The year
1831 was significant for Mary for another reason: She published a revised
version of Frankenstein. (In 1824, her
father had made some slight changes in the book for another republication.) In
1831, she made some substantive changes.
In the original (1818), for example, she had Victor marry his cousin Elizabeth,
but in the revision she becomes, instead, a girl his family had adopted.
(Whatever the case, Elizabeth does not live long, thanks to … you get three guesses.)
Mary also removed some of the scientific references. And there were other
changes that, collectively, merit—in the view of most scholars—the adjective significant.
But the
great gift to fans of Mary and the book is her 1831 “Introduction,” in which
she explains the genesis of the novel—those stormy nights and days on Lake
Geneva in the summer of 1816, the ghost-story-writing project that Byron had
suggested, her frustrations about her initial failure to come up with a good
idea.
Then—this
famous passage about what happened late one night: When I placed my head on the pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be
said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the
successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual
bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision,—I 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.[i]
In that “Introduction,”
she also credits Bysshe for encouraging her to expand her story into a novel,
and she refers to her work with a phrase that has become famous enough to serve
as a title of other books about her and her work—my hideous progeny.[ii]
Most
scholars agree that Mary embellished—even sanitized—that summer and its various
doings. (They were a rowdy crew—Byron, Bysshe, Mary, Claire, Dr. Polidori.) But
there is certainty, too, that there is a core of truth in Mary’s bright apple.
[i] “Frankenstein; or, The
Modern Prometheus,” The Novels and
Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1996),
179.
[ii] Ibid., 180; on Amazon.com, search, using the title line, “hideous
progeny,” and you will find quite a selection, including editor Steven Earl
Forry’s Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations
of Frankenstein from the Nineteenth
Century to the Present (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1990). It’s a
book I’ve used a lot.
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