Abstract
‘Every thing must have a beginning’: Mary Shelley’s words are offered as, a decade and a half after Frankenstein’s publication, the author of one of the most famous novels about beginnings and their consequences attempts to tell the story of Frankenstein’s own origins. As the first two epigraphs above suggest, Frankenstein is a story in which acts of creation themselves are questioned, even rejected, but placed as they are above, alongside quotations from women’s writings of the 1790s, including by her mother, Shelley’s questions about creation begin to look like they had already started some time before. The questioning of his maker by Frankenstein’s creature echoes the turn to myths of creation by women writers of the 1790s, as they asserted the rights of women against political and social injustices rendered newly challengeable in the climate of debate ushered in by the French Revolution. For Mary Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson and Mary Wollstonecraft, one way such challenges might begin is with creation. The nature of creation, the history of women’s place in society and the origins of their social oppressions: such concerns appeared to hold the key to some of their questions about women’s current state, and the possibility of ameliorating it. In part, such lines of enquiry manifested an analytic reason characteristic of radical thought of the time, which repeatedly sought to trace effect to cause, to lift the curtain of social appearances and reveal ‘things as they are’ — a method of thought condemned in Edmund Burke’s denouncement of a revolutionary determination to tear society into a ‘chaos of elementary principles’, and at odds with his own desire to uphold such social fabrics as already existed.5
Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?
Paradise Lost X 743–5, epigraph to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
‘Hateful day when I received life! … Cursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?’
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein1
The fairest of created works was made
To share, with man, th’ empire of creation,
T’enjoy its comforts and its sweets, its pains
And suff’rings
Anon., epigraph to Mary Ann Radcliffe, The Female Advocate (1799)
Wherefore are we
Born with high Souls, but to assert ourselves?
Epigraph to Mary Robinson, Letter to the Women of England (1799), from Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703)
‘I know I am in some degree under the influence of a delusion — but does not this strong delusion prove that I myself “am of subtiler essence than the trodden clod:” … have I desires implanted in me only to make me miserable?’
Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788)2
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Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto), vol. 1. p. 134.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 195.
See Marilyn Butler’s introduction to her Oxford University Press edition of Frankenstein (1993) for a convenient route into this work. Other scientific contexts for Shelley’s text have also been mooted: see Laura Crouch, ‘Davy, A Discourse: A Possible Scientific Source of Frankenstein’, Keats-Shelley Journal, 27 (1978), 35–44, and Jan Golinski’s Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), which links Frankenstein not directly to vitalist science but to the new chemical discoveries of the late eighteenth century. For a discussion of the materialism of both Mary and Percy Shelley, see Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 139–55.
See Erasmus Darwin, The Temple of Nature, or The Origin of Society (London, 1803), Additional Note 1 on Spontaneous Generation, p. 7. Shelley misremembers the experiment as on ‘vermicelli’.
Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England (London, 1799), p. 44.
Mary Ann Radcliffe, The Female Advocate (London, 1799), pp. 40–1.
Golinski, Science as Public Culture. For women and science, see pp. 76 and 102; also Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), chs 1–2.
Memoir, prefaced to John Thelwall, Poems, Chiefly Written in Retirement (Hereford, 1801), p. xxiii.
Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air Pump (Princeton University Press, 1985). Golinski, Science as Public Culture, p. 102.
For one recent study of Romantic representations of natural force, see Ted Underwood, The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–1860 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005).
Eliza Fenwick, Secresy, or The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Ontario: Broadview, 1998).
Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 40–4.
Julia M. Wright, ‘“I am ill fitted”: Conflicts of Genre in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy’, in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre, ed. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 149–75.
Terry Castle, ‘Eliza Fenwick and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing’, The London Review of Books, 17:4 (1995), 18–19.
Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 40–54. See also his introduction to his Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mary and The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. vii–xxi, esp. p. xi.
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), repr. in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 113.
Simon Schaffer, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 82–98 (p. 92).
Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 149.
Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 310.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Animation and Vitality in Women’s Writing of the 1790s. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_7
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