Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Our Struggle with God (Part I)

Post #8 in the blog series “I Read Dead People” on faith and great literature.

Note bene: This time around, I wish to divide the following post into two sections, partly for the sake of reading length (especially as folks go into their weekends :) and partly because the first remains more tightly bound to the literary sphere, while the second is intensely personal. I will continue to aim to post every Tuesday and Friday. I hope you enjoy both, and that they each challenge and nourish your own faith walk in some way. - Caro

Author’s Name: Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley

Dates:    1797-1851

Country of Origin: England, though she eloped to the Continent and lived much of her younger writing life abroad 

Genres: Although most famous as a novelist, her work spans many genres, including short stories, essays, biographies, children’s literature, travel writing and drama. Her letters and journals reveal much about her complicated life and the intensity of her grief, along with the pressures she faced as a woman writer in her time (to move in circles of men and be accepted, to support herself and child as a widow by her writing, and the tension she felt between creativity and propriety).

Brief Religious Heritage or Association:  Mary was the daughter of illustrious parents, both of whom were famous (if not notorious) in their age. Her father was the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin, whose radical work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) which influenced such thinkers as Thomas Paine. His novel Things as they are: or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), considered the first mystery novel, provides a scathing critique of aristocratic privilege. Godwin had been raised in a strict Calvinist household, but came to reject many of its tenets and eventually embraced a utilitarian and rationalist atheism. Her mother, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, had become a famed author in her own right and a strong presence in the Revolutionary pamphlet debate by the time she and Godwin (eventually) married. After surviving a violent childhood with much upheaval, and making her own way as a governess, Wollstonecraft’s intellect received attention and she was taken into Unitarian circles. While she believed in the goodness and perfection of God, however, her faith was essentially her own system, with an emphasis on reason and morality. Although neither author believed in the institution of marriage – Wollstonecraft once referred to it a “legalized prostitution” – they did marry so as to prevent their impending child from becoming a bastard. Godwin had been a long time bachelor; Wollstonecraft had a previous daughter as the result of an affair with an American during the French Revolution. When Wollstonecraft died 10 days after giving birth to Mary, Godwin raised his natural daughter and adopted her other. He remarried a Mrs. Clairemont, adding a step sister and brother to the brood. Mary received an unusual education for a girl in her time. She was schooled extensively by her father in all subjects, including science, philosophy and classical languages. Although Godwin withdrew from much of his political life following Wollstonecraft’s death, Mary remained steadily and impressionably exposed to his wide circle of famous and erudite friends, including, perhaps most notably, the overtly Christian poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (whose poem The Ancient Mariner greatly influenced Frankenstein). Later, married to the self-proclaimed atheist poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and following his death, Mary Shelley herself owned a searching and an openness to the Christian religion. Never an atheist herself, she found solace in a faith that sought – much like the metaphor of her famous monster – to patch meaning together out of suffering.

Random Fact from the Author’s Life:  Mary was just 16 yrs old when she eloped with the then-married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She wrote Frankenstein the following year. In addition to suffering several miscarriages, only one of her four children she birthed survived past toddlerhood. Disowned by her father, she was left to raise her remaining son on her own after Percy drowned in a boating accident in the Gulf of Spezia.

Focus Text(s) for Discussion Here: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (loaded subtitle!), first published 1818. Having been born already of much suffering and alienation endured at a young age, Mary’s tale grew from a ghost story contest among her, Shelley, Lord Byron and John William Polidori (who authored the original Vampyre). Frankenstein is considered the first science fiction novel in English, and a hallmark Gothic novel. It was first published anonymously; people believed it must have been penned by her husband. Great outrage broke out and the novel, though popular from its very first appearance, came under attack once it was confirmed that a woman had written such “shocking” material.

Suggested Edition of this Text/Biographies/Resources: I prefer the first 1818 edition of the text, as amendments were made to the later pirated 1826 and then revised 1832 versions (to “appease” a sensitive audience). Again, the Norton critical editions remain a staple for me. My editor today is J. Paul Hunter. The two biographies that I would most recommend are: Muriel Spark’s Mary Shelley and Emily Sunstein’s  Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, which reads like a novel, or the soap opera that, in many ways, Mary’s life was!

