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Frankenstein
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Hey hey book lovers and fascism haters! For this episode, Curator, editor, and general badass Lynne M. Thomas joins us to discuss what is widely considered the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. We have a great discussion; first off, Lynne is an amazing human, but also? She's spent the last year curating an exhibit for the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that explores Shelley’s life, career, and context for her most famous novel. (Be sure to check it out before it leaves in May 2027!)
We cover a lot of ground in this episode, including:
- Mary Shelley, goth icon and intellectual nepo baby
- Her unusual-for-the-time education
- Unethical polyamory (or, Percy Shelley Is A Fuckboi)
- How a volcanic eruption, arctic exploration, and emerging science influenced the text
- The multiple lenses through which to view this work
Since the frame of the story is set on a ship stuck in icy waters--and, who are we kidding, it's October and therefore officially Spooky Season--we paired our discussion with mulled wine. Now, there are approximately a zillion recipes for this online, so use the one you want; we chose this one by Gimme Some Oven. Cheers!
Hey everybody, welcome to Bard Books, the podcast that mixes band books, booze, and conversation into one delightfully chaotic mix. I'm your host, Kelly Swales, and today we're going to be discussing what is widely considered the first science fiction novel, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Buckle in, gang, because we're gonna get a little monstrous in here today.
SPEAKER_00Hi there. My name is Lynn M. Thomas, and my in my day job, I am the uh head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Juanita J. and Robert E. Simpson Rare Book and Manuscript Professor at the University of Illinois. And in my side hustle, I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy editor and podcaster.
SPEAKER_01You're so good, you're so cool. I love Living.
SPEAKER_00Just experienced, you know.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's what that's what you get whenever you get to be a woman in your 50s, right? You've had like five lives already. Yep, pretty much, yeah. First off, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. And also before we get to our discussion, I want to uh talk about the cocktail or the drink that we're pairing with our discussion today. Since the frame of the story is set on a ship that's stuck in ice and can't move and it's really cold and wintry and brrrrrrr, I decided a mold wine would be nice. There's a million and two recipes online. Pick any one you want if you want to join us with your mold wine, but I'll uh post the recipe that we're using and uh well cheers, Lynn. And to you, Kelly. Uh, mold wine. It is it's that time of year, too, right? It's like October, it's fall. Absolutely. It's time for the warm drinks.
SPEAKER_00I live in central Illinois, so fall's only two weeks long, but it's a glorious two weeks.
SPEAKER_01The best two weeks ever. Yeah, like up here in Chicago, it's basically like, oh, it's summer, and then a switch flips and nope, it's fall. And then by by early November, it's gonna be like, mm-hmm, no, it's winter until March. See ya. Yep, pretty much, yeah. Alright, so on to our discussion. In 1816, Mary Shelley and three friends each agree to write a ghost story. After giving it some thought, Mary imagined a scientist who creates life and then becomes horrified at what he's done. It was first published anonymously in 1818 when Mary was 20 years old. Her name was added as an author in 1821, and the revised version we know today published in 1831. It's one of the best known works in gr in English literature, and it's been banned at various points in its history due to its quote unquote graphic nature. I've known you for a lot of years, so I know that this is this type of literature is your jam. I have never actually read Frankenstein. You know, like you're I'm familiar with the story, or I thought I was, of course, just because it's so saturated in our pop culture today. Uh in terms of horror movies or or whatever, there's a million, you know, adaptations and movies and you know, serial characters kind of look like Frankenstein's monster or whatever. But as I was reading, I was like, oh, I don't know if I'm actually familiar with this story. Like I didn't realize it was a framed story. First off. Second, I didn't really realize like the actual creation of the monster is so takes up so little page space. It's like not specific at all. It's just like, here's a thing I did, here's this creature I made, and then the creature disappears and various sundry things happen. Because I think so many of the retellings really focus on the graphic, horrific nature of what it would take to take a bunch of body parts out of cemeteries and make a uh viable living creature out of them. Uh so that was surprising for me. Tell me a little bit about your experience with the book, when you first read it, how you came to love it, that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_00So, fun fact one of the reasons that we're, you know, that I I was excited to come on the podcast today is because we just had an exhibit at my day job open, which is uh called I Could People the Hours with Creations, celebrating Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, because the Rare Book and Manuscript Library recently acquired a first edition. So Holy shit, really? I yeah, yeah. So I built a whole exhibit around the first edition that we had acquired. So I have been in a Frankenstein deep dive in terms of like context and figuring out the stories I was gonna tell about the book for over a year. I sat down at the beginning of the process to what I thought was going to be rereading the novel because I was sure I had read the novel. I'm a, you know, I have I have an undergraduate literature degree, I have a master's in English. Like I'm I'm my brain was convinced I had I had read Frankenstein at some point. I had not. I was reading it for the first time as part of the prep for this exhibit.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_00It ended up being a thing that turned into one of the threads of the exhibit, which is about how our creations get away from us and about how the novel Frankenstein and the narrative of Frankenstein that we all think we're familiar with are actually not the same thing.
