Women’s Writing, Volume 12, Number 3, 2005
369
“Have
You Thought of a Story?”
Galland’s
Scheherazade and Mary
Shelley’s
1831 Frankenstein
REBECCA NESVET
ABSTRACT
Internal evidence from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its 1831
Introduction
reveals Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights as the
source
of many of the novel’s most significant themes and imagery. From
Scheherazade’s
legendary experience and her own, Shelley constructs a lineage of
female
survivalist storytellers crossing temporal, geographic, and cultural
boundaries.
For the text of Frankenstein, Shelley appropriates the telescopic
structure,
the character of Safie, and several anecdotes and images. In her
Introduction
to the revised edition of 1831, Shelley more conspicuously
emphasises
the parallel with the Arabian Nights, reliving Scheherazade’s struggle
and
triumph when she takes up Byron’s intimidating storytelling challenge.
Shelley’s
use of Scheherazade’s stories and life story suggests that in her own
perspective,
to quote the Introduction, her “invention” of Frankenstein comes not
“ex nihilo”, but out
of
In
her 1831 Introduction to her 1818 novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern
Prometheus,
Mary Shelley responds to a question she claims intrigued many
readers
of the earlier editions: “How [had she,] then a young girl, c[o]me to
think
of ... so very hideous an idea?” Shelley states that “[t]he Publishers” want
to
know “the origin of the story”.[1] Agreeing to explain, she hints: “Every
thing
must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something
that
went before”, as “[i]nvention ... does not consist of creating out of the
void.”[2]
Ann K. Mellor provides one response to the publisher’s question.
“Mary
Shelley created her myth single-handedly. All other myths of the western
or
eastern worlds,” Mellor declares, “whether of Dracula, Tarzan, Superman, or
more
traditional religious systems, derive from folklore or communal ritual
practices.”[3]
Close
readings of the 1831 edition of the novel and the new Introduction
Shelley
composed for it reveal imagery and themes appropriated from an early
Rebecca Nesvet
370
Western
European translation of the Arabian
Nights, a collection of “folklore”
that
legendarily originated, to use Mellor’s terminology, in “the eastern world”.
Furthermore,
in interpolating the character and experiences of the Nights’
narrator-heroine
Scheherazade into not only her novel but also its aetiology as
explained
in the Introduction, Shelley identifies a mythical tradition or lineage
of
female storytellers for whom literary creativity is a survival strategy, and
locates
herself in this tradition. In light of the influence of the Nights upon
Shelley’s
construction of the novel and Introduction, and the implications of this
influence
for her view of her story’s origins and her own authorial heritage, we
must
rethink Mellor’s claim that Frankenstein
owes little or nothing to “folklore”.
We
must also rethink the assumption – which is certainly not exclusive to
criticism
of this particular novel – that the myths and literary traditions “of the
western
or eastern worlds” can be clearly or meaningfully identified, separated,
and
polarised.
The
literary culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
the Arabian Nights. In 1704, Galland published the first volume of his Frenchlanguage
Les Milles Nuits et Une, the first European translation of a version of Alf
Layla wa-Layla, or
“One Thousand Nights and One Night”. The version of this
body
of folk tales consulted by Galland was written in Middle Arabic, a
language
used c.1200-1600 in Persia.[4] An unattributed English translation of
Galland’s
Nuits, titled The Arabian Nights’
Entertainments, appeared in 1800,
proved
immensely popular, and was reprinted in 1809, 1814, and 1816. Many
European
and a few American Romantic writers, including Diderot,
Montesquieu,
Clara Reeve, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Jan Potocki,
Thomas
Moore, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe, wrote novels, poems,
and
tales inspired by or parodying the Nights.[5] Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud has
studied
the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European craze for “Oriental”
tales,
and found evidence of extraordinary popularity. “[T]here were so many
preposterous
imitations of the Nights,” Moussa-Mahmoud writes, that, in
eighteenth-century
and
the New Arabian Nights were long taken for forgeries.”[6]
Of
the writers in Shelley’s circle at the time she composed Frankenstein,
Byron
wrote several best-selling verse romances set in fanciful constructions of
Ottoman
lands; and in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (published
1819,
commenced 1818), the Titaness “
lover
and saviour. As Robert Irwin notes, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas
