Mary Shelley: A Biography by Muriel Spark
Dec. 15th, 2007 06:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaI finished In Cold Blood in the bunker this week. I certainly have things to say about it, but everything has fled in the knowledge that I READ THE WRONG BOOK. I called my friend to let her know I was finished and we could now discuss the book (I read this for a friend who lamented having no one to discuss it with) and she said, "But I wanted you to read Executioner's Song."
Needless to say, I do not regret In Cold Blood, and it will probably make a good study of contrast to Executioner's Song, but I am not in the mood to read another true crime just now. So I picked Muriel Spark's biography of Mary Shelley as my next "bunker book." (Bunker books need to be easily put down when work shows up, but engaging enough to pass the time. Usually they are a little dry, the sort of thing I would not avoid chores to do, but honestly want to read.)
I don't know what to say about the biography. I picked it up because I found it at a used bookstore and am of light familiarity with Spark's novels. I was actually looking for the most recent Mary Shelley biography, but I can't remember who wrote it or what it's called. For some reason I got it into my head that she might be a figure sympathetic to me, and that I knew almost nothing of her life.
The Spark biography seems to be a classic in the field, but it was not an easy read. Spark disdains the novelistic approach to non-fiction, "I have always disliked the sort of biography which states 'X lay on the bed and watched the candle flickering on the roof beams' when there is no evidence that X did so." This makes for an extremely accurate biography, but very dry. The most entertaining bits were Spark's acerbic assessment of character, such as her disdain of Clare (Jane) Clairemont, Mary's step-sister who accompanied the Shelley's on their elopement:
There is a type of person, who having glimpsed the glories attendant upon the life dedicated to creative achievement, and who is yet unqualified to create, who pursues in a vague sort of way not the achievement itself but its accoutrements. Such a person was Claire Claremont, the type of young woman who would today be called "arty." Brought by her mother's marriage into a society of luminary spirits, she envied the high pitch of their existence but lacked their justification, a capacity for vision and performance; and their can be no more insidious or inconvenient company for the truly creative mind as this parasitic type of manque individual. (p49)
But these bits were few and far between. So, it wasn't an enjoyable read, but it was informative. What I disliked most is that Mary emerges as more of an enigma by the end of the book, than she was at the beginning. The book did not get into her head for me, or explain the whys or wherefores of her life and work. Instead, I feel all the facts obfuscated her work. She emerges somehow separate from it, instead of one with it, as though her work (particularly her best known Frankenstein) happened despite her life rather than because of it.
One of the difficulties in approaching the life of Mary Shelley is that it is impossible to separate her life or work from that of her contemporaries. She falls in the shadow of genuis. Spark writes:
Knowing Shelley seemed to go to everyone's head who knew him; and Mary experienced eight years' contact with that most heady of geniuses. Speaking of Shelley, T.S. Eliot said that "the weight of Mrs. Shelley must have been pretty heavy." I am sure that, ultimately, it was the other way around. For Shelley created an illusion about himself that he left as legacy to Mary. It was an illusion that fostered in her the memory of their life together in a form that never was on land or sea, and which set her perpetually in odds with existence. (p234)
This theme of 'at odds' is repeated throughout the book, and perhaps, as Spark comments throughout the book, this is the key to Mary's character. Mary was daughter of rationalist thinkers William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, best known by women's studies majors today as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (The title 'Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley' by which she has come to be known, is no doubt via the influence of the same women's studies persons, as in her time Mary was known as 'Mary Godwin Shelley' due to the patronymic nature of names in the Western world, and to the fact that SHE NEVER KNEW HER MOTHER as her mother died of 'childbed fever' after delivering Mary. ETA: This statement was later proved false. Mary deliberately took her mother's name to distance herself from her father and her father's philosophy.) As such she was the product of a 'rationalist' upbringing, and was educated far beyond what was usual for women at the time and exposed to many of the great poets and thinkers of her time. (Apparently she and her half-sister hid behind the couch to hear Coleridge read Ancient Mariner, an influential experience which she mentioned throughout her life.)
Despite her elopement with Shelley, there is no evidence of the airy-fairy 'romantic' thinking throughout the rest of her life. She remained true to her rationalist upbringing and to Godwin's utilitarian philosophy, always pursuing the rationalist ideal, or later in life, the most pragmatic approach to ensure the success of her only remaining progeny by Shelley, Percy.