SPEAKER_01Not at all.
SPEAKER_00And they go off in these two very different directions. And like, you know, as you said, there there are over 1,200 different adaptations of Frankenstein. And that was at last count like five or ten years ago. So it's you mentioned Breakfast Cereal because everybody loves Frankenberry. There's stage plays, there's comic books, there's multiple TV versions from Scooby-Doo on up. You know, there are tons and tons of films, of course. But the version of Frankenstein that most of us think about when you say the word Frankenstein without any context is the version, of course, that comes from the 1830s, sorry, the 1931 film, as directed by James Whale. Right. By Universal Studios with Boris Karloff playing the main character. Yeah. You know, it's the green head with the bolts on the neck and and a lot of grunting. And like the hilarious thing is, of course, in the novel, the creature learns French. And like maybe the anglers are arguing that French is kind of a lot like grunting. And as a former French major, they're not completely wrong, but the creature is actually pretty articulate for an a living entity that was created from scratch from dead body parts. And what we get in pop culture is like a lot of just grunting and groaning and uh, and it and it's like it's nothing like how Mary Shelley has created the character of the creature. Like the creature in the novel spends a third of the novel telling his own story. Yeah. Like from his point of view. He has a massive interior life.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes, he's not just a monster. It was that was actually my favorite part of the novel was the volume two, which was from his voice. Yeah. First, I want to say it's astounding to me that someone so young wrote this, wrote this novel. I mean, yes, I know that she did revisions before ahead of the 1831 edition or whatever. Sure. But it wasn't substantially changed. She clearly had a command of the written language that was used at that time. Absolutely, 100%. And what I found so interesting is that volume two, that's from The Monsters POV, the voice is different. I mean, the autharial voice is the same, right? You know, like Mary Shelley wrote this. It wasn't somebody else wrote this section for her. Yeah, like the character voice is like markedly different than than the other two volumes. And I just thought for such a young author, that that was very deftly done and well done, I thought.
SPEAKER_00Well, the fascinating thing about Mary Shelley is that she's weird in a lot of ways. So she had a highly unusual education for her time. She's the daughter of two political radicals, William Godwin, who wrote one of the what is now considered a central libertarian text, and Mary Wollstonecraft, of course, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. And the two of them are these political radicals who basically only got married when Mary Wollstonecraft is pregnant with the child that will become Mary, because Mary Wollstonecraft has already had a child out of wedlock, and it was such a terrible experience that despite both she and William Godwin believing in quote unquote free love as part of their radical anarchist belief system, they got married so that the child, Mary, would have legal and financial protections, which was great and important because Mary Wollstonecraft died 11 days after Mary was born from an infection. So Mary is basically raised by her dad, William Godwin, and educated primarily by him in everything that he would think useful to a philosopher. So she learned a lot more science and history and literature and multiple languages, and basically had a much more hardcore education that was on a par to what a young man of similar status would have been educated in, only she's a woman, because Godwin is trying to live in adherence to Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophies about the need for egalitarian education for women.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And he's doing that through raising young Mary. Now, the problem is that Mary Sh Mary Godwin now, so the daughter who will become Mary Shelley. Right. She's got a stepsister named Claire that to that comes along a bit later, and the two of them are kind of pitted against one another by her stepmother. And William Godwin has all of these random people who come to his house to just sort of hold court, like to hold court with him, to, to, to pick his brilliant brain. Sure. And so he's got Aaron Burr shows up, you know, uh Thomas, you know, Thomas Paine shows up periodically. Um, Mary Wollstonecraft was friends with Thomas Paine. Like these are these are folks who are contemporaries of her family. Yeah, contemporaries and heavy duty thinkers and people who who really thought of themselves as sort of the intellectual vanguard, right? Right. And then this this 21-year-old named Percy shows up. Percy Bish Shelley. That punk. He comes in and declares himself an acolyte of William Godwin's and basically love bombs Godwin, and then love bombs Mary. And Mary decides that she's going to she's in love with him, and she's going to quote unquote elope with him. Except the problem is she's 16. Okay. He's 21. Right. He's already married with a kid and another one on the way. Okay. But he believes in free love, and this is not a group of people who are exploring polyamory in an ethical manner. So, like, he just abandons his wife and his child and soon-to-be additional child to quote unquote elope with Mary. The apocryphal tale is that they declared their love and Mary lost her virginity on her mother's grave because the her mother's grave was one of her major hangouts as a teenager because she's just that goth. Right. They go, they decide to elope to Italy and end up not going to Italy. They end up going to Germany and Switzerland for a bit. They run out of with Claire, who runs, who comes along as a third wheel for reasons that are still kind of opaque. Okay. And they run out of money after a few months and go back to England. And then two years later in 1816, Percy is so deep in debt that he has to leave the country before he gets thrown into debtor's prison. So they decide to leave to go to your back to Europe. And this time, Claire has thrown herself at Lord Byron, had a very short-lived affair with him. She's completely obsessed with Byron. Byron is like, Well, if you're gonna fling yourself at me, I can't, I'm not gonna say no, but I really don't give a care about you. Like, I give zero shits here. Byron saw her as completely disposable. Claire convinces Mary and Percy that they should go to Switzerland and hang out near Lake Geneva because she knows that's where Byron's going to be. And at this point, she's fundamentally stalking Byron to try to rekindle this relationship that is very one-sided. So they all go to Switzerland in the summer of 1816.
