Many, if not most of us, have read the novel or viewed
the movie derived therefrom entitled Frankenstein.
However, few of us have probably ever taken the time to
delve into the facts behind the writing of this long-
lived story and the message it conceals. It reveals the
story of a conflict that existed in the soul of a young
woman, resulting in her writing the world's most famous
horror story. A talk given by Dr. E. Michael Jones at a
high-school commencement ceremony in June, 1995,
analyzes this conflict in a remarkable way. It follows:
I'd like to begin tonight by talking to you about a
girl your age. Her name is Mary. Mary led a sad life in
many ways, and just why it was sad is the point of our
talk tonight because her sadness was a very influential
sadness. Her sad story has been with us for almost two-
hundred years now. It has never gone out of print; it
has been made into plays and numerous movies, one of
which was just newly released on video a few days ago.
But why was this young lady's life so sad?
To begin with, her mother, who was also a famous writer
in her day, died ten days after Mary was born. From
just about the time Mary came into the world she had no
mother, which is a sad state of affairs. Her father
tried to raise both Mary and her half sister, Fanny,
the best he could by himself. But, within a few years
decided to marry again and so Mary eventually found
herself growing up in a household with an unsympathetic
stepmother and another half sister by the name of Jane,
although she soon changed her name to Claire. Mary's
father, like her mother, was a famous writer too. In
fact, Mary's parents taken together were probably the
most famous radicals of their day. They were both
passionately concerned with social justice and were at
no loss in proposing schemes for the betterment of man.
As a result, their house became a magnet for the
political radicals of their day. Mary grew up in a
household where just about everyone had a scheme for
overturning the current order of things and
substituting what they considered a better order in its
place. All of this was primarily the result of a book
Mary's father had written.
One day when Mary was sixteen years old she met a young
man three years older than she who had been influenced
by her father's book on social justice. This young man
was, as time would show, one of the most talented men
of his generation. In fact, this young man would turn
out to be one of the most talented writers who ever
wrote in the English language. His name was Percy and
not only was he talented, he was also rich, standing to
inherit from his father and grandfather a fortune which
would give him an income of $200,000.00 a year---
roughly twenty times what the average worker would earn
in a year, and this was before income tax, because
there was no income tax. Percy was not only rich and
talented, he was also handsome, in the slightly
feminine was that young men in the aristocracy were
handsome. And on top of that he seemed more than a
little interested in Mary. He would spend long hours
with her, sitting on her mother's grave talking about
his plans; plans for the poetry he planned to write,
plans for how he was going to reform society---
beginning, of course, with the Irish.
Needless to say, Mary soon fell in love with Percy and
Percy with Mary. Mary pledged her undying love, and
Percy---with all the sensibility of a young poet of
impeccable education and sensibility, where both nature
and nurture combined to produce something that could be
considered the flower of his generation---pledged his
as well. Mary and Percy decided that a union as
promising as this one could not wait, so they decided
to elope. Taking Mary's half sister Jane along for good
measure, they left before dawn on the carriage to
Dover, and then took ship for the continent, where they
travelled extensively admiring the scenery of the Alps
and the castles along the Rhine at a time when Europe
was yet innocent of things like saturation bombing,
superhighways, strip malls and EuroDisney world. It
sounds a bit like a fairy tale and so it must have
seemed to the teenagers who were involved in this lark.
Two years after they eloped, Mary and Percy were back
in Europe again, this time on the shores of Lake
Geneve. On a clear day you could see Mont Blanc from
the Villa Diodati, where they spent much of their time.
This time with another young aristocrat who was also
extremely wealthy, extremely handsome, and also
destined to become one of the greatest poets in the
English language. Since the weather was bad this
summer, this poet, whose name was George, suggested
that Mary and her friends should while away the rainy
days by writing stories at his villa. Now at this point
I would like to ask you a question: If you were a young
lady of eighteen living a life like this with the most
handsome, richest, and without a doubt most talented
people of your generation at the foothills of the Alps;
if you were living in a castle with Mont Blanc as part
of the backdrop to your own personal little domestic
drama with a man who had the family connections of John
F. Kennedy, Jr., the face of Tom Cruise, the talent of
Stephen Spielberg, and the money of Bill Gates, what
kind of story would your write? Cinderella? Sleeping
Beauty? Paradise regained? Love Story?
