Why was she writing of Clerval? And why was she changing his name around like that?
(I remembered those scraps of paper I’d dropped in the graveyard.)
Then:
in a most painful degreeMWS.
Where had the S come from? Why was that part of her name? I couldn’t know then how that S would change her.
And:
I am having my character, Walton, write to his sister Margaret—I’ve given her my own initials: MWS
Her hand signed many different ways:
Your Affectionate Companion Mary—W.G.—; Runaway Dormouse; Your own Mary who loves you so tenderly; Adieu Yours MaryS.; Mary W. Shelley; Ever Affly Ys MWS.; I am dear Sir Yours truly MaryShelley; Ever Yours MWS.; Your attached friend Mary W. Shelley; Yrs my dearest friend ever Mary Shelley; I am &c &c MaryShelley; Vostra Affma Amica—Mary Shelley.; Your own Mary; I am dear Sir Yours Obliged MaryShelley
Sometimes she didn’t sign her name at all—
You must forgive [] as I am only convalescing []—and still very weak
I tried to piece together what I could. The lost Atlantis of her. Substance and error. Visibility’s brief promise. Far-off shore—
Claire,
How long could I remain so brittle? Though I imagined him my creation, sometimes even my slave, wasn’t I equally controlled by his silence and withdrawal, my response to him largely making me into what I’d become? And in that way wasn’t I enslaved by him as well? I missed the world. Missed dailiness. Whatever freedoms I might find there. Even so, when I thought of my glass skin, I admired its genius as one admires an ice-field or the cooled gleaming surface of spilled lava. That vial-skin so fierce and without compromise—alien, unforgiving. Father’s friend John Newton had published his book The Return to Nature, remember? But what did that really mean? What was truly natural? And even if the skin were to be left in its natural state, uncovered, and all of us were to go around naked, what of the mind? Nature seemed to me less penetrable all the time—brutal, full of violations, and when I considered my own thoughts I wondered if the human mind is built to turn on itself and others, if this is natural, the ways it complicates, withdraws, turns against, and circles. Even if the Newtons were choosing to go around without clothes, and feeling close to nature in this way, they still lived on their income from slave plantations in the West Indies. So what was I to make of that? Meanwhile, Father worried about money and debtor’s prison. Fanny stayed to herself. You and I passed in the hall like strangers. When finally they sent me away to Scotland, to the Baxters, Father wrote to them of my “excessive reserve.” The sea voyage took 6 days and on board I somehow lost all my money—arrived with nothing. Maybe my skin will feel different in this new place, I thought, maybe I won’t recognize myself and will be free, though I could feel his silence travel with me, his withdrawal as strong and mysterious as ever, and what I came to think of as his “frightening detachment”—this traveled with me also, though I knew I had no idea of what he truly felt.
William, a chalk-white film sifts onto your skin—I’m trying to wipe it away, scrutinize your features, know you—Always I felt a certain barrier inside myself vivid as pain or the smell of kerosene—I turned to the muteness of books, gave myself to them wholly, fearlessly, and often when reading I felt neither female nor male—But with you, with anyone living, it was different—I held myself back—In Paris when they marched the king to his death I was the stranger, alone, watching from outside their language, their history. Even the particularities of their silences differed from my own— That distance was a fact of nature— My distance from you felt more secretive, illicit—I think we are ever-changing meanings to each other—If we could have been facts—Clarities—not immolations of meaning, edges, shadings, risks of meaning, not hiddenness, or—If humans could be actual facts to one another—My child’s body’s clear to me but not her mind—How will you know her, this child? Will she come to understand what an other is— To what extent does a mind construct what it knows, what it touches— What will she construct of me? I listen to your voice your hands turning pages but you were never a narrative as I was not a narrative but clusters of increasing and decreasing perceptions—Uneven. Contradictory—The mind’s never