Mary Shelley in Her Times

Mary Shelley in Her Times

Mary Shelley in Her Times

Edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran

© 2000 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2000

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data will be found at the end of this book.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0-8018-6334-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mary Shelley in her times / edited by Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8018-6334-1 (alk. paper)

1. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and history—England—History—19th century. 3. Women and literature—England—History—19th century. I. Bennett, Betty T. II. Curran, Stuart.

PR5398 .M27  2000

823′.7—dc21

99-057227

To Bill and Stuart Buice

To honor them as they honor the Romantics

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1 : Not this time, Victor!: Mary Shelley’s Reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner

BETTY T. BENNETT

2 : To speak in Sanchean phrase: Cervantes and the Politics of Mary Shelley’s History of a Six Weeks’ Tour

JEANNE MOSKAL

3 : The Impact of Frankenstein

WILLIAM ST CLAIR

4 : From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda: Mary Shelley’s Changing Conception of Her Novella

PAMELA CLEMIT

5 : Mathilda as Dramatic Actress

CHARLES E. ROBINSON

6 : Between Romance and History: Possibility and Contingency in Godwin, Leibniz, and Mary Shelley’s Valperga

TILOTTAMA RAJAN

7 : Future Uncertain: The Republican Tradition and Its Destiny in Valperga

MICHAEL ROSSINGTON

8 : Reading the End of the World: The Last Man, History, and the Agency of Romantic Authorship

SAMANTHA WEBB

9 : Kindertotenlieder: Mary Shelley and the Art of Losing

CONSTANCE WALKER

10 : Politicizing the Personal: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and the Coterie Novel

GARY KELLY

11 : Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author between Public and Private Spheres

MITZI MYERS

12 : Poetry as Souvenir: Mary Shelley in the Annuals

JUDITH PASCOE

13 : Trying to make it as good as I can: Mary Shelley’s Editing of P. B. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose

MICHAEL O’NEILL

14 : Mary Shelley’s Lives and the Reengendering of History

GREG KUCICH

15 : Blood Sisters: Mary Shelley, Liz Lochhead, and the Monster

E. DOUKA KABITOGLOU

Notes

Contributors

Index

Preface and Acknowledgments

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797-1851), as her given names eloquently testify, was a child of the radical 1790s: her first major publication, History of a Six Weeks Tour (1817), evinces the impress of her mother’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and her second, Frankenstein (1818), was influenced by and dedicated to her father. By the time she was thus marking these family continuities, however, she was already in association with a second radical circle of the English Regency, one that positioned itself against Europe’s rapidly entrenching postwar conservatism. The famous Geneva summer of 1816, for most students of literary history, is now more often identified with Mary Shelley’s first novel than with the writings of Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley contemporary with it. From these influences, and with the perspective of a highly gifted, intellectual woman educated both in the culture of her own era and in the contexts of the broader literature and history of western civilization, she shaped a literary voice singularly alert to the significant political, economic, and social changes that inaugurated the world as we know it today.

Her intellectual range is not the only element that set Mary Shelley’s experiences apart from those usual for her day. Her lengthy stay in Scotland as an adolescent, the Geneva summer, and the five years she spent in Italy (1818-23) extended her sense of geography and history as well as literature onto a pan-European plane, giving her a perspective rare among writers of the day and rarer still among prominent female writers.

After P. B. Shelley drowned in 1822, she reentered the London literary world in 1823 alone and on a different footing from when she had left it. Though Frankenstein had made its indelible imprint, she was no longer a part of the Elect (MWSL 1:450). But despite her deep sense of loss and her concerns about raising her one surviving child, Percy Florence, she pursued the literary path she had cultivated for herself since childhood. Blending knowledge of a remarkable breadth of past and contemporary history, literature, languages, and philosophy, she enunciated in her works an enduring humanistic vision of the future. Mary Shelley spent more than three decades at the center of Great Britain’s literary world, as it negotiated the profound transition between its Romantic and High Victorian cultures. By birth, education, associations, and experience, she was virtually unique in the place she held through the shifting modes of her times. Her six novels, a novella, five volumes of biographical lives, two travel books, and her many short stories, essays, and reviews, not to mention her monumental editions of P. B. Shelley’s writings, reveal a writer of singular calling and a thinker of consequence.

