October 25, 2024 • 47 mins
The mother of modern sci-fi, Mary Shelley, had a life as interesting as the timeless fiction she created. A woman ahead of her time, her greatest work was an allegory for the struggles and tragedies of her own life, as well as a commentary on the politics of the time.
Trigger warning: miscarriage, infant death
SOURCES
The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece; by Roseanne Montillo
SLAVERY AND RACE IN FRANKENSTEIN; A VERSION OF THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS JASON M. KELLY, “SLAVERY AND RACE IN FRANKENSTEIN,” INDIANA HUMANITIES ONE STATE / ONE STORY: COMMUNITY READ PROGRAM GUIDE, VERSION 5 (20 MARCH 2018
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft-Shelley
The Afterlife of Frankenstein: A Century of Mad Science, Automata, and Monsters Inspired by Mary Shelley, 1818-1918 (Clockwork Editions); by David Sandner (Editor)
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/autumn-s-oddities--5307439/support.
Trigger warning: miscarriage, infant death
SOURCES
The Lady and Her Monsters: A Tale of Dissections, Real-Life Dr. Frankensteins, and the Creation of Mary Shelley's Masterpiece; by Roseanne Montillo
SLAVERY AND RACE IN FRANKENSTEIN; A VERSION OF THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS JASON M. KELLY, “SLAVERY AND RACE IN FRANKENSTEIN,” INDIANA HUMANITIES ONE STATE / ONE STORY: COMMUNITY READ PROGRAM GUIDE, VERSION 5 (20 MARCH 2018
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Wollstonecraft-Shelley
The Afterlife of Frankenstein: A Century of Mad Science, Automata, and Monsters Inspired by Mary Shelley, 1818-1918 (Clockwork Editions); by David Sandner (Editor)
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/autumn-s-oddities--5307439/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
Dark Cast Network. Welcome to the dark Side of podcasting. Hey, hey,
welcome back to Autumn's Oddities. I'm Autumn. The ween is
nearly upon us, the veil is thinning, and I'm making
my costume today. It's going to be a process. I
(00:53):
can't wait to show it to you. I'm going to
stay in character the whole time. I'm doing like a
whole bit going as my favorite cryptid, and if you're
a longtime listener, you know exactly who that is. Today,
I want to talk to you about the original goth
girlfriend who paved the way for us all. The creator
(01:15):
of one of the greatest horror characters of all time,
Mary Shelley, the mother of modern sci fi. Mary Shelley
had a life equally or more so, as interesting as
the timeless fiction she created. A woman well ahead of
her time, her greatest work was an allegory for the
(01:37):
struggles and tragedies of her own life. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
Shelley began writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus when she
was eighteen years old, just two years after she'd become
pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name.
She wrote in her diary. Day after day nurse the
(01:59):
bank baby read, and on the eleventh day she wrote,
I awoke in the night to give it suck. It
appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not
awaken it, And then in the morning find my baby dead.
With grief at that loss came a fear of a
fever from milk. Her breasts were swollen inflamed, and you know,
(02:21):
no baby to nurse. That her sleep too grew fevered,
dreamed that my little baby came to life again, that
it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it
before the fire, and it lived. She wrote in her diary,
awake and find no baby already off to just an
incredibly sad start. She became pregnant again only weeks later,
(02:45):
and she was likely still nursing her second baby when
she started writing Frankenstein, and pregnant with her third by
the time she finished. She didn't put her name on
her book. She published Frankenstein anonymously in eighteen eighteen, not
least of a concern that she might lose custody of
her children, and she didn't give her monster a name either.
(03:07):
The anonymous androdemon One reviewer called it for the first
theatrical production of Frankenstein, which was staged in London in
eighteen twenty three, by which time she had given birth
to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby
to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of
(03:28):
bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit
on ice. What the fuck is all I'm gonna say
about that? On ice? The monster was listed on the
playbill as dot dot dot. That's it, no name. The
nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good, Shelley
remarked about the creature's theatrical billing. She herself had no
(03:50):
name of her own, like the creature, pieced together from
cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, so two, her name was
an assemblage of parts, the name of her mother, the
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the
philosopher William Godwin, grafted on to that of her husband,
(04:11):
the poet Percy Shelley. It was on a dreary night
in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.
Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out his tail.
The rain patters on the windowpane. Obleaque light flickers from
a dying candle. He looks at the lifeless thing at
his feet come to life. I saw the dull yellow
(04:34):
eye of the creature open. It breathed hard, and a
convulsive motion agitated its limbs. Having labored so long to
bring the creature to life, he finds himself disgusted and horrified.
Unable to endure the aspect of the being that he created,
he flees, abandoning his creation unnamed. I the miserable and
(04:55):
the abandoned am an abortion, the creature says before in
the books fine scene, he disappears on a raft of ice,
which I mean you can immediately see where she was
drawing that allegory from. He escapes on a raft of ice,
and her husband had her sit on a block of
ice while she was miscarrying and bleeding to death. Frankenstein
(05:17):
is actually four stories and one. It's an allegory, a fable,
an a pistolary novel, and an autobiography, a chaos of
literary fertility that left its very young author at pains
to explain her quote hideous progeny in the introduction that
she wrote for a revised edition in eighteen thirty one.
(05:39):
She took up the humiliating question how I, then a
young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon
so very hideous an idea and made up a story
in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting
that the story had come to her in a dream.
I saw, with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I
(06:00):
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the
thing he had put together, and that writing it consisted
of making only a transcript of that dream. So she'd
tried to downplay her ability, in her intelligence and her
pain very obviously. And she's like, oh, no, I didn't
create this from my own mind or experiences or anything.
It came to me in a dream. So you know,
(06:22):
it would be a little more accepted by the public
that way. A century later, when Boris Karloff played the
creature in Universal Pictures brilliant nineteen thirty one production of Frankenstein,
which was directed by James Whale, the monster, who was
prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel was no
longer merely nameless, but also speechless too. As if what
(06:46):
Mary Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, which,
you know, an agony that seemed to be unutterable, just
the existence of this creature. Every book a baby is born,
but Frankenstein is often supposed to have been more assembled
than written. He's an unnatural birth, as though all that
(07:06):
the author had done were to piece together the writings
of others, especially those of her father and husband. If
Godwin's daughter could not help philosophizing, one mid twentieth century
critic wrote, and I'm sure it was a guy Shelley's
wife knew. Also the eerie charms of the morbid, the occult,
the scientifically bizarre, this enduring condescension, you know, the idea
(07:31):
of the author as a vessel for the ideas of
other people. These couldn't possibly be the ideas of a woman.
They've got to be things she heard from her dad
and her husband and you know, other men. A fiction
in which the author participated to avoid the scandal of
her own brain, which I totally understand. Go which goes
some way to explain why Frankenstein has had so many
(07:52):
wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two
centuries its publication. For its bicentennial, the original eighteen eighteen
edition has been reissued It's a Little paperback by Penguin Classics,
with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon, and
(08:14):
as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake the new annotated Frankenstein,
which is edited and annotated by Leslie as Klinger. Universal
is developing a new bride of Frankenstein as part of
a series of remakes from its backlog of horror movies.
I mean, they've got literally all of the greats. It
(08:36):
seems that the age of the superhero is about to
yield the age of the monster. But what about the baby. Well, Frankenstein,
the story of a creature who has no name, has
for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything.
There are a lot of interpretations. Most lately it has
been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley Technologist,
(08:59):
an interpretation that derives less from the eighteen eighteen novel
than from you know, later stage and film versions, especially
the nineteen thirty one film, and that took its modern
form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, the
MIT Press has published an edition of the original text,
which has been annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of
(09:21):
all kinds and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein
bi Centennial Project. Of all places, Arizona State University the
only thing I know, ASU four is like always being
one of the top party schools in the country. With
funding from the National Science Foundation, they offer the book
as kind of a catechism for designers of robots and
(09:42):
inventors of artificial intelligences. Remorse extinguished every hope, Victor says
in Volume two, Chapter one, by which time the creature
has begun murdering everyone. Victor loves I had been the
author of unalterable evils, and I live in daily fear
lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some
(10:04):
new wickedness. The MIT edition appends here and gives a footnote.
The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer's
sentiments as he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb.
Scientist's responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed.
(10:24):
And that's a really good allegory. It makes a lot
of sense but you know, Mary Shelley, the atomic bomb
wasn't even an idea back then. This is a way
to make use of the novel, but it also kind
of strips out nearly all of the sex and birth,
everything that's female about the novel. Material first mind by
(10:45):
Muriel Spark in a biography of Shelley published in nineteen
fifty one on the one hundredth anniversary of her death. Spark,
who worked closely with Shelley's diaries and paid very careful
attention to the author's eight years of mere, constant pregnancy
and loss, argued that Frankenstein was no minor piece of
(11:07):
genre fiction, but a literary work of striking originality. In
the nineteen seventies, that interpretation was taken up by feminist
literary critics, who wrote about Frankenstein as establishing the origins
of science fiction by way of the female gothic. And
when you think about it, the category of female gothic
(11:29):
just the things that happened to women's bodies in reproduction, puberty.