SPEAKER_01Is this where we say that Lord Byron clearly has like a magical, magical dick or something?
SPEAKER_00Like, I don't even know. I the thing about like the thing is when I was researching this exhibit, I came into this exhibit thinking Lord Byron was terrible. I that you know, my research didn't really change my opinion of him. However, by the time I was done with this exhibit, I had decided that Percy was actually worse.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, Percy doesn't sound like a gentleman and a scholar or anything.
SPEAKER_00He honestly, Percy must have been an incredible lay because I cannot imagine putting up with his nonsense otherwise. Like the amount of complete bullshit that Mary put up with.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00This period of time, right, from when they elope, for the next four years, Mary is going to either be pregnant, rearing a child, or grieving a child who has died at a very young age for the next four years. She loses four children in that period.
SPEAKER_01My God.
SPEAKER_00So she's parenting, she's dealing with the grief of the loss of a child, she's pregnant a fair amount of this time, and she still manages to be creative during all of this, especially when Percy and Lord Byron decide to like go off on a road trip together. And Percy just leaves her with all the household stuff that's not his problem. And he doesn't care. And basically, as far as I can tell, both Percy and Byron declared themselves to be followers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and particularly of the idea that came from Rousseau that, you know, really we're only required to follow societal mores insofar as it matches up with our own interior desires.
SPEAKER_01Which is that well, that kind of sounds like the the Peter Thiel bullshit right now, right? Like, well, maybe evil isn't really evil if it feels good or whatever.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it it very like between the two of them, it's very much like, well, but but I want to, and that's sufficient reason. They they they did not care that they had an effect on other people. Now, I will say that Percy and Mary did work very closely together in terms of reading and writing. Mary edited all of Percy's work. Percy edited Mary's work. There were initial accusations after Mary published Frankenstein in 1818 that Percy had actually written it, um, because people couldn't believe that a woman could write this book. Sure. And the the documentary evidence on the extant manuscript that lives at the Bodleian is that Percy didn't provide any more editorial feedback than any given editor in a New York house would provide on a novel. Right. Like he, in fact, he provided less. So, like, yes, he edited, he made suggestions. There are pro there are definitely some turns of phrase that he suggested and Mary accepted, but the book is Mary's. Right. It's just this thing where that whole summer, they're basically all trapped in the house together. It's Mary and Percy and Lord Byron and Claire Claremont, and Lord Byron's doctor, John Paulidori, who takes a snippet of something that Byron had tossed off and decided he didn't care about and turns it into a novella called The Vampire, which is a precursor to Dracula. Right. Where the main character is Lord Ruthfin, who is suspiciously like Lord Byron. Ah. You know, Mary Shelley writes this story, starts writing Frankenstein, which has a very self-centered young man at the center of the novel who does things because he thinks he wants to, and that's all that matters, and he doesn't care about the consequences. And when the consequences show up, he just runs away. And she's trapped in, she's basically trapped in the neighborhood with two guys that are just like that. So it's it's really not a shock that that that's how Victor Frankenstein turned out. And the reason she's trapped is because that summer it rained. It rained and it was cold and it was awful. It was called the Year Without a Summer. Yeah, I've heard of it. There was a massive climate event during this period. So in 1815, over in Indonesia, there is a massive volcano eruption. A hundred times the size of the volcano eruption at Mount Vesubius. No. It created a smoke and ash cloud the size of Australia. And that smoke and ash cloud moved around the planet and basically screwed up the weather everywhere, including in Europe, where crops are failing because there's not enough sun and there's too much rain and it's cold and wet. So there's famine happening. It also changed the the all of the jet streams and tides and the water temperatures around the Arctic. So the Arctic starts to melt. Oh. And this is why in 1816, there are all of these expeditions between 1816 and 1818 that are going to the Arctic because they're still searching at that point for the Northwest Passage. Right. So Mary is writing this tale where the monster has deposited himself in the Arctic as a way of getting away from humanity during a period where everybody's talking about Arctic exploration because the snow and ice has melted just enough to cause everybody to decide they're going to go do some exploration and a lot of people to get caught because it refreezes and the and they don't know how to escape and they die. So she's actually drawing from her own understanding of what's going on in the world during this time. Because the Arctic is melting and Europe is cold and everything is terrible. This is, you know, this is before the internet, this is before television, this is before even really radio. So, like, how are you gonna entertain yourselves? Well, you read a bunch of ghost stories and then you decide, then Lord Byron says, Yeah, we can do better than that. I dare everybody to write a story. And so they did.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say, well, you're gonna do three things. You're gonna like drink, you're going to have sex, and you're going to read or write. That's basically what you're doing. Yep, exactly.