To celebrate the notable artistic and intellectual range of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, in terms of her own era and ours, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, in May of 1997, her bicentennial year, hosted an international conference bringing together notable scholars from around the world to assess the totality of her achievement and legacy. This volume represents an integration of the principal concerns articulated at that conference.

Among the categories to which the authors continually revert are Mary Shelley’s debts to Wollstonecraft and Godwin; other influences on her thought from the 1790s; her relations with P. B. Shelley, Byron, and the Satanic School; her position in Regency culture; her cosmopolitanism; her place in the transitional literary scene of the 1820s; her later career in Victorian England; her politics and her representations of history; her uses of science and other contemporary thought; the genres of her writing; and her trajectory as a female writer. Lest one unnecessarily constrict our sense of the times in which Mary Shelley lives, the final essay in this volume, by way of a historical postlude, focuses directly on a contemporary author whose confrontations with Mary Shelley have occurred throughout her career and have largely impelled their own trajectory.

The essays are meant to stand on their own. But in their affinities—and differences—they speak to establishing Mary Shelley’s works at a level that truly recognizes her cosmopolitan historical concept of the human experience and its potentialities. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer fitting testimony to Mary Shelley’s place as an important Romantic author; but more than that, they testify to a visionary perspective that endures to influence cultures yet to come.

With pleasure, we wish to acknowledge the many colleagues whose special contributions have made this volume a reality. For particular praise, we would like to single out Dr. Doucet D. Fischer for integrating our conference activities with the exhibition contemporary with it mounted by the New York Public Library and curated by Doucet Fischer and Stephen Wagner, curator of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle. The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York was notably generous in its support of our aims, and that they were realized to their fullest possibility is in great measure owing to the care of Professor Joseph Wittreich of the English Department, Provost William Kelly, and President Frances Degan Horowitz. Dr. Nora Nachumi watched over the welfare of all the conference participants with diligent kindness. The American University and the University of Pennsylvania have supported both the conference and the assembling of these essays, and we wish to acknowledge their unflagging commitment to the success of both undertakings. We are also indebted to members of the Department of Performing Arts of the American University for their performance of Frankenstein at the conference, especially Professor Gail Humphries, who directed the performance, Professor Valerie Morris, then chair of the department, and the remarkable cast of students and graduates who so well imbued with life both creature and scientist. Also at American University, we wish to thank Alexandra Meadows, Tisha Brady, and, particularly, Kathleen Kennedy-Corey, for their assistance with any number of the conference preparations.

We are grateful to the Directors of the Keats-Shelley Association of America for providing the support that made the conference a reality. And finally, we wish to acknowledge the very special support given us by William T. Buice, III, President of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and his wife, Stuart Buice, and we dedicate this volume to these very special friends.

Abbreviations

References to the writings of Mary Shelley, unless otherwise indicated, cite the respective volumes of The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996): F (Frankenstein); Fa (Falkner); L (Lodore); LM (The Last Man); M (Matilda, The Fields of Fancy, and Miscellaneous Writings); PW (Perkin Warbeck); TW (Travel Writings); V (Valperga). The shorter fiction of Mary Shelley is cited from Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), as CT. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 vols., ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980-88) are cited as MWSL. The Journals of Mary Shelley 1814-1844, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995) are cited as MWSJ.