All of that is grotesque. It involves a lot of blood,
it involves a lot of violence upon the body. It
makes a lot of sense, and what made Mary Shelley's
work so original, Ellen Mohers argued at the time was
that she was a writer who was a mother. Tolstoy
(11:51):
had thirteen children born at home. Mower's pointed out, but
the major female eighteenth and nineteenth century writers, like you know,
Austin and d Dickinson, tended to be spinsters and virgins.
And that's according to her. Those are not my words.
And Shelley was an exception. So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a
woman Shelley knew not as a mother, but as a
(12:12):
writer who wrote about, among other things, how to raise
a baby. I conceive it to be the duty of
every rational creature to attend to its offspring. Wollstonecraft wrote
in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in seventeen eighty seven,
ten years before giving birth to the author of Frankenstein.
I wonder what her thoughts were on the education of daughters.
(12:36):
I wonder, As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography
Romantic Outlaws, Wollstonecraft first met her fellow political radical William
Godwin in seventeen ninety one at a London dinner party
hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine's Rights of man.
So many literary people all in one room. I bet
it was a fun conversation. Wollstonecraft and Godwin were mutually
(13:01):
displeased with each other. Godwin later wrote, they were the
smartest people in the room and they couldn't help arguing
all evening. That's hot, yeah, like for real, that's my thing. Like,
I'm not really attracted to the way people look. Like
I can look at someone and be like, oh, they're attractive,
but I'm not attracted to them unless they like challenge
(13:21):
me mentally, honestly, unless they can go toe to toe,
which I just love doing. That's why my husband's great
for me. Walston Craft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman
appeared in seventeen ninety two, and the next year Godwin
published Political Justice. In seventeen ninety three, during an affair
with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, walston Craft
(13:47):
became pregnant. Yeah. In a letter to Mlay, she wrote,
I am nourishing a creature. Not long after, Wollstoncraft gave
birth to a daughter, who she named Fanny. Imlay abandoned her.
She and Godwin became lovers in seventeen ninety six, and
when she became pregnant, they married for the sake of
the baby, even though neither of them believed in marriage.
(14:11):
In seventeen ninety seven, Wolstoncraft died of an infection contracted
from the fingers of a physician who reached into her
uterus to remove the after birth. Jesus Seriously, Godwin's daughter
bore the name of his dead wife, as if she
could be brought back to life. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was
(14:32):
fifteen years old when she met Percy Shelley in eighteen twelve.
He was twenty and married with a pregnant wife. Yeah.
Mary Shelley had some drama. She had a very dramatic life.
Having been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism and
disowned by his father, Shelley had sought out William Godwin,
his intellectual hero, as a surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin
(14:56):
spent their illicit courtship the girl Godwin as much romanticism
as romance, passionately reading the works of her parents. That's
a little weird, while we're psych passionately reading the works
of her parents, which that's a little weird. While reclining
on wolstone Craft's grave in the Saint Pancras churchyard. Go
(15:19):
to the tomb and read, she wrote in her diary,
Go with Shelley to the churchyard. I told you she
was the original Goth girlfriend. I'd be hanging out in
cemeteries all the time. You like, if you want to
get me somewhere, say let's go take a walk around
the cemetery. Let's go clear off the graves. Like you
know how people's little artificial plants and chowch keys fall over.
I like to go and put them right. One time
(15:41):
at the sidebar. One time I did that in Tampa,
at this extremely old cemetery that was right across the
street from my house. I went to some grave. I
was just kind of like drawn to it, and it
had like crystals hanging from a tree above it, and
little statues all over it, and it had some thing
I can't remember, a tree branch or something obscuring the grave.
(16:04):
And I cleaned everything off, and then I finally looked
at it and the woman died on the exact same
day I was born. Yeah, Like, call me over here.
How strange like that? What a coincidence of all the
graves that I could have picked in this really big cemetery.
I mean, I chose that one. And strangely enough, my
(16:28):
nana died on the exact same day that my daughter
was born. I don't know. Maybe like little bits of
our souls are composed of of theirs. Who knows, I don't.
I got theories, though, I think you know that good
and well. Plainly though, uh, they were doing a little
more than reading at the at the grave site because
she was pregnant when she ran away with him. So
(16:50):
it is rumored that Mary Shelley had sex on her
mother's grave. Like that is as god as it gets. Yeah,
it's also pretty messed up. But you know, she seemed
to have sort of a traumatic wife. I don't know.
So she fled her father's house in the in the
half light of night, along with her stepsister Claire Claremont,
(17:13):
who wanted to be ruined too. If any man served
as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord Byron,
who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and abandoned his children.
Great guy. He was quote mad, bad, and dangerous to know,
as one of his lovers pronounced mainly because of his
(17:33):
many affairs, which likely included sleeping. This is gross with
his half sister, Augusta Lee. Sounds like a real piece
of shit to put it in modern terms. Byron married
in January eighteen fifteen, and his daughter Ada was born
in December. But when his wife left him a year
into their marriage, and I can't imagine why, Byron was
(17:55):
forced to never see his wife or daughter again lest
his wife revealed the scandal of his affair with Lee. Yeah,
it's pretty gross. You had sex with your half sister.
You're related by blood, that's not all right. Ada was
about the age that Mary Godwin's first baby would have
been had she lived, and AIDA's mother, fearing that the
(18:15):
girl might grow up to become a poet as mad
and bad as her father, raised her instead to be
a mathematician. Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein,
would in eighteen forty three provide an influential theoretical description
of a general purpose computer, a century before one was built. Yeah,
(18:39):
but men inventured everything, right, No, I don't think anybody's
buying it. In the spring of eighteen sixteen, Byron, fleeing
the scandal, left England for Geneva, and it was there
that he met up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and
Claire Claremont. Moralizers called them the League of Incest. What
a horrible names. Stop hanging out together. And by summer
(19:02):
Claremont was pregnant by Byron, but Byron was bored, so
one evening he announced, we will each write a ghost story.
Godwin began the story that would become Frankenstein. Byron later wrote,
methinks it is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen,
not nineteen indeed, at the time, what the fuckever that means? Dude? Again,
(19:25):
the condescension is killing me. It's like, dude, she wrote
a better something, better than you ever ever wrote, So
chill out. During the months when Godwin was turning her
ghost story into a novel and nourishing yet another creature
in her belly, Shelley's wife, pregnant now with what would
have been their third child, killed herself. Really can't imagine why.
(19:45):
She's like, I can't keep pumping out these children with
this guy who is cheating on me. Claremont gave birth
to a girl Byron's, although most people assumed it was Shelley's.
And I know the naming here is confusing as shit,
because Mary Shelley had so many names, and Elly and
Godwin got married. For a time they attempted to adopt
the girl, though Byron later took her, having noticed that
(20:07):
nearly all of Godwin and Shelley's children had died. And
this is just horrible. He said, I so totally disapprove
of the mode of children's treatment in their family that
I should look upon the child as going into a hospital.
He wrote very cruelly about the Shelleys. He said, have
they reared one? And by no means was Byron interested
(20:27):
in rearing a child himself. He put his daughter in
a convent, where she died at the age of five.
So again, real piece of shit. When Frankenstein, which she
began writing in the summer of eighteen sixteen, was published
eighteen months later, it bore an unsigned preface by Percy
Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The book became
(20:51):
an immediate sensation, and a friend wrote to Percy Shelley
that it seems to be universally known and read. Sir
Walter Scott wrote in an early interview the author seems
to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. And
oh lord, these men would have rather like put their
balls in a bucket of ice than say a good
(21:13):
thing about a female writer back then. So I just
love that he said this. Scott, like many readers, assumed
the author was Percy Shelley, a man. Reviewers less enamored
of the romantic poet, damned the books Godwinnian radicalism and
its byronic impeties. John Croker, a Conservative member of parliament,
(21:37):
called Frankenstein quote a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity, radical,
unhinged and moral. And with that review I would have
most certainly read it. I've been like, oh, yeah, that
sounds cool. Let's get into some unhinged, moral, radical tissues
of horrible, disgusting absurdity. I'm so down. But the politics
of Frankenstein are as intricate as its structure of stories,
(22:00):
nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set
of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting
his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated,
haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the
story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to
(22:22):
pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And
within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself,
the littlest, innermost Russian doll, the baby, and it keeps
going back to the baby. The novel structure meant that
those opposed to political radicalism often found themselves baffled and
(22:43):
bewildered by Frankenstein, you know, because they just worn into it.