SPEAKER_00And the thing is, as far as I can tell from from the research I've done, and I will say, while I have a lot of familiarity with the period, I do not proclaim myself to be a Mary Shelley expert. I want to be really, really clear about that. Everything that I am talking about, I have drawn from other people's research from people who are experts. So just keep that in mind. But as far as I can tell, Mary conceivably believed in free love. Like she was she was on board with it from a moral perspective, but she didn't really actively practice it. Right. Like at one at one point, there is one friend who Percy kind of flings at her in the hopes that she'll take up with him. And she sort of flirts vaguely and then just wanders off and that's it. And you know, meanwhile, Percy is having affairs left and right.
SPEAKER_01Sure, sure.
SPEAKER_00But Mary just, I think, wasn't all that interested. Like, in principle, she was like, Yeah, free love is important. You should be able to love who you want. Great. Um, but she was fundamentally a monogamous person in a way that Percy and Lord Byron absolutely were not. Right. I I I I have so many so many titles for this exhibit that did not make the cut because they were um inappropriate. The exhibit was at one point subtitled Mary Shelley Deserved Better. Oh, yeah. There's another version of the title that was Percy Shelley was a fuckboy and you can't tell me different.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you're not wrong from the sounds of it.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it was just oh, such a mess. So, like, they're all trapped in this house and they're all writing these stories. And Byron decides to go back to Child Herald, which is the epic poem he was working on anyway, after sort of tossing off this little snippet that then Paul Dori, who's more of a wannabe than anything else, writes The Vampire based on. Um, and this is like the only thing Pollidory's ever ever ever published. Like he is Byron's doctor, but he's basically a hanger-on. Sure. He's trying real hard, but there's just not that much there there compared to the group of people he's surrounded by, unfortunately for him. And so, like, it's this amazing amount of creativity because people are trapped and bored. And that's awesome. And it's also terrible because people are trapped and bored. And bored, and because Mary is trapped, and she's trapped in a lot of different ways because she spent her entire the she was only married to Percy for eight years before he dropped. In a boating accident after refusing to learn to swim. Oh my God. And having a boat contest with Byron where he commissioned a boat that was supposed to be bigger and faster and better than Byron's boat because it was a whole thing, but never learned to swim. So Mary was actually only married for eight years. And then she spends the rest of her adult life raising the one son that survives, fighting Percy's dad, Sir Timothy, because Sir Timothy didn't want anything of Percy's work to be out in the world. For the rest of Mary's lifetime, she's actually better known as the editor of Percy Shelley's works than she is as an author in her own right. Even though she publishes five more novels after Frankenstein and a whole bunch of travelogues and essays and short stories and poems in different gift books and annuals and things like that. Like she is consistently working as a writer for the remainder of her adult life and as an editor, but she is primarily known at that point as the editor of Percy's work. Sir Timothy, Percy's dad, is so horrified by Percy's anarchism, his atheism, his political stuff overall, that he wants everything that Percy ever produced to fall out of print. And Mary spends the rest of her life fighting that and trying to put Percy out in the world and rehabilitating Percy's image so that his politics get put on the back burner and his poetics get put on the front burner. Right. And so Percy's work lives on as a poetical genius. Mary writes very carefully crafted biographical essays at the beginning of the books because she's not allowed by Sir Timothy to actually publish a biography of her late husband. Because if she does, Sir Timothy will withdraw any and all funding from her son, Percy Florence. I mean, it's this whole thing. It's the fact that she was a functional human at all, given the sheer amount of bullshit to which she was subjected in her life, is astonishing. It's an amazing tale of resilience that should not have had to be gained, frankly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, because so I'm listening to this, and I'm listening to just just you know how big of a fuckboy Percy was, uh the bullshit that she's going with her, you know, ex-father-in-law or you know, whatever throughout the remainder. It's like, dude, I want to like burn everything fucking down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but she she she loves Percy. She really does. And I mean, I I get a certain amount of it because Percy did from all accounts actually appreciate and love her for her brain and her intellectual prowess. And you know, they a lot of their relationship was deeply intellectual. They read books together and would talk about them and all of that kind of thing. Like I think that, you know, I think there was an actual romantic relationship there that had some basis. Right. It's just that Percy couldn't keep it in his damn pants. Sure. And Percy was deeply self-centered. And Mary was fine with Percy being self-centered most of the time. And it's just, it's really frustrating because it's just like I Mary, Mary does Mary Shelley deserved so much better than Percy as a husband.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah, absolutely. I well, it's interesting because one of my notes that I had that I wanted to talk about, and we we've kind of covered it, but I want to circle back a little bit because I was like, is Mary Shelley a Nepo baby? Because it it kind of sounds like it, right? In terms of like having the privilege and having, you know, her her father had these contemporaries and but the thing is the privilege was only intellectual, it was not financial. Okay. Yeah, that's fair.
