“Chloe liked Olivia.” When Virginia Woolf wrote this innocuous sentence in “A Room of One’s Own,” her foundational work of feminist criticism, she opened the door to another field, still decades in the future—that of queer literary criticism. “Do not start. Do not blush,” Woolf cautioned her audience. (The published text of “A Room of One’s Own” is framed as a lecture and based on a pair of talks that she gave at two Cambridge women’s colleges in October, 1928.) “Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.”
Chloe and Olivia are characters in a book that Woolf has invented, a mediocre novel by a writer she names Mary Carmichael. Ostensibly, the women are friends and colleagues, not lovers, but Woolf drops clues for attentive readers. At one point, she interrupts her train of thought to ask for reassurance that Sir Chartres Biron is not lurking somewhere in the room. When she gave her original talks, Biron had recently been appointed the chief magistrate in an obscenity case that had been brought against the publisher of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness,” a novel about a girl named Stephen who wants to be a boy and has romantic feelings for women. The novel had been published earlier that year, and the trial, which Woolf would attend, took place a couple of weeks after the Cambridge lectures. What’s more, Woolf had just published her novel “Orlando,” a fictional biography of a man who transforms into a woman. The inspiration for the book was her lover Vita Sackville-West, who accompanied Woolf on at least one of her trips to Cambridge. The implications of Biron’s crusade would not have been lost on either of them.
A typical reader may skim over the reference to Biron, which is no more than an aside. But, as is often the case in queer history, words unspoken or muttered under the breath can be more significant than words said aloud. Woolf laments the paucity of models for relationships between women in novels by male writers: “If Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been.” “A Room of One’s Own” argues for the importance of literary forebears. “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” Woolf writes. If conventional literary history passes over these figures, we may need to create them.
Feminist readers have long acknowledged Mary Shelley as one of the most influential of those literary mothers. In the past few decades, her novel “Frankenstein”— which she began writing, extraordinarily, at the age of eighteen— has been credited as a primary text not only in science fiction, a genre that the book is said to have originated, but also in fiction about women’s experience. Critics have drawn attention to the circumstances under which Shelley wrote the novel: her first child, born prematurely, had died at less than two weeks old the previous year, and she had recently given birth to another; she then became pregnant again during the year she worked on “Frankenstein.” Her journal hints at another haunting analogue for the work of Victor Frankenstein, a student of science who creates a figure out of dead matter, stitches it together, and animates it: “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived.”
At the same time, the novel can be read as a fantasy of reproduction without women, giving rise to queer-oriented interpretations. Critics have noticed that the horror and revulsion with which Victor reacts to his creation, which is male, resemble the “homosexual panic” sometimes manifested by men confronted with homosexuality in nineteenth- century England, where sexual relations between men had been criminalized for at least five hundred years. The creature initially appears at Victor’s bedside as he awakens from a nightmare about kissing Elizabeth, his cousin and intended bride, who turns into a corpse in his arms. Victor, whose closest relationship is with his boyhood friend Henry Clerval, refers to his creation as a “dreadful secret” that he can reveal to Elizabeth only after their wedding night. Even the namelessness of the creature—Victor calls it “the being” or “the fiend”— might be seen as anticipating Lord Alfred Douglas’s famous reference to homosexuality as “the love that dare not speak its name.” The Age of Frankenstein, as the critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called this period in England, was one in which gay men suffered constant fear of exposure and arrest, which could result in a sentence of death or, as in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 conviction, of forced labor. The poet Lord Byron—whom Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, her eventual husband, met and befriended while visiting Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816—sought refuge in Switzerland after rumors spread in London about his penchant for young men.
Though sexual relationships between women were not criminalized, women whose romantic inclinations defied the heterosexual standard generally faced a choice between repressing their desires and living as outcasts. Was Mary Shelley herself such a woman? The Dutch novelist Anne Eekhout suggests as much in “Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein” (HarperVia), a reimagining of both Mary’s early life and the period during which she wrote her famous novel. Regardless of whether her biography confirms that designation—and at least one late relationship suggests that it does— Eekhout’s book, together with two other recent novels that expand the contours of Shelley’s life, offers a bold new framing for questions about where we draw lines: between queerness and heterosexuality, the natural and the unnatural, and the imaginary and the real.
The origin story of “Frankenstein” is nearly as famous as the novel itself. During the summer of 1816, the Shelleys, visiting Lake Geneva along with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont, spent time with Byron and his friend John Polidori, who were staying at a nearby villa. One evening, the group read aloud from a book of ghost stories, and then Byron challenged each of them to write one. Everyone except for Mary abandoned the effort. As she wrote in her preface to the third edition of “Frankenstein,” the premise had come to her in a vision: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. . . . I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.”
