- Women in Horror Week
- Women in Horror Week: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Our Unnatural Mother
- Women in Horror Week: “Lois the Witch and Other Stories” by Elizabeth Gaskell
- Women in Horror Week: Caitlín R. Kiernan
- Women in Horror Week: The Quiet Dread of Daphne du Maurier
- Women in Horror Week: Nalo Hopkinson
- Women in Horror Week: Amparo Dávila
- Women in Horror Week: Angela Carter
- Women in Horror Week: Bad Girls Go To Hell: On Shirley Jackson
- Women in Horror Week: Necromantic Mysteries: The Ghostly Stories of Sarah Monette
- Women in Horror Week: Gemma Files
- Women in Horror Week: Flannery O’Connor: A Good Woman Horror Writer Is Not So Hard To Find
And what a mother. Oh, Lord.
Nor was Shelley alone, even in her time. There were, of course, the Brontës. But she was unique. And surprisingly prolific. Many think that because Frankenstein (1818) was such a foundation of the genre, so scientific and so gothic, that its author was a one-hit wonder and an amateur who huddled alongside her more-famous lover and husband, Percy Shelley. She was anything but. Seven novels; dozens of short stories, poems, articles, and children’s books; travel narratives; several biographical anthologies; and her work on editing and translating Percy’s poetry. That’s just the published stuff. It’s doubtful Percy Shelley would be nearly as important today without the indefatigatible efforts of his wife. But that was hardly all she left behind.
Mary was a professional writer at a time when few women wrote (or were even literate) and it was one of the few careers a respectable woman could take on that didn’t involve baby-making. She resorted to it after Percy died, to support their young son, the only one of their children to survive infancy. Her diaries at the time she wrote Frankenstein clearly show the influence of postpartum depression and the recent loss of a child on the story, even more than the famously cold and wet summer that year. A grieving mother wrote that book.
Oddly enough, the popularity of Frankenstein for a long time diminished her reputation as a forward-thinking writer, since it was the least iconoclastic of her novels. It was assumed for quite a while that she had not followed in the footsteps of her illustrious mother, the feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary’s namesake mother had died of childbed fever ten days after her birth. She might be forgiven for feeling a bit smothered by maternal memory.
But her other novels have strong female characters and themes. Frankenstein is an early fluke, written when she was still a teenage mother and in the throes of a scandalous affair with an older married man (Percy). As she matured, so did her writing. Even so, the raw emotion and vivid imagery of the book made it the only famous work to come out of Percy Shelley’s challenge to write a horror story during the chilly, wet summer of 1816.
Some have criticized the novel as dry, more a book of ideas than of fast-moving plot and deep characterization. While one might allow this, I’d add that this is a common feature of many a famous later Hard SF novel. This subgenre is quite frequently all about the ideas – in Frankenstein‘s case, 18th century galvanism and reanimation of dead tissue, and Renaissance alchemy, as well as a sociological critique of the contemporary sterile, male-only view of science. The only difference between most other Hard SF novels and Frankenstein is that those others were written by men. It seems that a female pioneer in the field just can’t win. Write a science fiction story with emotion and vivid characters in it, and it’s not real hard science. Write the first modern Hard SF novel and everybody scrambles to hopskip right over you to get to swashbuckling Jules Verne.
Mary’s influence on the field isn’t limited to Frankenstein, which was heavily influenced by contemporary Gothic horror. Though most her novels are historical, The Last Man (1826) is the first modern novel about a science fiction apocalypse. In it, everyone is dying of a plague. The story follows the last survivors as they try to get by in the ruins. Many tropes that you will find in later zombie and scientific vampire novels (like I Am Legend) can be found here, right down to the On the Beach-style loneliness and philosophizing.
Similarly, all those fears about science-gone-amuck (the Creature), and cold-blooded scientists who do terrible things in the name of Knowledge (Dr. Frankenstein), come from Frankenstein. Not to mention that Mary cleverly never gives a full description of the Creature. He is a high-minded and sensitive individual who falls prey to murderous and vengeful rage after being repeatedly rejected and abused by society (The subtitle of the book is ‘The Modern Prometheus,’ invoking a sacrificial pre-Christian figure of mythology). However, if you take into consideration Frankenstein’s extreme and hysterical bias toward his creation, there is little in the Creature’s physical description to explain why humans reject him. He could be anything from cringingly ugly to angelically beautiful. As far as we can tell, people just sense something off, something wrong, about him and they respond with extreme prejudice.
The Creature is an early embodiment of our paranoia about playing God, which we project onto our creations, punishing them for our own sins. In the book, we are the true monsters. And in every nuclear or environmental disaster flick, we mouth Mary Shelley, like puppets that don’t know they’re only wood.
It is not a big surprise that Mary Shelley’s books have influenced both science fiction and horror so much. She had big ideas and those tend to catch people’s imaginations even more than big plots. More depressing, it is not really a surprise that she gets handwaved off the classics so much as a woman, either. After all, when you’re drawing up an historical list of famous speculative writers and you’ve got no women on it, it can’t be too comfortable to have the Mother of Science Fiction Horror looking over your shoulder with a disapproving frown.