SPEAKER_00So the the thing is that so William Godwin, for basically for all of Mary's childhood and for the bulk of Mary's life, and for the rest of William Godwin's life, you know, he remarries about four years after his after Mary Wollstonecraft passes away. And he and his new wife, Mary Jane, because everybody's named Mary, just to keep it really confusing. Sure. Um, he and he and Mary Jane start a publishing company where what they do basically is publish inexpensive children's books. That's fundamentally the whole business model. They never really make money at it. In fact, William Godwin spends a fair amount of time asking Percy and Mary for money, even though Percy and Mary don't have money. Yes. He vacillates between being deeply disapproving, especially initially, of their relationship, because they aren't able to get married until December of 1816. So after she started writing Frankenstein, after they're back for the second time from Europe, because that's when Percy's first wife commits suicide. Oh, how convenient. And now Percy is eligible to be married. Is there any indication that he actually murdered her? No. No. She drowned herself. No. Oh, okay. Yeah. It's a whole thing. So Percy is so notorious politically at this point that he can't even get custody of the two kids that he had with his first wife. They end up going getting turned over to other family members. Which, in a legal system where his wife literally doesn't exist legally, except under him, the person she married, he couldn't get custody of the kids. He was that badly viewed. He was like that big of a fuck up. Yeah, he was that big of a fuck up.
SPEAKER_01That's kind of astounding.
SPEAKER_00It's amazing. So, like Mary was an intellectual Nepo baby, but she never had money. You know, she was she was scraping by for the bulk of her career. And she was, you know, she got to a point when she was in her 30s and 40s and moving a little later in her life where she got to be just about comfortable, but not until after her father-in-law died, and her son inherited enough money to actually and the title so that she had some so that he had some security so that she only had to take care of herself. Right. She didn't have the financial privilege, and she did not have the social privilege that Percy came from, for example, or Lord Byron came from, because both Percy and Lord Byron are from titled families, and Mary is absolutely not.
SPEAKER_01Interesting. Okay. Yeah. All of this context is really, really great. I mean, obviously, art is created, not created in a vacuum. It's created by somebody who's living in a society with different pressures and different perspectives and everything. And by everything you're telling me, it's like, oh yeah, no, I can see all of this in the story that she's creating. Obviously, she's going to pull all of this from her own life and whatever. And and and this isn't specific to Frankenstein, I don't think. I think it's more typical in literature of that time, like how present death is. It always strikes me, because in current American society, we are so divorced from death, right? Like death. Yeah, we're terrible at it. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00We are terrible at death, dying and grieving.
SPEAKER_01Awful at it. You know, no one generally dies at home. You know, you die in a hospital, the body is whisked away, there's people in back rooms that deal with it. The next time you see it is either in an urn or a coffin. You know, like we just are not, we are so emotionally divorced from the process. And I was as I was reading the first part, because like I said, I actually kind of uh I'll I'll be completely honest. Sometimes I got bogged down by the by the nature of of the prose, so I was just kind of skimming some of it. So I'm like, all right, all right, I think I got, I think I I get this or whatever. And then several times I had to go back, especially after the the monster was created in the first part. I'm like, wait a minute, the the monsters already exist? Did I miss that? Wow, I I sure did because it's two sentences in the in this in this novel. One thing that really struck me was all of the death. And so during the first part, I was like, wait, is this all kind of an allegory? Is he like, is this creature not really a thing? It's just like an external metaphor for the grief he has from his, you know, siblings dying or whatever, like the the death that the uh that Victor had already experienced in his life or whatever, this is like a physical man is manifestation of that guilt. I'm like, oh yeah, this is this is great. And then I'm reading it, I'm like, oh wait, no, this isn't an allegory. This monster's actually real, it's already been created. So it's just really interesting, like reading something like this as a modern reader, because I have such different expectations of like the storytelling and the story framework that I'm not necessarily appreciating what the story is on the actual page.
SPEAKER_00Sure. I mean, it's one of those things where, in the same way, that if you are relatively new to reading contemporary to us science fiction and fantasy, like the first 50 pages of any given book is there to sort of teach you how to read the book itself because that's where your world building is getting established, right? That's where you're learning about the language and the economics and the interrelationships and all of that kind of stuff in a modern novel. We have expectations in terms of how the structure needs to work. We have expectations in terms of what character arcs look like and things like that, but the the individual world that is built is one that you sort of learn to read at the as you're beginning to read the novel itself. Right. Now, with literature from Mary's era, and keep in mind that Frankenstein is fundamentally a regency novel.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it 100% is, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's published exactly the same year as Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. And it is part actually of a much longer literary tradition of Gothic literature. So there's there's this whole generation of female writers who write quote-unquote sensation novels from like the 1780s to the 1820s, who are really well known at the time and have sort of disappeared at this point in terms of history because the way that English literature is taught, you sort of get, you know, you get the survey course, which like you get one Jane Austen book, you wave at Mary Shelley, but that's kind of genre, so we're gonna skip it. And then you move on to all the other male authors who are clearly way more important than the one woman we put in the syllabus who who will fit, right? Right. It's Mary is coming actually from an entire tradition of women's writing that modern readers are are generally really unaware of. Like Mary Shelley, if you look at sort of the pop culture version of her, like what has happened in terms of the memefication of her on the internet. Right. Like she's she's this weird, super hyper gothic one-hit wonder who's more badass than you because she had sex on her mother's grave. And like the only thing she ever did was write this one novel at 19, and what are you doing with your life? And it's and it's just like, no, she's part of a literary tradition. She has all of these literary forbears that she shares in common with Jane Austen, even though she and Jane Austen didn't read one another. Interesting. So, like, there she's but she's part of this whole tradition that is not necessarily talked about in the context of people reading the novel. So a lot of the things that made Frankenstein special outside of the way that we think of it as special, but at the time, what set it apart was her emphasis on the scientific factor in the work. Like the fact that Victor is this histrionic crybaby who takes no responsibility for himself and his work, A is absolutely a reflection of Byron and Percy, and also is a version of a character that has already existed in Gothic literature. Sometimes it's a self-centered young lady rather than a self-sunk self-centered young man, but it's it's already a character that exists in the literature. But but it was her approach to the scientific part of it that set it apart. Because as a woman who was educated in science beyond what was typical, she's reading contemporary science works at the time. So she's reading Galvani in translation, who is the scientist in Italy who discovers that you can make flesh move if you add electricity, which is where, of course, the how the creature is brought to life comes from. So she's reading this contemporary science and she's putting it into the novel, but she's doing it in a really graphic way because she is openly admitting that graveyards are being robbed and that that the dead are being defiled. And that's the thing that makes it so punk rock, basically. Right. Like from a linguistic point of view, she is writing in a style that is reasonably similar to what is going on around her. Right. Um, it's not, you know, she is she is not an island by any means in that sense.
SPEAKER_02No.
SPEAKER_00But but reading 19th century literature overall is a thing that you learn to do through practice the same way that you learn to read a new science fiction novel as you're reading it. Yeah. Like it it really is, it really is just practice and comfort. And I happen to have a background where when I did my literature degrees, I focused on 19th century liter literature. So for me, going to Frankenstein was like, yep, here we go again. I know what to do with this because my brain has had over a decade of tr uh like two decades at this point of training and practice in reading these kinds of novels. Right. So it was less of an issue for me. But I can totally get how it would be an issue for folks who don't have that 20 years of reading things like this. And and like if you think about how you sort of miss the monster, miss the creature being created, and like you had to go back, right? Yeah, yeah. Think of it in the same way that the Battle of Helm's Deep in The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, Tolkien does that off page, it's not actually depicted in the novel. Peter Jackson is the one that created our concept of the Battle of Helm's Deep because he needed a 20-minute set piece in his film. But Helm's Deep happens off camera. Not on page, it's off camera in the novels, and it's a it's a similar thing. Basically, the creation of the creature mostly happens off camera. Suddenly he's there and he is figuring out how to human right. And one of the fascinating things about Frankenstein as a novel going forward is that it's really heavily studied. So, like when you look at like the secondary literature of people writing about Frankenstein, just about every single school of literary thought has taken a crack at this novel and found something there. Right. Like it's so rich in and of itself. It really is. You can choose any framework of approach to this novel and get a quite reasonable, backed up by the text reading of it. There are readings of it that are about climate literature, there are readings of it that are about queer literature, there's disability critique readings of it, there's new historicist readings of it. Like you you can Marxist readings of it, feminist readings of it, like anti-feminist readings of it. Like there are lots and lots of ways to read this novel, which is one of the reasons it's so persistent in our culture.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say there are a lot of lenses through which to view this this text for sure. What what struck me, and I think it's because maybe part of where we are today, like in the world or whatever, and just how profoundly patriarchy and men have fucked things up for everybody. Well, for the first part of the novel, like like Victor being like you're saying, right? Like he's this hotshot, he's doing this, I want to do this because I think I can do it, not really thinking about any potential consequences or harm he's doing by actually, you know, robbing graves and making this monster. It felt a little Jurassic Park to me, right? Where it's like, yeah, you were just so, so, so worried about whether or not you could do it, you didn't stop to think of whether or not you should. Yep, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00It is, it is in in that sense, like Jurassic Park is drawing from exactly the moral stance that Mary Shelley is taking with that novel. Oh, one person says you can doesn't mean you should.
