THE SENSITIVE SHELLEY AND FRANKENSTEIN
We shall become the same, we shall be one 1
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
We are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley2
Sensitivity, passion, love, romance, and Frankenstein would seem at first sight to be a subject hardly worth consideration, particularly in a book setting forward a rather focused and deliberate argument for an alternative author to the classic novel. The story is particularly dull for the reader searching for passion, romance, and true love between Victor Frankenstein and his fiancée/sister-like cousin Elizabeth.
The focus of the relationships touching Victor are familial: father and son; mother and son; sister/cousin and brother, i.e., Victor and Elizabeth; and young Victor and his childhood brother-like friend, Henry Clerval. The relationships are platonic in the modern understanding of “platonic”3 and largely serve as a supporting background to the relationship between Victor and the creature. If any relationship within the story bears a resemblance of higher affection, though clearly nonsexual, it is that between Victor and Henry. Victor is loved by others but does not seem to be able to reciprocate love; he is a man alone and obsessed with chasing after his creation. Much like the central figure in Percy Shelley’s poem The Sensitive Plant, composed in 1820, Victor is companionless:
A Sensitive Plant in a garden grew,
And the young winds fed it with silver dew,
And it opened its fan-like leaves to the light
And closed them beneath the kisses of night.
And the Spring arose on the garden fair
Like the Spirit of Love felt every where;
And each flower and herb on Earth’s dark breast
Rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.
But none ever trembled and panted with bliss
In the garden, the field or the wilderness,
Like a doe in the noontide with love’s sweet want
As the companionless Sensitive Plant.4
Here again, the reader should not find it surprising that The Sensitive Plant is far more than a nature poem, it is another autobiographical poem in the Shelley canon. It is worth quoting at length from Earl Wasserman’s scholarly work, Shelley, A Critical Reading:
Although a member of the garden, it [the Sensitive Plant] is radically differentiated from all the other flowers, especially by its participating in the world less perfectly than the others and by its finding the garden inadequate to its desires. What obviously distinguishes sensitive plants is that, like man, they seem to participate in two levels of the Great Chain of Being, and occupy an “isthmus of a middle state”: belonging to the botanical order, they nevertheless respond sensitively to stimuli and seem to imitate the characteristics of animal life, as their botanical name, mimosa, indicates. The traditional botanical and biological classifications were seriously under question in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the sensitive plant was one of the most frequent examples of those ambiguous border-forms sharing both vegetable and animal characteristics. Like man, therefore the Sensitive Plant is a native of the world-garden and yet is alien to it, aspiring to its other order of existence; and thus it symbolically reflects the tension, let us say, between the Narrator of Alastor, who seeks only whom the world cannot satisfy and who is drawn beyond it by the visionary complement of himself projected by his own mind. Being hermaphroditic, the Sensitive Plant, unlike all the other flowers, is “companionless” (I.12), unable to complement or fulfill itself in another in the world-garden, where it has no compeer; and in this way it has affinities with all of Shelley’s aspiring solitaries. Again, like man, the Sensitive Plant is the special favorite of nature and receives the fullness of its ministry. Yet its status is paradoxical in every way, for although it “Received more than all” the other flowers, it is discontent, desiring more than the garden is capable of giving, even though, lacking bright flowers, rich fruit, and scent, it is unable to return any of the beauty it receives from the others… In a world where everything else is fulfilled in a perfect reciprocity of love and beauty, it is at least half out of place.5
THE SENSITIVE PLANT IN FRANKENSTEIN
It is not difficult to associate the Sensitive Plant’s half out-of-place status with the creature in Frankenstein. The creature is caught in an existent state that is neither fully human and yet not entirely non-human at the same time. Yet, to keep the question of authorship at the center, note that Wasserman’s astute observation is that Percy Bysshe Shelley’s choice characters are patterned after those who are most like his own life experience—those who are half out of place, who have received something unique within their nature and must live solitary lives as a consequence of it. They are those characters and people, like Shelley, who were outside of the “normal” social structure. Shelley is the one who is surrounded by flowers in the garden and yet companionless, searching for his other half, chasing that which can never be found. The associations between Shelley, Victor, the creature, and even Walton are uncanny and autobiographically important, for once again Frankenstein reveals far more than a ghost story told during a stormy Geneva summer. Shelley is creating characters with plights resembling his own: companionless, identified by their “otherness,” searching, and in desperation to find someone suited to be their proper complement.
