Tag Archives: Mary Shelley

New Paperback Edition of Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley

A new paperback edition of “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries” with an updated cover is available for bookstores and libraries through Ingramspark and through Amazon. The cover is of Mary Shelley as she writes her book and dreams of her visit to the castle on the Rhine where her experiences would suggest a story to her. The novel tells the story of Mary Godwin’s elopement with Percy Shelley and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont on a journey of discovery as they walk across France to Switzerland.

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Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?

!9th Century Seduction Scene -Byron and ClaireIn present times we tend to have a modern revisionist view of human behavior in the past. Some behavior in relationships and sex seems a constant from ancient forgotten times to the present, but the rules of society, the prism through which we view them as acceptable or taboo changes and shifts. What was common to men and women in days of old has new meaning in the age of #metoo. I was recently reminded of this in a discussion of the movie version of Mary Shelley. The thematic premise of which seemed to be how Mary was seduced by Percy only to find out later he was married, and Claire was seduced and abandoned by a libertine Bryon, and that Mary was deliberately denied credit for writing Frankenstein because she was a woman. While the question of credit due for Frankenstein’s authorship is a complex subject, especially in a time when anonymous publication was fairly common and the risk to social reputation was as much a consideration as any financial reward, and deeply bound in the difficult search for a publisher for a manuscript rejected several times, I’ll stick to the seduction discussion.

I find it odd that what is intended to be a feminist view of a patriarchy chooses to make women so weak in character that they are unable to make deliberate choices in their own lives, at the mercy of scheming cads. In the recent movie version of the story, Shelley and Mary meet in Scotland, she falls for him, then later discovers! he is married. And then, that Shelley encourages Mary to be pursued by Hogg in some kind of free love invitation which horrifies Mary when Hogg seems to chase her around the furniture. This architecture is inaccurate at best, and disingenuously revisionist.

Mary, of course, knew that Shelley was married before she ever met him. He was in continual correspondence with her father William Godwin, and supplying Godwin with financial assistance when Mary was as young as fourteen. Mary first met Shelley when he came to visit Skinner Street with his new bride, Harriet Westbrook. It was with Harriet that Shelley had eloped with to Scotland, where they married privately and then remarried in London at a formal ceremony, where the Godwins may have been witnesses. Percy Shelley had been a visitor to Skinner Street while Mary was away in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.

Harriet Shelley, as the aggrieved wife, accused Mary as the romantic schemer, writing at the time that, “Mary was determined to seduce him, she is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him.” This is hardly the picture of the unwitting naïve waif presented in the film version of the story.

As for Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he was more infatuated with Shelley’s wife, Harriet, than he was with Mary. It had been Harriet who Hogg had pursued with an intensity of ardor that seems to be the inspiration for the chasing around furniture, and rebuffed by her. As for Mary, he was her confidante during the difficult days of pregnancy and the tragic loss of her first child, a time when Shelley was desperately dodging creditors. Shelley is notoriously on record as suggesting in the spirit of their shared philosophy of “free love”, that Mary could be with Hogg. Shelley meant this as an expression of freedom for her, that she enjoyed Hogg’s company and if they were true to their ideals he would not stand to the way. Mary rejected this idea outright, having no expressed desire for anyone beyond Shelley. If she did have a romantic thought for someone outside her relationship with Shelley it would have been Byron, with whom she seemed to share a sympathetic temperament and a respect of his talent. But any thought of a physical liaison had been tempered by her step-sister Claire’s difficult relation with Bryon.