And yet, in many periods of her life this left her lonely and emotionally (not to mention socially) bereft. Much has been made of the 'free love' philosophy of the Shelley/Byron circle. Some biographies have suggested Shelley's sexual involvement with a number of their acquaintances, including Mary's step-sister Clare (who gave birth to one of Byron's bastards) and Jane Williams, a family friend. Spark does not give much credit to this interpretation, though we have textual evidence to suggest that Mary was encouraged to flirt heavily with William Hogg, another patron who was bankrolling the Shelley's at the time. Shelley was married prior to his involvement with Mary and they lived much of their eight years together unwed until his first wife's suicide, after which point they were married, more, Spark believes, for the sake of their children than any change of commitment to one another.
Spark portrays the Shelley's relationship as being a sort of creative ideal and the happiest time in Mary's life, only sullied later by the suggestion of a family friend, Jane Williams, that Shelley was pursued Williams at the end of his life due to Mary's insufficiency as a wife. This caused an enormous rift between Mary and her social circle, both because Mary knew that her marriage with Shelley was largely a "successful union," but also because she felt that she had let him down at the end of his life due to her grief over the death of two of her children. (She lost three of her four children by Shelley.) - p115
It is the death of her children, her response to it, and the response of her social circle, that represent the strangest aspects of the biography. Some historians have suggested that what we now regard as tragedy (the death of chidren) was at one time considered commonplace and therefore no tragedy. This idea is both credited and discredited by Mary's father's response to her depression over the death of two of her children (who died within months of each other while the family toured of Italy)
[The affliction] I may consider as the first severe trial of your constancy and the firmness of your temper that has occurred to you in the course of your life; you should, however recollect that it is oly persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a pusillanimous disposition, that sink long under a calamity of this nature.... We seldom indulge long in depression and mourning except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it and it does us honor. p65
Spark responds to Godwin's horrifying callousness and the issue of high infant mortality with the following paragraph, which to me feels like the key to the entire biography, and the plight of 19C women generally:
We are accustomed to regard the nineteenth-century woman, married or unmarried, as a terribly frustrated being. The wife and mother, we often hear, was frustrated by a lack of erotic interest and the spinster by the lack of both lover and children. But by far the greatest sense of frustration was experienced by those mothers of large families who so frequently watched all or most of their children droop and die in infancy. This was an emotional disappointment of a very profound order, and had a more disasterous effect on women than did other emotional and physical deprivations. (p69)
Spark goes on to describe the case in specifics as relates to the deaths of Mary's children, evidence of Mary's textual responses, and her perceived pessimistic viewpoint on life. And yet, I also feel there is a larger metaphor being drawn here about the the creative difficulty for women in the era, and to some extent our own. It didn't seem to matter how much care they took of their children, or their creations, the tendancy was for the effort to be rewarded with the inability for their creations to be able to thrive in the world.
Thinking over her upbringing and education, the legacy she embodied as the child of two progressive thinkers, I cannot help but think of the enormous futility of her life and education. Mary Wollenstonecraft's essential thesis in Vindication of the Rights of Women is that women will be equal to man if they are educated equally. Mary Shelley was raised under that banner and educated far beyond the usual sphere of women in her era; but that did not make her equal, and quite possibly may have put her further at odds with the world, her peers, and the men towards which it was supposed to make her equal.
I also couldn't help but notice the similarities of her life to that of Louisa May Alcott. Both women were daughters of influentual thinkers, had unusual educations, and difficult relationships with their fathers who they supported financially through their work and relationships. Both are 'also rans' in the literary Pantheon's of their respective times, (Ms. Shelley's work being the more respectable in the cannon, but perhaps less read as an entire body.) mentioned more for their femaleness and literary associations than the quality of their work. (Whether or not the quality of their work holds up is another issue entirely, though I've strongly felt that Little Women should be read alongside Huck Finn to the extent that either should be required reading at all.)
But something else popped out at me as I considered the problem of education and whether or not their educations had ruined them for ordiary life. For me it is a sense that there was something extra about these women that went beyond the scope of their background. Plenty of people have been afforded excellent educations to go on and live average lives; these women were hungry and were not content with the educations they received and continued reaching for more despite its rather exacting price.
There is also an enormous sense of creative frustration that surrounds the lives of these women. For Mary it was her father-in-law's threats to disinherit her son from the Shelley title and fortune if she published any of her work while he remained alive. For Louisa it was the inability to find the time, training, or incentive to write more mature works. She is regarded primarily as a children's author because that's what she was paid money to write. She did not particularly like her books for children, but was under enormous financial pressure to support her family and did so at a considerable cost to both her art and her health.