The Sensitive Plant also presents another curious autobiographical association linking Shelley with Victor and the creature—the “Lady.”
There is a Power in this sweet place,
An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace
Which to the flowers did they waken or dream
Was as God is to the starry scheme:
A Lady — the wonder of her kind,
Whose form was upborne by a lovely mind
Which dilating, had moulded her mien and motion,
Like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the Ocean —
Tended the garden from morn to even:
And the meteors of that sublunar Heaven
Like the lamps of the air when night walks forth,
Laughed round her footsteps up from the Earth.
She had no companion of mortal race,
But her tremulous breath and her flushing face
Told, whilst the morn kissed the sleep from her eyes
That her dreams were less slumber than Paradise:6
The companionless Lady who graced the garden where the Sensitive Plant grew was subject to the changing seasons and with her death the Sensitive Plant had become a leafless wreck and decayed.
The garden once fair became cold and foul
Like the corpse of her who had been its soul
Which at first was lovely as if in sleep,
Then slowly changed, till it grew a heap
To make men tremble who never weep
When the winter had gone and spring came back
The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck;
But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.7
One should not miss the autobiographical association between Shelley’s Sensitive Plant and the central character of the novel Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein. The grace and love that nurtured the Sensitive Plant was found in the angelic “Lady” whose presence gave meaning and beauty to the garden in which the Sensitive Plant grew. With the loss of the “Lady,” the plant’s future is destined to be sadness, loss, and eventual death. In Frankenstein, Victor’s mother Catherine, though introduced as a key figure in his childhood, hardly appears in the story before she turns her attentions away from him and is lost to an early death shortly before Victor sets off for Ingolstadt. It is a key turning point for Victor when he loses his mother on the occasion of his departure for studies away from home. She is the first domino to fall in a series of losses that begin with his pursuit of education. But what of the link to Shelley himself?
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s mother, Elizabeth Pilfold, has been described as holding “the pride of place for influencing his [Shelley’s] poetic genius”8 and yet before young Percy had turned two years old, his mother’s attention was to be directed to the care of a new child, Percy’s beloved sister, also named Elizabeth. It is not difficult to concede that Elizabeth influenced the poetic genius of her son; however, determining whether that influence was positive or negative is quite another matter. Very little is known of the relationship that Percy shared with his mother as few letters survive from Elizabeth describing her son. The tearing away of a maternal image so early in the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley is significant, particularly as it relates to his developing ideas regarding women. Richard Holmes summarizes the complications in the relationship between Percy Shelley and his mother, particularly childhood years and the impact made on that relationship as Shelley was sent off to school as a young boy at Syon House:
We know nothing directly of his relationship with his mother during his first fifteen years, and Shelley rarely mentioned her in later life. From a few stray remarks in letters from Oxford, and from passing references by his cousin Tom Medwin and his undergraduate friend T.J. Hogg, we can gather that the feelings between mother and son were exceptionally close and warm up to the time that Shelley went to school. After this Shelley seems to have found his mother increasingly distant and unresponsive, and there are indications that he felt deeply rejected.9
As noted earlier, the image of Elizabeth Shelley, Percy’s mother, given by Richard Holmes in his biography of Shelley, was of a loving mother who virtually disappeared from his life the moment he was sent off to school away from home. The obvious comparison in Frankenstein is found in the loss of Victor’s mother at the very moment that he is to take his first leave of home to study at the University of Ingolstadt.
