Adventures in Imagination: The Art and Writing of Kirstin Mills

Moving Monsters: The First Frankenstein Film, 1910 (Anniversary Series #8)

October 31, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Having explored some of the many fascinating and spooky contexts surrounding Mary Shelley’s novel, this final post for my 200th Anniversary Series looks at the novel’s entry into the glamorous world of film. Frankenstein has entered popular culture in a massive way, largely influenced by the famous 1931 film starring Boris Karloff with his neck bolts and lumbering frame, but did you know that this isn’t the earliest film adaptation of Frankenstein? Over twenty years earlier, in 1910, Edison Studios released a 15-minute feature that has become one of the most interesting films of the silent era. Designed to be accompanied by music, it loosely adapts Mary Shelley’s plot to represent the first time the monster was seen on screen. (more…)

Frankenstein, Galvanism & the Science of Raising the Dead (Anniversary Series #7)

October 30, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

A nervous crowd huddles in the makeshift amphitheater of a house near London’s Newgate Prison. The hum of voices rises and falls with the excited whispers and troubled exclamations of the surgeons and attending officials who have come to witness this spectacle. The lamps flicker overhead, casting a pool of wan light onto a table in the centre of the crowd; upon it, the pale, lifeless body of a man, hanged only hours before. In life he had been a murderer; now the purple bruise of the hangman’s noose swells darkly on his cold neck. The man leading the show busies himself around the corpse with shining metal equipment. An electric battery stands nearby, and the man leans over the corpse brandishing two conducting rods. The crowd hushes. A scintillating tremor of expectation sizzles through the mass of eager bodies, perched, awaiting what new horrors might be opened up by this latest scientific breach of the natural world – this time, of the boundary between life and death. The rods connect with the cold skin, a crackling buzz sounds – the electric pulse is delivered. A moment of quiet, and suddenly the dead man’s body moves. His eyes snap open and glare, glass-like, wide with animated horror at the men whose terrified gaze stares back. (more…)

Frankenstein’s Phantoms: Mary Shelley on Ghosts (Anniversary Series #6)

October 29, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Everyone remembers Frankenstein‘s monster – helped along in large part by the 1931 film adaptation that made him so lumberingly, hulkingly corporeal. But fewer people remember that Mary Shelley’s most famous novel is also peopled heavily with ghosts, and a general pervading sense of the ghostly that reflects Shelley’s fascination with the supernatural and a genuine spiritual world. (more…)

Frankenstein, Death & the Tragic Life of Mary Shelley (Anniversary Series #5)

October 28, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Frankenstein is all about death. Death is embodied not only in the creature, composed of dead human and animal body parts, scientifically brought to life, but especially in the many deaths this creature brings about – from Frankenstein’s child brother William (and indirectly, Justine, who the monster frames for the crime), to Frankenstein’s closest friend Henry Clerval, and even his new bride Elizabeth Lavenza. Deaths are also present in other ways: just before Frankenstein leaves for Ingolstadt to complete his education, his mother dies from illness, and his father later dies of grief and shock after Elizabeth’s death and the harrowing incidents haunting Frankenstein’s life. Indeed, death begins to stalk Frankenstein in ever greater measure until his own final moments, which leads Frankenstein to assume that he lives a cursed life – a wretch, doomed to wander the earth alone, in the company only of his departed loved ones who people his dreams (his waking life has become a living nightmare). This may sound like a tragic, gothic plot, but did you know that Mary Shelley’s life was itself even more tragic, and that it even began to eerily resemble, in many ways, the cursed fate of her eponymous character?

Grave of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mother of Mary Shelley, Old St Pancras Churchyard, London, UK, gothic, headstone, gravesite, romantic

The previous post in this Anniversary Series explored Mary Shelley’s early loss of her mother when she was only 10 days old, and the ways that she lived with a sense of the ghostly at her mother’s grave to feel connected to this most important figure in her life. Her early familiarity with death created a keen awareness of the devastating effects of loss and tragedy – a feeling that Shelley would only experience more frequently, and in greater measure, as her life went on. Just 16 years after the publication of Frankenstein, she would feel like her life was doomed to the lonely sadness of one who has lost, one after the other, nearly every one closest to her. On the 2 Dec 1834, in language that strongly recalls Frankenstein’s habitation in his dreams where he finds the only solace from his death-stalked life, Mary Shelley wrote of her own life in her journal:

“Loneliness has been the curse of my life – What should I have done if my Imagination had not been my companion? I must have grovelled on the earth – I must have died – O but my dreams my darling sun bright dreams! They peopled the Churchyard I was doomed so young to wander in.”

