From JSTOR Daily:
In her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explains: “It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.” She is answering an oft-asked question—the nineteenth-century equivalent of “What’s a nice girl like you doing writing gross stuff like this?”—and the fact that she begins by mentioning her parents is a sign of how greatly they figured in her sense of self.
Yet only one of Mary Shelley’s parents lived to see Frankenstein published. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the brilliant feminist best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Women, died shortly after giving birth to Mary, a fact that haunted her daughter for the rest of her life. Baby Mary, however, was not the fatal agent: It was the physician, one Dr. Poignand, who removed the placenta piece by piece with unwashed hands, and who transmitted the puerperal fever that killed Wollstonecraft Godwin days after giving birth. (In light of her daughter’s creative output, it’s worth mentioning that puerperal fever was then often transmitted by doctors proceeding directly from autopsies to births.)
After that, Mary Shelley’s “only real ‘mother’ was a tombstone,” as Sandra M. Gilbert writes. The remark is not as figurative as it may first appear: Mary spent a considerable amount of time at her mother’s grave in the St. Pancras churchyard, reading her mother’s work. Her father, the reformist writer and philosopher William Godwin, first took her to the churchyard when she was a child, and Mary continued visiting on her own, especially after father married his next-door-neighbor Mary Jane Clairmont—whom Mary found insufferable—and her home life became considerably strained.
“Especially because she never knew her mother … her principal mode of self-definition—certainly in the early years of her life with Shelley, when she was writing Frankenstein—was through reading,” Gilbert says. “Endlessly studying her mother’s works and her father’s, Mary Shelley may be said to have ‘read’ her family and to have been related to her reading, for books appear to have functioned as her surrogate parents, pages and words standing in for flesh and blood.” And much of Mary’s reading during her younger years took place in the graveyard.
The cemetery took on a new relevance when Percy Shelley burst upon the scene. The Godwins maintained an intellectual household, with visitors such as the radical essayist William Hazlitt, the painter Thomas Lawrence, the chemist Humphry Davy, and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who once allowed Mary and her stepsister to hear a recitation of The Ancient Mariner after the pair were discovered hiding under the sofa). But none had such an influence on Mary as Percy, a fervent admirer of her father’s who came for dinner one night in late 1812. The pair met again in 1814 and, despite the fact that Mary was only 16 and the 21-year-old poet was married (to another 16-year-old), began taking walks together in the St. Pancras churchyard. Mary was attracted by his idealism, fearlessness and what his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg called his “wild, intellectual, unearthly” looks.
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The idea of the cemetery as a site of (sometimes forbidden) knowledge shows up in her most famous work. As a student, Victor Frankenstein supplements his study of chemistry and anatomy with trips to the graveyard, explaining: “To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death.” The cemetery, or at least its gleanings, is the site of Victor’s greatest aha moment, upon which the rest of the novel depends:
Now I was led to examine the cause and progress of this decay and forced to spend days and nights in vaults and charnel-houses … I beheld the corruption of death succeed to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analyzing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me—a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
The secret, of course, is that of life itself—of how the “component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth,” as Mary writes in her introduction. The fact that Frankenstein’s monster is assembled from fragments of corpses has a parallel in Mary’s assembly of her own self-identity: in some sense she is like her own creature, without a mother, assembling herself out of dead fragments in the form of books.
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