By Isabela Torezan
Mary, or the Birth of Frankenstein, is a fiction novel based on real events of Mary Shelley’s life. Having read Mary Shelley (a biography by Miranda Seymour) earlier this year, my first thought when I saw Anne Eekhout’s book (in translation from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson) was “and is that possible?”
Mary Shelley’s life was so dramatic and full of incredible events that I thought it was unlikely that someone could write good original fiction about it. Her real life had already won over art.
Well, I was wrong, again. Recently, it seems I have often been mistaken on my first impressions of books. I like that, though, because I have been gifted with enjoyable surprises and it also makes the job of reviewing easier. The answer to my question was, ‘yes’, this is possible – and it was done very gracefully.
Two kinds of chapters alternate, representing two explorations of Mary Shelley’s life that picture her as one of the most relatable female characters I have read in the last few years.
We have teenage Mary’s diary, written while she was living in Scotland with the Baxter family, and chapters in the third person that narrate the days she spent in Switzerland with Percy Shelley (her husband), the poet Byron, the doctor John Polidori and Claire, her stepsister.
The diary chapters tell a beautiful story of the love between Mary and Isabella Baxter, fictionalising a friendship that is only mentioned in Mary Shelley’s biography. I suspect that not all readers will be happy with the importance that was given to the love and sexual attraction that Mary feels for Isabella.
Some of them will be dissatisfied simply because they are homophobic (yes, unfortunately they still exist in 2023). A few others, because they are too attached to the image they had of Mary Shelley, of the woman who created a very sad story of a monster after a life of misfortunes. They think the mother of such a creature is not allowed happiness and hopeful daydreaming.
Fortunately, I do not belong to either of the aforementioned groups of readers. And, as bored as I have been with love stories in the past, I have found the combination of chapters in Mary a very clever structure that kept me more engaged in Mary Shelley’s story as a woman in a (even more) misogynist world than her biography did. The book by Miranda Seymour, by the way, is listed among the books that Anne Eekhout says she is “indebted” to.
Although the story relies on several mysterious passages and only the suggestion of supernatural incidents, the lines connecting the two kinds of chapters and the two moments of Mary Shelley’s life are quite clear and objective. The monster, born inside her and first seen at the same time she discovers her love for Isabella and unfolds as a woman leaving childhood, will come out of the shadows of her inner world later in the Switzerland episodes.
The question of the role of the mother already exists in Mary’s teenage years, as her own mother had died while giving birth, and Isabella lost her mother too. Then, in the adulthood chapters, Mary is a mother herself, grieving a daughter and obsessing over the fragile life of her baby son. Even though most of this really happened to Mary Shelley, it is put in evidence in this fiction as a way to connect the two parts of the story running in parallel.
The poem Christabel, by Samuel Coleridge, is another element we could point as a link between teenage Mary and adult Mary. In Switzerland, Percy is always reading Coleridge and this particular poem is mentioned. It tells the story of a young maiden who gives shelter to a beautiful woman she found in the forest, and they end up sleeping together.
The young lady is mortified when she wakes up and realises that she has sinned. Worse, it appears that the beautiful woman was some sort of witch, because she occasionally changes form and has the eyes of a serpent. This connection of attraction between women, sin, witchcraft and even the figure of the serpent had already appeared in the teenage chapters.
What I found most beautiful in this story, though, was not the delicate description of Mary’s love life, from Isabella to Percy, or the sad but surely moving portrait of motherhood. For me, it is Mary’s salvation through writing, the way she realises that her story, her monster, her writing powers were what made her who she was and nobody could take that from her. Writing, alone, makes her a woman, a mother, and a living being:
Yes, she will write. It is her story. She brought it into the world. She gave it life, fed it. She will care for it, her sweet, true imagination, her monster, her growling, snarling, unyielding beast. He is back. In the twilit world under all that light she sees the things she had forgotten. There is a world of spirit and marshes, of water beasts, snakes, monsters and witches, a world of gold filigree bracelets with stones glittering as deep and dark as the sea, a world of mirror images, of sheet lightning and birth. She holds on tight, her hands like claws on the rail, leans forward to look, to see, she makes no concessions, she is a woman, and her gaze falls down, into the water, and there she sees herself, it is her, in the midst of all those other things, all that she brought into the world. She stays there for a while, watching, wondering, remembering.
The fear of a lack of identification, of looking in the mirror and not knowing who you are, of seeing just a dark and deep nothing, is something scarier, to me, than any monster that could have been created. This book’s main quality is the new significance given to a story that has been read and re-read so many times. The birth of Frankenstein may have been the rebirth of a woman who had died many times, sinking in the deep waters of her sorrows.
About our contributor
Isabela Torezan is a Brazilian writer and translator who sincerely believes that literature is the meaning of life. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and, soon, a master’s degree in Literary Translation. She writes short stories, essays and book reviews regularly on her blog (in Portuguese). She has also written a book of short stories, O Bibliófago, which was published in 2018, and participated in some short story collections. Isabela lives in Brazil but travels the world through books and you can find her on Instagram @isa_torezan, always ready to talk about literature.
Your message has been sent
Leave a Reply