Switzerland and Mary Shelley
...and her mom
A book to read: MARY’S MONSTER: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge
I just want to write about Switzerland.
I know the obvious book choice here would be HEIDI, but I’m going with MARY’S MONSTER because I love this book and pieces of it are indeed in Switzerland.
This book is straight out of a teenager’s twisted nightmares. It’s a story-in-verse (aka, each page is kinda like it’s own tiny story, but with extra lyrical writing) about Mary’s Shelley’s terrible life. Her mother is dead, her own babies die, she is usually poor, her married lover sleeps with her sister, and she literally walks through war-torn France to get to the Swiss Alps.
This all happens before her eighteenth birthday. Somewhere in there she also wrote Frankenstein, although most of her creative energy was wrapped up in editing her lover’s work. Ugh. Stupid Percy Shelley.
Buy a copy of this book to enjoy, and then pass it on to the most gothic and/or horror-obsessed teenager you know. They’ll eat it up. For more on Mary Shelley, check out Jillian Hess’s essay here on Substack.
A place to explore: Interlaken, Switzerland
Several years ago my then five-year-old daughter randomly announced that she wanted to live in a tiny house in Switzerland when she grew up. Being the supportive parent that I am, who also desperately wanted to go to Europe, I started vacation planning. COVID gave me time to save money and plan, and we set off during the summer of 2023. Our trip ballooned to include Paris (my other daughter’s dream locale), Belgium (because I’m writing a book set in Antwerp and Brussels), Germany (because I wanted to run a marathon there), and Milan (because it’s the cheapest city to fly out of).
Like Mary and Percy’s trip, our time in Switzerland also involved a lake, some mountains, and a couple of thunderstorms. Other than that, we had completely separate experiences. Let’s compare:
RAIN
We were out exploring Lauterbrunnen when our second thunderstorm of the trip dumped down upon us. I opted to troll my children by singing cheerful songs about rain while filming them. They were not amused. We waited out the storm in a gift kiosk.
Mary Shelley opted to stay inside during rain storms and listen to Lord Byron get increasingly creepy. Sadly, we did not tell ghost stories during thunderstorms. Next time.
LAKES
I am obsessed with lakes. O.B.S.E.S.S.E.D. I love swimming in them, paddle boarding on them, and staring at them all day. Oceans are magnificent and rivers have a wild beauty, but lakes are my favorite.
On a train ride from Grindelwald to Interlaken, I got into a conversation with an elderly lady who was en route to Lake Thun. She went there daily to swim in the summer. (In the winter, she goes skiing daily.) In 2063, I hope I’m the kind of 80 year old who swims in cold lakes all summer long. She was a delight to talk with. I loved her and all the “elderly” women like her who were busily hiking up mountains and swimming in lakes.
Behold! Lake Thun! We stayed a couple of miles away from the lake so a couple of times I ran to the local beach, went for a swim, and ran back home. What a glorious way to spend an evening.
Apparently, Mary Shelley also appreciated lakes with emerald water. I’m a little jealous that she got to go sailing. We took a lake cruise one day, which was lovely, but nothing beats sailing.
HOTEL
We stayed at an adorable AirBnB apartment in Interlaken, just steps away from restaurants, a grocery store, the train station, and the canal connecting the two lakes. While Interlaken isn’t the most idyllic place in Switzerland (it’s a busy, super-touristy town), the location was great for us because it was in the middle of everything we wanted to do. Somedays we took the train West to explore the nearby towns of Thun and Bern. Somedays we took the train East to explore the mountain towns of Grimmelwald, Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, and Wengen. Somedays we stayed in town and took the kids to the public pool, the lakeshore, or up the funicular to the top of the town’s little mountain.
As much as I loved our digs in Interlaken, Mary Shelley wins this round. She hung out in Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva, which Lord Byron had rented for the summer. Our apartment was cool and all that, but it was no Villa.
WRITING
Note how there is zero writing paraphernalia in my little coffee-on-the-balcony picture above. Despite my best intentions, I did very little writing in Europe. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, wrote a novel that singlehandedly kicked off the science fiction genre. Do I feel jealous that a tortured teen way way more productive than me whilst in Switzerland? Yes.
A lesson to teach: Mary Wollstonecraft, the Enlightenment, and Gender Equality in Education
As a history teacher, I spend much more time discussing Mary Shelley’s mother than the author of FRANKENSTEIN. Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Mary Shelley.
I teach Mary Wollstonecraft as part of my unit on Enlightenment thinkers. Wollstonecraft translated tons of books, opened up a school for girls, wrote a history of the French Revolution, and hung out with Voltaire.
I teach the Enlightenment by highlighting a few Enlightenment thinkers, distilling (bastardizing, you could argue) their thoughts down to one single idea. Then, I have students think about how that ideal is showing up in America. Is John Locke’s idea of equality working out in America today? What about Voltaire’s idea of free speech or Martin Luther’s idea of separation between Church and State?
Mary Wollstonecraft’s big idea (the big idea I highlight anyway) is that if boys and girls receive an equal education (as they should), they will soon become equals in society. I give my students a few sentences from her VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN to exemplify this concept. Here is a link to the book if you want to read the entirety of Wollstonecraft’s work.
Then we look at some data to see how this is turning out in America. It seems to be the case that girls are actually receiving a better education than boys these days. (Although teachers are still more likely to talk to boys in class and allow boys to talk over the class. Also, students will definitely want to talk about nonbinary students, whose educational outcomes are a bit tougher to get statistics for.) However, even though girls have been outperforming boys in K-12 schools and at the college level, one could argue that this has not led to equality in the workplace or in government. I usually print out the articles linked above and then cut the graphs out of the articles. Then, students complete a “chalk talk” about each graph. This information is great fodder for both Socratic Seminar discussions and essays.
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Oh my, this sounds terrific (all of it! Mary's Monster to Switzerland!)