Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on 30 August 1797, in London , England. She was the daughter of the notable philosophical anarchist and novelist William Godwin and leading feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2020/04/mary-wollstonecraft-2741759-1091797.html Her father's most famous book was Political Justice (1793), which is a critical look at society and the ethical treatment of the masses. Godwin's other popular book Caleb Williams
(1794) examines class distinctions and the misuse of power by the
ruling aristocracy. Mary Wollestonecraft, her mother, espoused her views in her famous work A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
Mary's parents adhered to revolutionary
principles both in politics and in their private lives, but in spite of
despising the institution of marriage they took the step after all to
facilitate Mary's entrance into society. Sadly however, Mary Wollstonecraft
died ten days after the birth of her daughter from puerperal fever. Her father William Godwin was left to care for Mary and her
older half-sister Fanny Imlay. Imlay was Wollstonecraft's daughter from
an affair she had with a soldier.
The family dynamics soon changed with Godwin's marriage to Mary Jane
Clairmont on 21 December 1801. Clairmont brought her own two children into the
union, Charles and Jane, who later called herself Claire. and she and Godwin later had a son together. Mary never got
along with her stepmother, who did not encourage Mary Godwin's intellectual curiosity and
did not bring her up according to her mother's principles. Mary never
went to school, but was taught to read and write at home. Her father
encouraged her to use her imagination, so she started being creative at a
very young age, finding a creative outlet in writing. According to The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft,
she once explained that "As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite
pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write
stories.'"
The family lived at Somers Town, where William Godwin and his wife
opened a publishing firm (M. Godwin and Co.) and a shop retailing
children's books. In 1810, the Godwin Juvenile Library published the
first work by Mary Godwin: Mounseer Nongtongpaw, a verse poem
which extended the five-stanza song of the same name that Charles
Dibdin had published in 1808. It is a humorous account in an iambic
pentameter ballad of John Bull's trip to Paris and the resulting
linguistic misunderstandings.
Mary Shelley was very conscious of the political issues of her time.
Visitors to her father's house, when Mary was young, included many
leading radical thinkers and
distinguished guests included the likes of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While she didn't have a formal
education, she did make great use of her father's extensive library.
Shelley could often be found reading, sometimes by her mother's grave.
She also liked to daydream, escaping from her often challenging home
life into her imagination.
By 1812 things between Mary and Mrs Godwin had come to such a head
that William Godwin sent Mary to board with an acquaintance, William
Baxter, and his family in Dundee for several months. There she
experienced a type of domestic tranquility she had never known. Shelley
returned to the Baxters' home the following year.
In 1814, Mary began a relationship with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2017/08/percy-bysshe-shelley-august-4-1792-july.html An admirer of Godwin, Percy Shelley visited the author's home and
briefly met Mary when she was fourteen, but their attraction did not
take hold until a meeting two years later. Shelley, twenty-two, was
married, and his wife Harriet Westbrook. was expecting their second child, but he and Mary began to go on daily walks to
the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft at St Pancras churchyard, and here
they declared their love for each other on 26 June 1814. When Godwin
found out on 8 July, he was outraged, immediately writing to Shelley to
forbid Mary from seeing him again (In fact Godwin did not speak to Mary
for three years, which hurt her immensely.)
Like Godwin and Wollstonecraft, believed that ties of the heart were
more important than legal ones, and .in July 1814, one month before her
seventeenth birthday, Mary ran away with Percy, and they spent the next
few years traveling in Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. Percy's
father, Sir Timothy Shelley, cut off his son's large allowance
after the couple ran away together.
In late 1814, Mary and Percy returned to England and lived in
hiding to avoid his first wife and previous back debts. In February 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter,
who was born prematurely and who subsequently died in March of the same
year. Stricken
with grief, the Shelleys moved to Bishopsgate, but Mary soon became
pregnant again. In 1816, she gave birth to a son, William, who she named
after her father.
Despite difficult circumstances, Mary and Percy enjoyed a large
group of friends, which included the poet Lord Byron and the writer Leigh Hunt. They also maintained a
schedule of very strict study,including classical and European
literature, Greek, Latin, and Italian language, music and art and
other writing.