And as literary critics such as Chris Baldick, What a
Name and Adriana Crassion have pointed out, the novel appears
to be heretical and revolutionary. It also appears to be
counter revolutionary, if that makes any sense. This is according
(23:04):
to critics, it depends on which doll is dueing the talking.
If Frankenstein is a referendum on the French Revolution, as
some critics interpret it, then Victor Frankenstein's politics align nicely
with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as
a species of political monster which has always ended by
(23:26):
devouring those who have produced it. And I think this
happens with most creative things. You know, you put it
out into the world and people interpret it in their
own way, because that's really all you can do. You
have your life experiences, you have your lived experiences, and
so you see everything through the lens of your own
experiences and context. So it makes sense that she didn't
(23:48):
live in France, she wasn't writing about the French Revolution,
but you know, some people took it that way. The
Creature's own politics, though, align not with Burke's, but with
those of two of Burke's keenest ades, Mary Wollstoncraft and
William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men's bodies,
like a lord over the peasantry or a king of
(24:10):
his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when
he described feudalism as a ferocious monster. How dare you
sport thus with life? The creature asks his maker. The creature,
born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he became
a villain in just the same way that Wolstoncraft predicted.
(24:32):
People are rendered ferocious by misery, she wrote, and misanthropy
is ever the offspring of discontent. Make me happy? The
creature begs Frankenstein to no avail Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin. Shelley
took pains that reader's sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein,
who's you know, suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature,
(24:54):
who's suffering is worse. Like he didn't ask to be
pieced together and reanimated by I'm jackass, only to be
horrified of him and abandon him. The art of the
book lies in the way Shelley nudges reader's sympathy page
by page, paragraph by paragraph, from Frankenstein the doctor to
the creature. Even when it comes to the Creature's vicious murders,
(25:18):
first of Frankenstein's little brother, then of his best friend,
and finally of his bride. Much evidence suggests that she
did succeed. The justice is indisputably on his side, one
critic wrote in eighteen twenty four, and his sufferings are
to me touching to the last degree. Hear my tale,
the creature insists when he at last confronts his creator,
(25:42):
what follows is the autobiography of an infant. He awoke
and all with confusion. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch.
I knew and could distinguish nothing. He was cold and naked,
and hungry and bereft of any company, and yet, having
no life language skills, was unable even to name these sensations,
(26:04):
but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat
down and wept. He learned to walk and began to wonder,
still unable to speak. The uncouth and inarticulate sounds which
broke from me frightened me into silence again. Really, can
you imagine like dying? I mean, I don't know if
we can't, I can't really imagine it because I don't
(26:26):
know what happens. But can you imagine dying and then
having I guess your brain and potentially some of your
other body parts reanimated with pieces of complete strangers, and
not knowing how you got there, what you were doing,
you know, having no language skills, having no knowledge of
(26:46):
your life before. I mean, can you even imagine that?
And the person that made you with their hubris, you know,
just dipping out, just being like, oh I don't like
what I made. It's ugly and it scares me. It's like, well, dude,
you made it. You didn't have to make it. Eventually,
he did find shelter in a lean to adjacent to
a cottage alongside the woods, where observing the people who
(27:08):
lived in the cottage speak, he learned of the existence
of language. I discovered the names that were given to
some of the most familiar objects of discourse. I learned
and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood. Watching
the cottagers read a book Ruins of Empires, by the
eighteenth century French revolutionary the Comte de Vuney. He both
(27:30):
learned how to read and acquired a cursory knowledge of history,
which was a litany of injustice. He said, I heard
of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty,
of rank descent and noble blood. He learned that the
week are everywhere abused by the powerful, and that the
poor despised. Shelley kept careful records of the books she
(27:54):
read and translated, meaning that you know title after title
and compiling a list each year. Milton goeth Rousseau Ovid Spencer,
Coleridge given in hundreds more from history to chemistry. She
wrote in her diary while writing Frankenstein, Babe is not well. Write,
draw and walk redlock or walk write Read the Rights
(28:17):
of women the creature keeps track of his reading too,
which I think is very interesting, and unsurprisingly he reads
the books that Shelley read and reread most often. One day,
while wandering in the woods, he stumbled upon a leather
trunk just lying on the ground that contained three books,
(28:38):
Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goats The Sorrows of
Young Worther. The library that, along with Bonney's Ruins, determines
his political philosophy. As you know readers readily understood, his
code of ethics is formed on the extraordinary stock of
political theology, pagan bi our, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical Jacobinism.
(29:05):
According to one review of Frankenstein, most widely read in
the United States, it continues, yet in spite of all
his enormities, we think the monster a very pitiable and
ill used monster. Sir Walter Scott found this the most
preposterous part of Frankenstein, saying that he should have not
(29:26):
only learned to speak, but to read, and for ought,
we know to write that he should have become acquainted
with Werther, with Plutarch's Lives, and with Paradise Lost by
listening through a hole in a wall seems as unlikely
as that he should have acquired in the same way
The Problems of Euclid or the Art of Bookkeeping by
single and double entry. Okay, it's a work of fiction, jackass,
(29:50):
but the creature's account of his education very closely follows
the conventions of a genre of writing that was very
distant from Scott's own, the enslaved person's narrative. So yeah,
she's she's making this parallel as well. Frederick Douglas, born
into slavery the same year that Frankenstein was published, was
following those same conventions when in his autobiography he described
(30:13):
learning to read by trading with white boys for lessons.
Douglas realized his political condition at the age of twelve
while reading the Dialogue between a Master and a Slave,
reprinted in the Colombian Orator. It's a book that I
was able to find very easily, and it was one
of the only things that he brought with him when
(30:34):
he escaped from slavery. It was his coming of age.
Douglas wrote, The more I read, the more I was
led to abhor and detest my enslavers. Yeah, and that's
really a line that the creature himself could have written likewise.
The creature comes of age when he finds Frankenstein's notebook
recounting his experiment, and he learns how he was created,
(30:57):
and with that, you know the injustice at how he
had been treated when he certainly did not ask to
be created. He was dead and made of other dead people.
It's at this moment that the Creature's tale is transformed
from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of
an enslaved person. Douglas wrote, I would at times feel
(31:19):
that learning to read had been a curse rather than
a blessing. It had given me a view of my
wretched condition without remedy. So too, the creature said, increase
of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched,
outcast I was. Douglas also said, I have often found
myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead. They
(31:41):
keep paralleling each other, and the creature says in the
book cursed, cursed creator, or curse it? Either way, why
did I live? Douglas sought escape and the creature sought revenge.
Either way. Among the many moral and political ambiguities of
Shelley's novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is
to be blamed for creating the monster, you know, usurping
(32:04):
the power of God and of women, or for failing
to love, care for and educate him. And I would
say it's failing to love, care and educate for him.
You created it. Great, you, It's a scientific breakthrough, you know,
if that could really happen. So the Frankenstein is Oppenheimer
model considers only the former, which makes for a week
(32:27):
reading of the novel. Much of Frankenstein participates in the
debate over abolition of slavery, as several critics have astutely observed,
and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns
is not the one in France, but the one in Haiti.
For abolitionists in England, the Haitian Revolution, along with you know,
(32:50):
continued enslaved rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands,
raise deeper and much harder questions about liberty and equality
than the Revolution in France had, you know, since they
involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin
and Wolstencraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and
(33:10):
Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because
of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United
States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in eighteen
oh seven, the debate over slavery in Britain's territories continued
through the decision in favor of emancipation in eighteen thirty three.
(33:31):
Both Shelley's closely followed this debate, and in the years
before and during the composition of Frankenstein they read several
books together about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley
was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation,
fearing that the enslaved so long and so violently oppressed
(33:52):
and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance
of blood. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't they? He asked?
Can he who the day before was a trampled slave
suddenly become liberal minded, forbearing and independent. I've got a
question for you, why do you fucking care? Like, really,
why do you care what they turn into? Why does
(34:14):
it matter? Give them their freedom and don't worry about
how they lived their lives? After that, why do they
need to become liberal minded and forbearing? Why can't they
just be free? Given Mary Shelley's reading of books that
stress the physical distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the
Creature is explicitly racial, figuring him as African as opposed
(34:37):
to European. I was more agile than they, and could
subsist upon course or diet. The creature says, I bore
the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to
my frame. My stature far exceeds theirs. And this characterization
became on stage a caricature, beginning with the eighteen twenty
three stage production of Frankenstein. The actor playing the unnamed
(34:59):
creature wore blue face paint, a color that identified him
less as dead than just a different color. It was
this production that George Canning, the abolitionist Foreign Secretary and
Leader of the House of Commons, invoked in eighteen twenty
four during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Isn't it wild?
