The Monsters (27 page)

O
n August 28, Byron and Shelley had a final sail together and a long walk along the harbor. Byron gave Shelley the printer’s
copies of his poems, collected in a red leather quarto volume, which Shelley promised to deliver to Byron’s publisher. They
included some of his finest poetry—canto 3 of
Childe Harold,
“Darkness,” “Prometheus,”
The Prisoner of Chillon,
“The Dream,” “Monody on the Death of Sheridan,” and “Stanzas to Augusta.” The next day the Shelley household packed up and
was off to Geneva and the trip home.

Claire left a letter for Byron, writing, “My dreadful fear is lest you quite forget me.” She cautions him as a wife might
have, “One thing I do entreat you to remember & beware of any excess in wine,” but then returns to her wounded mode, “now
don’t laugh or smile in your little proud way for it is very wrong for you to read this merrily which I write in tears. .
. . I shall love you to the end of my life.”

When the travelers reached the port of Le Havre, Mary must have reflected that this was the birthplace of her half-sister.
Here it was that Mary Wollstonecraft had given birth to Fanny Imlay, had hoped to find happiness with Gilbert Imlay. A melancholy
thought to return home on. Mary’s summer of creative inspiration was over.

He sprung from the cabin-window . . . upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. He was soon borne away by the waves,
and lost in darkness and distance.

—
Frankenstein,
Mary Shelley, 1818

W
ITH THE WORDS ABOVE,
Mary ended her masterpiece. Her monster disappears into the Arctic mists, his ultimate fate unexplained. The creature had
promised to do himself in, saying,

Do not think that I shall be slow to perform this sacrifice. I shall . . . seek the most northern extremity of the globe;
I shall collect my funeral pile, and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious
and unhallowed wretch, who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which
now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched.

But he still might be out there.

The ending the monster chose—the one Mary chose for him—echoed Mary’s life in the four months after she, Percy, and Claire
returned to England. Two suicides weeks apart shattered Mary’s peace of mind, and the family’s reaction to both was oddly
inappropriate. The first death was kept as secret as possible; the note left behind indicated a wish to be forgotten, and
that was granted to the extent that even the body was abandoned. The second death resulted in what should otherwise have been
a joyous occasion; in almost obscene haste, Mary and Percy would celebrate their wedding.

By allowing the readers of her novel to think that the monster might still be alive, continuing his lonely search for love
and understanding, Mary permitted herself to think that perhaps those who had willingly left life behind also—somewhere, somehow—lived.
She had, as challenged, written a ghost story after all.

T
he Shelley party arrived back in England on September 8, 1816, landing at Portsmouth instead of London via the Thames—for
Claire, now showing her pregnancy, could not risk appearing in London. (Victor Frankenstein would also leave the British Isles
from this port, avoiding London because he cannot bear recalling the times that he shared there with the now-murdered Henry
Clerval.) Shelley went on to London to try to clear up his financial affairs. Claire and Mary set out for Bath, a fashionable
resort town where the pregnant Claire would be among strangers. She assumed the title “Mrs.” when they found lodgings.

Soon Percy joined them. Even from a distance he tried to get Byron to assume financial responsibility for Claire, but without
success. Mary was disturbed that Shelley and Claire had kept from her the secret of Claire’s pregnancy for so long. Feeling
shunted into the position of outsider, Mary would include secrecy among the sins that Victor Frankenstein committed in his
pursuit of forbidden knowledge.

In Bath, Mary took art lessons and started reading the novels of Samuel Richardson—
Pamela, Clarissa,
and
Sir Charles Grandison
. She was considering ways to lengthen
Frankenstein
so that it could be published as a novel and these epistolatory novels, told in the form of a series of letters, probably
influenced her. In
Clarissa,
Richardson presents events from multiple points of view, and Mary would frame her novel in a similar way, adding not only
length but additional complexity and nuance. Another book from Mary’s September reading was
Glenarvon,
Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel. It must have been fun to read for anyone, like Mary, who knew Byron.

Mary and Claire had informed the Godwins they were staying at Bath for Claire’s health. Fanny—quiet, melancholy eldest child
of the family, who seemed always to blend into the background—had written Mary two letters in late September and October.
In one, she urged her half-sister to persuade Shelley to give more money to Godwin, for “it is of the utmost consequence for
his own
[Godwin’s] and the
world’s
sake that he should
finish his novel
and is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?” Godwin had already been informed that the money Shelley
expected to get from his grandfather’s estate was being held up, and Mary noted in her journal, “stupid letter from F.”

Fanny was the only child in the Godwin household with no natural parent living there, and although Godwin had treated her
as his own, she often felt lonely and isolated. She also suffered because she was caught in her position of emissary between
the Godwins and the runaways Mary and Claire. On October 9, a depressed Fanny left London and went to Bristol, which was not
far from Bath. From here she wrote two letters. One, to Godwin, read in part, “I depart immediately to the spot from which
I hope never to remove.” This worried Godwin enough that it actually propelled him into action: he went to Bristol to look
for her. At the same time, Mary and Percy received another letter, which has been destroyed. Mary wrote in her journal, “In
the evening a very alarming letter comes from Fanny—Shelley goes immediately to Bristol—we sit up for him until two in the
morning when he returns but brings no particular news.” Later inserted in the same day’s entry are the grim words “Fanny died
this night.”

In a seaside hotel at Swansea, Fanny had taken an overdose of laudanum, the poison of choice of her mother. She left a suicide
note on the table next to her body, which read, “I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to
the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who hurt
their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have
the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as . . . [here the signature was torn off].” There would be eerie
echoes of this note in Mary’s novel. In the monster’s final speech, he tells of his intended suicide with the words, “when
I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish.”