1816 was called “The Year Without a Summer.” The eruption of Mount
Tambora caused a global catastrophe. Heavy smoke and volcanic ash
disrupted the stratosphere, blocking sunlight. The loss of sun caused
cold temperatures, darkness, and a food shortage around the world.
During this gloomy season, the Shelleys traveled for a vacation to Switzerland by the shores of Lake Geneva There, they stayed with their friends, Lord Byron, Dr. John
Polidori, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Mary was in an emotionally difficult
situation. She had craved a mother's love all through her life and
bitterly regretted being alienated from her father. The relationship
that developed between Shelley and Claire undermined her self-esteem.
The following story is well known: The weather was consistently too rainy to go outdoors, in response to their isolation,
Byron suggested an indoor activity, a sort of contest. They would each
make up a ghost story and read them to each other on the chilly
evenings. Byron wrote a fragment of a poem. Another visitor, his
personal doctor, John Polidori, wrote a reasonably scary story called
“The Vampyre”, which has a history of its own, seventy years later it would be the inspiration for Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Mary had difficulty,coming up with anything until, in a nightmare, she saw a pale figure
surrounded by machinery, and another shape lying on a table that
suddenly stirred with horrible life. Mary's story, the best of the group,
was so frightening to Byron that he ran "shrieking in horror" from the
room. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
was thus conceived.The
story was first only a few pages, but with the encouragement of Percy,
the tale took on a greater length.
But as Mary set off to continue working on the novel, she received the
news that her half-sister, Fanny, had committed suicide. Then, just one
month later, the Shelleys heard that the body of Harriet Shelley was found in London's Serpentine,
into which she had jumped in order to commit suicide. Percy Shelley was
denied custody of his and Harriet's two children in the following year.
On 30 December, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin married Percy Bysshe Shelley
at St Mildred's, London.
Born in
1819, their son, Percy Florence, was the only child to live to
adulthood.
Mary had been having nightmares about the death of her
daughter, and her anxiety brought on a "waking dream". She lay awake picturing what it would be like for a scientist to give
life to something that was dead and how he would react when the creation
started to move. She scared herself so badly that she had to snap out
of her reverie. But it sparked her imagination.
Mary’s monster was created not by magic or alchemy, but by the application of electricity in an attempt to reanimate dead tissue. Mary was a pretty sharp teenager and was unusually well-educated in
the sciences; and had read about the Galvani experiments on dead frogs and she wondered, not unreasonably, if electricity might be used to reanimate dead tissue.
Prior to this time, inanimate objects, such as the Golem, had been brought to life in fantasy tales by magical means. The premise has become familiar to us from two hundred years of
retellings, especially film adaptations. Dr Victor. Frankenstein, Shelleys peotaganist an ambitious
scientist, discovers a means of giving life to an artificial body, which
he calls the Creature through the use of that newly discovered force, electricity. (The idea that this body is a corpse, or made of
parts of corpses, comes in later versions.) However, he is horrified by
the Creature’s ugliness and abandons it.
The creature can’t bear his isolation so he begs Frankenstein to conjure
him a female mate. Frankenstein complies but immediately regrets his
action, so winds up destroying the female in front of his original
creature.Without guidance from its creator, without human contact, without
love, only rejection the creature does turn to violence, but it is more sinned against
than sinning. Frankenstein never 'loses control' over his
creature,.because he never exerted control - or guidance over the
creature to begin with. In its friendless, heartbroken
state, it begins to pursue Frankenstein and murder those whom he loves.
Everything bad that happens occurs because the creature is lonely:
“Misery made me a fiend,” it declares. This theme comes from the
influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the idea that man is born free, but
is corrupted by societies and civilisations.
Mary picked a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost for the title page of
her book, setting her story up as a mythic recapitulation, in secular
terms, of what happened in the Garden of Eden: “Did I request thee,
Maker, from my clay to mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to
promote me?”. Adam says this in Milton’s poem when he realises he is
going to be expelled from the Garden of Eden.
Mary Shelley very possibly, invented modern science fiction at the
age of 18. At least that’s the claim of the British writer Brian W.
Aldiss, who, in his history of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, cited Frankenstein as the first work of actual science fiction and Mary Shelley as the mother of the entire genre.
Frankenstein
shows several qualities that have become standard elements of sci-fi.