(35:20):
How literature can branch out so far? Tellingly, Canning's remarks
brought together the novel's depiction of the creature as a
baby and the culture's figuring of Africans as children. Yeah,
this is really messed up what he said. He said
that in dealing with black people, because I'm not going
to say the word that he said, sir, we must
(35:40):
remember that we are dealing with beings possessing the form
and strength of a man, but the intellect of only
a child, which is ridiculous. They don't know what those
people's intellect are because they probably don't speak the same language.
Why would they know how smart or stupid someone was.
They never asked, And they said, to turn him loose
in the manhood of his physical strength, the maturity of
(36:00):
his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed
reason would be to raise up a creature resembling the
splendid fiction of a recent romance. So he was saying,
even though he was an abolitionist, that you could not
give enslaved people their freedom because they were bigger and
stronger than white people. Okay, well you're the ones that
(36:23):
you know, enslaved them and made them work in fields. Yeah,
they did physical labor. They're stronger than you, and you
don't know what they can endure. They're forced to endure
things they weren't enduring them because their bodies were like
better suited to it. They were enduring things because they
had to. They didn't have a choice. They were enslaved. Seriously,
though so, in later nineteenth century stage productions, the creature
(36:44):
was explicitly dressed as an African person. Even in the
nineteen thirty one James Whale film, in which Karlof wore
green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as
not white. He is in the film's climactic scene. Lynched
so parallels there because the creature reads as an enslaved person,
(37:06):
Frankenstein holds a unique place in American culture, as the
literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued in Black Frankenstein, The Making
of an American metaphor, what is the use of living
when in fact I am dead? The black abolitionist David
Walker asked from Boston in eighteen twenty nine in his
work Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, anticipating
(37:31):
Eldridge Kleaver's Souls on Ice by a century and a half.
Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people,
Frederick Douglas declared in New York on the eve of
the American Civil War, Nat Turner was called a monster,
so was John Brown. By the eighteen fifties, Frankenstein's monster
(37:51):
regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked
black man signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the
nation that created him. Uh, why shouldn't they? Mary Wollstoncraft
Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins
already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did,
(38:14):
most of them when she was still very young. Her
half sister, Fanny Imlay took her own life in eighteen sixteen.
Percy Shelley drowned in eighteen twenty two. Lord Byron fell
ill and died in Greece in eighteen twenty four. Good riddings,
leaving Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, the
last relic of a beloved race. My companions extinct before me.
(38:37):
And she doesn't mean white people by race. She means
freethinkers and authors. She chose that as the theme behind
the novel that she wrote eight years after Frankenstein, published
in eighteen twenty six, when the author was just twenty eight.
The Last Man is set in the twenty first century,
where only one man endures, the lone survivor of a
(38:59):
terrible play, having failed, for all his imagination, for all
his knowledge, to save the life of a single person.
Nurse the Baby read find my baby Dead. And that
is the tale of the original Goth girlfriend, the mother
of modern sci Fi Mary Shelley or Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin Shelley,
(39:22):
if you're nasty? What do you think? What a life? Right?
Did you have any idea that Frankenstein was such a
complex work like an autobiography. You can see it like
as soon as it's pointed out, And once I started researching,
I'm like, oh my god, I knew Prometheus, that it
mirrored Prometheus. But it also had direct ties to Marry
(39:43):
Shelley's own life, like what tragedy to lose that many
children and childbirth, to have a miscarriage and bleed so
much that you almost die and have your husband make
you sit on a block of ice. What doesn't that
just sound? I understand that ice is a vasoconstrictor, meaning
(40:04):
it constricts or titans your arteries or any capillaries that
might be open, thus slowing the blood. But No, that
is not the solution, like to somebody bleeding. Also, blood
is hot, it comes from inside your body, so it's hot,
so it would indeed melt the ice. But can you
even imagine? And then Frankenstein's monster, the creature escaping on
(40:27):
a raft made of ice? What and he is a baby,
He's a baby, he's born, he's born with you know,
just pain, nothing but pain. Seriously, can I cannot imagine it?
I'm trying to being dying, who knows how he died?
And then being stitched together made of other people. And
(40:47):
you remember the episode I did on cellular memory in
tissues and organs organs not organs, good lord, but you
remember that episode that I did that organs and tissues
have memory, and that sometimes when people get a transplant
that they get new talents or new interests, or you know,
some sort of characteristic of the person who donated that
(41:08):
organ to them. What if Mary Shelley obviously didn't know
that at the time. Like, that's still a hotly contested
debated thing, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to
support it. I read a lot of studies on it.
It seems like it might be true. And I'm not
saying that every single person that gets an organ donated
to them or tissue of some sort donated adopts the
(41:30):
characteristics of the donor, but it has absolutely been known
to happen. And the cases that I read to you
were like extreme, like one guy becoming a piano virtuoso
like overnight, another one like a mathematician, the other one
like a person that total personality change, like turned into
a psychopath, Like I would want to know from my
(41:50):
tissue donor, like who that was coming from. If it's
coming from a serial killer, please keep it the fuck
out of my body. We good, I would. I'd rather
just go than have you know, beliver or whatever of
a serial killer inside my body. But in Frankenstein, he's
just haphazardly thrown together. You don't know who his parts
(42:11):
are from. You don't know what those people went through,
you don't know what kind of people they were. And
maybe his murderous rage came not only from you know,
discovering his just how horrible his own existence was and
that it was wholly unnecessary, and feeling the pain of
rejection and understanding just you know, how bad his life
(42:32):
was in existence in general. I don't know. Maybe the
murderous rage not only came from that, but from one
of those pieces that you sewed onto him, or perhaps
his brain. Maybe it was a violent person, maybe it
was murderer. He didn't know. So you're out here playing
god or the part of a woman. And I like that.
Mary Shelley did that. She made that parallel. For sure,
(42:55):
he is the mother. You know, women create life, Sperm
fertilizes an egg, the body of a woman creates life.
But Victor Frankenstein bypassed all that. He became god and
a woman at the same time, birthing a baby. And
when he didn't like what he'd made, which I mean,
I don't know why what he thought would happen? Like
(43:18):
you pieced together parts of a corpse, and you sewed
it together, and you electrified it and somehow reanimated it.
What did you think it was gonna look like? Did
you think it was? You chose the parts, Like if
you didn't like how it looked, you should have picked
some better looking parts. I don't know why. Like he was, oh,
I'm horrified by what I created. Well, that was your goal, right,
(43:39):
Your goal was to reanimate a dead person. And again
I think that's part of the allegory. I think that
was Mary Shelley's wish was that she could. And if
you've ever lost someone, we've all had that thought of
maybe away we could bring them back, and if if
there were, would we want to. Like I'm just going
(43:59):
to cite a really obvious example like practical magic, where
the Aunts tell Sally and Jillian that you know, they
can bring people back from the dead, but they won't.
They won't do it, they said, because whatever comes back
is something dark and unnatural. Well, he brought something back
from the dead. And I'm guessing probably practical magic and
other retellings of bringing people back from the dead probably
(44:22):
take a little bit from Frankenstein, and perhaps Mary Shelley
took a little bit since she was interested in Haiti
from voodoo. Because voodoo is old, it's an old religion,
she could have taken from that. And I'm seeing all
these parallels now that like go back to other episodes
I've done, And isn't it fascinating? Don't you love to
learn the enslaved person narrative? I honestly, I'll be very honest,
(44:47):
I never connected those dots. But again, once they started researching,
I'm like, oh no, she intentionally did that. She threw
so much into that novel that people were devouring and
they didn't even rea that she was espousing all these
incredibly just liberal, liberated views of women and enslaved people
(45:11):
in politics and just the ills of men. It's it's
a brilliant novel. I read it a long time ago. Well,
I hope you enjoyed this episode and the education mary Shelley,
which I did not have before researching this episode, But
my my, I found this just beyond fascinating. Like I'd
(45:34):
heard stuff about Mary Shelley and you know, her being
super goth, and I'm like, I just I need to
I need to know more about her. And now that
I do, I'm like, holy shit. This was a complicated woman.
She was incredibly smart and talented and just way way
(45:54):
ahead of her time. Because, like on its base, this
is a great horror story, but once you delve into
it just a little bit, like the metaphors, the allegories,
the biographical parts, the political parts, they become immediately visible
and I just love it. If you like what you hear,
you can hear more episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays, released
(46:15):
on all podcast platforms. On social media, you can find
me on Instagram at Autumn's podcast, Facebook at Autumn's Auditis,
Threads at Autumn's podcast, and Patreon at Autumn's Oddities Podcast.
If you're in Kentucky, I will be at the Battletown
Witch Festival. I'll be doing a panel and uh, I
think a no not And I think I will be
(46:37):
doing a live podcast recording about the battle Town Witch
Leah smock as she was burned as a witch in Kentucky.
She was what do you think do you think she
was a witch? Probably not? You know, she was just
a woman who was kind of smart and she was pretty.
And no, no, they didn't like that. They still don't
(46:58):
like it. Who's they? I don't know. You decide. I
appreciate you listening, and remember, if it's creepy and weird,
you'll find it here.
