A REVIEW OF JESSICA CUELLO’S YOURS, CREATURE
Yours, Creature, Jessica Cuello. Jackleg Press, 2023. 110 pages. $18.00
by Angele Ellis
The life of Mary Shelley (1797-1851), a cavalcade of Gothic and Romantic adventures and tragedies, of art and glamor, of fame and infamy, is nearly as fantastic as the novel she wrote at eighteen and published at twenty, Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. “Modern” is the operative word of the subtitle. Although the novel and its cinematic versions are ingrained in popular culture, it is time for new interpretations. Frankenstein’s tropes—science transgressing the boundaries of nature, patriarchal society’s reckless arrogance toward the rights of the vulnerable—are the stuff not only of the past, but of our imperiled present.
In Yours, Creature, her fourth full-length collection, Jessica Cuello plays on a common confusion of names: Is Frankenstein the creator or the “Creature”? In Cuello’s imaginative retelling, both. In forty-eight first person epistolary poems—in which Cuello creates a distinctive and credible Regency era voice for Mary Shelley (much as she did for the contemporary child narrators of her prizewinning third collection, Liar)—Cuello traces Shelley’s development as a person, an artist, and a woman from birth to age twenty-five.
These lyrical letters—some similar in form to unrhymed sonnets, with lines of ten to twelve syllables, a volta, and a startling two-line conclusion—are punctuated by paragraphs about Mary Shelley’s life, drawn from Cuello’s research. The letters are addressed primarily, though not exclusively, to Mary’s mother, the feminist philosopher and social reformer Mary Wollstonecraft (who died of puerperal fever just eleven days after Shelley was born).
Half-orphaned, kept at a distance by her father (the philosopher William Godwin, who wrote frankly of his late wife’s bold choices, but was strict with their daughter), harried by a difficult stepmother, raised in the company of artists and thinkers, educating herself from her father’s library, happiest when near her beloved mother’s grave—Cuello’s Mary Shelley is both natural creative and freakish curiosity, constrained by social conventions and the demands of a female body (as was her mother, for all her brilliance and bravery). She bursts into the world and from the page in “Dear Mother [I wanted to crawl],” the first poem in Yours, Creature:
Dear Mother,
I wanted to crawl back into the black interior
of you, womb scratched by an animal—
but they wouldn’t let me. I hung apart
like gallows men, dangling for sweet touch.
A line from the red radius of your womb
went dark. That night the whole of London
raised its eyes to watch the comet pass—
except for us. Instead, my currish cry & snarl,
my cuss, my cut-and-run, my cutting tooth,
made death a customhouse.
Your daughter,
Mary Shelley
“Dear Mother [I wanted to crawl]” introduces themes that Cuello revisits throughout Yours, Creature: the connection between major events in Mary Shelley’s life and omens in the natural world (here, the Comet of 1797); the gifted woman who exists in the shadow of a famous man (here, the “comet-bagging” astronomer Caroline Herschel, whose achievements were eclipsed by those of her brother William); the newborn child as destructive force, not quite human; the inescapable passage of death. The poem references hanged men—during Mary Shelley’s youth, England hanged over a hundred people a year—and the customhouse, a place where travelers, including ships carrying every kind of merchandise, had to pay tolls in order to enter a country.
Cuello’s use of the epistolary form is an inspired choice for Yours, Creature. The letters that Cuello crafts for Mary Shelley, some of which contain direct quotes from Shelley’s writing, have the urgency of and poignancy of diary entries, as if the reader has gotten inside Shelley’s head. In addition to this, they contain echoes of both Shelley’s work and her mother’s. The novel Frankenstein employs as a framing device correspondence between a ship captain and his sister. The captain writes of his rescue of Victor Frankenstein during Frankenstein’s desperate northward quest to find and kill the Creature, the events of the novel as related to him by Victor, and the tale’s heart-wrenching ending. Mary Wollstonecraft used the form in Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark—part travelogue, part social critique, but also a cry of the heart to her unnamed correspondent (Gilbert Imlay, a faithless American adventurer and the father of Mary Shelley’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay). It was this book that led William Godwin to fall in love with Wollstonecraft; Cuello references it in several of the poems in Yours, Creature that reflect and merge Wollstonecraft’s experiences with her daughter’s.
In poems such as “Dear Mother, [I am threatened]” and “Dear Scottish Time,” Cuello limns the chilling constraints of Mary Shelley’s upbringing and her desperate need to escape:
…I am threatened with a return of my girlish troubles.
[…]
In the three stories of the Skinner house my stepmother is not you.
her latch on me is fixed and I learn to regard myself
with her repulsion, fixed to the mould of her domestic eye.
(“Dear Mother, [I am threatened]”)
###
…Father sent me away—or was it stepmother?
To be sent is different from being left.
To be left is to remain in the walls
that repel you. Memory rooms
have no equilibrium. They never match
and Mine is so full of him. His turn, his back.
(“Dear Scottish Time,”)
It is not until the auspicious seventh poem of Yours, Creature that Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley makes his dashing entrance into this narrative. Mary is sixteen; Percy is twenty-one, already married and a father. He also is the scandalous author of Queen Mab, a book-length poem that advocates a communal life of vegetarianism, atheism, and free love.