No youth could have passed more happily than mine… When I attained the age of seventeen, my parents resolved that I should become a student at the university of Ingolstadt. I had hitherto attended the schools of Geneva; but my father thought it necessary that I should be made acquainted with other customs than those of my native country. My departure was therefore fixed at an early date; but, before the day resolved upon could arrive, the first misfortune of my life occurred — an omen, as it were, of my future misery.10
The occasion of Victor’s misfortune and omen of future misery was the death of his beloved mother. In describing the internal conflict produced by this loss, Victor explains,
I need not describe the feelings of those whose dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for ever… and why should I describe a sorrow which all have felt and must feel?11
The turning point for Victor Frankenstein clearly comes at the point of losing his mother in conjunction with his departure for school. The loss of his mother, the leaving behind of his close friend Henry, the separation that takes place with his sister/cousin Elizabeth, leads Victor to seek in himself—and by creating one in his own image—the fulfillment of his own emptiness and desire for self-completion. How closely the lives of Victor and Percy line up.
In her article “Parent-Child Tensions in Frankenstein: The Search for Communion,” Laura P. Claridge writes,
Previous commentators have, of course, noted Frankenstein’s abuse of his monster; strangely enough, however, they have tended to ignore the precedent within his own family for Victor’s later actions, as well as the familial tensions that Walton, Victor’s shadow self, implies. Such critical shortsightedness has inevitably resulted in textual analyses that fail to account for the complexity of the novel.12
Although Claridge is viewing the novel through the lens of Mary Shelley as the author, it is to be carefully noted that it was not Mary alone who suffered the psychological trauma of losing a maternal influence in life. It could be argued, as Victor himself argues, that the “irreparable evil” is more significant for the one who has known and lost such a figure as opposed to the one who never felt the pain of knowing and then losing such an influence or love. Percy Bysshe Shelley knew the anxiety and loss of a maternal figure in his earliest years and the effect of this broken relationship left a profound impact on him and gave expression to his feelings throughout his writings.
Letters from Shelley have suggested that his inspiration for the “Lady” in The Sensitive Plant arose from his relationship to Margaret, Countess of Mount Cashell (“Mrs. Mason”), and Jane Williams; however, one can hardly avoid the psychological implications behind Shelley’s words: with the disappearance of the maternal power (the Lady) in the Sensitive Plant’s garden, the plant itself could not survive, for it was without one of corresponding nature—the companionless seeking the companion. James Bieri observes,
Aroused and “companionless,” the plant’s frustration introduces the substitute satisfaction of a maternal “undefiled Paradise” whose flowers (as an infant’s awakening eyes/Smile on its mother).”
The maternal “Power in this sweet place,” the Lady who tends the garden, also having “no companion,” is an idealized mother: “If the flowers had been her own infants she/Could never nursed them more tenderly.” With the passing of summer, this maternal bliss ends as “she died!”13
It is the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley and it is the plight of Victor Frankenstein, the creature, and Robert Walton. Consider the words of the creature pleading with his maker,
My vices are the children of a forced solitude that I abhor, and my virtues will necessarily arise when I shall receive the sympathy of an equal. I shall feel the affections of a living being and become linked to the chain of existence and events from which I am now excluded.14
It is to belong to the chain of existence, to find the appropriate companion of like-nature, to find union and meaning by being joined to someone or something which gives meaning, love, and produces the sense of unity that all men and creatures long for. And again, The Sensitive Plant:
For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower —
It loves — even like Love — its deep heart is full —
It desires what it has not — the beautiful.15
HERMAPHRODITES, MONSTERS, AND SHELLEY
The Sensitive Plant, the mimosa, being hermaphroditic, adds another unmistakable fact related to its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley, into the weight of considerable evidence for his authorship of Frankenstein. The hermaphrodite, some have argued, symbolically has the unfortunate status of existing as a living being and yet lacking a proper social identity—“it” is neither a “he” or a “she”; it is an “it” and as such becomes virtually dehumanized and viewed as if a monster.