And despite their associations with the leading male artists/thinkers of their respective timespace, the creative isolation in which they lived, no one with whom they could really share their art or emotional lives, absolutely breaks my heart. I've often imagined Louisa wandering the woods around Concord alone, while all her male contemporaries walked in pairs, and I can't help but wonder what they'd make of their lives, and their art, if they had been afforded true equality or companionship.
Spark ends the book by reflecting both on Mary's seemingly pessimistic nature and her rationalistic upbringing. She suggests that Mary's pessimism is a product of her rationalistic upbringing, and the source of the general sense of foreboding that haunted Mary even during the happiest and most productive periods of her life.
And yet from Mary's own hand we have the following communication in a letter to Claire just a few years before the end of her life:
I have been pursued all my life by lowness of spirits which superinduces a certain irritability which often spoils me as a companion. I lament it & feel it & know it---but that does not suffice---To be as I ought to be towards others (for very often this lowness does not disturb my inward tranquillity.) I need to be a little tipsy---this is a sad confession but a true one; any thing of emotion that quickens the flow of my blood makes me not so much a happier as a better person. (p145)
Spark goes on to reflect on intoxication and the tragic irony that Mary was largely a teetotaler, and hypothesizes that her life might have been better for more intoxication. (Or self-medication, I might add.) But this moment, in addition to an appendage Mary adds a few years later, suggests a divided life, and one which speaks towards what little creative work Mary left behind:
It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being the record of my feelngs, & not of my imagination... my imagination, my Kubla Khan---my Stately pleasure ground.(p146)
So we're left with an enigma, and a sense that the personal thoughts and feelings she recorded were regarded as being somehow seperate from her creative output; but also a sense of a woman whose creative work was an immense solace to her rather difficult life.
In anycase, I still haven't untangled the huge snarl of thoughts the book created in me. And I didn't really *enjoy* the book, though it was certainly provoking. But I do recommend the essays that follow: Spark's treatment of Frankenstein examines its 'rationalist' roots, has some interesting analysis of Shelley's style including hilarious (and insightful) comparisons to popular gothics of the day. She makes a compelling argument for its status as NOT a gothic, because its apparatus is entirely scientific and does not involve any supernatural forces.
She also has an interesting essay about The Last Man, which is a remarkably prophetic piece of proto-distopian fiction that predicts (among other things) the atmosphere and disasters following the Second World War. (But I have not read it, so don't take my word for it.)
There is also some excellent bits about Mary Shelley's contribution to biographical criticism that is certainly worth a second look.
And all the above essays are informed by the biography, which if not particularly engaging, is blessedly short.
Needless to say, I do not regret In Cold Blood, and it will probably make a good study of contrast to Executioner's Song, but I am not in the mood to read another true crime just now. So I picked Muriel Spark's biography of Mary Shelley as my next "bunker book." (Bunker books need to be easily put down when work shows up, but engaging enough to pass the time. Usually they are a little dry, the sort of thing I would not avoid chores to do, but honestly want to read.)
I don't know what to say about the biography. I picked it up because I found it at a used bookstore and am of light familiarity with Spark's novels. I was actually looking for the most recent Mary Shelley biography, but I can't remember who wrote it or what it's called. For some reason I got it into my head that she might be a figure sympathetic to me, and that I knew almost nothing of her life.
The Spark biography seems to be a classic in the field, but it was not an easy read. Spark disdains the novelistic approach to non-fiction, "I have always disliked the sort of biography which states 'X lay on the bed and watched the candle flickering on the roof beams' when there is no evidence that X did so." This makes for an extremely accurate biography, but very dry. The most entertaining bits were Spark's acerbic assessment of character, such as her disdain of Clare (Jane) Clairemont, Mary's step-sister who accompanied the Shelley's on their elopement:
There is a type of person, who having glimpsed the glories attendant upon the life dedicated to creative achievement, and who is yet unqualified to create, who pursues in a vague sort of way not the achievement itself but its accoutrements. Such a person was Claire Claremont, the type of young woman who would today be called "arty." Brought by her mother's marriage into a society of luminary spirits, she envied the high pitch of their existence but lacked their justification, a capacity for vision and performance; and their can be no more insidious or inconvenient company for the truly creative mind as this parasitic type of manque individual. (p49)
But these bits were few and far between. So, it wasn't an enjoyable read, but it was informative. What I disliked most is that Mary emerges as more of an enigma by the end of the book, than she was at the beginning. The book did not get into her head for me, or explain the whys or wherefores of her life and work. Instead, I feel all the facts obfuscated her work. She emerges somehow separate from it, instead of one with it, as though her work (particularly her best known Frankenstein) happened despite her life rather than because of it.
