The Social Order VS The Wretch: Mary Shelley's Contradictory-Mindedness in Frankenstein

Abstract

In his The Spirit of the Age, published in 1825, William Hazlitt attempted to articulate the social and intellectual spirit of his age by setting up two poles of tension: on one side, there was philosophical radicalism (the spirit of the age, as Hazlitt claimed), and on the other, the spirit of conservatism. The book consists of portraits of the leading contemporary spokesmen, each of whom Hazlitt characterizes as either creative or destructive of the true spirit. One of these portraits is of William Godwin, Mary Shelley's father. According to Hazlitt, it was in Godwin's fall from intellectual prominence to infamy and oblivion that the betrayal of the spirit of the age was best reflected: Fatal reverse! Is truth so variable? ... Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814?2 Not only Mary Shelley's father, but also her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her husband, Percy Shelley, were committed defenders of the radical perspective. In 1816-19, when she wrote Frankenstein, Mary consciously shared their viewpoint. Her journal, from 1814 to 1817, clearly shows that both she and Shelley were dedicated not only to the study of such works as Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) and Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but also to an attempt to live according to the radical ideas they expressed in their works.3 And if we read Frankenstein looking for a defence of the radical perspective, we do find that Mary articulates what may be called a Godwinian concern for the victims of an oppressive domestic and social order. But, unlike Shelley, Mary was also imbued with the spirit of conservatism which dominated England during her adolescence. In 1815, she wrote of herself: I never quarrel with inconsistency.4 Over twenty years later, after her ideas had become increasingly conventional, she still thought of herself as the ambivalent type: