The Goth subculture is often associated with its emergence during the 1980s, defined by fashion, music, and lifestyle. And while most of the gothic influence was largely associated with gothic rock and the post-punk music era, the culture emerged even earlier and was heavily influenced by gothic literature, which emerged in the late 18th century. Mary Shelley was amongst the first to mark a shift in gothic literature.
Mary Shelley is well-known for writing Frankenstein (1818), a novel she wrote when her husband and a group of friends decided to try their hands at writing their own horror story. Proof that when like-minded individuals with similar interests come together, great things emerge. As gothic literature has transformed over the centuries, what kind of gothic writer would she be today? What shift in gothic literature would she have created in modern literature?
WARDROBE:
When doing my research on Mary Shelley, I found little about her wardrobe. There aren’t even many photos of her. But from her most well-known photo of her in a black victorian dress with daisies trimming the neckline, I gather she favored darker colors while still embracing femininity. However, lighter colored gowns were more popular in the early 1800s. So, evidently she wasn’t swayed by trends, but she stuck to her own personal style and felt comfortable enough with her own identity to wear what she felt confident in.
Today, I think personal style has a lot to do with having a common theme, whether that be a color scheme, a particular style of clothing, or even a singular accessory that people identify your style with. For Mary, I think she would lean more towards darker colors and let her natural gothic aesthetic shine through her style while still embracing her feminine side with subtle floral accents, even if some of these elements aren’t particularly trending at the moment.
Writing Style:
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; …it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
— Mary Shelley, 1831 introduction to Frankenstein
Mary wrote 7 novels, a novella, mythological dramas, stories and articles, various travel books, and biographical studies. Mary is known to have written in the gothic sub-genre, a darker side to romanticism, including symbolism, imagery, allusions, irony, etc. She also wrote with an epistolary structure, allowing the reader to gain insight into characters’ thoughts and emotions. Her writing style is similar to modern authors such as Donna Tartt, Mona Awad, and Margaret Atwood.
Mary experienced many tragedies in her lifetime, including the loss of three children. Some sources say that the loss of her first child is what inspired her to write Frankenstein, a story about resurrecting the dead.
“Dreamt 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.”
— Mary Shelley, March 19, 1815
HOBBIES:
There isn’t much about what Mary enjoyed doing other than writing, but that may be because her entire life revolved around writing. Both of her parents were writers and intellectual writers, so she was often surrounded by literary greats. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after giving birth to Shelley, is often credited for kickstarting feminism, and her father was a philosopher. She often made use of her father’s expensive library after being denied a formal education and would sometimes read by her mother’s grave.
Apart from reading and writing, Mary enjoyed daydreaming as a means of escape from her complicated home life. She once had a dream about a scientist at work on his abominable creation made of body parts stolen from corpses. Much of the creativity in her stories stemmed from her dreams.
“My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed — my dearest pleasure when free.”
— Mary Shelley
Disclaimer: “Author Aesthetic” is a series I created for fun and to entertain my imagination. While the facts about the authors are true, my assumptions of what they would be like today are fictional and my own opinion.
bonitappétit 