True North, the Intertextual Dialogue of Frankenstein's Polar Plot

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TRUE NORTH The Intertextual Dialogue of Frankenstein’s Polar Plot

Jean Li Spencer

Submitted in Partial Fulfllment of the Prerequisite for Honors in English Under the Advisement of Marilyn Sides

May 2021

1 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ...... (3)

Part I: Locating Frankenstein’s Polar Plot in a Larger Conversation …………………………...(5)

Part II: Coleridgean Ice and Frost ...... (28)

Part III: Traveling Shelleys ...... (63)

Epilogue ...... (76)

Bibliography ...... (78)

2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many years before I began writing this thesis, I was fortunate enough to travel from

Argentina–across the turbulent and dangerous Drake Passage–to Antarctica, on a trip dedicated to climate change awareness. Naked with wind, biologically and oceanographically lush, and tantalizing as outer space, the Antarctic is otherworldly. It is one of the most vulnerable and ephemeral, yet entirely imposing, places I have ever been– for the Antarctic may seem indomitable, but within a matter of days, the landscape will shift and change irrevocably and without signal; metamorphosing quickly and dangerously. The polar landscape is exactly the

“region of beauty and delight” (7) that Mary Shelley describes, but it also harbors the threat of an

“[early] grave amidst” a “scene of desolation” (154).1

Unlike in the populated setting of Chamonix, a favorite vacation destination of Mary

Shelley’s in France, there are no sweet Alpine cottages, no reprieve in the mossy palette of pine trees or easy distraction in fashionable winter sport. Standing on the snowy bank of some mountain nearby an abandoned whaling station, I never felt so small– a pinprick of matter in the

1 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and J. Paul Hunter. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Criticism. 2nd ed, W.W. Norton & Co, 2012.

3 cosmos. It is from my own polar trip that my appreciation of Mary Shelley’s Arctic descriptions originates. I owe a debt of gratitude not to a person, but to a place. Without this opportunity to travel Southwards, I may have never been drawn to the polar elements in Mary Shelley’s novel.

I would like to give my eternal thanks to Professor Marilyn Sides, without whom this project would have never started. It means more than I can say that you took me on as your advisee in the strangest of years, and in the wildest circumstances, even though we did not know each other before. I am so lucky and grateful to you for the time you gave me whenever I requested it, and for your lengthy editorial notes on my fnished draft. To get your personal attention is quite special indeed, and I have come out a better writer for it.

Special thanks to the professors who read my work and ofered their expertise and feedback: Tim Peltason, Alison Hickey, and Mingwei Song. You have been part of my journey at

Wellesley in important, lovely, and profound ways. I am honored by your help on this project.

My appreciation to Professor Tracy Ware at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, for corresponding with me about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and English Romanticism, and for connecting me with Ian MacLaren, who directed me to critical reading material. I am greatly indebted to you both. You were sources of clarity in the general lack of scholarship surrounding

Coleridge’s polar knowledge and “Frost at Midnight”; thank you for flling that puzzling gap.

Thank you also to my dads, who knew that Wellesley was the place where I might grow and challenge myself. You have encouraged my lifelong joy in reading, and your care for me is boundless. Thank you to my partner, Brendan, for his unconditional love and total belief in my skills as a writer. And thank you to my senior year blockmates–Sam, Maddie, Hunter, and

Macy–who supported me whenever I felt overwhelmed, and told me not to toss my writing in the trash because I had already come so far. It really does take a village (or a dorm).

4 PART I: Locating Frankenstein’s Polar Plot in a Larger Conversation

5 Origins

Mary Shelley, who wrote her most famous novel Frankenstein at the young age of eighteen, was perhaps always destined to be a great writer. Mary held pen to paper throughout her life: one might argue that she even expected herself to do so as the daughter of two celebrated literary and political fgures of the nineteenth century. Through William Godwin’s and Mary

Wollstonecraft’s library, and her own ambitiously self-directed studies growing up, she became the author of a novel that helped write women novelists into the British literary marketplace. To this day Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) holds a frm position at the intersection of contemporary gender and literary studies, and is often regarded as the mother of the science fction genre.

But to strip all that down and to read Frankenstein in an early nineteenth-century context is a richly rewarding exercise. Indeed, what is so interesting about Mary Shelley’s commentary on early nineteenth century literary conventions and themes is that she, more than any other woman writer of the day, was positioned tightly between the great male writers of England:

William Godwin, Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and of course, the great poet Percy Shelley (her lover and husband). Rather than sufocate under the intense challenge of these men, Mary Shelley–who was never properly educated the way a son would have been (she was mostly self-taught)–rose to the occasion to write a great work of literature that is far better remembered and inscribed in the modern cultural imagination than any of her male contemporaries.

I posit that to appreciate certain overlooked elements of the story–mainly, that of the

Polar narrative, which opens and closes the novel–we must understand Frankenstein in an early

6 nineteenth century context. For Mary Shelley takes polar elements from her real life travels, the contemporary public polar fascination, and from selected poems by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and

Percy Shelley, to inform Robert Walton’s expedition to the Arctic and the “Sea of Ice,” where

Victor Frankenstein and his creature face of.

The implications of my conclusions are limited to the polar theme in Frankenstein because it is an integral thread that ties the novel together, and is perhaps even the most important narrative thread of the novel, as it is the one that makes cohesive her opinions about the conventions of creative/artistic genius in literary tradition. The polar theme also writes Mary

Shelley into a larger contemporaneous scientifc and literary conversation, one that dramatizes elements of horror within the novel to turn it into a book concerned with morality and pathos.

Mary Shelley was known to have kept personal diaries throughout her life, detailing not only the daily events and conversations she thought worthy enough to keep an account of, but also the reading material she engaged with. Unfortunately, any kind of record by Mary Shelley from the period in which she wrote Frankenstein does not exist, and so I would like to propose that not only was the Arctic more than a peripheral element of the book–which is how the polar theme has largely been viewed– but also that Frankenstein’s polar theme is one such monumental clue to piecing together the history of how this enduring novel came to be.

This thesis attempts to tell the story, so far as I understand it, of the origins of

Frankenstein’s polar elements, and its turn–its glacial Alpine stretch–in three remarkably infuential works. Two of them, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and “Frost at Midnight”

(1798), preceded Mary Shelley and were written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), the famed poet who was also a regular childhood visitor at the Godwin house and one of Mary’s enduring poetic idols. The other work, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, is a memoir and travelogue

7 that includes “Mont Blanc.” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) is co-authored by Mary and

Percy Shelley, bringing together works by each writer in one volume.

Within this ripe body of source material is a strong fxation with the polar regions and its scientifc and literary potential. The fascination with the North Pole makes sense if we consider that Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelley were writing at a time where there was already more than half a century’s worth of popular, scientifc, and empirical interest in

Arctic exploration and in voyages of discovery. I chose these three works to ground my research because their icy climes, dizzying heights, and icebergs line the road that leads to Frankenstein.

Percy Shelley was an integral supporter, editor, and advocate for his wife’s novel, helping to bring it to “full term” over the nine months that the couple dedicated to “drafting, expanding, and fair-copying.” He furthermore presented it to the public on Mary’s behalf on publication day, 1

January 1818.2

An integral fgure indeed was Percy Shelley. Percy Shelley (1792–1822) occupies a sometimes contrapuntal, yet also complimentary, role in the writing of Frankenstein; but he was more than Mary’s editor and reviser, he was truly her creative partner. Likewise, what cannot be overlooked is the fact that Mary utilized Frankenstein as a clever way to facilitate an intellectual and philosophical conversation with Percy Shelley about topics that interested them both greatly–science and philosophy–in the literary mode that suited their prolifc artistic talents. The conversations Mary had with Percy were fertile sites of material for her. Based on what we know of Mary Shelley’s life, the shadow of these brilliant men cast themselves strongly across her

2 Robinson, Charles E. “Texts in Search of an Editor: Refections on The Frankenstein Notebooks and on Editorial Authority.” Frankenstein, Second Norton Critical Edition, p. 199.

8 mind, and she borrows equally from Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to shape and form the polar elements of Frankenstein.

My research will focus on the polar elements of the novel, what I refer to as the “Polar plot.” The polar elements of Frankenstein appear in the beginning of the novel, the middle, and the end. The beginning and end of the novel take place in the Arctic regions, while the middle of the book is built around a pivotal and important scene in the glacial Alps. I draw attention to how

Mary Shelley enters into an intertextual dialogue with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy

Shelley through her “Polar plot.” This section, Part I: Locating Frankenstein’s Polar Plot in a

Larger Conversation, will outline the novel and provide some key information on its historical context and past scholarship. Part II: Coleridgean Ice and Frost focuses on the poet’s lines of infuence and looks at The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Frost at Midnight.” Part III:

Traveling Shelleys examines the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, including “Mont Blanc.” I do not wish to overextend or overemphasize my own fndings, or to suggest that the polar elements play a more central role in the novel than they actually do; my hope is to thicken and favor the rather sparse scholarship on Frankenstein’s Polar meaning, which has been particularly overlooked in the over 200 years since the novel’s initial publication.

⧫⧫⧫⧫

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began writing Frankenstein in Geneva at the age of eighteen, during the summer of 1816 after being challenged to the task during a ghost story writing contest between herself, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The holiday was passed at Villa

Diodati, where Byron and his physician and companion, Dr. John William Polidori, had settled in

9 for the season. The group included the two lovers, the renowned poet and his doctor, Mary’s infant son William, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Mary describes that time of travel as “ a wet, ungenial summer, … incessant rain confned us for days in the house” (Shelley, IX).3

According to Shelley’s introduction to the 1831 edition, which she penned herself (Percy Shelley wrote the original 1818 preface, as the novel was originally published anonymously), the idea for the novel was taken from a nightmare resulting from an evening discussion with Lord Byron and

Percy Shelley around reanimating dead corpses: “He sleeps, but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside [...] I opened mine in terror.” She decided to use this nightmare as the basis of her contribution to the story writing contest, fueled by the group’s stimulus and conversation. It must not be forgotten that when she birthed the idea for her novel, she was well aware that Byron was beginning the third Canto of Childe Harold

(1812-1818) and another poem, The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), while at Lake Geneva (later

Manfred would reveal its infuences from this holiday too). Meanwhile, Percy Shelley spent the holiday composing Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1817) and Mont Blanc (1817).4 Mary’s reputation as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the “most famous radical literary marriage of eighteenth century England,”5 was under careful observation by the highly active group of writers, and she would have wanted to prove herself as an equal and member of their literary circle. Or, as she writes herself, “I busied myself to think of a story– a story to rival those which had excited us to this task” (Shelley, 167). The idea that she wished to

“rival” Shelley and Byron is incalculably important– Mary wanted to contend with the men on a

3 I use the Second Norton Critical Edition (1996, 2012) of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter. It is a reprint of the original 1818 version. 4 Wordsworth, Jonathan, editor. “Introduction: The Romantic Period,” The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry. Penguin Books, 2005, p. xliv. 5 Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Taylor & Francis Group, 1989, p. 1.

10 leveled playing feld. That commitment ultimately took the form of a novel, a manuscript which would become lengthier and more ambitious than any beginning pieces either man wrote from the contest (much less completed), and which centered around a horror story that encompassed more than women’s tales, striking universally at the very “fears of our nature.”

Mary Shelley originally began the novel at Chapter IV: “It was on a dreary night of

November”. The Polar plot was a later addition in November of that year, when Mary began to

“read old voyages.”6 I fnd it interesting to consider what the novel might have been without the

Polar plot, for it surely would not be in the form we recognize today. The added layer of the

Polar plot can be understood as a much-needed guide to Mary’s intentions for her novel, because the plot traces intentional intellectual and creative choices that respond to–and ultimately expand upon–Romantic mythology and ideology as characterized by the male poets she knew. The Polar plot efectively turns the novel into a story about key ideas of Romantic literature: solitude and endurance, mankind and nature, the surreal and the sublime. Frankenstein recognises these familiar tropes and then re-contours them so that the idealized prototype of “the artist”–in this case, Victor Frankenstein–is turned on its head and made more composite. In these terms,

Frankenstein makes the portrait of “the artist” more composite or complex by showing what is often absent in Romantic values, thought, and praxis.

Here is the plot of the novel: Frankenstein is the story of the young Genevan scientist

Victor Frankenstein, who shares a ghastly retelling of creation gone wrong with the English mariner Robert Walton. It is set sometimes in the eighteenth century (Mary Shelley denotes this as “17––”). Walton fnds the man freezing to death while trying to navigate his ship around an

6 Cavell, Janice. “The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein.” Arctic Institute of North America, vol. 70, no. 3, 2017, pp. 295-307.

11 impassable blockage of ice on a route towards the North Pole. He welcomes Frankenstein, a complete stranger, aboard the ship and tries to nurse the ill man back to health, during which time he hears the unbelievable story about the reanimated creature that Frankenstein has assembled in secret. The story is recounted by Walton in a series of four letters addressed back home to his sister in England.

In Volume I, after two years of studying and toiling away in his secret laboratory at the

University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria (the real life birthplace of the order of the Illuminati, who prioritized the “cultivation of human nature”7), Victor Frankenstein creates a creature made from pillaged parts of the dead, which he harvests from “charnel houses,” the “dissecting room,” and the “slaughter-house” (Shelley, 34). Through his blended study of ancient alchemy, combined with the newer intellectual breakthroughs in chemistry and natural philosophy of the eighteenth century, Frankenstein dismantles the “ideal bounds” between life and death. While studying as a university student, he is convinced he has unlocked the secret of life through galvanism. He dreams of being the creator–the idol, really–of a new species of creatures that will have “happy and excellent natures” and possess entirely gratitude and adoration for him, like children

(Shelley, 33). Victor is so devoted to his project that he himself grows pale and emaciated, becoming like the “lifeless clay” he has robbed from the “unhallowed damps of the grave” (33).

After bestowing the spark of life onto his patchwork creation, which is meant to imitate in aesthetic ideals the perfect human being, Frankenstein is deeply disturbed by the hideous product and fees to his bedroom, where he awakens many hours later to fnd the creature looming over

7 In 1759, Ingolstadt, a Bavarian town, had recently founded a university that adopted Calvinist and progressive principles with the goal of achieving social reform. In the early 1780s, Ingolstadt had reached fame across Europe for a particular brand of Enlightenment, the Illuminati. (“The Signifcance of Place: Ingolstadt” by Christa Knellwolf and Jane Goodall in Frankenstein: Second Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 2012.)