The story that Mary wrote, the one just released as a
video last week, was called Frankenstein, subtitled The
Modern Prometheus. Which brings us to a further
question: Why did a lady in a situation as promising as
this write the world's most famous horror story? Before
we write this off as an aberration, we should say that
just about everyone there at the Villa Diodati wrote
horror stories as well. George, or as the world would
come to know him, Lord Byron, brought a physician with
him who anticipated Bran Stoker some seventy years by
writing the first vampire story in English literature,
The Vampire by John Polidori. The vampire in question
was Lord Byron. And as anyone who has read Mary
Shelley's novel can see, Frankenstein was modeled on
the other paradigm of English romantic poetry, the man
who was eventually to become her husband, Percy Bysshe
Shelley. But the question remains: Why did Mary write a
horror story? In fact, a whole series of questions
remain. Why was Frankenstein such a popular story,
popular to the point of never going out of print, to
the point as I said of just being released as yet
another movie just a week or so ago? Let me frame the
question another way with the young ladies in the
audience specifically in mind. If you were romantically
involved with a man who had the good looks and family
connections of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and the money of
Bill Gates and the talent of Stephen Spielberg, what
kind of story would you write? Would you write a horror
story?
Well, it depends. And the perceptive among you may have
concluded rather cleverly that the "it" here depends on
what I mean by being "romantically involved." The term
is a euphemism more often than not for illicit sexual
behavior, even though with reference to Byron and
Shelley, the term romantic has other associations as
well. And it is here that we find the thread that
unravels the tangled sleeve of history and biography
surrounding the ever-popular cultural artifact that
Frankenstein has become.
To begin with, to go back a few steps in our narrative,
Shelley may have been only 19 when he met the 16-year-
old Mary Godwin, but he was already married and the
father of two children at the time. Shelley had married
Harriet Westbrook when she was 16, and now he was---as
he would tell her brutally in his letters---growing
tired of her. He even went so far as to say that he
wanted to be just friends. In fact, his illicit passion
for Mary Godwin convinced him that he had never loved
her in the first place. This was, as we have come to
expect with people like this, not the last time this
sort of thing would happen. Roughly six years after
their trip to Lake Geneva in 1816, Shelley was
intimating the same sort of thing to an attractive
American lady by the name of Jane Williams, who could
and would play the guitar as Shelley and Jane sailed
the Bay of Spezia with Jane's husband in the sailboat
that would eventually kill both of them.
Making brutal personal moves against your 18-year-old
wife, especially when she is pregnant with your second
child, is usually not without consequences either. And
the consequences are usually not good. So roughly six
months after the famous summer with Byron, the summer
during which Mary Godwin gave birth to Frankenstein,
Shelley got some bad news. His first wife Harriet was
found drowned in the Serpentine, an obvious suicide. We
know it was a suicide because Harriet wrote a few
notes: one asking for help for her children, the other
about the kind of person Shelley had become. The
language, I think, is instructive. In a letter to a
friend, Harriet Westbrook Shelley wrote just before she
died that
"Mr. Shelley has become profligate and sensual, owing
entirely to Godwin's Political Justice...Next month I
shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares
not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word
how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is
dead. This is Vampire."
On 9 November, Harriet disappeared. A little over a
month later her body was discovered in the Serpentine,
Hyde Park. The body was, as one might expect, swollen
by over a month's immersion in water. and Shelley later
floated the rumor that she died pregnant by another
man. Since the rumor was never substantiated, its
existence is probably more attributable to Shelley's
guilty conscience than anything else. The fact remains
that Harriet was dead and her death was traceable to
Shelley's sexual desires---first, in his acting on them
and second, and more important, by his attempt to
justify them by his appeal to his father-in-law's free
love ideology. The current object of Shelley's desires,
Mary Godwin, could spend the bleak winter of 1816-17
mulling over the fate of her lover's first wife and
wondering how her life fit into that fate. Frankenstein
is the result of that meditation.
