The Development of the Weird Tale Read online

  In 1833 Mary moved to the town of Harrow so that her son Percy could attend Harrow School as a “day boy”—that is, one who did not have to incur the considerable expense of boarding at the school. Novels continued from her pen: The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837)—the first a work of historical fiction, the latter two romantic melodramas. Her landmark edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works, with her invaluable notes, appeared in 1839. William Godwin died at the age of eighty in 1836, and soon thereafter Percy began attending Trinity College, Cambridge, allowing Mary to move back to London. In 1840, when Percy came of age, she went with him and two friends on a tour of the Continent. At Como, in northern Italy, Mary, remembering what had happened to her husband, was horrified at her son’s fondness for going out on Lake Como in a boat, but no disaster occurred. This trip, and another in 1841 in which she and Percy went to Germany, Austria (Salzburg), Bohemia (Prague), and Venice, served as the basis for her travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1848). When Percy married Jane St. John on June 22, 1848, she lived with the couple at Field Place in Sussex, the Shelleys’ ancestral home. But her final years were beset with illness, and she experienced particular difficulties—including headaches and partial paralysis—in the winter of 1850–51. She died on February 1, 1851.

  The character of Mary Shelley—as found in her diary,[5] her surviving letters,[6] and occasional memoirs of and tributes to her by friends and family—is that of a shy, reserved, fiercely intellectual woman who nonetheless felt immense passion, especially for her lover and husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her children, especially the two who died young. Shelley’s portrayal of her, in the dedication to his poem The Revolt of Islam (1817), is imperishable:

  And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak,

  Time may interpret to his silent years.

  Yet in the paleness of thy thoughtful cheek,

  And in the light thine ample forehead swears,

  And in thy sweetest smiles, and in thy tears,

  And in thy gentle speech, a prophecy

  Is whispered, to subdue my fondest fears;

  And through thine eyes, even in thy soul I see

  A lamp of vestal fire burning internally.

  They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,

  Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child:

  I wonder not—for One then left this earth

  Whose life was like a setting planet mild,

  Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled

  Of its departing glory; still her fame

  Shines on thee through the tempests dark and wild

  Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim

  The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immortal name.

  A more sober but no less penetrating portrait comes from an acquaintance, Mary Novello, who met Mary in 1824:

  Her well-shaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress, which the customs of that time allowed to be cut low and which her own taste adopted (for neither she nor her sister in sorrow [Jane Williams] ever wore the conventional “widow’s weeds” and “widow’s cap”); her thoughtful, earnest eyes; her short upper lip and intellectually curved mouth, with a certain close-compressed and decisive expression while she listened and a relaxation into fuller redness and mobility when speaking; her exquisitely formed white, dimpled small hands, with rosy palms and plumply commencing fingers that tapered into tips as slender and delicate as those of a Vandyke portrait.[7]

  This description may focus perhaps unduly on Mary’s appearance: then as now, women—even women writers and intellectuals—are judged more on their looks than on the contents of their minds and characters. One wonders whether that “plain black velvet dress” was the same one that we seem to see in Richard Rothwell’s celebrated portrait, shown at the Royal Academy in 1840 and now the most widely reproduced image of her. In this portrait, the repeated traumas she suffered in her earlier life seem etched around her eyes, and yet she still manages a faint smile for the artist, as if suggesting a quiet assurance that she has bravely borne the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and, in spite of her celebrated father and husband, will be remembered for her own accomplishments as well.

