The Golden Fleece: Essays
through the whole period during which I was the slave of my creature, I allowed myself to be governed by the impulse of the moment.
The Monster is, significantly I think, given no name. He is referred to variously as fiend, daemon and monster; though from the time of the book’s appearance it has been a common error to call the Monster ‘Frankenstein’. This is not really a surprising error, since the relationship of identity and conflict between the Monster and Frankenstein tends to show that the creature is a projection of his creator. The two are complementary yet antithetical figures; for the rational faculty which Frankenstein has lost can be found in the Monster, who is a symbol of the intellect. The Monster is also shown as the perpetrator of evil motivated by revenge for Frankenstein’s neglect of him. And I suggest his conflict with Frankenstein represents the forces which, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, had started to pit reason against imagination, instinct, faith. Mary Shelley equated those rational forces with evil.
The real subject of the novel can perhaps best be found in its sub-title. The book was called Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. In the humanist image of Prometheus, she saw Frankenstein perpetrating the ultra-humanistic act of creation of life, and she used every device of horror that her imagination could conceive, to express the ghastliness of Frankenstein’s action and its consequence. Its consequence is the real subject, and the real subject is the disintegration of the individual personality, as Frankenstein was disintegrated, following the practice of rational humanism in its last and dehumanising degree. Her story culminates in the romantic motif of man in search of himself and in conflict with himself.
I don’t think Mary Shelley was intellectually aware of these conclusions I have drawn; but it’s worth noting that Shelley, who wrote the Preface to the first edition of Frankenstein, seems to have felt uneasy about its underlying meaning. Here are Shelley’s strangely equivocal words, made to appear, incidentally, as if coming from the author:
The opinions which naturally spring from the character and situation of the hero are by no means to be conceived as existing always in my own convictions; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine whatsoever.
They are strange words, and in a way, meaningless, since Shelley well understood that any consummate creative work has for its basis a system of thought, if only a temporary one.
But I don’t think this was merely a temporary attitude which Mary Shelley adopted for the duration of her story, for the other novel of hers I have mentioned, presents us with conclusions entirely consistent with those of Frankenstein.
The Last Man, a long, panoramic work, is the story of a plague that sweeps across the earth, annihilating all but one man. The book unfortunately is almost unobtainable to-day.* It isn’t neat enough for modern tastes, and as a work of art it hardly meets with the standards set by the best nineteenth-century English novels – the language has a solemnity that often defeats itself, and since the story is not really about people but about mankind, the characters are neither here nor there. The merits of The Last Man are in the development of its tremendous theme. Only there, does the novel give us something new in nineteenth-century fiction.
But it needed a more objective intellect yet a more sympathetic imagination than Mary Shelley’s to make a great book of it. All the same, I regret being unable to do justice here to the detail and scruple with which, incident by incident, she shows the encroachment of disaster. And one of the compensating features of the book is the way in which she copes with vastness. Mary Shelley had a grip on social ideas, and though she could never comfortably bring off a domestic scene, she was able to manipulate people in a mass, she could depict a social trend.
The subject of The Last Man occupied many creative thinkers of the time; the poets Campbell, Beddoes and Hood wrote poems of that name, and the theme was treated by contemporary painters. It was a general pessimistic reaction to the progressive time-spirit. But Mary Shelley was not so much concerned, as were these poets, with the fate and feelings of the one survivor, as she was with the cause of his situation; she deals with the disintegration, first of domestic life, then of civilised society, and lastly of the very concept of mankind. The novel may be taken as an essay on the futility of mankind when faced with universal disaster outside its own agency; it posits those very social and political problems which Godwinism had made perceptible, but in circumstances which made them unanswerable by Political Justice.
The scene of The Last Man is set in the future, about the year 2075. England has become a republic by the peaceful bloodless means that Godwin advocated; and the first part of the story tells of the domestic life under a Protectorate – of the loves, marriages, births and ambitions of an English family. A plague breaks out in Eastern Europe, but attracts little attention in Britain, until it spreads across Europe and westward to America – a swift, incurable and fatal disease.
Our attention is now focused away from the domestic to the social and political scene. Refugees from the plague crowd into Britain and the fortunes of the family are subordinated to a national emergency. Mary Shelley writes,
When any whole nation becomes the victim of the destructive powers of exterior agents, then indeed man shrinks into insignificance, he feels his tenure of life insecure, his inheritance on earth cut off.
And she describes the emergency measures adopted by society, as it may seem with some foresight. Private parks, gardens, pleasure-grounds are ploughed up to grow food; it becomes fashionable to walk instead of ride and to generally behave as we now behave in wartime. Meanwhile the republican leaders are still giving out that nothing is happening.
But the plague reaches Britain and introduces, as the next phase, the complete breakdown of society. Hedonism takes hold of the decreasing population. Criminal gangs spring up here and there, till they, too, fall victims of the plague. A temporary tyranny is exerted by a fanatical leader of a quasi-religious sect; the strong exploit the weak; and whatever human virtues are individually displayed everywhere succumb to Mary Shelley’s relentless pessimism.
At last the few survivors decide, hopelessly, to search Europe for a refuge. Politics are now ludicrous, the great cult of mankind has come to nothing. Mary Shelley reduces and reduces as she shows the struggling emigrants dying off. ‘Man,’ she says, ‘existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean; man, the queller of the elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer.’ So, she depopulates the earth until only one man remains to say, ‘A sense of degradation came over me. Did God create man, merely in the end to become dead earth in the midst of healthful vegetating nature? … Were our proud dreams thus to fade? … How reconcile this sad change to our past aspirations, to our apparent powers? Sudden[ly], an internal voice, articulate and clear, seemed to say: Thus, from eternity it was decreed …’ This was the matter of the argument Mary Shelley was instinctively moved to make against the rational-humanist doctrines in which she had been educated. But it was a negative argument – the argument of vanitas vanitatum without its religious corollary; she was impotent to arrive at that or any other positive precept.
But in both Frankenstein and The Last Man she did turn rationalism back upon itself; she demonstrated the flaw in a way of thought which was becoming a way of life. I have called these novels prophetic, because I think that within their fictional premises they show an extraordinary access of foresight: the divided individual whom Frankenstein represents is not unknown to us; and we are aware of the possibility, at least, of universal devastation and the consequence to civilisation, as expressed in The Last Man.
Mary Shelley died a hundred years ago, on 1 February 1851. She was never, herself, an integrated being. Her temperament was unsuited to her environment, for as the daughter of two libertarian Progressives and the widow of Shell
ey, she was expected to further their cause. But she lived to declare she had no ‘passion for reforming the world’ – a phrase associated with Shelley – and to say, ‘I have no wish to ally myself to the Radicals – they are full of repulsion to me …’ It was an attitude that lost her many friends, nor did she find many new ones, because the doors of convention were closed against her.
Her claim to distinction lies in her macabre inventiveness and her strong rational turn of mind. She was not a great novelist, she was not artist enough to be considered one. But the Gothic-rational synthesis of Frankenstein and The Last Man establish her historical importance as a novelist; and their powerful speculative themes established her uniqueness.
[1951]
* Since the first edition of The Last Man was published in 1826, the novel had not been published again at the time of this essay (1951). This essay was originally broadcast by the BBC Third Programme and set up in type by the Falcon Press in 1951 as an Editor’s Foreword introducing the novel, but it was never published as the publisher failed. Eventually a new edition of the novel was published by the University of Nebraska Press (1965) and in the UK by the Hogarth Press with an introduction by Brian Aldiss (1985). This, Muriel Spark’s introduction, was published by The Listener as ‘Mary Shelley: A Prophetic Novelist’ on 22 February 1951. It was translated into German and published by Insel in 1992 as an Appendix to Muriel Spark’s biography of Mary Shelley.
Shelley’s Last House
The Casa Magni stands on the sea-front at San Terenzo, near Lerici, on the Ligurian Gulf of Spezia in Italy. It is a simple, elegant house with a portico of five arches at the front and one at each side, upholding a long, deep terrace. Above the main archway is a worn plaque, with the quaint words (here translated from the Italian):
From this portico on which an oak tree cast its ancient shade; in July 1822 Mary Godwin and Jane Williams awaited with tearful anxiety
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
who was brought from Livorno in a fragile sailing vessel by unexpected fortune to the oblivion of the Elysian Isles.
O Blessed Shores where love, liberty, dreams, have no chains
By the time the poet Shelley came to his Casa Magni he had been married to his second wife, Mary Shelley, for six years. It was the end of April, 1822. He was not yet thirty; she not yet twenty-five. Their wanderings in Europe, especially in Italy, had occupied most of their life together. Shelley, the rebellious and estranged son of an English country gentleman and Mary the daughter of the progressive thinkers and writers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, formed that sort of literary couple who are a living myth, and they knew it. Shelley’s most durable poetry was written during this union and Mary had written her famous novel, Frankenstein, six years before at the age of eighteen. Intellectually, they grew up together.
Their nomadic life in Italy, moving from house to house – Rome, Florence, Pisa, Lucca, Livorno – was still in course when they took the Casa Magni. They were the type of couple who attracted an ever-changing circle of friends. They seldom lived alone. Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister, had actually ‘eloped’ along with Mary when she and Shelley first ran away together; and Claire was almost constantly with them.
Byron, with his mistress Countess Giuccioli, was at Pisa, comparatively nearby. Leigh Hunt was to arrive from England to start a new magazine with Shelley and Byron. Shelley, always attracted to group living, had invited a young couple, not formally married, Edward and Jane Williams, with their two children to stay at Casa Magni. Mary, who had by this time had four children, only one of whom had survived, was now pregnant again. Claire’s five-year-old daughter by Byron had recently died of typhus, alone in a convent, but when Claire joined the group at Casa Magni she had not yet been told.