William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Mark Philp, vol. 3 of The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin (London: Pickering, 1993), is cited as PJ; The Enquirer, vol. 5 of the same edition, ed. Pamela Clemit, is cited as E. Quotations from P. B. Shelley’s poetry are taken from Shelley’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977); where this edition is cited for prose or for a particular page of the verse, it is abbreviated as PBSPP. Verse not contained in that volume is cited from the Oxford Standard Authors edition (OSA) of The Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1905, rev. G. B. Matthews 1970). The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964) are cited as PBSL.

The editors, preferring some rhetorical awkwardness and personal distancing to an unintended blurring of identities or a reinforcement of the cultural prioritization of the male surname, have rigorously separated the wife and husband under the denomination of Mary Shelley and P. B. Shelley.

Mary Shelley in Her Times

1 : Not this time, Victor

Mary Shelley’s Reversioning of Elizabeth, from Frankenstein to Falkner

BETTY T. BENNETT

Mary Shelley created in her first and last novels two characters who, like philosophic bookends, reflect, extend, and comment on each other and the works in which they appear: Elizabeth Lavenza in Frankenstein (1818) and Elizabeth Raby in Falkner (1837). Beyond their given names, the two Elizabeths share other important attributes, including their being partial or total orphans, Catholic lineage, and surrogate families. The similarities of the women, however, seem dramatically eclipsed by their sharply different roles in the novels they inhabit: from a minor player in Frankenstein, Falkner’s Elizabeth, some two decades later, takes center stage. This marked transposition might lead to the assumption that the coincidence of their names is just that: a coincidence. But exploring the circumstances of the Elizabeths reveals a remarkable relationship between the two. Out of the matrix of their similarities, fused with their critical distinctions, Mary Shelley created in her final novel not a reversal or denial of her early Romantic ideology, as many commentators have argued, but rather a reversioning of Frankenstein that affirms the author’s remarkably consistent reformist sociopolitical ethos.

Mary Shelley’s reversioning in Falkner is consistent with both Shelleys’ works, in which they commonly retold canonized stories.¹ But this instance is extraordinary in its reflexivity. If Frankenstein’s future may have been doubted in 1818,² by 1835, when Mary Shelley began to write Falkner, there was ample evidence that the scientist and the Creature held a permanent grip on society’s imagination, permeating all levels of the culture, including newspapers, parliamentary debate, theatrical productions, inexpensive or pirated reprints, and translations. Rarely does an author create an instant myth; usually such meteoric candidates fade within their own era. Mary Shelley, then, had an unusual opportunity that went beyond bringing out a second, revised edition of her work, as she did in 1831. Unlike almost any other author, she could draw on an earlier, already semi-canonized public myth that she herself had written to create negative and positive prints of the same Romantic etching. While her reformist ideology remained unchanged, however, her second printing, Falkner, recontextualized her philosophy to reach an increasingly middle-class and materialist Victorian society, one that had largely turned away from Romantic radical politics to take its tea and literature in the more secure confines of Romantic aesthetics.

First, let us look at the 1818 Elizabeth, passively introduced into the novel, as is everyone else in Victor Frankenstein’s circle, through his third-person controlling lens, a metaphor itself for his commanding power over their lives. Elizabeth Lavenza in the first edition is the child of Frankenstein’s deceased aunt. Her father, about to remarry, proposes to send her from her native Italy to be raised as the senior Frankenstein’s own daughter, and educate her thus (F 23). The father packages his request with both a carrot and a stick, commodifying the child much as one might in a business negotiation. The carrot, practical and mercantile, is a guarantee that the child will retain her mother’s fortune. The threat—which surely must have nettled the second Mrs. Godwin—he couches in a question: Reflect whether you would prefer educating your niece yourself to her being brought up by a stepmother (F 23).³ Frankenstein’s father, a basically kind man, immediately fetches his sister’s little girl to Switzerland and the safety of his own family.