There is an abundance of criticism on this text, but a few key, not-to-be-missed discussions (in my evaluation) include: Chris Baldick’s In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing; Bennett, Betty T. and Stuart Curran, eds. Mary Shelley in Her Times; Anne Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. New York: Methuen, 1988, and the enduring (for good reason) study by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. All you Bronte fans will love the latter, too.

How this Text has Challenged, Inspired and Fed my Faith Walk

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay

To mould me man? Did I solicit thee

From darkness to promote me? —

Mary Shelley chooses the above lines for the epigraph to her novel Frankenstein. The words are spoken by Adam to God in John Milton’s Paradise Lost after the Fall (Book 10, lines 743-45). I discuss John Milton and sin in Paradise Lost here. 

As epigraphs are intended to do, the lines set the atmosphere for the entire story. And in the case of Frankenstein, the epigraph echoes deep within the text itself.

Frankenstein is often categorically a misunderstood novel. Cultural representations, especially those by Hollywood, have been misleading. In fact, of the many film versions made of the novel, not a single one stays relatively true to the text to its very end. This is telling, I think, as it points to some essence within the story itself that is, well, hard to fully grasp. And yet it remains provocatively relevant to us today, for many reasons (if not for the debate over scientific discovery and ethics) alone.

The image of a monster with nuts and bolts sticking out of its neck, stitched together and then shocked alive by a mad scientist, and who then terrorizes villagers and takes an equally monstrous bride, has become a Halloween caricature of what I would argue to be actually one of the most poignant characters in literary history. Mary Shelley’s “monster” is in fact a reanimated being who displays great sensitivity and longing for companionship, but who is rejected by its ambitious maker, and then anyone else he comes in contact with (barring, tellingly, one blind man).

The monster remains nameless. He desires to learn, to love and be loved, to belong. He hurts and, finally, after much rejection, seeks to hurt in return. Mary Shelley’s “monster” is not a green-skinned murderer gone wildly astray, but a re-membered, rejected man with a pointed agenda for gaining vengeance simply because negative attention from the parent he seeks is better than no attention at all.

Sound familiar?

The monster lives within each of us. I certainly see him in my toddler’s tantrums!

And of course, this is Satan’s modus operandi, in his going against God’s will, simply because it is God’s will. Satan, stuck in his own personal hell, would rather have negative attention from God, and from us, God’s precious creations, than no attention at all.

Charles Spurgeon defined wisdom as the right use of knowledge. Just because we know something doesn’t always mean we have to act on it, or use that knowledge. As we well know from Eden, goodness can call for rejection or lack of action just as much as acceptance and action. Prayerful discernment, that is, responding with fear and love of God, is the right way. But as Adam and Eve also show us, we as humans remain suckers for the low-hanging fruit.

And the appetite for ambition – or that hubristic longing for knowledge – comes with a warning, in this novel.

The novel owns a tripartite framework, resulting in a kind of “Russian doll” effect. First, the entire story is told from the point of view of the ambitious young sea captain Robert Walton, who is writing it all down as letters to his sister back in England (interestingly, her initials “MWS” are the same as the author’s, who also resides as another feminine presence “outside” of a text in which creation takes place only by the masculine). Walton is trying to find a way to the North Pole, both for increased wealth in trading paths, but also to discover “the secret of the magnet.” Along the way, his ship gets mired in ice and he begins to face a revolt from his desperate crew, who wish to abort the mission and return home. While Walton remains fixed on his goal, he takes aboard a stranger who has been wandering through the frozen wasteland. This stranger, Victor Frankenstein, proceeds to tell Walton the tale of his life, from his loving childhood through to the creation of his monster and his subsequent torment, as he lies dying. It is through Frankenstein’s words to Walton that we learn of the monster’s story, as told by his own words at the very heart of the novel.

The result is a narrative structure that falls deeper and deeper into concentric circles, much like Dante’s representation of hell. As the reader, we lose track of Walton’s recording presence and become entranced in the monster’s story. By the end, we are jolted back to the reality of Victor on his deathbed, and the monster’s very real presence unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Victor relates his happy childhood, but when his mother dies he becomes obsessed with trying to discover the “secret of life,” to prevent others from dying. Initially, his curiosity is well-intentioned. But eventually, he becomes so immersed in his work as to lose sight of his health, his friends, his fiancé, his world. The result of his focus is the successful discovery of how to reanimate the dead, but he hasn’t thought of the consequences of actually carrying such an experiment through. As a result, when his creation comes to life – and seeks to connect with his “father” – Frankenstein abandons it, and refuses to take any responsibility. The monster, left to his own devices, tries to make his way in the world. But because he is perceived as physically hideous, and without any guidance or companionship, he eventually falls into a cycle of crime as a form of punishing the creator who refuses to love him.