San Terenzo is no longer an isolated village, but in those days it was little more than a fishing base with a church, a ruined castle and, right on the sea-front, the Casa Magni.
It should be remembered that all five of the Casa Magni set – Shelley, Mary, Jane, Edward and Claire – were still in their twenties. They were very much like a group of unorthodox young people to-day who might take on a place of strange, wild, isolated, beauty for the summer. Shelley dominated the party with his restless genius.
But from the start there was a feeling of crisis in the house. They crowded into the Casa Magni in May. Claire was then told of the death of her daughter Allegra, and was stricken with passionate despair and hatred of Byron who had wilfully taken the child from her. Shelley had one of his eerie visions: while talking with Edward on the terrace by moonlight he ‘saw’ a naked child, with its hands clasped, rising out of the sea. At that time too, Mary, who was having a bad pregnancy, although sensitive to the loveliness, at the same time suffered from mysterious forebodings. She described years later, in a Note on Shelley’s poems of that date how the local fisherfolk unnerved her: ‘Many a night they passed on the beach, singing, or rather howling; the women dancing about among the waves that broke at their feet, the men leaning on the rocks and joining in their loud wild chorus.’
Beautiful Jane Williams enchanted Shelley; she sang and played the guitar. Edward and Shelley ordered a boat to be made. It arrived from Livorno, their plaything for the summer. Shelley was in high spirits. But Mary had a miscarriage of which she nearly died, being saved only by Shelley making her sit in a bucket of ice, against the protests of Jane and Claire. Shelley’s was a febrile temperament. ‘The fright my illness gave him,’ Mary wrote, ‘caused a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times.’
The Casa Magni seems to have become a personality, to be feared and awesomely lived in. The living quarters comprised one large room with three bedrooms leading off it; windows and doors led from here to the great terrace which spread the width of the room and the Shelleys’ rooms. Mary describes in a letter the atmosphere of terror that followed her illness. One day Jane ‘saw’ Shelley pass by the window on the terrace twice in the same direction. She looked out, and seeing no one, imagined he must have leapt from the wall. In fact, he was out of the house at the time. Shelley had a screaming fit one night, and walked in his sleep. He had been frightened by a dream that Edward and Jane came to him with ‘their bodies lacerated, their bones starting through their skins’. In Shelley’s dream Edward said to him, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down.’ Shelley then dreamt he looked on the terrace and thought he saw the sea rushing in. This was followed by a dream where he saw himself strangling Mary.
Shelley had other ‘visions’ at this time: he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace and said to him, ‘How long do you mean to be content?’
Not long after this Shelley and Edward, both now in high spirits, sailed away on a trip to Livorno and Pisa, to establish Leigh Hunt, his wife and numerous children. Shelley and his friend arrived safely in the new boat, and saw to their business; but the return trip was fatal. The boat went down in a storm, with both men and their sailor-boy Charles Vivian, on 8th July 1822. It was not till 19th July that Mary, Jane and Claire gave up hope of their return: the bodies had been washed ashore.
When, in February 1985, I went to San Terenzo to look at Shelley’s last house, I didn’t expect to be able to see inside. It is in the private hands of Dr Arrigo, who now lives and has his medical practice there. However, I rang the bell and when I explained that I wasn’t a patient, but an English writer who had written a book on Mary Shelley, Dr Arrigo very courteously agreed to break his rules of privacy.
To-day, a street runs in front of the house where the sea used to come up to the portico. The ground floor has been reclaimed for living space, but the large room upstairs and the long, handsome terrace are as unchanged as the dramatic expanse of the bay and the dark promontories facing it. That very terrace, the location of so many of those young people’s psychic crises and infectious hysteria, in the days before the tragedy, is where Mary sat in her convalescence, listening to the
howling ritual of the fisherfolks’ nightly sea-dance, and where Shelley met his own image. It is where Mary, Jane and Claire anxiously watched for the sails of the doomed boat. The large room is where Shelley ran, screaming, crossing from his bedroom to Mary’s in his frightful nightmares. There is indeed, on that terrace, a sense of the sea coming into the house. One does not see the road beneath. ‘We almost fancied ourselves on board ship,’ Mary said. Yes, one still does.
Behind the house, the garden rises up to thick woodland. Shortly after Shelley’s death Mary wrote to a friend, ‘The beauty of the woods made me weep and shudder.’ A sense of misfortune hung like a thunder-cloud over Casa Magni that splendid summer of 1822.
I went back again to see the Casa Magni, in the September of 1985. This time, I didn’t ask to go inside. There was a bustle of painters and workmen. The garden was being put in order for a happy family of our days. A brown workman’s face looked out of an upper window. He waved and smiled as I took him on my Polaroid.
[1986]
The Essential Stevenson
[…]
The essential background of all Stevenson’s work is Edinburgh, no matter by what name the streets and landscape of his fiction go by; and it is not merely Scottish speech that Stevenson reproduces, but an Edinburgh way of putting things.