But what exactly does this proffered safety mean in terms of the inhabitants of her sanctuary? From the perspective of Frankenstein’s mother, Caroline Frankenstein, she now has possession of the most beautiful child she had ever seen, who shewed signs even then of a gentle and affectionate disposition. Frankenstein reveals his mother’s immediate determination, to bind as closely as possible the ties of domestic love by considering Elizabeth as [his] future wife; a design which she never found reason to repent (F 23). Nor does Frankenstein, whose narrative nullifies each of Lavenza’s potential strengths by counterbalancing them with an ingrained subservience. For example, Lavenza was docile and good tempered, yet gay and playful as a summer insect … her feelings … strong and deep, and her disposition uncommonly affectionate. No one could better enjoy liberty. But this is quickly modified by, yet no one could submit with more grace than she did to constraint and caprice. Frankenstein could allow his perfect female her luxuriant imagination given her ability to submit; her light and airy figure that was capable of enduring great fatigue because, at the same time, she appeared the most fragile creature in the world. In sum, Frankenstein acknowledges, I admired her understanding and fancy, I loved to tend on her, as I should on a favourite animal. Not surprisingly, despite their great differences, they were strangers to any species of disunion and dispute (F 23). Every one, including the servants, adored Elizabeth Lavenza.

The safety given Lavenza, in terms of the tacit privilege born of wealth that pervades the life of the Frankensteins, clearly exacts the heavy toll of a passivity that reflects her position in the family and in society. Her docility is as much a given as her aunt’s ordaining that she would be her first cousin’s wife, situating her in what some critics have regarded as a quasi-incestuous marriage. Mary Shelley’s refiguration of Lavenza as an orphan of a Milanese nobleman in the Frankenstein of 1831, a more conservative time, has supported that suggestion. But marriage between first cousins was not regarded as incestuous in England in that period, though one might argue incest is implied because the two are raised in the same household. Peter L. Thorslev Jr., however, has cogently argued the significance of incest among the Romantics as a symbol of the Romantic psyche’s love affair with self and of its tragic isolation in an increasingly alien world.⁴ This import would situate the near-relationship of Lavenza and Frankenstein as another example of Frankenstein’s egocentricity.

Even without the suggestion of incest, in 1831 Lavenza’s role in terms of that egocentricity is unchanged, symbolized by the fact that Caroline Frankenstein in that text gives the four-year-old Lavenza to the five-year old Victor Frankenstein as a pretty present (F 192). In the 1831 revision, Mary Shelley additionally intensifies Frankenstein’s ownership of Lavenza as well as her functioning as a symbol of the psyche’s love affair with self, by the transfer of an 1818 epithet. In the first edition, Lavenza referred to Justine Moritz as my more than sister (F 62), a hyperbolic acknowledgment that breaks the barriers of class to assert devotion of one woman for another. In 1831, however, the phrase belongs to Victor Frankenstein, who twice describes Lavenza as his more than sister (F 192). In male-female relationships, this hyperbole doesn’t break the societal gender barriers between the two but rather, I would suggest, increases Frankenstein’s psyche’s love affair with self.

The revision also provides Mary Shelley one of a number of opportunities to underscore the generally implicit politics of Frankenstein. By removing the child’s genealogy from that of the family Frankenstein in 1831, she introduces, however briefly, the existence of altruistic and humane values through the story of Lavenza’s father, who sacrifices his freedom, and perhaps his life, in the name of liberty.

In both versions, from the family’s point of view, Lavenza dutifully fulfills the traditional expectations of a girl in her circle and her era. But what of Lavenza’s attitude towards her place in society and her role in life? For the most part, all we know of her interior life is one narrative remark to the effect that to her the world was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own (F 24) and what we may guess from her actions. For example, Lavenza learns to draw not because she enjoys it but to please her aunt. Even her study of Latin and English with Frankenstein, which suggests an enlightened educational agenda for girls, proves rather to be part of an indulgent agenda, more of a plaything for the children of a wealthy family than a serious system of education directed towards developing reflective moral and ethical values. Frankenstein underscores that carelessness of attitude in his retrospective comment: I cannot help remarking here the many opportunities instructors possess of directing the attention of their pupils to useful knowledge, which they utterly neglect (F 25). In Frankenstein 1831, Frankenstein’s parents’ spirit of kindness and indulgence continues, but Lavenza’s education is limited to reading poetry and admiring nature on her own while Frankenstein attends a local school. This new comparison emphasizes the limitations on Lavenza’s sphere of knowledge at the same time that it further condemns society’s relegation of women to the status of puppets.

