Mary Shelley’s Seduction: Who was seducer and who seduced?
In 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in Scotland with the Baxters, during which time Mary’s half-sister Fanny developed an infatuation with him, which was superseded by Mary’s attraction to him in the spring of 1814, leading to the elopement trip to Paris.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.
Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley – E-Book
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Mary 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 she-mate of the creature of Mary Shelley’s imagining is not jilted, just put off for some soul(less) searching. The Universal Pictures version of the “Bride of Frankenstein” which had been moving forward on the production and release schedule of Universal Studios under the direction of Bill Condon, best known for recent Hollywood musicals (Chicago, Beauty and the Beast) has been pushed back for more work on the script with writer David Koepp (The Mummy, Angels & Demons).
Mary Shelley, the movie, (formerly 
TCM cable channel Turner Classic Movies recently ran a Boris Karloff day and I had a chance to watch the 1931 Frankenstein and the 1934 Bride of Frankenstein shot four years later, both directed by James Whale. The difference between the two movies was quite fascinating. Boris Karloff had gone in the credits from a “?” to simply the one name KARLOFF by the send movie, having become a household icon in between. The original film deviated so far from the original book to be almost unrecognizable, and oddly switched Victor to Henry Frankenstein and Victor’s friend from the book to Victor in the movie. The Bride of Frankenstein went back to the book to borrow more, and famously dramatized the introduction with Byron and Percy Shelley in Geneva.
The Frankenstein Village set had changed quite a bit as well. In the original it was a Bavarian style village with the Frankenstein family house a high ceiling mansion in the middle of the village with an entrance looking out on the street. In the Bride of Frankenstein, the town had turned into a larger walled castle city with a gate and drawbridge. In the first movie, the science lab was in a mill tower on a hill, in the second, a castle tower as part of the city complex. Both films were shot on the Universal studio back lot.
The 1931 Frankenstein village set was actually built for the World War I epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” shot by Lewis Milestone a year earlier in 1930, for where the soldiers left home to the fervor of marching bands, before the devastations of war. The archways and street scenes can be recognized between the two films, with the archway into town shot from different angles. Some small parts of the Old Europe called the Court of Miracles set on the Universal backlot is still there but much of the set areas were burned in a fire at the studio some years ago. A few remnants called Little Europe still remain on the 
The stored laboratory sets and equipment were famously used again in Mel Brook’s “Young Frankenstein” and some of those props still remain in the Universal props shop. The lake where the little girl scene was filmed is out in Agoura about 40 minutes from Universal out the 101 highway. Malibu Lake is now surrounded by houses and a golf course. The Paramount Movie Ranch with its much used western town set is about five minutes away from the lake, and is now actually a National Park as part of the Santa Monica Mountain Recreation Area, but the western sets, used for countless movies and TV shows also recently burned in a wild fire.
The story has been told over and over, repeated by journalists, films and bloggers for almost 200 years. You know the familiar story, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Polidori gathered around a fire on a dark and rainy night in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. They made a bet with each other who could write a scarier ghost story than the “penny dreadful” writers of the day. Mary Shelley went to her room and woke up from a dream, proclaiming she had seen the vision of a student of sciences standing over the horrible creature he created, and the thus began her inspiration to write her famous novel “Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus”.
Review – Warning, spoilers abound. Okay, I looked forward to the new revisiting of the Frankenstein story with some anticipation, but rather like the creature itself, the movie of “Victor Frankenstein” seems a construction of parts from other movies brought to life by a spark of imagination before being destroyed by its creators, a giant creature with two hearts instead of one, intended to power it for a modern audience, but ultimately ending in an epic failure of hubris. (Currently about 28% on Rotten Tomatoes, fairing a little better with viewers than reviewers). It’s not a bad movie, offering enough entertainment value to fill the time, but rather less than fulfilling the promise of new generational watermark.
The Frankenstein legend has made another movie screen appearance, and of the latest incarnation of Frankenstein adaptation, Victor Frankenstein, reviews have been mixed to say the least, and the box office, rather a disappointment, though perhaps one might agree that it is if not the best, at least the most imaginative reimagining of the Frankenstein story since Frankenstein 1970.
The storyline has a modern day Baron von Frankenstein who was tortured and physically mangled at the hands of the Nazis in post WWII Germany, because he refused to use his science skills for the Nazi war effort. The Baron is continuing his work as a scientist, but needing money to continue his experiments, he agrees to rent out his castle as a film location to a movie crew to film a television movie about his famous family, and his grandfather, the old Baron von Frankenstein of monster reputation. Little do they know the current Baron is following in his ancestor’s footsteps. The money allows Frankenstein to obtain a nuclear reactor to power his creation, rather than the old standby lightning bolts. But when he runs out of body parts he starts killing off the members of the film crew. This is done through his partially completed monster, a lumbering figure with his head completely bandaged, serving both a story function in the later reveal, and a budget saving device of not having to create a monster make-up. His creature has no eyes at first and kills the wrong girl, until he can get the right ones. When the end finally comes in a climactic burst of atomic reactor steam, and the bandages are removed, inside them is revealed the face of Karloff/Victor Frankenstein as he was before he was tortured, with a recoding played explaining that the Baron was trying to create a lasting version of himself for perpetuation of the family name.
On an entertainment level it was very low budget and a bit of a cheat, with the monster. a mummy-like creature, a guy stumbling around in a bandage helmet ranking somewhere between Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (a gorilla suit with a space helmet) and Project Metalbeast (with Kane Hodder – Friday 13th’s Jason, in a rented werewolf suit) but certainly an imaginative take on the legend and the lore of extending the Frankenstein world. I don’t know what poor Boris Karloff felt about it, but I can imagine. His career had reached a nadir in the late fifties. Abbot and Costello had come and gone, and Hammer horror was taking over the classic stories with new stars like Christopher Lee. The aging great horror star would see a bit of a resurgence in the early 1960’s, with some modestly decent horror projects, but perhaps a more reverent casting in television, where he would appear in episodes of shows like I Spy as a kindly but eccentric old gentleman in a Don Quixote quest, and even lend his name to a series of spooky comic books from Gold Key.