Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
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Mary Shelley on Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A bad summer and a dare she didn’t dropThe summer of 1816 was catastrophically cold across Europe, the atmospheric fallout of Mount Tambora’s 1815 eruption. Shelley, Percy, Lord Byron, and Byron’s physician John Polidori were effectively imprisoned at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, which is where Byron issued the ghost-story challenge that the others soon abandoned.
It proved a wet, ungenial summer and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.
Percy and Byron quit their attempts within days. Shelley was still trying to find her entry when, half-asleep one night, the central scene arrived fully formed: not an idea she worked toward, but a vision that presented itself with its moral already attached.
I saw — with shut eyes, but acute mental vision — I saw the pale student of the unhallowed arts 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 with an uneasy, half-vital motion…
Long before that summer, she had been building the habit that would let her answer Byron’s challenge at all. She describes a childhood in which writing was not schoolwork but her chosen occupation during free hours.
As a child, I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to ‘write stories.’
By 1816 she had lost a premature first baby, eloped with a married man, and was nursing a second child. She was not a girl dabbling in a parlor exercise. She was a writer who had been waiting for the right material.
How she wrote it
Daily work, anonymous publication, and a preface she had to earnThe public story of the book’s origin, anchored to the lightning-bolt vision and the Villa Diodati, came from the 1831 preface Shelley wrote thirteen years after the first edition. By then she had been widowed, she was supporting herself as a writer, and she had spent years fielding the same question about how a young woman could have produced something so dark. The 1831 preface opens by naming that question directly.
I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me—‘How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?’
Her journal from the summer and autumn of 1816 tells a different story about how the book actually got written: not in visions, but in short, unremarkable daily sessions. A single week’s entries from August of that year, reproduced in The Millions, show the rhythm she kept.
Sunday, Aug 18. – Talk with Shelley, and write… Wednesday, Aug 21. – Shelley and I talk about my story. Finish ‘Herman d’Unna’ and write… Saturday, Aug 24. – Write.
The novel arrived at her publisher in 1817 and was published anonymously in January 1818, with Percy’s preface, under circumstances that left many readers assuming a man had written it. Her journal entry for the day the book came out records the event in exactly four words, then moves on.
Read Tacitus – Walk – S reads Gibbon – Fran[kens]tein comes
Her name did not appear on the novel until the 1823 second edition. The 1818 first edition belonged, publicly, to nobody.
When she did finally claim the book in the 1831 preface, the act of claiming it carried a complicated tenderness. The happy days she refers to were already gone: Percy had drowned in 1822, and at least two of her children had died. The preface rewrites the book’s origins as something she had survived rather than something she had made.
And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.
The personal thread
The dream that rehearsed the novelIn March 1815, eleven days after her first child was born prematurely, the baby died. What Shelley wrote in her journal over the following days is one of the most direct windows into the emotional material that became the novel’s central preoccupation with life created and then abandoned.
Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived. / Awake and find no baby.
She began writing Frankenstein the following year, while nursing her second child and pregnant with her third. Victor Frankenstein’s creature is brought to life and immediately fled by the person responsible for his existence. That structure was not invented at a distance.
What she wants us to sit with
What we owe to the things we bring into existenceThe subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, was Shelley’s own. Prometheus stole fire from the gods and was condemned to eternal punishment for it. Shelley built that same arc into the novel and stated its moral plainly in the 1831 preface, arriving at the sentence that works as the book’s thesis: creation that mimics divine power carries a cost the creator cannot foresee and cannot escape.
Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
When the creature appeared on a London theatrical playbill in 1823, the production listed him not by name but as a series of dashes: ’––––––.’ Shelley’s response to the choice, quoted in The New Yorker’s account of the novel’s afterlife, was immediate and approving. She had structured the book so that the creature is its most articulate narrator, the figure who speaks at greatest length and with the most precision, while remaining the only major character the novel refuses to name.
This nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good.
That combination, the sharpest voice and no name, is where the book’s central question lives: what do we owe to the beings we bring into existence, and what does it mean to create something and then refuse to account for it?