Parental neglect concerning education proves to be a critical turning point in Frankenstein’s own life. When as a boy he questions his father about Agrippa, his question is tossed aside as sad trash (F 25). Had his father taken the time to explain, Frankenstein asserts, my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin (F 25–26). In Frankenstein 1831, Mary Shelley spells out that the failure of Victor Frankenstein’s education includes his lack of interest in the structure of languages, … the code of governments, … the politics of various states (F 194), all disciplines she regarded as essential to the development of an educated citizen of the world. Lavenza, the product of the same societal code as Frankenstein’s, responds to her education as expected for a woman: she is, except for one major incident in the novel, silent.

Apart from that incident, which I will return to, the remainder of Lavenza’s role in the novel is relatively sparse, consistent with her societal role. In Chapter 2, when she contracts scarlet fever, she serves as the unwitting catalyst to Caroline Frankenstein’s death and a warning about female assertiveness, however benevolent. At first, Caroline Frankenstein yields to her family’s appeals not to attend her niece. When the girl’s life is threatened, however, she nurses Lavenza, who survives, while the aunt/mother is punished for her imprudence (F 29)—defiance of the family’s judgment, which surely means the father’s—by herself falling victim. Caroline Frankenstein’s death plays out in two ways: First, tending a fatally ill relative is women’s work—no sacrifice is too great. Second, the exchange of Caroline Frankenstein’s life for Elizabeth Lavenza’s melds the concepts of incest, egocentricity, and male domination. To reinforce this connection, in one of Caroline Frankenstein’s last acts, she addresses Lavenza and Frankenstein as my children, joins their hands together, and reminds them of her hopes for their union. She also informs Lavenza that she must supply my place to your younger cousins. Her mothering complete, she then resigns herself cheerfully to death (F 29), as much a victim of the dominant power system as its proponent. Lavenza, now ersatz mother, wife, and fiancée, immediately begins her assigned duties of contributing to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of herself (F 30).

Little wonder that in Chapter 4 Frankenstein’s feverish attempt to forget his horror at the Creature he had constructed from dead limbs results in a construct made of other dead limbs. When he dreams he embraces Lavenza, blooming with health, he finds her lips became livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel (F 40). This dream has been variously interpreted as an expression of Mary Shelley’s suppressed guilt about her own mother’s death, her own unconscious suppression by P. B. Shelley, Godwin, or society generally, her exclusive concern with women’s issues, or a general hostility towards men.⁵ These theses, however, remain unproven within the larger context of Mary Shelley’s life and works. But the dream may be understood within Mary Shelley’s conscious argument in Frankenstein, in which the mother-daughter sequence is as much Frankenstein’s product as the Creature. In both instances, Frankenstein represents society’s agent, and the roles of women and of men in Frankenstein’s world, by extension, are ultimately societal constructs that are destructive to all.

In one circumstance in the novel in which we do see more deeply into Lavenza’s interior world she functions as an overt expression of Mary Shelley’s political agenda. When Lavenza comes out to defend the innocent Justine Moritz, she indicts both the prevailing judicial system as well as her own education, which had failed to prepare her for the world as it was.⁶ Deeply affected by the unjust accusation that Moritz murdered William, Lavenza finds a voice that defies public and family opinion: she insists on Moritz’s innocence while everyone else condemns her, underscoring the marginality of those who lack wealth and prestige. Lavenza wavers only when told that Moritz confessed, but her initial confidence is restored when Moritz explains to Lavenza that her confession was a lie: Ever since I was condemned, my confessor has besieged me; he threatened and menaced, until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was. He threatened excommunication and hell fire in my last moments, if I continued obdurate (F 62). Again, the individual predicament serves to depict the societal condition.

