Two Marys and a Monster

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

Readings

Words of William Shakespeare from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark:

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, -- why it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilential congregation of vapors.

What a piece of work is man!  How noble in reason!  How infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!  in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

 From the Novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, written in 1818

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.  With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. The rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite care I had endeavored to form? I had selected his features as beautiful.  Beautiful!  -Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips.

The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.  Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bedchamber.  At length weariness succeeded the tumult; and I threw myself on the bed, to seek a few moments of forgetfulness.  I slept, but I started from my sleep with horror: when, by the dim and yellow light of the moon, as it forced its way through the window shutters, I beheld the wretch -the miserable monster whom I had created.  He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes, if eyes they may be called, were fixed on me.  His jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks.  He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed down stairs.  I took refuge in the courtyard, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.

From the poem Monster by Robin Morgan written in 1961

Oh mother, I am tired and sick 

“How do you stop from going crazy?”

No way, sister, no way.

May we go mad together, my sisters.

May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution be the death of all pain.                

May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped.

May I learn how to survive until my part is finished.

May I realize that I am a monster.  I am a monster.

I am a monster.

And I am proud.

Sermon

Yesterday on NPR Margot Adler, who happens to be a Unitarian Universalist, spoke with a tentative hope when she said,  “Perhaps, as a result of September 11, we will look back at our forefathers and revisit, in the deepest sense, what it means to be an American.  It is a choice, not a nationality,” she said – and I would add that it is not a simply a nation but an evolving idea that has traversed oceans and eras.  We cannot draw perfectly tight our borders and remain true to the founding ideas of this country.  It would be tragic if the attacks into the heart of this country provided an excuse for the loss of that liberty – incomplete and flawed though it was – upon which this nation was founded.  This is a sermon about that liberty -- incomplete and flawed -- because we need to continually evolve in our understanding and use of it – to flourish or survive.

And so, as two Sundays ago, I invite you to look back with me to that wild and shifting time, to the dirty streets and charged atmosphere – the era of our forefathers, but now – to look back at our foremothers as well and remain on the hunt for the healthy seeds of liberty and creativity.  Today we dwell in a world of horrors and miracles – yet, it has always been so.  Horrors and miracles – they have arisen from our hands, our hearts, and our minds. 

            In 1818 a 19-year-old woman named Mary wrote a story and created a Monster – a monster we have come to recognize and to use as a catchword until its very meaning has been obscured.  Yet it lives among us – not under but in our very beds.  Young Mary Shelly wrote a creation story that flashes with brilliance, flows with uncountable tears, howls with wild winds, and crackles with electricity – because she was a creature born into the brilliance, lived in the unsettling winds, wept the tears, and witnessed the remarkable shocks of science and progress – the signs of her times.  This is the story of two Marys and a monster – a story of oppression, freedom, slavery, feminism, class, arts, letters, science, of evolution and revolution.

            The first Mary was born Mary Wollstonecraft on April 27, 1759 in Spitalfields, England, to a silk weaver, a brute, and his wife, his most visible victim.  The family moved often due to her father’s wild schemes and failures.  Mary’s life was not the prettiest of old etchings and she reached beyond the confines of home for friendship. In her correspondence, it is possible to observe the many human shortcomings and many great awakenings of an 18^th century girl.  To read her life is read the record of revolution – both social and personal, for her dates of life made her both a child and architect of revolution.  Her education was at first confined to the womanly arts but her character and imagination stretched out, gropingly, toward a world of greatness – of freedom and creativity.

            In 1775, when Mary was sixteen, her real education began – she was done with formal schooling and her family moved to Hoxton – a tough neighborhood in London – where thugs gathered by night to fleece the workers as they headed home.  Incidentally, there was a Dissenting Academy – where Unitarians and other wild-eyed dreamers cast out of the Anglican Church studied together.  It was in Hoxton that Mary began to exhibit signs of depression and anxiety.  Her depression was relieved by two gifts.  The first was that her scholarly neighbors – the Clares -- took her under their wing and offered her books to read and helped her to study and discover the world of Rousseau and Locke and to nurture her own seeds of enlightenment -- she refused to dress and powder her hair and would wear it long and loose.  It was through the Clares that Mary met the next gift -- Fanny Blood, who became her great friend.  Fanny’s family, though poor, was educated, and Mr. Clare would tutor them together.  Mary worked as a companion and a teacher.  She helped her family financially and was devoted to her friends.  She watched some of her dearest, including Fanny, die – in childbirth and poverty.  Mary left England, a governess, and returned a writer, amid the radicals of her time.  When the Analytical Review came into being, edited by Joseph Johnson and Thomas Christie, she was hired as reviewer of women’s writing.  She became known for her progressive writings on children’s education.

