When I began rereading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the purposes of penning this introduction, I received—like the corpse Victor Frankenstein brings to life—a galvanic shock: I was not rereading. I had never read the book before. I turned page after page with the growing conviction that although I knew the story, its settings, the characters, the flavor of its language, the history and philosophy that underlie it, the tale of its creation, and even the novel’s structure, the actual prose was new to me. How had I—a writer, a student of literature, an erstwhile fan of the nineteenth-century gothic novel, a college major in British Studies—how had I managed not only never to read the book but also not to realize I hadn’t?
This isn’t, of course, so terribly surprising. Frankenstein, who with his literary cousin Dracula, bookends the nineteenth century with an eponymous horror novel, is an icon of such magnitude that we all know him in some form. As with Dracula, we often speak of the Frankenstein “myth” or “legend,” when actually the monster in question is the creation of a single, known author.
To begin to ponder Frankenstein—or, more accurately, the creature given life by the scientific ambition of young Victor Frankenstein—is to encounter images of him everywhere: in endless film and animation iterations, advertisements, Halloween costumes, toys, and, of course, comic books. I recently watched a small child in a restaurant draw a picture of a ghoulish man with a bolt through his neck. “Who’s that?” I asked. “I don’t know,” the child told me. “A scary guy.” The bolt through the neck, of course, has no place in Shelley’s tale, where the monster is a good old-fashioned normal corpse, but that detail has been the signature of film and cartoon Frankenstein monsters for decades.
Only five years after the publication of this edition, Shelley’s creation will celebrate its two hundredth year in the cultural consciousness: Frankenstein, again like Dracula, was an overnight success and has never been out of print. The novel has also indirectly rendered its creator far more famous in the twentieth-first century than her exquisitely gifted and short-lived poet husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom she grieved (with a poignant insistence on privacy) in her 1831 Author’s Introduction: “[The novel’s] several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.” She also confessed freely that her dead husband had written the entire preface to Frankenstein. Percy Bysshe Shelley was beloved of nineteenth-century readers, but how many of us now look up at a lark and mutter to ourselves, “Hail to thee, blithe spirit; bird thou never wert”? Yet everyone—everyone—knows Frankenstein, or rather his monster.
* * *
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein when she was not yet nineteen years old. Born in 1797, she had always been precocious, running off with Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of sixteen, and before that reading and writing from childhood. She came honestly by her legacy of literature, as daughter of the famous feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and novelist/philosopher William Godwin (Lives of the Necromancers). Her brilliant mother died of fever eleven days after Mary’s birth, a fate that threatened all childbearing women of the era. Godwin and his second wife raised Mary and their other children in a home frequented by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. The young poet Shelley, an admirer of Mary’s father, apparently made on Mary the greatest impression of all; in the summer of 1814, the two fell deeply in love and eloped from Godwin’s home. Mary was sixteen; Shelley was already married. Mary would spend most of the next three years repeatedly pregnant, in grief, and—from 1816 to 1817—writing Frankenstein.
* * *
The genesis of Frankenstein has become almost as famous in literary history as the monster himself. In the summer of 1816, the Shelleys spent a rainy summer at Lake Geneva, where they were joined by remarkable friends, the poet Byron—who was already popular with British readers—and his dashing young physician, John Polidori. The weather was often bad, as Mary Shelley later related, and their little company read and discussed ghost stories to while away the time. During an evening of rain and conversation, the group made one of the best-known literary pacts in history: each of them would write a ghost story.
The three men set to work with alacrity. Percy Bysshe Shelley soon abandoned his project, although Byron later published part of his at the end of a poem, and Polidori’s novella The Vampyre was published in 1819. Mary, however, was unable to think of an idea for her story until a later evening, when the discussion turned to some of the pressing scientific topics of the era. She describes the scene in her Author’s Introduction: “Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin [Erasmus, grandfather of Charles Darwin] . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. . . . Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together and embued with vital warmth.”
That night, Mary Shelley had the quintessential experience of the Romantics: sudden inspiration, conceived in a state between waking and sleeping. “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. . . . 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.” This scene, vividly reproduced from her semi-dream, is the horror at the heart of the novel, the moment that is both the climax of Victor Frankenstein’s ambitions and the beginning of his undoing.
In the Author’s Introduction, Mary Shelley also confesses to still feeling (sixteen years later) an affection for her “hideous progeny,” the monster and book that brought her such fame as a young writer. She claims that it is “the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.” In reality, however, by the time she was composing Frankenstein, she had already sacrificed her close family ties to her elopement with Shelley, lost one child in infancy, and borne another, William, who would die a year after the publication of the book. And, of course, her own mother had perished giving birth to her, a circumstance that finds its echo in Victor Frankenstein’s giving life to a being who brings mortal danger to his creator, and in the story’s theme of the dangers of reproduction. The writing of Frankenstein was interrupted twice for mourning—once for the suicide of Mary’s half-sister Fanny Imlay, and once for that of Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, a tragedy that also left the new couple free to marry. It was a work shadowed by the realities of loss.
Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, with a dedication to William Godwin. Its immediate success was followed by the greatest horror of all: in 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing accident on the Bay of Lerici in northern Italy. His body was identified by the volume of John Keats’s poems in one of his coat pockets. Mary was not yet twenty-five, and she and Shelley had been on poor terms before his death, which added remorse to her grief. His heart, the source of every Romantic poet’s song, was snatched from his funeral pyre on the beach by admirer Edward Trelawny, a scene as strange as any recounted in Frankenstein. Shelley’s heart vanished soon after and was found again on Mary Shelley’s death; she had kept it for nearly thirty years, wrapped in silk and in the pages of one of his greatest poems, “Adonais,” an elegy to Keats, who had died in 1821. The poem begins, “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!”
* * *
Some of the fascination of Frankenstein lies in its structure. Like many nineteenth-century novels of the supernatural, it takes the form of stories within stories and insists on documentation as proof of reality. The book as a whole is a set of documents—opening with the letters of Captain Robert Walton, written to his sister in England during an Arctic voyage. Captain Walton, who suffers from a milder form of the scientific ambition that causes Victor Frankenstein’s agony, recounts his meeting with Victor in the frozen wastes of the north and reports the tale of Victor’s life as the dying man conveys it to him. Victor’s report includes in turn the monster’s confession to his creator—a confession of murder and hatred, but also a plea for compassion.
The novel also uses a dazzling and sometimes awkward range of settings, from that favorite Romantic region, the Swiss Alps, to the Orkney Islands and points between, beginning and ending with Captain Walton’s polar expedition. This is one of the many elements that set it apart from other gothic novels of its century. Instead of relying on dark castles, dungeons, and lonely graveyards for its effect, it paints the Frankenstein tragedy against the sublimity of nature—the enormous picturesqueness of mountains, islands, icebergs. This is a portrait of uncaring nature, splendid but cold, the nature from which the younger Darwin scientist would soon deduce a probable absence of divine creation. Indeed, the frequency with which ice, snow, and winter appear in Frankenstein could prompt a dissertation; Mary Shelley’s novel is one to read by the fire, with plenty of blankets on hand. The downfall of nearly every literary hero involves some sort of hubris, or overambitious pride, and Victor Frankenstein’s first and greatest error is tampering with the laws of this powerful, chilling nature.
Frankenstein’s second error is perhaps more interesting because it is more ordinary: he gets queasy. After bringing a corpse to life (by means he refuses to reveal to Captain Walton and therefore, conveniently, to the reader), he deserts his creation and attempts to pretend to himself and the world that his experiment has never taken place. Perhaps the most poignant moment in the story is the monster’s later plea to Victor, the cry of a child to a neglectful parent, or of the miserable human race to its absent gods: “Remember, that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel. . . . Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” (It’s interesting to note that the monster uses the most elevated language in the book, echoing biblical passages and sometimes Milton’s Paradise Lost)
By this time, however, the monster has begun to murder the people Victor Frankenstein loves most, and the stricken creator is already beyond forgiveness: “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.”
Victor’s situation is further complicated by his creature’s demand for a mate who will bring him happiness but with whom he will surely, like Adam with Eve, sire more miserable beings of his own kind. The darkness in Frankenstein is not one of creaking doors and castle crypts but of the conundrums of the human condition: were we brought into this beautiful world only to make mistakes and suffer from them? The greatest torment the Frankenstein monster experiences in his anguished, undead life is loneliness, and it drives him to his most terrible deeds. In other words, the horror of the Frankenstein monster is not that he’s an alien, but that he is Victor’s other, his double, his conscience—and ours. He is our worst self, but also our most needy, most vulnerable incarnation, set adrift. Enduring monsters—the vampire, the Frankenstein monster, the restless mummy—are those who are nearly human. At the same time they are those denied real humanity by their inability to put the past behind them and die a natural death.
* * *
In the creation of her story, Mary Shelley drew on some of the most powerful currents of thought of her day: Romantic literature, a movement only a quarter-century old when she began her novel, and seismic changes in the scientific world. Elizabeth, the love of Victor Frankenstein’s life, studies “the aerial creations of the poets,” while Victor unwittingly prepares his own downfall by viewing the natural world as “a secret which I desired to divine.” Frankenstein invokes the older bards of Romanticism, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their literary ancestors Milton and Shakespeare. Mary Shelley drew her epigraph for the novel from the tenth book of Paradise Lost (“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man, did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?”). Paradise Lost, which Percy Bysshe Shelley read aloud to his wife, is also one of the first books the monster reads to himself as he evolves toward human knowledge. He can’t decide whether to compare himself with Milton’s Adam or Satan.