12 him. In sheer terror, he runs from the creature and does not fulfll the essential responsibilities of care beftting one’s progeny. Instead of unlocking a new branch of study, Victor’s necromantic achievement reveals the consequences of self-absorbed, glory-seeking scientifc hubris.

He spends a period of fve months from November until early March recovering from the illness that overtakes him. It is then that he receives two letters from home informing him of the death of his youngest brother, William Frankenstein. His decision to abandon the creature has unknowingly set up an international cat-and-mouse chase between maker and creature that leads

Frankenstein from Bavaria back to his home of Geneva, to the Swiss Alps, England, Holland, and ever northward over the course of Volumes I, II, and the frst half of III. Along the way, the creature murders Frankenstein’s loved ones in an efort to exact revenge on his irresponsible maker and force him to provide him a female mate. Victor’s actions lead to the deaths of his brother William Frankenstein as previously mentioned, his family’s gentle caretaker Justine

Moritz (who is accused of murdering the boy), his best friend Henry Clerval, his father Alphonse

Frankenstein, and fnally, his [fance and] bride, Elizabeth Lavenza. Upon the death of all of his loved ones, Victor fnally vows to kill the creature and tracks him towards the Arctic in a mad dog-sled chase.

At this late point in the story (Volume III Chapter VII), we return to the opening scene where Robert Walton encounters Frankenstein and the narrative catches up to the present moment. The novel's narrative structure is often regarded as a series of concentric rings, each enclosing the next. These rings are recognized as the voices of the novel's three narrators:

Walton, whose account of his encounter with Frankenstein near the North Pole begins and closes the novel; Victor Frankenstein, who tells his history to Walton; and the creature, whose story is

13 situated within Frankenstein's voice. The last and lengthiest letter, letter four, is the crux of the novel and recounts Victor Frankenstein’s tale (with Walton as scribe).

The fourth letter ends with a fnal encounter between Victor and the creature, but this time it is written entirely from Walton’s frst-person perspective. Frankenstein’s sickness worsens and he dies, presumably from the efects of frostbite and starvation. At the same time, and from the pressure of his crew, Walton has been forced to abort his mission to the North Pole and is rerouting the ship to return West. One night, he enters Frankenstein’s sickroom to check on his friend during the midnight hour, only to fnd the creature weeping over Frankenstein’s freshly deceased corpse. Walton, who has promised to fnish of the creature on Frankenstein’s behalf, engages with the creature in a display of pure and passionate outrage on his friend’s behalf. But exposed to the creature’s misery and wretched state, Walton has a change of heart. Instead, he is made witness to the creature’s announcement that he will end his own sufering at the “most northern extremity of the globe”–i.e. the North Pole, Walton’s destination–now that Frankenstein is dead. The novel concludes with the creature springing from the cabin window “upon the ice-raft which lay close to the vessel. [Where] He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance” (Shelley, 161).

Reading Frankenstein as a Popular Book of the Times

Frankenstein is a novel that must be contemplated in a context with consideration for

Mary Shelley’s individual place within a fourishing literary community, rather than a wholly internalized psychological (especially female) context, which is often how it is interpreted. Much

14 of twentieth century feminist scholarship has attempted to view Frankenstein as a metaphor for

Mary Shelley’s personal experiences, with a focus on domestic duties and the female body

(pregnancy, birth, motherhood). Mary Jacobus separates the feminist scholarship into camps, fnding that much writing has been dedicated to the interpretation of Frankenstein as a euphemism for Mary’s experience of postpartum depression and teenage pregnancy, or a feminist re-reading (bibliogenesis) of Milton’s Paradise Lost that writes Lucifer’s fall as women’s fall into the hell of sexuality, both of which inadvertantly make Mary Shelley’s life the “primary locus” of meaning in the novel.8 While I fnd these arguments fascinating, I believe that such thinking oversimplifes Frankenstein and confnes its meaning so that the novel is about the author, and the author alone. Following these foundational feminist interpretations, Frankenstein may be seen as a kind of “women’s novel” if we decide that it is about Mary Shelley’s life, but I caution that the novel must not be confned by that reading on its own.

Another infuential voice in Frankenstein scholarship, Ann K. Mellor proposes: “All other creation myths, even that of the Jewish golem, depend on female participation or some form of divine intervention [...] The idea of an entirely man-made monster is Mary Shelley’s own.”9 She goes on to say that Mary Shelley created the myth of Frankenstein “single-handedly.” I think that

Mellor is correct that in writing Frankenstein, Mary Shelley sheds the identity of silent bystander and comes into her own rhetorical power against an entire tradition of depicting women as passive and unimportant to the process of creation. Yet what Mellor doesn’t emphasize enough in her biography of Mary Shelley is the deeply embedded context and exchange that Mary

8 Jacobus, Mary. “Is There a Woman in This Text?” Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986, pp. 83-109. UPenn: knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/jacobus.html#par21. 9 Mellor, Anne K. “Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein.” Frankenstein, Second Norton Critical Edition. Edited by J. Paul Hunter, written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. 2nd edition, W.W.Norton & Company, 2012, p. 39.

15 Shelley had with the men in her life about the themes and construction of her novel. After all, as I previously mentioned, the idea for Frankenstein came directly from the parameters of a ghost story writing competition that Lord Byron and Percy Shelley set forth for their group of three.

While I think that Mellor’s biography on Mary Shelley is a good starting point to begin a conversation about gender in Frankenstein, it sells her subject short by not giving credit where credit is due. On the one hand, Mary followed in her mother’s feminist footsteps by crafting a male protagonist that is easy to criticize; but on the other hand, she also nodded towards ideas and storytelling devices she engaged with from her circle of male writers. I fnd there is a level of resistance against the behaviors and portrayal of gender in literature within Mary Shelley’s novel, but also a facet of pure delight and emotional engagement in the practice and pleasure of artmaking that surrounded her. The male writers Mary knew well romanticized the classical ideals of the masculine ego and created a celebration and nostalgia for them; the “masculine ego” as a concept displaced women’s role in literature, leaving women writers and women characters to carve out a place of belonging for themselves. The reality I seek to paint acknowledges the exclusion, but also intense collaboration, that Mary Shelley experienced. Without the relationships and sense of competition that Mary Shelley enjoyed with these men, she may not have developed Frankenstein into a completed manuscript. My initial instinct when I began this project was to suspect that Mary Shelley wished to position herself against her male contemporaries by writing Frankenstein– but my sense now is that her intention was concerned with establishing herself within a shared web of thought, rather than to occupy a space of total opposition. I see her taking up a daughter’s mantle of family inheritance, becoming a kind of proto-systematic anarchist like her parents while in the heat of her youth. She was inspired by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft–and Wollstonecraft’s redirection of educational theory to include

16 women pupils in response to Rousseau’s educational doctrines–and her father, William Godwin, who was regarded as the frst anarchist in Europe. She wanted to achieve success through an integration into a dialogue within British Romanticism, rather than an outsider’s attack on established norms. By an opening of doors, rather than a total upheaval.

Contrary to what some foundational feminist scholars have argued (Rubenstein, 1976;

Hodges, 1983; Homans, 1986), I do not think that Mary Shelley’s intention was to “overturn the patriarchy” or reveal her own miserable sufering. Historically the established Western canon often ridiculed, made passive, or exploited the role of the feminine and female in cultural aesthetics. A young Mary would have been well-conditioned to this secondary treatment and denigration of women’s accomplishments and capabilities, and therefore been highly responsive to it. Certainly she was aware of how women, including herself, were being disenfranchised as to education and other professional possibilities, but she was in an exceptional position of entry into elite intellectual, political, and literary circles through her parents. It rather seems to me that she sought to be treated with the same respect and seriousness that a man, like her father William

Godwin or Percy Shelley, would have received. As I have tried to stress, the novel is psychologically and morally about more than just the author’s life. It enters fully into a conversation with broader literary practices and conventions through its direct parallels and references to other works of literature and poetry, particularly because of Mary’s special proximity to the infuencers of the day. So while Frankenstein was partly a young Mary’s reaction to the idealistic and progressive mood of the era–a visionary cultural feeling set of by the French Revolution and other political, social, and scientifc movements–it was ultimately a reaction that sought participation within popular dialogue. Frankenstein as a work of literature therefore has dimensions totally removed from Mary Shelley’s own identity.

17 I fnd that the “Polar plot”10–which I defne as a) Walton’s expedition to the North Pole that begins and ends the novel, and b) the Frankenstein family’s trip to the Alps that occurs midway through the novel–is a big part of Mary’s attempt to write herself into the dominant literary models of the early nineteenth century. Frankenstein’s “Polar plot” (a term I should acknowledge comes from previous studies, and not my own coinage) is a key narrative device she employs to convey her outlook on literary principles and defne her place within the framework of the Romantic movement.

However, Mary Shelley’ novel positions her in a diferent attitude than many other

Romantic writers. According to modern literary theory, the British Romantic movement valued

“emotion, imagination, a belief in human potential taken beyond its ordinary limits,” and put down into writing “an aspiring, a hopefulness– an exalting, and exulting, of the imagination”

(Norton, xxiii). I agree with Diane Long Hoeveler, who explains that Frankenstein is a novel that depicts common societal attitudes while also presenting an argument against them.11

Frankenstein is a counterpoint to the pitfalls of an idealized characterization of ambition and artistic spirit that is wholly inward facing, and typically made out as an exclusively masculine experience. Mary Shelley must have identifed her perspective as one that was vastly overlooked in the soaring, fowering writing of the day that celebrated the oneness of the self and the world through an “ennobling interchange,” as popularized by poetic titans like Wordsworth, Lamb,

Keats, and Byron.12 Through Frankenstein, she suggests that the “ennobling interchange” can be

10 I utilize the term “Polar plot” to refer to the Arctic framing narrative because my research focuses on its structure and story. Typical academic terms used to refer to the novel’s framing Arctic narrative include the “Polar Romance” or “Polar Frame,” but I do not fnd that those terms adequately describe my own focus in this research paper. Therefore, I shall employ the term “Polar plot” throughout this paper to refer to the Arctic framing narrative. 11 Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory.” January 1, 2003, Marquette University, p. 48. https://epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1051&context=english_fac. 12 Wordsworth, William. “Book XIV,” Prelude.

18 narcissistic if it is not properly, morally governed. Unlike some Romantic poets, the depiction of death in Frankenstein is highly realistic and repugnant; Mary Shelley is the opposite of someone like Keats, who admitted to being “half in love” with Death, giving him “soft names” as a lover might. She is no more enamored by “masculine heroism” than she is by “other ingredients of aristocratic ideology” and defates the “danger and redundancy of the heroic ideal”.13 In the novel, the Arctic’s and the Alpine “excessive cold,” “mountains of ice,” and the “imminent danger of being crushed in their [glacial] confict,” pierces through the preeminent Romantic allusions and metaphors of the day to address death directly, without the distraction of a certain fetishization of poesy or beauty.

The History of Frankenstein’s Polar Plot

Tracing the scholarship of Frankenstein’s Arctic and Alpine storyline proves more difcult than expected; as Janice Cavell notes in “The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic

Frame of Frankenstein” (2017), the Arctic framing narrative does not generate more than a feeting mention in the major scholarly works of the late twentieth century about Frankenstein, except by some notable mention from Sunstein, 1989; Mellor, 1988; Veeder, 1986; and Small,

1973.14 According to Cavell, one “common” attempt by twentieth century researchers sought to interpret the novel’s Arctic frame–what I have been calling the Polar plot–as a veiled commentary for the northern expeditions chartered by the British Admiralty after the Napoleonic

Wars. However, according to her own research into this chronology, that particular interpretation

13 Baldick, Chris. “Assembling Frankenstein,” Frankenstein, Second Norton Critical Edition, p. 178.

14 Scholarly attribution as listed by Cavell.

19 proves “untenable” due to errors in timeline (295). She explores other possible sources for the

Arctic frame and cites the circumstantial evidence for each case; most notably the 1815 plan by

William Scoresby for a sledge expedition towards the North Pole, John Barrow’s articles about polar expeditions in the Quarterly Review, and Mary’s own research into polar literature that came after she committed to Frankenstein (Cavell writes that, “Unlike Coleridge, Mary Shelley was ‘never a devout reader of exploration literature’”).

What is so confounding about this peripheral interest in the Polar plot by scholars is that polar adventures and the geography of the cold regions to the South were not coterie fascinations; there was a very keen public attention towards the Arctic that would only be fanned further by later nineteenth century expeditions. According to Cavell, Mary may have come across multiple reports about the Arctic in newspapers, scientifc heralds, and magazines: chiefy,

William Scoresby’s (1789-1857) reports on the northern seas which he delivered to the

Edinburgh-based Wernerian Natural Historical Society in 1815, and which was printed in parts for the public ([Cavell], 299). Sir Joseph Banks and Admiral John Barrow, men of prominent government and scientifc circles, spent the years 1815-1818 appropriating any sweeping theory about the Arctic and a Northwest Passage in order to garner support for new northern expeditions that might spread “scientifc knowledge” and also foster “Britain’s international growth,” indicating that an Arctic fervor had a strong hold on such institutions as the Royal Society

(where Banks was president) and the British Admiralty ([Cavell], 300). Her argument is founded on the belief that reports of Scoresby’s North Pole plan were put out in the kind of journals and newspapers of the day that Percy and Mary would have likely read, especially considering Percy

20 Shelley’s dedication to scientifc matters and Mary’s connection to Scotland15 (Scoresby was taught at the University of Edinburgh and delivered his Arctic lecture to the Wernerian Society in

March 1815, in Edinburgh).

