Frankenstein’s Shadow

I recently read a book called The Monsters by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, which dealt with the events leading up to and following the writing of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. The Monsters was fascinating; mostly because of the details it had about Mary Shelley’s life. The child of two authors and social revolutionaries, Mary Wollstonecraft (best know for The Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and William Godwin, Mary Shelley was willful, highly intelligent, and very progressive. At 16 she ran away with the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley, taking her step-sister with her. In time, Percy came to think that he had run away with two women, and took full advantage of the situation. Don’t think that Percy was a cad; he was just a wholly selfish person who lived up to his philosophical ideas, which included free love, no matter what the consequences might be to other people. Mary was well aware of this, she was just not aware that ideas she harbored at 16 might change over the hard, eventful years.

Eight years after her elopement she had lost three children to illness, a sister to suicide, was ostracized from her family (because she had put the radical ideas she was raised with into practice), Shelley was at the bottom of the sea, and her first novel was on its way to immortality. Today it’s hard to find a high school student who has not read Frankenstein and Mary’s monster has a life and identity separate from the novel. He is iconic, and he should have elevated Mary with him. And yet, Mary is still living in the shadow of her husband.

Over a hundred and fifty years after Mary Shelley’s mother wrote the first feminist manifesto, I found, in an introduction to Mary Shelley’s journal, the line, “…this journals main contribution to history is the light it sheds on Shelley’s daily life: where he lived, where he went, and whom he saw from day to day.” The academic who collected and edited Mary’s many journals cared only for what they would tell us of Percy. Not a word or thought does he seem to bestow on the actual writer of the journal, a woman who wrote one of the most enduring novels of the English language at the tender age of 19, who went on to author several more novels and numerous collections of lovely, highly intelligent essays. How could he not feel the voice of the journal’s main author, her sad, sweet lament when by 18 she realized that she had already made all the wrong choices in life?

This marginalization of Mary is not due wholly to the secondary status of women in the literary world. Mary helped to make herself Percy’s shadow by constantly deferring to his wishes, even when his need for constant travel caused the death of their frail daughter. She sat silently in the corner while her husband and Lord Byron were discussing literature and philosophy, even though her education and quick mind made her their equal. She never saw herself as an artist, just a woman forced to write to pay the bills after her visionary husband fulfilled his promise by dying early. After Percy’s death, Mary dedicated her life to editing and publishing his poems and to rewriting his life, turning a reckless, amorous atheist into a simple and pure seraph. It was Mary’s diligent work that made her husband an icon, all done during a time where her novels appeared under an assumed name so as not to embarrass Shelley’s family.

But even more, Mary has been forgotten because Frankenstein’s monster has taken on a life of his own. He has become infinitely larger than Mary or Percy, a creature of power and poignancy, a symbol of loneliness, fear, and infinite sadness. He has eclipsed his maker, becoming more real to us than the shadowy Mary Shelley who was content to labor in the shadow of her prodigious father and husband. Mary has far surpassed her famous family and husband in the creating of an enduring image and idea, and by doing so she has become the most insubstantial of them all.