"I Am Cast as a Monster": Shelley's Frankenstein and the Haunting of Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry

"I Am Cast as a Monster": Shelley's Frankenstein and the Haunting of Howard Brenton's Bloody Poetry JENNIFER A. WAGNER As a Playwright's Note to the script of his 1984 play, Bloody PoetlY, Howard Brenton quotes from Richard Holmes's biography of Percy Shelley: "Shelley 's life seems more a haunting than a history."! Taking his cue from that quotation, Brenton's rendering of the last years of that life is itself "more a haunting than a history" as well. Bloody Poetry is obsessed with the theme of the "haunting"; as Shelley himself remarks in the second act ofBloody Poetry, "Hasn't my life become a kind of haunting?" (59). Leaving aside, however, the many ways in which Brenton shows us how this may be so, with past, present and future all reverberating significantly throughout this rendering of Shelley's life, I will explore in this essay the haunting of the text itself. For all the quotation of Percy Shelley's poetry throughout this script, the literary text that most remarkably shadows this text is IIot his verse, but his lover/wife's novel Frankenstein (1816; published 1818). Bloody Poetry's intertextual engagement with Mary Godwin Shelley's novel confirms what becomes increasingly evident as the play goes on: that the moral force of the play lies not with the unfulfilled utopian dreams of poets Shelley and Byron, nor of course with Dr. Polidori - whom Brenton presents as the hypocritical, narrow-minded stand-in for an ever-scandalized English public - but with the play's women, Harriet Shelley, Claire Clainnont and, in particular, Mary Shelley. Stressing their roles as mothers, and the callous manner in which they are treated by their relentlessly idealistic and selfcentered men, Bloody Poetry follows Frankenstein in being a critique of a revo1utionary utopianism. adesire to "remake humanity."The problem of "the affections" - those real, difficult-to-theorize emotions that ultimately dictate human behaviour, most particularly social behaviour - is at the center of both novel and play. The figure of the monster - brutalized for lack of such affections , and yet nearly mad for want of them - lies behind not only Mary's but also Brenton's text, serving in each as a warning of the way in which the sinModel 'll Drama, 37 (1994) 588 The Haunting of Bloody Poetry 589 gle-minded idealism of any individual human being can undermine the good of those around him, even as he attempts to create an ideal society for the good of all. In a posthumously published review of his wife's novel, the poet Shelley observes that the "direct moral" of Frankenstein is this: Treat a person ill,and he will become wicked. Requite affection with scorn; -let one being be selected, for whatever cause, as the refuse of his kind - divide him. a social being, from society, and yOll impose upon him the irresistible obligations - malevolence and selfishness. It is thus that, too often in society, those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and itsornaments, are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of hean, into a scourge and a curse.2 Shelley regards this moral as "perhaps the most important, and of the most universal application, of any moral that can be enforced by example" because it centers upon what both he and Mary Shelley felt most passionately about, the crucial place of Human Affection in the success of social reform. Both of them agreed that such reform would find its strength in, and must begin with, the family, within which social unit a condition of true human happiness and virtue might be first achieved. Indeed Percy Shelley's 18,·8 "Preface" to Frankenstein (published as if it were written by the author herself ) pinpoints his particular interest in the family with the assertion that while the novel espouses no "philosophical doctrine of whatever kind," it does offer as its "chief concern ... the exhibition of the amiableness of domestic affection , and the excellence of universal virtue."3 Percy Shelley's readings of his wife's book, however, are as interesting for what they do ·not say as for what they do. Consider the biographical context: the...