In Her Eyes

The Creature was not born of hate but of an amalgamation of the pain felt by a husband who lost his wife. 

Mary Shelley was born to a father mourning the loss of his wife, and left with a mirror image of her. I often wonder how he must have glanced down at her living portrait as he walked by: was it with love? A sparkle in his eye for the last remnant of his life’s greatest treasure? A doting, paternal care for the one who so resembled the woman who made wintry evenings brighter with their conversations? Or with deep sadness because she reminded him of what he had lost?

I believe William Godwin saw his daughter as treading the same path as her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, before her. Like mother, like daughter—father and husband were both measly with money and often struggling themselves. The men marched almost fatefully towards lives as outcasts through various scandals of the heart and of passion.

And what of Wollstonecraft’s daughter, whom she laboured to bring into this world, who one day gifted us with the wisdom of grief? What did Mary see when she looked into the mirror? A child baptized in her mother’s blood? A child whose very birthing bed was stained with death—surely she must have wondered if she had caused it. If her very existence was plagued by either resembling her mother too much or not quite enough.

For her entire life, Mary was suffocated beneath the burial shrouds of a woman she only knew as a gurgling babe whose filmy eyes had not yet cleared enough to know any more of the Madonna than the perfumes lingering in the matron’s bedchambers for decades after. And yet, she could no more look in a mirror and escape herself than you or I could walk into the dead of a wintry night and not gasp at the fingers of frost burning our lungs.

To me, when I read Frankenstein, I read a story of a child who never watched her parents labouring in the throes of passion but only saw the quiet aftermath. Imagine seeing your father only as a grieving man for the first four years of your life. Is there ever a point where love and death are not, then, inextricably combined?

I look at Mary’s portrait, and I see someone who thought the only happiness in life was marriage before the inevitable grief that befalls the ending of every coupling. And perhaps not even marriage was a promise of safety or happiness; maybe, to her, the very stress of societal expectations had infected her mother, whereas passion is what man is made of.

Indeed, she chased her desires as a hound caught leaves in the wind. She wed a married man in bed and heart, if not in law—not in law until long after his wife was gone from the world in a lake somewhere and had completed her final exeunt from the world’s stage by her own hand to make space for a new woman with a different mind.

Did Mary see then, in her dark eyes, one who had succeeded in the fight for the right to the title of ‘wife?' Did she feel it was her rightful place to take his side after how she had laboured to earn it? I believe so. Who could tell her otherwise and not be seen as either snippish, judgmental, or even vying for her place?

Or did she look into the mirror afterwards and imagine the surface rippling, seeing a tormented gaze staring back, soundless lips declaring: 'he is mine.'

Did she write the monster choking the life out of Elizabeth because writing Elizabeth drowning in heartbreak would have been too autobiographical?

Nevertheless, by the end, as she wrote her final letters, she had a set of tiny love blossoms indeed, all with her mother’s face, and not one greeting the age of four. Ghosts embarking along the walls, perhaps scratching at the door but never greeting her fully.

But the one named for her husband superseded her expectations, and it would be his boots arriving, his living hand turning the handle, his bright eyes greeting his mother. Though often poor, she educated him. He earned a baronetcy and lived a quiet life. The passion, it seems, had burned out of her line.

I hope, in her later years at least, she saw that the Creature—irredeemable as he was—had a different face from hers. That he who chose such horrific violence could not truly be compared to she who survived it. That not having a father who looked at her in turn as some sort of relic, a cruel doll, and a surviving remnant did not doom her to a life solely of loss.

That she was less the Creature, less the murderous being who stole an innocent woman and child, than a grieving woman surviving in a heartless world. Elizabeth and William in her famous book reflected only Percy’s wife and Mary’s own lost children (one of whom, remember, was named William but died after the 1818 version of Frankenstein was written, which must have seemed to her a cruel twist of fate). She never escaped their grasp, but nor did she intend to. We do not write of ghosts unless we are willing to stare them in the eyes, the living defying the dead. Whether she felt responsible or not, she did not fall into their hands so easily.

I hope that on the eve of her life she discarded her father’s heavy gaze, which she had fled so young. She moved to the window long after she had laid down the quill. That she saw only herself in the clear glass.

Yes, that she read in her eyes that even a Creature born from pain—without thought for the consequences that then consumed them—could be deserving of the breath that fogged the glass. A child who was never motherless—nor ever, fully, her mother—but who had her mother’s sharp wit and her father’s penchant for passion. And I hope Mary recognized that she had always gripped life by the reins but never rode too fast—that she never forgot to look back at the graves from which she was born.