de
Quincey both read the Nights as children and later recalled having been
traumatised
by the tales.[7] Brian Alderson has surveyed the marketing of
bowdlerised
editions of the Nights as children’s literature. Two best-selling
examples
of this genre were Richard Johnson’s The Oriental Moralist: or, the
Beauties of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (c.1791), from which is “expunged
every
thing that could give the least offence to the most delicate reader”, and
SCHEHERAZADE AND FRANKENSTEIN
371
the
unattributed 1829 Oriental Tales: Being Moral
Selections from the Arabian Nights’
Entertainments.[8]
Like
Coleridge, de Quincey, and many of their contemporaries, the author
of Frankenstein may
have been introduced to the Nights as a child. “Respecting
the
books I think best adapted for the education of female children from the
ages
of two to twelve,” her father William Godwin wrote in a letter of 1802, “I
will
put down the names of a few books, calculated to excite the imagination,
and at
the same time quicken the apprehensions of children.” The subsequent
titles
include “Robinson Crusoe, if weeded of its Methodism, and the Arabian
Nights”.[9] If
Godwin practised what he preached, and his daughter did in fact
read
the Nights at an early age, her interest in the Nights and in
“Orientalism” was
not
limited to childhood. A reading list inscribed in her journal of 1814
includes
the entries: “Ochley’s History of the Saracens”, “Caliph Vathek”
(William
Beckford’s The History of Caliph
Vathek, 1786), and “New Arabian
Nights”,
probably the aforementioned 1792 text.[10]
Before
tracing Shelley’s appropriations of Galland’s Nuits in Frankenstein
and
its Introduction, it may be useful to summarise briefly the elements of the
Nights’ frame
story that will be most germane to this discussion. In the 1800
English
translation, two princes, Schahryar, the Sultan of Persia, and his brother
Schahzenan,
the Sultan of Greater Tartary, witness their wives committing
adultery
and murder them. Consequently, Schahryar then convinces himself that
“there
is no wickedness equal to that of women” and “in order to prevent the
disloyalty
of such [women] as he should afterwards marry”, he decides “to wed
one
every night, and have her strangled the next morning”.[11] Soon, “the
commendations
and blessings which the sultan had hitherto received from his
subjects”
cease and are replaced with “imprecations” against him.[12]
Schahryar’s
gynocide jeopardises his public image and threatens to destabilise
his
rule. At this point, Scheherazade, the daughter of Schahryar’s grand vizier,
plans
to stop this reign of terror. She asks her father to offer her in marriage to
Schahryar,
which after many horrified protestations he reluctantly does. She
then
instructs her sister Dinarzade to hide herself in the bridal chamber and to
emerge
early in the morning, before dawn, and demand to hear her sister tell a
story
before dying. Beginning with this story, Scheherazade captivates
Schahryar
with a thousand-and-one-night-long series of iterated tales, each
broken
off at dawn at a suspenseful point, obliging Schahryar to postpone her
execution
until the following morning so he may hear the conclusion of the
latest
tale. These tales make up the interior text of the Nights, and,
after
Scheherazade
has told them, Schahryar reconsiders his misogyny and his insane
law.
He renounces the policy of serial rape and murder, and regains “the
blessings
of all the peoples of the large empire of the
Shelley’s
1831 Introduction contains many echoes of this story. She
recalls
the now-legendary rainy evening in July 1816 at Byron’s house in
Rebecca Nesvet
372
from
“some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into
French”.[14]
In a scene that strikingly mirrors Scheherazade’s experience,
Shelley
narrates:
“We
will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron, and his proposition
was
acceded to ... I busied myself to think of a story ...
I felt that blank
incapacity
of invention which is the misery of authorship when dull ... Have
you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was
forced
to reply with a mortifying negative.[15]
Byron
plays Schahryar’s role by making the storytelling “proposition”, which is
immediately
“acceded to”. Shelley exaggerates the stakes in this game: a
negative
response, given in the morning, to the question “Have you thought of a
story?” would be
“mortifying”. This scenario becomes particularly resonant in the
light
of Scheherazade’s experience, as the word “mortifying” derives from the
same
root as “death”, and therefore may carry morbid connotations. For
Scheherazade,
to fail to come up with an interesting story by morning would be
literally
fatal. Shelley’s word choice ratchets up the dilemma of writer’s block to
suggest
a crisis of that degree.