The fact that Moritz and Lavenza, as women, do not possess the credibility to convince the jury of Moritz’s innocence intensifies the book’s condemnation of the judicial system and the predicament of women in the society. Furthermore, recognizing they are powerless, Lavenza councils Moritz—and herself:

Yet heaven bless thee, my dearest Justine, with resignation, and a confidence elevated beyond this world. Oh! how I hate its shews and mockeries! when one creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in a slow torturing manner; then the executioners, their hands yet reeking with the blood of innocence, believe that they have done a great deed. They call this retribution. Hateful name! When that word is pronounced, I know greater and more horrid punishments are going to be inflicted than the gloomiest tyrant has ever invented to satiate his utmost revenge. Yet this is not consolation for you, my Justine, unless indeed that you may glory in escaping from so miserable a den. Alas! I would I were in peace with my aunt and my lovely William, escaped from a world which is hateful to me, and the visages of men which I abhor. (F 62–63)

After Moritz is hanged, Lavenza’s sad and desponding (F 69) mourning contrasts with her acquiescent response to her aunt’s death. Frankenstein reports that Lavenza

no longer took delight in her ordinary occupations; all pleasure seemed to her sacrilege toward the dead; eternal woe and tears she then thought was the just tribute she should pay to innocence so blasted and destroyed. She was no longer that happy creature, who in earlier youth wandered with me on the banks of the lake, and talked with ecstasy of our future prospects. She had become grave, and often conversed of the inconstancy of fortune, and the instability of human life.

When I reflect, my dear cousin, said she, on the miserable death of Justine Moritz, I no longer see the world and its works as they before appeared to me. Before, I looked upon the accounts of vice and injustice, that I read in books or heard from others, as tales of ancient days, or imaginary evils; at least they were remote, and more familiar to reason than to the imagination; but now misery has come home, and men appear to me as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood. … Alas! Victor, when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? I feel as if I were walking on the edge of a precipice, towards which thousands are crowding, and endeavouring to plunge me into the abyss. (F 69)

These passages, with Lavenza playing the central role, condemn organized justice and religion and concomitantly redefine the idea of the monster. Moritz admits the threats and menaces of the priest almost made her believe I was the monster that he said I was (F 62). In this early example of brainwashing, Mary Shelley provides another lesson on the power of authority over the minds of its subjects. The second important redefinition of monster reverts to the subject of Elizabeth’s education. Unprepared for a world in which men appear … as monsters thirsting for each other’s blood, the vacancy of her mind draws her towards the concept of the world as an abyss in which humanity perishes at its own hands.

Chastened, Lavenza retreats into character for the remainder of the novel, her brief dissent from the system suggesting a potential never developed, because she is, after all, a product of that system without the means or education to change her place within it. She placidly renounces her claim to marriage with Frankenstein if he has found another, but then she just as placidly accepts him. Shadowed by fear for their future happiness because of the past misfortunes, she simply refuses to listen to such a sinister voice (F 148). Her last actions in the novel circle back to her first. Once married, she lawfully belongs to Frankenstein, disposed of through a marriage contract reflective of the same legal code that had disposed of Moritz. When Lavenza observes Frankenstein’s agitation on their wedding night, Frankenstein protects her from reality as one might a young child by not revealing the source of his own obvious fear. Egocentrically interpreting the Creature’s threat, I will be with you on your wedding night (F 130), he entreats her to retire. Obediently, she does so. The rest, after a shrill and dreadful scream (F 150) is indeed silence. Elizabeth Lavenza last appears in Frankenstein as she was in the beginning, a figment of Frankenstein’s mind, in his dreams, her sisterly soothing voice whispering in his ear.

