Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in "Frankenstein."
Hunt applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The First Last Man: Mary Shelley and the Postapocalyptic Imagination is the center of the book. On this page you will find some of the core and controversial themes of my third book on Mary Shelley (and of Mary Shelley's own life!): incest, love triangles, and how they spread wider social conflicts including the metaphorical plague of war. In the following passage drawn from page 99, I describe how the teenage Mary Shelley became obsessed with the figure of Oedipus from the time she eloped with Percy Shelley in 1814, when she was just 16 and he was 21 and married to another woman. Sometime in the couple's first year together, Mary Shelley wrote down and modified a quote from the original ancient Greek from Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in the endpapers of her first journal book, which she co-kept with Percy:Learn more about The First Last Man at the University of Pennsylvania Press website.The original meaning of the journal’s Greek quote adapted from Aeschylus, however, might be inferred from its probable writing in Mary Shelley’s hand, and its placement at the very back of her first notebook, which ends in May 1815. Her copying and modification of this passage from Seven Against Thebes would suggest that she was a quick study. Perhaps it was Shelley’s guilt over disobeying her father Godwin during her elopement that inspired her preoccupation with the choral lament of the “heavy fate” of Oedipus. In 1834, Shelley disclosed in passing to the woman who nursed her, Maria Gisborne, that her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont noticed “long before” she was fourteen that she had an “excessive & romantic attachment to my Father.” Mary Jane may have attempted to purge the family of a younger female rival for Godwin’s attention by helping to arrange for the adolescent’s departure in 1812 to live with the Baxter family in Scotland.Page 99 of The First Last Man doesn't tell you the whole story of this study of how Mary Shelley's 1826 novel, The Last Man, helped to generate the modern genre of postapocalyptic pandemic literature, film, and television. But it does give you a lot of reasons to pick up the book and read it: to figure out why and how the deeper interpersonal conflicts of Mary Shelley's complex familial and romantic life—especially with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, her father William Godwin, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont—led her to develop not just one, but two, of the major sources for contemporary political science fiction: Frankenstein and The Last Man!
Akin to the exposure of the infant Oedipus by his parents, Shelley’s youthful exile would backfire upon her family. Upon her first return to London from Dundee, in November 1812, she met Percy at a dinner party at her father’s table. Upon her next return, in 1814, they fell in love, courted on her mother’s grave, and ran away to France with Mary Jane’s daughter Claire.
But Mary and Percy’s scandalous three-way elopement with her stepsister did more than anger their joint father-figure Godwin and his second wife. It infused an incestuous and conflictive dynamic in their romantic relationship from the very start. As she filled the final pages of her first journal book in the spring of 1815, Shelley’s cursive grew ever larger and more uncontrolled.
--Marshal Zeringue
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