Sublime morbidity, ethereal horror, and grotesque intellectual birth: Mary Shelley. The mother of sci-fi gothic horror, is a true goth icon and a prominent writer amongst the greats of the long eighteenth-century, who breathed her intellectual vigour, artistic vision, and lived relationship with the macabre, directly into her works.
At sixteen, I was engrossed in one of her most famous pieces, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818, written when she was only eighteen years old. While Shelley conceived the idea for the story in a dream, she embodied within her person and her prose a carnal nightmare of dark romanticism; from chthonic consummation at her mother’s grave to literally preserving her dead husband’s heart in a jar, she expressed necromantic aesthetics and the terrifying beauty lying within the line between life and death, especially through Frankenstein.
Her work becomes far more nuanced when considering how she lived during the Enlightenment—a period marked by scientific, religious and political turmoil, making Frankenstein a profoundly influential and artistic intersection of multiple frameworks of knowledge, culture, and sentience. Shelley wrote what would have been considered an outrageously immoral and unorthodox story for her time, as she wasn’t a rationalist enlightenment thinker, yet also not exactly the typical romantic, instead reflecting an underrepresented, radical part of the political-artistic spectrum at the time; tackling a narrative where her characters represented the clash between enlightenment thinking and romantic ideals. Using an uncanny, galvanic-inspired lens for critiquing and commenting on the dangers of scientific pursuit, she unknowingly gives rise to a whole new, niche genre for the distorted sublime and darkly divine.
While much of Frankenstein was a conversation with her time’s political affairs, the story was also a result of intensely intimate aspects of Shelley’s life. She was deeply attuned to her internal world while writing Frankenstein, which is seen through many of the esoteric and philosophical themes present in this book. Her relationship to death was especially complex, as she had an almost obsession with it, using death as a source for ideas, considering it as like a physical presence, and as the source of her deep mourning and isolation. She described herself as a “child of death” as her mother died shortly after she was born, mirroring this in Frankenstein through the birth of the monster and immediate abandonment by his creator. This theme of rejection can also be drawn to the deep sense of abandonment she felt from her father for shunning her out of his life for fear of scandal when she eloped. Shelley also experienced great pain when she lost her first child who was born prematurely, even dreaming bittersweet nightmares about massaging her baby back to life; the idea of reanimation central to the story. Even more, her half-sister, her father’s first wife, and others were all lost to suicide.
Mary Shelley was a woman who was encompassed by melancholia; she carried grief so deeply inside of her, that the people she lost became a part of who she was. The womb of her expressive, creative ideas was death itself, and Victor’s dream of giving life to the dead within Frankenstein emerges from her longing to bring everyone back. Considering that her book rather critiques this concept, it makes her stance all-the-more powerful, as she wishes for the boundary between life and death to disappear more than anyone else, yet firmly describes the ramifications it would ensue. Death was a beautiful liminal space to her, and corporeal existence was almost burdensome as explored in Frankenstein. Later, Shelley famously referred to the novel as her “hideous progeny” directly linking literary creation to that of giving life, or as in the story, monstrous life. A true prototype for goths, Shelly was a woman who dug into all the dark, twisted horrors that haunted her soul and put it out on paper for the world to see.
At some point, everyone should engage with the intellectually rich discourse found in Frankenstein, or even in Mary Shelley’s other works like The Last Man and Mathilda. She pioneered what is now one of my favourite genres of all time, inspiring many classics. Her influence can still be felt today as the elements of sci-fi gothic horror seep into spectacular works like the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and games like Castlevania and Mouthwashing.
Mary Shelley’s legacy is grounded in visceral horrors of the flesh and the terrifying consequences of scientific ambition, single-handedly transforming the sublime concept of life and death into a grotesque conversation on the human condition.