[Janice] Cavell makes several fundamental contributions in redirecting our attention to

Mary’s polar studies. She believes that Mary would have familiarized herself with several Arctic writers who had a presence in Western European culture: Daines Barrington’s The Probability of

Reaching the North (1775); Richard Hakylut’s compilation (1809-1812) of Robert Thorne and

Constantine Phipps’s polar expeditions; and Gerhard Friedrich Müller’s English translation on

Russian voyages to Alaska (1761). Interestingly, Müller’s tales referred to a Captain John Wood, who had set out on an attempt in 1676 to reach the Pole, only to renounce his belief in the open polar sea upon his return (Müller: 1761, 22-23). Mary likely found some source material here; the surname for her seafaring captain could have come from the list of ofcers who served under

Vitus Bering in 1733-41. Among these men, the name William Walton jumps out: he was the only Englishman on board, and commander of the Hope (Müller, 1761: 15, 26). Cavell also entertains the idea that Walton’s frst name, Robert, was taken from Robert Thorne, the

16th-century originator of the open polar sea theory ([Cavell], 302), which would be a ftting source, since Robert Walton believes in this theory and seeks to prove its existence in his

Northern expedition.

When Percy and Mary eloped to Switzerland in 1814, their transcontinental travels and visits to the Mer De Glace and Mont Blanc were another grand infuence on the author of

Frankenstein. Richard Holmes points out in his article, “The Power of Contemporary Science,”

15 Cavell writes that Mary spent almost two years living with friends in Dundee, Scotland, and her step brother Charles Clairmont worked at an Edinburgh-based publishing frm.

21 that Mary and Percy took a public riverboat down the Rhine, where according to them there were several hulking, inhumane looking German men that they noticed as they sailed beneath a lowering schloss known as ‘Castle Frankenstein.’16 After a return to England from the continent in 1816 after a long period of travel, Mary and Percy lodged in Bath, where her access to the local Literary and Philosophical Society exposed her to a concentrated collection of exploration literature.17 We may only speculate what she read during this stay, but we know that she was interested enough in the genre to research it.18 Mary furthermore took stock of her father’s ideas; elements from Godwin’s The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and St. Leon, A Tale of the

Sixteenth Century (1799) made it into Frankenstein, and Mary even dedicated the fnished novel to him. Ancient alchemy, Victor Frankenstein’s frst feld of interest in the novel, proves to be a family attraction, for William Godwin published a book-length secularized study of the old alchemists in Lives of the Necromancers: or, An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in

Successive Ages (1834). (Eric G. Wilson in The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science and the Imagination describes Percy Shelley’s readings as a rather similar combination of science and alchemy [94-10]). I digress slightly. I mention all of this to say that there were certainly fgures of empire and science within Mary’s personal stratosphere as she grew into herself as a young writer.

According to Janice Cavell–again, the best chronicler so far of Mary Shelley’s Arctic and its place in broader Romantic literary culture–the twentieth century scholarly consensus on the

Arctic’s peripheral focus and its imperial commentary was upended by Francis Spuford in I May

16 Mary Shelley’s Journal, 25 August 5–September 1815 as referenced by Richard Holmes in “Mary Shelley and the Power of Contemporary Science,” Frankenstein, Second Norton Critical Edition, p. 184. 17 Cavell, Janice. “The Sea of Ice and the Icy Sea: The Arctic Frame of Frankenstein.” Arctic, vol. 70, no. 3, 2017, p. 301. 18 Holmes, p. 184.

22 Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (1997), which takes up the well-established idea that Mary’s novel critiques masculinist scientifc culture and extends that critique to include

Robert Walton in addition to Victor Frankenstein as exemplars of “male experimenters.” He argues that Frankenstein and Walton are two adventurers “atomising the attractions of [the

Arctic] to a particular male sensibility, Romantic, self-driven, and ever willing to exceed the limits of the human body… For her the pole [was symbolic of] destructive abstraction”

(Spuford: 1997, 59).19 In his argument, Spuford views Mary Shelley’s polar angle in the novel as an alternative to the kind of utopianism that emerged from a total belief in the power of imagination–a hopeful sensibility that was certainly blind in its own ways to reality, and was taken up by the frst and second generations of Romantic writers even as the French Revolution reached its grim end.20 Cavell, summarizing Spuford, emphasizes that in I May Be Some Time,

Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge ardently believed that through imagination–the human power of mankind to perceive–humans could take part in the Godhead, despite harsh historical realities.21 His research relates the sense of domination, penetration, and conquest of Walton and

Frankenstein as examples of the “daring, defnitively male experimenter” to the centuries-long age of discovery that galvanized European colonization and exploration, and characterizes both as sexually charged agendas. Just as importantly, Spuford theorizes that Mary Shelley was interested in the North Pole partly because it was a popular “topic of the times” (Cavell, 296).

Cavell supports her argument that there is a link between the polar activity of the early nineteenth century and Frankenstein by referencing Beck (2000), Richard (2003), Hill (2007), Lanone

(2013), and Craciun (2011, 2016), who suggest that the British Admiralty was focused on the

19 But as noted and quoted by Janice Cavell (2017), p. 296. 20 Wordsworth, Jonathan, editor. The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry. Penguin Books, 2005, p. xli. 21 Penguin, ibid.

23 North Pole “at the very same time when Mary Shelley was writing her novel.”22 (Cavell goes on to dissect this theory and show that while these articles pose a fascinating postcolonial reading of

Frankenstein, reports of the Admiralty’s polar interest would have been published months late and therefore casts a level of doubt on chronology.) However, since then the connection between

Frankenstein’s polarity and other literary publications has been built up as we sift through what

Mary would have really known, and only what we surmise she knew. By stressing the popular appeal of the Arctic at the time of Frankenstein’s publication (in particular Craciun gives a rich overview of the contemporary “polar print nexus” and the Shelleys attention to it–in fact they ofered the novel frst to a publishing frm that specialized in polar publications but were rejected

[457]), Spuford and Cavell show that Mary Shelley was identifying and isolating a sensationalist mindset towards progress that had pervaded modern society. Or, as Cavell notes, “By brilliantly using the polar tropes established by Coleridge’s poetry and by northern exploration literature,

Mary Shelley turned a brief tale of horror into an intricately structured novel characterized by what Favret (1987) has called ‘unsettling ambivalence’” (299).

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Now in my own reading of these articles, what Cavell and other researchers have not answered in substantial depth is the extent to which Samuel Taylor Coleridge informed

Frankenstein. One well-known connection taken up by academics has been between

Frankenstein and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Mary actually heard Samuel Taylor

Coleridge recite The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a girl, and the poem was equally adored by

22 Cavell, p. 297.

24 her husband, who was known to recite it with wild delight.23 Coleridge, although having never set course for the Arctic himself, knew William Wales, the British explorer James Cook’s astronomer, when he was a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital. Notably, Wales had sailed on Cook’s second Pacifc voyage, the one that was destined for Antarctica, before Coleridge’s time at

Christ’s Hospital and he supposedly retold these stories while at the boy’s school. Wales taught mathematics at Christ’s Hospital when Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb were all students there.24 According to Bernard Smith, “the precision and clarity of [William] Wales astronomical and meteorological observations” had a profound efect on the students at Christ’s

Hospital (Smith, 118).

John Livingstone Lowes’s strongly infuential book, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the

Ways of Imagination (1927) is an extensive study of Coleridge’s reading portfolio through notebooks and other papers (housed at the Bristol Library) while he wrote The Rime of the

Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. Livingston Lowes’ book has fundamentally redirected the way scholars have regarded Coleridge since the 1920s; by analyzing the sources and journals for

Coleridge’s The Rime and Kubla Khan, Livingston Lowes assembles an extensive reading list and charts a direct relationship between the ideas and imagery in Coleridge’s journals to his poems. The main takeaway from The Road to Xanadu is that Coleridge constructed both poems by taking scraps of inspiration from the most mundane and fantastical places, which he copied and fushed out in his personal notebooks, writing down details that were later incorporated into the poems, and bordering on outright plagiarism at times.

23 Mellor, p. 11. 24 Smith, Bernard. “Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's Second Voyage.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1956, pp. 117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/750245.

25 Following swiftly in Lowes’ footsteps, Bernard Smith’s “Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Cook's Second Voyage” (1956), focuses its gaze on the impact of Captain James Cook’s third and last expedition and the publication of his memoir, A Voyage towards the South Pole

(1777), on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley. Smith writes that Coleridge’s line in The

Rime: “And through the drifts the snowy clifts, Did send a dismal sheen” is taken from Wales’ experience with the “ice blink phenomenon” on the Hudson Bay in 1769. One real lesson

Coleridge would have known about, according to Smith, was Wales’ recollection of Resolution’s frst encounter with pack ice in December 1772, southeast of Cape Town, when he noticed a

“whitish haze on the horizon” and saved the ship from potential fatality (Smith). Bernard Smith considers Cook’s impact on the British imagination, writing that the commonly misstated belief

Cook was the frst navigator to use a set of scientists and illustrators on his ship, Endeavor, made him the template of Enlightenment discovery, and that Enlightenment ideals of empirical science were institutionalized by Cook. Captain Cook, through his three epic voyages to fnd a Northwest

Passage, created a “visual encyclopedia” that brought glimmers of unknown realms to the public in the exciting manner of Newton and Darwin.

Perhaps Smith’s most salient observation is the parallel that he establishes between the evolution in cultural expression and voyages of discovery, noting that the frst generation of

Romantic poets–William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge–were “weaned” on

Cook as children, so that their poetry was informed by appropriating Enlightenment ideas about reason and then turning those reasoning processes inward; the prototypical hero of the

Enlightenment Era, James Cook, gives way to the prototypical hero of the Romantic era.

Following this train of thought, Smith brings Mary Shelley into the Coleridgean conversation,

26 albeit indirectly, and writes her presence into the Polar fascination that took hold of two generations of British writers, by tying the idea of a prototypical British hero (James Cook) to heroism as it is depicted in Frankenstein and The Rime.

Laying down a small history of Frankenstein’s Polar plot through key scholars is important, as it helps us step into Mary Shelley’s mind in the best way we can do, which is to note as well as imagine what she read and valued; in the next section I will move to examine The

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with its important parallels in tone, thematic symbolism, and style to Mary Shelley. Both texts were born from a similar lack of familiarity with the polar regions, and yet a total secondhand familiarity with them through reading material. We must keep in mind from the very start that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein were texts written by writers who were describing scenes and things which they only knew from tales and reports alone; they had seen none of them, and yet, Coleridge and Shelley manage to captivate their readers with its fantastic literary appropriation.

27 PART II: Coleridgean Ice and Frost

28 Navigating the Circle: The Rime in Frankenstein

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold: And ice, mast-high, came foating by, As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken— The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!

– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (b. 1772) is known as one of the founding fathers of Romantic poetry. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is perhaps his most well-known work of poetry. It was published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads volume, an infuential and foundational instrument of

Romantic idiom which Coleridge co-authored with William Wordsworth. Bristling with oracular power, The Rime begins by introducing the Ancient Mariner, who intercepts a Wedding Guest from a nearby wedding celebration, to tell the young man the story of a cursed ship voyage. The

Mariner’s story recalls the history of a sea excursion that leaves harbor and sails southward away from Europe. Along the way, a tremendous storm blows the ship past its predetermined course towards the South Pole, where the crew are in a state of wonder at the glaciers, mist, and snow of the Antarctic. Out of the seemingly lifeless Antarctic, an albatross starts to follow the ship and appears each morning when the sailors call for it, and it is greeted as a good omen. But then,

29 unexplainably and simply because he can, the Mariner decides to shoot and kill the albatross with his crossbow. The fog that has been blocking the ship’s path from sight suddenly clears away, and the ship’s crew are under the impression that the albatross was responsible for the inclement conditions and their poor sense of navigation. As the wind ceases, the ship is trapped in the sea ice, and the sailors dream now that an angered spirit has followed them to the South

Pole. They make the Mariner wear the albatross around his neck in penance.

In the terrible, entrapping calm, the crew grow thirsty and weak. What happens next could merely be a phantasmagoric delusion: a ghost ship comes out of nowhere, and on that ship’s deck are Death and Life-in-Death, who gamble against each other for the sailors’ lives.

Life-in-Death wins the gamble and the soul of the Mariner. As a result of his victory, the crew begin falling to the deck one by one and dying. After facing the fact that he is the only man left alive, the Mariner is moved to pray. He sees a group of beautiful Water Snakes swimming beside the ship, and comes to the inspired, spiritual revelation that all of God’s creatures are divine and must be treated with respect. Coming to this realization, he is fnally able to pray to the heavens and the albatross falls from his neck.

In the fnal part of Coleridge’s poem, the Mariner drifts into a kind of stupor and wakes to fnd the sailors’ bodies have been resurrected by angels. The ship returns homeward, where the

Mariner witnesses a choir of angels leave the bodies of the deceased sailors. Immediately after this incredible vision, the Mariner perceives a small Pilot’s boat, and a Hermit approaches. The

Mariner’s boat begins to sink, and he begs the Hermit to rescue him; once on land, he asks the

Hermit to absolve him of his sins and recites his tale of woe. The Mariner ends by informing the

Hermit that as he travels from land to land he has the same compulsion to retell the events of his

30 sea voyage to men who will listen, and that he can discern from the look on a man’s face who must hear him speak. The poem fnishes with the explicit lesson that prayer is the greatest joy in life, and the best prayers come from love and reverence of God’s creations. The Mariner moves onward to fnd the next person who must hear his story, leaving the Wedding Guest “a sadder and a wiser man.”

The Rime seems to have been conceived on a walk to the port of Watchet on the Bristol

Channel while Coleridge was accompanied by William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy

Wordsworth (his regular walking companions). The Rime was written in the wake of another poem, Kubla Khan. It came from a tale Coleridge supposedly heard from a local acquaintance,

John Cruikshank, who spoke of a delusive dream about a skeleton ship manned by spectral seamen. During the poem’s development, Wordsworth would insist that the poem be a tale of

“crime and punishment,” while Coleridge treated it as a story “in Christian terms, [of] transgression, penitence, and atonement.”25 Of course, an archaic English word for frost is rime.

In rural Northern English dialects of the 19th century, rime–as in, Rime of the Ancient

Mariner–was still used in passing speech, but it mostly came back into fashion among Romantic poets, like Coleridge, as it provided great fodder for symbols and wordplay (“rime” and

“rhyme”). In writing of rime in his poetry, Coleridge gave symbolic shape to abstract poetic

“rhyme.”