The Bastille fell on July 14, 1789.  It was then that she made her first great mark – for when Edmund Burke – who had supported the American freedom movement and the French awakening – had his reversal and wrote his conservative reflections on the French revolution she was the first person to publish a response to him in her Vindication of the Rights of Man.  Three months later Thomas Paine wrote the Rights of Man.  Wollstonecraft was articulate, angry and awakening with the spirit of her time.  There is a story of a party in honor of Thomas Paine, which Mary attended, at which she met the eminent political philosopher William Godwin.  She and Godwin argued vehemently for hours – while Paine sat silent. They each left the party with a confirmed dislike for one another.  Later that year Mary wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which only circulated a few thousand copies, but somehow it seemed that everyone had read it.  In the Vindication she said aloud things that would not be said again for many years – about the education of women, the cultivation of intellect and reason, as well as virtue, and of the necessity for women to participate in government.  She traveled to France to observe the transformations of freedom and participated in drafting ideas for the new department of education.  She saw the streets begin to run with blood as the French Revolution transformed into a monster of its own – with brutality akin to that we hear about in the Taliban.  Mary asked tough questions about the price of freedom and about the nature of liberty.  Her own life bears the scars of these questions -- she questioned conventional marriage and had a child out of wedlock with Gilbert Imlay, an artist.  It made Mary notorious – an outcast to many – but not to all.  When things ended with Imlay and she found herself in London she met up again with William Godwin who fell deeply in love with her and her small child.  He loved her and could stand with her through her wild feelings.  They found in each other a mate worthy of intelligent passion.  Their home was filled with radicals and artists – Godwin knew everyone.  Life was profound and exciting.  Once again, Mary found herself pregnant, a product of the love between herself and Godwin – but these two married.  Behind their radical spirits were two homebodies content to provide for one another the safe ground for far-reaching thoughts and explorations. Sadly, when Mary gave birth to their daughter – the second Mary – the botched birthing and the puerperal fever that followed killed her within a few days, on September 10, 1797.  She was 38.  Little Mary lived, and in her and her sister, Godwin found consolation.  He oversaw their education – as tenderly as his wife could have wished and he wrote: “We should always remember that the object of education is the future man or woman.  It is a miserable vanity that will sacrifice the wholesome and gradual development of the mind to the desire of exhibiting little monsters of curiosity.”  This Mary grew up a petted favorite – amid the conversations of philosophers, scientists, and poets.  She hid in terror behind the sofa as Samuel Taylor Coleridge recited his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  She learned the theories of electricity and recent discoveries in the new sciences.  Remember the picture of Benjamin Franklin discovering electricity with his kite and key.  In 1790 Luigi Galvani had touched an electrical current to dead frog’s muscles and the leg jumped.  In 1798 Galvani’s cousin Aldini produced the animation of corpses with jolts of electricity.  In 1800, Alessandro Volta created the voltaic pile, a battery, and his paper was presented to the British Royal Society by two of Godwin’s friends.  And Mary was keenly mindful of her brilliant mother whose portrait hung in their home and in whose footsteps – it was implied – she was expected to follow.

While she did follow the thread of her mother’s life – in ways both fine and tragic – the footsteps she followed were those of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.  On the 28^th of July in 1814, at five in the morning, sixteen year old Mary and her fifteen year old stepsister Claire snuck out of their run down home above a bookstore and tiptoed to the corner of Hatton Street where Shelley, 20 years old, married to another woman and already the father of two children, awaited them.  Mary was in the first trimester of pregnancy.  This baby was born prematurely and died.  Thus the three began their tumultuous life together – Claire would live with them and away from them at various times throughout Shelley’s life.  Mary was again pregnant in later in that same year.  She settled at Clifton awaiting Shelley who had gone abroad, so to speak, again – don’t get me started on Shelley.  It was at nearby Bristol that Mary encountered reminders of the slave trade.  Bristol had gotten wealthy on the trade in humans and although that business had ceased, Mary found herself in a black population very recently escaped from slavery and bearing the scars as they found an uncertain freedom.  Her father and mother had written against slavery, Shelley was opposed to it, as well. Mary’s time in Clifton was a time during which she read tracts and gathered reflections on slavery and racism.  Her son William was born January 24^th, 1816.  Shelley was still little known as a poet – though infamous for scandal.  Scandals deepened as Claire became infatuated and then pregnant with the slightly more famous poet Lord Byron.  It was then that Shelley, Mary, and Claire headed for Geneva, where they settled by Montalegre – on the banks of the lake.  Byron joined them eventually and the four entered a love-hate relationship.  Over the next years, Mary would give birth to two more children, loose little William and one other baby, and have one child, named Percy  who would survive. Mary did finally marry Percy Bysshe Shelley only to have him drown in a freak storm on the lake in 1822.  While Mary Shelley would go on to write a number of works of philosophical fiction during her life none would match the fame of her first work begun that stormy season, in 1816, on the lake.

            Their guest Dr. Polidori was laid up with a sprained ankle got by trying to impress Mary with a leap off a balcony.  And the group sat often discussing the recent lectures of Dr. William Lawrence.  Lawrence had asserted that life was not an entity separate from the body – that humans were simply bodies with impulses made of electrical cues and chemical reactions.  He argued that God had nothing to do with creation.  This and other weighty topics were the subjects of their conversations in the night.  It was an unusually stormy summer and caught inside with their enfeebled guest the group moved from tales of wild science and revolution – of twitching limbs and severed heads to telling ghost stories to frighten one another.  One dark and stormy night a bet was begun to see who could write a horror story after their evening ended.  In 1818, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was published.  Grandchild of a master weaver, the young mother wove a many-layered tale about wisdom and folly, morality and amorality, of love and hate.  In one volume she conjured feminism, questioned racism and slavery, and challenged the dream of progress ever upward and onward the dream that married freedom, rationality, science, and revolution as the new holy family. 