Mary Shelley set her five novels following Frankenstein in varied locations and eras, spanning the fourteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Each represents its characters and events as analogs of larger societal values within a context that indicates her resistance to conventional norms. But the novels incrementally shift from the Frankensteinian landscape of male-autocracy, in which Mary Shelley’s honored values of love (female and male), equality (female and male), nature, and expansive education are destructively suppressed. Instead, the later novels explore less-unidetermined landscapes in which those societally constructive values play an increasingly important role, often voiced through characters who, like Euthanasia in Valperga and Lionel in The Last Man, combine what Mary Shelley regards as the strengths of both genders. With Falkner, Mary Shelley represents another iteration of those combined strengths. She personifies them in the character of Elizabeth Raby, a young woman whose experiences are on a human scale, acted out in contemporary England, no doubt influenced by the irony of a society that had been gradually increasing the rights of its male citizenry while intensifying constraints on its female citizens.

Falkner’s Elizabeth Raby, like Frankenstein’s Elizabeth Lavenza, is first introduced as a young child, though not through the filter of another character’s voice as is Lavenza but through the narrator’s, who proves to be a far more reliable commentator than Frankenstein. Briefly, Raby’s father, Edwin Raby, defied his wealthy Catholic family—the oldest Catholic family in England—by marrying the non-Catholic Isabella and was disowned by hardheartedness of the wealthy (Fa 12). He struggles to earn a living for his beloved wife and child, but succumbs to consumption. Her mother struggles on, refusing to comply with Edwin’s father’s stipulation that he would support the child only if he were given complete custody, an experience directly drawn from Mary Shelley’s early negotiations with P. B. Shelley’s father. Four months later, Elizabeth Raby’s mother, who had nursed her husband, also succumbs to consumption. We meet Raby, who is about six years old, not sheltered in some wealthy home but in a tattered dress in her usual place of retreat in a thorny, stony-hearted world, at her mother’s unmarked grave, where she took her picture books and her playthings, so she could talk to, and be blessed by, her Mama.

Mary Shelley drew the image of the child at her mother’s grave and the grandfather’s demand for complete possession of the child so directly from her own life that I wish to pause for a moment to comment on their significance, as well as on the other biographical allusions that she incorporated into her novels.⁷ Students of the Romantics are fully aware that they all drew on and reworked their own histories as it fit the objectives of their works. Mary Shelley’s commentary on this technique, written about Godwin, applies to her own writing as well: Merely copying from our own hearts will no more form a first rate work of art, than will the most exquisite representation of mountains, water, wood, and glorious clouds, form a good painting, if none of the rules of grouping or coloring are followed.⁸ The analogous rules of personal experiences, reshaped into the art of writing about larger societal issues in both Frankenstein and Falkner, speak to the author’s self-confidence in projecting the microcosm of her own intellectual vision into the landscape of her art and obviate a reductive reading of the novel as roman á clef, an interpretation that invariably has critically circumscribed that vision.

The climax in Frankenstein occurs in that very dramatic moment when the scientist abandons his Creature, an event foreshadowed by the senior Frankenstein’s abandonment of responsibility to educate his son away from the train of … ideas (F 25) that led to his ruin. Falkner contains an equally dramatic climax, but with significant modifications of role, intention, and outcome. Specifically, a short time before the book opens, Rupert John Falkner had forced his beloved Alithea Raby from her selfish and contemptible (Fa 94) husband, Sir Boyvill, whom she does not love, and her young son Gerald, whom she does. Though she loves Falkner—and had from youth, although wed at her father’s will to the wealthy Boyvill—she attempts to return home out of love for her child and accidentally drowns. Falkner and his ally bury her in an unmarked grave, which he explains was the custom he had witnessed during his ten years in India, but also because of his ally’s fears of being prosecuted for kidnapping or murder. Her complete disappearance convinces her husband she has willingly run off and he divorces her, forcing his son to bear witness against his mother in court. A distraught Falkner appears in Raby’s churchyard, and attempts to commit suicide on the unmarked mound that is Raby’s mother’s resting place. However, when Falkner drew the trigger, his arm was pulled; the ball whizzed harmlessly by his ear: but the shock of the sound, the unconsciousness that he had been touched at that moment—the belief that the mortal wound was given, made him fall back; and, as he himself said afterwards, he fancied that he had uttered the scream he heard, which had, indeed, proceeded from other lips (Fa 19).

