This Monstrous Thing(85)
I remembered the feeling in the days after Oliver died, the impossible loneliness of it, and the way I’d watched him wear solitude for two years after. The same sort of sadness was playing about her face, and before I knew what I was doing, I stopped walking and said, “So come with me.”
She stopped too. “What?”
“Come with me. Back to Ornex. You can stay with us until you get things figured out on your own, and after that . . . I don’t know where I’m going to end up, but if you want to come along, you could do that too.” Her mouth twisted, and I added quickly, “It doesn’t have to be forever, but you shouldn’t be alone like that. No one should.”
She stared down at the ground for a moment, then looked up at me. The sunlight caught her eyes, turned them sea-glass blue, and she smiled, the first true, genuine smile she had given me in perhaps the whole time I’d known her. “That’d be good.”
“So you’ll come?”
“Yes,” she said, and her smile went wider. “I’ll come.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I would have dragged you along if I had to.”
She laughed, and it sounded so extraordinary that I laughed too. Ahead of us, the sun was collapsing into the rooftops, turning the sky wine-colored and rosy. Mary’s house was long out of sight, and though the street around us was full of people, it felt for a moment like there was no one there but the two of us. Just Clémence and me, and without saying anything to each other, we started walking again at the exact same moment.
Side by side, and sure as clockwork.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is the story of two monstrous young men—the medical student who refuses to believe in mortal limitations, and his creation, whose wild heart proves itself to have tremendous capacity for both love and hate. The creator of this creation myth, Mary Shelley, was herself much like her two lead characters—a bold, ambitious young woman caught up in and trying to make sense of a changing world around her. When I first got the idea of writing a Frankenstein reimagining and began my research, I was amazed to discover that Mary’s life was not that of a proper Regency woman—it was full of dramatic and shocking stories, even by today’s standards. There were secret love affairs and scandals, midnight escapes and haunted castles, heartbreak and grief and misty moors, and through it all, a stalwart young woman struggling to find her footing in her own impossible life. The more I learned about Mary, the more I realized I wanted to write about her as much as I wanted to write my reimagining. The plot of my novel finally came together for me when I realized I could do both.
Mary Godwin Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of one of history’s most important feminist texts, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and William Godwin, a prominent English political thinker of the late 1700s. Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Mary, and Godwin raised his daughter to be “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind1.” He encouraged Mary’s curiosity in an age where women were often silenced, and she grew up educated, liberal, and acquainted with a range of important figures, including American Vice President Aaron Burr and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose poem “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is referenced throughout her books.
When she was seventeen, Mary became involved in a forbidden romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a notorious and radical poet who already had a wife and several children when he and Mary began to meet in secret at her mother’s grave. When William Godwin found out about their relationship and disapproved, the couple fled from England to the European continent, beginning a period of travel as they tried to evade their families’ displeasure and Percy’s many creditors. By the time they arrived in Switzerland in the summer of 1816, Mary was broke, shunned by her family, and suffering from depression in the wake of her and Percy’s daughter’s death.
The couple took up residence with Lord Byron, the “mad, bad, and dangerous2” celebrity poet in his lakeside villa in Geneva, where he entertained a wild crowd who practiced free love, reveled in substance abuse, and read from a variety of scandalous books that ranged from German ghost stories to scientific texts on the possibility of reanimating dead tissue. They spent most of their summer indoors—due to a volcanic eruption that disrupted weather patterns, 1816 was known as “The Year Without Summer”—and in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary called it “a wet, ungenial summer . . . incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” It was that confinement, combined with their healthy diet of opium and dark literature, that prompted Lord Byron to issue a challenge to his guests: Which of them could write the best horror story?
Mary’s entry in that contest was the resurrection scene from Frankenstein. Upon Percy’s encouragement, she expanded it into a novel, which was published anonymously in 1818 when Mary was only twenty-one. She claimed the inspiration came to her in a dream—“I saw the pale student . . . kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir,” she wrote in her introduction.
But that dream was likely a product of the world in which she was living. Frankenstein can be read as a science creation myth, a product of Mary’s Age of Enlightenment—a period defined by a societal movement away from God and toward scientific scholarship. What happens when we take divinity out of creation, and instead man becomes the vehicle by which life is made? An examination of Frankenstein as an Enlightenment-era creation myth was one of my main access points to the story, and the one I found the most fascinating. Months after my curiosity with the novel began, I heard it misidentified as the first steampunk novel. I knew that was incorrect—Frankenstein could not be steampunk because it was contemporary for its time, and the definition of steampunk involves creating an altered past—but I started to wonder what that steampunk creation myth might look like. What was the mechanized equivalent of Adam and Eve, and where were the lines drawn between God, men, and monsters when those men were made from metal pieces? With the Industrial Revolution in full swing in 1818, I decided to shift the focus of Frankenstein from Enlightenment anxieties to industrial anxieties.