In the summer of 1797, the Wordsworths’ move to Alfoxden became a catalyst for

Coleridge to germinate philosophical inquiries into the role of poetry and science in society. The

Alfoxden move generated an ongoing participation between the poets in an endless dialogue

25 Foundation, Poetry. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-taylor-coleridge.

31 about ideals of freedom, revolution, and ego as the two men entered into a period of rapid creative interchange and near constant companionship. Based on his telling of this newfound domestic and poetic proximity, Coleridge “turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination.”26 The frst point of view is identifably Wordsworthian, while the “colors of imagination” is Coleridge’s contribution to their exchange.

There are three points of focus within The Rime that have the most overarching connection with Frankenstein. The frst is its linguistic archaism. The strange “romance” of The

Rime, with its odd blend of interpreted medieval romance and science, is similar to Mary

Shelley’s mixing of old alchemy (again, a medieval touch) and modern science. Although Mary

Shellely’s diction is more “modern,” both pieces are quasi-scientifc, and interested in the magical/supernatural, to the extent that Coleridge and Shelley both literally “cut and paste” actual descriptions of polar places from journals and articles covering voyages of discovery and polar theory into their writing. We know from John Livingston Lowes’ examination of

Coleridge’s notebooks that Coleridge read and would then jot down lines and reactions to much of what he read–from fairy tales and adventure stories like Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian

Nights, to more botanical and encyclopedic volumes like History of Britain, Travels through

North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, Cherokee Country, Frederick

Marten’s Voyage into Spitzbergen and Greenland–and even manuals of science like Joseph

Priestley’s History and Present State of Discoveries relating to Vision, Light, and Colours.27 He

26 Ibid. 27 Lowes, John Livingston. “Chaos,” The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. Princeton University Press, 1955. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv03r.

32 quotes the likes of Erasmus Darwin verbatim (Livingston Lowes, 18), whose experiments Mary

Shelley says that she, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron discussed at length during evening conversations during their Geneva trip.28 Just as Coleridge would “cut and paste” the words of other writers into his notebooks and poems, so too does Mary Shelley “cut and paste” the same references of Coleridge and excerpts of The Rime into sections of Frankenstein.

The second two points which The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frankenstein share are thematic. Like the Ancient Mariner, Victor Frankenstein transgresses the line between order and chaos with no good reason other than that he, quite simply, has the power to do so. However, unlike the Mariner, Frankenstein is unable to repent for his actions. Mary Shelley concludes

Frankenstein having the titular character perish without a resolution; Frankenstein is not penitentially testifying when he relates his tale to Robert Walton. The tale-telling stems from an impulsive feeling of despair, not to warn of folly like the Mariner.

In The Rime, a marriage is going to take place when the Mariner stops the Wedding

Guest–a more redemptive, celebratory conclusion–while Frankenstein ends with Walton’s failed

Arctic voyage and “doomed” expedition (the expedition is “doomed” in the sense that he must forfeit his mission, or risk certain death). Mutinous sailors demand entry into his private cabin and demand that, if their ship be freed from the ice blockage that has entrapped them, he will turn around. So Walton makes a “solemn promise” not to “lead them into fresh dangers” (155).

Frankenstein meanwhile, cementing his own place as an unrepentant Mariner fgure, challenges these men by calling them “cowards” who will “return to your families with the stigma of

28 Introduction to Frankenstein, Third Edition (1831) by Mary Shelley. From Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), v–xii. Reprinted in the Second Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein (1996, 2012), pp. 165-9.

33 disgrace marked on your brows.” Not as “heroes” on a “honourable undertaking” who have fought and conquered,” but as men who turned back at the “frst imagination of danger” (155).

Lastly, the issue of ruptured domestic spheres permeates both texts. By assembling his creature and the consequences, Frankenstein over and over again destroys his family. Even the creature can not fnd a home, for he has no family to adopt him, and cannot seek a mate. Unlike

Frankenstein, who has declared Walton’s crew “cowardly,” Walton ultimately carries through his loyalty and promise to his crew–who have become a kind of family unit–and returns back to

England after the “ice began to move, and roarings like thunder were heard at a distance, as the islands split and cracked in every direction” (156). The groaning of the ice, its cracking like thunder, evokes the storm that takes place on the “dreary night of November” that the creature is created, and then again upon Frankenstein’s return to Geneva after little William’s death. It almost exactly mirrors the language that Coleridge uses to describe the “cracking,” “growling,”

“roaring” and “howling” of the ice. In Frankenstein, thunderstorms harken the coming of the creature (for example, on the night that Frankenstein travels back to Geneva from University and a fash of lighting above the summit of Mont Blanc reveals the “gigantic stature” of the creature).29 And so again he appears, for one fnal face-of, in Walton’s cabin. But this time, the thundering ice signals a diferent turn; for if we equate thunder with the act of choice and its consequences, then Walton’s decision to return to England is a “creation” of its own kind– his choice does not damn him, but saves him.

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29 Shelley, pp. 49-50.

34 I begin my comparison of Frankenstein with Coleridge’s The Rime primarily because it imprinted itself onto Shelley’s mind to such a great extent on August 24, 1806, when Coleridge recited it during tea and supper at the Godwin residence.30 One telling of the story explains that she hid behind a couch in order to hear the full recitation. Regarding it as one of the most impressionable moments of her childhood, Mary Shelley remembered it all her life and references it in the opening pages of her novel, and then again, repeatedly.

Coleridge’s description of the “cold Country” is a study of a climate that is intensely inhospitable, vastly scaled, and ultimately, a desolate wasteland. That the ice “cracked and growled” suggests the biggest threat to human life in this tundra is not animal, man made or artifcial, but the extreme force of pure nature. The Mariner’s sense of “feeing” and “chase” by the storm that pushes his boat Southward positions man in resistance to nature; it posits that nature is fercely inhospitable to man when the harmony between man and nature is brooched, and that man is not immune to the limits imposed on him by nature (death, illness, pain). There is a borrowed sense from Coleridge in Shelley’s novel that vast and inhuman circles of nature are incompatible with man, and make human ego inefectual.

Since the publication of Frankenstein in 1818, scholars and readers alike have drawn multiple parallels between Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Robert Walton, and Victor

Frankenstein–the two ambitious, naive “explorers” in Shelley’s novel. Walton longs to uncover nature’s most veiled secrets and channels this desire into a risky voyage of discovery to the North

Pole. Frankenstein, the young scholar of natural philosophy and the “chimerical,” “wild fancies” of alchemy (Shelley, 22), seeks personal glory through the discovery of galvanism. Their yearning for scientifc knowledge and public recognition leads them on their separate, yet equally

30 Mellor, p. 11.

35 laborious quests to the Arctic. Like the Mariner, Frankenstein and Walton are taught the boundaries of their own egos in the face of the ruthless polar landscape. The Rime sets up the

Arctic as a representation of human psychology. It is not flled or characterized by devolving mental detritus, but given a mythical and highly active and symbolic energy. Philip Shaw suggests in “Landscape and the Sublime” (2014), “[That] the links between sublime landscapes and ideas of liberty were forged in the 18th century. Where enclosed gardens symbolised notions of aristocratic confnement and control, the wild, untamed landscapes beyond the country house represented freedom and release.”31 The untameable swathes of snow and awesomely massive features of the polar regions are both fear-inducing and beautiful, possessing an immensity and complete release from confnement; the Arctic landscape is entirely opposite from the dense, domesticated topography of London. The Arctic setting of The Rime clarifes a symbolic notion of the sublime, which Edmund Burke defned in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our

Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) as ‘delightful horror, which is the most genuine efect, and truest test of the sublime.’

Yet the link to Coleridge’s The Rime goes beyond the symbolic; Walton and Frankenstein fnd themselves in the same unforgiving landscape of “foating sheets of ice” and are

“encompassed by ice and snow” as the Mariner (Shelley, 10). In fact, there is strong evidence to suggest that Mary Shelley drafted her descriptions of the polar regions from Coleridge. She repurposes Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner as an archetype for Frankenstein, casting Walton as the counter to her version of the self-damning Mariner fgure, who shares striking similarities with

Victor Frankenstein. In Letter II, Walton writes to his sister in England: “I am going to

31 Shaw, Philip. “Landscape and the Sublime.” The British Library, https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/landscape-and-the-sublime.

36 unexplored regions, to ‘the land of mist and snow;’ but I shall kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety” (12).

From the start of the novel, it is clear that Walton will not err in the same way that

Coleridge’s Mariner does; he will not kill the metaphoric albatross that leads to grief and self-castigation. Walton never reaches the North Pole, which is positioned as the center of all things, the very essence of existence. He aborts his mission before he can transgress that unspoken, but clearly drawn, boundary. Thus, Shelley employs The Rime as a frame over

Frankenstein, using it as a guide with which to outline and enhance the evershifting obscurity and fatalistic elements of the North Pole.

So what, or who, is Mary Shelley’s albatross? Let us consider that in Coleridge’s poem, the albatross emerges, like passing icebergs, through the fog; in Frankenstein, the creature frst appears to Walton like an “apparition” through “a very thick fog” among the “vast and irregular plains of ice” (13). It is the same presentation of discovery, and the albatross has multiple identities. An anthropomorphized manifestation of the Mariner’s desire for a familiar worldview, now under threat, the albatross is both orienting and disorienting.32 In The Rime, Coleridge selects the albatross as a representative metaphor for the Arctic, so that when the Mariner shoots the albatross, he wages a battle against the Arctic itself. Interestingly, most of the ecology of the

Arctic is either aerial or marine. Eric G. Wilson suggests that the bird as “synecdoche for the desolate ice, as microcosm of chaos, threatens all that the Mariner holds sacred. Hence, he notches his arrow, takes his revenge on this ofense to good order, and thus fnds his place in a long line of cosmic hunters: Marduk, Jehovah, Zeus, Beowulf” (Ibid). The albatross is therefore

32 Wilson, Eric G.. “The Poles.” The Spiritual History of Ice, Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 171.

37 a source of misplaced salvation, and then, when it does not conform to the Mariner’s expectations, a source of temptation. The albatross is an externalization of the Mariner’s inner confict, just as the creature becomes the lived embodiment of Frankenstein’s narcissistic ego.

The creature, I believe, is an uncanny double of Victor Frankenstein; both him and not-him. The creature is Frankenstein’s unconstrained daemon, the Dorian Grey double of Oscar Wilde’s secret portrait released wildly into society.

So, this naturally leads to the next question: who is Shelley’s Mariner fgure? I believe that it is both Walton and Frankenstein, for they two embody diferent aspects of the Mariner, and serve as shadow-selves of the other. Frankenstein carries the curse of the Mariner, while Walton is compelled to re-tell the tale. Shelley chooses to delineate between a frame “author” narrator and Victor Frankenstein’s character, with the efect that there is a partiality and distancing between the stance of the protagonist and narrator. The center of consciousness in Frankenstein is split between Frankenstein and Walton, and at the same time the two voices become melded.

We can only access Victor Frankenstein through Robert Walton; Walton is the intercessor, or bridge, between the reader and Frankenstein, where we are encouraged to feel and understand more than Frankenstein’s limited perspective and are aware of his mistakes and ironies through

Walton’s transcription. Of little notice to most, but still of importance, is the role that the reader takes up as Walton’s sister. The novel, as I previously summarized, is epistolary; the letters addressed from Robert Walton to England are received by his sister, who is the literal embodiment of the domesticated and organized motherland. There is no bigger contrast Mary

Shelley could have described than positioning the Arctic realm in opposition of the familiar, highly visible, topographically aesthetic, domesticated and mercantile England.

38 On an allegorical level, Walton possesses the Mariner’s storytelling power, creating reality out of language–without Walton’s letters to his sister, the knowledge of Victor

Frankenstein’s deeds would perish with him. Yet Walton, who has to listen to Frankenstein’s tale and the creature’s epilogue to that tale, is also like the Wedding Guest, who “cannot chose but to hear” the Mariner’s tale of woe, and absolves him like the Hermit (the Guest absolves him). So

Walton is given the authorial power of the Mariner by Shelley. He gains an omniscient sense of perception through Frankenstein’s account; he knows sufering without having sufered as

Frankenstein, or erred as Frankenstein, and Walton also gains the moral high ground by the end of the novel. In rerouting his expedition away from the Pole and fnding sympathy for Victor

Frankenstein and his creature (not one or the other), Walton “earns” the all-seeing wisdom of the

Mariner, but without the harrowing toil. Shelley splits the character of Coleridge’s Mariner so that it is shared by both Frankenstein and Walton; the parts that come together to form a bigger personality.

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John Livingston Lowes suggests: “Nowhere more clearly, then, than in the recital of the passage through ice is it possible to see these two conspicuous characteristics of the poem: its close adherence to actuality; and its power of striking through confused masses of recollections to the luminous point upon which they all converge” (129). He then picks up later on,

“Coleridge’s memory has struck straight as a homing pigeon through its chaos of hovering impressions of the polar ice to the exact, concretely visualizing phrase. [...] Every word, with the instant intelligibility of speech daily on the lips, calls up its picture, and the thing which is

39 Coleridge’s is the marshalling of a shapeless confusion of scattered recollections into clarity, order, and form.” (131). Or, as Coleridge writes in the Mariner’s voice:

I saw a something in the Sky No bigger than my fst; At frst it seemed a little speck And then it seemed a mist: It moved and moved, and took at last A certain shape, I wist. (139-144)

Out of formlessness emerges clarity. Lowes’ point here is that Coleridge’s vivid descriptions of the Polar landscape “converge” together. Coleridge’s preoccupation with the various elements of the Antarctic is insightful; it points to his philosophy that out of limbo or unformed chaos comes a synthesis–a coalescent formation–of reality. Shelley is the architect of a similar plot in

Frankenstein, and she uses the same narrative ploys as Coleridge, in which seemingly atomized details, characters, and plots coalesce together into one main chain of events with “clarity, order, and form.” The creature appears to Walton from the fog; then, shortly thereafter comes Victor

Frankenstein. Frankenstein passes on his tale to Walton, who writes it into defniteness through letters to England. These subjective “masses of recollections” truly do amalgamate to a

“luminous point”– that point is the novel itself. Throughout the labyrinthine accumulation of narrative, we are constantly left to question what constitutes reality, as there is an illusory quality to the polar landscape in the process of it coming into clarifed being.

