It may come as a shock that the 'boys' club' of Science Fiction was founded by a 19-year-old girl, but the strange life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley makes it seem quite logical. Shelley's "Frankenstein" (think Gothic manor meets modern laboratory) was...
[more]It may come as a shock that the 'boys' club' of Science Fiction was founded by a 19-year-old girl, but the strange life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley makes it seem quite logical. Shelley's "Frankenstein" (think Gothic manor meets modern laboratory) was an all-too-sane response to the mix of idealism and catastrophe from which the author -- and her monster -- emerged.
Shelley was the daughter of a unique union -- her parents were feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and social theorist William Godwin -- who grew up surrounded by card-carrying Romantics. Her father's house regularly hosted poets, rebels, and eccentric academics. Though her mother died shortly after giving birth, Shelley inherited her liberated instincts toward travel, academics, and the printed word. Still, maternal absence cast a gloomy shadow over her childhood: morbidly, Godwin taught her to read and write by instructing her to trace the letters on her mother's gravestone.
At the tender age of 17, Shelley shunned her odd upbringing and ran off with poet and bon vivant, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tragedy upon tragedy (the death of three children and the drowning of Percy's abandoned first wife) tested the couple's strength. In the summer of 1816, the Shelleys found comfort with fellow Romantic Lord Byron near Lake Geneva. It was a time of strange intellectual fusion: from discussions of Darwin's theory of evolution and his experiments with animating the inanimate, Shelley produced "Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus" (1818).
Shelley's book is a Gothic tale of a botched medical experiment and its resulting monster. Allegories of creation -- through birth, authorship, invention, and alchemy -- abound in "Frankenstein." In a burgeoning industrial world, Shelley's novel questioned the hubris of an inventor who manipulates natural laws but fails to assume responsibility for his creations. Some see the novel as a morality tale about science, a warning against man toying with nature. But it's also a dig at poetry -- Shelley subtly took to task the self-important Romantics who believed their wild words could produce utopian results. Dr. Frankenstein, a superficially "progressive" man with a vision to improve the world, proves to be delusional, arrogant, and irresponsible. (The character's relation to Lord Byron remains controversial.) Society's rejection of the monster raises the question of who is more humane: the emotionally sensitive creature, or the intellectuals propelled by notions of utopian progress?
Social progress continued to let Shelley down. Her husband drowned in 1822, leaving her to support their surviving child and her aging father at age 25. Both father and husband had espoused a grand utopian vision, but they ultimately failed to create private utopias. A prolific writer of historical novels and biographies, Shelley lived through the Romantic era into the Victorian -- though she emblematized the former, neither era was particularly kind to her. Until her death in 1851, she remained somewhat stigmatized for her liberal views and her scandalous relationship with Percy Shelley. A century and a half later the literary landmark that is 'Frankenstein' has finally assumed its rightful position within the Romantic canon. Her vision is still frightening, not for its unholy monster, but for the dark side of humanity that it reveals.
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