Mary Shelley Dramaturgy II: A Family Portrait Continued

Originally posted on October 23, 2016

by Malvika Jolly

For the upcoming week, Mary Shelley dramaturge Malvika Jolly will be guest posting here with all manner of dramaturgical research and documentation that goes into bringing our play to life! Here you will find short essays, photos & video from the rehearsal process, and other tasty tidbits to help us flesh out the social, political, and performative landscapes of “Mary Shelley Sees the Future”. This is part two in the series.

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Here is an introduction— a family portrait— of the Wollstonecraft sisters and their progenitors. In our last post we covered Mary Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft; today we will tackle polymath William Godwin and his eldest step-daughter Fanny Wollstonecraft… Buckle up!

~    W I L L I A M         G O D W I N ~

William Godwin was, in many ways, the child of the French Enlightenment, drawing many of his most fundamental ideals from the rationalists of the movement. He was a historian, an essayist, and a novelist (and for a period in his second marriage he co-wrote many a children’s primer on biblical stories), and had a lasting impact on British literature and literary culture. He wrote what is widely seen to be the first mystery novel or thriller (Things As They Are; Or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams which, moreover, is a scathing attack on the aristocracy and systems of privilege). He is best known for his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which is a text of political philosophy published during the French Revolution and outlines a kind of non-violent anarchistic society… an idea that 20th century sociologist and critical theorist Habermas picked up and adapted into his own work. It was this text which made him so popular and so cherished by the Romantic Poets (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and so on)

After the death of his wife, he chose to publish a very tell-all biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, titled Memoirs of The Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, which definitely takes the prize for the longest book-title. In his book, he revealed all sorts of things about Mary Wollstonecraft, including the details of her two suicide attempts, all of her lovers before their marriage (including Gilbert Imlay, father of her now-outed illegitimate child Fanny!), and so on. This book completely killed his reputation, and he lived out the next decades as a recluse, hiding under the weight of his reputation.

Two or three years later, Godwin left young Mary and Fanny under the supervision of his friend and playwright James Marshall and traveled to Ireland. I’m not sure how long he was gone for— in some places it is described as only a summer, and in others it appears to be much longer… It is interesting to note that in her semi-autobiographical novella Mathilda, Mary Shelley describes the protagonist’s father leaving her in the care of a friend as he embarks on a trip (and writing her the same indulgently sweet letters Godwin wrote to his daughters) and not returning until she is well into her adolescence!

~   F A N N Y       I M L A Y ~

I could not find a reliable portrait of Fanny— to be honest, she was kind of a lifelong forgotten child, and it is not unlikely that there may have never been a portrait of her made. In place of an image of her, I’ve included this copy of a letter she wrote to her sister Mary and brother-in-law Percy Shelley in 1816, after they ran away to the sunshine and bohemian idylls of “The Continent”. On this escapade, the pair took along the 16-year old youngest Godwin sister Claire, but neglected to invite Fanny, leaving her behind at home to deal with the very dysfunctional and complicated household they had escaped. In this letter she is writing from Godwin’s home in London. He has permitted her to write in the margins and unused spaces of his own (rather bad-tempered) letter to Percy Shelley. Doesn’t that just paint a portrait, of her very soft and tragic life?

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Fanny Imlay is the textbook definition of a life in the margins. Or, perhaps, for the crisis of identity that comes from being put in the corner your whole life? At various points in her life she also went by the names “Fanny Wollstonecraft” and “Fanny Godwin”. Though she and Mary Wollstonecraft lived very happily together with Fanny’s biological father Gilbert Imlay— and, in fact, to protect Mary Wollstonecraft in France at the time, he claimed that he had filed them for marriage and that they were lawfully husband and wife, an illusion of propriety that fell apart very quickly— he did leave both of them (dishonored woman and illegitimate infant) alone and impoverished, in the midst of the French Revolution.

After the Scandinavian trip she went along on during infancy, Fanny was returned to London. Soon after, Mary Wollstonecraft fell in love with William Godwin and, marrying him, brought three-year-old Fanny into the family they build together.

After the death of her mother, Godwin had his publisher contact Fanny’s biological father Gilbert Imlay, seeking out the next guardian in whose hands he could put the now orphaned child. However, he was unable to find a home for her, and so Fanny was left under the care of the rather unfeeling Godwin— and his new wife Mary Jane Clairmont, who resented Godwin’s children from his previous marriage. The Godwin household during this era has been described as a kind of house on fire, becoming an increasingly uncomfortable and tense place to live.