In terms of technique, book uses a pseudo-realistic narrative form,
achieved in this case by multiple narrators. This pseudo-realism has
become a staple of horror (notably in Dracula) as well as much sci-fi, heightening the emotional impact of the story by making it as credible as possible.
But the theme of Frankenstein
is almost unique to science fiction: the philosophical implications of
technology. In particular, the novel explores the question of whether
replicas of human beings are human themselves, and how an “artificial
intelligence” would respond to the world. The trope that any such
creation would turn on its maker, arguably, comes originally from
Shelley. Books and films from Erewhon to Blade Runner to 2001: A Space Odyssey have ruminated on these matters ever since.
Mary felt ambivalent towards her creation and called
it her "hideous progeny." The novel was published
on New Year's Day 1818,
debuting as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that
Percy Bysshe Shelley had written it since he penned its introduction. Despite several negative reviews, one calling it a “horrible and
disgusting absurdity” it became a big popular success. Mary saw the
first theatrical production in 1823.Despite the book’s popularity, Shelley still had to fight for recognition of her work. She still endured publishers who believed that her husband actually wrote the
story.
Frankenstein became an iconic
masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging the idea of modernity and questioning the state of
“being human” while continually searching for a way to validate
the
emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily
corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary
Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the
pain on invalidation for most of her life. She received a severe
rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares
with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today,
Frankenstein stands at the
heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true
still.
In 1820, she co-wrote a play called ‘Midas’ .Mary wrote the drama and Percy contributed two lyric poems to it. Mary Shelley tried unsuccessfully to have the play published by children's magazines in England in the 1830s; however, it was not published until A. Koszul's 1922 scholarly edition. Whether or not the drama was ever meant to be staged is a point of debate among scholars.
The play combines the stories of the musical contest between Apollo and Pan and that of King Midas and his ability to turn everything he touches to gold. Apollo is judged the winner, but Midas prefers the music of Pan, so Apollo gives him the ears of an ass. Largely concerned with gender issues, Midas comments on the definitions of femininity and masculinity in the early nineteenth century and the developing ideology of separate spheres which encouraged women to restrict themselves to domestic affairs and men to political affairs. Part of the Romantic interest in rewriting classical myths, Midas focuses on challenging patriarchy and satirising the unbounded accumulation of wealth.
In May 1822, the Shelleys moved to La Spezia, where Mary miscarried
on 16 June during her fifth pregnancy, On July 8, 1822, Mary's life was forever altered
when her husband was drowned at sea in a storm off the coast
of Livorno (sometimes called Leghorn), Italy while sailing to meet Leigh Hunt and his wife.
By now, Mary's life was
seemingly connected to tragedy, with the deaths of three children, her
mother, and her husband, and the suicides of Percy's former wife and
Mary's half-sister. Mary suffered from intense feelings of guilt
towards her dead husband, particularly so as at times she had wished
her husband were dead. Shelley's friends blamed her, as she did
herself, for having made Shelley's last year unhappy.
After his death, Mary tried to continue to write, but cycles of
depression and sorrow kept her from it, as her letters and journals attest. Bereavement
drove her to express her grief in verse, a medium she normally avoided.
"I can never write verses," she wrote to Maria Gisborne on 11 June 1835,
"except under the influence of a strong sentiment & seldom even
then."
Mary and Percy Florence returned to London in August 1823. They
found themselves impoverished. Mary immediately turned to writing
articles, novels, encyclopaedia entries, stories and reviews. She
turned away from Gothic and futurist novels to historical and
sentimental ones, set in fourteenth-century Italy (Valperga),
the Yorkist uprising in fifteenth-century England (Perkin
Warbeck) or the fashionable world of early nineteenth-century
society (Mathilda, Lodore, and Falkner),
William Godwin welcomed Mary on her return to London in 1823. They
lived close to each other and met almost daily. But his financial
troubles prevented him from giving her the emotional and financial
security she needed. She refused all offers of marriage, namely from
John Howard Payne, an American actor-manager (1825), and the writer
Prosper Mérimée. Edward John Trelawny suggested in 1831 that fate might
have thrown him and Mary together, but she refused him, too, although
she had retained his friendship since her husband's death.She had an epistolary relationship with Washington Irving, another
American writer. Mary also may have had a romantic relationship with a
Jane Williams, and moved to be near her in 1824 before they had a
falling-out.