After her half sister Fanny, and Percy Shelley’s pregnant first wife Harriet both took their lives within months of each other – both of which would haunt Mary’s conscience – some of the most significant, crippling and lasting losses that Mary Shelley endured were those of her infant children. After suffering the loss of her own mother after childbirth, Mary herself would struggle with pregnancy illness, premature births, a near miscarriage in which she would have died had her husband Percy not thought to sit her in a tub of ice to stem the bleeding until help could be sought, and most tragically, despite her five pregnancies, only one child would survive past infancy. Her first child was a daughter, Clara, born two months premature when Mary was just 17. The attending physician wasn’t hopeful about the baby’s survival, but Mary was determined. She managed to get the infant to nurse, after which the physician admitted more hope for the child. However, mere weeks after her birth, Mary’s daughter died, not waking from her sleep. Mary wrote to a friend, “I am no longer a mother now.”

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Oil portrait of William Shelley by Amelia Curran, 1819.

This first loss of a child had a devastating and lasting effect on Mary. She wrote in another journal entry of a dream she had that would profoundly impact her ideas of rejuvenating life in Frankenstein:

“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. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits.” (19 March 1815).

It was unfortunately an experience that would recur with haunting frequency in her life. Her next child, a son named William (after her father and brother, but in eerie likeness to the murdered boy of her novel), and the daughter, Clara Everina, that followed, would both die in short succession. William was three years old when he died, the darling of both his father and mother. Mary Shelley would later write in a letter that she “ought to have died on the 7^th of June” with William. Another letter records her “wretchedness and despair” at having lost “two only and lovely children in one year – to watch their dying moments.” She felt she was “not fit for anything and therefore not fit to live.”

‘The Funeral of Shelley’ by Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889.

As if these tragedies weren’t enough, Mary would also suffer the death of her husband Percy when she was only 24 years old, and after only 8 years together. While they were abroad, Percy had taken his boat out for a sailing trip, but it was caught in a storm. When he didn’t return from his trip, Mary spent days anxiously awaiting news, until finally Percy’s drowned body was discovered washed ashore, identifiable only by his clothes and the book he was carrying in his pocket. His body was temporarily buried on the beach, before being exhumed and then cremated on the shore. During the cremation, an attending friend noticed something refusing to burn, and he plucked what was thought to be Percy’s heart (possibly calcified from earlier bouts of tuberculosis) from the flames. It was eventually given to Mary, who kept it with her for her remaining days.

Mary’s resilience in the face of the many tragedies in her life can partly be put down to the way she turned to her imagination, creativity and writing, but though she would continue to support herself and her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, with her writing, Mary would never quite recover from these losses. Three months after her husband’s death, she wrote: “Tell me the truth, Beloved, where are you? And when shall I join you? They are all gone & I live—if it be life to be as I am.” Years later she wrote: “instead of the cheerful voices of the living, I have dwelt among the early tombs of those I loved.” When Mary herself died in 1851, Percy’s heart was found in her desk drawer, wrapped in a sheet of his poetry, along with locks of Clara’s and William’s hair.

What do you think of Mary Shelley’s tragic story? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Mary Shelley & her Mother’s Ghost: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave, London

October 27, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts Gothic Landscapes No Comment

A bitterly cold day has settled over London. The teeming bustle of St. Pancras Station lies nearby, but a hush falls over a small churchyard tucked in the streets behind it. The few remaining leaves overhead rustle dryly against the skeletal fingers of the trees that scrape the suffocatingly close, grey sky. In summer this unassuming, almost humdrum cemetery would be teeming with life, tourists huddled around one particular headstone – the one-time resting place of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as its inscription reads – but now there is something hauntingly barren about the place. Golden lamps glow behind the small windows of the church, an inviting warmth that seems to amplify the creeping cold outside that raises up from the hard frosted ground wrapped tightly around its silent inmates. (more…)

