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Frankenstein
Yet
now despair itself is mild, Nothing surprising there. Anyone who
has ever lived in Naples feels that way sometimes.
Shelley’s wife, Mary, called Naples “…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 a 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
contestants have not actually read Mary
Shelley’s original novel). Even the set-up to the
question surprised most people: “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 Genevese, 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,
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.” 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—whosever 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. |
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:
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