            The novel is the story of a young man captivated by a thirst for learning.  He stumbled across ancient texts of alchemy and pursued his studies with intensity.  His father failed to notice the direction of young Victor’s studies until it was too little and too late  His father – normally wise and caring ridiculed and dismissed his esoteric studies and like any young man – it only made Victor cling the more fiercely.  He fell into the guidance of a doctor who offered him new and improved research into electricity and alchemy.  Victor grew to realize that he could, in fact, create life.  “What had been the study and the desire of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within my grasp,” he  said.  “I began the creation of a human being.  Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.  A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their beings to me.  No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”  He glowed with hope.

            A strange and envious science, indeed, that strove to do what man by the generous agency of woman had done since the dawn of human time.  And, if Percy Shelley were any measure, man had often done this with casual intent, seeding and uprooting as the moment moved. 

            Dr. Frankenstein was unseeing of the character and consequence of his work – Mary hoped to open our eyes.  Frankenstein hungered for the gratitude and beholdeness of some creature but could not see his responsibility for that creature –  nor see the longing arm outstretched in need.  The doctor was destructively short sighted.

            The passage I read earlier was the moment when the Creature, made of dead parts, charged with electricity, came to life.  Giant in stature – newborn in awareness – neither a birth nor a healing – but a revolution of life.

            The voice of Mary Wollstonecraft whispered through the book, in the descriptions of the monster’s dawning awareness, early lessons, hunger for love.  The Moral sense – the author and her mother argued would grow when fostered in beauty and touched by love.

            The moral sense took root early in the Creature and he loved beauty and gentleness but met violence and rejection everywhere he went.  So he hid and spied to learn – as women and as slaves have had to hide and spy to learn.  The only kindness he had found was offered by a blind man.  It was a book of vision and in which only the blind could see beyond surface differences to appreciate the hearts of persons.  Rejected by the world and his creator the monster then began a life of destruction.  “Misery made me a fiend.” He argued.  As the monster destroyed everyone that the doctor loved, the doctor began to awaken to the enormity of his error.  “I had turned out into the world a depraved wretch!”  But he still missed the problems, the issues the monster raised.  That too often we create the monstrosities that beset us and that to sport with life, as the monster phrased it, is to risk its flip-side, death.  The monster was more awake – even in his violence – than Frankenstein in his passive regrets and musings.

            “Once I falsely hoped,” the monster moans, “to meet with beings who pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.” Although some slave riots had erupted, Mary Shelley was not claiming that slavery created monsters – unless the monsters would be the slave masters.  Slavery and sexism made us see other humans as less than human.  She was claiming that it kept decent men and women in the condition of brutes by denying them the lights of science, knowledge, and, most importantly, the exercise of freedom.  “Of what a strange nature is knowledge!  It clings to the mind…”  The monster mused.  Mary knew that knowledge was a beginning but not an end.  She knew that oppression led to revolution and that revolution and the gaining of freedom and power were not simple ends, good in themselves, either.  These things did, can, and do run amok and the once oppressed become monsters in their turn.  Knowledge sticks but does wisdom or peace or goodness necessarily grow in it?

            May Shelley lived with a man of poetry who wrote of angels and fairies and treated women as collateral beings – contingent on the will of men – the poet laid waste of his world while loosing visions of beauty beyond his walls.  Mary Shelley’s book was telling and prophetic.  It was her response to William Lawrence who claimed that there was no innate sacredness in life – her response was that there was such a sacredness – the very pain of its denial was proof enough – compassion and love were the final taming of the brute, the monster.  “Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who would love me.”  Who would love me and help me.

            In Frankenstein, as so often in the world, there is no easy villain.  The monster asked, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” No one in her book set out to do evil – each one had a rationalization for the damage he caused.   It is easier when there is a clear enemy – an Osama Bin Laden or a Saddam Hussein or the terrorist of the month.  To hear about the first soccer game held since the fall of the Taliban was very moving – the stories of the games banned for religious reasons while people would be rounded up and hung from the goal posts – as if that were less evil than soccer?  There is madness.  Blinding themselves -- Victor Frankenstein – or the Girondins or the Jacobins or the …terrorist of the month.  Just as I suspect, no one in the White House, or the Shadow White House intends evil and yet it is loosed day after day upon the world -- after all the clear enemies are eradicated we are left with our own hearts and minds – our own flawed notions and best intentions. This is a sermon about that incomplete and flawed liberty because we need to continually evolve in our understanding of it – for it to flourish – or even to remain alive.

Therefore, let us learn and be loving and wise for only then will our hands shape the miracles we need.  The alternative is a horror indeed.