Frankenstein created Adam, as Mrs. Shelley describes. Then, he created Justine. And this is where the biography becomes, as Mary calls it, a pack of lies. It concludes with an implausible and melodramatic chase across the Arctic, with Frankenstein pursuing the monster he created, for “revenge.” Seriously, even I write more believable fiction than that! Those of you who have read the book will have noticed how different those chapters are from the earlier ones, which recount entire conversations verbatim, and describe Frankenstein’s experiments in detail.
To understand her motivations, you have to understand the complicated woman who was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, only nineteen years old when she started writing the Biography. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and one of the few female members of the Société des Alchimistes at that time. She died when Mary was only a child, although we know that Mary identified with her mother and often read her writings. Mary’s father, the political radical William Godwin, was also a member. Mary herself never became a member of the society—we do not know why. Her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, was a member, as were Lord Byron and his friend Dr. John Polidori. Evidently, it was quite fashionable to be a member of the society in the early part of the century. It was not as secretive as it later became, and just scandalous enough to tempt men like Shelley and Byron.
So, think of who was gathered at the Villa Diodati that summer in 1816 when Mrs. Shelley began work on the Biography. Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, who was pregnant with Byron’s child. About halfway through the summer, they were joined by Polidori’s friend Ernest Frankenstein, Victor’s younger brother and the sole remaining member of the Frankenstein family. It was an unusually wet summer for Switzerland: rain kept the inhabitants of the villa indoors. To pass the time, they told stories, and that was when Mrs. Shelley learned the details of Victor’s life, from Ernest himself. In the records of the society, there is a letter from Ernest to the president of that time. I record here a portion of it:
“Although you will scarcely credit it, Monsieur le Chevalier, the Creature came to me himself to tell me of my brother’s death in Scotland. He gloated over his vile crime, which I did not hesitate to call patricide, and vowed that he would revenge himself upon all the Frankensteins, forever. And upon that she-creature my brother had so unadvisedly made for him. I told him that she was likely dead already, if not of drowning then of exposure and starvation, and indeed I have heard nothing more of her. If I do, I will destroy her myself. Such an abomination should never have been allowed to walk the Earth. It is bad enough that my brother created Adam, but that he would create an Eve both stronger and more clever than man? That should never have been permitted, and if Waldman had known, he would have brought the full wrath of the society down on my unfortunate and misguided brother’s head.”
Ernest knew how his brother had died. He knew about Justine. In that company, among members of the society sworn to secrecy, and Mary Shelley, daughter of trusted members, I believe he revealed the truth. So why did Mrs. Shelley write her book, and knowing the truth, why did she lie?
It must have been, in part, to deflect attention from the society. If Adam appeared in Europe, he would be seen as the creation of a lone university student who had already paid the price for creating a monster. He would not be connected with the Société des Alchimistes.
MARY: I told you so.
But Mrs. Shelley also did something else: in her Biography, Justine is never created. Frankenstein decides a female monster would be too dangerous, and throws her body parts into the sea.
Why did Mary Shelley never join the Société des Alchimistes? Because she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and the stepsister of Claire Clairmont, whom Lord Byron was treating as a mistress he had already tired of. He would later abandon her daughter Allegra, who died in a convent in Italy. She knew the truth: that Frankenstein had created a female monster, and that the female monster had escaped. And she hid that truth. Knowing of Justine, she did the best she could, for another woman. She erased her from the story.
MARY: That’s highly speculative, you know.
CATHERINE: But I’m convinced it’s true. Look at the sympathy with which she wrote of Justine Moritz.
That summer, Mary Shelley was only nineteen. She had run away from home with Percy, who was already an acclaimed poet. She was in the home of the famous and scandalous Lord Byron, among men who were learned and powerful. And in their midst, she did something revolutionary. She allowed Justine to write her own story.
JUSTINE: I like to think it’s true, and that in her own way, Mary Shelley was also a sister to me. . . .
As I’ve written this book, I’ve sometimes wondered what she would have thought of us and our adventures, and of course the book itself. I think she would have excused its defects (yes, Mary, I know there are some, don’t act so astonished) and praised it as an accurate portrayal of a group of women trying to get along in the world as best they can, like women anywhere—even if they are monsters. Sometimes I imagine her sitting in my room, in the chair by the window, as I write—marveling at the typewriter and how much faster it is than a quill pen! Whenever I’m not sure what to say, when the words don’t come and I sit there staring at my notebook, she says something encouraging, one author to another. I swear, sometimes I can see the shadow she casts. . . . And then I nod at the chair, as though she were really present, and get back to writing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel began as a question I asked myself while writing my doctoral dissertation: Why did so many of the mad scientists in nineteenth-century narratives create, or start creating but then destroy, female monsters? I didn’t get a chance to answer that question within the dissertation itself, so I tried to answer it here, in a different way.