Eekhout’s novel proposes a different origin story. Four years before the trip to Lake Geneva, as biographers have chronicled, Mary, then a young teenager, paid an extended visit to the home of William Baxter, a Scottish friend of her father’s. She became close to Baxter’s daughter Isabella, a vivacious girl of sixteen, with whom she rambled in the countryside during the day and shared a room at night. Near the house was a hill where the spirits of women who had been burned as witches were said to walk. It was in this landscape, Shelley later wrote, that “the airy flights of my imagination” first took shape.
In Eekhout’s novel, Mary discovers her powers of invention during one of the Baxter family’s regular storytelling sessions, when she takes an episode from her life and elaborates on it “until it was more than the truth.” This is an apt description of Eekhout’s own method, which picks up the seeds dropped by Shelley’s biographers about Isabella and allows them to bloom into an intense romantic and sexual attachment. The narrative unfolds in hypnotic language steeped in fantasy and allusion, poetically translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson. The girls examine a book about mythological gender-bending sea creatures, “half male, half female, with breasts and beards, elegant, long hair, tough, muscular arms, and a fish’s tail.” At once seductive and dangerous, the beings exert a fascination on the girls, who may unconsciously recognize in them something of themselves.
In her preface to “Frankenstein,” Shelley writes of hearing Percy and Byron discuss the experiments of Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), who is said to have observed a microbe spontaneously coming to life. Eekhout represents the potentially sinister powers of science in the figure of David Booth, a mysterious older man married to Isabella’s sister, Margaret. Booth speaks about seeing a physicist use electricity to reanimate the corpse of a criminal. Soon afterward, while walking in the countryside near the Baxters’ home, Mary and Isabella glimpse a creature similar to a man but larger, with dark skin and hair on its body—the result, perhaps, of a deranged experiment by Booth, whose odd behavior disconcerts them.
The idea that “Frankenstein” could have been inspired by the work of an actual mad scientist may seem to diminish the genius of Shelley’s imagination. But Eekhout suggests throughout the novel that the beast, which Mary continues to see, could be the offspring of her own fantasies. The monster—if that is what it is—appears only at moments of sexual tension between Mary and Isabella. That first glimpse takes place after the girls have decided to remove their corsets and expose their skin to the air. Mary sees it again after an intensely erotic episode (which she may or may not have imagined) while she and Isabella are swimming nude in a lake, and again as she stands outside the window of their bedroom after a similar encounter, or a dream of one. “Our monster was here,” Mary says—a phrase that could refer to either the physical creature or the frightening power of their sexuality.
The monster reappears four years later, as Mary struggles to come up with a ghost story. She is tormented by Percy’s attention to Claire Clairmont, with whom he may be having an affair, and even more so by dreams of their dead child. With unusual deftness, Eekhout blurs the lines between the facts of Mary Shelley’s life and the world of the novel. The fictional Mary blames herself for not having watched over the baby more carefully: Did her feelings for Isabella mark her as an unnatural woman who shouldn’t be a mother? (Four years earlier, sick and delirious in the Booths’ house, she had a dream about giving birth in which a midwife tore her newborn daughter limb from limb, saying, “Girls like that cannot exist.”) She is also distressed by Percy’s insistence that they should both have sex with others—a demand that she experiences as an affront to her nature. After Polidori kisses her, at Percy’s instigation, she becomes enraged: “There is a beast inside her, a monster . . . it howls. It is awake.”
“Mary and the Birth of Frankenstein” is punctuated by appearances of a mythical creature called the Draulameth, which can be seen as personifying the perils of any chosen path for a queer person in nineteenth-century England. The Draulameth insinuates itself into people’s minds and lures them to the sea: “As you stand there on the water’s edge, it shows you how your life could be: all your fears become reality, your dreams dissolve in the foam of the waves. Every moment of your life will be filled with horror, bitterness, sadness, and loss, or: you go with the Draulameth.” The creature is first invoked by Booth, apparently as an attempt to frighten Mary into agreeing to marry him after Margaret dies under suspicious circumstances. But it might also be read as another monstrous embodiment of Mary’s desires—or her fear of them. Beyond the novel, the legend takes on the qualities of a grim prophecy, in light of what would happen to the historical Mary Shelley. Within a few years, she would experience the early deaths of three of her and Percy’s four children, as well as the death of Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron, at age five; the suicides of her half sister Fanny Imlay and of Percy’s first wife, Harriet; and, finally, Percy’s death, in a shipwreck, in 1822.