But let's return to our original question: Why did Mary
Godwin write a horror story? If you are familiar with
Frankenstein and Shelley's life, the question becomes
easier to answer. Victor Frankenstein, the young
medical student at the University of Ingolstadt, gets
expelled from the University of Ingolstadt much as
Shelley got expelled from Oxford. In both instances,
the students challenged God. In Shelley's instance, it
was a pamphlet on atheism; in Frankenstein's, the
challenge was more direct. Frankenstein wanted to be
the author of life. He in fact becomes the author of
life but on his own terms, which in effect means he
creates a monster, which in turn destroys people he
loves. One of the people who gets destroyed is
Frankenstein's brother, William. The name is
interesting. It was Mary's father's name; she was the
daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the
world's first feminist. It was also the name Godwin and
Wollstonecraft had chosen for Mary herself, who they
obviously thought was going to be a boy. It was also
the name Shelley and Mary chose for their first child,
the scion of the Shelley family, William, who was to
die at the age of four in Rome of gastroenteritis.
By separating procreation from love, by accomplishing
procreation in the laboratory and not where God
intended it, which is to say in marriage, Frankenstein
created a monster, whose major work was death and
horror. Which leads us to answer our question about why
a young lady connected with the cream of English
society at the time, people of undeniable talent and
seemingly unlimited promise, would write a horror story
as the best evocation of their lives together. It is
because sex disconnected from the moral order leads to
horror. This is not a new story, although it seems to
be a story that each generation has to learn in its own
way. Euripedes said something similiar in the Bacchae
thousands of years ago. As soon as the Asiatic god
Dionysos became an object of worship in any State,
someone is going to die. Sex disconnected from the
moral order leads to death. As soon as the women leave
their looms and go off to dance naked on the mountain
side, horror is soon to follow. The mother of young
Pentheus, the king of Thebes, listened to the music of
undoubtedly thinking that she was engaging in some form
of liberation. When the intoxication finally wore off,
she found herself sitting with her son's head in her
lap, and in answer to her father's question about what
she saw, replied, "I see horror; I see suffering; I see
grief."
This tripartite phrase could be the epitaph for our
culture and of my generation as well. The same sort of
bitter realization dawned on Victor Frankenstein in the
chargrined aftermath of his experiments with life.
"When I thought of him," Frankenstein says of the
monster he created, "I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became
inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life
which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed." How many people
in our time have had the same thought about
"life...thoughtlessly bestowed" and have had recourse
to abortion as a solution, and in recourse to that
solution have created horror instead? Then as now, sex
disconnected from the moral law leads to horror. It
happened in Mary Shelley's time too. The seminal
political event for her parent's generation was the
French Revolution. William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft were the revolution's major
propagandists in England. Then as now, what began in
sexual excess ended in an orgy of terror. The crucial
link in this progression was the Marquis de Sade, whom
Erik Kuehnelt-Leddhim refers to as one if not the main
progenitor of the French Revolution. In Leftism
Revisited he refers to the Marquis de Sade as "the
grandfather of modern democracy." "The French
Revolution," he says at another point, "truly lived up
to de Sade's visions. In a sense, the Divine Marquis is
the patron saint of all leftist movements."