Coleridge’s poem is divided into seven parts (seemingly to mirror the seven days and nights in the poem, which is reminiscent of the time it took the Christian God to create the

World). The stanzas range from four lines to six lines, in which the second and fourth lines tend to rhyme. In the six-line stanzas, the second or third line usually rhymes with the last line. His

40 meter oscillates between iambic tetrameter (four feet) and iambic trimeter (three feet) and is imbedded with internal rhyme within lines:

And I had done a hellish thing And it would work ‘em woe: For all averred, I had killed the Bird That made the breeze to blow.” (89-92)

The composition of The Rime is composed of compact parts that coagulate and create a cohesive whole–Coleridge’s poetic structure is informed by the same philosophy as his theory of

Imagination, which is how Frankenstein is composed in its fragmented epistolary form, and its distinction between narrator and protagonist(s).

With this notion in mind, Shelley further channels the concept of parts to whole by making Victor Frankenstein’s creature an exercise of assembling disparate pieces into the human body. Mary Shelley likely wrote the creature’s monstrous appearance to nod towards a longstanding tradition of aesthetic composition; in the visual arts, it was not uncommon for an artist to generate a complete painting by combining the beautiful hands of one model with the swan like neck of another, the shoulders of someone else, and the elegant visage of yet another person. The trick of beauty was that it had been assembled from a multitude of parts, not from one impossibly fawless person. Writing that detail into her novel makes her thematic exploration of these ideas more nuanced.

The premise of a collection of beautiful parts that is metamorphosed into something hideous also brings into question the idea of sight. I believe there is a reason The Rime is written in an archaic style and embraces a highly formal poetic composition; he is asking for a lineage to the Greek myths. The creature is pursued by Frankenstein in an epic and hemispheric hunt across the globe that embraces a mythical comparison to older tales from the ancient world. I cannot

41 help but think of Orion (frst introduced to the classical Western canon in Homer’s Odyssey), who according to legend, was the best hunter among men. Orion could not control his sexual appetite, and raped the maiden Merope in Chios. As revenge her father, Oenopion, blinds Orion. He pays for his crime against Merope with his sight, and it is the frst price he pays in a long line of error.

Due to his other adventures, Orion ultimately loses his life at the hands of the moody and scheming Greek gods and goddesses.

I will not dwell too long on Orion, but I will wrap up this thought by citing this myth and stressing how essential eyesight is in the telling of his heroic fall. Let us not forget that

Frankenstein’s expanded title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. My point in mentioning briefy the Greek myths is that similar to Orion and the classical heroes of yore,

Coleridge’s Mariner and Shelley’s Frankenstein lack the ability to see beyond themselves (they are efectively blinded by their own judgement), and they make the fatal mistake of challenging the order of the universe, or the supremacy of the natural laws (gods). In their storylines, we can fnd numerous classical examples rooted in antiquity.

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I would like to reiterate once more that an especially evocative similarity between

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mary Shelley is their inquisition into the authority of the interior mind to form reality, which is challenged by diferent kinds of distance: the isolation of characters, the structural/compositional format, and the symbolism of strained geographic solitude. When the Ancient Mariner has stricken the albatross that curses his crew, they die and are resurrected out of darkness; notably, this occurs after the Mariner awakens from a dream. The

42 Mariner sufers the consequence of his ghastly decision in solitary isolation, “The man hath penance done,/And penance more will do” (413). Loosely told in this manner, the chain of events maps the plot of Frankenstein. The interchange between composition and narrative plot in

Shelley’s novel can all be traced in some part to Coleridge, where the two are writers in thoughtful exchange about the overlap between geographic and metaphysical states of being.

If we look at Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, his miscellany of opinions and philosophy published in 1817, we can clearly understand that the choice of form in The Rime is related to his theory about the act of creation, which is sourced from earthly stimuli. For Coleridge, creation is partly an introspective, neurological process. In Chapter XIII of the Biographia, he writes about the act of Imagination:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the fnite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infnite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and difering only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, difuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fxed and dead.33

Thus it is evident, whether we classify Imagination on the primary or secondary level, that the artist-beholder must undergo a process of rebuilding the world from parts (dissolves, difuses, dissipates) within the interior mind. That recreation is entirely informed by external, earthly forces, which the artist shapes and molds as his source material. Mary Shelley explicitly references the process of creation in the Preface to the 1832 edition of Frankenstein: “Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the

33 Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, reproduced by Tapio Riikonen and David Widger, https://www.gutenberg.org/fles/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.

43 materials must, in the frst place, be aforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself” (Shelley, X). In layman’s terms, she agrees with

Coleridge that Imaginative power and creative output originates from man’s interaction with what already exists, not from a void.

However, she disagrees on the fundamentally gendered preconception that achievement and intelligence is particular to the (male) individual; rather, true accomplishment and imaginative achievement is gained by the pull-and-give of diferent communal factors, not the completely egotistical. The Imaginative faculty must be regulated. She is actually criticizing the way in which her male Romantic contemporaries “objectify” Imagination by making it “helpless and alone,” to suggest that Imagination has been turned into an “agent of ego” and not a true

“ennobling interchange” that arouses, directs, and gives essential meaning to Imagination

(Poovey, 350-53).34 It is not that Mary disagreed with Romantic notions of the imagination and creative process; that would not be the case, particularly because so much of the novel comes from other Romantic poets and Percy Shelley, who co-collaborated with her on Frankenstein to an extent, and also co-authored History of a Six Weeks’ Tour with Mary. My reading of the novel instead suggests that she did not fnd these notions fully realized; instead of self-adoration, Victor

Frankenstein would have been wise to act with self-restraint. We, like Walton, are free to judge the man within the narrative gap.

Frankenstein’s discovery of galvanism breaks the barrier between humankind’s limited knowledge and a “higher” dimension of life, asserting his visionary desires at a moment when he should have retracted his vision or submitted to, even contented himself with, the unknown. For

34 From Mary Poovey’s essay, “My Hideous Progeny: The Lady and the Monster,” in the Norton Critical Edition of Frankenstein, edited by J. Paul Hunter.

44 Frankenstein, as for the Mariner, instead of mediating the link between his “crime”–to use the

Mariner’s term–and his penance, Frankenstein negates his moral duty and entraps himself in an ambiguous, in-between state that wedges him between the real and the Imaginative. Compatible with this undefned state, the Arctic is also an arena of projected desire and a physical place. It is a realm of blankness, which Eric G. Wilson interprets as the next meta-state yonder the

Imagination, “the ice as refection of Harmony (Blake’s Beulah– nature as a garden of gorgeous dreams and amorous delights) to the boundless energy of the sublime, the ice as nothing (Blake’s

Eden– the invisible power of life within and beyond nature).”35

Now to the point of fatalism. The product of Frankenstein’s Imagination is strikingly out of harmony with the laws of nature–Shelley’s point here is not about the veracity or righteousness of Frankenstein’s creation, it is about the disjointed efect Frankenstein’s convictions and choices have on his direct network of people and values. Within the world of the novel’s universe the young scientist, in seeking to conquer the power of creation, makes a grand mistake in his attempt to surpass the mysterious, supreme bounds of nature; to disregard “the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” (Shelley, XI). Whether we treat that Creator as an immanent force, as in Coleridge’s “infnite I AM,” or a more ambiguous, unifying principle, there is a spiritual discipline that unites the universe; Thomas Taylor (1758-1835), the

Platonist, described this cohesive power as being “coeval with the universe itself.”36 Mary Shelley calls this cohesive force, “the secret of the magnet,” which is a more atheistic label

(Frankenstein, 8). Once Coleridge’s Mariner shoots the albatross, everything that occurs after is destined in the sense that he no longer has control.

35 Wilson, p. 183 36 Wordsworth, Jonathan, editor. “Introduction: The Romantic Period,” The Penguin Book of Romantic Poetry. Penguin Books, 2005.

45 Shelley’s interest in harmony then, which is paired with an interest in a lack of harmony, is apparent through Walton’s expedition to the North Pole. The poles somehow take up a critical role in Frankenstein and indicate Shelley’s adherence to Coleridge’s occupation with symmetry and circumference: Walton is a polar explorer; he is headed to the North Pole; the creature baits

Frankenstein on a circular chase across Europe and into the Arctic. The concept of a harmony of spheres can also be applied to ideas of domestic relationships and tranquility. Frankenstein’s creature, which symbolizes his imagination and the assertion of that imagination, bleeds into the real world and destroys his domestic bliss, or “sphere.”

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The Mariner and Frankenstein are aroused by their thirst for knowledge, which they feel required to assert onto the inhospitable “real” world, in a misguided imaginative quest that reveals an innate grotesqueness–for Victor Frankenstein, that “grotesqueness,” which is his self-oriented egotism, is literally brought into existence through his creature, the monstrous

“singularity” of the self. Mary Poovey describes it this way: “Paradoxically, in this incident

Shelley makes the ego’s destructiveness literal by setting in motion the fgurative, symbolic character of the monster.” This fused identity is further reinforced by their shared death. A singularity of the self is in sharp confict with the idea that a harmonious artistic persona encourages an exchange and participation between the creator and the world, a kind of capacious awareness of the order and rhythm of a greater system of interactions.

Anca Vlasopolos posits that we should consider the search for meaning in The Rime as a nineteenth-century motif of the Romantic Quest:

46 The Romantic Quest, like the Greater Romantic Lyric, centers on the meeting of mind with experience, which often takes the form of sublunary mutability. The mind attempts to move beyond experience to restructured or– as Yeats would put it– radical innocence. But the heroes of such quests as The Rime [...] cannot reach the upper region of Imagination because they never fully defeat the principle of psychic fragmentation, of spiritual death which Milton calls Selfhood and Coleridge the Will.37

Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is a kind of tragedian. Vlasopolos goes on to argue that Romantic

Quests often place the heroes into a “cycle of mutability,” and we see that manifest itself in the

Mariner’s compulsive repetition (we are told he must recount the events of the poem). A sense of cyclical pattern is also built into the poem’s circular structure as a kind of wheel (2). To examine the wheel pattern as a prototype of the Romantic Quest begs whether the Mariner’s failure of vision and loss of Selfhood–a failure that can be applied to Victor Frankenstein in his “Romantic

Quest”–makes the pattern persist from Coleridge to Shelley. Should we choose to view Victor

Frankenstein as a Romantic Quest fgure with the same fawed qualities as the Mariner in The

Rime, then Vlasopolos’ subsequent suggestion that the act of retelling experience–or fashback–is prescriptive to the “post-Romantic journey,” or “a la recherche du temps perdu”38 is also true. In this interpretation of Frankenstein as a hall of mirrors that focuses on the Romantic Quest motif,

Robert Walton subscribes to the mold of the “naive questioner” while Victor Frankenstein is the

Romantic Quest fgure, or “informant” (Ibid).

Mary Shelley’s allusion to the Romantic hero is further given a classical grounding in

Dante's Inferno. In Volume I, Chapter IV, after seeing the full efect of his creature looming over his bed at night, Victor fees from his chamber and spends the night wandering in the streets of

Ingolstadt: “Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again

37 Vlasopolos, Anca (1979). 38 This is loosely translated to “a reclamation of lost innocence,” as used by Vlasopolos.

47 endued with animation could not so hideous as that wretch. [...] it became such as even Dante could not have conceived” (36). He then goes on to hurry on with “irregular steps, not daring to look about” himself like Coleridges’s Mariner, reciting these lines to himself:

Like one who, on a lonely road, Doth walk in fear and dread, And, having once turn’d round, walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows a frightful fend Doth close behind him tread. (37)

Shelley’s Dante reference seems to speak to Vlasposo’s idea of the “cycle of mutability,” where the cyclical nature of the wheel is literally made into the nine concentric rings of Hell. Thus

Coleridge’s interest with symmetry and circumference fnds its way into Frankenstein, and all the way back to Dante’s Divine Comedy. But Victor Frankenstein cannot move beyond experience, never reaching the “upper region of Imagination” because unlike Dante, Frankenstein has manifested monstrosity into the physical world; his search for meaning–in Dante, that is the journey of the soul towards God–is no longer allegorical, but material. Coleridge is playing on

Dante in his poem, and Mary Shelley nods to them both, transforming the message and motif of the poetic/literary “hero” into an all-too-earthly mold.

However, while we can better understand Mary Shelley’s characterization of the mortal limitations of the human experience as being derived from Coleridge, and from broader

Romantic literary traditions more generally, this comparison only holds until a certain extent. She predicates her narrative design and structure from the poet, but then diverges from Coleridgean thought to come entirely into her own philosophy: looking death in the face. The Arctic is the setting in which Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s prototype of the artist/maker, is forced to

48 admit that he cannot attain deitifc status in his “mad” pursuit of “glory” (Wollstonecraft Shelley

(1818), 11); thus, contrary to Coleridge and the broader culture of the day, man is not perfectible; he cannot conquer what is and will be– “the infnite I AM”–; man is forever disillusioned if he believes he can.

I believe it is too simplistic to say that the reason she was interested in gendered literary constructions is because she was a woman. Many feminist scholars ofer their own takes on this angle reason, but I fnd that Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft

Shelley is especially insightful. They suggest that “Mary Shelley explained her sexuality to herself in the context of her reading and its powerfully felt implications,” and that femaleness and literariness were on her mind because “its author was caught up in such a maelstrom of sexuality at the time she wrote the novel,” including “teen-age motherhood.”39 We may never truly know her reasoning; yet, even without any fnite explanation, the source of the schism between

Imagination and scientifc reality in Frankenstein is undeniably a gendered construction. In ascribing to the Romantic Quest storyline, Frankenstein is an ironic, subversive response to a masculinized discourse of the dominating, self-centered heroic fgure. Frankenstein re-situates the Romantic Quest with that discourse in mind; an addition Mary Shelley must have found was generally excluded, yet entirely ancillary, in the themes and tropes typical in Romantic literary works. Through the subtle use of irony as a tool and her narrative borrowing from Coleridge,

Shelley captures a version of the Romantic Quest that subverts the centrality of masculine dogma to Britain’s intellectual and literary identity.

