Abstract
One of the most famous and well-examined authors in biofiction for young adults is Mary Godwin Shelley; such a focus on her life and works in the genre comes as no surprise when her most famous novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), was written when Shelley was only eighteen or nineteen. The mythos surrounding Shelley’s life and her seminal text are, like her creature, revived in considerations in fiction and graphic novel form. Chapter 2 reads Antoinette May’s The Determined Heart (2015) and Lita Judge’s Mary’s Monster (2018) as texts that enact a kind of double vision, wherein they return to the historical past through Shelley and her creature to illuminate the connection between monstrosity and adolescence by framing Mary Godwin Shelley and/as her creature.
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Notes
- 1.
Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin lived, respectively, April 27, 1759–September 10, 1797, and March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836.
- 2.
According to Christine Hallett, puerperal fever “affected women within the first three days after childbirth and progressed rapidly, causing acute symptoms of severe abdominal pain, fever and debility” (2005, 1); in Wollstonecraft’s situation, infection most likely occurred when bacteria was introduced into the female reproductive tract after childbirth by the physician in attendance.
- 3.
From 1814 onwards, Mary’s half-sister decided to use the name “Claire” and is how she will be referenced throughout this chapter.
- 4.
Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, and died in unclear circumstances, by drowning, on August 4, 1792.
- 5.
This elopement with a girl-child was not Shelley’s first; he had already seduced Harriet Westbrook when she was only sixteen and married her in Edinburgh on August 28, 1811. On June 23, 1813, Harriet gave birth to Eliza Ianthe Shelley. He remarried her in London to secure the rights to their child in March of 1814.
- 6.
The lore of how the challenge to “each write a ghost story” occurred has been well rehearsed by scholars, but for the most accurate version according to Mary Shelley’s “Introduction” to the 1831 edition.
- 7.
- 8.
The last few years have seen enquiries regarding these women such as renewed interest in Alcott’s sexuality in “Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?” (Thomas 2022), the film about the Brontë family To Walk Invisible (2015) and another about the middle sister, Emily (2022), and the TV series Dickinson (2019–2021). Most pertinent here is the biofictional film Mary Shelley (2017).
- 9.
There are several tween and young adult adaptations of Poe’s life and tales including Eddie: The Lost Youth of Edgar Allan Poe (2012) by Scott Gustafson, Masque of the Red Death (2012) and The Fall (2014) by Bethany Griffin, The Raven’s Tale (2019) by Cat Winters, and His Hideous Heart (2019) edited by Dahlia Adler.
- 10.
- 11.
Edward Said has argued effectively, and pertinent to the argument here, that comics can defy “the ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures…. I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see differently” (qtd in Whitlock 967).
- 12.
According to vampire lore, a vampire must be invited in for the first time (Gelder 2002, 35).
- 13.
Clara died of dysentery at the age of one, and William of malaria at three and a half (Seymour 2000, 214 and 231).
- 14.
Ledore sees the historical questioning of Mary Shelley’s authorship as insulting and as a supposition that the text is “more assembled than written, an unnatural birth, as though all that the author had done were to piece together the writings of others, especially those of her father and her husband” as if “this enduring condescension, the idea of the author as a vessel for the ideas of other people—a fiction in which the author participated, so as to avoid the scandal of her own brain” (n.p.).
- 15.
For an excellent critical discussion on the Gothic strain of anti-Catholicism in popular fiction, see Diane Long Hoeveler (2014); however, for seminal examples of such novels, see Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796/2016) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797/2017).
- 16.
F. W. Murnau’s silent German Expressionist film, Nosferatu (1922), was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Gothic vampire novel, Dracula (1897/1997).
- 17.
Other recent Gothic tales using this trope include The Somnambulist (2007) by Jonathan Barnes.
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Maier, S.E. (2024). Re/articulated Monstrosity: Mary and Her Creature. In: Neo-Victorian Young Adult Narratives . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47295-4_2
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