Their Love is Alive

The period of writing Frankenstein was typically chaotic. In the summer of 1816, Percy was again fleeing his creditors. Mary's stepsister, Claire, was pregnant by Byron, who was now tired of her. In October Mary's half sister, Fanny, committed suicide; the next month Percy's wife, Harriet, drowned herself. In late December Mary married Percy and was soon pregnant—for the third time in three years. Thoughts about pregnancy and parenthood surely weighed on her mind. Doubtlessly, she also thought about neglect.

We know that science preoccupied her. In her 1831 introduction, Mary describes listening to Percy, Byron, and Polidori discuss new scientific experiments. She had also accompanied her father to public lectures on chemistry and discussed scientific ideas with Percy, who had been interested in experimentation since boyhood (explosives held special appeal). Frankenstein is commonly considered a parable about the dangers of scientific inquiry, mostly because film and stage adaptations tend to portray the scientist as an evil maniac and the monster as a dumb brute. The novel is much more complex. The Romantics did not reject science, as Richard Holmes demonstrates in his remarkable new book, The Age of Wonder. (Holmes is also the author of a brilliant biography of Percy Shelley). They were ambivalent. Romantic artists and scientists shared a commitment to the quest for truth, and they were both motivated by wonder. It's no accident that Frankenstein shares certain features with Percy Shelley. Frankenstein is a kind of artist, as well as a composite of the era's well-known scientists. But as Holmes shows in a chapter on Frankenstein, Mary also captured the fear surrounding scientific exploration: if man can manipulate nature like a machine, what becomes of the soul? Chemistry and biology must be only half the story—half the human, one might say. Frankenstein is an argument between reason and emotion, nature and civilization, the divided self. Frankenstein's radical suggestion is that it doesn't take God to heal the rift. It takes the loyalty and love of another person.

Years later, Mary called Frankenstein "the offspring of happy days." With all the turmoil in her life, it's tempting to see this as wishful nostalgia. The Original Frankenstein makes it easier to believe her: Robinson's editing—prose embroidered lightly with italics—is evidence of a real and strangely moving companionship between Percy and Mary. Examining the page leaves, Robinson deduced that the lovers passed the notebooks between them as Mary wrote. Mary may have called the book her "hideous progeny," calling to mind Frankenstein's monster, but unlike Victor Frankenstein, she did not cloister herself to construct it.

Her "happy days" were soon over—by the time she was 25, three of her four children were dead, and so was her husband. When she wrote Frankenstein, however, she was not alone. And neither was Percy. In his biography of the poet, Shelley: The Pursuit, Holmes notes that in the monologue of the "fallen angel," "Mary states with an extraordinary premonition the theme which was to dominate so much of Shelley's later poetry." Perhaps it wasn't a premonition. Influence, like love, runs both ways.

© 2009