Dark Cast Network. Welcome to the dark Side of podcasting. Hey, hey,
welcome back to Autumn's Oddities. I'm Autumn. The ween is
nearly upon us, the veil is thinning, and I'm making
my costume today. It's going to be a process. I
(00:53):
can't wait to show it to you. I'm going to
stay in character the whole time. I'm doing like a
whole bit going as my favorite cryptid, and if you're
a longtime listener, you know exactly who that is. Today,
I want to talk to you about the original goth
girlfriend who paved the way for us all. The creator
(01:15):
of one of the greatest horror characters of all time,
Mary Shelley, the mother of modern sci fi. Mary Shelley
had a life equally or more so, as interesting as
the timeless fiction she created. A woman well ahead of
her time, her greatest work was an allegory for the
(01:37):
struggles and tragedies of her own life. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
Shelley began writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus when she
was eighteen years old, just two years after she'd become
pregnant with her first child, a baby she did not name.
She wrote in her diary. Day after day nurse the
(01:59):
bank baby read, and on the eleventh day she wrote,
I awoke in the night to give it suck. It
appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not
awaken it, And then in the morning find my baby dead.
With grief at that loss came a fear of a
fever from milk. Her breasts were swollen inflamed, and you know,
(02:21):
no baby to nurse. That her sleep too grew fevered,
dreamed that my little baby came to life again, that
it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it
before the fire, and it lived. She wrote in her diary,
awake and find no baby already off to just an
incredibly sad start. She became pregnant again only weeks later,
(02:45):
and she was likely still nursing her second baby when
she started writing Frankenstein, and pregnant with her third by
the time she finished. She didn't put her name on
her book. She published Frankenstein anonymously in eighteen eighteen, not
least of a concern that she might lose custody of
her children, and she didn't give her monster a name either.
(03:07):
The anonymous androdemon One reviewer called it for the first
theatrical production of Frankenstein, which was staged in London in
eighteen twenty three, by which time she had given birth
to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby
to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of
(03:28):
bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit
on ice. What the fuck is all I'm gonna say
about that? On ice? The monster was listed on the
playbill as dot dot dot. That's it, no name. The
nameless mode of naming the unnameable is rather good, Shelley
remarked about the creature's theatrical billing. She herself had no
(03:50):
name of her own, like the creature, pieced together from
cadavers collected by Victor Frankenstein, so two, her name was
an assemblage of parts, the name of her mother, the
feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, stitched to that of her father, the
philosopher William Godwin, grafted on to that of her husband,
(04:11):
the poet Percy Shelley. It was on a dreary night
in November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.
Victor Frankenstein, a university student, says, pouring out his tail.
The rain patters on the windowpane. Obleaque light flickers from
a dying candle. He looks at the lifeless thing at
his feet come to life. I saw the dull yellow
(04:34):
eye of the creature open. It breathed hard, and a
convulsive motion agitated its limbs. Having labored so long to
bring the creature to life, he finds himself disgusted and horrified.
Unable to endure the aspect of the being that he created,
he flees, abandoning his creation unnamed. I the miserable and
(04:55):
the abandoned am an abortion, the creature says before in
the books fine scene, he disappears on a raft of ice,
which I mean you can immediately see where she was
drawing that allegory from. He escapes on a raft of ice,
and her husband had her sit on a block of
ice while she was miscarrying and bleeding to death. Frankenstein
(05:17):
is actually four stories and one. It's an allegory, a fable,
an a pistolary novel, and an autobiography, a chaos of
literary fertility that left its very young author at pains
to explain her quote hideous progeny in the introduction that
she wrote for a revised edition in eighteen thirty one.
(05:39):
She took up the humiliating question how I, then a
young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon
so very hideous an idea and made up a story
in which she virtually erased herself as an author, insisting
that the story had come to her in a dream.
I saw, with shut eyes but acute mental vision. I
(06:00):
saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the
thing he had put together, and that writing it consisted
of making only a transcript of that dream. So she'd
tried to downplay her ability, in her intelligence and her
pain very obviously. And she's like, oh, no, I didn't
create this from my own mind or experiences or anything.
It came to me in a dream. So you know,
(06:22):
it would be a little more accepted by the public
that way. A century later, when Boris Karloff played the
creature in Universal Pictures brilliant nineteen thirty one production of Frankenstein,
which was directed by James Whale, the monster, who was
prodigiously eloquent, learned, and persuasive in the novel was no
longer merely nameless, but also speechless too. As if what
(06:46):
Mary Shelley had to say was too radical to be heard, which,
you know, an agony that seemed to be unutterable, just
the existence of this creature. Every book a baby is born,
but Frankenstein is often supposed to have been more assembled
than written. He's an unnatural birth, as though all that
(07:06):
the author had done were to piece together the writings
of others, especially those of her father and husband. If
Godwin's daughter could not help philosophizing, one mid twentieth century
critic wrote, and I'm sure it was a guy Shelley's
wife knew. Also the eerie charms of the morbid, the occult,
the scientifically bizarre, this enduring condescension, you know, the idea
(07:31):
of the author as a vessel for the ideas of
other people. These couldn't possibly be the ideas of a woman.
They've got to be things she heard from her dad
and her husband and you know, other men. A fiction
in which the author participated to avoid the scandal of
her own brain, which I totally understand. Go which goes
some way to explain why Frankenstein has had so many
(07:52):
wildly different and irreconcilable readings and restagings in the two
centuries its publication. For its bicentennial, the original eighteen eighteen
edition has been reissued It's a Little paperback by Penguin Classics,
with an introduction by the distinguished biographer Charlotte Gordon, and
(08:14):
as a beautifully illustrated hardcover keepsake the new annotated Frankenstein,
which is edited and annotated by Leslie as Klinger. Universal
is developing a new bride of Frankenstein as part of
a series of remakes from its backlog of horror movies.
I mean, they've got literally all of the greats. It
(08:36):
seems that the age of the superhero is about to
yield the age of the monster. But what about the baby. Well, Frankenstein,
the story of a creature who has no name, has
for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything.
There are a lot of interpretations. Most lately it has
been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley Technologist,
(08:59):
an interpretation that derives less from the eighteen eighteen novel
than from you know, later stage and film versions, especially
the nineteen thirty one film, and that took its modern
form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, the
MIT Press has published an edition of the original text,
which has been annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of
(09:21):
all kinds and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein
bi Centennial Project. Of all places, Arizona State University the
only thing I know, ASU four is like always being
one of the top party schools in the country. With
funding from the National Science Foundation, they offer the book
as kind of a catechism for designers of robots and
(09:42):
inventors of artificial intelligences. Remorse extinguished every hope, Victor says
in Volume two, Chapter one, by which time the creature
has begun murdering everyone. Victor loves I had been the
author of unalterable evils, and I live in daily fear
lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some
(10:04):
new wickedness. The MIT edition appends here and gives a footnote.
The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer's
sentiments as he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb.
Scientist's responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed.
(10:24):
And that's a really good allegory. It makes a lot
of sense but you know, Mary Shelley, the atomic bomb
wasn't even an idea back then. This is a way
to make use of the novel, but it also kind
of strips out nearly all of the sex and birth,
everything that's female about the novel. Material first mind by
(10:45):
Muriel Spark in a biography of Shelley published in nineteen
fifty one on the one hundredth anniversary of her death. Spark,
who worked closely with Shelley's diaries and paid very careful
attention to the author's eight years of mere, constant pregnancy
and loss, argued that Frankenstein was no minor piece of
(11:07):
genre fiction, but a literary work of striking originality. In
the nineteen seventies, that interpretation was taken up by feminist
literary critics, who wrote about Frankenstein as establishing the origins
of science fiction by way of the female gothic. And
when you think about it, the category of female gothic
(11:29):
just the things that happened to women's bodies in reproduction, puberty.
All of that is grotesque. It involves a lot of blood,
it involves a lot of violence upon the body. It
makes a lot of sense, and what made Mary Shelley's
work so original, Ellen Mohers argued at the time was
that she was a writer who was a mother. Tolstoy
(11:51):
had thirteen children born at home. Mower's pointed out, but
the major female eighteenth and nineteenth century writers, like you know,
Austin and d Dickinson, tended to be spinsters and virgins.
And that's according to her. Those are not my words.
And Shelley was an exception. So was Mary Wollstonecraft, a
woman Shelley knew not as a mother, but as a
(12:12):
writer who wrote about, among other things, how to raise
a baby. I conceive it to be the duty of
every rational creature to attend to its offspring. Wollstonecraft wrote
in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in seventeen eighty seven,
ten years before giving birth to the author of Frankenstein.
I wonder what her thoughts were on the education of daughters.
