FICTION ADVOCATE
February 1st, 1014
Two hundred years ago, in the spring of 1814, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin began her romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley—a romance shadowed by dreadful mortality, but which birthed Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus in 1818. February 1st is the anniversary of her death in 1851. The name Frankenstein as a unit of exchange has become synonymous with forms of bastard science, Promethean or Faustian transgressions and their mutant consequences. So profound is this shorthand metaphor, so great has been its escape, that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s teenage wit in producing the name Victor Frankenstein has been obscured. But it is there, buried in the lurid séance of the narrative. Mary Shelley’s tale is a sustained act of extraordinary ventriloquism in which the reader does well to remember that none of its creatures actually ‘speaks’ except for the mariner Robert Walton, who transcribes the entire catastrophe of Frankenstein and his creature in a manuscript intended for his sister Margaret.