39 Gilbert, Sandra M., Gubar, Susan. “Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979, Chapter 7, https://www.knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/gilbert.html#par18.

49 If anything, Coleridge lays a foundation for the polar regions to serve as a place where things are not as they frst appear. Shelley picks up the themes of The Rime and entertains them in Frankenstein. The frozen apocalypse of the poles is a spiritual and mystical place where the

“grotesque” fnds its suitable home. For in the Arctic, contradiction is abundant. Through

Coleridge and Shelley’s writing, the Arctic/Antarctic is made into a phantom world, a mirror of the uncanny, in which the repressed desires of the day literally come alive, mixing man’s darkest desires with the light of day; immovable objects are interrupted and broken up by seismic shifts of ice and water, and the frenetic dance of elemental particles is proof that the white, snowy waste is flled with unexpected life. The secrecy and surrealism of the polar regions, and even the soluble properties of frozen liquid, is indeed alchemical.

Finally, there is something about unmapped spaces that inspire “robust visions” and make them the “blank screens” on which mankind projects “deep reveries” of “tyrannical narcissisms” and “spiritual sublimities.”40 Even in our own time, the polar regions are one of the remaining wondrous places still genuinely unknown; it is there we may even fnd ghost sailors or a monstrous creature sewn together from human remains among the permeable, primal, and subjective frozen land. The blank screen, or terra incognita, of the Arctic symbolizes untapped possibility, not an ecologically dead environment. One could go so far as to suggest that the ice and the poles are a manifestation of the principle of life. The representation of ice in Coleridge and Shelley present it as the site of death and creation– really, a metaphor for Frankenstein’s creature, who sits between those two states.

40 Wilson, Eric G. “The Poles.” The Spiritual History of Ice, p. 141.

50 The Eternal Wanderer/Stranger in “Frost at Midnight” and Frankenstein

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

– “Frost at Midnight,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

In the next section, I will look at “Frost at Midnight” and the nature of identity within the poem that relates to the nature of identity in Frankenstein. Very little published material exists on the infuence of “Frost at Midnight” on Frankenstein; the only printed source I could fnd on the subject was a brief article by Tracy Ware, titled “A Note on ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Frost at

Midnight,’” which proposes that the Arctic and Alpine (including the Sea of Ice) are used as places of key confrontation, and that the role of the “stranger” in the novel is similar to the

“stranger” in “Frost at Midnight.”41 Working of of Ware’s revealing point42, I present a longer and more detailed argument on the role of what I call the “eternal wanderer/stranger” in

Frankenstein, and how the ideal of the welcoming stranger and friend is modeled of of

Coleridge’s stranger in “Frost at Midnight.” First I examine the setting of solitude found in “Frost at Midnight” and the Arctic and Alpine glacial scenes in Frankenstein, ofering reasons for why

41 Ware, Tracy. “A Note on ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Frost at Midnight.’” Keats-Shelley Journal, vol. 53, 2004, pp. 15–17. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30210524. 42 Professor Ware made himself an essential resource to me in my research. Without his article, I would not have pondered the role of the stranger in “Frost at Midnight.” Even so, I am shocked by the lack of in-depth analysis that scholars have dedicated to the connection between “Frost” and Frankenstein, which is just as valuable and present as that between the book and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. “Frost” really only gets a mention.

51 these shared descriptions have value. I also draw attention to the streams of time in Frankenstein, by looking at comparable domestic depictions of family and fatherhood in “Frost at Midnight” and in Frankenstein. After this, I then explore the sleeping and waking states, or the “dream visions” as Kant would call them, that make their way into “Frost at Midnight” and

Frankenstein; after all, the premise of each text is rooted around fgures that experience hyperreal and blended fantasies that challenge linear space and time and the limitations of an internalized, interior psychology. Next, I propose that Robert Walton views Victor Frankenstein as the friendly

“stranger,” also called the “wanderer” by Shelley, which speaks directly to Coleridge’s poem in its characterization of the stranger as a potentially friendly, yet ambiguous, entity. To legitimize this connection, I would like to mention that Walton actually uses the phrase “divine wanderer” to describe Frankenstein, and then a few lines down, he dubs him “the stranger” in his letters on

August 13th and 19th after fnding Frankenstein out on the ice.43 Lastly, I examine the relationship between natural imagery and the elements– “heating” and “cooling”– and their temperate and visual usage as allegories for creative fertility.

The extreme silence and meditation with which Victor Frankenstein refects on his choices recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem, “Frost at Midnight,” written February

1798. Coleridge’s poem is about frost performing “its secret ministry” in the quiet night. While the inmates of the speaker’s cottage slumber, the speaker (Coleridge) sits alone, contemplating the cry of an owlet and the “cradled infant” sleeping peacefully by his side. The speaker then imagines his babe’s future in a myriad of possibilities and blessings, while also revisiting his own childhood memories. The contemplative silence of the poem–the act of introspective inquisition

43 Shelley, 17.

52 into nature through the observation of nature–is the practice and pattern with of the scene, described by Walton, in which Victor Frankenstein self-refects:

Even broken in spirit as he is, no one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature. The starry sky, the sea and every sight aforded by these wonderful regions, seems still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth. Such a man has a double existence: he may sufer misery, and be overwhelmed by disappointments; yet when he has retired into himself, he will be like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within whose circle no grief or folly ventures (Mary Shelley, 17).

Walton expresses a sympathetic interest in Frankenstein after rescuing him at the beginning of the novel. While watching him on the ship’s deck, Walton perceives his new friend as a “wise” and “experienced” man (Shelley, 17). His face upturned towards the skies in solitude, Walton dubs Frankenstein an “eternal wanderer,” giving him a mystical label. Coleridge’s idea that silence somehow masks movement and pattern undetected by the naked eye is central to “Frost at

Midnight,” and is an easy metaphor for Frankenstein’s Northern setting– Shelley and Coleridge present the idea that opposition often shares the same space. For Coleridge, opposition gives birth to a “double existence” that is only made possible by those opposites; to take one example, his lively inner monologue fractures the stillness and silence of an English winter scene in “Frost at Midnight” to create two equally held existences: one of the mind and one of the world. The

“eternal wanderer” seeks to merge the real and the imagined, just like the speaker of Coleridge’s poem. In Mary Shelley’s novel meanwhile, the real and the imagined are represented by science and poetry. We can think of Frankenstein’s creature’s birth merging the real and imagined into the “double existence” of Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.”

Another quality of “Frost at Midnight” with a remarkable connection to Mary Shelley’s novel is the sense of restless anticipation Coleridge nurtures towards a number of future and

53 divergent possibilities for his young son. These possibilities for the younger are “mimetic,” in which forms and objects are not “confned to their own limits,” leading to a dissolution in boundaries of the self and distance that create multiple coexisting time frames.44 By the end of the poem, Coleridge’s imagined future and the real present merge into one; the poet imagines a future version of what he is experiencing, that being the stillness and “secret ministry of frost” of another cold night. That feeling of anticipation is most outward facing in the surface plot of the poem, wherein Coleridge refects on his own life, mistakes, and joys, and uses those to envision a brighter future for his babe. While there are aspects of “Frost at Midnight” that are intensely personal to Coleridge, the context of raising progeny transcends his experience alone, just as

Mary Shelley’s novel is about a parent’s lack of proper care towards his ofspring, which leads to his own and his ofspring’s demise.

In both texts, there is one autonomous subject that has presence but lacks voice; in

Coleridge’s setting, personal voice has not yet been cultivated (that comes with the babe’s growing up), and in Shelley’s novel, voice is actively being denied to the creature. The will of the narrator or protagonist is projected onto the younger; however, one notable diference in

“parenting” attitude is the undeniable delight with which Coleridge enjoys being a father:

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, Fill up the intersperséd vacancies And momentary pauses of the thought! My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart With tender gladness, thus to look at thee.

44 Foundation, Poetry. “Samuel Taylor Coleridge: ‘Frost at Midnight’ by Katherine Robinson.” Poetry Foundation, 5 May 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70316/samuel-taylor-coleridge-frost-at-midnight.

54 In Frankenstein, the person that Victor Frankenstein is most paternal to is his younger brother,

William Frankenstein. Compare his description of William as a “dear blessed child” (58) which is reminiscent of Coleridge’s gentle language, and contrast it with his characterisation of the creature, who is “more hideous than belongs to humanity” and a “flthy daemon” (50). In “Frost at Midnight,” Coleridge looks ahead to his son’s future, but in the novel Frankenstein is disgusted and disavows his own “son” and is reproached for his rejection through the death of William.

Frankenstein consequently kills his own “child”–the creature–and also the idealized child, which takes the form of William in Frankenstein (and Coleridge’s son in “Frost at Midnight”).

A most obvious juxtaposition between “Frost at Midnight” and Frankenstein is the image of Coleridge recalling boyhood and tender wishes for his son to experience a celebration of youth and nature. In contrast, Shelley’s novel is darkly devoid of any fruitful homo-compatible relationship–and herein lies, strangely, a fulflling comparison; Coleridge, through “Frost at

Midnight,” invites his young son into a literary conversation– he allows his son to be literary. He wishes for transparency, even a translation, of his literary delights onto his babe. In efect,

Coleridge’s son is turned into literary inheritor and literary subject–he is the muse fgure.

Coleridge’s son is a distinct “other,” but he also becomes part of the poet’s self. “Frost at

Midnight” successfully merges the poet’s self and the other in a kind of fractal, even crystalline, composition of self-refections. Again and again, Coleridge imagines and reimagines a diverse possibility of creative futures for his son. In Frankenstein, the characters keep trying to perform this same exercise, but all ends in tragedy. Among the human joys that Frankenstein’s creature is denied, perhaps the most acutely felt–or at least described–is his desire and love for literature.

Frankenstein’s creature is not permitted to be literary, although he has learned to speak and read better than average men; his readings include Plutarch’s Lives, Paradise Lost, Sorrows of Werter

55 (sic), and Volney’s Ruins of Empires. Still Victor Frankenstein, great reader himself, refuses to see himself in his creature; he vehemently rejects any marriage between the self and other.

Shelley and Coleridge seem keenly interested in the conjunction between opposites; we can see this interest in the relationship of the “hotbox” cottage setting of “Frost at Midnight” to the

English winter, and the warmth and domesticity of Walton’s ship, where Frankenstein is wrapped up in blankets and placed near “the chimney of the kitchen-stove,” when he is frst discovered out on the ice.45

But the identifcation, or lack of identifcation, with the paternal fgure is not the only connection I believe Shelley’s Frankenstein shares with Coleridge. There are two ways that

“Frost at Midnight” tends to be read: one might distinguish Coleridge’s connection to his son as the purpose of the poem, or, a critic may choose to analyze the workings of the imagination. It is the role of the eternal wanderer, and the “stranger,” that interests me rather than the former.

Walton and Frankenstein’s budding friendship, and their remaking of a domestic idyll on an icebound ship, brings to the forefront the vulnerability and fragility of these blissful spaces. We are all too aware that outside of Frankenstein’s cozy, warm sickroom, rages an unforgivable cold, as relayed by Walton in Letter IV back home to England:

His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and sufering. [...] As soon as he shewed signs of life, we wrapped him up in blankets, and placed him near the chimney of the kitchen-stove. By slow degrees he recovered, and ate a little soup, which restored him wonderfully. Two days passed in this manner before he was able to speak; and I often feared that his suferings had deprived him of understanding. When he had in some measure recovered, I removed him to my own cabin. (Shelley, 14)

In the passage quoted above, there is an undercurrent of worry in Walton’s description that the warmth and domesticity of the cottage is permeable. The same awareness is present in The

45 Shelley, p. 14.

56 Friend, Coleridge describes how glass can suggest interpretations between imagination and fact, inner and outer.46 Coleridge details the setup of his own library in Keswick: “The window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the freplace, and looks out on the very large garden that occupies the whole slope of the hill on which the house stands. [....] At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement to watch the image or refection of the fre” (CC

4.1:144-5).47 Coleridge’s study is the same setting for “Frost at Midnight,” and one can clearly see him sitting in front of the grate with a view of the cold outside the cottage. Even in this description, we are invited into the pastoral and comfortable environment of Coleridge’s cottage, a familiar setting for poetry, and then given a hint of the “secret ministry,” which is molecular in its wording, pointing to scientifc mystery and fascination. It seems that Coleridge was captivated by the punishing power of frost, ice, and cold, as much as he was by its magical qualities and its transformative fuidity, which translated nicely into poetics. If we remember that Frankenstein is both a scientifc and poetic fgure, we can view his creature as a result of his literary and scientifc tastes coming together; the creature is a fusion of Frankenstein’s literary and scientifc minds, just as “Frost at Midnight” is a strange blend of pastoral romance and pseudo-scientifc intrigue, and an intellectual exercise. Mary Shelley’s novel has long been considered a precursor of the science fction genre, but in a more complex analysis, Frankenstein yields itself as a psychological novel as well, where the climate and natural landscape become part of her characters’ psyches, even part of the chambers of their minds.

Coleridge and Shelley were writing at a fascinating renewal in European history. In

Germany, professional philosophy had been rejuvenated by the implications of Emanuel Kant’s

46 Wilson, p. 230. 47 Wilson, ibid.

57 “Copernican revolution,” whereas in England there was more of a “withering of the philosophical appetite” in reconstructing ideology after a post-revolution culture that was taken up mostly by poets, essayists, and journalists.48 In this early modern period, the Imagination was often referred to as the “mind’s eyes.”49 The idea that ideas took the form of images (or visuals) was not founded by Coleridge or Shelley but actually followed a long line of thought from Aristotle,

Descartes, Rousseau, Locke and Kant. This is one area of thought where Coleridge and Shelley are in harmony; the written form now matters as much as content and symbols do; for

Frankenstein, above all, can be characterized as a novel of ideas, and those ideas are extremely visual and mental in their apparition. An interesting aspect of Shelley’s novel is that although she invests herself into the exploration of many timely ideas of the early nineteenth century, she does not adjudicate. Hers is a position of probing and exploration, and not of expounding or lecturing.

It is an inquiry into popular ideas of the time.

