the strangest tale that ever imagination formed
There may be an element of self-puffery by Mary Shelley in this statement,
yet it is surprisingly prescient in its sense of the cultural impact her
novel was to have. Moreover, it is entirely consistent with the way both
she and her husband represented the work to its public. Percy Bysshe
Shelley, writing the Preface to
the
original edition of Frankenstein, distanced this novel from any
attempt at "merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors," insisting on
its adherence to the higher aims of the "imagination." Similarly, Mary
Shelley, in writing the Introduction to the
third edition, stresses how in its initial conception her
"imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided" her. That all these
statements are congruent with one another and with an exalted notion of
the Romantic imagination, however, cannot alter the ironic context in
which this particular phrase is uttered. In the previous paragraph we
have been observing Victor Frankenstein, who was once swept along by his
imagination to create a deformed and alienated being, revising with
soberly rational care his account of that act and its consequences. The
actual context for this phrase in the novel would thus appear to offset
its perhaps expected paean to the imagination.