The two characters, creator and creation, then enter into a deadly fugue of perpetual mutual torment. One pursues the other in an attempt to destroy his life. They become relentless shadows of each other, literally chasing each other across the map. In fact, the two blur so much it becomes hard to tell the difference between them. This is seen in how readers even today still persist in conflating the scientist with his experience. We call the monster “Frankenstein” when in fact the monster has no name.

This is an important detail.

“We name ourselves by the choices we make, and we can help in our own naming by living through the choices, right and wrong, of the heroes and heroines whose stories we read. To name is to love. To be Named is to be loved. So in a very true sense the great works which helps us to be more names also love us and help us to love,” writes Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water.

The symbolism of naming and being named runs deep and wide. It is the first responsibility God gives Adam (responsibility for our decisions and actions also being an important theme in this book). In this sense, it is God’s invitation for Adam to co-create alongside Him, and to join in the responsibility of creation. Hence, we call this first naming “Adamic.” Having a name represents having meaning within a community, belonging to someone and to somewhere. We cannot be the subject without owning a name. We cannot be identified or valued or included.

The tortured text of Mary Shelley’s novel rests in the fact that the two characters who most desire acceptance by each other, and love for each other, reject each other, and refuse to forgive each other. Their relationship, instead of growing in respect and compassion, becomes toxic to both themselves, and all they touch.

We all know how that works.

God puts us in families for a reason.

I once saw a t-shirt that read: “Every family has one.”

It made me chuckle.

Until I thought, “Am I that one?”

The monster shows up at Walton’s ship just as Victor dies. The missed reunion is the final, true tragedy of the story. Earlier, Victor had made Walton promise that he would kill the monster. But after Walton speaks with him over Victor’s dead body, he lets the wretched monster go – this being who still longs for reconciliation with his now dead father, in spite of coming to torment him.

Walton decides to turn his ship back to home. He opts in favor of saving his crew and avoiding further peril. He considers himself a failure for giving up on his dream, but we, as the readers, know he has succeeded – that he has made the “right use” of knowledge, and valued human life over his own selfish desires.

In doing so, he has in fact accomplished what he set out to do: discover the secret of the magnet. How we live in attraction and repulsion within these great life forces and so, with each other and with our God. How the truth of mercy, compassion, forgiveness and love must override the selfishness of such temptations as ambition, vanity, fear and obsession.  For when we draw close to God, we are electrified by him, and consequently, we pass that power on to all else we touch, as Henry Drummond puts so beautifully in his tract The Greatest Thing in the World.

After reading Paradise Lost, the monster often compares himself to Satan: “I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me.”  The image he is referring to comes from Satan’s speech in Paradise Lost, Book IV, lines 72-80:

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;

And, in the lowest deep, a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven.

O, then, at last relent:  Is there no place

Left for repentance, none for pardon left?

Even Satan realizes that we bring our own hell with us. His utter despair is palpable. Asking for forgiveness and accepting grace are the only means out of this fragile, fallible and self-induced web.

And yet, Satan does not ask … in fact, he reasons away asking. Shelley’s monster, too, and his maker, also fall into this trap. The trap of preferring self over the otherness, and yet oneness, of God. The trap that dooms us to self-torment, and which brings others into our painful vortex … spiraling down …

Where is God in this novel?

There is no mention. Not at all. Surely this is not an oversight on Mary Shelley’s part, especially in her day and age. Surely again, just as the absence of a name speaks so powerfully in understanding her monster, so the omission of any kind of divine presence speaks more loudly than words.

Silence is an answer, perhaps the truest answer, as I discussed in my post on C.S. Lewis and the journey of the soul.  

The effect of Shelley’s final pages echo deep within us, rendering us still.

God hasn’t abandoned us.

We just insist on bringing our hells with us.

… Stay tuned for part II on this text, Tuesday