One of the difficulties in approaching the life of Mary Shelley is that it is impossible to separate her life or work from that of her contemporaries. She falls in the shadow of genuis. Spark writes:
Knowing Shelley seemed to go to everyone's head who knew him; and Mary experienced eight years' contact with that most heady of geniuses. Speaking of Shelley, T.S. Eliot said that "the weight of Mrs. Shelley must have been pretty heavy." I am sure that, ultimately, it was the other way around. For Shelley created an illusion about himself that he left as legacy to Mary. It was an illusion that fostered in her the memory of their life together in a form that never was on land or sea, and which set her perpetually in odds with existence. (p234)
This theme of 'at odds' is repeated throughout the book, and perhaps, as Spark comments throughout the book, this is the key to Mary's character. Mary was daughter of rationalist thinkers William Godwin, the author of An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Mary Wollstonecraft, best known by women's studies majors today as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. (
Despite her elopement with Shelley, there is no evidence of the airy-fairy 'romantic' thinking throughout the rest of her life. She remained true to her rationalist upbringing and to Godwin's utilitarian philosophy, always pursuing the rationalist ideal, or later in life, the most pragmatic approach to ensure the success of her only remaining progeny by Shelley, Percy.
And yet, in many periods of her life this left her lonely and emotionally (not to mention socially) bereft. Much has been made of the 'free love' philosophy of the Shelley/Byron circle. Some biographies have suggested Shelley's sexual involvement with a number of their acquaintances, including Mary's step-sister Clare (who gave birth to one of Byron's bastards) and Jane Williams, a family friend. Spark does not give much credit to this interpretation, though we have textual evidence to suggest that Mary was encouraged to flirt heavily with William Hogg, another patron who was bankrolling the Shelley's at the time. Shelley was married prior to his involvement with Mary and they lived much of their eight years together unwed until his first wife's suicide, after which point they were married, more, Spark believes, for the sake of their children than any change of commitment to one another.
Spark portrays the Shelley's relationship as being a sort of creative ideal and the happiest time in Mary's life, only sullied later by the suggestion of a family friend, Jane Williams, that Shelley was pursued Williams at the end of his life due to Mary's insufficiency as a wife. This caused an enormous rift between Mary and her social circle, both because Mary knew that her marriage with Shelley was largely a "successful union," but also because she felt that she had let him down at the end of his life due to her grief over the death of two of her children. (She lost three of her four children by Shelley.) - p115
It is the death of her children, her response to it, and the response of her social circle, that represent the strangest aspects of the biography. Some historians have suggested that what we now regard as tragedy (the death of chidren) was at one time considered commonplace and therefore no tragedy. This idea is both credited and discredited by Mary's father's response to her depression over the death of two of her children (who died within months of each other while the family toured of Italy)
[The affliction] I may consider as the first severe trial of your constancy and the firmness of your temper that has occurred to you in the course of your life; you should, however recollect that it is oly persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a pusillanimous disposition, that sink long under a calamity of this nature.... We seldom indulge long in depression and mourning except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it and it does us honor. p65
Spark responds to Godwin's horrifying callousness and the issue of high infant mortality with the following paragraph, which to me feels like the key to the entire biography, and the plight of 19C women generally:
We are accustomed to regard the nineteenth-century woman, married or unmarried, as a terribly frustrated being. The wife and mother, we often hear, was frustrated by a lack of erotic interest and the spinster by the lack of both lover and children. But by far the greatest sense of frustration was experienced by those mothers of large families who so frequently watched all or most of their children droop and die in infancy. This was an emotional disappointment of a very profound order, and had a more disasterous effect on women than did other emotional and physical deprivations. (p69)
Spark goes on to describe the case in specifics as relates to the deaths of Mary's children, evidence of Mary's textual responses, and her perceived pessimistic viewpoint on life. And yet, I also feel there is a larger metaphor being drawn here about the the creative difficulty for women in the era, and to some extent our own. It didn't seem to matter how much care they took of their children, or their creations, the tendancy was for the effort to be rewarded with the inability for their creations to be able to thrive in the world.