“Have you thought of a story?” is one of two complete sentences in the 1831
edition
that are italicised for emphasis. The other, appearing in the text of the
novel,
is Frankenstein’s reiteration of his Creature’s intimidating promise: “I will
be with you on your wedding-night.”[16] In the Nights, Schahryar’s promise to be
with
many women, including Scheherazade, on their wedding nights implicitly
incorporates
a death threat. Frankenstein interprets the Creature’s promise:
I
shuddered to think of who might be the next victim sacrificed to his
insatiate
revenge. And then I thought again of his words – “I will be with you
on your wedding-night.” That then was the period fixed for the fulfilment of
my
destiny. In that hour I should die, and at once satisfy and extinguish his
malice
... I resolved not to fall before my enemy without a bitter
struggle.[17]
The
Creature’s multiple murders and generally antisocial attitudes, like
Schahryar’s,
are his reactions to his perceived betrayal and the frustration of his
desire.
The tangle of morbid and erotic imagery in this passage, and particularly
Frankenstein’s
understanding of his “struggle” with the Creature in terms that
suggest
sex (“satisfy and extinguish”) or a fight for survival (“not to fall before
my
enemy”), also parallels the conflict between Scheherazade and her
bridegroom.
The Creature is “insatiate” in his pursuit of the “fulfilment” of
Frankenstein’s
destiny, which must “extinguish” the fire of his emotions, but
these
emotions, like Schahryar’s, are hate and revulsion. Like Schahryar, he is
looking
for “victims” to sacrifice to his “revenge” on their wedding nights.
Frankenstein’s
reference to premature, violent, and preannounced death as his
“destiny”
is also telling: in the Nights, the vizier tells Schahryar what he
SCHEHERAZADE AND FRANKENSTEIN
373
perceives
to be his daughter’s attitude toward the marriage she has requested:
“The
sad destiny ... could not scare her; she prefers the honour of being Your
Majesty’s
wife one night to her life.”[18] Here, as in Frankenstein, “destiny”
means
“death”. In the vizier’s view, Scheherazade’s desire for Schahryar
overrides
her survival instincts. Really, nothing could be further from the truth.
She
resolves, like Frankenstein, to engage her wedding-night companion in an
intense
“struggle”, and arms herself with stories to fight for her survival. The
Creature/Schahryar
instigates a battle, which Frankenstein/Scheherazade
intends
to fight.
Both
Frankenstein and the Nights begin with a frame story, which
introduces
a series of interior tales. As Gregory O’Dea points out in his 1997
study
of the “tales” Shelley wrote in the 1820s and ’30s for The Keepsake (an
ornate,
annually published, illustrated anthology marketed as a Christmas gift
for
young women), she was not unfamiliar with the frame-and-tales structure of
the Nights, Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, and other such texts. O’Dea explains:
The
“tale” is an ancient and amorphous narrative form ... unlike the novel
and
the short story ... A Thousand Nights and One
Night and Boccacio’s
Decameron set
their tales in larger structures that include not only other tales
but
meta-narratives or framing situations in which the tales are told.[19]
Frankenstein is a
similar literary box puzzle, taking the form of a series of letters
written
by the Arctic explorer Robert Walton to his sister. Walton’s life, like
Scheherazade’s,
is in danger. If he does not die of the cold, starvation, or
shipwreck,
it seems likely that his restless and frightened crew will kill him so
they
can return home. As David Collings has pointed out, Walton ends each of
his
letters (except, worryingly, the final one) with a statement that he will write
again
if he lives another day, and with his signature.[20] Each time we read this
promise
followed by Walton’s name, we know he has won another day of life
from
the uncertain and perilous future. Like Scheherazade, Walton addresses his
narration
to his sister, but the reader knows that she, like Dinarzade, is a device
Shelley
supplies to allow her audience, like Schahryar, to receive the stories
without
directly asking Walton to tell them. The state of affairs on-board
Walton’s
ship resembles the political climate of Schahryar’s Persia. “I would
sacrifice
my fortune, my existence, my every hope to the furtherance of my
enterprise,”
Walton resolves, and judges “[o]ne man’s life or death ... but a small
price
to pay for the ... knowledge which I sought.”[21] If Walton is willing to
die
for “the furtherance of [his] enterprise”, he probably values the lives of his
crew
at similar (or lesser) worth. His boundless lust for glory parallels
Schahryar’s
lust, to which the “existence” of many of his female subjects is
sacrificed.
