Frankenstein
Percy
Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and his wife, Mary
(Wollstonecraft Godwin) (1797-1851) visited Naples in
December, 1818. They stayed for three months. During that
time, Shelley wrote Stanzas written in
dejection near Naples, the final portion of which
is:
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,—
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.
Nothing
surprising there. Anyone who has ever lived in Naples
feels that way sometimes. Shelley’s wife, Mary, was fond
of citing the line, "Naples is a paradise inhabited by devils….”
Again, nothing new.
The
Neapolitan interlude in the complicated soap opera that
was the life of both Shelleys (free love, illegitimate
children, abandoned wives, incest and suicides —for
starters) was just a few years after Percy and Mary had
hunkered down near Lake Geneva with Byron and John William
Polidori to read ghost stories and write their own. It was
the disastrous summer of 1816, the world-wide “year
without a summer” brought about by the climate-changing
eruption in April, 1815, of Mt. Tambora in far-away
Indonesia. Thus, it was cold and dark in Geneva, so the
group wrote some scary stuff. Polidori penned the
progenitor of the vampire genre of fantasy fiction, The Vamypre, and Mary Shelley, famously,
wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
I have
actually been in Frankenstein, a town near Kaiserslautern,
Germany. Well, I saw it from the window of a train. It was
a dark and stormy night (!) and I was jogged out of fitful
slumber as our train pulled into a small station. I opened
the window, looked out and saw the sign on the station. We were in Frankenstein! Not the
movie, the real deal! I got all spooked, closed the window
and started muttering, Come on, let's
go...let's go...let's go. (I was very young.) There
is even a Frankenstein Castle, which may be the source of
the name Mary Shelley chose for her good doctor. She
claimed she got the name in a dream, but then she was
telling stories, wasn’t she? She might have taken it from
whatever passed for a phone book in 1816. It’s not that
rare a name. There are currently 408 Frankensteins in
Germany. One claims to be “Dr. Viktor Frankenstein,” but
he runs Frankenstein Tours in Ingolstadt, near Munich,
(where Mary Shelley’s fictitious doctor studied to learn
the dark art of reanimating corpses), so I’m betting that
Vic’s real name is Otto or Fritz.)
So, the
other night on the popular Italian TV quiz show, Alta tensione, there was a tricky question
(tricky because most people have not actually read
Mary Shelley’s original novel). Even the set-up to the
question surprised audience and contestants: “Frankenstein
was born in an Italian city.” (!) Then, “Which one?” It
was multiple choice from among five possible cities:
Florence, Venice, Naples, Genoa, Rome. The contestant blew
it and guessed Florence. Correct answer (as if you didn’t
know) —Naples!
What?!
Gasp! Sputter! Even if you knew that the
question referred to Dr. Victor Frankenstein and not to
his creation, the monster, how could he have been born
in Italy? It all happens in Germany, right? Wrong. The
novel is told in a series of “frame letters” written by
a ship’s captain who meets Victor Frankenstein and
repeats the story that Frankenstein tells him:
“He [Victor Frankenstein]
then told me that he would commence his narrative the
next day when I should be at leisure….”
Then
“Chapter One,” the narrative, starts with Victor
speaking in the first person:
“I am by birth a Genovese,
and my family is one of the most distinguished of that
republic.”
(Careful,
quiz-show types —that doesn’t mean he was born
in Genoa; it means he was a citizen of the Republic of
Genoa because his parents were.) Then, after two pages
of description of how his parents met, Victor says,
“I, their eldest child, was
born in Naples…”
Mary
Shelley,
painting by Richard Rothwell
If Victor was
born in Naples in the first edition (1818) of Frankenstein, then everything is much
less interesting. Mary Shelley just chose the city by
coincidence, or maybe out of girlish enthusiasm for the
trip she and Percy could finally make now that the
Napoleonic wars had ended and all of Italy —including
Greek and Roman Naples— was again open to Grand Tourists. But!
—if she put in Naples as the birthplace of Victor
Frankenstein in a later edition, then things get
interesting. Not clear, mind you, just interesting.
Frankenstein was first published,
anonymously, on Jan. 1, 1818 (months before the Shelleys
ever set foot in Naples); in 1823 there was another
edition crediting Mary Shelley as the author; the first
“popular” edition, the one most widely read today, is
from 1831 and contains revisions, although Shelley says
in the introduction to the 1831 edition that
“...[Alterations] are principally those of style. I
have changed no portion of the story, nor introduced
any new ideas or circumstances.”
In spite of that
disclaimer, parts of the 1818 edition differ substantially
from the 1831 edition, especially in the first section,
where Victor Frankenstein talks about his childhood. The
first five paragraphs of chapter 1 (where his narrative
starts) are identical in both versions, but then the
chapter expands significantly, growing into two chapters
for the 1831 version. Although the
first edition indeed has Victor saying, “I am by birth
a Genovese, and my family is one of the
most distinguished of that republic,” there is no
mention of Naples in the first edition. Mary Shelley put
that part in later.
Why? Here,
this is sheer speculation on my part because I don’t know.
When the Shelleys were in Naples, they registered the
birth of a child, Elena Adelaide Shelley, born December
27, 1818. Most who have studied this episode in some
detail are of the opinion that Mary was not really the
mother. (Both Shelleys were believers in “non-monogamy,”
so it gets complicated. I refer you to the “soap opera”
reference, above.) One theory is that the Shelleys adopted
an orphan to take Mary’s mind off of the fact that one of
her children had died a few months earlier. (In all, only
one of her four children, Percy Florence Shelley
[1819-89], survived infancy.) The mystery has remained.
The child was placed in foster care almost immediately,
and the Shelleys moved on. Elena Shelley, whoseever child
she was, died only 17 months later in Naples.
I really want Victor Frankenstein’s birth in Naples to be more than coincidence. I want it to be something Mary Shelley added to the first edition after the Neapolitan episode in her life, something to connect the birth of her fictitious creation to the birth of a mysterious child in Naples, maybe hers, maybe not. But, as I say, I don’t know. And that puts me in good company.
(The memory of Naples stayed with
Mary Shelley for the rest of her life. She even used
the Sibyl of Cuma as a device to advance the narrative
in her 1826 novel, The Last Man.)
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