After returning to London in 1823 Mary had found that Frankenstein
had become a stage production, complete with a frightening monster which
sprang from a concealed laboratory at the top of a staircase! In her
novel the scientist who re-animates the corpse is called Frankenstein;
yet ironically by 1830 his creation was being referred to by this name.
Mary’s original creature is not evil; he is an innocent victim, who
develops and yearns to be integrated into society. He becomes malign
after being rejected by his creator and by society, declaring: ‘I am
malicious because I am miserable.’ Nevertheless the word ‘Frankenstein’
gradually became associated with things that were monstrous and
threatening.
In 1824, Shelley;s Posthumous Poems was published, which was
edited by Mary. She had begun negotiations with her father-in-law, Sir
Timothy Shelley, who did not want his renegade son's works published or his
family's name published in the press again during his lifetime.
The Last Man
(1826) is her best-known work after
Frankenstein.
This novel, in which she describes the destruction of the human race in
the twenty-first century, is noted as an inventive description of the
future and an early form of science fiction. The work is the first English example of a novel about a dystopian universe where
a pandemic sweeps across the earth, spreading through globalization and
panic. It shakes the foundation of countries, stoking revolution and
fear around the world.
Mary tested her ideas
of the egalitarian family against human egotism, temporal mutability
and the brute forces of nature which annihilate individual achievement
through chance, accident and death, thus contradicting the more
optimistic stances of both her father and her husband and their utopian
idealism. Instead of following the idea of Godwin and Burke, that
history leads ultimately to perfection, Mary depicts a history that can
abruptly stop. She also introduces the theme of shared marital love
being lost love; trust is destroyed. She portrays the self-destructive
side of motherhood, a mother who lives for her children only cannot
acquire a life of her own. In this deeply pessimistic novel, women
cannot find fulfilment within nor without the family.
She saw herself as a
follower, not as an active agent, and felt unable to take a stand on
behalf of women's rights.
In 1831, Mary revised Frankenstein for Colburn
and Bentley's Standard Novel Series. By then, her philosophical
convictions had radically changed; her personal tragedies, together
with her financial straits and her despair over her feelings of guilt,
had convinced her that material forces beyond any human, not free
will or personal choice, control the course of events. Her organic
conception of nature was now replaced by a conception of nature
propelled by brutal, machine-like force. Human beings are reduced to
puppets manipulated by external forces. Victor Frankenstein is
presented in a more sympathetic way, he is held less responsible for his
actions. He is the victim of circumstances, not the perpetrator of
evil. The earlier ideology of the loving family has now turned into
maternal love as a self-destructive force. Experience had taught Mary
Shelley that her earlier Utopianism and her belief in a world without
monsters were untenable.
I believe that we should treat Shelley’s novel as a
cautionary tale. It should prompt us to ask ourselves if our science and
technology today is or is on track to cross lines to the point of human
anguish and demise.Shelley’s most pressing and obvious message is that
science and technology can go to far. The ending is plain and simple,
every person that Victor Frankenstein had cared about met a tragic end,
including himself. This shows that we as beings in society should
believe in the sanctity of human life.
We also learn important life lessons through her book. She
illustrates that actions have their consequences and stemming from
that, we should not “play God.” The novel’s subtitle, or alternate title
is The Modern Prometheus. According to Greek mythology,
Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man and suffered
punishment eternally as a result. Shelley parallels this through her
story, where Victor Frankenstein pursued a place of forbidden knowledge
in arrogance. Frankenstein is an example of the Romantic over-reacher,
breaching boundaries between human and divine principles.
An additional message Shelley conveys is that “monsters”
are not born as monsters. The Creature arguably became the way he was
through his treatment, or mistreatment rather. Shelley gives the
Creature a voice, and the reader understands that there is a disparity
between his appearance and his thoughts which ultimately tests the
reader. I thought it was interesting that Shelley’s character heavily
contrasts the Frankenstein portrayal that we see in popular culture. She
may have been making a statement on how humans should not mistreat one
another for judgement of their appearance, and their race even.
The education of Mary's son Percy Florence at Harrow proved too
costly when she boarded him there, so she left London and moved to
Harrow herself to cut down on cost. Sir Timothy did little to help her
and his heir. On 7 April 1836, William Godwin died of catarrhal fever and was
buried beside Mary Wollstonecraft in St. Pancras Churchyard.