The angry sailors, like the Persians, are beginning to hate their
irresponsible
and narcissistic despot.
Walton’s
narcissism is another characteristic he shares with Schahryar.
Both
of their destructive lusts are exclusively self-serving because they are
Rebecca Nesvet
374
apparently
at odds with the desire and well-being of other people involved, and
Walton’s
pointless mission to conquer the distant, inhospitable, and probably
agriculturally
and industrially non-productive territory of the North Pole must
prove
as barren as Schahryar’s deadly marriages, in which his wives do not live
long
enough to produce children.[22] When Frankenstein is brought on-board
Walton’s
ship, he attempts, like Scheherazade, to dissuade Walton/Schahryar
from
his selfish, unpopular, non-productive, and potentially deadly mission by
telling
his own story as a cautionary tale. When Frankenstein shares his story
with
Walton, they are both in Walton’s cabin, where Walton has put the
exhausted
invalid Frankenstein to bed. As Walton’s dating of the letters he
writes
after Frankenstein’s arrival (5, 13, and 17 August) indicates that nearly
two
weeks pass after Frankenstein is lodged in the cabin, and Walton
establishes
early that his guest is too weak and ill to be moved, it seems that
Frankenstein
never leaves the cabin (or the bed), and Walton either stays up all
night,
for several nights, watching him in it, or sleeps in the cabin with him,
neatly
paralleling the setting of the corresponding parts of the Nights story in
Schahryar’s
bedroom. In content and structure, Frankenstein’s frame mirrors that
of
the Nights.
Other
details in the novel also derive from the Nights, and Shelley draws
on
the interior tales narrated by Scheherazade as well as the frame story in
which
she appears. In comparing himself to “the Arabian who was buried with
the
dead”, as Joseph notes, Frankenstein alludes to Sinbad the Sailor, the hero of
a Nights tale
appearing in Galland’s translation and probably fabricated by
Galland.[23]
When Frankenstein’s friend Henry Clerval introduces him to
“Persian,
Arabic, and Sanscrit” literature, Frankenstein finds “not only
instruction
but consolation in the works of the Orientalists”, and digresses into
hyperbole:
Their
melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating, to a degree I never
experienced
in studying the authors of my own country. When you read of
their
writings, life seems to consist in a warm sun and a garden of roses, –
in
the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your
own
heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of ancient
Greece
and Rome![24]
As
Moussa-Mahmoud notes, Galland’s Nuits was the most famous of “the works
of
the Orientalists” and the genre of the pseudo-Oriental “tale” grew from
imitations
of the Nights. Although Frankenstein’s literary criticism seems very
subjective
and almost comically saccharine, he specifies that in the literary
traditions
of the Middle East and India, the implicitly feminine and organic
claim
a place not afforded in the “manly” classical and neoclassical traditions of
the
Western European canon. However, Shelley’s most significant appropriation
of
the Nights is probably her transplantation of the character Safie from the
Nights’ tale of
“The Callenders and the Three Women of Bagdad” into
SCHEHERAZADE AND FRANKENSTEIN
375
Frankenstein. The heroines
of this tale are three unusually resourceful sisters (the
male
protagonist is amazed to see them shop for groceries without assistance,
and
to find that they live together in a house of their own without any male
guardian)
named Zobeide, Amine, and Safie. In Frankenstein, Shelley introduces a
woman
from Arabia named Safie, who proves instrumental in the Creature’s
development.
In the de Lacey episode, the Creature recalls:
[S]ome
one tapped at the door. It was a lady on horseback ... The lady was
dressed
in a dark suit, and covered with a thick black veil ... She held out
her
hand to Felix, who kissed it rapturously, and called her ... his sweet
Arabian
... when they separated, Felix ... said, “Good night, sweet
Safie.”[25]
When
Safie travels to Europe, the Creature learns about the patterns, codes, and
rituals
that are supposed to indicate love. Then, as Felix and his father and sister
teach
Safie to speak, then read and write their language, the Creature
eavesdrops
and develops speech and literacy, and first realises his potential to
become
a civilised or enlightened member of human society. Like Schahryar,
the
Creature learns love and humanity from the overheard speech of a scholarly
Arabian
woman. By transposing Safie from “The Callenders and the Three
Women
of Bagdad” into her own narrative, Shelley links the Nights and
Frankenstein. Shelley’s
“Arabian” woman’s literal journey from her homeland in
Turkey
across Italy to Switzerland reflects the figurative journey of the Arabian
Nights from Middle
Eastern to Western European culture. The Creature explains
that
before Safie arrives in Switzerland, she and Felix meet in Paris; she
manages
to “express her thoughts in the language of her lover by the aid of an
old
man, a servant of her father, who spoke French”.[26] When Safie recites her
life
story to Felix and is overheard by the Creature, she is effectively translating
herself
into that tongue in which Galland first introduced the Nights to Europe.