I’ve long admired Mary Wollstonecroft Shelley, given the truly tragic life and hardships that she endured in the course of it. Of all her old friends who spent that summer at the Villa Diodati, she was the only one to survive the longest. To get “Frankenstein” published, I’m told that she had to go to one of the least reputable publishing houses in England to get the job done (the modern equivalent would be being published in “Playboy” or “Penthouse”). Yet…”Frankenstein” endures. Nor did she ever ask for pity from anyone…she just did what she had to do.
There is one aspect of “Frankenstein” that I often feel gets overlooked: parental responsibility. It makes me truly wonder what Mary saw in her relationships with both her parents and/or Percy Shelley that prompted her to write this story. Someone who is writing about someone failing to shoulder the real work of caring for their own creation likely saw it in action in the real world.
One of the articles I linked to mentions a feminist historian who says that Frankenstein is what happens when men have babies without women.
I’ve heard that one myself through the excellent Midnight Marquee Frankenstein film retrospective “We Belong Dead”. The person I heard it from even took it a step further, saying that it was partially modeled on the Biblical book of Genesis. The latter was deemed a male creation fantasy, something I’m less-than-inclined to disagree with.
As I recall, Shelley herself discussed the influence of Genesis. I am a bit skeptical about the male creation fantasy, too. Even though the creation beginning of Genesis is believed to be very late (and therefore from the very rigid and paternalistic Exile period), it is based on older myths. And the telling of the creation of humans is ambiguous. In the Torah, “Man” appears originally to be a hermaphrodite that is later split into the two genders. Elizabeth Cady Stanton points out in her commentary, “The Woman’s Bible,” that Eve is the proactive one in the Apple story, not Adam (and also that the serpent is a symbol of wisdom not Evil in some Eastern cultures). The misogynist slant that woman was punished for disobedience is only one possible interpretation. There is also the factor that woman eats the apple first and gains true knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus enlightened, she gives the apple to Adam. But knowledge comes with a price, hence why the woman must suffer more for seeking it first. But it is not necessarily a punishment, only an acknowledgement that truth and wisdom often hurt.
That last bit is the one truth that too many people seeking “enlightenment” spend too much of their time dodging. That’s how you wind up with fundamentalist follies of all religious stripes.
No denying that Eve was the proactive part of that hoary old fable…even the fundies acknowledge that bit. But nothing I have ever seen in my life has ever once told me that ignorance is ANYTHING along the lines of bliss. Harlan Ellison once aptly pointed out that when you’re aware, you’ve at least got the advantage of who’s knocking you in the head.
In a way, this all kind of leads back to “Frankenstein” as well. The creature is enlightened himself about who is to blame for, well, everything about his life. That he does horrible things with that knowledge in his head does nothing to change the fact that he is putting the blame where it belongs in Victor Frankenstein. By the end of the novel, the creature is both wise and terrible.
Well, it’s hard to say with the Creature. Yes, Frankenstein is to blame for his creation and abandonment, and making him something that freaks people out. However, just as it is the fault of those who give in to unreasoning prejudice and abuse him, it is the Creature’s fault for murdering innocents in his quest for revenge on Frankenstein. Yes, the kid is annoying; yes, it’s a convenient way to get back at his Maker. But it’s no more right than a serial killer blaming his kills on a bad childhood. Being gifted with Reason also means being gifted with Free Will and the Creature abuses it. His beef is with Frankenstein and he should have harmed only Frankenstein in his quest for revenge. Once he started killing everyone in the way, he lost his moral high ground.
That lack of moral high ground is actually something else that tends to get lost in a lot of the film adaptations, Paula (though I would say that major exceptions could be found in many entries in the Hammer Frankenstein films, which has probably the nastiest take on Victor Frankenstein ever). Both Frankenstein and his Creation start off with noble aims but when the results are something other than what they expect, they both make others pay for their broken hopes. In creating the monster, Frankenstein may well have created a truer son than any he would have had by Elizabeth.
In Thomas Edison’s version, the creature is actually portrayed as a mirror image of its creator at the end.
I remember that from “We Belong Dead”, though honestly that felt like a bit of a cop-out. Nothing annoys more than to find out that the plot you’ve been following ends with “that was all just a dream” (one of the reasons why I nearly got pissed at the suprisingly horrific novel “Weapon X”, based on the Wolverine comic storyline of the same name, until it showed an original twist to the idea). One of the commentators in that same book actually made the argument that the Monster is an extension of Frankenstein’s unconscious, seeking to destroy the people that stand in his way (remember that he always seems to be asleep when the Monster comes calling on those folks). They even went so far as to link it to the Id Monster in the film “Forbidden Planet”.
Yeah, but the Id monster in “Forbidden Planet” is more based on Caliban from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”