When you're walking down a street in a city you've never visited before, turn a
corner and suddenly, there's a friend of yours from half a world away, that's a
coincidence. That kind of coincidence is what we see in medieval romances. That
kind of coincidence is not what we see in realistic novels because realistically
you'd never see your friend there. But, in a romantic comedy people, meet cute all the
time, and in fact, lots of romantic things do happen, some of them bad romantic
things where just the person you most fear will materialize when you fear that
person's presence, romantic then both in the happy sense and in the unhappy sense.
Romantic, heightened emotion. Romantic coincidence. This happens actually in real
life. You might think - Mary Shelley what kind of a woman was she to name the first
familial victim of the monster with the name of her child who is beside her and
moribund. What kind of person could do this? The answer is a romantic person.
It's worth taking a few moments to look at the people involved in Mary Shelley's
production of Frankenstein and its backgrounds to understand just how
romantic reality may sometimes be. Now, Mary Shelley's mother was Mary
Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most important early feminists. Her
"Vindication of the Rights of Women," 1792, is at least of historical interest today,
and for some, still of philosophical interest. She married William Godwin,
another important liberal voice in England. He died in 1836, but he married
Mary Wollstonecraft in 1779. He wrote "Inquiry Concerning Political Justice." If
you read the dedication page to Frankenstein, you'll notice that that and
his novel "Caleb Williams" are both mentioned when he is made the dedicatee of
the novel. The "Inquiry Concerning Political Justice" argued for free love. It
argued for liberation. These two people, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,
conceived between them a child, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797,
coincidentally, the year of Mary Wollstonecraft's death. She didn't die at
the moment of childbirth, but she died as a consequence of that childbirth. Birth
and death are intimately linked in the reality of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin's
life. Now, as you can tell from the webpage that I've prepare for you to have
notes on this, in February 1815 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin gives birth to a
daughter to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the daughter dies. In January of 1816, the son William
is born. He dies in March of 1818. She begins writing Frankenstein in June of
1816 by agreement with Shelley and Byron and J.W. Polidori. In December of 1816,
Shelley's wife Harriet commits suicide. She dies by throwing herself into a lake in a
park in London. The lake, for those of us who remember the fall from the garden of
Eden, is coincidentally named the Serpentine. Harriet throws herself into
the water and drowns. News of that reaches Percy and Mary in Switzerland where they're on
retreat with Byron and Claire Claremont and J.W. Polidori, and in response to
that, they marry. This is a romantic life they're leading, not romantic in the sense
of, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, pitter-pat, but extraordinarily heightened emotions,
extraordinary coincidences. In March of 1818 this story that was begun before the
marriage, went through the marriage, was finally published. In March of 1818 Mary
Shelley in a sense gives birth to the book Frankenstein. That's the same month, I
remind you, that William, in reality, dies. It happens that Mary Shelley is also
important in the history of letters for publishing a book called "The Last Man" in
1826. Frankenstein is in fact, the very first book of its kind in the history of
the world. "The Last Man" is the first book of its kind in English. It is a book, as
the title suggests, about someone who is left alone in the world and has to try to
make his way. But, it is in fact informed by Jean de Grainville's "The Last Man," from
1805, a French book. And the notion that the world will be overgrown by human
activity, and thus will destroy all human beings is already clear in Malthus'
famous essay on the "Principle of Population," 1798, exactly the year of
"Lyrical Ballads," the beginning of the romantic period. Percy Bysshe Shelley is,
of course, one of those five canonical romantic poets, and becomes, of course,
ultimately the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. He dies by drowning
just as his first wife did, except in his case it's not suicide, it's a capsized
boat. The boat is named the Ariel. Ariel, of course, is the spirit of the air who
causes the shipwreck in "The Tempest," the Tempest being raised by Ariel to
create the shipwreck so that the people from Milan who have earlier abandoned
Prospero, the magician, and his daughter Miranda, on a new world island, the
Bermuthes, can be brought there and tamed somehow. In other words, Ariel is a spirit
of the air, under the power of a scientific magician, who means to bring
society back together. And it's this Ariel who causes the bad people in "The Tempest"
to drown, though some survive and come to land, and it is the Ariel, the boat, that
Shelley loves, that brings him out into a storm and has him drowned. Romantic
coincidences everywhere. Claire Claremont is along on this trip. Claire Claremont is
Mary Shelley Godwin's stepsister because she is the daughter of a Mrs. Claremont
who is William Godwin's second wife. Now, Claire Clairmont has already by this time
born illegitimate children to Byron who is also there. So, we have the free love and
the activity and the romance and violation of taboos and all kinds of
coincidence. But the coincidence goes further because Mrs. Clairmont, among her
other activities, was a publisher. And what she published most famously for our
purposes was a book called "A Rough Outside with a Gentle Heart." "A Rough Outside with
a Gentle Heart" seems to be a verse version, published in 1811, fully seven years
before Frankenstein, of Beauty and the Beast, that is someone who looks terrible
on the outside, but if only we would love him, he would reveal his inner beauty and
be joined to community, exactly the problem that Victor's monster deals with,
but no one comes to love him once they see his outside. You can see the power of that
story. That story is published by Mrs. Clairemont, the daughter of Mary Shelly's
stepsister. Madame de Beaumont was a woman born in Rouen who came to England as a
servant. She managed to make her way in the world by writing traditional fairy
stories from French into English, and she eventually published a magazine and became
quite wealthy and took her money and went off to Switzerland where she lived out her
life as a successful writer and business woman. But, what she left behind in
English was the first English version of Beauty and the Beast. Marriage, love,
inside, outside. I will be with you this night. "I will be with you on your wedding
night," the monster tells Victor. And Victor, egotist that he is, thinks the
monster means to be with Victor, when of course, what he means to do is insert
himself in community. These figures have to do with making the world into someplace
where coincidences can really happen. How do you rule the world? The archetypal
figure who rules the world is Faust. Faust is the doctor who makes the deal with the
devil, Mephistopheles, who serves him for 24 years, at the end of which time his
soul is carried off to hell. Now, in Goethe's famous version, in fact, he's
redeemed by the love of a good woman. But in Marlowe's version, the English version,
in fact, he goes down to hell in flames. Christopher Marlowe might have been as
great a writer as Shakespeare, but he didn't live long enough. Because, in
addition to being a playwright, he was a spy for Queen Elizabeth, and he was
provoked into a fight, probably for political reasons, in a bar one night and
stabbed through the eye and killed. Talk about romantic coincidences. Now, the real
Johann Faust was a wandering German conjurer, who lived at the end of the
fifteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, and that conjurer did enough
trickery that other miracles were magnetically attracted to him. There was
no real Dr. Faustus, of course. But, there was the idea of Faust. And that wasn't the
only idea of making things whole. The Jewish legend of the Golem, which centers
around Rabbi Judah of Loew. And his grave, that is Rabbi Judah's, is still visible in
the old Jewish cemetery in Prague. He died in 1609. He created a man of clay, as God
would. And then because he was a great, great and holy man, he was able, according
to the way the legend is written, either to inscribe the four letters that are
God's given name on the forehead of the man of clay, or write them on a piece of
paper and insert them into his mouth and at that point the golem arises to protect the
ghetto, to protect the Jews from the, the people around them. This idea of taking
dead clay and animating it became a stock part of German folklore. Take dead body
parts, put them together, take the new science of Galvani, lightening coming down
and making dead frog's leg move, and suddenly we have the golem in a modern
Faust, who is willing to give up his soul in order to make some new extraordinary
discovery. These people have lives that intertwined again and again. Although I
believe that the Faust behind Frankenstein is Marlow's Faust, I can't help but
mention that Goethe, in addition to writing Faust, wrote "The Sorrows of Young Werther." "The
Sorrows of Young Werther" is a story about a young man who pines for the love of another, a
girl, and she chooses someone else. He throws himself into a river, not the
serpentine, to commit suicide. This suicide was so romantically popular, that for
quite a while after the publication of "The Sorrows of Young Werther," people were found
who had committed suicide by drowning with the characteristic yellow-covered book in
their pocket. It turns out that romantic ideas take people over; they make us
change our minds. That's one of the reasons that they're are so important to
us. But, even if we didn't try to make things this way, sometimes, for some
people, romance intervenes. Wordsworth and Coolridge published in 1798, so does
Malphus. There comes the end of the world, here comes Mary Shelley writing about it.
She says that she was the only one of the people who met to decide to write these
extra horror stories who finished her work. But, in fact J.W. Polidori also
finished his. His 1819 book, "The Vampire" is perhaps the first book of it's kind in
the English language, and it takes aim at it's vampire Lord Ruthven Polidori. An
unappreciated immigrant Englishman makes fun of an aristocratic Englishman in the
guise of a vampire. Irishman Bram Stoker, while Ireland is still under the
domination of the English, attaches himself to the most prominent actor of the
age, Henry Irving, and produces a vampire story. Coincidence? Horace Walpole is the
youngest son of the first Prime Minister of England. In 1797, Horace Walpole dies,
the same year that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin dies, the same year that Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley is born, and in fact he creates the gothic novel, as I
mentioned in an earlier clip, "The Castle of Otranto" in 1764. In 1764 Ann Radcliffe
is born and she writes "The Mysteries of Udolpho," which is the greatest of all the
Gothic novels, setting the scheme for what today we might call the Scooby Doo ending,
that is, as things become more and more supernatural, we get the shock of the
fantastic again and again, until at the very end, the final twist is to realize
that it wasn't supernatural at all, there was a realistic explanation. That's a way to
keep the genre alive. Matthew Gregory Lewis, known as Monk Lewis, published "The
Monk" in 1818, the same year that Frankenstein came out. This is perhaps the
single classic example of all Gothic literature with castles and abbeys and
monks and suicides and illegitimate children, kinda like the life that Mary
Shelley and her group were actually living. 1818, he dies. 1818, Frankenstein
is born. Sir Walter Scott, in 1818, writes "The Heart of Midlothian," a great novel of
running across the Scots highlands, sort of where Victor Frankenstein is going in
order to have the time and space to build his monster. And in 1818 Jane Austen
publishes "Northanger Abbey," itself both a satire of gothic literature and an
example of gothic literature. How can all these books and lives and births and
deaths have the same date? How can they all interconnect? Maybe after all, romance
is much closer to reality than we believe. Certainly it was when Mary Shelley used it
to try to explore domestic affection and universal virtue.