Later,
on Walton’s ship, Frankenstein makes a final translation of Safie’s
recollection
into the language of the English explorer, in which it is
communicated
to Walton’s sister and Shelley’s original reading audience. This
process
exactly replicates that of the Nights’ transmission from its Arabian
origins
to French and English. In the Safie episode, Shelley depicts the process
by
which bodies of legend are transmitted between places, languages, and
cultures,
and individual storytellers, listeners, and readers.
The
depiction of Safie’s relationship with her mother and her unwitting
transmission
of her mother’s intellectual and ideological legacies to the
eavesdropping
Creature and his audience forms a fictional literary tradition
centred
around a character appropriated from the Nights and culminating with
Walton’s
transcription of Frankenstein’s confession for the edification of his
sister.
Shelley depicts the message Safie imparts as a survivalist one and
associates
it with the ideas she encountered in the writings of her own mother,
Rebecca Nesvet
376
Mary
Wollstonecraft. The Creature recalls that “the young girl”, Safie, “spoke in
high
and enthusiastic terms of her mother”, as this woman had:
taught
her to aspire to higher powers of intellect, and an independence of
spirit
forbidden to the female followers of Mahomet. This lady died, but
her
lessons were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie, who sickened at
the
prospect of again returning to Asia, and being immured in the walls of
a
haram.[27]
Like
most women of her time, Wollstonecraft was to a considerable extent
“enslaved”
by her society; however, she “spurned” such “bondage” and the
“religion”
in which she “instructed” her daughter (posthumously, through her
writing
and example) is the belief that women may “aspire to the higher powers
of
intellect ... and independence”. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),
Wollstonecraft
associated the conventional state of women in her own society
with
prevalent stereotypes of women in Islamic societies: “In a seraglio ... the
epicure
must have his palate tickled ... but have women so little ambition as to
be
satisfied with such a condition?”[28] Scheherazade, for one, is far from
devoid
of “ambition” and demonstrates a great deal of “intellect” and
“independence”.
The “religion” and survival strategy that begins with
Scheherazade
is thus passed down in two parallel lineages: from Safie’s mother
to
her daughter, and from Mary Wollstonecraft to hers. From that point, the
Creature
transmits it to Frankenstein, who repeats it to Robert Walton, who
transcribes
it in a letter to his sister Margaret Walton Saville, who has the same
initials
as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who reveals the entire story to the
readers
of Frankenstein.
Scheherazade’s
and Safie’s participation in this tradition of intellectual
pursuits
and assertion of independence allows them to survive individually and
influence
other women and men in politically beneficial ways. Conversely, in
both
Frankenstein and the Nights, the women who effect no positive changes in
their
acquaintances and societies, and are murdered, are those who do not use
their
voices; and their deaths are linked with the silencing of the human voice.
In
the Nights’ frame story, there is no recorded dialogue between Schahryar and
any
of his one-night wives; and they do not question or attempt to prevent or
forestall
their executions. When Frankenstein entreats his fiancée Elizabeth to
reserve
any questions about his strange behaviour until the morning after their
wedding,
she agrees, but, before morning, she has been killed. Exactly like
Schahryar’s
victims, Elizabeth is murdered by strangulation, which cuts off the
voice,
silencing before killing. These women are the antithesis of the archetype
of
the verbally empowered woman who British writers had identified with
Scheherazade
long before 1816. Moussa-Mahmoud notes that in 1756, Dr
Alexander
Russell wrote from Aleppo that “oriental men of fashion were lulled
to sleep
with ‘stories told out of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments ...
which their
women
were taught to repeat for that purpose’”.[29] Here, Russell suggests that
SCHEHERAZADE AND FRANKENSTEIN
377
the
Turkish women replicate Scheherazade’s performance in order not to
convince,
but to incapacitate men. Russell’s report displays anxieties about the
power
that Scheherazade-derived storytelling invests in women (and specifically
in
“Oriental” women) and takes from men.