Captain Walton assures his sister in the opening documents of the book that he will not suffer the fate of the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem by that title, although his childhood love of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” sent him to sea in the first place. (Coleridge began composition of the poem the year Mary Shelley was born, and she recalled hiding behind a sofa, as a child in her father’s home, to hear the famous poet read it.) Victor Frankenstein quotes the same poem when he describes his sudden sense that his newly created monster is pursuing him: “he knows a frightful fiend / Doth close behind him tread.” The very dream state that generated the work, and the legend Mary Shelley made of it in retrospect, echo the Romantic creative manifesto; Wordsworth conceived of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and Coleridge credited a waking dream with inspiring his famous poem “Kubla Khan” (a dream probably induced by opium). Mary Shelley would have known these poets from her own literary upbringing and also from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s interest in their work. In fact, the most mysterious lines in the book are her husband’s. As Victor Frankenstein ascends the peaks above the Alpine valley of Chamonix (which the Shelleys visited together in 1816 when Mary was already at work on the book), he quotes the two final stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mutability”: “Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; / Nought may endure but mutability.” It is a quietly uncited tribute.
In addition to quoting the Romantics—and joining their ranks as writer—Mary Shelley invokes their great themes, particularly the obsession of Romantic poets and painters with the picturesque or “sublime” (a word she rings like a bell throughout the novel). Her choice of the Alps as a setting is a classic Romantic move; even in the midst of chasing his monster through mountain passes, Victor Frankenstein is distracted by their beauty: “From the side where I now stood Montanvert was exactly opposite, at the distance of a league; and above it rose Mont Blanc, in awful majesty. I remained in a recess of the rock, gazing on this wonderful and stupendous scene. . . . My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy. . . .” One of the great tragedies of the monster’s “life” is that, unlike his creator, the monster is so embittered by his experiences that he loses the Romantic ability to draw consolation (even lonely consolation) from the splendor of the natural world.
* * *
But the early nineteenth century was not simply rediscovering the beauties of nature; if anything, the Romantics were reacting to advances in science that seemed to promise to uncover all of nature’s secrets—Victor Frankenstein’s great desire. As we’ve seen, Mary Shelley was well aware of some of these discoveries, and they were a partial inspiration for her story. Galvanism—electrical force produced by chemical action—had been identified by Luigi Galvani of Bologna in the 1790s. Mary Shelley would also have been aware of a new general science called chemistry, which in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries encompassed other fields, such as geology. All of these studies were considered disciplines of “natural philosophy,” a term Victor Frankenstein uses to describe the interests he pursues at his university, where he proves his skill as scientist: “. . . at the end of two years, I made some discoveries in the improvement of some chemical instruments, which procured me great esteem and admiration at the university.”
We never find out what those discoveries are, nor do we learn how Victor Frankenstein becomes capable of “bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.” Even if such an ability could have been explained, Mary Shelley was no scientist, and she hastens toward the human and the gothic elements of her story; the hard science in Frankenstein is always in soft focus. Despite this possible shortcoming, the novel brims with questions we face in our own era of gene therapy, artificial intelligence, and robotics. Can and should the force we call life be “created” or genetically altered? What are the possible ethical and human repercussions of such experiments? Should there be a limit to our attempts to explore and control the natural world? Once we have tampered with nature, is it our obligation—or perhaps our doom—to try to restore balance by further tampering? (One timeline of Mary Shelley’s life, in another contemporary edition of Frankenstein, concludes with the 1996 creation of Dolly, the sheep who was the first cloned mammal.) These themes, beyond the gothic story that still haunts us, are what make Frankenstein both classic and modem.
* * *
Mary Shelley’s “hideous progeny” was her ultimate literary achievement, as well as her first one. After Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death, Mary continued to write; she also devoted herself to raising her one surviving child, Percy Florence. She financed his upbringing and their travels together mainly by the production of works that have not survived in the literary canon and that frequently attracted poor reviews and even censorship, although her forward-looking novel The Last Man has had a durable reputation. She also put considerable effort into posthumously editing and publishing her husband’s works. The last decades of her life were marred by poor health, and she died in 1851 after a series of strokes. She had never remarried, claiming, “I want to be Mary Shelley on my tombstone.” She was buried in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England; the bodies of her illustrious, scandalous parents were moved to the same churchyard to be near hers.
Within five years of the publication of her bestseller, the Frankenstein creature had lumbered onto the stage, where it appeared in various incarnations throughout the nineteenth century. By 1910, early filmmakers were already trying to capture Mary Shelley’s saga in a brand-new medium. In 1931, actor Boris Karloff brought to life the square-headed, suit-jacketed, sad-eyed Frankenstein that is still our most famous film image of the monster. What would modest Mary Shelley, who lived so much personal grief, have thought of the industry her first novel launched? “Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition,” the dying Victor Frankenstein counsels his friend Captain Walton. Mary Shelley’s tale, rooted in inspiration rather than the desire for an audience, has conveyed to us for nearly two centuries the eerie pleasure it gave its author.
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA