In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth,[7] I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as ‘my workshop of filthy creation,’ used by Frankenstein of his secret work. Mary’s life experience taught her to regard life and death as closely intertwined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to Mary in a dream, in which she says she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion.’ The powerful line suggests both a distorted image of her mother dying, in those final restless moments which often tantalisingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite, and also the stirrings of sexual intercourse, particularly when we recall that ‘powerful engine’ is a term which serves in pornography as a synonym for penis.
The critic, Ellen Moers, writing on female gothic,[8] disposes of the question of how a young girl like Mary could hit on such a horrifying idea (though the authoress was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were spinsters and virgins, and in any case Victorian taboos operated against writing on childbirth. Mary experienced the fear, guilt, depression and anxiety which often attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers, unmarried, her consort a married man with children by another woman, and beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Beard’s girlfriend says, ‘She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life.’
Moreover, the casual remark made by Beard’s girlfriend takes us into a deeper level of meaning which, although sufficiently obvious, has not been remarked upon to my knowledge. Frankenstein is autobiographical.
It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. We do not deny other interpretations – for a metaphor has many interpretations – by stating that Mary sees herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love; but the move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley. Her mother’s death in childbirth must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead; behind the monster’s eloquence lies Mary’s grief. Part of the continued appeal of the novel is the appeal of the drama of the neglected child.
Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A madness for knowledge abounds; not only Frankenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interestingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the Gothic mode, with its soft, frightened heroines); Victor’s espoused remains always a cold and distant figure. The monster, product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny.
The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost before him and Quilp in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, as it was the monster that came first to Mary’s mind. The monster holds its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudo-science, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the golem.
Frankenstein emerges from the Gothic tradition. Gothic still tints science fiction with its hues of suspense and doom. In Billion Year Spree I argued that Frankenstein was the first real science fiction novel. Here the adjective ‘real’ serves as an escape clause. The point about discussing where science fiction begins is that it helps our understanding of the nature and function of SF. In France in pre-Revolution days, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuilleries. The best-known example is Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2400, set seven centuries ahead in time; it was translated into several foreign languages. Mercier writes in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley does not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier, and worked with ‘actual possibilities of invention and discovery.’ H.G. Wells was influenced by Frankenstein, and wrote what he called fantasies – the phrase set in quotes is Wells’s, who added that he ‘did not pretend to deal with possible things.’* One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much.
As Muriel Spark says, Mary in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time.[9] She discovered the Irrational, one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb, and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tradition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for the irrational.
Other arguments for the seminal qualities of Frankenstein are set out more fully in Billion Year Spree, for those interested. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modern, consciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favour of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping paternal power, invading what was previously God’s province – the role medicine has played since Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism that was to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary’s death.
As befitted an author writing after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary deals, not merely with extrapolated development like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change, like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (though the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, unable to control the new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. No other writer, except H. G. Wells, presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.
The Last Man was published in 1826, anonymously, as Frankenstein had been. Few critics of standing have praised the novel. It meanders. Muriel Spark, however, said of it that it is Mary’s ‘most interesting, if not her most consummate, work.’
The theme of The Last Man was not new, and could hardly be at a time when epidemics were still commonplace. The title was used for an anonymous novel in 1806. Thomas Campbell wrote a poem with the same title; whilst at the Villa Diodati, Byron composed a poem entitled ‘Darkness’ in which the world is destroyed and two men, the last, die of fright at the sight of each other. In the same year that Mary’s novel was published, John Martin painted a water-colour on the subject (later, in 1849, he exhibited a powerful oil with the same title).
The novel is set in the twenty-first century, a period, it seems, of much sentimental rhetoric. Adrian, Earl of Windsor, befriends the wild Lionel Verney. Adrian is the son of the King of England, who abdicated; one of the King’s favourites was Verney’s father. Adrian is full of fine sentiments, and wins over Verney. Verney has a sister called Perdita who falls in love with Lord Raymond, and eventually commits suicide. Raymond is a peer of genius and beauty who besieges Constantinople. The relationships of these personages, together with a profusion of mothers and sisters, fill the first of the three volumes. Adrian is Mary’s portrait of Shelley, the bright rather than the dark side, Perdita is Claire, Raymond Byron. Verney plays the part of Mary, and eventually becomes the Last Man. Verney, like Frankenstein, is a paradigm of the Outsider.
There is undoubted strength in the second and third books, once the plague has the world in its grip. Society disintegrates on a scale merely hinted at in the unjust world of Frankenstein. ‘I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could