Mary Shelley

Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters

Anne K. Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136609336
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

An innovative, beautifully written analysis of Mary Shelley's life and works which draws on unpublished archival material as well as Frankenstein and examines her relationship with her husband and other key personalities.

CHAPTER ONE

In Search of a Family

When Mary Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever on September 10, 1797, she left her newborn daughter with a double burden: a powerful and ever-to-be-frustrated need to be mothered, together with a name, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, that proclaimed this small child as the fruit of the most famous radical literary marriage of eighteenth-century England. Watching the growth of this baby girl into the author of one of the most famous novels ever written, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,we can never forget how much her desperate desire for a loving and supportive parent defined her character, shaped her fantasies, and produced her fictional idealizations of the bourgeois family—idealizations whose very fictiveness, as we shall see, is transparent.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth was unexpected, although not unusual within the context of eighteenth-century medical practices. She was in excellent health and had three years earlier borne without complications a first daughter, Fanny, the offspring of her passionate affair with the American businessman and gambler, Gilbert Imlay. She chose to give birth to this second baby at home, attended only by a midwife, Mrs. Blenkinsop. But when Mary Wollstonecraft failed to expel the placenta, Mrs. Blenkinsop hastily summoned Doctor Poignard who, without washing his hands (as was common at the time), pulled out the fragmented placenta piece by piece. In the process, he introduced the infection of the uterus that ten days later killed Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the most ardent advocate of her times for the education and development of female capacities.

William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, was an austere intellectual who prided himself on his philosophical rigor and revolutionary principles. Having tasted the intense joy of a passionate love for a woman for the first time only thirteen months before at the age of forty, Godwin was shocked and deeply grieved by his wife’s death. His diary, in which he conscientiously recorded every day his reading, his visits and visitors, his activities and, rarely and usually in French, the emotional crises of his life, found no words to articulate her death. Poignantly, it reads only

Sep. 10. Su 20 minutes before 8..........................................................

............................................................................................................

............................................................................................................

Married only five months earlier, despite both his own and Mary Wollstonecraft’s principled opposition to the institution of marriage, in order to give their child social respectability, William Godwin was now left with two infant girls to care for alone. He dealt with his grief in the way most natural to him, by reasoned reflection and writing. The day after her funeral, he began to sort through Mary Wollstonecraft’s papers. By September 24 he had begun writing the story of her life, and by the end of the year he had finished his loving celebration, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published in January 1798).

Despite the genuine feeling and sensitively distanced rhetoric of Godwin’s account of his dead wife’s history and writings, qualities that render this book one of his most compelling works, despite his noble intention of memorializing his wife’s literary reputation, despite his deep admiration for her political wisdom and personal courage, Godwin completely misjudged his audience. Public outrage followed his published account of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thwarted affair with the painter Henry Fuseli (during which she had offered to join Fuseli and his new wife Sophia in a platonic ménage à trois), of her passionate love affair with Gilbert Imlay and the birth of her illegitimate daughter, followed by her two suicide attempts when Imlay deserted her, and of Godwin’s unabashed admission that he had been sexually intimate with Mary Wollstonecraft well before their marriage. The Monthly Review declared that

blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr. G.’s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror.¹

The novelist Charles Lucas called the book Godwin’s History of the Intrigues of his own Wife while Thomas Mathias considered it

“a convenient Manual of speculative debauchery, with the most select arguments for reducing it into practice;” for the amusement, initiation, and instruction of young ladies from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, who wish to figure in life, and afterwards in Doctor’s Commons and the King’s Bench; or ultimately in the notorious receptacles of patrician prostitution.²

Many readers were more shocked by Mary Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempts—and the lack of religious conviction that they implied—than by her love affairs. On this score, Godwin was unfair to Wollstonecraft. Being an atheist himself, he had concealed her faith in a benevolent deity and an afterlife and had instead declared at the end of the Memoirs that “during her whole illness, not one word of a religious cast fell from her lips.”³

The end result of the publication of Godwin’s devoted but injudicious Memoirs,coupled with the publication later that year of The Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft which included not only her unfinished novel Maria,or The Wrongs of Woman but also all of Mary Wollstonecraft’s infatuated and overtly sexual love letters to Gilbert Imlay—letters which Godwin asserted were superior in “the language of sentiment and passion” to Goethe’s Werther⁴— was to undermine Mary Wollstonecraft’s influence as an advocate of women’s rights for almost a hundred years. Immediately after the original publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, many upper-class women had rallied behind Wollstonecraft’s claim that state-supported education for females as well as males would render women better fitted to serve as sensible mothers, more interesting companions to men, and more useful citizens of the nation. The bluestocking Anna Seward thought A Vindication a “wonderful book.... It has, by turns, pleased and displeased, startled and half-convinced me that its author is oftener right than wrong.”⁵ The young Dissenter Mary Hays, who was to become Mary Wollstonecraft’s most ardent disciple, wrote that the book was “a work full of truth and genius.”⁶ And even Lady Palmerston, the meekest of wives, warned her husband that “I have been reading the Rights of Woman, so you must in future expect me to be very tenacious of my rights and privileges.”⁷ But Godwin’s revelations made it impossible for a respectable English woman openly to associate herself with Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist views. And they further increased the burden upon his and Wollstonecraft’s daughter, who grew up both idolizing her dead mother and at the same time keenly aware of the social opprobrium and personal costs suffered by any woman who openly espoused the causes of sexual freedom, radical democracy, or women’s rights.