In Ancient Greece and Rome up until the Republic, beings possessing both sexes seem to have been pitilessly eliminated as monsters, that is to say, as foreboding signs sent to human beings by the gods to manifest their anger or announce the destruction of the human race.16
The choice of the Sensitive Plant associated so perfectly to Percy Bysshe Shelley that he referred to himself as “the sensitive plant” when writing to Claire Clairmont, and he also used the hermaphrodite as a paradoxical monstrous beauty in his deeply personal poem, the Epipsychidion:
And others swear you’re a Hermaphrodite;
Like that sweet marble monster of both sexes,
Which looks so sweet and gentle that it vexes
The very soul that the soul is gone
Which lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.17
That which vexes Victor, the creature, Robert Walton, and Percy Shelley through the solitude of life is the longing to find one of similar nature: to be united or reunited with the missing half of themselves. And yet, as a sort of “monster,” where can such a companion be found? Such questions must be asked, along with why was this idea of union or reunion so important to Shelley? It is a dominating theme from Walton’s first letter to the sister he has left behind in his quest, or avoidance of his own need for the truly Platonic soul mate he longs for. It is Victor’s expressed purpose in telling his own story, as a warning to Walton, of what happens when adventures and exploits take over to cover up the deeper inner longing for a soul mate. Victor makes and chases his own demons while avoiding his hidden need for a soul mate, forever making excuses as to why he chooses to be separated from Elizabeth. It is also the obvious plight of the creature who has none like him and seeks his own soul mate, only to live in frustration that what he knows must exist for him is denied to him.
How then does this theme also relate to the companionless hermaphroditic plant and the author of Frankenstein? The answer to that question is found in the sacrificial and solitary pursuit by all to find their corresponding companion; it is the unfulfilled longing of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the impetus behind his poetic aspirations, the motivating principle driving both Victor and the creature to their deaths. It is what drives Robert Walton far from home and from his only family, Margaret Saville. For Shelley, there was no greater philosophic explanation for his pursuit than that which was contained in Plato’s Symposium (The Banquet).
PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM, SHELLEY, AND FRANKENSTEIN
So important and inspirational was this work of Plato that Percy Bysshe Shelley began translating Plato, On the Symposium, or Preface to the Banquet of Plato in 1818, the same year that Frankenstein was first published. Shelley’s impulsive obsession to translate Plato’s Symposium resulted in his completion of the work within two weeks. The reader would do well to consider Shelley’s state of mind as he translated Plato with Frankenstein only recently finished; Shelley’s characteristic autobiographical theme reappears as a commentary on what was fictionalized in his masterful novel Frankenstein.
The ultimate question about love and the reason behind human companionship arises during a supposed banquet at the home of Agathon. The insightful response is given by Aristophanes, a response whose message is unmistakably the reason why Shelley was moved to translate Plato without any intention to have it published—in other words, it was translated for his own sake. Consider the speech of Aristophanes:
At the period to which I refer, the form of every human being was round, the back and the sides being circularly joined, and each had four arms and as many legs; two faces fixed upon a round neck, exactly like each other; one head between the two faces; four ears, and two organs of generation; and everything else as from such proportions it is easy to conjecture. Man walked upright as now, in whatever direction he pleased; and when he wished to go fast he made use of all his eight limbs, and proceeded in a rapid motion by rolling circularly round, — like tumblers, who, with their legs in the air, tumble round and round. We account for the production of three sexes by supposing that, at the beginning, the male was produced from the Sun, the female from the Earth; and that sex which participated in both sexes, from the Moon, by reason of the androgynous nature of the Moon. They were round, and their mode of proceeding was round, from the similarity which must needs subsist between them and their parent.
