Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Shape of Water

“Who was Mary Shelley?” The first line of an untitled poem by Lorine Niedecker (1964), which Rachel Feder uses as epigraph in Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein, reverberates in multiple ways throughout this study of the discourses of motherhood in Frankenstein and Mathilda. Wife, mother, daughter, author—the potential prismatic refractions of the person and persona of Mary Shelley can be combined and recombined in an infinite number of Whitmanian permutations, to such an extent as to suggest (although in my view not always justifiably) the overlap or outright substitution of the author with three of her narrators: Victor Frankenstein, his Creature, and Mathilda, the adolescent who was herself tragically the victim of a damaging fatherhood. Who was Mary Shelley? The carrier (probably far from healthy) of a name belonging, biographically and culturally, to others— Mary like her mother, Godwin like her father, Shelley like her husband—an unenviable hyper-onymous condition (her “status as intellectual-historical royalty” [xi]) that in effect is equivalent to an an-onymous one. This was a predicament she shared with her only surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, likewise burdened with two cumbersome royal names, between which is wedged, like an estranging modifier, the cultural double of that Italy of the mind with which the Shelleys’ history is so intimately entwined.