  The central work in Mary’s corpus of weird fiction, as in her literary output as a whole, is Frankenstein. The scholarly and critical literature on this novel is immense, and we can here suggest only a few points of interpretation. One issue we can dispense with at once—unintentionally fostered, perhaps, by the fact that the first edition of Frankenstein was published anonymously, and by the fact that Mary Shelley’s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley was and is far more celebrated as a literary figure than she is—is the frankly misogynist suggestion that Percy actually wrote much of the book, or perhaps the whole of it. While James Rieger—editor of a well-regarded 1974 edition of the novel—concluded that Percy could indeed be regarded as “a minor collaborator” on Frankenstein, George Levine states emphatically: “Yet, despite his involvement in many details of the writing, despite the persistence of Shelleyan images and parallels between Victor’s and Percy Shelley’s education, the central imagination is certainly Mary’s alone.”[8] Percy actually wrote a review of Frankenstein, although it remained unpublished until after the 1831 edition appeared; the review was then published in the Athenaeum for November 10, 1832. In it Percy states that the novel “is undoubtedly, as a mere story, one of the most original and complete productions of the age. . . . The general character of the tale indeed resembles nothing that ever preceded it.”[9] One presumes that Percy would not have written such a flattering review if he himself had had any large share in the novel’s composition.

  Percy’s comments raise the question of literary influences. It is indeed difficult to ascertain any literary predecessors to the work—certainly not in the realm of the Gothic novel, a genre that had exploded in numbers and popularity since the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). The two works by Mary’s father William Godwin are of little relevance here. Caleb Williams is a non-supernatural novel that is really more a tale of psychological suspense than a work of horror. St. Leon is a novel about the quest for eternal life; but Victor Frankenstein’s successful attempt at fashioning a creature out of the disparate parts of dead bodies results in an entity who does not have eternal life (for Victor spends much of the novel in pursuing him, for the purpose of destroying him), but merely life where there was none before. Still less can we see any influence from Percy’s own schoolboy novels, Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811), even though both feature gigantic human beings as protagonists (the latter also deals with the theme of eternal life).

  Mary Shelley’s prefaces to both the 1818 and the 1831 editions speak of the influence of Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), a physician and poet and the grandson of Charles Darwin. Mary refers somewhat inaccurately to a passage in Darwin’s poem The Temple of Nature (1802) in which he discusses the notion of spontaneous generation in regard to a species of protozoa called the vorticella: “Thus the vorticella or wheel animal, which is found in rain water that has stood some days in leaden gutters . . . though it discovers [i.e., reveals] no sign of life except when in water, yet is is capable of continuing alive for many months though kept in a dry state.”[10] (Mary refers erroneously to vorticellae as “vermicelli.”) Whether or not Erasmus Darwin had any significant influence on the conception of Frankenstein, the general point is that Mary Shelley is making a strong departure from the existing Gothic tradition, which looked to the superstitions of the mediaeval past for the sources of their supernatural terrors. Victor Frankenstein is initially attracted to such medieval alchemists as Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, but while at university he is persuaded by Professor Waldman to pursue actual scientists of his own day: “They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake,
and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows.” It is now the findings of modern science that hold both wonders and terrors—a point that justifies one in regarding Frankenstein as a landmark in the protohistory of science fiction.

  Perhaps the most significant aspect of Frankenstein, as far as the interpretation of its essential features is concerned, is its subtitle: “or, The Modern Prometheus.” What does this mean? On the whole, the figure of Prometheus—the demigod who brought fire to humanity, thereby incurring the wrath of Zeus, who condemned him to eternal punishment—is a positive figure in his benevolence toward humankind, his symbolic quest to expand the boundaries of knowledge, and his defiance of tyranny. One could imagine Mary Shelley sharing this view, especially in light of her husband’s manifestly sympathetic portrayal of Prometheus as a figure of moral perfection in Prometheus Unbound (1820), a work he wrote in 1818–19, apparently just after Mary completed Frankenstein.