In the film version, this is treated as Byron seducing and then abandoning Claire. However, it is much more likely that it was Claire who deliberately sought out Byron, who already had the public reputation of “mad, bad and dangerous to know”, from his scandalous affair with Caroline Lamb. Claire had an early infatuation with Byron as a famous figure of the time, like a modern girl might with a pop star. Claire (her actual given name was Jane, but she took on Claire as a romantic affectation), had an interest in the theater and sought an introduction to Bryon when he was a director of the Drury Lane Theatre. Drawing on her family connection to William Godwin and an introduction, very likely through Bryon’s publisher John Murray, she had delivered to him a copy of her, then and forever lost, unpublished manuscript of “The Idiot” or Ideot, written following the elopement trip with Mary and Percy, asking that he might consider it for a play and give her his reaction as a mentor, as many a young hopeful writer of today seeks out a peek at an over the transom unsolicited submission.

She went to see him to gain his response and later wrote of the sad treatment he had given as his reaction to her writing. Whether on this visit, he, like a Regency Harvey Weinstein demanded a sexual payment for her naïve theatrical ambitions, or instead, like a romantically infatuated groupie, she seduced him, I think is entirely open to conjecture. Claire had demonstrated a willfulness toward a sexual freedom notion of “free love” that was much more literal than the more intellectual ideas held by Shelley and Godwin, which was more about the financial strictures of legal marriage than it was about sex. In either case, the result was a pregnancy after apparently one brief encounter on a theatre office or London hotel residence casting couch.

It was Claire who then designed to pursue Bryon with the intent to snare his name in marriage with the evidence of the child growing in her. Claire suggested the trip to Geneva to introduce them to Bryon. Whether Mary or Shelley were aware of Claire’s intent is unknown, but it is clear that once the pregnancy was revealed to Lord Byron, he wanted nothing to do with a continued relationship with her. He agreed to financially support the resulting child, but his interest in the mother was less than nil. Byron’s temperament and Mary’s were much more compatible, and he likely felt much less a risk of his fortunes in a friendship with her than Claire.

Their friendship, even from afar, would continue until Byron’s death, with Mary caretaking the publication of his work along with Shelley’s, and a fondness in their Italy travels, even as Shelley’s relationship with Byron had become strained.

As for Shelley and Claire, whether he ever had a sexual relationship with her is also a matter of two-hundred years of conjecture. Mary herself insisted vehemently that they did not. Could she have been naïve about it, willingly blind, or just publicly defensive, protesting loudly to assuage the rumors? Maybe. Shelley clearly enjoyed Claire’s company at some level. She was less serious than Mary, more frivolous, and they could share ribald humor together that Mary chided as disgusting. Shelley was more amused by Claire’s antics than Mary, who seemed to view their life in each other’s constant company as mostly annoying. The salacious scandal rumors at the time among London gossips, the equivalent of tabloids, were that William Godwin had “sold” both of his daughters to Shelley, and every form of lascivious behavior was attributed to them. It had even been suggested that Claire’s daughter Ianthe was Shelley’s child and not Byron’s, but none of the actual participants ever accepted this.

Did Percy Shelley sleep with Claire or encourage an orgy of free love? This is a question Mary clearly answers in her Secret Memoirs, at least up to that point in her story and found at the heart of their journey.

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Shelley & Byron Lore House on Lake Geneva for Sale

mary_shelley_plaque_nernierAn historic property on the shore of Lake Geneva associated with the lives of Percy and Mary Shelley and Lord Byron is offered for sale for €2.7 million. A plaque on the house declares that Mary Shelley wrote some pages of Frankenstein there in April of 1816. Short of the known facts that Mary did not start Frankenstein until after June of 1816, and did not arrive in Geneva from Paris until May of 1816, the house is surely connected to the travels of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

​The now custom designed four bedroom home with beautiful lake views of the Jura Mountains is located in Nernier, Haute Savoie France, on the southern shore of Lac Leman and dates back to 1739. In Percy Shelley’s journals, he reports that on his boating trip with Lord Byron as his companion to circumnavigate the lake while Mary remained with Claire in the house they had rented, one of their first stops was at Nernier. Percy had noted that Polidori was unable to join them on their trip, due to an ankle sprain. The trip continued to the Chateau Chillon on the Swiss side, which inspired Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon.

nernier_house_shelleyThe present house at the time in 1816 was an auberge guest inn for travelers around the lake. It has been reconstructed into a modern four bedroom single family home on upper and lower floors, which had been owned for many years by a French family, who have decided to sell, now that children have grown and moved away.