In 1837, Mary published the novel
Falkner, another book on the theme of the (foster) father-
daughter relationship. Again Mary demonstrates that a woman's
fulfilment lies within the family. Also in 1837, Volume III of the
Lives was published, with Mary contributing essays on Cervantes,
Lope de Vega, and Calderón. In the same year, Percy Florence took up
his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge. July 1838 saw the
publication of Volume I of the Lives of the most Eminent Men of
France with essays by Mary on the lives of Montaigne, Rabelais,
Corneille, Rochefoucauld, Molière, La Fontaine, Pascal, Mme. de
Sévigné, Racine, Boileau, and Fénelon.
In 1839, Mary contributed essays
on Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Mirabeau, Mme Roland and Mme. de
Staël for Volume II. In the same year, she also published Volumes I
through IV of her husband's Poetical Works, complete with notes,
at monthly intervals. In November, she published her edition of his
Essays, Letters.
The situation for the Shelleys' improved when Sir Timothy increased Percy
Florence's allowance with his coming of age in 1840, which
allowed mother and son to travel in Italy and Germany; their journeys
are recounted in
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 published in 1844.After graduating from
Cambridge in 1841 Percy married Jane Gibson who Mary adored, and equally Jane thought the world of her and on all accounts Percy was a loyal and affectionte son. so Mary was at least
surrounded by loved ones as she aged. In July 1843, Mary returned to England, stopping on the way to
visit Claire in Paris.
In 1844, Sir Timothy died, leaving the baronetcy and his heavily
indebted estate to Percy Florence. In 1849 Mary was able to move into
Field Place, the Shelley country home at Bournemouth, with Percy
Florence and his wife Jane. Sadly due to a life plagued by trauma and misfortune, Mary suffered from various kinds of
psychosomatic illnesses and nervous attacks. Finally, she died from a
mysterious paralysis on 1 February 1851 aged fifty-three.
After she died, her family
cleared the contents of her writing desk. In it, they found locks of her
dead children’s hair, as well as a parcel of Percy’s cremated heart,
wrapped in one of his last poems, Adonais. She was buried between her
mother and her father, whose remains had been transferred from St.
Pancras, at St. Peter's churchyard in Bournemouth.
Mary's legacy was sanitised after her death. Her son, Percy, and
his wife, Jane, became fierce guardians of her papers. Jane despite worshipping Mary destroyed many journal entries and
letters she deemed too bohemian for proper society, and refashioned
Mary her into the Victorian ideal of a selfless daughter, wife, and
mother, presented as an entirely innocent woman,
which she wasn't: she had run off with another woman's husband. Jane also commissioned a monument, modelled after
Michelangelo’s Pièta, and created a ‘shrine’ for Mary, Shelley and
their circle at Boscombe Lodge, near Bournemouth.
It wasn’t until the middle 20th century that Mary
Shelley’s unconventional life became more widely known, and scholars
began reexamining her life and work, looking at her journals, letters and fiction together, they reveal a remarkable woman, who overcame tragic circumstances time and time again with such reslience.. Mary herself was a revolutionary figure who lived an exciting life of
hedonism and sin, tooled around with England's poetic elite, and broke
rules as her mother and her father often encouraged. She was a modern
woman in every sense, too often sidelined by her husband and his Byronic buddies.
Frankenstein, became an iconic
masterpiece of both horror and science fiction, challenging the idea of modernity and questioning the state of
“being human” while continually searching for a way to validate the
emotions that one may feel through the course of life.The story heavily corresponds with the life of its creator, Mary
Shelley, who suffered a loss of love and family, and had to bear the
pain on invalidation for most of her life.
She received a severe rejection for her actions and life decisions, a heartache she shares with her character,the monster of Frankenstein. Even today, her trailblazing literary masterpiece Frankenstein stands at the
heart of classic literature because its timeless themes ring true still. Shelley’s Frankenstein, whether it was the intended purpose or
not, serve as a warning in regards to the direction of science,
technology, social responsility and human circumstances now, and most likely will continue
to do so for the foreseeable future.Like her most famous creation,she contiiues to be revived and reappraised, haunting the popular imagination, For this alone Mary Shelley leaves us a tangible legacy that will never fade.
Mary Shelley's Gravestone , Bouremouth