Next there is the matter of dream visions in British Romanticism. Kant argued that the faculty of fantasy inspired poetry and art in the same state found between sleeping and waking, rising out of the world of dreams to communicate with the waking world.50 “Frost at Midnight” is uniquely nestled between the sleeping and waking state–the midnight hour, with its secrecy and folkloric magic– to act as a bridge from the visual mind and its creative epiphanies to outside matter. There are other Romantic poems I would consider in this genre of “dream vision”: Kubla

Khan by Coleridge, “The Eve of St. Agnes” by John Keats, and “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelley, to name a few. In “dream vision” poems, the poem is the vehicle with which vision turns to

48 Milnes, Tim. “Through the Looking-Glass: Coleridge and Post-Kantian Philosophy.” Comparative Literature, vol. 51, no. 4, 1999, p. 310. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1771265. 49 O’Connell, Anita. "Visions in Verse: Writing the Visual in Romantic Dream Visions." Studies in the Literary Imagination, vol. 48 no. 1, 2015, p. 35-54. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/sli.2015.0003. 50 O’Connell, ibid.

58 verse; in which fantasy is made real, in some transformed sense. If Coleridge’s poem can be thought of as a “dream vision,” then Shelley’s Frankenstein is a dream gone wrong– it is a nightmare. And it is this veering from the blissful or melancholic nocturnal dream that sets

Shelley apart; when other Romantic poets such as Coleridge and Percy Shelley insisted that the imaginative states along a spectrum of liminal states difered only in degree,51 they were arguing for a commonality in kind– Mary Shelley seems to take that degreed separation to its extreme in her “dream vision.” Frankenstein himself even says, “The whole series of my life appeared to me as a dream; I sometimes doubted if indeed it were all true, for it never presented itself to my mind with the force of reality.”52

Kant holds a place of merit within the hierarchy of metaphysical epistemology in

Romantic thought. According to Kathleen Wheeler, Coleridge and Percy Shelley esteemed themselves as intellectual inheritors of Kant, so that we may attribute radical transformations in

Romantic poetry through a line of thinkers that places Kant in a primary parental position.

Should we attempt to map an inheritance, Wheeler traces Kant’s infuence to Coleridge, who had a frm grasp of Kant, and Coleridge’s infuence on Percy Shelley. From Kant, to Coleridge, to

Percy Shelley: these fgures turned away from a dualistic framework of imagination, rejecting the notion that the mind is either passive or receptive in relation to aesthetics, and tuning into a fner appreciation of the mind through poetry.53 We can conceive of their relationship as not reciprocal necessarily, but directed from Kant to Coleridge and the Shelleys through an asymmetrical trickle-down direction. According to Coleridge and the Shelleys nous, or the “synthetic faculty”

51O’Connell, ibid (the original reference is to Phantasmagoria by Marina Warner, 2006). 52 Shelley, p. 128. 53 Wheeler, Kathleen M. “Kant and Romanticism.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 13, no. 1, 1989, pp. 44. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1353/phl.1989.0049.

59 (reason and logic), cannot be distinguished from imagination; to regard the mind as being organized into distinct faculties yields false divisions (Wheeler, 47). Because the synthetic power of the mind is so great, the nature of perception is vibrantly active rather than static.

Victor Frankenstein’s arrival in the novel echoes the arrival of Coleridge’s stranger

(placed in italics by Coleridge himself), to show in one possible interpretation that this fgure might be imagined as a desired friend. David Simpson explains that when Coleridge employed the term stranger in “Frost at Midnight,” he does so to convey a kind of desire for friendship with

“folkloric confation,” and that the “conjunction of apparent opposites prefgures, almost precisely, Freud’s interpretation of the uncanny.” In Coleridge’s day, the word “stranger” did not necessarily have the alienating, othering connotation it possesses today; even now, the OED insists that to be a “stranger” can mean “one who has stopped visiting.” Thus, Coleridge’s stranger might be a friend in the making, somebody beloved, or a true foreigner from unfamiliar parts with friendly, not sinister, implications. However, it was also believed that fre-watching at midnight could invite ghosts and spirits according to folkloric tradition.54 Perhaps this is the very point of “Frost at Midnight”; to leave undefned what craves identifcation.

“Frost at Midnight” is suggestive beyond the hearth; the tight enclosure, domesticity, and

“hotbox” of fowering creativity in Coleridge’s cottage on a winter night leads me to think about the singularity and distinction between the poetics of nature–what man dictates–and natural poetry– beauty and order in our immediate world. The “hotbox” cottage, insulated from the cold outdoors, stands for more than Coleridge’s dwelling place; it is a pressure point, in which the intensity and cloistered parameters mold the creative mind until there is a fssure and release in

54 Simpson, David. “Hearth and Home: Coleridge, De Quincey, and Austen.” Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger, University of Chicago Press, 2012, pp. 59. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/well/detail.action?docID=1061195.

60 creative outpouring, which is then “cooled” by the chill, intermingling and mixing into one of the

“airy” Eolian spirits of poetry. In Frankenstein, the “hotbox” setting takes the form of Walton’s cabin, or Frankenstein’s sickroom, which must be impermeable to the cold or risk the patient’s life. The “cooling” of the “hotbox” only takes place when the creature enters the cabin through the porthole window; yet the “cooling” occurs too late for Frankenstein, who has died.

Coleridge uses his cottage as both the poetic and literal setting where he combines words to express a microscopic revelation about the cosmos–that microscopic attention is further projected in his fascination with the “secret ministry” and futtering flm of soot on the chimney grate. For Coleridge, nature is the infnite Teacher, and even the tiniest particles are alive and kinetic with vitality, invisibly waiting to be embraced and celebrated by the piercing eye of mankind. In both Coleridge and Shelley, there is an imbued interest in the dynamic between spatial/artistic compression and resulting invention. Coleridge’s “hotbox” setting leads to an ejaculation of spirit and optimism, while Shelley’s Frankenstein recalls a dream of dark and deep delirium, without the loveliness found in Coleridge. Whereas Coleridge’s poem has a touch of ironic pleasure, Shelley’s Frankenstein is disastrous.

Finally, I would like to suggest that along with being timely towards the popular interest and evolving fascination towards Polar regions at this time, Coleridge and the Shelleys were equally enraptured by the magical qualities and inherent mystery of ice and snow simply because of their boundless love for language and the continuity of literary ingenuity– at this point, there is already an established poetics of fre, earth, water, and air. The frst generation of Romantic poets solidifed the essentiality and connection between man and nature, city and country, in their lyrical ballads (and Lyrical Ballads). We can think of Coleridge and Percy Shelley as celebrated poets of earth, fre, water, and air: the next unknown to explore through poesy in the early

61 nineteenth century was, naturally, ice. It was a literal frontier and a poetic frontier. In The Rime,

“Frost at Midnight,” and the Shelleys’s writings about frozen landscapes, we can see their nod to classical forms and Romantic idiom as a mythopoeic device, and also a predictive foreshadowing of science fction and Victorian literature. Above all, what I wish to stress is that these writers wished to be interpreters of the natural elements–as masters, even wise magicians, of the idiosyncrasies concerning mankind and the cosmos.

62 PART III: Traveling Shelleys

63 Travel Narrative in Frankenstein

Far, far above, piercing the infnite sky, Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between Of frozen foods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven

– “Mont Blanc,” Percy Shelley (1817)

The wandering eye of “Mont Blanc” is as unbound as the Arctic in Frankenstein, as unconstrained and free as the time that the Shelleys spent traveling across Europe in their whirlwind tours of the continent. Without a doubt, “Mont Blanc” by Percy Shelley is a kind of travel narrative, although it is not usually understood as such, and so is Frankenstein. The fuid, weaving, and fighty narrative of the poem is historically and purposefully tied up with the

Shelleys’s travels and their travel book, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France,

Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of

Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamounix (1817). In fact, the initial publication of “Mont

Blanc” is within this travelogue. Consider the travelogue as an overture for “Mont Blanc.”

Donald Reiman (1986) and Michael Erkelenz (2014) propose that Percy and Mary’s History of a

Six Weeks’ Tour is “carefully conceived to culminate… in ‘Mont Blanc.’”55

History is a telling piece of carefully revised memoir, and it is the singular volume presented to the public in 1817 as being co-written by Percy and Mary Shelley (they were often private editors towards one another, but not co-authors). The travelogue is a variation– propelled

55 As recited by Erkelenz, from “P.B. Shelley to T.L. Peacock, July 17, 1816,” in Shelley and his Circle, vol. VII, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fisher, gen. Ed. Donald H. Reiman, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 41.

64 by sexual adventure, new love, political liberalism, and independence–of the customary “Grand

Tours” with which young aristocratic men capped their university education. The weeks-long sojourn to France or Italy, typically accompanied by a tutor and pilgrimages to the French and

Roman antiquities, was a display of wealth, symbolic capital, and eventually, cultural tradition.56

The cultural meaning of these “Grand Tours” would trickle down to the English middle class and honeymooners.

The initial publication of History required far more labor than either Mary or Percy let on; the published version contained seventy percent of content written post-1814 (the predominant year of travel); at least two of the Geneva letters were extensively revised; and

“Mont Blanc” had changed since 1816, when Percy began sharing it with interested acquaintances through the post. As Erkelenz warns regarding the preface to History, we should not take the Shelleys’s “desultory” and “Romantic” attitude towards their years-long compilation at face value, for what is obscured here is the attention towards the coherence of History as a connected composition. Most interesting is the way in which Percy and Mary seem to almost apologize for bringing their readers to such “classic” (and therefore tried) ground as Mellerie, and Clarens, and Chillon, and Vevai, but then switch tone so that the glaciers of Chamonix ofer much new excitement to the well-traveled reader:

Those whose youth has been past as theirs [meaning the Shelleys and their fellow travelers] (with what success it imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of delight and beauty which invests this visible world, will perhaps fnd some entertainment in following the author, with her husband and sister, on foot [...] They [the readers] have perhaps

56 Moskal, Jeanne. Summary of “Travel Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, edited by Esther Schor, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 242–258. Cambridge Companions to Literature. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521809843.016.

65 never talked with one who has beheld in the enthusiasm of youth the glaciers, and the lakes, and the forests, and the fountains of the mighty Alps.57

Positioning the reader as a swallow is a charming domestic visual that also underscores consecrated ideals of poetry, seasonal fertility, and freedom; like the swallow, the reader can dip and dive about, observing diferent perspectives of the wilderness (much like the active and diverse glimpses ofered to readers in “Mont Blanc”). Swallows are also birds that build nests and mate for life, so perhaps we can read into the symbolism of the swallow a youthful optimism for a blessed life together, one that is especially autobiographically punctuated when we consider

Mary had experienced much sickness and death in her short teenaged life. By the time the couple was revising their travelogue for publication, Mary had been impacted by two very important deaths–that of her mother, Mary Godwin, and Mary’s frst child, a daughter, who died on March

6, 1815, which plunged her into a deep depression. Percy was undergoing his own medical evaluations as his health declined and he was diagnosed with a weak heart by their Dr.

Pemberton within the same year.58 While on the band’s “Grand Tour” of Europe in 1814, not knowing about Percy’s weak heart, the Shelleys sought mild to high adventure and entertainment. The swallow feels like a later, idealized addition to describe this complicated, bittersweet time of intense love and folly.

In History, which details some of the places and events of their 1814 trip, Mary and Percy

Shelley default to exultations over the perceived promise of Continental beauty–the word

“pleasure” is often thrown around in their descriptions of places they anticipate visiting–and yet,

57 Shelley, Mary and Percy Shelley. “Preface.” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamounix, T. Hookham, Jun., 1817. 58 Mellor, Anne Kostelanetz. “In Search of Family.” Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters. Routledge, 1989.

66 they actually encounter some obstacles surrounding navigation, and must be resilient against intense physical exertion, personal discomfort, the eyesore of local poverty, fatigue, and eventually, a drying up of travel funds. Mary Shelley goes so far as to describe Echemine (the name of a village in France) as “ in every respect the most disgusting place I ever met with.”59

Germany is also regarded with mild revulsion. The German people are found to be “vulgar” and

“rude.”60 The pleasure the group eagerly sought out on their tour often came with the baggage of

“disgust” and “brutality.”61 Within the History, there is a parody between what was expected to be decorative and refned, and the untameable real.

Finally, it is in Geneva that the Shelleys fnd the tranquility and delight that they had been blindly seeking after in 1814–a whole two years later. Prior to setting out to Geneva in search of

Lord Byron, they had just settled into their home in Bishopsgate–a nesting desire more of Mary’s than Percy’s–at a time when Mary needed reassurance and security from Percy about his devotion to their family unit and her place in his life (for Percy believed in communal love and was in a near constant sexual relationship with Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister). Within this two year frame, Percy had come into his inheritance, and Claire Clairmont’s attentions were positioned away from Percy towards the charming, volatile, and equally famed poet Byron. So it was from a rocky period in her life that Mary Shelley found herself transitioning into a more secure, creatively satisfying, editorially and personally attentive relationship with Percy Shelley while in Geneva.

59 From “France,” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. 60 From “Germany,” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. 61 Again from “France.”

67 That change of mood is evident from the start of the vacation. “To what a diferent scene are we now arrived!” Mary Shelley exults in a letter from May 1816. She continues the correspondence with obvious appreciation:

To the warm sunshine and to the humming of sun-loving insects. From the windows of our hotel we see the lovely lake, blue as the heavens which it refects, and sparkling with golden beams. [...] Gentlemens' seats are scattered over these banks, behind which rise the various ridges of black mountains, and towering far above, in the midst of its snowy Alps, the majestic Mont Blanc, highest and queen of all.62

The way in which History is structured leads one to leap directly from the misadventures of 1814 straight into Mary’s letter from Geneva in 1816, painting a huge contrast in her exaltation of the Alpine scenery with previous desultory portraits of destinations like France and

Germany. In Geneva, Percy and Mary Shelley were immediately drawn to the “azure” daytime mountain scenes. On an excursion into the mountains while high enough to penetrate the

“regions of frost,” it began to snow heavily, and as evening advanced, the group was faced with the realization of being snowed in. This is one of the frst scenes of Geneva that the group is met with–the beautiful danger of the “magnifcent ravines,” “large fakes of snow thick and fast,” pines “laden with snow,” “scattered and lingering vapour,” and of course, Lake Geneva.63 For it is most abundantly clear in a letter by Percy Shelley dated July 22nd, 1816, that the group was entirely impressed by Mont Blanc in Chamonix, which is important to relay in its completed description:

Mont Blanc was before us, but it was covered with cloud; its base, furrowed with dreadful gaps, was seen above. Pinnacles of snow intolerably bright, part of the chain connected with Mont Blanc, shone through the clouds at intervals on high. I never knew—I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these aerial summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness. And remember this

62 “Letter 1,” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. 63 Ibid.