The property is situated on the harbor’s edge in the little medieval village of Nernier, about twelve miles from the Cologny neighborhood where the Villa Diodati is to be found, and across the lake from the Chateau Coppet, where Shelley and Byron visited Madame DeStael. The house can be reached by road from Geneva along the lake, or a ferry crosses the lake from Nyon on the Swiss northern shore to Yvoire on the French south shore. The winter ski resort of Portes du Soleil is an hour’s drive away.

nernier_house_interiorThe house is described by the real estate listing with Leggett Prestige as having an entrance hall on the ground floor with an open-plan kitchen, dining and living area and a balcony with idyllic views across the lake. The first floor has an office area and lounge with a fireplace and another balcony. The second floor has a landing with a built-in double closet and two bedrooms, one with its own balcony.

At the time of Shelley and Byron’s stay there he described it in rather a different frame:

“Leaving Hermance, we arrived at sunset at the village of Nerni. After looking at our lodgings, which were gloomy and dirty, we walked out by the side of the lake. It was beautiful to see the vast expanse of these purple and misty waters broken by the craggy islets near to its slant beached margin. There were many fish sporting in the lake, and multitudes were collected close to the rocks to catch the flies which inhabited them.

On returning to the village, we sat on a wall beside the lake, looking at some children who were playing at a game like ninepins. The children here appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats; but one little boy had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equaled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed. There was a mixture of pride and gentleness in his eyes and lips, the indications of sensibility, which his education will probably pervert to misery or seduce to crime; but there was more of gentleness than of pride, and it seemed that the pride was tamed from its original wildness by the habitual exercise of milder feelings.

My companion (Byron) gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play. The imagination surely could not forbear to breathe into the most inanimate forms some likeness of its own visions, on such a serene and glowing evening, in this remote and romantic village, beside the calm lake that bore us hither.

On returning to our inn, we found that the servant had arranged our rooms, and deprived them of the greater portion of their former disconsolate appearance. They reminded my companion of Greece: it was five years, he said, since he had slept in such beds. The influence of the recollections excited by this circumstance on our conversation gradually faded, and I retired to rest with no unpleasant sensations, thinking of our journey tomorrow, and of the pleasure of recounting the little adventures of it when we return.”

I’m sure the beds have much improved, and if you’re got a couple a million handy and looking for a beautiful location to live in France with a literary history, this might be a golden opportunity.

Photos Courtesy Leggett Prestige BNPS

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Free Frankenstein Audiobook from Audible for Pandemic Listening

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Dan StevensIn the face of the coronavirus pandemic, Audible is stepping forward to serve all those closed schools, kids, and stay-at-homes with free access to a broad assortment of titles, mostly works in the public domain of classic literature, fable and fairy tales and children’s stories. One of them available without requiring a password or login is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, narrated by Dan Stevens of Downton Abbey fame.

The free audiobooks are available at stories.audible.com.

Other classics include the likes of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, narrated by Thandie Newton of Westworld, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Jack London’s Call of the Wild , Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and children’s titles like Winnie The Pooh. and Beatrix Potter stories.

The intent is for learning opportunities for younger folks, but while you’re at home waiting for the Covid-19 epidemic to pass by your door, why not read up on a few classics.

According to the Audible site: “For as long as schools are closed, we’re open. Starting right now, young and old everywhere you go can quickly stream an amazing selection of stories, including titles in six distinctive languages, that will assist them to go on dreaming, studying.”

All stories in five collections are free to stream to desktop, laptop, phone or tablet.

If you want to listen to Mary Shelley’s Secret Memoirs for a free trial with a signup if you’re new to audiobooks. Free with Trial at Audible.

