Godwin increased. Mellor argues that Mary "construed Mrs. Godwin as the opposite of everything that she had learned to worship in her own dead mother"--as conservative, philistine, devious, and manipulative, where Wollstonecraft was freethinking, intellectual, open, and generous.
In the summer of Godwin sent his precious only daughter to visit William Baxter, an acquaintance who lived in Dundee, Scotland. With the Baxter family, Mary experienced a happiness she had rarely known. She grew fond of Baxter, and a friendship soon developed between Mary and his two daughters, Christina and Isabel. This close-knit family was to provide Mary with a model of domestic affection and harmony that would surface later in her fiction.
The dunes, the beach, and the barren hills near Dundee inspired Mary, and she would later describe this scenery in her novella Mathilda written in The son of a man of fortune, Percy had received a superior education at Eton and briefly at Oxford. Before the age of seventeen, he had published two Gothic romances, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne , and now, influenced by Godwinian precepts, he desired to benefit humanity more directly. Percy Shelley shared Godwin's belief that the greatest justice is done when he who possesses money gives it to whomever has greatest need of it.
Therefore it was not long before Shelley was supporting Godwin financially. When Mary next met the tall, frail-looking, elegant Percy, on 5 May , she viewed him as a generous young idealist and as a budding genius. He, in turn, had become dissatisfied with his wife and was affected by Mary's beauty, her intellectual interests, and, above all, by her identity as the "daughter of William and Mary.
By June Shelley was dining with the Godwins almost every day. Chaperoned by Jane, Mary and Percy went for daily walks, sometimes to St.
Pancras Church to visit Wollstonecraft's grave, where Mary had earlier gone to read her mother's works. Inevitably, on 26 June, they declared their love for each other. Mary tried to obey her father's injunction, but Percy's attempted suicide soon convinced Mary of the strength of his love, and on 28 July she fled with him to France, accompanied by Jane Clairmont.
During this period Mary and Percy, both extremely idealistic, lived on love--because of extended negotiations over the disposition of the estate of Percy's grandfather--without money, constantly moving from one placed to another.
Mary gave birth to four children, only one of whom survived to adulthood. The first, a girl, was born prematurely and died eleven days later in ; William, born in , died of malaria in ; Clara Everina, born in , perished from dysentery the next year; Percy Florence, born in , died in In Mary miscarried during her fifth pregnancy and nearly lost her life. With the suicides of Fanny Godwin and Harriet Shelley in , death was much on her mind.
Numerous critics--among them Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert , and Susan Gubar--have pointed out the link between the themes of creation, birth, and death in Frankenstein and Mary Shelley 's real-life preoccupation with pregnancy, labor, maternity, and death. Before Mary Shelley wrote her most popular novel, she published History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni , which was based on journal entries and long letters home to Fanny.
For this work Mary had as a literary model her mother's Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark , a book that, according to Godwin, "calculated to make a man in love with its author. She complains, for instance, of the squalor and the dirt in French villages, and of the disgusting behavior of Germans.
In , shortly after the death of her first baby, Shelley recorded a dream that may or may not have had a direct influence on the plot of Frankenstein.
For example, Frankenstein's act has been read, by Robert Kiely and Margaret Homans among others, as an attempt to usurp the power of the woman and to circumvent normal heterosexual procreation.
In Frankenstein , Shelley dramatizes some of her ambivalent feelings about the proto-Victorian ideology of motherhood. Condemned by her beloved father, who believed that she "had been guilty of a crime," the seventeen-year-old Mary, not yet a wife and no longer a mother, was insecure and increasingly dependent on Percy for emotional support and familial commitment.
He, on the other hand, caught up in his excited passions, was eager to live out his theory of "free love," encouraging Claire's affections. In the early part of Percy's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg came to stay with Mary, Percy, and Claire for six weeks, during which time Percy urged Mary, despite her reluctance, to reciprocate Hogg's sexual overtures. Though Claire continued in Mary and Percy's household until , she was temporarily diverted by an affair with George Gordon, Lord Byron , during the spring of Persuading Percy and Mary to accompany her to Switzerland to meet Byron, Claire set off with the Shelleys in early May and eventually moved into a chalet on the banks of Lake Geneva, within walking distance from Villa Diodati, where Byron and his physician, Dr.
John William Polidori , were staying. Byron and Percy became close friends, sailing together on the lake and having literary and philosophical discussions in the evenings. Both Mary and Percy found Byron fascinating and intriguing. He was handsome, capricious, cynical, and radiated an intellectual energy. Mellor surmises that "The intellectual and erotic stimulation of [Percy] Shelley 's and Byron 's combined presence, together with her deep-seated anxieties and insecurities, once again erupted into Mary's consciousness as a waking dream or nightmare," becoming "the most famous dream in literary history.
In the edition of Frankenstein Mary Shelley 's introduction explains how she, "then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea. At Byron 's suggestion, they each agreed to write a horror story. The next day Byron read the beginning of his tale, Shelley "commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life," and Polidori had "some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole.