The suicide of “a respectable-looking female” was reported in the Swansea newspaper for October 12. Among her effects were
a gold watch (a present that Percy and Mary had brought her from Geneva). The newspaper noted that the corpse’s stockings
were marked with the letter “G” and her stays with the initials “M.W.”

Fanny’s motives for killing herself remain unclear. The most likely suggestion is that she was despondent at being denied
the chance to go to Ireland and teach at the school operated by her aunts, Mary Wollstonecraft’s sisters. Her aunt Everina
had recently come to London to discuss the possibility, but turned Fanny down.

Another possible motive was that Fanny maintained a secret, hopeless love for Percy Shelley. A Godwin family friend, Maria
Gisborne, wrote in her journal in 1820: “Mr. G. told me that the three girls were all equally in love with ———, and that the
eldest put an end to her existance [
sic
] owing to the preference given to her younger sister.” That it was Godwin’s suggestion throws some doubt on this theory,
for he made up a number of stories trying to conceal Fanny’s suicide altogether. Indeed, Godwin acted abominably. Fear of
disgrace led him to abandon Fanny in death. He never went to claim the body and forbade the rest of his family to do so as
well. He wrote to Mary on October 13, “Go not to Swansea; disturb not the silent dead; do nothing to destroy the obscurity
she so much desired that now rests upon the event.” Mary and Shelley wanted to claim Fanny’s body to make sure it received
a proper burial but honored Godwin’s wishes. As a result, no member of the family was present at the pauper’s funeral. No
one knows whether Fanny was buried in a potter’s-field grave or if, as sometimes happened with other unclaimed bodies, hers
was acquired by a Frankenstein-like medical experimenter.

Godwin, trying to account for her absence, told others that Fanny died a natural death. He wrote a friend in May of the following
year:

From the fatal day of Mary’s elopement, Fanny’s mind had been unsettled, her duty kept her with us; but I am afraid her affections
were with them. Last autumn she went to a friend in Wales—and there was a plan settled about her going from thence to spend
a short time with her aunts in Dublin, but she was seized with a cold in Wales which speedily turned to an inflammatory fever
which carried her off.

This from a man whose philosophical teaching said lying was wrong even when it was meant to save people’s feelings. Fanny’s
stepbrother Charles was not even informed of her passing until much later, and he continued to send her letters as late as
August of the following year.

The news hit Mary hard, and she wore mourning clothes for some time. She and Fanny had shared the distinction of being the
children of a fearless pioneer of sexual freedom. The words “unfortunate birth” in Fanny’s suicide note hit home, for Mary
had already given birth to two children to whom that phrase could apply, and Claire was pregnant with another. Mary inevitably
asked herself if she could have done something more for Fanny, even wondering if she should have invited Fanny to move in
with the already extended “family” around Shelley. Later Percy himself would memorialize Fanny’s death with these lines:

Her voice did quiver as we parted,

Yet knew I not that heart was broken

From which it came, and I departed

Heeding not the words then spoken.

Misery—O misery,

This world is all too wide for thee.

As always, Mary found solace in reading and work. In her journal entry for October 28, she noted that she was reading the
Humphry Davy pamphlet
A Discourse, Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry
. She spent several days with it, so there is no doubt it was of great interest to her. In it, Davy celebrated the accomplishments
of the modern chemist, particularly “his” ability to “modify and change the beings surrounding him, and by his experiments
to interrogate nature with power, not simply as a scholar, passive and seeming only to understand her operations, but rather
[as] a master, active with his own instruments.” Davy sounds here, with his idea of mastering nature, much like Victor Frankenstein.

Mary also read Lord George Anson’s
A Voyage Around the World,
which familiarized her with the ongoing process of mapping the regions of the world. Nowhere, of course, was the map so incomplete
as in the polar areas, which were subjects of intense speculation. Magnetism was another of the forces of nature that scientists
of the time were investigating, and they wondered what polar property might be attracting compass needles to point in that
direction. Also on Mary’s reading list was John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. She used much of its observations on learning and sensation to describe her creature’s intellectual development. Her conscientious
research on what must have been difficult topics show Mary’s serious purpose: this was not to be a Gothic potboiler, but a
novel that posed—and perhaps answered—serious questions.

In addition, unlike the Gothic novelists, Mary didn’t intend to create horror from magic, superstition, or fantasy, but from
the fear of modern science. The “mad scientist” whose experiments spin out of control may be a cliché today, but in Mary’s
time it was brand new, and she was ahead of her time in imagining that scientific discoveries could be as scary as the witchcraft
and sorcery of the past. She recognized that the “gift” that the scientist Victor Frankenstein gave to the world was as much
a threat as a blessing, anticipating the fears of a scientist as notable as Albert Einstein, who wrote about the unintended
consequences of the search for knowledge, “By painful experience we have learned that rational thinking does not suffice to
solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for
mankind.”

To lengthen and enrich her tale, Mary filled in details, now writing a subplot about the unjust accusation made against the
Frankenstein family’s servant Justine, who is framed for William’s murder when the monster leaves incriminating evidence on
her sleeping form. Although Victor’s cousin/fiancée Elizabeth stoutly defends Justine at her trial, Victor himself—who knows
the truth—fails to testify in her behalf. He leaves the courtroom because he fears the shame of admitting it was his creation
that has killed his brother. Victor’s inaction is clearly analogous to Godwin’s attempts to deny Fanny’s suicide, in which
he considered only his own reputation. Soon Mary would see an example of that kind of dishonesty in the other man in her life.