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Mary Shelley’s Invisible Girl meets the Invisible Man

Engraving of Rosina by Boxall of Mary Shelley's Invisible GirlA recent auction notice appeared for a sale at Bonham’s auction house in London. One of the items was listed fairly simply as “The newly discovered handwritten manuscript of part of The Invisible Girl, a semi-autobiographical short story by Mary Shelley (1797-1851)” with an auction sale price estimate between 2,000-4,000 pounds. It was being offered with items of other female authors, including a first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that had been in the possession of Rowling’s literary agent, estimated at 40-60,000 pounds at auction and letters from Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, a collection of what could be argued as the three most commercially successful women writers, or writers of any gender if you count movie box office.

The Mary Shelley manuscript offered consisted of a few pages of writing, densely packed on letter paper. There was no date of the writing on the documents but the appearance of the story in Keepsake was 1833 and said to be written in 1832. And even though Shelley’s Frankenstein shares shelf space and movie marquee history from Universal Pictures with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, first serialized in Pearson’s Weekly in 1897, they had little in common, but would be make for perhaps an intriguing pairing.

The Invisible Girl is one of a hand full of Gothic tales that Mary Shelley published in The Keepsake. Magazine in from 1829 to 1834, capitalizing on her notoriety following the re-publishing of Frankenstein under her name. Her writing credit for the story in the Keepsake was not her name, but “By the Author of Frankenstein”. Others stories she wrote around the same period include “Ferdinando Eboli” (1829), “The Evil Eye” (1830), “Transformation” (1831), “The Dream” (1833), and “The Mortal Immortal” (1834).

The story includes several common motifs of the Gothic Terror Tale like those read during that summer by Lake Geneva, featuring an unhappy heroine, overbearing tyrant guardian, and a ghost figure wandering the landscape, like the story originally thought of by John Polidori. And like several other works by Shelley, “The Invisible Girl” employs a framed narrative often referred to in Gothic literature as a “Fragment”, like the Walton letters of Frankenstein, a device rather akin to the “found footage” horror film style of today. It wouldn’t be referred to as a “short story” until sometime later. The frame involved surrounds a portrait of a girl, and the telling of the tale to a visitor.

The Invisible Girl is a pure Gothic Tale that involves a ghost, but is not supernatural, more a mood piece of lost love and longing. It takes place on the coast of Wales, and the title refers to an apparition of a ghost-like figure, than turns out to be a young woman wandering the coast.

It is the story of Rosina, who lives with her guardian, Sir Peter Vernon. She is secretly engaged to his son, Henry. While Henry has traveled away from the estate, Sir Peter discovers the relationship and sends Rosina from the house. He later regrets his harshness and searches for Rosina, but cannot find her. He tells his son that she is dead when he returns home. Henry joins a search to recover her body, but is told by villagers of a ghostly figure of a young woman seen wandering the woods at night, they call the Invisible Girl. Henry ultimate discovers Rosina hiding in the ruin of a castle tower in the woods and realizes she is the roaming apparition. Sir Peter forgives his son for the secret engagement, and the two young lovers are at last married and together.

The story is said to be semi-autobiographical, but perhaps only draws on some of Mary’s life experiences, with rejection by the noble father of a lover, as she had been by Shelley’s father. And the Wales setting may just be a device of a remote romantic setting, or perhaps echo the location of her half-sister’s Fanny’s familiar ground. The ghost of the young woman lost in the landscape may connect to Fanny’s suicide, and Fanny’s confession to Mary that she felt she was the invisible daughter in her family. The story features scenes in a boat tossed on the sea trying to reach shore and nearly lost, which echoes both Shelley’s death in Italy and the near drowning of Mary, Percy and Claire in crossing the channel in 1814 described in the journals and the Secret Memoirs. Unlike the tragedies she might draw on for the story, it ends happily with lovers reunited and reconciled with the father, a happy ending Mary could not quite manage in her own life.

