The Lady and Her Monsters Page 2

  He cannot choose but hear;

  And thus spake on the ancient man,

  The bright-eyed Mariner.

  Coleridge captivated his listeners as the mariner recounted excitedly what good luck his ship had initially encountered. But it wasn’t long before a mighty storm arose in the seas and blew the ship off course, driving it southward toward Antarctica, and the startled crew found relief in the sudden appearance of an albatross, which mysteriously began to guide them away from the bleak land of ice. Naturally, the sailors soon began to think the albatross had brought them much-needed good luck. But, watching from afar, the mariner became disgusted by his crew’s show of superstition.

  Angry, he lifted his eyes toward the albatross and, in a moment of unbridled passion, shot it dead. The crew became distressed and began to wail in despair, and as if echoing their own agony, the spirits swirling around them began to grieve the great abomination that had been committed against nature. To further inflict punishment, the spirits followed the ship through unfamiliar waters.

  The poem moved ahead as the vessel did, Coleridge’s voice most likely rising and falling as the waves continued to lull the ship; it was then that he described the encounter between the crew and the eerie vessel boarded by Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death. A struggle ensued, and nature struck back, killing all but the mariner. Filled with guilt for killing the albatross and the consequences of that act, the mariner was left doomed to wander the earth forever, always repeating his tale as a final act of atonement:

  He went like one that hath been stunned,

  And is of sense forlorn:

  A sadder and a wiser man,

  He rose the morrow morn.

  The girls stayed quiet as the tale ended and the grown-ups began debating the various properties revealed in the poem: the images of life and death; the mysteries of sin, redemption, and the repercussions of guilt; the pursuit of forgiveness and forbidden knowledge; the ache and sorrow that loneliness brings; the belief in superstitions, of atoning for one’s sins. A decade later Mary Godwin would use similar imagery in the opening scenes of her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In it, the fictional character of Robert Walton, a mariner and explorer intent on finding a passage to the North Pole, appears and echoes Coleridge’s mariner as he too was traveling into uncharted waters, trying to be the first explorer not only to accomplish such a feat, but to do so while avoiding a mutiny on the ship. Coleridge’s mariner is mentioned again when Walton, in writing to his sister Margaret, declares, “I am going to unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow,’ but I shall kill no albatross, and therefore do not be alarmed for my safety.”

  But many others were to inspire Mary Shelley in the writing of Frankenstein, though there was no indication of them yet. That evening she only knew that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner had made a deep impression on her soul, one that would last a lifetime.

  On the night of Mary Godwin’s birth, August 30, 1797, a storm descended upon the city of London that was later remembered as one of the most awesome displays of thunder and lightning anyone had ever seen. Loud, crackling noises pierced the night air, while jagged yellow lines crisscrossed the inky night sky. It was a wondrous spectacle Mother Nature seemed to revel in, and some were awed by it. The story of Benjamin Franklin’s “stealing” thunder from the sky in 1752 was widely known and still played havoc in people’s imagination, allowing them to believe in the “testimony to the ability of human reason to bring nature under its sway.” Natural philosophers like the famed Humphry Davy also saw it as a vehicle not only to understand nature, but to “interrogate [her] . . . not simply as a scholar, passive and seeking to understand her operations, but rather as a master, active with his own instruments.”

  But others, given their superstitious and religious mind-set, were frightened by nature’s so-called wonders. To them, the idea that nature could be made to bow down to man bordered on the sacrilegious. If man could steal thunder from the sky; elicit electricity from the heavens; make dead frogs, sheep, and dogs jump; and impart a certain measure of respiration to the dead, then what need was there for a God who had dominion over everything and everybody? These people believed the angry thunderstorms of August 30 were a sign not of untamed knowledge, not of nature bending down to human will, but of God’s wrath. The human race had overstepped its boundaries in some fashion, and God was now seeking His vengeance.

  But in the Godwin home in the Somers Town district of London, neither idea was truly being contemplated. Those living within it thought of the powerful show outside their window as just a storm, a vicious storm that coincidentally was occurring on the night of the baby’s arrival.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s labor pains had begun earlier that day, when she retired to her bedroom just before two P.M. Feeling a nagging ache in the lower portion of her back, she slowly hiked up the staircase, aware of what to expect. Having gone through a pregnancy and childbirth before—her firstborn daughter, Fanny, was now three—she knew what would happen in the hours ahead. No male doctor would be present at the birth. Instead, she had decided to have only a woman midwife to “sit by and wait for the operation of nature.”

  Her husband, William Godwin, waited downstairs. He had been a bachelor until the age of forty-one, and his rigid and somewhat inflexible manners had changed only upon the second meeting with, and subsequent awakening of his affection for, Mary Wollstonecraft. In his early forties he became a husband, a stepfather to Fanny, and a father-to-be. As they settled into a life together, Godwin tried to find his way among his new roles, though he still had a certain measure of inadequacy about him. When Mary’s labor started, he was happy to remain below.

  As the afternoon and evening progressed, the storm intensified, much as Mary’s labor did. Both, it seemed, were gathering momentum, and at about nine o’clock Mrs. Blenkinsop arrived to serve as midwife.