They were strong also, and had aspiring thoughts. They it was who levied war against the Gods; and what Homer writes concerning Ephialtus and Otus, that they sought to ascend heaven and dethrone the Gods, in reality relates to this primitive people. Jupiter and the other Gods debated what was to be done in this emergency. For neither could they prevail on themselves to destroy them, as they had the Giants, with thunder, so that the race should be abolished; for in that case they would be deprived of the honours of the sacrifices which they were in the custom of receiving from them; nor could they permit a continuance of their insolence and impiety. Jupiter, with some difficulty having devised a scheme, at length spoke. ‘I think,’ said he, ‘I have contrived a method by which we may, by rendering the human race more feeble, quell the insolence which they exercise, without proceeding to their utter destruction. I will cut each of them in half; and so they will at once be weaker and more useful on account of their numbers. They shall walk upright on two legs…
Immediately after this division, as each desired to possess the other half of himself, these divided people threw their arms around and embraced each other, seeking to grow together; and from this resolution to do nothing without the other half, they died of hunger and weakness…
From this period, mutual Love has naturally existed in human beings; that reconciler and bond of union of their original nature, which seeks to make two, one, and to heal the divided nature of man. Every one of us is thus the half of what may be properly termed a man, and like a psetta cut in two, is the imperfect portion of an entire whole, perpetually necessitated to seek the half belonging to him.18
Aristophanes’ answer to the question of human love is found in the longing that each person has to find their complementary other half. And yet, what if one is the “third sex” or the hermaphroditic Sensitive Plant, or the creature who is neither human and yet not entirely non-human at the same time? What if one is as Percy Bysshe Shelley himself, a companionless creature longing and searching for that which is most complementary to himself and yet unable to find the perfect other half? In essence, just as Victor pursues the creature and the creature pursues Victor, so with Shelley himself—it is a chasing after oneself that dead-ends in frustration, loss, and death.
And so the poet who searched for himself, for the image of the one who would make him One, to complete the truth which was half finished within himself, at the end finds that the search is in vain. Shelley, perpetually chasing himself, the doppelgänger which is easily recognizable in Frankenstein, finds in Plato the philosophy to make sense of his pursuit. The journey after that which cannot be found except in the oneness mankind has with Nature repeatedly appears in Shelley’s fiction and poems, as Shelley was first and foremost a man whose writings are also his Gnostic-style autobiography.
In his introspective poem Alastor (1816) Shelley wrote of his agonizing search for himself, a search for truth, companionship, and the alchemy necessary to gain the gift of eternal life, or new life—themes which the reader should now notice as unmistakably Shelleyan—and the story behind Frankenstein. And just as Frankenstein’s narrator, Robert Walton, the searching Poet in Alastor “left his cold fireside and alienated home to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.” For Shelley the wandering poet, answers to the ultimate question in the search for unity, companionship, and truth often require the sacrifice of home, and end in the realization of solitude. Consider the Poet’s chase after himself, a female vision of himself, as penned in Alastor,
A vision on his sleep
There came, a dream of hopes that never yet
Had flushed his cheek. He dreamed a veiled maid
Sate near him, talking in low solemn tones.
Her voice was like the voice of his own soul
Heard in the calm of thought; its music long,
Like woven sounds of streams and breezes, held
His inmost sense suspended in its web
Of many-coloured woof and shifting hues.
Knowledge and truth and virtue were her theme,
And lofty hopes of divine liberty,
Thoughts the most dear to him, and poesy,
Herself a poet.19
Wasserman, in his masterly analysis of Shelley’s poetry, notes, “The lady, however, is not to be understood as a spirit distinct from the Visionary, a soul to his flesh, but as the union of all that he yearns for in his intellect, his imagination—and, the Preface adds, in his senses. She is created out of the desires of his total nature.”20 The effect of the vision that the Poet has in meeting himself, even the feminine vision of himself, leads him into a predictable Shelleyan pursuit, driven on by a hidden fiend!
While day-light held
The sky, the Poet kept mute conference
With his still soul. At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness. — As an eagle grasped
In folds of the green serpent, feels her breast
Burn with poison, and precipitates
Through night and day, tempest, and calm, and cloud,
Frantic with dizzying anguish, her blind flight
O’er the wide aëry wilderness: thus driven
By the bright shadow of that lovely dream,
Beneath the cold glare of the desolate night,
Through tangled swamps and deep precipitous dells,
Startling with careless step the moon-light snake,
He fled.21
It is not difficult to connect the recurring themes of searching for that single perfect companion whose image and nature are most like oneself, the longing and frustration of an unfulfilled pursuit which is driven within but under the symbolic form of a fiend, a demonic force at work without and within the soul of the one searching to fill the missing part, to find the perfect other half.
