Pale Shadow of Science. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ Science Fiction’s Mother Figure

      IN ANTHONY BURGESS’S NOVEL, BEARD’S ROMAN WOMEN (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girl friend in an airport bar. Both work in what it is fashionable to call ‘the media’; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says ‘I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of women’s liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life ….’

      Even today, when our diet is the unlikely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems extremely far-fetched; how much more so must it have appeared on publication in 1818. Yet Beard’s girl friend puts her finger on one of the contradictions which possibly explains the continued fascination of Frankenstein, that it seems to know a lot about life, whilst being preoccupied with death.

      This preoccupation was undoubtedly an important strand in the character of the author of Frankenstein. Marked by the death of her mother in childbirth, she was haunted, at the time of writing Frankenstein, by precognitive dreads concerning the future deaths of her husband and children. By embodying some of this psychic material into her complex narrative, she created what many regard as that creature with a life of its own, the first SF novel.

      This perception will bear examination later. Meanwhile, it should be pointed out that Frankenstein is generically ambivalent, hovering between novel, Gothic, and science fiction, just as its science hovers between alchemy and orthodox science. To my mind, precisely similar factors obtain even today in the most celebrated SF novels. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land contains magic; Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels hover between legend, fairy tale, and science fiction. ‘Pure’ science fiction is chimerical. Its strength lies in its appetite.

      Mary Shelley’s life (1797–1851) forms an unusual pattern, with all the events crowding into the early part and, indeed, many transactions that would mould her character occurring before she was born. Both her parents played important roles in the intellectual life of the time. Her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793). Godwin also wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest, even excitement, today. The influence of both these works on Godwin’s daughter’s writing is marked. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was a brilliant woman who wrote the world’s first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Wollstonecraft came to the marriage with Godwin bringing with her a small daughter, Fanny, the fruit of her affair with a charming but elusive American, Gilbert Imlay, who deserted his pregnant mistress in the Paris of the Terror.

      A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Distracted by the failure of her love for Imlay, she tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. She survived to marry Godwin and bear him a daughter, Mary. After the birth, puerperal fever set in, and she died ten days later.

      Godwin remarried. His second wife was a Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, and she brought with her two children by her previous marriage, Charles, and Jane, who later preferred to be known as Claire and bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, then four years old, were further upset by the arrival of this new step-mother into their household, and the alienation was no doubt increased when Godwin’s new wife bore him a son in 1803. The five children crowded into one house increased Mary’s feeling of inner isolation, the refrain of which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relationships, is seen embodied in the five children, no two of whom could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted.

      Mary grew to be an attractive woman.^[1] Her reserved manner hid deep feelings baffled by her mother’s death and her father’s distance – two kinds of coldness, one might say, both of which are embodied in her monster’s being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived, he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his callow unfaithfulness to her. She was also a blue stocking, the product of two intellectuals, and through many years maintained an energetic reading programme, teaching herself several foreign languages. Moreover, she had the good fortune to know in childhood many of the celebrated intellectuals and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Trelawny said of Mary that ‘her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher.’

      Enter Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, son of a baronet. An emotional and narcissistic youth, full of admiration for Godwin’s revolutionary but now somewhat faded political theories. When nineteen, he had married Harriet Westerbrook. He soon fell in love with Mary, and she with him. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane with them.

      Europe! What freedom it must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what close companionship Shelley, handsome and intellectual, must have offered. But these youthful travellers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, the fields uncultivated, the villages and buildings destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote to invite Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley’s second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she also was pregnant.

      Catastrophe followed the harum-scarum young lovers. Mary’s child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts; it was premature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary went to Switzerland again, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire, as Jane now called herself. On the shores of Lake Geneva, they found accommodation at the Maison Chapuis, next to the Villa Diodati, where the poet Lord Byron was staying. Although Claire threw herself at Byron’s head, and managed to encompass the rest of him too, it was a happily creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pursued as well as the more touted facets of the good life. Here, Mary began to write Frankenstein. Summer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble.

      Mary’s self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty-two, by which time the Shelley menage had moved to the West Country; Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein, and was now also pregnant. Then news reached them that Shelley’s wife Harriet had drowned herself, not in the Thames, but in the Serpentine. She had been far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary were married almost immediately.

      The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Six and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley was drowned whilst sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, the little boy, William, was dead, as was another child, Clara; Mary had also had a miscarriage, but a further son, Percy Florence, was born. He alone of Mary’s progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire’s daughter by Byron, the little Allegra, had died.

      The rest of Mary’s life is curiously empty, lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, both the great poets were gone – a loss to English letters. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her husband. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. She wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), which enjoyed some success, short stories, and one novel, The Last Man (1826) which, by its powerfully oppressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, Godwin, died; Shelley’s difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.

      This painful СКАЧАТЬ