Percy Shelley generously gives money to the like-minded Godwin, even though his own wealthy, titled father has cut him off, and he is living on loans. When Percy runs away with Godwin’s daughter, however, a furious Godwin rejects them both. In Cuello’s version, Percy and Mary’s romance—a story almost as familiar as Frankenstein—is told slant. Cuello suggests that Mary trades one self-absorbed man/god (genius or no) for another:
…My brain
was a carnation on a stem
made my god-of-a-father look at me:
quiet petals and silver pages
I meant to read until I was his perfect
daughter, but P. put one hand beneath
my smock and all the untouched years
responded Godwin had nothing
to hold me with I didn’t know
he’d snap me like a stem and toss me
on a pile of exile
(“Dear Mother, [Silence was my pride]”)
From the beginning, there are intimations that Percy’s utopia will become Mary’s paradise lost. The lovers, fleeing to France (where Mary Wollstonecraft had witnessed the Revolution), are joined by a third party: Mary’s stepsister Jane, who will rename herself Claire Clairmont and become intimate with both Shelley and Byron, and also by the guilty memory of Percy’s abandoned wife, Harriet:
…I kneeled
in the wet boat against
the altar of P.’s knees,
swallowed vomit & fear
to place my head there.
The forms of stepsister
beside him in the boat
and his wife at home
meant this god was like
the other gods: thin love
and absent eye
and never enough
god to go around.
(“Dear Mother, [I left father]”)
Mary’s first child with Percy—a daughter born prematurely and out of wedlock in 1815, who lives only thirteen days—stokes Mary feverish imagination, along with her haunted grief:
…I had a dream
that my little baby came to life again.
What is it to make a life
that dies—like god
it cannot stand
to stay.
[…]
and in the dream we rubbed it by the fire
and it lived.
(“Dear Mother, [I had a dream]”)
Switzerland, 1816: Enter the infamously cold Year Without a Summer—brought on by several volcanic eruptions, including that of Mount Tambor in Indonesia, the largest volcanic event in over a thousand years. Mary and Percy, along with Byron, Claire (pregnant with Byron’s child, yet another doomed daughter), and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, do their best to amuse themselves at Lake Geneva. A restless Byron—whom Polidori, in The Vampyre, will make the model for every handsome aristocratic literary vampire that follows—suggests that the company compose ghost stories. Several days later, Mary has the “waking dream” that impels her to write Frankenstein:
Dear Creature,
The sea of ice
was my favorite distraction.
…At night
when we read “Christabel,”
P. thought my nipples
were eyes. He ran away—
afraid. (“Dear Creature, [The sea of ice]”)
“Christabel” is a ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who once wrote of Mary Shelley and her sisters, “The cadaverous silence of Godwin’s children is quite catacomb-ish”—a line Cuello uses as the epigraph for her poem “Dear Mother, [Silence was my pride].” “Christabel” follows the implicitly sexual—almost vampiric—relationship between two beautiful young women, the innocent Christabel and a mysterious stranger, Geraldine. No wonder Percy Shelley is terrified.
Mary goes on living with Percy—who encourages her to expand her story and publish it as a novel—for six more tumultuous years. Mary’s quiet sister, Fanny Imlay, kills herself with laudanum in a hotel; Percy’s desperate wife, Harriet, pregnant with a lover’s child, drowns herself in a river. Mary and Percy marry and teeter on the edge of respectability, although they are ruled unfit to take custody of Percy’s son and daughter by Harriet. Mary suffers three more childbirths and the deaths of two of those children in infancy, along with a miscarriage, nearly expiring before Percy stanches the bleeding by placing her in an ice bath. (Again, as Cuello puts it, the appearance of “Arctic ice” in Shelley’s life and work.)
Mary is not quite twenty-five when Percy and a friend perish in a boating accident in Italy. His friends wolfishly claim pieces of him before burning his body on the beach, leaving Mary with only the lump of Percy’s heart—symbolic of their complex relationship and her then calcified reputation:
…Trelawny took a jawbone.
Leigh Hunt broke off
another piece of bone.
Pieces of a man to men.
What didn’t burn was in his chest.
A tug of tissue, a knot of grief
and still I had to beg
for what was mine. (“Dear Mother, [I sailed with P.]”)
In her poem “Dear Creature [After everyone forgot],” Cuello prefigures the next twenty-eight years of Mary Shelley’s life, during which Mary publishes three more novels, edits her husband’s and father’s writings, and raises her sole remaining child, Percy Florence Shelley, refusing to relinquish him to Percy’s unforgiving father. She endures. She may triumph.
…After everyone forgot the summer without a summer
I still had the ice indelible
and your parceled face
shifting in visible heat.
I was making sentences for dear life
and also money. I would know
its particular uncertainty
my whole life.
[…]
I could sketch out life
or snuff its current.
Angele Ellis’s work, including book reviews, has been published widely, and has appeared on a movie theater marquee (winning Pittsburgh Filmmakers G-20 Haiku Contest). She is author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery), whose poems on heritage earned a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Spared (A Main Street Rag Editor’s Choice Chapbook), and Under the Kaufmann’s Clock (Six Gallery), a short fiction/poetry hybrid inspired by her adopted city of Pittsburgh.