The publishing of the story included a portrait of a girl said to be the subject in the story, Rosina, seen winsomely reading in a parlor with an Italian musical instrument and a parrot. The image was a painting by William Boxall, engraved by J.C. Edwards. Boxhall, who later became director of Britain’s National Galley, early in his career focused on portraiture. He had returned from art study travels in Italy, so the painting may be from that trip and not an original for the story. William Boxall was a friend of William Wordsworth and had painted his portrait in 1831. Wordsworth and Mary Shelley knew one another through her father, so Mary may have called upon Boxall to provide a portrait for her story to be published. Mary may also have a connection to the engraver. J.C. Edwards in the 1820s was noted to be an illustrator of Shakespeare and Mary’s early friends though her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, both made their reputations on the bard’s revival. Who the model in the image of Rosina is, provides some mystery all its own.

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Mary Shelley Memoirs Author Interview at Witch Haunt

Frankenstein Castle Karloff Halloween HauntThe Horror Authors Witch Haunt blog recently featured an interview guest post with “Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley: Frankenstein Diaries” co-author Michael January on the release of the audiobook narrated by Heidi Gregory on Audible, and just in time for Halloween, discussing how the book defies genre.

While the Secret Memoirs is not a horror book, Mary Shelley is the reputed “mother” of horror and with the founding of the origins of Frankenstein, suitably timely. The Frankenstein castle has in modern times become a major spot in the world for celebrating Halloween. While the spectral figures of witches and ghouls have been haunting the thick woods for millennia, making their appearances in Grimm’s Tales and Gothic legends and Romantic Tales of Terror, the tradition of parties with costumes on All Hallows eve didn’t really take hold in Germany until the arrival of American soldiers stationed there after the Second World War, who brought some of the home customs with them.

Defining the genre of the Secret Memoirs has been a bit of a challenge, as it takes a unique approach to the Mary Shelley biography, at the same time a novel and a look at history through the eyes of a real life participant in it. It is to quote, “a romantic adventure in the Regency Period of contemporary Jane Austin, a young adult coming of age story, a history of post–Revolution Napoleonic France and the London publishing world, a family drama of personal tragedy, and an exploration of the heart and mind of a young woman seeking a connection to the mother who died in giving her birth, and the creative formation of a young writer of genius accomplishment.” The audio format with the voice of Mary Shelley telling her own story is an especially intimate way to experience the young lives of Mary, Clair and Shelley as they lived them.

With the 200th anniversary of the first publishing of Frankenstein, the book world has filled with myriad biographies about Mary Shelley, and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, examining the girl who wrote Frankenstein and academic examinations, even a biopic movie, but none as intimate and personal, told in her own words and experiences as she lived them.

How much is fact or fiction in the Secret Memoirs is outlined elsewhere here on Frankenstein Diaries. The book itself, ebook, paperback or audio book can be found here.

Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley Audiobook
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Ebook and Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00W6R8V0G

Review Quote from the Historical Novel Society: “An entertaining ‘collaboration’, exhaustively researched, skillfully adapted…long on memorable characters that will make readers see the seminal classic Frankenstein in a new light.” Historical Novel Society

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Paris to Geneva in Three Hours On TGV-Lyria

TGV Lyria200 years ago during that famous summer of 1816 when Mary and Percy Shelley left England for the second time to travel to Switzerland, where they would meet up with Lord Byron on the shores of Lake Geneva for the oft-told ghost story competition and the beginning of Frankenstein, it required about four days to travel from Paris to Geneva, by hired coach, with room for Clare and a few servants to carry all the luggage. Today, traveling from Paris to Geneva with a small group of friends or family takes 3 hours by train, on the High-Speed TGV-Lyria, the “bullet train’ of the SCNF French Railway.

And from now up through Christmas of 2018 and a little beyond, if you’ve a hankering to follow the trail of the Shelley’s with a family or small group of friends for an anniversary year exploration of the sights that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to visit the Bodmer Library where some of the Shelley documents reside or to see the Villa Diodati and walk through the garden, or just for a romantic adventure, Rail-Europe is offering TGV-LYRIA ticketing as a special discount for small groups.

From 1 September through 27 December the TGV-Lyria High Speed train which rockets through the Burgundy countryside to from France to Switzerland is offered at – for 3, 4, or 5 passengers traveling together. Rail Europe TGV-Lyria

*This is an affiliate link for FD gets a small commission from the supplier, but adds no cost.

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Mary Shelley gets to theaters in the U.S.

elle_fanning_as_mary_shelley_movieMary Shelley, the film version of the Frankenstein author’s story, directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour and starring Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley arrives at theaters in America on May 25th, 2018, from IFC Films. The film which we’ve been following from its inception a few years ago under the title “A Storm in the Stars”, to its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival has taken the long road of an independent film production to the big screen,  released in the UK in 2017.

The movie, an Irish production, filmed on location in Dublin standing in for London, and in Luxemburg for the Geneva Villa Diodati scenes tells the story of teenage Mary dreaming of writing, finding inspiration when she meets the dreamy Percy Shelley. Mary soon becomes pregnant with his child, a daughter who tragically dies. They are outcast by polite society and visit Lord Byron and John Polidori at the Villa Diodati in Lake Geneva, where the stormy night ghost contest story gives birth to the Frankenstein monster story. Then, Mary struggles to find a publisher and to get the credit for her creation.

The film also stars Douglas Booth, Bel Powley, Maisie Williams, Joanne Froggatt and Stephen Dillane. The original script was by Emma Jenson with Al Mansour as additional writing. Ruth Coad and Amy Baer produced.

Reviews for the film have been mixed. To sample a few – Fanning gives an earnest performance, though perhaps a little miscast, while Tom Sturrage as Byron chews the furniture, and Booth as Shelley pouts and broods, a traditional period biopic flavor trying hard to be modern. The film does make a mark for inclusion, written by a woman, directed by a woman, and produced by women, and adds a decided feminist cant to the story around whether Mary would get the credit for writing her story. Shelley comes off as a bit of a cad, not revealing he’s married until after they get involved, but in fact Mary went into the relationship with her eyes open and she had already met his wife. Though, he does arrive at a saving bit of honor in the perfunctory, tied-in-a-bow ending. Beautifully photographed by David Ungaro, with moody atmospheric production design by Paki Smith, the film is a little more intent on stating its theme, than illuminating the complex characters and relationships which make up this world. Still room for more.

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Guillermo Del Toro Thanks Mary Shelley

Shape of Water Hawkins and CreatureGuillermo del Toro wins BAFTA as best director for 2018

As he has on other occasions, Guillermo del Toro, in his acceptance speech on winning the best director honor at the BAFTA Awards, where other winners thanked their agents and mothers, thanked Mary Shelley, referring to the 18 year old girl who created a monster to represent the fear man has in his own psyche and foibles. Del Toro says that Mary Shelley’s invention of Frankenstein saved him and he often thinks of her in his work. If she was still alive, she might return the favor.

The reference for Del Toro is his view that the horror film monster is a stand-in for the audience’s fear of what they themselves might become if overcome by the inner demons everyone carries. A working theory that has served to scare movie goers since the medium began, not to mention comic books, plays and of course, novels.

The fantasy drama film “The Shape of Water” directed by Guillermo del Toro and written by del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, stars Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Doug Jones, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Octavia Spencer. Set in Baltimore in 1962, during the height of the cold war search for new possible weapons, the plot follows Hawkins as Elisa Esposito, a mute from childhood female custodian at a high-security government laboratory, where a singular humanoid amphibian creature has been captured and special tanks have been built to contain it. The government, led by the archly brutal Michael Shannon as Colonel Richard Strickland, wants to understand his secrets, though Strickland seems more interested in tormenting and torturing the being than understanding it.