Rather than run from the scene, the young Elizabeth Raby takes action that symbolizes human responsibility. Elizabeth Lavenza’s passive life ends with a scream, to Frankenstein a signal the Creature has bested him. Elizabeth Raby’s scream—of warning and compassion—coalesces the lives of the girl and the man, who in the moment believes he had uttered the scream. More than that, it presages what the remainder of the novel verifies: that Elizabeth Raby is the novel’s hero.

When Falkner learns that Alithea Neville was Isabella Raby’s dear friend, he puts aside his intended suicide to raise the child as his own daughter. In contrast to the world of the family Frankenstein, neither Falkner nor the young Elizabeth Raby envision their world as Edenic. Instead, Mary Shelley describes a world in which the father figure is guilt-ridden and often unreliable in judgment and action, while the child, innocent in herself, realizes from childhood that in her world good people die, have dark secrets, and at times conduct themselves inappropriately and even outright unconscionably.

The differences between Frankenstein and Falkner, Lavenza and Raby, inform us we have entered a new landscape. Frankenstein’s hubris and egocentricity, bred of the privileges and blinders of his class, operate in an eighteenth-century world that engages the supernatural. Falkner, equally the victim of hubris and egocentricity, in his case bred from disdain and cruelty, lives very much in the real world. Lavenza’s innocence is the outcome of overprotection and ignorance of the real world. Gaining experience only when the justice system hangs Justine Moritz, Lavenza remains class-bound and victimized. Raby, on the other hand, the nursling of love and nature (Fa 14) and also, significantly, having worldly experience and extended education, like the Creature, exchanges innocence for knowledge. But, unlike the Creature, she remains faithful to her values, even when faced with losing her beloved as well as a respected station in the world. As a result, even from early childhood she asserts her own will, able to deal with whatever events confront her.

Falkner’s notion of raising the child for the solace he needed (Fa 28) parallels the Creature’s need for companionship. At first Falkner provides Raby the kind of undemanding education that had molded the passive Lavenza. However, Falkner’s idyll of dependency is disrupted when he hires a highly skilled governess for Raby, who encourages the girl’s intellect: from Miss Jervis she acquired the thoughts and experience of other men. Like all young and ardent minds, which are capable of enthusiasm, she found infinite delight in the pages of ancient history: she read biography, and speedily found models for herself, whereby she measured her own thoughts and conduct, rectifying her defects, and aiming at that honour and generosity which made her heart beat, and cheeks glow, when narrated of others (Fa 39). Raby’s relationship to her surrogate parent, unlike Lavenza’s, changes over the course of time. Her better education, familial and formal, eventually empower her to become the decision maker oftentimes for both Falkner and herself.

Raby’s independence leads her to befriend and then fall in love with Gerald Neville, who has dedicated his life to finding his mother and killing the man who abducted her so many years earlier. When Falkner realizes the situation, to set Raby free so she may marry Neville, he gives her a lengthy confessional letter that details the story of his love for Alithea and her death, as well as his sometimes ferocious nature. The letter tests Raby’s independence and judgment, allowing Mary Shelley to use Raby’s reaction to advocate a code of personal and public conduct in sharp contrast with the conventional power-based code that Falkner, Boyvill, and Frankenstein exemplify.

In Frankenstein, however, Mary Shelley uses the scientist to epitomize the sociopolitical power system but seldom allows him a glimpse of recognition into the hazards of that system or his role in it. The narrowness and privilege of