4 - Mary Shelley

Summary

INHERITANCE AND ORIGINALITY

The Preface to the first edition of Frankenstein aims to distance the novel from hackneyed Gothic convention, but in doing so it re-emphasizes one element which, it has been argued here, most crucially characterizes the genre. We are told that the ‘event on which this fiction is founded’ – the creation of a man from inanimate matter – has been considered by scientific writers ‘as not of impossible occurrence’. That is what distinguishes this story, however incredible, from ‘a mere tale of spectres or enchantment’. But the Preface then goes on to echo the claim made in the very first ‘Gothic story’, The Castle of Otranto; the claim that by ‘creating more interesting situations’ than would be allowed in realist fiction, it is possible to examine the ways in which ‘mere men and women’ would ‘think, speak and act’ in ‘extraordinary positions’.1 It is this vision of Gothic writing as a laboratory of the mind that is restated and reaffirmed in the Preface to Frankenstein:

The event on which the interest of the story depends …was recommended by the novelty of the situations which it developes; and, however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield. (F. 3; emphasis added)

Mary later was to identify Percy Shelley as the author of the Preface (see F. 197), but this does not discount its value as an authorial statement. Rather, it is salutary in drawing attention to the fact that the view put forward in the Preface was one held in common by her and her associates (notably Percy), and by the writers that most strongly influenced her, who also happened to be her mother and father, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

The facts of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's life are well known and readily accessible. Rather than reviewing them here in any detail, I want to begin by examining the tributaries of women's Gothic that meet in her work through her familial literary inheritance. Her genealogy is indeed inseparable from her ambitions as a writer.