  But the crux of the issue—made quite clear in the subtitle—is Frankenstein’s usurpation of the role of God as creator. Although it is unclear whether Mary Shelley was an atheist, like her husband, she probably had some tendencies in that direction; but the course of the novel itself strongly suggests that Frankenstein has exceeded his moral status as a human being by the creation of another human being. A standard feminist reading of Frankenstein, found so early as Robert Kiely’s The Romantic Novel in England (1972), declares that Dr. Frankenstein is to be held culpable because he has usurped the woman’s role as childbearer, and that the various misfortunes of the creature (I will not call him a “monster,” as Shelley herself never does so) are a result of his lack of a mother. There does not seem to be anything explicit in the text to justify this intrepretation, although that by itself does not mean it is erroneous. But what the text does declare, repeatedly, is that Frankenstein has taken over the role of God in his scientific pursuits.

  Scholars have pointed to the fact that Mary Shelley herself never had a mother, since Mary Wollstonecraft died following childbirth. But this would result in the grotesque suggestion that Mary Shelley saw herself as somehow akin to the creature, for which no other textual evidence exists. If there is an autobiographical connexion, it is in the novel’s clear criticism of Victor Frankenstein for abandoning the creature in horror soon after it is “born”—a feature that may suggest Mary’s criticism of her father for being less than loving and sympathetic in his treatment of her.

  The great merit of Frankenstein, of course, is the extensive self-justification provided by the creature himself for his own acts, with the result that the creature’s outward hideousness is mitigated by a sense of his moral complexity. The creature, indeed, has much to answer for; how can he justify his killing of Frankenstein’s brother William, his fiancée Elizabeth, and his close friend Clerval? It is a tall order, and it is not entirely clear that the creature fully turns the trick. His chief assertion rests upon the fact of his loneliness and the wretchedness that his isolation from the rest of humanity has engendered; as he puts it succinctly, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.” But the creature damages his own case both by his murder of William (and, more so, by his conniving to implicate the nurse Justine as the perpetrator, with the result that she is tried, convicted, and executed) and by making veiled threats to Frankenstein of further destruction if the latter does not bring him “relief” by the creation of a female being. It is plain that the creature wishes to reduce his creator to the same loveless and isolated condition in which he finds himself.

  In the creature’s long story of his “life” following his creation, there are a few paradoxes. Why, for example, should the creature revert to the intellectual status of a baby, being unable to speak and knowing nothing of the world? Frankenstein had, after all, endowed him with the brain of an adult human being. But this is manifestly a rhetorical device that allows the creature to see the world from a naïve point of view similar to that, say, of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), so that the frequently absurd and irrational conventions of life that we take for granted can be highlighted. In any event, at the end of his narrative, and after Frankenstein has initially refused to make a mate for him, the creature again enunciates his moral status with simple eloquence: “I am malicious because I am miserable.”

  Frankenstein is an inexhaustibly interpretable novel; it may be the sole genuine contribution of Gothic fiction (by which I refer to the novels and tales produced in the period 1764–1824) to the great literature of the world. The issues it raises—the proper role of knowledge; the quest for the secrets of creation; the need for human sympathy; the moral responsibility to our fellow creatures—are of eternal validity, and Mary Shelley is wise in providing no simple solutions, instead letting her characters express their perspectives and leave it to the reader to gauge their effectiveness and validity. In the history of weird fiction, the novel is crucial in withdrawing terror from the remoteness of the Middle Ages and placing it fully in the contemporary world. More significantly, Mary Shelley herself attests that her prime motive is the creation of fear and the exercise of imagination. Even though, in her original preface, she declares, “I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors,” she reverses herself in the preface to the 1831 edition, stating that her goal was to fashion a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” To be sure, there is far more in Frankenstein than mere shudders; and Mary Shelley’s triumph is in eliciting fear in the very act of posing the moral conundrums implicit in her story. As she herself states in the 1831 preface: “Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject; and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.”

