shelley’s did– and throughout her life, she was a survivor. Sampson has taken an unusual and effective approach to her subject, taking a “close-up” of who Mary Shelley was and how she became that person, a young woman who, surrounded by great men, “forced open the space for herself in which to write” and because of that, was later able to establish a literary life of her own.

While not a complete look at the Shelleys and their friends and family, the zoom-in focus on Mary Shelley makes this a worthwhile, and fascinating read. Recommended for adult library collections

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

 

Posted on August 22, 2018 by , Reply

Musings: Frankenstein and Race

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor by Elizabeth Young

NYU Press, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0814797167

Available: Used hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition

 

With this being the bicentennial of the publication of Frankenstein, we can look forward to a year of interpretations of the text. Of course, you can read the novel as if it was produced in a blank space if you just want entertainment(this seems unlikely since the framing device is deadly dull, and almost anyone who picked it up and just read the first page would probably put it back down), or you can run with the romantic version of the summer party where the novel was first inspired, but Mary Shelley, even at 18, was an intelligent woman who listened well and was familiar with literature, philosophy, and the issues of the time.

The easiest way to look at Frankenstein is to consider her life circumstances as the gifted and passionate daughter of a prominent and provocative feminist who died giving birth to her, and a freethinking, progressive father who educated her to want more than she had.  She had already been a mother herself, and watched her child die. The creation and destruction of life must have often been on her mind. In that way, Frankenstein is deeply personal to the author. But for the book and its characters to have survived so long and been recreated in so many ways and such a variety of media, it’s about much more than her own circumstances and emotions. She touched a nerve in our culture through her insights about her own life and times, and even if she never expected that her creation would continue to be relevant as time passed… well, it has been, and continues to be.

Frankenstein centers on reactions to physical and mental difference– monstrosity– and oppression and rejection of the “other”. It is a text that can be used both to justify oppression and to critique it. I was surprised to learn recently that the novel had been used in an argument against the abolition of slavery. This made me want to look further into it. In 1824, British Foreign Secretary George Canning did, in fact, refer to Frankenstein’s creature in a rebuttal to pro-abolition forces in Parliament, saying:

“We must remember that we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength … would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” (Wolfson)

I can’t imagine that Shelley was anything but appalled to have her work manipulated to support slavery.  I learned from an online excerpt of Elizabeth Young’s Black Frankenstein that that support crossed the ocean to America (this seems like a cool book, if you like certain kinds of academic reading, which I do, but I haven’t had the opportunity to read the whole thing). After the Nat Turner revolt, American Thomas Dew quoted Canning’s reference to Frankenstein in a long pro-slavery essay. (Young, 19)  In 1860, Frederick Douglass wrote that “slavery is the pet monster of the American people”, and it is still one we’re grappling with today. A century later, civil rights activist Dick Gregory observed that James Whale’s movie told the story of  “a monster, created by a white man, turning on his creator.” (Young, 4) In fact, race played into the visuals of the movie, with the filming of the mob scene at the end created to evoke a lynching. (Wolfson) Frankenstein may have started out as a nineteenth century British Gothic novel, but it’s made a home for itself in American culture. With race at the forefront of our issues today, now is a great time to consider Frankenstein in a new light.

 

Wolfson, S. “What makes a monster?” New York Public Library. Retrieved from http://exhibitions.nypl.org/biblion/outsiders/outsiders/essay/essaywolfson

Young, E. (2008) “Introduction”. In  Black Frankenstein: The making of an American metaphor.  New York: NYU Press.  Retrieved from https://nyupress.org/webchapters/9780814797150_Young_intro.pdf)

 

Posted on January 4, 2018 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Mary Shelley’s”Hideous Progeny”

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley  When writing about women in horror, it’s almost impossible not to mention Mary Shelley.

Who was Mary Shelley? She was the daughter of two brilliant and unconventional thinkers, whose mother died in childbirth. A gifted and unconventional thinker herself, she read and wrote in five languages, and set herself an ambitious reading program. She was a pregnant teenager– just sixteen– who, accompanied by her half-sister, ran away from home with Percy Shelley, an older, married man. Disowned by her father, looked down on because she was an unmarried mother for most of that time, she saw three of her children die at a young age, the first just a few weeks after she was born.

Pregnancy must have been often on her mind often, and the consequences were often unpleasant: Shelley’s wife was pregnant when he ran away with Mary (she eventually committed suicide); and Mary’s half-sister was abandoned by Lord Byron when she announced she was carrying his child. It was in the midst of these events that Mary Shelley birthed her novel, Frankenstein.  Yet, Mary loved being a mother and loved her children. People familiar with the genesis of Frankenstein know the story of the wager made one dark and stormy night at the Villa Diodiati, between Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley; but Mary Shelley’s creation did not emerge from a vacuum. Her birth, which caused her mother’s death; her witness to the abandonment of other pregnant women (Shelley’s wife and her own half-sister); and the early death of her first child, all combined in the emotions and mind of an intellectually advanced teenage girl with intense emotions who was fascinated by the world around her.

In Literary Women, Ellen Moers relates that shortly after the death of Mary’s first child, she wrote “Dream that my little baby came to life again, that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived”. It’s no surprise, then, that the nightmare she wrote is a vision of the terrible power and consequences that accompany the creation,  the possibility of reanimation, and the death of a living creature. In Frankenstein is a synthesis of all the guilt, fear of abandonment, joy, and pain that Mary felt– a story narrated by men and monsters that illuminates a woman’s complex feelings about birth, parenthood, and death.

 

Posted on February 4, 2015 by , Reply
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