After these tragedies, Shelley developed an intense friendship with Jane Williams, the widow of a friend who had drowned with Percy. Recalling these years in a letter to a friend in 1835, Shelley confessed that, after Percy died, she was “ready to give myself away—and being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousymousy for women” (a reference to sex). In the travel book “Rambles in Germany and Italy’’ (1844), Shelley’s final published work, she wrote of the art she had encountered and argued that artists should not be condemned for depicting homosexual love—“a bold stance that was anathema to most Victorians,” Charlotte Gordon argues in “Romantic Outlaws,” her dual biography of Shelley and her mother, the writer and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft. Gordon describes the real-life Isabella Baxter and Mary Shelley as sharing a mutual admiration for Booth—feared by neighbors for his “prodigious store of arcane knowledge,” but also for his radical politics—and writes that Shelley encouraged Baxter to marry him after her sister’s death. In Eekhout’s novel, these events play out differently. But, in its philosophy, this fictional excavation of a lesser-known episode in Shelley’s life feels true to her memory.
Victor Frankenstein’s anxiety about the birth of his creature has lately been understood as a reflection of Shelley’s tragic pregnancies. But we can also hear in it the reverberations of her own birth: Wollstonecraft died of an infection shortly afterward. The aftermath—common in those days—was a household uncomfortably stitched together. Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was already responsible for Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s daughter from an earlier relationship; he soon wed Mary Jane Clairmont, a widow who brought her own two children into the home and didn’t get along with her stepdaughters.
Though Godwin and Wollstonecraft had disparaged marriage as a patriarchal institution, they had decided to marry when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, in order to spare their daughter the uncertain fate of an illegitimate child. The narrator of C. E. McGill’s “Our Hideous Progeny” (Harper) is not as lucky. Her mother became pregnant by the son of the family for whom she was a servant, was banished from their home, and died in childbirth. The baby’s father, who brought her back to the family home, died of consumption shortly thereafter, leaving the child to be raised by his mother, a forbidding woman who never hesitates to remind her granddaughter of the disgrace of her birth. “An ill-gotten child is a faulty cog; living testament to the fact that rules are not always followed, that sons and daughters cannot always be controlled, that men and women do not always couple as we might think they should,” the narrator muses. “Our Hideous Progeny” might be called historical science fiction: it takes place in the aftermath of “Frankenstein,” treating that text as if it were a true family history rather than a novel. Blood runs strong in this family, of whom all the child narrator initially knows is their surname—“long and sharp and foreign”—which she, being illegitimate, does not share. She grows up hearing stories of her grandfather, a businessman who left Geneva for London, and of a mysterious tragedy. One of her grandfather’s brothers was murdered, as was a sister-in-law; another brother went insane and disappeared, leaving behind only a trunk full of old papers entrusted to a British sea captain. In these papers, as she eventually discovers, her great-uncle, one Victor Frankenstein, chronicles an experiment gone grotesquely awry.
The narrator, whose name is Mary, inherits her ancestor’s scientific proclivities, as well as his boldness. Growing up on the Isle of Wight, she is fascinated by fossils that wash up on the shore. As a teen-ager, she follows debates among scientists trying to puzzle out what dinosaurs looked like and how they moved. Eventually, she undertakes an experiment worthy of Victor Frankenstein, had he been a paleontologist.
And what if Frankenstein had also been a woman? In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf posits the existence of a Judith Shakespeare, sister to the playwright, and imagines the fate of a female genius in Elizabethan England: insanity, suicide, or isolation “in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” The narrator of “Our Hideous Progeny” is, in effect, a Victoria Frankenstein. Unlike her infamous progenitor, who runs from the creature he animates, she acts as mother to hers: caring for it, educating it, and ultimately giving it what it needs most. Did Victor Frankenstein’s crime lie not in creating a new being but in deserting it? If he had reared it properly, it might not have sought recourse in rage and violence.
Like Eekhout, McGill is concerned with questions about what is natural or normal and what is not—and the conservatism and arbitrariness with which such distinctions are made. The novel’s protagonist is motivated by her sense of herself as an unnatural creature. Her world has no language for a female scientist: as McGill points out in a postscript, the term at the time was “man of science.” And her interest in fossils is linked from the start to her passionate attachment to another girl her own age who identifies an ammonite that the narrator finds on the beach. Like Mary and Isabella, in Eekhout’s novel, they pore over a book filled with illustrations of monsters, but this one is a paleontology text called “Book of the Great SeaDragons.” Perhaps this is a nod to Woolf: her Chloe and Olivia are scientists who share a laboratory.
Later, in a marriage that resembles a business partnership, McGill’s Mary becomes close to her husband’s sister, whose status as a spinster and an invalid, in the social strictures of the time, renders her an outsider. Mary is drawn, too, to others who inhabit the outskirts, such as an Indian scientist who points out that British innovation relies on imperialism. “West Indian cotton in the looms, Amazonian rubber in the hydraulics,” he says. “What wonders the British have made, with their own wit and gumption.”
Evocatively and compassionately, “Our Hideous Progeny” seeks a way to tell the stories of those “whose tales cannot fit in one book, those poor creatures who remain lost or forgotten,” as one character notes. Here, too, there are reallife analogues. The teenage Mary Wollstonecraft imagined setting up a household with her friend Fanny Blood, an artist who supported her family at the age of eighteen by making botanical illustrations. Wollstonecraft was saddened when Blood chose to marry a man who Wollstonecraft thought was unworthy of her, and was devastated when she died in childbirth soon afterward.
But happier endings were also possible. Half a century later, Mary Shelley became close to a woman named Isabel Robinson, who had recently given birth to an illegitimate child. Together with another friend, Mary Diana Dods, known as Doddy, Shelley concocted a plan: Doddy, whose looks were masculine, would disguise herself as a man and move with Isabel to France, where the two would pretend to be husband and wife. McGill’s narrator, too, ultimately finds a way to escape from patriarchy with her respectability intact and live a life true to her desires.
In 2011, a BBC article suggested ten ways to read the novel “Frankenstein”; a followup a few weeks later offered at least a dozen more, derived from readers’ comments. Most fundamentally, the book has been seen as an analogue to God’s creation of Adam, and as a perversion of it. If humans are created in the image of our Maker, then what Victor Frankenstein does is a crime against God as well as nature. “Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator,” Shelley wrote in her preface.
Some of the novel’s earliest readers reacted violently to its implicit atheism: one called it “the foulest Toadstool that has yet sprung up from the reeking dunghill of the present times.” But, as others have pointed out, Frankenstein’s intention is not to compete with the divine but to be useful to humanity: he hopes to ultimately eliminate diseases such as those which killed Shelley’s mother and children. And he creates only a single being. “If this is a blasphemous crime, then all parents stand condemned for it too,” one “Frankenstein” scholar has written.
Pregnancy and birth, if not as deadly today as they were in Mary Shelley’s time, can still be gruesome. Louisa Hall’s “Reproduction” (Ecco) is a work of autofiction that juxtaposes a failed attempt to write a novel about Shelley with harrowing stories of pregnancy: debilitating nausea, a latestage miscarriage, an experience of labor that makes the narrator feel as if she had “departed from Earth,” a hemorrhage in which blood clots the size of her organs emerge from her body. Recalling that Shelley was pregnant when she wrote “Frankenstein,” Hall vividly imagines pregnancy’s effect on the novelist’s body and mind. “What am I? she must have wondered. What kind of creature is this?” The female body is mad scientist and creation in one. In Hall’s hands, “Frankenstein” evolves yet again, this time becoming a parable for a contemporary American dystopia of climate change, abortion restrictions, family separation, white supremacy, and, finally, COVID—all of which give the narrator a sense that “the world had tilted ever so slightly toward the sciencefictional.” The last section, a novella in itself, tells the story of a female scientist who “edits” her own defective embryos, altering their genes to make them viable. She sees this process as returning them to a “natural” condition, “the state they’d have been in if they’d been conceived in a world without pollution and global warming.”
The parallels that Hall draws with “Frankenstein” sometimes feel too direct, as when the narrator imagines a miscarried fetus as her own “creature of imperfect animation.” But her ultimate insight is resonant: “We are all monsters, stitched together loosely, composed of remnants from other lives, pieces that often don’t seem as though they could plausibly belong to us.” McGill, similarly, urges the contemporary reader to reclaim the idea of monstrousness as something empowering, especially for “women who love women, women who didn’t know they were women at first but know better now, those who thought they were women at first but know better now. We shall be monsters, you and I.”
Perhaps this is why the “Frankenstein” story continues to haunt us. If, as parents, we are Victor Frankenstein, then as children we are all his creature. Or, perhaps better, the creature is us: the expression of our most forbidden desires, for sex or violence or revenge, as well as of our deepest fears—abandonment, isolation, unlovability. We may dress in clothes and abide by social compacts, but our bodies know that we are still animals. Even today, as we move ever closer to the boundary between person and machine, sharpening our vision with plastic in our eyes or replacing our joints with steel hardware, the creature lurks, threatening to expose us for what we truly are: imperfect, human, real.
Author – RUTH FRANKLIN