(12:36):
I wonder, As Charlotte Gordon notes in her dual biography
Romantic Outlaws, Wollstonecraft first met her fellow political radical William
Godwin in seventeen ninety one at a London dinner party
hosted by the publisher of Thomas Paine's Rights of man.
So many literary people all in one room. I bet
it was a fun conversation. Wollstonecraft and Godwin were mutually
(13:01):
displeased with each other. Godwin later wrote, they were the
smartest people in the room and they couldn't help arguing
all evening. That's hot, yeah, like for real, that's my thing. Like,
I'm not really attracted to the way people look. Like
I can look at someone and be like, oh, they're attractive,
but I'm not attracted to them unless they like challenge
(13:21):
me mentally, honestly, unless they can go toe to toe,
which I just love doing. That's why my husband's great
for me. Walston Craft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman
appeared in seventeen ninety two, and the next year Godwin
published Political Justice. In seventeen ninety three, during an affair
with the American speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay, walston Craft
(13:47):
became pregnant. Yeah. In a letter to Mlay, she wrote,
I am nourishing a creature. Not long after, Wollstoncraft gave
birth to a daughter, who she named Fanny. Imlay abandoned her.
She and Godwin became lovers in seventeen ninety six, and
when she became pregnant, they married for the sake of
the baby, even though neither of them believed in marriage.
(14:11):
In seventeen ninety seven, Wolstoncraft died of an infection contracted
from the fingers of a physician who reached into her
uterus to remove the after birth. Jesus Seriously, Godwin's daughter
bore the name of his dead wife, as if she
could be brought back to life. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was
(14:32):
fifteen years old when she met Percy Shelley in eighteen twelve.
He was twenty and married with a pregnant wife. Yeah.
Mary Shelley had some drama. She had a very dramatic life.
Having been thrown out of Oxford for his atheism and
disowned by his father, Shelley had sought out William Godwin,
his intellectual hero, as a surrogate father. Shelley and Godwin
(14:56):
spent their illicit courtship the girl Godwin as much romanticism
as romance, passionately reading the works of her parents. That's
a little weird, while we're psych passionately reading the works
of her parents, which that's a little weird. While reclining
on wolstone Craft's grave in the Saint Pancras churchyard. Go
(15:19):
to the tomb and read, she wrote in her diary,
Go with Shelley to the churchyard. I told you she
was the original Goth girlfriend. I'd be hanging out in
cemeteries all the time. You like, if you want to
get me somewhere, say let's go take a walk around
the cemetery. Let's go clear off the graves. Like you
know how people's little artificial plants and chowch keys fall over.
I like to go and put them right. One time
(15:41):
at the sidebar. One time I did that in Tampa,
at this extremely old cemetery that was right across the
street from my house. I went to some grave. I
was just kind of like drawn to it, and it
had like crystals hanging from a tree above it, and
little statues all over it, and it had some thing
I can't remember, a tree branch or something obscuring the grave.
(16:04):
And I cleaned everything off, and then I finally looked
at it and the woman died on the exact same
day I was born. Yeah, Like, call me over here.
How strange like that? What a coincidence of all the
graves that I could have picked in this really big cemetery.
I mean, I chose that one. And strangely enough, my
(16:28):
nana died on the exact same day that my daughter
was born. I don't know. Maybe like little bits of
our souls are composed of of theirs. Who knows, I don't.
I got theories, though, I think you know that good
and well. Plainly though, uh, they were doing a little
more than reading at the at the grave site because
she was pregnant when she ran away with him. So
(16:50):
it is rumored that Mary Shelley had sex on her
mother's grave. Like that is as god as it gets. Yeah,
it's also pretty messed up. But you know, she seemed
to have sort of a traumatic wife. I don't know.
So she fled her father's house in the in the
half light of night, along with her stepsister Claire Claremont,
(17:13):
who wanted to be ruined too. If any man served
as an inspiration for Victor Frankenstein, it was Lord Byron,
who followed his imagination, indulged his passions, and abandoned his children.
Great guy. He was quote mad, bad, and dangerous to know,
as one of his lovers pronounced mainly because of his
(17:33):
many affairs, which likely included sleeping. This is gross with
his half sister, Augusta Lee. Sounds like a real piece
of shit to put it in modern terms. Byron married
in January eighteen fifteen, and his daughter Ada was born
in December. But when his wife left him a year
into their marriage, and I can't imagine why, Byron was
(17:55):
forced to never see his wife or daughter again lest
his wife revealed the scandal of his affair with Lee. Yeah,
it's pretty gross. You had sex with your half sister.
You're related by blood, that's not all right. Ada was
about the age that Mary Godwin's first baby would have
been had she lived, and AIDA's mother, fearing that the
(18:15):
girl might grow up to become a poet as mad
and bad as her father, raised her instead to be
a mathematician. Ada Lovelace, a scientist as imaginative as Victor Frankenstein,
would in eighteen forty three provide an influential theoretical description
of a general purpose computer, a century before one was built. Yeah,
(18:39):
but men inventured everything, right, No, I don't think anybody's
buying it. In the spring of eighteen sixteen, Byron, fleeing
the scandal, left England for Geneva, and it was there
that he met up with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin, and
Claire Claremont. Moralizers called them the League of Incest. What
a horrible names. Stop hanging out together. And by summer
(19:02):
Claremont was pregnant by Byron, but Byron was bored, so
one evening he announced, we will each write a ghost story.
Godwin began the story that would become Frankenstein. Byron later wrote,
methinks it is a wonderful book for a girl of nineteen,
not nineteen indeed, at the time, what the fuckever that means? Dude? Again,
(19:25):
the condescension is killing me. It's like, dude, she wrote
a better something, better than you ever ever wrote, So
chill out. During the months when Godwin was turning her
ghost story into a novel and nourishing yet another creature
in her belly, Shelley's wife, pregnant now with what would
have been their third child, killed herself. Really can't imagine why.
(19:45):
She's like, I can't keep pumping out these children with
this guy who is cheating on me. Claremont gave birth
to a girl Byron's, although most people assumed it was Shelley's.
And I know the naming here is confusing as shit,
because Mary Shelley had so many names, and Elly and
Godwin got married. For a time they attempted to adopt
the girl, though Byron later took her, having noticed that
(20:07):
nearly all of Godwin and Shelley's children had died. And
this is just horrible. He said, I so totally disapprove
of the mode of children's treatment in their family that
I should look upon the child as going into a hospital.
He wrote very cruelly about the Shelleys. He said, have
they reared one? And by no means was Byron interested
(20:27):
in rearing a child himself. He put his daughter in
a convent, where she died at the age of five.
So again, real piece of shit. When Frankenstein, which she
began writing in the summer of eighteen sixteen, was published
eighteen months later, it bore an unsigned preface by Percy
Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin. The book became
(20:51):
an immediate sensation, and a friend wrote to Percy Shelley
that it seems to be universally known and read. Sir
Walter Scott wrote in an early interview the author seems
to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination. And
oh lord, these men would have rather like put their
balls in a bucket of ice than say a good
(21:13):
thing about a female writer back then. So I just
love that he said this. Scott, like many readers, assumed
the author was Percy Shelley, a man. Reviewers less enamored
of the romantic poet, damned the books Godwinnian radicalism and
its byronic impeties. John Croker, a Conservative member of parliament,
(21:37):
called Frankenstein quote a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity, radical,
unhinged and moral. And with that review I would have
most certainly read it. I've been like, oh, yeah, that
sounds cool. Let's get into some unhinged, moral, radical tissues
of horrible, disgusting absurdity. I'm so down. But the politics
of Frankenstein are as intricate as its structure of stories,
(22:00):
nested like Russian dolls. The outermost doll is a set
of letters from an English adventurer to his sister, recounting
his Arctic expedition and his meeting with the strange, emaciated,
haunted Victor Frankenstein. Within the adventurer's account, Frankenstein tells the
story of his fateful experiment, which has led him to
(22:22):
pursue his creature to the ends of the earth. And
within Frankenstein's story lies the tale told by the creature himself,
the littlest, innermost Russian doll, the baby, and it keeps
going back to the baby. The novel structure meant that
those opposed to political radicalism often found themselves baffled and
(22:43):
bewildered by Frankenstein, you know, because they just worn into it.
And as literary critics such as Chris Baldick, What a
Name and Adriana Crassion have pointed out, the novel appears
to be heretical and revolutionary. It also appears to be
counter revolutionary, if that makes any sense. This is according
(23:04):
to critics, it depends on which doll is dueing the talking.