The monster's second victim in Frankenstein is a woman
by the name of Justine, the name of the Marquis de
Sade's infamous pornographic novel. We know that Byron
possessed a copy in April of 1816. We know that Mary
Shelley began writing Frankenstein in May of 1816 in
Byron's villa. So it is not unreasonable to think that
she was familiar with de Sade's classic piece of moral
and political pornography. One person who clearly
thinks Mary Shelley read the book is the British film
director Ken Russell, who has Mary perusing an
illustrated version in his film on the famous Byron
Shelley summer of 1816, Gothic. I like to think that
Mary Shelley was familiar with the book as well, and
that Frankenstein is more than just a passing reference
to de Sade. Frankenstein is at its deepest level a
protest against what de Sade---and by extension the
Enlightment---stood for. If you carelessly bring life
into the world without regard to the moral law (which
is another definition of sexual liberation) you
invariably create monsters which will return and
destroy not only you, but your friends and family,
indeed, your entire culture as well.
Mary Shelley felt this particulary acutely at the time.
She was an 18-year-old girl, pregnant by a man who was
at the time married to someone else, reading the
Marquis de Sade's vision of the future. A vision which
had already led to the horrors of the French
Revolution. In gazing at the pornographic illustrations
in Justine, she was smart enough to understand what
role 18-year-old girls were going to play in the brave
new world by revolutionaries like her father and soon
to be husband. "Woman," said the divine Marquis in
Justine, is a machine for voluptuousness." Sexual
license is in its way ultimately just a way of treating
people like machines, and as Mary must have understood
by reading Justine, the fate of female machines was not
a happy one. The trajectory of his novels is the
trajectory of pornography itself. When sex is separated
from the moral order, someone ends up getting tortured
and killed.
Frankenstein is a protest against the vision of the
world proposed by the Enlightenment, whose vision was
proposed in explicit terms by the Marquis de Sade. It
keeps getting retold because we still live in that
world. The protest is still necessary because the
Enlightenment is still with us in the form of in-vitro
fertilization, and test tube babies, and an $8 billion
a year pornography industry. In his latest encyclical
the pope denominates this world of the Enlightenment,
the "culture of death."
Why would anyone choose death, we ask? Or better still,
how could anyone choose death over life? The answer is
simple. The choice is made in installments, and the
first installment is the separation of sexual desire
from the moral law. Everything follows therefrom as a
matter of course. The summer of love in San Francisco
almost 30 years ago, to give an example closer to home,
always ends up with something like the Manson murders
as its logical outcome. This is not a new revelation
for Christians. In his epistle to the Christians of his
day, St. James says that passion leads to disordered
desire and when that disordered desire is acted upon
that it gives birth to sin, and that when sin reaches
its maturity it too gives birth, this time to death.
"Everyone who is tempted is attracted and seduced by
his own wrong desire. Then the desire conceives and
gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it too
has a child and that child is death" (James 1:14-15).
Disordered passion leads to horror and death every bit
as inexorably as the sun comes up in the morning. The
fact that we are here right now means that we had to
learn that truth, for the only alternative to learning
it was to die, as many of my friends had to learn the
hard way, and perhaps many of your parents' friends as
well.
The good news is that truth and life are embodied in
one and the same person, Our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ. His yoke is easy; his burden is light. His
truth is the truth that rescues all our desires from
the jaws of death, which is where they inevitably tend
without Him and without the law of morality which God
has written on our hearts.
Mary Godwin Shelley may have been just 18 years old
when she wrote Frankenstein, but she was smart enough
to see that the alternative of conforming our passions
to the law of the Lord of Life was, in Victor
Frakenstein's own words, "the birth of that passion,
which afterwards ruled my destiny." Or as the monster
himself says to Victor Frankenstein the "modern
Prometheus," "you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy
creature, to whom thou are bound by ties only
dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You
purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life?"
So, since it is customary to leave the graduating class
with some charge, some grandfatherly admonition, I, a
new frandfather, leave you the new graduates with this
one, "don't sport with life." There is no practice
life; not in the one you live or the one you create.
This is the only life you have. It is also eternal, but
can be spent in an eternity of suffering or an eternity
of bliss. Since you are the next generation, the ones
who will carry the torch beyond where we left it, it is
the only life we have as well. Those who sport with
life find, as Victor Frankenstein did, that their
desires beget monsters, and the life they created so
thoughtlessly will return to destroy them.