The fact that both her sisters ran away— and chose to leave her behind!— was an enormous wound to Fanny. Her exclusion from their “summer of love” was made only worse, I’m sure, by the fact that Fanny— not Mary— was the first love interest Percy Shelley had in the Wollstonecraft sisters! Being passed over not only by her suitor (who eventually moved on to her middle sister Mary) but also by her biological sister Mary, who chose not to bring her along but did choose to invite their youngest (and not even related to them!) sister Claire was only salt in the wound. My goodness!

In the rather pathetic letter above, wherein Fanny writes to her sister and now brother-in-law in the margins of Godwin’s letter, she pleads— and then tucks her pleading into the polite affections of a doting aunty:

“I endeavor to be as frank to you as possible that you may understand my real character. I understand from Mamma [Mary Jane Clairmont] that I am your laughing stock— and the constant beacon of your your riposte satire. I am very glad to hear that little William is so very much improved. Kiss him again & again for me.”

During her Scandinavian tour, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote of her infant daughter: “I dread lest she be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or her principles to her heart”, describing exactly the double-bind “predicament of the 19th century woman without means”.

At the age of 22, she took her cue from her deceased mother and successfully committed suicide by drinking laudanum.

After her death, Percy Shelley wrote the following poem titled “On Fanny Godwin” in her honor:

Her voice did quiver as we parted,

Yet knew I not that heart was broken

From which it came, and I departed

Heeding not the words then spoken.

Misery—O Misery,

This world is too wide for thee.

And— ever the pragmatist— William Godwin writes Mary Shelley this letter urging her to say nothing to anyone of her sister’s death, in order to avoid scandal.

(1816, Source: The Bodleian Library)

His opening line: “I did indeed expect it.”

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Malvika Jolly loves all things gender-bending, time-warped, & body-swapped. She tweets @dinnertheatrics

Mary Shelley Dramaturgy I: A Family Portrait

Originally posted on October 17, 2016 by Malvika Jolly

For the upcoming week, Mary Shelley dramaturge Malvika Jolly will be guest posting here with all manner of dramaturgical research and documentation that goes into bringing our play to life! Here you will find short essays, photos & video from the rehearsal process, and other tasty tidbits that help us flesh out the social, political, and performative landscapes of “Mary Shelley Sees the Future”. This is part one in the series.

Time-traveling Mary Shelley (Lindsey Tindall) and her father William Godwin (Rebecca Fletcher) pose for a family portrait in front of a storefront in Wicker Park, Chicago. Photo by Matthew Gregory Hollis

Mary Shelley (Tindall) gazes up at her younger half-sister Claire Jane Clairmont (Alexia Jasmene Meneely), who, at the tender age of sixteen, followed along with her sister and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley as they eloped to France. What followed was eight years of poetry, scandal, song, travel, free love, and lore. Photo by Matthew Gregory Hollis

In the Runaways’ newest production, we delve into the interior worlds of one of the 19th century’s most radical— and scandalous— families. Visionaries and early drafters of many of the political and literary ideas we hold so dear— Feminism! Anarchism! Raising daughters as humans! The modern thriller! The gothic! The dystopian science fiction novel!

At the same time, the Godwin/Wollstonecraft family was subject to all the notoriety, accusations, and bad-reputation that, it would seem, comes folded into the alternative lifestyle.

By consequence, the characters that populate playwright Olivia Lilley’s play arrive already deeply interconnected by the threads of scandal: teenage sisters conspiring their escape, suicide, poverty, elopements, serial marriages, dalliances, and numerous love affairs (past, present, and to come) all within the same incestuous circle, illegitimate children, abandoned lovers, group sex, and the ghosts of children lost and miscarried.

In her time-traveling epic, playwright Olivia Lilley chooses to hone in on the two sisters Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont and their (delightfully cross-cast) parental figure William Godwin. Together, the two Wollstonecraft sisters navigate a world of harsh propriety and rigid social conduct as women who have returned to mainstream society and find themselves painted scarlet.

But wait! We can’t forget Mary Wollstonecraft, mother to Mary Shelley. Nor should we forget the eldest Wollstonecraft sister, Fanny Imlay (whose story is diffused into Claire’s in our play). Both are characters who— though technically absent from the world of our play— still hold a palpable presence.

Here is an introduction— a family portrait— of the Wollstonecraft sisters and their progenitors.