The lonely Elisa lives in an apartment above a movie theater, just next door to the kindly, also lonely and gay, Giles, played by Richard Jenkins, who serves as a unofficial sort of father figure-friend. Elisa goes through a regular morning routine of bathing and masturbation before heading to work as a janitor at the secret government facility, where she works alongside Octavia Spencer as Zelda. They are present when the creature is brought in a specialized tank. Hawkins hides to observe the creature from afar, and when no-one is around, makes friends with it, feeding it from her lunchbox of hard boiled eggs.

The aquatic creature, like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, having no name, but looking very much like an upgrade of the iconic “Black Lagoon Creature ”, takes a shine to the kindness of the young woman and a passion for her boiled eggs. When Elisa learns that Strickland intends to vivisect the creature, she hatches an elaborate rescue plan, enlisting the aid of Giles, Zelda and Michael Stuhlbarg as Robert Hoffstetler, a sympathetic scientist and secret Soviet Spy.

Keeping the creature alive in her bathtub with boxes of salt, the mute lonely lady janitor no longer needs to masturbate with a real live fish-out-of-water creature available, and some mysterious lyrical underwater lovemaking occurs, until the government villains close in and Hawkins must help the creature escape in a poetic, romantically violent denouement.

The film offers a stunning design look, which also won a BAFTA for its artists, enveloping the decidedly odd, yet lyrically fascinating story in a world vision where its human-creature romance can take its flight of fantasy.

One can see the influences of the Frankenstein story in the film, although this creature is not created but merely found. What it presents is Del Toro’s monster as human psychological id concept,  though it seems to owe as much inspiration to watching the 50s “Creature From the Black Lagoon” escapist horror film and wondering, if the scaly fish monster from the deep carries the beautiful girl off in his arms, what exactly does he intend to do with her? And how does that work?

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Goethe and Frankenstein: Or, The Devil and the Dream

Goethe and FrankensteinHere’s an exchange from The Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley when Mary, Percy and Claire are unexpectedly entertained in Switzerland from a local academic who has read Percy Shelley’s St. Irvyne, addressing him under the mistaken name from his pseudonymous “A Gentleman from Oxford” author identity.

“Monsieur Oxford, in your book—an outcast from society wanders in the Alps Mountains hoping for death. This is Wolfstein,” he began, giving the abstract and the main character’s name to the author as if he might have forgotten it. “He encounters an alchemist, the Rosicrucian, who promises him the elixir of life if his magic can raise the corpse of his dead lover, Magalena, from her tomb. But to do this, he must denounce his faith and deny his creator. They are struck by lightning and they are destroyed.”

The familiar story of the creation of the Frankenstein novel is a fireside reading of a book of Gothic tales and a nightmare dream on the lakeside of Geneva one summer. But the formation of the ideas of Mary Godwin’s book arose from her exposure to many influences, of Shelley, a collection of literary minds in the circle of her father’s acquaintances, and her readings, assembling the themes and events of her story from as many parts as her fictional creature.

But what role did Johann Goethe play in the writing of Frankenstein? And his friend, Friedrich Schiller?

When Victor Frankenstein encounters his creature who has been wandering and hiding in the Alps above Geneva, his unwanted creation tells of his education, how he read “The Sorrows of Werter”, “Plutarchs Lives” and “Paradise Lost”, books he found in a dropped leather satchel. It is from Werter, he learns the human need for love and connection, which so angers him with Victor for denying him, it drives him to murder and revenge.

Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Goethe

Today, Goethe is more familiarly known for his play of “Faust”, the doctor who trades his soul for a deal with the devil, but Johann Goethe’s early masterwork “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young student so obsessed with a love he cannot have that he commits suicide, was the “Catcher in the Rye” or “Hunger Games” of its day in the late 18th Century, a popular story that reached out to the young, so melancholy that it was blamed for a wave of suicides. The creature in Frankenstein expresses the profound effect the story had on him, which is the author’s expression of the effect it had on her, so much that in it can be found her own inspirations.