68 was all one scene, it all pressed home to our regard and our imagination. Though it embraced a vast extent of space, the snowy pyramids which shot into the bright blue sky seemed to overhang our path; the ravine, clothed with gigantic pines, and black with its depth below, so deep that the very roaring of the untameable Arve, which rolled through it, could not be heard above—all was as much our own, as if we had been the creators of such impressions in the minds of others as now occupied our own. Nature was the poet, whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest.64

There is some suggestion on Percy Shelley’s part that beautiful natural scenery is complimentary with a beautiful mind; an impressive and powerful scenery, complimentary therefore with an impressive and powerful mind. It is this belief that makes it possible for nature to fow into poetry, and vice versa.

In Frankenstein, Victor, Elizabeth, Alphonse and Ernest travel to Chamonix as tourists on the suggestion of the father (Alphonse) after the deaths of Victor’s youngest brother and Justine.

The descriptions of the valleys, mountains, and trees in Chamonix are evocative of Mary and

Percy’s accounts in History, and the fctional group also departs in the summer (August) from

Geneva to Chamonix, which is the same route that Percy and Mary took in 1816. The group takes a trip up into the mountains on mule (just like in History): “it [Chamonix] was augmented and rendered sublime by the mighty Alps, whose white and shining pyramids and domes towered above all, as belonging to another earth, the habitations of another race of beings” (64). The glaciers of these regions rumble like thunder and there is an avalanche of snow and its attendant

“cloud” , which clears in revelation of “Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnifcent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and its tremendous dome overlooked the valley” (65).

The aiguilles of the novel are almost exactly the same as the “dark spires” in Mary Shelley’s letter from May 17, 1816. Her account of Mont Blanc captures the sense of intensity that Percy

64 “Letter II,” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour.

69 describes in his letter of “suddenly burst(ing) upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness.”65 Mont Blanc is seraphic in its sensational scale, and it becomes the illusive and mercurial mediator between the mysterious, the murky, the daemonical, and mankind. It is akin to a precursor of the Arctic; the Arctic takes all the elements of Chamonix and heightens them to the extreme.

The Mont Blanc of Frankenstein is also the conceptual bridge between what is tangible and imagined. The grand mountain elicits a heated, warmblooded reaction from its human spectators, but ironically, its environment proves inhospitable towards humans (we frail mammalian creatures) just as Frankenstein’s creation is better suited to the realm of dreams than reality. Furthermore, Percy Shelley’s chosen words ofer a delicious subtext– for the “madness” of the landscape sounds like a Coleridgean concept, an apt description of the Ancient Mariner’s interpretation of the South Pole, and Frankenstein’s scientifc madness. Herein we see that often, concepts of Romanticism circle back tightly around and exist in a tenable, circumferential paradox and harmony.

The “Sea of Ice” that Victor Frankenstein wanders across in solitude (he has separated from his family party) to reach the summit of Montanvert, parallel to Mont Blanc, leads him to view a colossal glacier which he says “flled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul, and allowed it to soar from the obscure world of light and joy” (66). We should understand his description of fight as a symbolic departure from the known world, alluding even to the viewless wings of poesy,66 for Montanvert becomes the ground on which Frankenstein is met by his creature for the frst time since feeing his bedchamber on the night of its creation. In History,

65 “Letter IV,” History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. 66 Foundation, Poetry. “Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats.” Poetry Foundation, 4 May 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale.

70 as in Frankenstein, this region is dubbed the “Sea of Ice,” where the mountains line up rows of

“dazzling ice” and the “naked pinnacles” of rock “pierce the clouds like things not belonging to this earth.”67 (Notably, “the Sea of Ice” is recreated in the Polar regions, where Walton’s ship is stranded. This forced lodging leads to the expedition’s run-in with Frankenstein.) The “aerial summit” of Montanvert is the natural habitat of the creature’s mind and body; of the “human mind’s imaginings” and “silence and solitude.”68 He has departed the gentle world of the swallow, and entered into the realm of the albatross.

The Geneva excursion kicks of a longer period of excessive leisure and academic learning for Frankenstein, who makes arrangements to travel to England in order to learn about scientifc advances he believes will aid him in building the creature a mate; he is accompanied by

Clerval– and again, in an itinerary parallel with the Shelleys in their History– decides that the two years of travel will be spent in France and Holland going to and from London. It seems that

Mary Shelley writes this diversion into her novel because she is making a point that Victor is no longer of our earthly, blissful world; the beauty and delight of Continental travel, which restores

Clerval’s spirits, cannot penetrate Frankenstein; he has returned from the so-called metaphorical

“cold Country” of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and is forever marked/cursed. Of course, the metaphorical “cold Country” of Chamonix is quickly replaced with a truly polar landscape–a well-earned buildup after the face-of between creature and maker on Montanvert. Frankenstein is further positioned as an eternal outsider when, after having sailed down the Rhine on a boat from Strasburgh to Rotterdam, Clerval exclaims: “Oh, surely, the spirit that inhabits and guards this place has a soul more in harmony with man, than those who pile the glacier, or retire to the

67 From History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. 68 Shelley, Percy. Part V, “Mont Blanc.”

71 inaccessible peaks of the mountains” (111). Frankenstein’s soul has been left high on the mountain, not amongst the low-lying foliage of “lovely trees” or the “Fairy-land” of Clerval’s happiness. There are creative intonations in this divide, for Clerval is “a being formed in the

‘very poetry of nature,’” (111) while Frankenstein is clearly othered.

As I have tried to address in my comparison between “Frost at Midnight” and

Frankenstein–and I hope, in this section as well–the cold regions of Chamonix and the Arctic are locales of conversation more than they are settings for action. The Coleridgean “hotbox” that brings warmth to Frankenstein and Walton’s friendship can be coupled with the aerial conversations of Victor and the creature, wherein the characters take on a bard-like voice and expostulate, philosophize, demand, curse, and tell tales.

The Shelleys’s travels as documented in the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour ends with the triumphant poem “Mont Blanc.” Shelley takes us closer to Mont Blanc throughout the poem in a continual pursuit–a continual making–of the summit. My personal reading of “Mont Blanc” is that the poem seeks afrmation of human identity in an unfamiliar (even dangerous) environment, which Percy Shelley rebuilds in his poetry. In Spencer Halls’ essay “Shelley’s

‘Mont Blanc,” Hall ofers the interpretation that Percy Shelley’s subject “becomes thought itself, and the natural landscape is reduced to an object and a metaphor of the mind.”69 The

“extraordinary state” of “poetic activity” gives fight to “foat above” the “darkness of the

Ravine” and “rest.../In the still cave of the witch of Poesy.”70 Frankenstein ventures out across

“the Sea of Ice” alone “musing” on the “separate fantasy” that Percy Shelley’s narrator searches for in “Mont Blanc.” During this solo trip, Frankenstein holds an “unremitting interchange” with

69 Hall, Spencer. “Shelley's ‘Mont Blanc.’” Studies in Philology, vol. 70, no. 2, 1973, p. 209. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4173802. 70 Ibid, p. 210.

72 the Alpine scenery, which is why he spends paragraph upon paragraph dwelling on the beauty and danger of the mountains of Chamonix. But unlike Percy Shelley’s narrator, he never arrives on “wandering wings” to the still cave of the witch of Poesy–for the cave he enters belongs to the creature, and not the witch of Poesy, who is able to inhabit this frozen world.

Percy Shelley makes a distinction between the poetic mindset and the philosophical mind as being distinct somehow. He was himself interested in science as much as he was a writer of poetry, wrote at the height of a rekindled fanaticism around the rise of geological science and glacial history in the eighteenth century, which contributed to a public shift in sensibility, and his personal interest in German folklore (for example, “Der Sandmann” by E.T.A. Hofman (1817), which Freud later references as an example of the uncanny in The “Uncanny” (1919)), which explored surreal and horrifc supernatural themes. These cultural infuences come together to give

Mont Blanc its shamanistic, alchemical qualities and its highly accurate scientifc sketch.

Eric G. Wilson, who has been quite an inspirational voice in this research, propounds the idea in his pivotal essay titled, “Shelley and the poetics of ice,” that:

This poem, like the poet's mind, and like the glacier, becomes a bewildering site of infnite regress. It is the sublime of the catastrophist: seemingly stable hunks are but hints of new explosions that will forever undo solidity. It is also the uniformitarian's sublime: the bit of ice is the efect of millions of years of numberless causes, without beginning or end. To read Shelley's "Mont Blanc" with a glacial brain is to peruse the poem forever.71

To draw out Wilson’s fner points: In “Mont Blanc,” Percy Shelley is occupied with diferent states of being (solid, liquid, gas) and the diference between transitivity and solidity (physically and metaphorically) in relation to ice and rock formations. I would like to pull this observation

71 Wilson, Eric Glenn. "Shelley and the poetics of glaciers." Wordsworth Circle, vol. 36, iss. 2, 2005, p. 55. Gale Academic OneFile Select, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A135063081/EAIM?u=mlin_m_wellcol&sid=EAIM&xid=4316686e. Accessed 7 Apr. 2021.

73 forward even further by pushing the idea that the mountain form itself–that is, Mont Blanc or

Montanvert–is meant to be the supreme glacier, imbued with all the sublime and catastrophic meanings of Wilson’s interpretation but to a much larger scale. The Mont Blanc of Percy

Shelley’s poem is so magnifcent, it has the capability of rupturing time itself, such as in “the everlasting universe of things” which fnds its wellspring in the Ravine of Arve that twists throughout the mountainous landscape in a “deep eternity” (Shelley).

Not only are glaciers sites of endless “regress” for Percy Shelley (and Mary Shelley), but they are–coupled with the creature–the most Promethean and primal of powers within both texts.

There is a potent and fantastical drama to “Mont Blanc” and the mountains of Chamonix in

Frankenstein. The mountain is, after all, the site where Victor comes face to face with the creature. Here, in Chamonix, we learn that he will be forever “chained to the rock” of the creature’s demands and revenge like the mythical Prometheus. The snowy mountain, I believe, is the primal poetic interpretation for punishment. It is the place where Victor sustains the most extensive interaction with the creature, who psychologically isolates him at the summit, establishing Montanvert as the only grounds beftting Victor’s special breed of disaster and repudiation. This is the Prometheus myth retold, and the snowy mountain plays a key role in it.

So it is that the speaker’s voice in “Mont Blanc” and Frankenstein are recognizably a similar construction, and the import of mountain symbolism and meaning in Mary Shelley is indebted to the poem “Mont Blanc,” with an apparent intercourse between these two texts. We can also see that intercourse in the descriptions of the mountain(s) and the myriad and fascinating turns the speaker focuses his attention on from various angles in “Mont Blanc” and Frankenstein. Yet, while there is compatibility between the speaker's voice in these texts, I fnd that the writer’s voice of “Mont Blanc” is starkly diferent from Mary Shelley’s; the direction she takes ofers a

74 totally unique psychological exercise and her sense of the mountain’s destructiveness is original.

But in no way is Mary Shelley attempting to imitate the male voice, especially Percy Shelley’s voice. Through harnessing a directorial writer's voice, Mary Shelley arrives completely at herself.

75 EPILOGUE

As I mentioned at the outset of this paper (so very long ago), Mary Shelley never once visited the Arctic. What I hope that my research has shown is that she uses the Arctic as a mostly imaginative literary device to sharpen and intensify the impact of her novel’s theatre of drama, and that we should consider Frankenstein in a larger context of narrative theory and historical artifact. In the same way that Mary and Percy Shelley lead the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour to its climax at “Mont Blanc,” so Mary Shelley climaxes Frankenstein in the Arctic. The pathos of

Victor Frankenstein is aptly translated into the Arctic setting; the domain of the outcast and the arbitrary. For the novel ends with the creature disappearing back out of the ship’s window and into the swirling clouds of the Arctic. It is left ambiguous whether he decides to kill himself or live on; the creature literally merges with the Arctic, collapsing the border between what we know defnitively and what is contested– dissolving as a ghost might. After all, Mary Shelley’s story came out of a ghost writing contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. This is a wondrous description for a novel that lacks any mention of apparitions or bumps in the night. But as I have come to ponder and love Frankenstein over the course of this project, I understand now that what

Shelley meant in this defnition–at least, what I believe her to have intended–is that her novel is meant to be viewed as a work of pathos and even mourning. The spectre of Frankenstein is not a ghostly fgure per say, but a tight theatre of drama with inspiration taken from her own life and the works of the Romantic writers in her circle. The Arctic represents the hidden world, the shadow world, or the unconscious.

Mary Shelley might have ended her novel in any way, but she chooses to return back to the original frame so that Victor Frankenstein’s tale is encircled by the Polar plot and efectively

76 shaped like an iceberg, isolating the main events and treating them as if they are the great

Northern region itself. What the Polar plot ultimately does as a plot device within a bigger story, is to turn Frankenstein into a novel that does not follow a progressive and linear form. I use the word “progressive” in two senses: frst, to convey the idea of timely advancement; the second is in the logical sequence of events. Frankenstein is told in a nonlinear, almost circular time frame, and that is vital to note because the very heart of Frankenstein is to question progress. Thus, in ofering a novel that is not progressive in its form, Mary Shelley ofers an inquiry into the early nineteenth-century fascination with “progress” and discovery in both literary theme and form.

The novel’s ending is intended to be abrupt and broken, and reminds me of Shakespeare’s

Hamlet, which concludes with the phrase: “The rest is silence.” Mary Shelley leaves us here, in the Arctic tundra, with nothing but the creature’s silence to make do what we will with her ending.

77 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Images - Ink illustrations by Jean Li Spencer.