Overheard Tales: Coleridge, Shelley and Frankenstein’s Poetic Inspiration

October 26, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Mary Shelley’s early life was made up of many wonderful and formative moments that would nestle in her memory, stoking her imagination, eventually to reemerge within her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein. For Day 3 of Frankenweek, this post explores one of these moments, experienced during her unique childhood, and its lingering impression on her. As the daughter of two of the most eminent writers of the age, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the young Mary Godwin was connected with many of the nineteenth-century’s greatest thinkers, who would often visit to converse with her father. Mary was often allowed to join these conversations, as a listener and occasional contributor. Undoubtedly the most significant of these visitors – and the one who would leave the most indelible impression on Mary – was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (more…)

A Frankenstein Travel Guide: Mary Shelley’s Journeys into the Sublime (Anniversary Series #2)

October 25, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts Gothic Landscapes No Comment

The second in my Frankenstein at 200 Anniversary Blog Series looks at one of the most crucial elements of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the profound sense of place that Shelley evokes as Frankenstein pursues his creature through increasingly wild and inhospitable landscapes that are repeatedly linked with death and the supernatural. From the seas of ice that open and close the novel, threatening to swallow and crush Walton’s ship, to the glacial summits of Mont Blanc, landscapes indicate the wild, sublime and insurmountable limits of nature that Frankenstein has attempted to transgress in his scientific creation of the ‘monster’, but which ultimately still wield their immense and unforgiving power over his mortal frame. They also represent Frankenstein’s increasing distance from the safe comforts of home, family and society – Frankenstein’s only comfort in such wild and harsh terrain is the spirits of the dead that seem naturally at home in such regions. But did you know that Shelley’s depiction of these landscapes is drawn from her own exciting travels, and that her experiences in these incredible real-life places form one of the central inspirations behind her novel? (more…)

The Birth of Frankenstein: Ghost Stories, Vampires & Villa Diodati (Anniversary Series #1)

October 24, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

Today marks the beginning of Frankenweek, and I’m celebrating with the first post in my Frankenstein at 200: Anniversary Blog Series. The story of the birth of Frankenstein as part of a ghost-story-telling competition in a storm-lashed lakeside villa is almost as haunting and fantastic as the novel itself. In the summer of 1816, the young Mary Godwin, only 18 years old, had just travelled to the continent with her lover, the married Percy Shelley, their infant son, William, and Mary’s step sister, Clare Clairmont. After meeting with the celebrated poet Lord Byron and his travelling physician Dr John Polidori in Geneva, they settled in a small lakeside cottage only a short walk away from Byron’s much grander rented mansion, the Villa Diodati. The parties met frequently, and it was at this villa, surrounded by vineyards and with magnificent views of the towering mountains and the shimmering lake beneath, that Frankenstein experienced its first sparks of life.

There was something strange and foreboding about that summer. Unbeknownst to the travellers, the devastating eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had sent giant clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere, which resulted, on the other side of the world, in weather so dark, rain-swept and gloomy that it became known as ‘The Year Without a Summer.’ Across Europe, snow still clung to mountains long after it should have melted away, torrential rain caused rivers to burst their banks, carrying bridges away, flooding crops and causing famine and disaster, and the impenetrable clouds laid a darkness over the land so that candles were lit in the day. In her letters Mary describes the ‘almost perpetual rain that confines us principally to the house,’ and the magnificent power of the electrical storms that beat over the heads and rolled through the jagged mountains that rose behind them: ‘The lake was lit up – the pines on Jura made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an instant, when a pitchy blackness succeeded, and the thunder came in frightful bursts over our heads amidst the darkness.’

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An engraving of Percy Shelley in the grounds of Villa Diodati

On the 16th of June, 1816, Mary Godwin’s party found the storms so wild and unforgiving that they were bound to stay the night at Villa Diodati. Under the flickering light of candles, interspersed with the flashes of lightning from the raging tempest outside, the party read aloud from a German book of horror stories, translated into French, called Fantasmagoriana. Full with references to the occult, ghosts, murder and death, the stories had a thrilling effect on the guests. Inspired by these tales, Byron proposed that each of the party should come up with their own ghost story. The proposition was eagerly accepted, and the two poets, and Dr Polidori had soon all come up with their ideas, though each was abandoned in turn.