  Mary’s labor progressed relatively normally, and at twenty past eleven a baby girl was born. As the etiquette of the time required, William Godwin was asked not to enter his wife’s room until all stages of labor and delivery were over. He waited patiently but anxiously watched the hours slowly ticking away, night ebbing into dawn. Eventually he heard the midwife’s footsteps rushing toward him; she told him “that the placenta was not yet removed.” Unable to continue on her own, she advised Godwin to search for another doctor, this time a male one.

  The storm outside continued to rage on as a frightened Godwin rushed to call on Dr. Poignand, who arrived at the house several hours after the baby was born.

  The eighteenth century was a remarkably difficult time for mothers and their infants. Infections, mistakes, malnutrition, and lack of care before, during, and after a pregnancy all resulted in a surprisingly high number of deaths. Dr. Poignand was a typical physician of the era and did what he could under the circumstances. Arriving in Mary Wollstonecraft’s chamber, he made a few disparaging comments about delivering a child without the aid of a male physician nearby. Then he rolled up his sleeves, raised the dampened sheets that covered Mary Wollstonecraft’s sore body, and, without latex gloves, inserted a hand between her naked legs. Slowly, the doctor removed Mary’s placenta piece by bloody piece, pushing his dirty hand several times within her vagina.

  He then became convinced that he had removed the entire placenta and assured William Godwin that everything would be okay. Writing afterward, Godwin recalled “the period from the birth of the child till about eight o’clock the next morning . . . full of peril and alarm. The loss of blood was considerable, and produced an almost uninterrupted series of fainting fits.”

  Dr. Poignand had been incorrect when he said he removed all of the placenta; a chunk had been left behind in Mary’s womb and was now festering. A new doctor, Dr. Fordyce, arrived later and said Mary’s condition was so grave it was not safe for her to nurse the new baby. Puppies had to be brought in to “draw out the milk” from her swollen and painful breasts.

  For the n
ext several days, she lingered between this world and the next. At certain times William Godwin felt hopeful, but during Mary’s shivering fits, despair overwhelmed him, and he knew “every hope was extinct.” At one point, he asked Mary what direction “she might wish to have followed after her decease.”

  What did she wish for her two small daughters? William approached the subject carefully, proclaiming that she was very ill and would take a considerable time to recover. But Mary knew what he was asking.

  “I know what you are thinking of,” she replied with little strength. She did not go any farther.

  On September 10, at 7:40 A.M., Mary Wollstonecraft, the first and most influential feminist and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died of puerperal fever at the age of thirty-eight, in the same bed where eleven days earlier she had given birth to her daughter Mary Godwin, later to become Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft was buried on September 15, 1797, in the old St. Pancras churchyard.

  William Godwin did not attend the ceremony. Bereaved and full of “longing,” he tried to get his mind off the alarming thoughts that had overwhelmed him since Mary’s death. One of his wife’s books was near him, but he did not want to pick it up, much less read it. Instead, he focused on another book by his side, this one detailing “the education of children.” As he leafed through it, he could not help but think of the “two poor animals” who were now his sole responsibility.

  Rather than reading, he decided to write a letter to the medical man Anthony Carlisle, a friend of his and Mary’s. “It is pleasing to be loved by those we feel ourselves impelled to love,” Godwin wrote. “It is inexplicably gratifying, when we find those qualities that most call forth our affections, to be regarded by that person with some degree of feeling.”

  That two such individuals—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—became entangled with one another to begin with struck some as an utterly peculiar event. They had initially become acquainted at a dinner party that Godwin attended to meet Thomas Paine, who had just published The Rights of Man. It was not love at first glance for William and Mary. On the contrary, they were “mutually displeased with each other.” Godwin had hoped to spend the evening with Paine, and Mary’s presence there irked him.

  Mary was an attractive woman who was rather tall and had brown hair and eyes. But right away, Godwin was put off by a streak of gloominess that was part of her persona. She would pass this trait on to her daughters. She was left cold by Godwin’s habit of complimenting everyone he met, even when they did not merit it. This was certainly not the most auspicious start of a love match in history.

  They saw very little of each other after the dinner party, as Mary went to France to attend to some business. It was a personal matter about a man with whom she’d become infatuated: Henry Fuseli, a painter eighteen years her senior. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he was married, and those around her did not understand why she was fascinated with him. This included Godwin, who thought Fuseli was not an intellectual but a snob.

  In the winter of 1792, Mary decided the only way to have a deeper relationship with Fuseli was to include his wife, Sophia. She propositioned them with a sort of ménage-a-trois that would involve all of them living together and her becoming their mutual partner. Not surprisingly, they rejected her.

  Toward the end of 1792, she was living a lonely existence in a tiny Paris apartment, the icy landscape of the city matching her own sadness. The passion she had desired from Fuseli may not have materialized, but she was desperate for the affection of any man. That’s when she fell for the American Gilbert Imlay, who picked up on her vulnerability and need, which let him feed her mind with fantastic (and false) stories of his past and those of a future they might have together. She quickly fell for him and clung tightly to him, especially when she learned she was pregnant.

