This excerpt comes from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, written in 1818, when she was a teenager. Both Victor and the Creature are ultimately consumed by remorse, that profoundly self-isolating emotion that paradoxically shows in both of them remnants of reflective humanity. This Promethean tale of daring and reckless scientific over-reaching is also one of unbearable alienation from human community, loneliness (like Shelley’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner whose “soul has been/Alone on a wide sea”) and, above all, remorse. The Creature blames his murderous behaviour on the exclusion brought about by his otherness, and his unacceptable, hideous appearance: “I was benevolent and good”, he cries, but “misery made me a fiend”. The monster feels agonisingly excluded from domestic happiness and Victor excludes himself by drawing away into his work. The novel contains many depictions of happy domesticity, but those scenes make outsiders of both Victor and the monster. Victor Frankenstein had started to narrate his terrifying story. She awoke and started to write a tale that began with the words “It was on a dreary night of November”. It was there that, stimulated by their efforts to entertain themselves with a ghost story-writing contest, she experienced a waking dream in which, as she later wrote, she saw a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together” who beholds a “horrid thing” that looks upon him “with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes”. Educated in the advanced scientific and intellectual culture of her day, she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, and spent that overcast, chilly summer with him, Lord Byron and her step-sister on the shore of Lake Geneva. She was the daughter of the radical political philosopher William Godwin and the pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft who died giving birth to her. She had already lived an extraordinary life. Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was only eighteen when she wrote the novel that would give her lasting fame. The dreamlike moment of artistic creation she describes echoes Victor’s account of his moment of perverse creation in the extract here. Stage adaptations of the story in the 1820s brought growing fame, and in 1831 Mary Shelley published an expanded version under her own name and with a preface that situates Frankenstein in the Gothic tradition of “thrilling horror” which she had done so much to revolutionise. The first edition was published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The Frankenstein legend now saturates our culture, so it is illuminating to look back to the moment when this short work of teenage fiction sold 500 copies, and was widely attributed to a male writer.
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