If Frankenstein is a referendum on the French Revolution, as
some critics interpret it, then Victor Frankenstein's politics align nicely
with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as
a species of political monster which has always ended by
(23:26):
devouring those who have produced it. And I think this
happens with most creative things. You know, you put it
out into the world and people interpret it in their
own way, because that's really all you can do. You
have your life experiences, you have your lived experiences, and
so you see everything through the lens of your own
experiences and context. So it makes sense that she didn't
(23:48):
live in France, she wasn't writing about the French Revolution,
but you know, some people took it that way. The
Creature's own politics, though, align not with Burke's, but with
those of two of Burke's keenest ades, Mary Wollstoncraft and
William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men's bodies,
like a lord over the peasantry or a king of
(24:10):
his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when
he described feudalism as a ferocious monster. How dare you
sport thus with life? The creature asks his maker. The creature,
born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he became
a villain in just the same way that Wolstoncraft predicted.
(24:32):
People are rendered ferocious by misery, she wrote, and misanthropy
is ever the offspring of discontent. Make me happy? The
creature begs Frankenstein to no avail Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin. Shelley
took pains that reader's sympathies would lie not only with Frankenstein,
who's you know, suffering is dreadful, but also with the creature,
(24:54):
who's suffering is worse. Like he didn't ask to be
pieced together and reanimated by I'm jackass, only to be
horrified of him and abandon him. The art of the
book lies in the way Shelley nudges reader's sympathy page
by page, paragraph by paragraph, from Frankenstein the doctor to
the creature. Even when it comes to the Creature's vicious murders,
(25:18):
first of Frankenstein's little brother, then of his best friend,
and finally of his bride. Much evidence suggests that she
did succeed. The justice is indisputably on his side, one
critic wrote in eighteen twenty four, and his sufferings are
to me touching to the last degree. Hear my tale,
the creature insists when he at last confronts his creator,
(25:42):
what follows is the autobiography of an infant. He awoke
and all with confusion. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch.
I knew and could distinguish nothing. He was cold and naked,
and hungry and bereft of any company, and yet, having
no life language skills, was unable even to name these sensations,
(26:04):
but feeling pain invade me on all sides, I sat
down and wept. He learned to walk and began to wonder,
still unable to speak. The uncouth and inarticulate sounds which
broke from me frightened me into silence again. Really, can
you imagine like dying? I mean, I don't know if
we can't, I can't really imagine it because I don't
(26:26):
know what happens. But can you imagine dying and then
having I guess your brain and potentially some of your
other body parts reanimated with pieces of complete strangers, and
not knowing how you got there, what you were doing,
you know, having no language skills, having no knowledge of
(26:46):
your life before. I mean, can you even imagine that?
And the person that made you with their hubris, you know,
just dipping out, just being like, oh I don't like
what I made. It's ugly and it scares me. It's like, well, dude,
you made it. You didn't have to make it. Eventually,
he did find shelter in a lean to adjacent to
a cottage alongside the woods, where observing the people who
(27:08):
lived in the cottage speak, he learned of the existence
of language. I discovered the names that were given to
some of the most familiar objects of discourse. I learned
and applied the words fire, milk, bread, and wood. Watching
the cottagers read a book Ruins of Empires, by the
eighteenth century French revolutionary the Comte de Vuney. He both
(27:30):
learned how to read and acquired a cursory knowledge of history,
which was a litany of injustice. He said, I heard
of the division of property, of immense wealth and squalid poverty,
of rank descent and noble blood. He learned that the
week are everywhere abused by the powerful, and that the
poor despised. Shelley kept careful records of the books she
(27:54):
read and translated, meaning that you know title after title
and compiling a list each year. Milton goeth Rousseau Ovid Spencer,
Coleridge given in hundreds more from history to chemistry. She
wrote in her diary while writing Frankenstein, Babe is not well. Write,
draw and walk redlock or walk write Read the Rights
(28:17):
of women the creature keeps track of his reading too,
which I think is very interesting, and unsurprisingly he reads
the books that Shelley read and reread most often. One day,
while wandering in the woods, he stumbled upon a leather
trunk just lying on the ground that contained three books,
(28:38):
Milton's Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives, and Goats The Sorrows of
Young Worther. The library that, along with Bonney's Ruins, determines
his political philosophy. As you know readers readily understood, his
code of ethics is formed on the extraordinary stock of
political theology, pagan bi our, adulterous sentimentality, and atheistical Jacobinism.
(29:05):
According to one review of Frankenstein, most widely read in
the United States, it continues, yet in spite of all
his enormities, we think the monster a very pitiable and
ill used monster. Sir Walter Scott found this the most
preposterous part of Frankenstein, saying that he should have not
(29:26):
only learned to speak, but to read, and for ought,
we know to write that he should have become acquainted
with Werther, with Plutarch's Lives, and with Paradise Lost by
listening through a hole in a wall seems as unlikely
as that he should have acquired in the same way
The Problems of Euclid or the Art of Bookkeeping by
single and double entry. Okay, it's a work of fiction, jackass,
(29:50):
but the creature's account of his education very closely follows
the conventions of a genre of writing that was very
distant from Scott's own, the enslaved person's narrative. So yeah,
she's she's making this parallel as well. Frederick Douglas, born
into slavery the same year that Frankenstein was published, was
following those same conventions when in his autobiography he described
(30:13):
learning to read by trading with white boys for lessons.
Douglas realized his political condition at the age of twelve
while reading the Dialogue between a Master and a Slave,
reprinted in the Colombian Orator. It's a book that I
was able to find very easily, and it was one
of the only things that he brought with him when
(30:34):
he escaped from slavery. It was his coming of age.
Douglas wrote, The more I read, the more I was
led to abhor and detest my enslavers. Yeah, and that's
really a line that the creature himself could have written likewise.
The creature comes of age when he finds Frankenstein's notebook
recounting his experiment, and he learns how he was created,
(30:57):
and with that, you know the injustice at how he
had been treated when he certainly did not ask to
be created. He was dead and made of other dead people.
It's at this moment that the Creature's tale is transformed
from the autobiography of an infant to the autobiography of
an enslaved person. Douglas wrote, I would at times feel
(31:19):
that learning to read had been a curse rather than
a blessing. It had given me a view of my
wretched condition without remedy. So too, the creature said, increase
of knowledge only discovered to me more clearly what a wretched,
outcast I was. Douglas also said, I have often found
myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead. They
(31:41):
keep paralleling each other, and the creature says in the
book cursed, cursed creator, or curse it? Either way, why
did I live? Douglas sought escape and the creature sought revenge.
Either way. Among the many moral and political ambiguities of
Shelley's novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is
to be blamed for creating the monster, you know, usurping
(32:04):
the power of God and of women, or for failing
to love, care for and educate him. And I would
say it's failing to love, care and educate for him.
You created it. Great, you, It's a scientific breakthrough, you know,
if that could really happen. So the Frankenstein is Oppenheimer
model considers only the former, which makes for a week
(32:27):
reading of the novel. Much of Frankenstein participates in the
debate over abolition of slavery, as several critics have astutely observed,
and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns
is not the one in France, but the one in Haiti.
For abolitionists in England, the Haitian Revolution, along with you know,
(32:50):
continued enslaved rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands,
raise deeper and much harder questions about liberty and equality
than the Revolution in France had, you know, since they
involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin
and Wolstencraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and
(33:10):
Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because
of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United
States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in eighteen
oh seven, the debate over slavery in Britain's territories continued
through the decision in favor of emancipation in eighteen thirty three.
(33:31):
Both Shelley's closely followed this debate, and in the years
before and during the composition of Frankenstein they read several
books together about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley
was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation,
fearing that the enslaved so long and so violently oppressed
(33:52):
and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance
of blood. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't they? He asked?
Can he who the day before was a trampled slave
suddenly become liberal minded, forbearing and independent. I've got a
question for you, why do you fucking care? Like, really,
why do you care what they turn into? Why does
(34:14):
it matter? Give them their freedom and don't worry about
how they lived their lives? After that, why do they
need to become liberal minded and forbearing? Why can't they
just be free? Given Mary Shelley's reading of books that
stress the physical distinctiveness of Africans, her depiction of the
Creature is explicitly racial, figuring him as African as opposed
(34:37):
to European. I was more agile than they, and could
subsist upon course or diet. The creature says, I bore
the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to
my frame. My stature far exceeds theirs. And this characterization
became on stage a caricature, beginning with the eighteen twenty
three stage production of Frankenstein. The actor playing the unnamed
(34:59):
creature wore blue face paint, a color that identified him
less as dead than just a different color. It was
this production that George Canning, the abolitionist Foreign Secretary and
Leader of the House of Commons, invoked in eighteen twenty
four during a parliamentary debate about emancipation. Isn't it wild?
(35:20):
How literature can branch out so far? Tellingly, Canning's remarks
brought together the novel's depiction of the creature as a
baby and the culture's figuring of Africans as children. Yeah,
this is really messed up what he said. He said
that in dealing with black people, because I'm not going
to say the word that he said, sir, we must
(35:40):
remember that we are dealing with beings possessing the form
and strength of a man, but the intellect of only
a child, which is ridiculous. They don't know what those
people's intellect are because they probably don't speak the same language.
Why would they know how smart or stupid someone was.