  In the 1820s, Mary Shelley took to writing short stories. The mere fact that this occurred is of some historical significance, for the short story as a literary mode had only recently come into existence. Within the realm of weird fiction, the first collection of horror tales might be Matthew Gregory Lewis’s Romantic Tales (1808), although some of the “tales” in question are very long, almost the length of short novels. (Coincidentally, Lewis—who had attained spectacular fame and notoriety with the publication of the rather salacious Gothic novel The Monk [1796]—visited the Villa Diodati on August 14, 1816, while the literary contest was underway.) It was only around this time that a market for short stories began to develop, with the establishment of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817) and other periodicals.

  Mary Shelley had become acquainted with the novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who was editing an annual anthology of short fiction, The Keepsake, and she wrote a number of stories for this series in the 1830s. Three separate tales resurrect the old Gothic idea of the quest for eternal life. “The Mortal Immortal” is the first-person narration of a man who is 323 years old. But it is of interest that the narrator ridicules the idea that the mediaeval alchemist Cornelius Agrippa—with whom he had studied, and whose elixir he imbibes—has anything to do with the Devil. The world-weariness that comes upon the narrator with the passage of years may reflect the influence of Godwin’s St. Leon.

  “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (written in late 1826 but not published until 1863) is a pseudo-fictional account of an actual hoax of the time, when one Roger Dodsworth claimed to have been frozen since 1654 and reanimated in 1826. Shelley presents the matter as a scientific phenomenon: “Animation (I believe physiologists agree) can as easily be suspended for a hundred or two years, as for as many seconds.” The rest of the tale is merely a political satire, but the gesture toward scientific verisimilitude is of significance. “Valerius: The Reanimated Man” (probably written in 1819; unpublished in Mary Shelley’s lifetime) is similar, but here no explanation whatever is offered in regard to the reanimation of a man from Roman times.

  “Transformation” is of some interest in its rel
ation to Frankenstein. Here a hideous-looking dwarf offers money to a handsome young man to exchange bodies with him for a period of three days only. The young man accepts the offer and finds himself in the twisted body of the dwarf; but three days pass, and the man feels he has been betrayed. The dwarf, true enough, has gone to marry the young man’s fiancée, Juliet. It is at this point, as the young man in the dwarf’s body proceeds to Genoa, that the parallels to Frankenstein accumulate: he is forced to proceed covertly, “for I was unwilling to make a display of my hideousness”; he has momentary thoughts of carrying Juliet off by force, just as the creature arrives for his baleful purpose on Frankenstein’s wedding night. In this instance, however, the two merely have a tussle, during which both are stabbed and forthwith return to their own bodies.

  “The Invisible Girl” is a tale of the “explained supernatural”—a scenario in which the supernatural is suggested but explained away naturalistically. What is taken to be “the ghost of a maiden” proves to be a young orphan who has been cast away from the family she has been living with by her cruel guardian. The atmosphere of weirdness that pervades the narrative justifies its inclusion here, in spite of the eventual elimination of the supernatural.

  Some attention should be given to Shelley’s very long novel The Last Man (1826), for although it may not strictly speaking be supernatural—it is, if anything, a work of proto-science fiction—it probes issues that would be taken up by later supernatural writers. It opens in the year 2073, at which time the last king of England has abdicated and republicanism has been established. It would be profitless to examine in detail the plot of this prolix, rambling work, told from the point of view of Lionel Verney, a friend of the son of England’s last king; but, after a very slow beginning, the novel does gain power in its account of the spread of a plague—initially emerging out of Egypt, apparently—throughout the whole world. Eventually, the plague reaches England; after Verney and others battle marauders from North America and Ireland, they are forced to abandon the island. An unfortunate encounter with religious fanatics in France compels them to go to Switzerland, by which time there are only fifty individuals left. Ultimately, this number is reduced to four: Lionel, his friend Adrian, Clara (Adrian’s daughter), and Evelyn (Lionel’s son). It is thought at one point that the plague might have exhausted itself, but then Evelyn is stricken and dies. There may still be a possibility for the revival of the human race, if Lionel and Clara can survive; but, as they make their way to Greece, a storm at sea renders Lionel the only survivor on the planet.