Shelley’s most clear commentary on love is contained in his essay On Love. Coincidentally, or perhaps predictably, Shelley penned this essay in 1818 after his completion of his translation of Plato’s Symposium. In the essay Shelley first declares his own recognition that he is not like others, i.e. reminiscent of the Sensitive Plant,
What is Love? — Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what is God. I know not the internal constitution of other men, or even of thine whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburthen my inmost soul to them I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance have the points of sympathy have been withdrawn. With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness, I have every where sought and have found only repulse and disappointment.22
Shelley, much like the Frankenstein narrator and adventurer Robert Walton whose sister could not sympathize with his inner need to find answers in a distant and dangerous land; like Victor Frankenstein, the alchemist turned scientist whose solitary life and single obsession was to create in his own image that which he found lacking in himself; like the creature whose vengeance is nothing more than a violent reaction to a solitary life lacking the ideal other half, identifies himself to the reader of his essay On Love as a solitary man hardly able to associate himself with other men and their affections. Shelley is the Sensitive Plant seeking, longing after, pursuing that Platonic ideal of his missing half, nakedly exposing his deepest need to share with his readers his pursuit after himself.
Thou demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope beyond ourselves when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s, if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is love… We are born into the world and there is something within us which from the instant that we live and move thirsts after its likeness… we dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man… a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper Paradise which pain and sorrow or evil dare not overleap. 23
In his essay On Love, Percy Bysshe Shelley has given the most clear and concise explanation for why Frankenstein lacks a romantic element: it is a fictionalized account of his own inner pursuit for love. It is the story of two men and a creature, all searching for inner completion and who must put their lives at risk; each man a solitary figure alone in the world searching for a part of themselves which is distant, misunderstood by others, and clearly lacking the expected love affair between men and women which is noticeable in each of Mary Shelley’s works other than in Frankenstein. Could Frankenstein really be Mary’s waking dream without owing even a thought to Percy, and yet be thematically so perfectly aligned not only to his writings but also to the very inner desires of his soul? It stretches the imagination beyond this writer’s ability to read the anonymously written 1818 Frankenstein and see anything other than another well-orchestrated Percy Bysshe Shelley ploy to hide himself as the author, publish anonymously, and later direct attention to Mary—all of which was conspired with the loving cooperation of his then-mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 406
2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Love,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 504
3 Shelley’s idea of Platonic relationships and modern ideas are quite different and the term as applied to how Shelley approached relationships must be distinguished from the modern understanding of a Platonic relationship. Cf. Plato’s Symposium, or The Banquet with particular focus on the answer of Aristophanes regarding the origin of love for Shelley’s understanding.
4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 287
5 Earl L. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), pp. 157–158
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 290
7 Ibid, pp. 292, 295
8 James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 19
9 Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975), p. 11
10 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, J. Paul Hunter, ed., The Original 1818 Text Norton Critical Edition (W.W. Norton and Co., 1996), pp. 24–25
11 Ibid., p. 25
12 Laura P. Claridge, Studies in the Novel, 17:1 (Spring 1985).
13 James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), p. 520
14 Mary Shelley, The Original Frankenstein, ed. Charles Robinson (Vintage Books, 2008), p. 172
15 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Sensitive Plant,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 289
16 Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence (University of California Press, 2002), p. 2
17 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, MobileReference electronic text, pp. 1955–1957
18 Plato, The Banquet, Translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818) (Pagan Press, 2001), pp. 47–49
19 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), pp. 77–78
20 Earl L. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 23
21 Ibid., p. 79
22 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On Love,” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, eds. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), p. 503
23 Ibid., pp. 503–504