SPEAKER_01Right, absolutely. And then also another thing that struck me was that he he made a a man monster or a male, male presenting, I guess, or whatever monster. And once the monster, you know, becomes sentient and educated and he has, you know, educated by blind people that don't know he's a monster, essentially, that kind of thing, once he becomes like a an educated man, he's like, Well, you know, it sucks. I exist, I don't like this existence or whatever, but I want you to make me a wife. Because if I'm going to be miserable in this life, by God, I want somebody just like me so I can be happy. And it's it's that inherent selfishness. I don't I don't know if it's selfishness, but it's also maybe it's selfish selfishness, but it's also entitlement. Where it's like, nope, I if I exist and I have to do go through all this, I'm not doing it alone. You have to create another thing for me. And I just found that a really interesting thing to pick at.
SPEAKER_00If you think about it, one of the lenses that you can read Frankenstein through is one of this being a novel of male entitlement from beginning to end. Front to back. Front to back. So yeah, I mean, it absolutely tracks. And that's, you know, that's one of the things that makes it so fascinating. So one of the things that I ended up doing when I was putting together the exhibit, I was I was writing the label for the case that was full of like contemporary responses to Mary Shelley. So, like what it was like when the book came out and how people responded. And, you know, there was parody, there were entire plays that were written mostly about the drama at the villa and not the work of the people. There were novels that were sort of weird riffs on Frankenstein that didn't make a whole lot of sense, except you had to know that they were riffs on Frankenstein. Right. But one of the things that I realized as I was like writing this novel was like all of the critique was exactly the same critique that is the chapter headings in Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing. Really? She wrote it, but yeah, she wrote it, but she shouldn't have. She wrote it, but she didn't really write it. She wrote it, but look at what she wrote. Like, it's all of those things. It's it is really fascinating. Like, I ended up basing 200 years.
SPEAKER_01200 years, Lynn, and we're still in the same fucking place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I ended up basing the exhibit on three books primarily. I based it on Charlotte Gordon's biography of Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft that's called Romantic Outlaws. It's a dual biography where she goes through their lives in alternating chapters. Really, really amazing. One won the National Book Award in like 2015. Nice. I I read Sarika Davis's uh Humans a Monstrous History, which is a historical survey of how humans create monsters of each other, of ourselves, in culture, in reality. And Frankenstein is literally in the opening chapter, of course. Obviously. Because it's like at this point, it's the cultural monster we all think of if you say the word monster. Right. And the third book was Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing. Because all of the critiques that happened to Mary Shelley also happened to Mary Wollstonecraft especially posthumously. Yeah. Because William Godwin, in an attempt to ensure that Mary Wollstonecraft's work was appreciated and moved forward, wrote a memoir of her where he laid out her two previous suicide attempts. He laid out the fact that she had two children out of wedlock. Uh, he laid out a whole bunch of other things that were considered socially horrific as a way of demonstrating how truthfully she lived her stated values. And as a result, all of her philosophical work was disregarded and she was just treated as a dumb whore for centuries.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_00It's not until the 1970s that Wollstonecraft's work starts to actually come back as part of the feminist rediscovery of the historical female canon.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna say like the big feminist push in the 70s would have would have brought that back out.
SPEAKER_00But that's the so that happens to Wollstonecraft and it absolutely happened to Mary Shelley too. Which is how you get she she wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. No, she wrote five, she wrote five other novels. Yeah, like she had a whole career, a beautiful career. And people don't know that. They just think, oh, Frankenstein and nothing else.
SPEAKER_01Right. Like she wrote this book when she was 18 or whatever. Haha, how's that isn't that great, and then nothing else.
SPEAKER_00And what have you done with your life? Yeah. It's it's the most amazing thing. It is a novel that is so incredibly modern and so incredibly of its time at the same time. And I think that's one of the reasons that it ends up being it ends up having such legs, having the longevity. Because it it covers so many universal themes. That every generation comes back to it and finds something different or finds the same things again.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think Shelley did what good authors and good filmmakers or good storytellers, let's say, do, which is find the humanity in the work. And they're truthful to that humanity. You know, obviously they're writing through their own lens or whatever, but she's truthful to that humanity. And I think that that's why that's why we can read it today. Like parsing the language aside, you know, like what you're saying is like all of these themes, they're absolutely still relevant.
SPEAKER_00We still look in the mirror and think, am I a monster? Have I created a monster?
SPEAKER_02Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00Like, is this is this novel an entirely long allegory about how difficult it is to go through childbirth? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, because that's an given that she had multiple miscarriages as well as she was pregnant and had children, and then had the children die at a very young age while she's writing this novel. That is not an unreasonable reading either.
SPEAKER_01No, no, it is not.