(John Keenan, 1787)

~  M A R Y       W O L L S T O N E C R A F T  ~

“A brilliant star in her firmament”, describes Moyra Davey in her film/essay on Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters The Wet and the Dry.

“…A brilliant star in her firmament, a passionate, early advocate of women’s, children’s, human rights, and an enlightened defender of truth and justice: a radical.”

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 (exactly ten years after Goethe!) and the themes of her future work were crystallized, in many ways, by three things:

First, her family’s dire poverty; she eventually supported herself and her six largely uncared-for siblings with her writing.

Second, the profound gender-based violence she encountered from an early age, from her father Edward John Wollstonecraft who, in fits of drunken rage, would beat her mother— an experience that would impact Wollstonecraft so much that in her teenaged years she apparently would sleep lying over the doorstep to her mother’s bedroom in order to keep an eye out.

And third, her incredibly close and collaborative friendships (first with Jane Arden, then with Fanny Blood) which created the nurturing environments of literary and philosophic thought that would create Mary Wollstonecraft the radical, the feminist.

Over the course of her life, she wrote many texts, but most prominently A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which makes arguments for the equality of the sexes, the significance of women to the nation as the educators of its future generations, why reason and emotion should work hand in hand, and specific plans for the education of children.

In Olivia Lilley’s play, when the current-day, Logan Square dwelling, student-loan-flouting, experimental drug-using Mya— having traveled through time to 1822 England— finds herself standing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave delivering a kind of eulogy, she says:

“Thanks For writing all that Literature With Godwin About how to raise a daughter as a human being Rather than a daughter”.

What she is referring to is Wollstonecraft’s first published work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters.

Moreover, Wollstonecraft also wrote on the French revolution, as well as novels that criticized the patriarchal and— in her opinion, antiquated— institution of marriage, citing, in particular, its negative consequences on women.

In short, Mary Wollstonecraft was a straight thug.

“She went to Paris to witness the revolution, and lived to tell of the bloody terror of 1793. She was a woman with enormous intellectual capabilities and savoir-faire.”

(Writes Davey— whose prose is so clean and so crisp that I can’t resist citing large chunks of her phenomenal essay and film The Wet and The Dry.)

“…But she also suffered from depression, and broken-hearted over the rejection by her lover, Gilbert Imlay, drank laudanum. In an attempt to revive her he offered a mission of travel to Scandinavia to investigate one of his murky business affairs.” Perhaps because she thought that staying, at the very least, in contact with and necessary to her love might lead to the ultimate success of their love affair, or perhaps because she needed the money, or perhaps just for wanderlust— she set off.

In 1795 she set off on the dangerous ocean voyage— with her two-year-old daughter Fanny (whom she had with baby daddy Gilbert Imlay), and a French maid.

Says Davey: “Like Goethe on his travels to Italy, Wollstonecraft wrote letters to Imlay chronicling her observations and emotional responses to the landscape and peoples of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Her heartbreak is softly intimated in the letters, but mostly she reflects and reports with a journalist’s eye on the native customs: a feather bed so soft and deep it is like “sinking into the grave”; children swaddled in heavy insalubrious layers of flannel; airless homes heated with stoves instead of fires…”

(Later on, she composed these letters into the book Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It was published in 1796 and made her extremely popular. Her future husband William Godwin remarked that if any book was designed to make a man fall in love with its author, this was it!)

Her second suicide attempt took place shortly. Only five months after the first botched laudanum attempt, she returned to London and, having confirmed that Imlay had a lover, jumped from a bridge after having walked up and down the street in the rain, so that that she would jump in rain-soaked clothes. She anticipated, correctly, that this would make her descent just that more quick.

She was saved by a boatman, and soon after came into the company of William Godwin, whom she married within the year (despite the fact that neither of the two really believed in marriage!). Despite not getting along at first, they ended up deeply in love.

The story goes that the night before she went into labor with her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft read Goethe’s novella Sufferings of Young Werther aloud with her husband. The next night she gave birth to the child who would grow up to become Mary Shelley. However, the delivery was “botched, the placenta did not descend, and a doctor’s unwashed hands reached into the womb to tear it out”.

As the character Mya in our play also acknowledges, there is a tragic irony to Mary Wollstonecraft’s death during childbirth, given her own enlightened advocacy of simple hygiene and non-intervention in the care of infants and mothers. “…Suspicious of doctors, she was a believer in wholesomeness and common sense in an age of superstition and quackery.”

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Malvika Jolly loves all things gender-bending, time-warped, & body-swapped. She tweets @dinnertheatrics