  The pregnancy brought about a dramatic shift in their relationship, causing Imlay to spend weeks away from Paris, most especially in Le Havre. As the days turned into weeks and weeks extended into months, Mary’s familiar ache and loneliness returned. Only toward the end of her pregnancy did Mary join Imlay in Le Havre, where her daughter Frances—Fanny—was born. In September 1795, soon after the birth, Mary left for London, in what she believed would become a permanent separation.

  Not long after, Mary learned that Imlay had found another woman. She urged him to change his ways and meet their new baby daughter, but this did not happen. Again she was alone, but this time with a baby. Unable to continue on, Mary decided to end her life. “I have been treated with unkindness, and even cruelty by the person . . . [from] whom I had every reason to expect affection,” she wrote to Archibald Hamilton Rowan. “I looked for something like happiness in the discharge of my relative duties, and the heart on which I leaned . . . pierced mine . . . I live but for my child, for I am weary of myself . . . I have been very ill—have taken some desperate steps . . . for now there is nothing good in store,—my heart is broken!”

  Panorama of the river Thames and the buildings of the city. In the eighteenth century, the river provided a great divide between social classes in London. It was also from one of its bridges that Mary Wollstonecraft jumped trying to commit suicide.

  During the eighteenth century the river Thames had become a major center of commerce by transporting goods across the British Empire and servicing farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, and other commercial ventures. It had also formed an unspoken boundary between the different classes who lived on either side of its waters. And that river, Mary decided, would finally transport her to her next life. It would become her grave.

  She tried to find a quiet spot for her final moments but could not find one on the Battersea Bridge. The evening of her demise was a viciously cold and rainy one in October, a dreary occasion even by London’s standards. Rather than being deterred, she decided this weather was helpful. Drenched, undoubtedly lonely, and surely frightened, Mary walked up and down the wooden bridge, allowing the rain to soak her clothes.

  On this night, no one was on the bridge, which meant she could carry out her plans in secret. The rain that seeped through her clothes added much-needed weight to her frame. When she thought she was heavy enough, she neared the parapet. She felt the cold dark currents sloshing against the riverbank below were beckoning her, and she jumped. One would imagine her body, now soaked, would have sunk deeply and quickly, but that’s not what happened. Agitated, she struggled against the currents and became tangled in her clothing more and more tightly until she passed out.

  Her body washed ashore and was later found and revived by a passerby. Gilbert Imlay rushed to her, declaring his love, but strangely enough, Mary was not moved by this. Apparently, plunging into the cold water had shaken her out of her melancholy, and she realized the affair needed to come to some sort of resolution.

  Around this time, she reconnected with William Godwin. Having been invited to take tea with Thomas Holcroft, she was surprised to see Godwin there as well. As before, their exchanges didn’t cause either one of them to feel any flurry of love or passion toward the other. By now Godwin had become famous, which seemed to have boosted his demeanor. He was socially awkward but also bent on achieving fame and acceptance from society, so this new lifestyle provided a bonus.

  On the other hand, Mary Wollstonecraft was now a disreputable woman with a sordid love life and an illegitimate child. Not surprisingly, Godwin didn’t think she was as irksome anymore, but rather, somehow, the suffering Godwin saw on her pale features gave her an alluring, vulnerable quality, so much so that he was drawn to a sense of “sympathy in her anguish.” In the following weeks, they saw a great deal of one another and eventually both spoke of “the sentiment, which trembled upon the tongue but from the lips of either.”

  To them, the state of their relationship felt as good as a marriage, without the restrictions of an actual ceremony. They both detested such shows of formality. “Nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine
march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony,” Godwin declared. That is, until a child entered the picture.

  When Mary became aware of her second pregnancy, she recalled the scorn she had suffered during her first. Godwin, of course, agreed to marry her, though doing so went against all the principles he had been advocating for years. He was aware that some would see him as a hypocrite for yielding to the institution he so despised: “Some people have formed an inconsistency between my practicing this instance & my doctrine,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Wedgwood. But he also explained why he did not see any inconsistency. He still believed marriage was wrong, and he had only married Mary because he cared for her. Despite having gone through the ceremony, he felt no different than before and said, “I hold myself no otherwise bound than I was before the ceremony took place.”

  On March 31, 1797, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft married in the small church at St. Pancras, and on April 6, 1797, they moved into a house together located at 29 Polygon Road, in London’s Somers Town district. Godwin immediately began to receive congratulatory notes that said such a union was powerful and intellectually a fabulous match. One note came from Thomas Holcroft, in whose house they had reacquainted themselves. As others before him had, Holcroft extended a happy note to Godwin for having landed “Mrs. W.” But whether or not his wishes were heartfelt remain unclear, because earlier in the months preceding the marriage, Holcroft seemed to have a great and passionate crush on Mary Wollstonecraft.

  “I think I discover[ed] the very being for whom my soul has for years been languishing,” he wrote to her. “The woman of reason all day . . . in the evenings becomes the playful and passionate child of love . . . one in whose arms I should encounter . . . soft eyes and ecstatic exulting and yielding known only to beings that seem purely ethereal: beings that breathe and imbue but souls: You are this being.”