SPEAKER_00Because I mean, Victor Frankenstein, of course, thinks he's making life, and and like Mary Shelley pregnant, having had just given birth and then had that baby die, is like, you don't know jack shit about giving life about creating life. Yeah, fuck you. You histrionic self-centered piece of shit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what? I'll show you giving life. Well, in Victor's thought process, like I mentioned Jurassic Park, but it's not that different from like the AI companies now, right? It's like look, let's let's look at this cool thing. Ooh, we need we're like within within reach of the singularity. Let's totally fucking do that and not think about any of the consequences of it. Not thinking about like, hey, is this actually going to like end human civilization if you do this? Like, what the fuck are you doing? You know, it's the same kind of, I think, thought process where somebody just wants to be, wants to have been the one to have created this new science.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, and again, these are these are young men who have never been held accountable, Percy and Lord Byron both. They are they are from wealthy families, even though they are constantly scraping for funds individually. And arguably they're the models for Victor Frankenstein. It's that entitled thing where they've where there are no consequences for the dumb shit that they do. Not for them, anyway, in the same way that there are for all of the people that are affected by the dumb shit they do. I mean, the monster kills a bunch of people.
SPEAKER_01A whole bunch of people.
SPEAKER_00A whole bunch of people. And and Victor Frankenstein is like, oh no, what shall I do? I guess I'll wander off and do nothing. Poor me. Poor me. I have created something terrible, but there's nothing I can do about it now.
SPEAKER_01Really? Men.
SPEAKER_00Like, seriously? As I would reread passages when I was like working on the exhibit and stuff, like the the barely contained rage that is underneath. Oh, yeah. Is real. It is absolutely real.
SPEAKER_01And it's interesting that even at such a young age that she is like tapping into that and not afraid to put it on paper. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_00And that's the thing to freak people out. Like, that was why people were like, why is she writing this? Like, that's that's not proper womanly stuff to write about. Women don't get to own anger. And Mary's like, hold my beer.
SPEAKER_01Oh, contraire.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, because that is not the training for women during the period.
SPEAKER_01Dude, that's not the training for us now. We still don't get to be angry. No. Even though all pretty much every single woman I know right now is like just a seething ball of rage. Mm-hmm. Yeah, not wrong. So I'm going, I know that we're kind of nearing the end of our time. I want to ask you the question, and I obviously the answer is going to be no, but I ask it in every episode: should this work be banned? And of course Absolutely not. Of course, of course it shouldn't. But I think that it's a commonality I'm finding in both the books and the and the movie podcasts. Like the reason, like we were just kind of talking, talking, right? Like the reason that stuff like this is banned is because, oh, it's saying something that we powerful people don't want you to think about. Or we're not banning this because of the graphic nature, we're banning this because women get to be mad on the page, and that's a problem, or whatever. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Or it puts, you know, entitled young men in a bad light.
SPEAKER_01Right. And not kissing their ass and being like, no, this is a really shitty thing that he that he's doing and has continued to do. And yeah, where's like the text does not feel sorry for Victor Frankenstein at all.
SPEAKER_00Not one bit. And nor should it.
SPEAKER_01And nor should it. Yeah, and nor should it. And I think maybe that's some of the pushback from the critics of the time was like, no, you should have cut him some slack. Like, look at this cool thing he did. But look at all the people that this cool thing he did killed. Murdered. Yeah. Yeah. Dead. Gone. Done. So tell me first, I'm gonna ask you for for any of your final thoughts. And as part of that, I do want to hear more about this exhibit. Like, can we can we go see it? When's it running? Where's it at?
SPEAKER_00Yep. So the exhibit is it's open. It is available in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois. It will be open through May 14th of 2027. So it's staying in the cases for a year. Uh we're open Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, generally speaking, when the university is in session. Uh over the summers, we tend to have more limited hours, but through the spring semester, it'll be Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. There will be an online version of the exhibit, as well as video recording of my opening talk uh will be posted on the RBML YouTube channel at some point. Both of those things are going to be asynchronous as time and energy permit. So the video of my talk has to be captioned before it can go up so that we're in compliance with ADA too, as is right and proper. And so that'll come up probably in a few weeks. The online version, it'll take a couple of months because it takes some organizing on the back end in terms of digitization and building things appropriately in our digital platform for exhibits, but there will be an online version as well. But I do encourage people to come and see it. It's free. You don't have to pay anything to come and see it. Um, we're in the main library on campus on the third floor.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. I think I might have to take a road trip down and grab some of my science fiction nerd friends and and come see it because it sounds it sounds really awesome. Well, I hope you do. I hope lots of people do. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody go drive to Champaign Urbana, go get some Poppadell's pizza and get get yourself to this Mary Shelley exhibit. This sounds awesome. Well, Lynn, thank you so much again for taking the time to share your wealth and all of your uh great insights on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I loved our conversation. I learned so much. I know our listeners did. And uh speaking of you listeners, don't forget to subscribe, like, tell your friends everything. If you want to hear podcasts like this before the rest of the world can, make sure to subscribe to our Patreon page. I believe that's patreon.com slash frozen shoulder. And you know, you can get us on Spotify or wherever. So again, thank you so much, Lynn. Thanks, Kelly, for having me. It's a pleasure.