Day 6 of ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘The Transformation’ by Mary Shelley

When people think of the Gothic, Mary Shelley’s name is bound to come up. Her early masterpiece Frankenstein (1818) is one of the first examples people come up with when naming Gothic novels. For today’s story, I wanted to introduce some of her lesser known writing. She was a fairly prolific author with several novels and many short stories to her name. My favourite of her novels is probably Valperga (1823), a political novel which is set in the fourteenth century in Italy during the historical conflict of the Guelphs and Ghibellines. As a fan of Gothic theology, I particularly enjoy the exploration of heretical enthusiasm in the character of Beatrice! When it comes to her short stories, one of my favourites is ‘The Mortal Immortal’ which tells the story of Winzy who takes the elixir of life thinking that it’s a cure for love. It is… in a sense but not in the sense he’d have preferred.

Today’s story is one of her lesser known works ‘The Transformation’, first published in 1831 in the literary annual The Keepsake. You can read it here. The Keepsake was a literary annual published with a young female audience in mind. It ran from 1828 – 1857 and was published for Christmas. It included contributions from many well-known Romantics and authors of the time, including Walter Scott whose ghost story ‘The Tapestried Chamber‘ appeared in the 1828 edition and is well worth a read!

It is impossible to read ‘The Transformation’ without it calling to mind many other works by Gothic and Romantic authors. Some of these conversations are clearly intentional. Shelley opens with a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

“Forthwith this frame of mine was wrench’d

With a woful agony,

Which forced me to begin my tale,

And then it set me free.

“Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns;

And till my ghastly tale is told

This heart within me burns.”

—Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.

The opening paragraph of the story picks up the theme of a tale which refuses to lie untold. As with the ‘Ancient Mariner’, the purpose of this retelling is a complicated web of self-recrimination, warning and narrative infection. I was also intrigued by the overlap with Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Imp of the Perverse’ (1845) suggested by the story’s first line:

I have heard it said, that, when any strange, supernatural, and necromantic adventure has occurred to a human being, that being, however desirous he may be to conceal the same, feels at certain periods torn up as it were by an intellectual earthquake, and is forced to bare the inner depths of his spirit to another.

In Poe’s story, this same paradox is explored. The ‘perverseness’ of the desire to do the one thing which runs entirely contrary to our own desires and best interest.

Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term.
In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far
modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible.

In drawing these parallels, I’m not necessarily suggesting a direct influence. Rather, it fascinates me the extent to which Shelley’s tale is in conversation with wider Gothic themes and fixations. The discussion of the double, the one who steals your face and acts in your place irresistibly calls up James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). More particularly, there seems to be a clear link to Byron’s unfinished poem ‘The Deformed Transformed’ (1824). We know Mary Shelley was familiar with this work because she copied it out for Byron. We also know she enjoyed it, writing to Byron that:

You could not have sent me a more agreeable task than to copy your drama, but I hope you intend to continue it, it is a great favourite of mine.

Byron’s work features a ‘hunchback’ who is driven out by his abusive mother, who never ceases to lament his physical appearance (the taunts echo Byron’s own boyhood experiences with his mother). When offered the chance to take on the appearance of the most attractive man alive (his choice as to who!) in exchange for just a little bit of demonic dealing, he leaps at it. The demonic figure in turn takes his form. Unlike Shelley’s story where the transformation/body swap has its two participants heading in opposite (and opposing) directions, in Byron’s work they stick close together with the demonic character acting as a sort of factotum to the ‘deformed transformed’. It’s hard to ignore that parallels and tempting to see Shelley’s story as a sort of sequel to Byron’s tale, in which the demonic figure takes his new form to a new place to make a new deal. If we’re talking Byronic influence, there is also, arguably a hint of The Corsair. The Corsair’s pirate anti-hero, Conrad, is brought to mind by the repeated nods to ‘freebooting’ and Guido’s declaration that:

I wandered along the sea-shore, a whirlwind of passion possessing and tearing my soul. It was as if a live coal had been set burning in my breast. At first I meditated on what I should do. I would join a band of freebooters. Revenge!—the word seemed balm to me; I hugged it, caressed it, till, like a serpent, it stung me.

Byron’s particular model of outcast though is rejected though and Guido continues pacing the beach until he makes an even more monumentally misguided decision.

Shelley’s story is a fairly simple tale of a spoilt young rich man who has to learn the error of his ways. There is a strong theological subtext throughout which seems to focus on the imagery of Romans 6: 17-18

But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

Guido tells us that he was a ‘slave’ the the ‘violent tyranny of his temper’ and that there was ‘in his own heart a despot so terrible and stern that he could yield obedience to nought save his own imperious desires’. He is offered the chance to ‘obey’ his potential father in law and give up his spendthrift and party boy ways. He, however, prefers obedience to his own ‘imperious desires’ which he yet likens to ‘the evil of [a] dungeon’ that has ‘whipped [his] soul to madness’. As the demonic figure on the beach tells him ‘thou art ready to give up thy good looks, thy bride, and thy well-being, rather than submit thee to the tyranny of good.’ In the end, our hero (?) breaks the curse/spell/enchantment with a bit of blood sacrifice. Lessons are learnt. Morals are given. And everything is wrapped up neatly. Except for the angelic Juliet who’s been passed round like a puzzle piece, praised primarily for her ‘infantine sweetness’ and cherub like charms, but also claimed like so much baggage. Personally, if I were her, I wouldn’t give Guido the time of day and I’d ask some serious questions about why he just stabbed someone in my garden.

One last parallel to draw before I go, and I promise it’s the last one. Shelley ends her tale with a ‘what if!’ attempt at a twist:

I did not revisit the sea-shore, nor seek for the fiend’s treasure; yet, while I ponder on the past, I often think, and my confessor was not backward in favouring the idea, that it might be a good rather than an evil spirit, sent by my guardian angel, to show me the folly and misery of pride.

It’s a fairly clunky introduction of the idea but this concept of the angelic coming in demonic form is one explored in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Markheim’ with greater subtlety and theological complexity. Correctly identifying the devil is always an issue in the Scottish Gothic, and Markheim (like ‘The Transformation’) poses the question of who exactly this seemingly demonic visitor is – angel, demon, double or simple hallucination. I personally enjoy the theological quandary that Shelley lightly tosses in at the end of her story with all the subtlety of a brick. Does the Divine come in demonic garb? Do the ends justify the means? Is this what people mean when they call God’s ways mysterious…? You decide!