“I thought Werter himself a more divine being than I had ever beheld or imagined; his character contained no pretension, but it sank deep. The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder…”

But the reading of his book was not Mary Godwin’s only connection to Goethe. At the time of her formations of ideas that would permeate her novel, the German classicism was infusing the English literature world, inspiring the romantics of her world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a regular of the literary society of her father, William Godwin, and a familiar acquaintance of Mary and Shelley, had been one of the founding sources of this.

Coleridge had learned German on a trip to Germany in his younger days, along with his friend William Wordsworth. Coleridge had encamped for a few months at Gottingen University, where he learned the language and listened to lectures and made side trips. He utilized this on his return to England to launch his literary career by translating to English his version of Friedrich Schiller’s “Wallenstein”.

And though he did not translate Schiller’s play of “Wilhelm Tell” he translated a poem “Tell’s Birthplace”. Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin had been so influenced by the story of Wilhelm Tell it had inspired their elopement trip to Switzerland in 1814, to the beauty of the Lake Uri locations of Schiller’s story, where they had hoped to live away from the clucking tongues of English society, until they ran out of money. Shelley had even expected his wife and son might come and live with them in an egalitarian communal paradise.

Schiller was not Coleridge’s only influence on Mary and Percy. About the time of their elopement escape, Coleridge had been approached by publisher John Murray II to produce a translation of Goethe’s Faust. Coleridge was struggling with his own particular demons at the time, his long addiction to Laudanum, and his doubts about his own work with a tendency to begin brilliant works and never quite finish them, like Kubla Kahn, even going so far as to add: Or, a Vision in a Dream, A Fragment to the title, after Byron and friends convinced him publish it.

Coleridge would surely have been well acquainted with the literary circle of Darmstadt, the German Romantic movement “Circle of the Senses”, much like the literary circles of the English publishing world of John Murray, and of Madame DeStael at her Chateau Coppet in Geneva, visited by Bryon and Shelley in their travels around the lake.

The Darmstadt Circle was organized around the literary lights of Johann Merck, Gottfried Herder, and Christoph Wieland. The German authors had been translating works of Shakespeare and Cervantes into their language, as Coleridge had been the German works to English. Goethe, born in Frankfurt had served briefly as a magazine editor in nearby Darmstadt with Merck, before trying to revitalize his legal career in Wetzler, where he was inspired by the suicide of a friend and his own passionate attraction to an unattainable girl to write Young Werther.

Had Coleridge heard of the story of the strange activities of the one-time inhabitant of the Frankenstein Castle at Darmstadt, the college lecturer-alchemist and occult dabbler, Johann Conrad Dippel, from his travels in Germany? Coleridge may have readily been introduced to Dippel’s Oil, a malodorous concoction made from distilled animal parts, claimed as a universal medicine (meant to be rubbed on and not swallowed.) But by Coleridge’s time in Gottingen, the medicinal qualities of the Dippel’s Animal Oil had been largely dismissed and perhaps turned into somewhat of a joke after his chemical formulas had found a use in cloth dies. Mostly now only known for his tangential relation to the Frankenstein Castle, Dippel had written almost seventy works about his chemistry in German by the time of Coleridge’s studies at Gottingen.

Coleridge never published his English version of Faust in his lifetime and only later has what is believed may be his unfinished work been discovered. Mary Godwin also began a book before Frankenstein that she never finished, she called Hate, and what secrets of her sixteen year old heart it held may never be known. But why would she chose a German name for her French speaking Genevan characters of: Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus? Not only were they French Swiss, but Victor Frankenstein’s father was Italian. Confusing?

Wallenstein, Wolfstein, Frankenstein, and some smelly creepy medicine for a pregnant young woman author, expressing her exposure to the lofty thoughts and influences of the circle of contemplative minds surrounding her. Constantly pressed for an explanation of where she got the idea for her story, if a vision in a dream worked for Coleridge to explain Kubla Khan, why not for Frankenstein?

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