Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797. Mary had the idea for Frankenstein—or the Modern Prometheus as it was known at the time—when she was 18, and she finished writing it when she was 19. This teenager, who was excluded from the kind of education her male peers enjoyed, created not one but two of the most enduring characters in fiction: the obsessive scientist and the monster he creates. For 200 years, Frankenstein has generated multiple stage and film adaptations across all genres, and it remains as firmly embedded in our culture as ever.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two hugely important radicals: feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin. She was the lover and then wife of the revolutionary poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and friend of the infamous rebel Lord Byron. Frankenstein was conceived while Mary, Shelley, and Byron were trapped indoors by bad weather during their stay in a villa by Lake Geneva in 1816. To occupy themselves, they decided to invent ghost stories, and Frankenstein was Mary’s contribution.
As is so often the case with women writers, Mary has been treated as an appendage to her parents’ and her husband’s literary careers… whose primary function was to guard the reputations of the more illustrious minds that framed her own. Mary’s life after Shelley’s death is usually dismissed as uninteresting. Biographer Richard Holmes writes, ‘She was still obsessed by Shelley’s papers, and trapped by memories both idealised and remorseful, her life attained a curious stillness’. But Mary, who was only 25 when Shelley drowned, was active enough to support herself and her surviving son despite being ostracised by society and by Shelley’s aristocratic family. She was a writer, reviewer, essayist, executor of her father’s estate, and architect of Shelley’s poetic reputation—in addition to writing five further novels which explored gender inequality.
It is apparently quite difficult for some to accept that a young woman was capable of writing Frankenstein. Professor Charles Robinson worked through a hand-written copy of Frankenstein counting some 5,000 changes suggested by Percy Shelley. The professor declared that ‘The book should now be credited as “by Mary and Percy Shelley”.’ This is rubbish. Other critics have noted that Shelley did no more than any editor, mainly correcting spelling and punctuation. When Shelley drowned just before his 30th birthday, he left a literary mess behind him. Many of his poems remained unpublished until Mary edited and published them. Another academic argues that Mary Shelley’s ‘magisterial editions of 1824 and 1837’ were vital in securing the poet’s reputation. Susan Wolfson writes that Mary’s editing demonstrated ‘considerable authority, at times co-creation’. Without Mary, Percy Shelley would never have entered the great canon of English literature. But does anyone claim that Shelley’s poems should now be credited to Percy and Mary Shelley’?
Many women writers are subtly undermined by the patronising assumption that they simply and artlessly describe their personal experiences. Mary Wollstonecraft died after giving birth to Mary, and by the summer of 1816, 18-year-old Mary had already had two children, one of which she buried. In 1817 Shelley’s wife Harriet and Mary’s half-sister Fanny both committed suicide. Bingo! The creation and destruction, the parody of giving birth in Frankenstein can be satisfactorily explained away. But again this will not do. Mary was familiar with all the intellectual and scientific developments of her time. She attended lectures given by chemist Humphry Davy and Dr Luigi Galvani who passed electric currents through dead bodies.
Mary was also a profoundly political woman. Her book is best understood as an imaginative engagement with the Industrial Revolution which threatened to reshape man’s relationship with nature and with capitalism which was still in its blood-soaked infancy. In Frankenstein, she created a tale which continues to resonate because it articulates a powerful response to capitalism, to class division, and to exploitation and revolt.
Frankenstein can also be read as a feminist novel. It is Victor Frankenstein’s attempts to supplant women in the process of reproduction that leads to disaster. The story, with its dead mothers and murdered wives, reveals what happens when women are marginalised.
Frankenstein was set in the 1790s, the decade of the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution which established the first black republic. As capitalism developed, it provoked a violent response from those it impoverished by new methods of manufacturing—some 12,000 troops were sent to Nottingham to quell the Luddite Rebellion of 1812. Lord Byron’s first (and only) speech in the House of Lords opposed the introduction of the death sentence for machine breaking, but hundreds of Luddite rebels were executed before the movement subsided. Frankenstein’s monster was born out of these social convulsions and protests.
Mary’s monster is not the mute, dumb monster portrayed by Boris Karloff in the 1931 film. He learns to speak and to read, to love music and the poetry of John Milton. ‘I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous’, the monster pleads. Here Mary echoes the pleas of her reforming contemporaries who argued that only improving worker’s lives could prevent violent revolt. But Frankenstein is not just an appeal for worker’s rights—there is a deeper and more fundamental protest going on.
Unlike previous monsters, Mary’s is a dynamic, totalising one. Frankenstein does not stay in the shadows or in the creepy castles like the ghosts in Anne Radcliffe or Lewis Monk’s gothic novels. Frankenstein and his monster chase each other across huge geographical spaces. This reflects how capitalism is also a dynamic system, driven to constantly expand and grow. In addition, the workings of the system are hidden and mysterious and far beyond the control of any individual capitalist, however powerful. From the Communist Manifesto comes this description, ‘Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’.
Frankenstein’s monster is a metaphor for the condition of the working classes in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The monster is not natural, he has been created. Like the men and women being forced into the factories, the monster is stitched together from different elements, and like them, he is deformed and debased.
Through the monster’s naïve eyes, Mary invites us to share his disgust at the degradation of workers. He tells Victor, ‘I heard of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty, of rank, descent and noble blood. I learned that the possessions most esteemed by your fellow creatures were high and unsullied descent united with riches. A man might be respected with only one of these advantages; but, with either, he was considered, except in very rare instances, as a vagabond and a slave, doomed to waste his power for the profits of the chosen few!’
The Monster warns Frankenstein: ‘Remember that I have my power …You are my creator, but I am your master!’ In the monster, Frankenstein has created his own gravedigger. Two hundred years later, Mary Shelley’s novel is more relevant than ever because capitalism is today more monstrous than even she could have imagined.
Charlotte Gordon’s double biography Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is available from Bookmarks bookshop .