In
Shelley’s Introduction, storytelling does not threaten men’s awareness
or
control, but it serves the female storyteller as a survival skill. The novelist
recounts
how she at last does “think of a story”:
My
imagination ... possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images
that
arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of
reverie.
I saw ... the pale student of unhallowed arts ... He would hope that,
left
to itself, the spark of life he had communicated would fade ... On the
morrow
I announced I had “thought of a story”.[30]
Shelley’s
“announcement” is the first moment in the Introduction in which she
depicts
herself speaking out loud. This is a cataclysmic moment, both in the
story
she is telling and in the development of Frankenstein as a text. In 1817, she
had
allowed her husband to write a Preface to her novel explaining the story’s
origins
in a first-person voice that appears to be hers, and to include this in the
published
version of her novel. In 1823, her father reprinted the 1818 version,
with
its Preface, and little or no intervention from her. By 1831, the “young
girl”
who wrote the original text of the novel had become a 34-year-old
established
(if still officially anonymous) author. She had published three novels
and
various other works and, since her husband’s death in 1822, had lived and
worked
in relative autonomy for nearly a decade. At that point, she seems to
have
found herself able and willing to write and publish her own explanation of
her
story’s origin.
In the
1831 Introduction, Shelley concludes that the creative process of
female
storytellers, as demonstrated by Scheherazade, can involve men, but the
storyteller’s
audience must not assume that these men have played authorial
roles.
She claims:
At
first I thought but of a few pages – a short tale, but Shelley urged me to
develop
the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of
one
incident, nor scarcely one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but
for
his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was
presented
to the world. From this declaration I must except the [1818]
Preface.
As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.[31]
She
claims that as the story grew from “a short tale” of “a few pages” to a threevolume
novel,
her future husband provided inspiration and “incitement”, but did
not
write the novel itself, and contributed only the original Preface, which she
has
since updated with her Introduction. This “incitement” mirrors
Scheherazade’s
husband’s thousand requests that she should continue her
narration,
inspiring but not informing her. These men do not determine any
Rebecca Nesvet
378
“incident”
or “train of feeling” related in the tales they hear; neither does Byron,
who
disappears from the final paragraphs of the Introduction after Shelley
answers
his challenge by finding her story.
Female
storytellers and writers have not (as Frankenstein feared of his
second,
female Creature) taken over the earth or disempowered men. On the
contrary,
too many women in Shelley’s era and more recently have found it
difficult
to launch their stories into print and public consciousness, not least
because
writing by women (like literary or cultural traditions originating outside
Western
Europe and Europeanised North America, or disseminated largely by
oral
transmission rather than in print media) has often been assumed to have no
identifiable
or relevant place in the history of English literature. However, as
Shelley
argues in the Introduction: “Invention consists in the capacity of seizing
on
the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning
ideas
suggested to it.”[32] She realised the “capabilities” of the Nights, and
fashioned
a creation myth suggested in some crucial details by characteristics of
her
source. In the relative absence of strong precedents within a unified,
wellpublicised
tradition
of female storytellers, the author of Frankenstein appropriated
the
mythical figure of Scheherazade – the storyteller-protagonist of a work
derived
from “folklore”, recorded in Arabia, translated into French, then
English,
and impossible to isolate as an exclusively “Western” or “Eastern”
cultural
creation – to “think of a story” that would become an enduring and
pervasive
legend.
Acknowledgements
Many
thanks to Ros Ballaster, David Collings, Damian Walford-Davies,
Andrew
Hadfield, and Jyoti Mohan for their encouragement and constructive
criticism.
Correspondence
Rebecca
Nesvet, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham
GL50
4AZ, United Kingdom ([email protected]).
Notes
[1]
M.K. Joseph (Ed.) (1998) Frankenstein
(Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 5.
The
novel was first published in 1818, and reissued in 1823 by William
Godwin;
the novelist seems to have had little involvement in the preparation of
this
reprint. All quotes from the novel are taken from Joseph’s edition.
[2]
Ibid., p. 8.
