Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Part II

Mary Shelley incorporated a number of different sources into her work, not the least of which was the Promethean myth from Ovid. The influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and John Milton's Paradise Lost, the book the creature finds in the cabin, are also clearly evident within the novel.

After Percy Shelley’s drowning in 1822, Mary was tireless in promoting her late husband's work, including editing and annotating unpublished material. Despite their troubled later life together, she revered her late husband's memory and helped build his reputation as one of the major poets of the English Romantic period. But she also found occasions to write a few more novels, including Valperga: The Life and Adventures of Castruccio and Falkner. The Last Man, a pioneering science fiction novel of the human apocalypse in the distant future, is, however, sometimes considered her best work, as is Mathilda, a novella published posthumously.

Mary Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, 1851, aged 53, in London and was interred at St. Peter's Churchyard in Bournemouth, in the English county of Dorset. At the time of her death, she was a recognized novelist. Her son, Sir Percy Shelley, arranged for her parents to be exhumed and re-buried next to her; he and his wife are also buried there.

Mary Shelley and Frankenstein Part I

The story of how Frankenstein was written is nearly as famous as the novel itself. A nineteen year old girl is issued a challenge by her host to write a ghost story. The girl was Mary Shelley the then fiancée of the poet Percy Shelley and her host was Lord Byron.

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, England, the second daughter of famed feminist, educator and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally famous anarchist philosopher, journalist and atheist dissenter, William Godwin. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a political radical and free-thinker like her father, when Percy and his first wife Harriet visited Godwin's home and bookshop in London. Percy, unhappy in his marriage, began to visit Godwin more frequently (and alone). In the summer of 1814 he and Mary (then only 16) fell in love. They eloped, (though Percy was still married to Harriet at the time) to France in July.

During the snowy summer of 1816, the "Year Without A Summer," the world was locked in a long cold volcanic winter caused by the eruption of Tambora in 1815. In this terrible year, Mary visited Lord Byron at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The weather was consistently too cold and dreary that summer to enjoy the outdoor vacation activities they had planned, so after reading an anthology of German ghost stories, Byron challenged the Shelleys and his personal physician John William Polidori to each compose a story of their own, the contest being won by whoever wrote the scariest tale.

Mary conceived an idea after she fell into a waking dream or nightmare during which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." This was the germ of Frankenstein. Byron managed to write just a fragment based on the vampire legends he heard while traveling the Balkans, and from this Polidori created The Vampyre (1819), the progenitor of the romantic vampire literary genre. Thus, Lord Byron’s challenge created both the Gothic themes of Frankenstein and the modern vampire.

Come back tomorrow for Part II.

Monster Time

Mary Shelley was 18 when she wrote Frankenstein. The story of the weekend spent with her boyfriend and then eventual husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron and the bet they made on who could write the scariest tale is now the stuff of literary legend. Byron and Shelley while great poets could not match the rich and frought imagination of Mary.

The novel first published in 1818 tell the story of Victor Frankenstein and his attempt to reanimate the corpse of a man who had been hanged. It then goes on to tell of the horrible deaths and misery that follows from this act to bend nature to the will of man by the use of science.

I think everyone of us has seen this story told in dozens of movies and have seen that theme come down through literature. All science fiction and horror novels can trace their roots to the imagination of a 19th Century woman, who was trying to win a very special bet and her nightmare.

When I placed my head upon my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. . . . 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 hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.

Mary Shelley, from her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein

As we draw closer to the first read of Rorschach's attempt to bring this creature to life in Monster, I thought this might be a good time to check out the some of the vast amount of imformation available on the web.

If you have never read the novel, I can't think of a better time of year to do it. As the leaves begin to change and the wind grows ever colder, why not print your own copy of the Novel here.

Wikipedia, in its very factually truthy way provides a nice overview of the novel and the movies that followed this most Gothic of Gothic Novels.

The National Institure of Health shows you the time line of what happened to bring this story of Medicine and Science to life. And they also talk about the social and moral issues raised by the novel here.

And finally here is a look at a museum that has taken great pains to explore the work and life of Mary Shelley, The Bakken Exhibit has some interesting artifacts and displays of the life of Frankenstein.

Monster Opens on October 31st. It's alright to be afraid of the dark sometimes.