Thinking over her upbringing and education, the legacy she embodied as the child of two progressive thinkers, I cannot help but think of the enormous futility of her life and education. Mary Wollenstonecraft's essential thesis in Vindication of the Rights of Women is that women will be equal to man if they are educated equally. Mary Shelley was raised under that banner and educated far beyond the usual sphere of women in her era; but that did not make her equal, and quite possibly may have put her further at odds with the world, her peers, and the men towards which it was supposed to make her equal.
I also couldn't help but notice the similarities of her life to that of Louisa May Alcott. Both women were daughters of influentual thinkers, had unusual educations, and difficult relationships with their fathers who they supported financially through their work and relationships. Both are 'also rans' in the literary Pantheon's of their respective times, (Ms. Shelley's work being the more respectable in the cannon, but perhaps less read as an entire body.) mentioned more for their femaleness and literary associations than the quality of their work. (Whether or not the quality of their work holds up is another issue entirely, though I've strongly felt that Little Women should be read alongside Huck Finn to the extent that either should be required reading at all.)
But something else popped out at me as I considered the problem of education and whether or not their educations had ruined them for ordiary life. For me it is a sense that there was something extra about these women that went beyond the scope of their background. Plenty of people have been afforded excellent educations to go on and live average lives; these women were hungry and were not content with the educations they received and continued reaching for more despite its rather exacting price.
There is also an enormous sense of creative frustration that surrounds the lives of these women. For Mary it was her father-in-law's threats to disinherit her son from the Shelley title and fortune if she published any of her work while he remained alive. For Louisa it was the inability to find the time, training, or incentive to write more mature works. She is regarded primarily as a children's author because that's what she was paid money to write. She did not particularly like her books for children, but was under enormous financial pressure to support her family and did so at a considerable cost to both her art and her health.
And despite their associations with the leading male artists/thinkers of their respective timespace, the creative isolation in which they lived, no one with whom they could really share their art or emotional lives, absolutely breaks my heart. I've often imagined Louisa wandering the woods around Concord alone, while all her male contemporaries walked in pairs, and I can't help but wonder what they'd make of their lives, and their art, if they had been afforded true equality or companionship.
Spark ends the book by reflecting both on Mary's seemingly pessimistic nature and her rationalistic upbringing. She suggests that Mary's pessimism is a product of her rationalistic upbringing, and the source of the general sense of foreboding that haunted Mary even during the happiest and most productive periods of her life.
And yet from Mary's own hand we have the following communication in a letter to Claire just a few years before the end of her life:
I have been pursued all my life by lowness of spirits which superinduces a certain irritability which often spoils me as a companion. I lament it & feel it & know it---but that does not suffice---To be as I ought to be towards others (for very often this lowness does not disturb my inward tranquillity.) I need to be a little tipsy---this is a sad confession but a true one; any thing of emotion that quickens the flow of my blood makes me not so much a happier as a better person. (p145)
Spark goes on to reflect on intoxication and the tragic irony that Mary was largely a teetotaler, and hypothesizes that her life might have been better for more intoxication. (Or self-medication, I might add.) But this moment, in addition to an appendage Mary adds a few years later, suggests a divided life, and one which speaks towards what little creative work Mary left behind:
It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being the record of my feelngs, & not of my imagination... my imagination, my Kubla Khan---my Stately pleasure ground.(p146)
So we're left with an enigma, and a sense that the personal thoughts and feelings she recorded were regarded as being somehow seperate from her creative output; but also a sense of a woman whose creative work was an immense solace to her rather difficult life.
In anycase, I still haven't untangled the huge snarl of thoughts the book created in me. And I didn't really *enjoy* the book, though it was certainly provoking. But I do recommend the essays that follow: Spark's treatment of Frankenstein examines its 'rationalist' roots, has some interesting analysis of Shelley's style including hilarious (and insightful) comparisons to popular gothics of the day. She makes a compelling argument for its status as NOT a gothic, because its apparatus is entirely scientific and does not involve any supernatural forces.
She also has an interesting essay about The Last Man, which is a remarkably prophetic piece of proto-distopian fiction that predicts (among other things) the atmosphere and disasters following the Second World War. (But I have not read it, so don't take my word for it.)
There is also some excellent bits about Mary Shelley's contribution to biographical criticism that is certainly worth a second look.
And all the above essays are informed by the biography, which if not particularly engaging, is blessedly short.