They never asked, And they said, to turn him loose
in the manhood of his physical strength, the maturity of
(36:00):
his physical passions, but in the infancy of his uninstructed
reason would be to raise up a creature resembling the
splendid fiction of a recent romance. So he was saying,
even though he was an abolitionist, that you could not
give enslaved people their freedom because they were bigger and
stronger than white people. Okay, well you're the ones that
(36:23):
you know, enslaved them and made them work in fields. Yeah,
they did physical labor. They're stronger than you, and you
don't know what they can endure. They're forced to endure
things they weren't enduring them because their bodies were like
better suited to it. They were enduring things because they
had to. They didn't have a choice. They were enslaved. Seriously,
though so, in later nineteenth century stage productions, the creature
(36:44):
was explicitly dressed as an African person. Even in the
nineteen thirty one James Whale film, in which Karlof wore
green face paint, furthers this figuring of the creature as
not white. He is in the film's climactic scene. Lynched
so parallels there because the creature reads as an enslaved person,
(37:06):
Frankenstein holds a unique place in American culture, as the
literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued in Black Frankenstein, The Making
of an American metaphor, what is the use of living
when in fact I am dead? The black abolitionist David
Walker asked from Boston in eighteen twenty nine in his
work Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, anticipating
(37:31):
Eldridge Kleaver's Souls on Ice by a century and a half.
Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people,
Frederick Douglas declared in New York on the eve of
the American Civil War, Nat Turner was called a monster,
so was John Brown. By the eighteen fifties, Frankenstein's monster
(37:51):
regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked
black man signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the
nation that created him. Uh, why shouldn't they? Mary Wollstoncraft
Godwin Shelley was dead by then, her own chaotic origins
already forgotten. Nearly everyone she loved died before she did,
(38:14):
most of them when she was still very young. Her
half sister, Fanny Imlay took her own life in eighteen sixteen.
Percy Shelley drowned in eighteen twenty two. Lord Byron fell
ill and died in Greece in eighteen twenty four. Good riddings,
leaving Mary Wollstoncraft Godwin Shelley, as she put it, the
last relic of a beloved race. My companions extinct before me.
(38:37):
And she doesn't mean white people by race. She means
freethinkers and authors. She chose that as the theme behind
the novel that she wrote eight years after Frankenstein, published
in eighteen twenty six, when the author was just twenty eight.
The Last Man is set in the twenty first century,
where only one man endures, the lone survivor of a
(38:59):
terrible play, having failed, for all his imagination, for all
his knowledge, to save the life of a single person.
Nurse the Baby read find my baby Dead. And that
is the tale of the original Goth girlfriend, the mother
of modern sci Fi Mary Shelley or Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin Shelley,
(39:22):
if you're nasty? What do you think? What a life? Right?
Did you have any idea that Frankenstein was such a
complex work like an autobiography. You can see it like
as soon as it's pointed out, And once I started researching,
I'm like, oh my god, I knew Prometheus, that it
mirrored Prometheus. But it also had direct ties to Marry
(39:43):
Shelley's own life, like what tragedy to lose that many
children and childbirth, to have a miscarriage and bleed so
much that you almost die and have your husband make
you sit on a block of ice. What doesn't that
just sound? I understand that ice is a vasoconstrictor, meaning
(40:04):
it constricts or titans your arteries or any capillaries that
might be open, thus slowing the blood. But No, that
is not the solution, like to somebody bleeding. Also, blood
is hot, it comes from inside your body, so it's hot,
so it would indeed melt the ice. But can you
even imagine? And then Frankenstein's monster, the creature escaping on
(40:27):
a raft made of ice? What and he is a baby,
He's a baby, he's born, he's born with you know,
just pain, nothing but pain. Seriously, can I cannot imagine it?
I'm trying to being dying, who knows how he died?
And then being stitched together made of other people. And
(40:47):
you remember the episode I did on cellular memory in
tissues and organs organs not organs, good lord, but you
remember that episode that I did that organs and tissues
have memory, and that sometimes when people get a transplant
that they get new talents or new interests, or you know,
some sort of characteristic of the person who donated that
(41:08):
organ to them. What if Mary Shelley obviously didn't know
that at the time. Like, that's still a hotly contested
debated thing, but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to
support it. I read a lot of studies on it.
It seems like it might be true. And I'm not
saying that every single person that gets an organ donated
to them or tissue of some sort donated adopts the
(41:30):
characteristics of the donor, but it has absolutely been known
to happen. And the cases that I read to you
were like extreme, like one guy becoming a piano virtuoso
like overnight, another one like a mathematician, the other one
like a person that total personality change, like turned into
a psychopath, Like I would want to know from my
(41:50):
tissue donor, like who that was coming from. If it's
coming from a serial killer, please keep it the fuck
out of my body. We good, I would. I'd rather
just go than have you know, beliver or whatever of
a serial killer inside my body. But in Frankenstein, he's
just haphazardly thrown together. You don't know who his parts
(42:11):
are from. You don't know what those people went through,
you don't know what kind of people they were. And
maybe his murderous rage came not only from you know,
discovering his just how horrible his own existence was and
that it was wholly unnecessary, and feeling the pain of
rejection and understanding just you know, how bad his life
(42:32):
was in existence in general. I don't know. Maybe the
murderous rage not only came from that, but from one
of those pieces that you sewed onto him, or perhaps
his brain. Maybe it was a violent person, maybe it
was murderer. He didn't know. So you're out here playing
god or the part of a woman. And I like that.
Mary Shelley did that. She made that parallel. For sure,
(42:55):
he is the mother. You know, women create life, Sperm
fertilizes an egg, the body of a woman creates life.
But Victor Frankenstein bypassed all that. He became god and
a woman at the same time, birthing a baby. And
when he didn't like what he'd made, which I mean,
I don't know why what he thought would happen? Like
(43:18):
you pieced together parts of a corpse, and you sewed
it together, and you electrified it and somehow reanimated it.
What did you think it was gonna look like? Did
you think it was? You chose the parts, Like if
you didn't like how it looked, you should have picked
some better looking parts. I don't know why. Like he was, oh,
I'm horrified by what I created. Well, that was your goal, right,
(43:39):
Your goal was to reanimate a dead person. And again
I think that's part of the allegory. I think that
was Mary Shelley's wish was that she could. And if
you've ever lost someone, we've all had that thought of
maybe away we could bring them back, and if if
there were, would we want to. Like I'm just going
(43:59):
to cite a really obvious example like practical magic, where
the Aunts tell Sally and Jillian that you know, they
can bring people back from the dead, but they won't.
They won't do it, they said, because whatever comes back
is something dark and unnatural. Well, he brought something back
from the dead. And I'm guessing probably practical magic and
other retellings of bringing people back from the dead probably
(44:22):
take a little bit from Frankenstein, and perhaps Mary Shelley
took a little bit since she was interested in Haiti
from voodoo. Because voodoo is old, it's an old religion,
she could have taken from that. And I'm seeing all
these parallels now that like go back to other episodes
I've done, And isn't it fascinating? Don't you love to
learn the enslaved person narrative? I honestly, I'll be very honest,
(44:47):
I never connected those dots. But again, once they started researching,
I'm like, oh no, she intentionally did that. She threw
so much into that novel that people were devouring and
they didn't even rea that she was espousing all these
incredibly just liberal, liberated views of women and enslaved people
(45:11):
in politics and just the ills of men. It's it's
a brilliant novel. I read it a long time ago. Well,
I hope you enjoyed this episode and the education mary Shelley,
which I did not have before researching this episode, But
my my, I found this just beyond fascinating. Like I'd
(45:34):
heard stuff about Mary Shelley and you know, her being
super goth, and I'm like, I just I need to
I need to know more about her. And now that
I do, I'm like, holy shit. This was a complicated woman.
She was incredibly smart and talented and just way way
(45:54):
ahead of her time. Because, like on its base, this
is a great horror story, but once you delve into
it just a little bit, like the metaphors, the allegories,
the biographical parts, the political parts, they become immediately visible
and I just love it. If you like what you hear,
you can hear more episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays, released
(46:15):
on all podcast platforms. On social media, you can find
me on Instagram at Autumn's podcast, Facebook at Autumn's Auditis,
Threads at Autumn's podcast, and Patreon at Autumn's Oddities Podcast.
If you're in Kentucky, I will be at the Battletown
Witch Festival. I'll be doing a panel and uh, I
think a no not And I think I will be
(46:37):
doing a live podcast recording about the battle Town Witch
Leah smock as she was burned as a witch in Kentucky.
She was what do you think do you think she
was a witch? Probably not? You know, she was just
a woman who was kind of smart and she was pretty.
And no, no, they didn't like that. They still don't
(46:58):
like it. Who's they? I don't know. You decide. I
appreciate you listening, and remember, if it's creepy and weird,
you'll find it here.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!