Domestically, Godwin struggled valiantly to care for his two infant charges. He assumed full responsibility for Fanny, now aged three, whom he called Fanny Godwin, as well as for the newborn Mary Godwin. He immediately hired Louisa Jones, a friend of his sister Harriet, to serve as housekeeper and governess at the Polygon where Godwin now resided. When the baby Mary became ill on December 20, 1797, he arranged for a wet-nurse for Mary who fed her between December 31 and April 30, 1798. Judging from Louisa’s letters, Mary Godwin’s earliest years seem to have been happy. Louisa was devoted to the two little girls, and Fanny was delighted with her baby sister. When Godwin went to Bath in March, 1798, Louisa sent a vivid account of the girls’ activities:

Fanny has a great many things to tell Somebody but I very much fear they will be all forgotten we have been most gloriously happy this morning, such a game of romps as would frighten you and we have been to Mr Marshals garden and told him to come and put the seeds in the Garden and we have been playing in the pretty place besides twenty other ands all conducive to the harmony of the mental and bodily faculties… Fanny’s progress in reading astonishes as much as it pleases me. all the little words come as freely from her as from a much older child & she spells pig, boy, cat, box, boy, without seeing them when asked…

Louisa wrote again to Godwin when he went to Bristol in June:

Sister Mary goes on very well indeed, has left off her cap today and looks like a little cherub… I cant get Fanny to send you a kiss only one to my Sister she says. Farewell return soon and make us happy.⁸

But this idyll was not to last. During that spring, the impressionable Louisa fell in love with Godwin’s young Scots disciple, John Arnot.⁹ After Arnot went to Russia that summer, she became increasingly involved with one of Godwin’s more tempestuous and irresponsible protégés, George Dyson. Godwin objected strongly to this relationship and for two years Louisa tried to repress her attraction to Dyson, but failed. “I have felt for a very long time that I ought to have told you my feelings,” she wrote to Godwin in the spring of 1808, “but I have lived in the hope of overcoming them the struggle I have had with myself has been very severe indeed and it would be impossible to convey to you the emotions that have by turn oppressed and agitated me.” Godwin had told her that if she went off with Dyson, she could never see the girls again, which clearly distressed her enormously and delayed her departure. But after Dyson appeared at Godwin’s house in a fit of drunken despair in July, 1800, while Godwin was on holiday in Ireland, Louisa capitulated and agreed to go to live at Bath with him. Before she left, she begged Godwin to let her visit the girls, claiming that she could yet be of service to Fanny: “As a visitor a frequent one if it meets approbation I can produce double the effect I could ever hope to do by living with her—for I am sure at present I should be the ruin of her temper and her habits in general.” She justified her decision to leave on the grounds that it would have happened eventually anyway, that someone else would have more authority with the servants than she had, and most importantly, that she left the children in good hands, for Cooper, the nursemaid, was “extraordinarily attached to Mary.” Louisa insisted that Cooper could take adequate care of the girls: “Where she knows what she has to do, she would do it to the minutest particular. You will have only to say to her what you require & I am certain she will be more ready & willing than she has ever shewn herself to me… Cooper told me this morning that she would lay down her life for the child if it were required of her.” Louisa was deeply attached to the girls and found it very hard to leave them, especially Mary, “whom I feel I should love better than ever I did human being.”¹⁰ Her departure, when Mary was just three years old, deprived the little girl of the only mother she had ever known.

Godwin had long realized that the situation was untenable. Within a year of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, he had begun looking for a wife who could be a mother to Fanny and Mary. He courted Harriet Lee, whom he had met in Bath in March 1798 throughout the winter of 1798–99, but she was too proper a lady to accept the irreligious philosopher. He pursued Mrs. S. Elwes, a widow, vigorously through the spring and summer of 1799; but when the husband of Maria Reveley, a woman he had long admired, died on July 6, Godwin interrupted this pursuit to propose to Maria, with indecent haste, within the month. Turned down by Maria Reveley (who nonetheless remained fond of Godwin and many years later, after her marriage to John Gisborne, became a close friend of Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley in Italy), Godwin proposed to Mrs. Elwes. She continued to see Godwin through the coming winter, but did not accept his proposal.

In the meantime, Godwin became quite close to the children. He took them with him on excursions to Pope’s Grotto at Twickenham, to theatrical pantomimes (they saw “Deaf and Dumb” on March 23, 1800) and to dinners with his friends James Marshall and Charles and Mary Lamb. When he went to Ireland for six weeks during the summer of 1800, he sent them frequent and fond messages in his letters to James Marshall, who had assumed responsibility for them:

Their talking about me, as you say they do, makes me wish to be with them, and will probably have some effect in inducing me to shorten my visit. It is the first time I have been seriously separated from them since they lost their mother, and I feel as if it was very naughty in me to have come away so far… Tell Mary I will not give her away, and she shall be nobody’s little girl but papa’s. Papa is gone way, but papa will very soon come back again, and see the Polygon across two fields from the trunks of the trees at Camden Town. Will Mary and Fanny come to meet me? … [11 July 1800]

I depute to Fanny and Mr Collins, the gardener, the care of the garden. Tell her I wish to find it spruce, cropped, weeded, and mowed at my return; and if she can save me a few strawberries and a few beans without spoiling, I will give her six kisses for them. But then Mary must have six kisses too, because Fanny has six. [2 August 1800]

And now what shall I say for my poor little girls? I hope they have not forgot me. I think of them every day, and should be glad, if the wind was more favourable, to blow them a kiss a-piece from Dublin to the Polygon. I have seen Mr. Grattan’s little girls and Lady...