Only Mary had yet to come up with a story. She was finding it difficult: here was her chance, as the daughter of two of the country’s most eminent writers and thinkers, to prove herself worthy of her heritage. She busied herself to think of “a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.” When teasingly asked each morning if she had thought of a story, she was “forced to reply with a mortifying negative.”

From left to right: Dr John Polidori; Percy Shelley; Mary Godwin (later Shelley); Lord Byron; Clare Clairmont.

One night, after listening to the conversations between Shelley and Byron about galvanism and the possibilities of re-animating corpses, Mary experienced a waking nightmare that would prove the fortuitous birth of her most famous creation. As her “imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided” her, she: “saw the pale student of 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.” Terrified by his creation, and hoping that “the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life,” the artist attempts to sleep, to shut out the horrible vision, but “he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.”

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The party at Villa Diodati in the 2018 film ‘Mary Shelley’

Terrified by her waking nightmare, Mary’s own eyes snapped open, a “thrill of fear ran through” her, and she desperately tried to ground herself in the realities of the room about her. It was harder than she thought: the “hideous phantom” haunted her, and she tried to distract herself by thinking again of her “tiresome unlucky ghost story.” She thought “if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened,” and then, “swift as light,” she realised that she had already found it. “What terrified me,” she wrote, “will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” The very next day she transcribed her dream, beginning with the words that open Chapter Four of Frankenstein: “It was on a dreary night of November.” She would continue to rigorously develop the story over the next few weeks, and return to edit and revise it, with the editorial assistance of Percy Shelley, over the following years, but the work of that fateful night was done: Frankenstein was born.

Villa Diodati as it stands today

Enter the Vampires: The Tales of Byron & Polidori

Frankenstein wasn’t the only tale to emerge from this ghost story telling competition. Two of the earliest vampire tales in English literature also arose from these storm-lashed, spooky beginnings. Though he quickly abandoned his attempt for the story competition, Lord Byron’s entry was published (without his consent) within his collection Mazeppa: A Poem in 1819, entitled ‘A Fragment’ (it is also known as ‘Fragment of a Novel’ and ‘The Burial: A Fragment’). The story follows the narrator’s journey to the East with an elderly man, who subsequently dies, his face instantly blackening into decay, and is afterwards buried. Byron abandoned his tale here, but Polidori’s writings reveal that Byron intended the dead man to return as a vampire: according to him, Byron’s story “depended for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive upon his return, and making love to his sister.”

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An illustration from Varney the Vampire, another popular vampire thriller, and an 1884 copy of Polidori’s The Vampyre, attributed to Byron

This fragment inspired Polidori to write his own vampire tale, The Vampyre, modelled on Byron’s fragment and also published in 1819, with his main character, Lord Ruthven – an aristocratic, depraved, seducing vampire – even modelled on Byron himself! Throughout the nineteenth century, the story was often credited to Byron rather than Polidori, much to the annoyance of both. This story is very important for vampire fiction, bringing it squarely within the notice of English literature and influencing its more famous vampire cousin, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and subsequently the tradition of vampire fiction ever since). Polidori’s Introduction explains the superstition of vampires, which spread from East to West and held “that vampyres nightly imbibed a certain portion of the blood of their victims, who became emaciated, lost their strength, and speedily died of consumptions; whilst these human blood-suckers fattened—and their veins became distended to such a state of repletion, as to cause the blood to flow from all the passages of their bodies, and even from the very pores of their skins.” Lovely!

What do you think of this way of creating stories? Join the conversation in the comments below!

Notes:

Read Polidori’s The Vampyre online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087-h/6087-h.htm

Read Frankenstein (and Shelley’s 1831 Introduction) online here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/42324/42324-h/42324-h.htm

Frankenstein at 200: Special Anniversary Blog Series

October 18, 2018 In Academic Research All Blog Posts No Comment

This year marks 200 years of one of the world’s most famous and enduring novels: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. First published in 1818, it quickly became a perpetually reincarnating creature of its own, transforming through multiple retellings, adaptations, references and parodies throughout the next 200 years. Central in each retelling is the iconic image of the ambitious scientist haunted by the horrors of his monstrous creation, most famously depicted in Jame’s Whale’s 1931 film featuring Boris Karloff’s iconic “monster,” complete with neck bolts and green skin, ushered into being by Frankenstein’s triumphant exclamations, “It’s alive!!” (more…)