[3]
A.K. Mellor (1998) Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her
Fictions, Her Monsters (New York
and London:
Routledge), p. 39.
SCHEHERAZADE AND FRANKENSTEIN
379
[4]
R. Irwin (1996) The Arabian Nights: A
Companion (New York: Penguin),
pp.
10-11.
[5]
Jyoti Mohan has alerted me to the influence of Galland’s Nuits and other
examples
of “Oriental” and Orientalist literature in the works of Diderot (Les
Bijoux Indiscrets, 1748) and Montesquieu (Lettres Persanes, 1755).
[6]
F. Moussa-Mahmoud (1988) “English Travellers and the Arabian Nights”,
in
P.L.
Caracciolo (Ed.) The Arabian Nights in
English Literature (Houndsmills:
Macmillan),
p. 95.
[7]
Irwin, The Arabian Nights, pp. 263-266.
[8]
B. Alderson (1988) “Scheherazade in the Nursery”, in Caracciolo, The Arabian
Nights in English Literature, p. 84.
[9]
Mellor, Mary Shelley, p. 9.
[10]
Beckford’s Vathek is the grandson of Harun al-Rashid, the hero of several Nights
tales.
The New Arabian Nights Shelley cites is not to be confused with Robert
Louis
Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights (1882).
[11]
R. Mack (Ed.) (1995) The Arabian Nights’
Entertainments (Oxford: Oxford
University
Press), p. 9.
[12]
Ibid., p. 10.
[13]
Ibid., p. 892.
[14]
Joseph, Frankenstein, p. 7.
[15]
Ibid., p. 8.
[16]
The text’s third and last italicised complete sentence, also from the
Introduction,
is “It was on a dreary night of November” (Ibid., p. 10). The first line Shelley wrote
of
the short story that evolved into Frankenstein, this sentence is
italicised
because
it is a quote, not, apparently, for particular emphasis.
[17]
Ibid., p. 169.
[18]
Mack, The Arabian Nights’
Entertainments, p. 16.
[19]
G. O’Dea (1997) “‘Perhaps a Tales You’ll Make It’: Mary Shelley’s Tales for The
Keepsake”,
in S.M. Conger, F.S. Frank & G. O’Dea (Eds) Iconoclastic Departures:
Mary Shelley after Frankenstein (London: Associated University Presses), p. 63.
[20]
In conversation, May 2000.
[21]
Joseph, Frankenstein, p. 98.
[22]
As orthodox heterosexual morality identified the creation of legitimate
children
as
the primary or sole purpose of marriage, non-procreative sex (which
Schahryar
effectively practises until marrying Scheherazade), even within
marriage,
was conventionally judged self-centred and wasteful. In the end
bracket
of the Nights’ frame, it is revealed that over the course of the thousand
nights
Scheherazade has given birth to three children, including a son who
becomes
heir to the sultanate. Scheherazade cancels out not only the destructive
nature
of Schahryar’s desire, but also its narcissistic non-productivity.
[23]
Joseph, Frankenstein, p. 53n. Galland’s Nuits includes stories that have no
identifiable
precedent in any surviving pre-eighteenth-century text of Alf Layla
Rebecca Nesvet
380
wa-Layla. These
include “Sinbad the Sailor”, “Ali Baba” and “Aladdin”. As
countless
commentators have observed, those tales that have most pervasively
entered
the European and North American cultural consciousness are mainly
Galland’s
interpolations.
[24]
Ibid., p. 69.
[25]
Ibid., pp. 116-117.
[26]
Ibid., p. 123.
[27]
Ibid., p. 124.
[28]
S. Tomaselli (Ed.) (1995) Mary Wollstonecraft:
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (
Press),
p. 98. According to the Oxford
English Dictionary (1989), the term
“seraglio”
is defined as an “enclosure; place of confinement”. Byron (in Don Juan,
1821-24,
and elsewhere) and Percy Shelley (in
confinement
of an Ottoman ruler’s concubines in the “seraglio”.
[29]
Moussa-Mahmoud, “English Travellers”, p. 96. Here, the active role of the
woman
and the man’s vulnerability correspond to the era’s Western
stereotyping
of Asian men as languid and feminised.
[30]
Joseph, Frankenstein, p. 9.
[31]
Ibid., p. 10.
[32]
Ibid., p. 8.