Encouraged by Percy, Mary developed the little ghost story into a novel, which she finished in May of at Marlow and published in March To those who have not read the book, the name Frankenstein is often associated with the monster rather than its creator. Their relationship is similar to that between the head and the heart, or the intellect and the emotion. The conception of the divided self--the idea that the civilized man or woman contains within a monstrous, destructive force--emerges as the creature echoes both Frankenstein's and narrator Robert Walton's loneliness: all three wish for a friend or companion.
Frankenstein and his monster alternately pursue and flee from one another. Like fragments of a mind in conflict with itself, they represent polar opposites which are not reconciled, and which destroy each other at the end. For example, the creature enacts the repressed desires of its maker, alleviating Victor Frankenstein's fear of sexuality by murdering his bride, Elizabeth Lavenza, on their wedding night.
Identities merge, as Frankenstein frequently takes responsibility for the creature's action: for instance, after the deaths of the children William and Justine, both of which were caused by the creature, Frankenstein admits they were "the first hapless victims to [his] unhallowed arts. In a recent reading of Frankenstein , Mellor demonstrates a link between events, dates, and names in the novel and those in Mary Shelley 's life.
Mellor argues that the novel is born out of a "doubled fear, the fear of a woman that she may not be able to bear a healthy normal child and the fear of a putative author that she may not be able to write Mellor discovered that the day and date on which Walton first sees the creature, Monday, 31 July, had coincided in , the year in which Mary Shelley was born.
This fact and other internal evidence led Mellor to conclude that the novel ends on 12 September , two days after Mary Wollstonecraft 's death: " Mary Shelley thus symbolically fused her book's beginning and ending with her own--Victor Frankenstein's death, the Monster's promised suicide, and her mother's death from puerperal fever can all be seen as the consequence of the same creation, the birth of Mary Godwin the author. The theme of creation is highlighted by the many references to Paradise Lost , John Milton 's epic rendition of the biblical story of Genesis, which becomes an important intertext of the novel.
The monster is caught between the states of innocence and evil: like Adam he is "apparently united by no link to any other being in existence," but as an outcast and wretch he often considers "Satan as the fitter emblem" of his condition. Victor Frankenstein, too, is at once God, as he is the monster's creator, but also like Adam, an innocent child, and like Satan, the rebellious overreacher and vengeful fiend.
Throughout the novel there is a strong sense of an Edenic world lost through Frankenstein's single-minded thirst for knowledge. Frankenstein is also cast as a Promethean figure, striving against human limitations to bring light and benefit to mankind.
While he advises Walton to "Seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition," he nevertheless invites his listeners to share in the grandeur of his dreams, to glory in his ability to create a sublime facsimile of the human self.
Frankenstein's fall, after all, results not from his creative enterprise, but from his failure and inability to give love to his creature. Indeed, another central concern of the novel is the conflict of individual desire against that of familial and social responsibility. George Levine writes: " Frankenstein spells out both the horror of going ahead and the emptiness of return. In particular, it spells out the price of heroism.
In her novel she shows that Frankenstein's quest is an act of selfish obsession, one that destroys his domestic relationships. He is contrasted with the mariner Robert Walton, whose concern for others ultimately wins over his ambition to reach the "region of beauty and light.
Finally, the use of the nightmarish murders, the demonlike monster, the terror of the unknown, and the destruction of the idyllic life in nature by a dark, ambiguous force places Frankenstein in the tradition of the Gothic novel. Like other Gothic authors, Shelley situates good and evil as a psychological battle within human nature. Both Frankenstein and the creature initially have "benevolent" feelings and intentions, but eventually both become obsessed with ideas of destruction and revenge.
Shelley's novel successfully manipulates the conventions of the genre, replacing the stock Gothic villain with morally ambiguous characters who reflect the depth and complexities of the human psyche.
After Frankenstein , Shelley wrote the novella Mathilda , which was never published in her life-time. A rough draft was originally titled "The Fields of Fancy" after Wollstonecraft's unfinished tale "Cave of Fancy," written in Mathilda , though not exclusively autobiographical, includes many self-revealing elements.
For example, the three characters--Mathilda, her father, and Woodville the poet--are obviously Mary Shelley , Godwin, and Percy Shelley. The tale is in the form of memoirs addressed to Woodville, composed by a woman who expects to die at age twenty-two. Written during the late summer and autumn of , when Mary was struggling with the depression from the deaths of two children in nine months, Mathilda is at once angry, elegiac, full of self-recriminations, and charged with self-pity.
Like Mary Shelley 's own nativity, Mathilda's birth causes the death of her mother, who has only shortly before been blissfully wedded to Mathilda's father. Please subscribe or login. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Not a member? Sign up for My OBO. Already a member? Publications Pages Publications Pages.
Subscriber sign in You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Username Please enter your Username. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. This is where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein after the group read a book of ghost stories on a rainy day and Lord Byron suggested that they all write their own horror stories.
In , Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus debuted as a new novel from an anonymous author. Many thought that Percy Shelley had written the book since he penned its introduction, but nonetheless it turned out to be a huge success. At the age of 24, Mary Shelley became a widow after Percy passed away. During this time she wrote several more novels including, Valperga and The Last Man.
Sadly, Mary Shelley died of brain cancer on February 1, , at the age of
0コメント