title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: During filming, then-21-year-old Bottin was hospitalized for exhaustion, double pneumonia, and a bleeding ulcer, caused by his extensive workload. Bottin himself explained he would "hoard the work", opting to be directly involved in many of the complicated tasks. His dedication to the project saw him spend over a year living on the Universal lot. Bottin said he did not take a day off during that time and slept on the sets or in locker rooms. To take some pressure off his crew, Bottin enlisted the aid of special effects creator Stan Winston to complete some of the designs, primarily the Dog-Thing. With insufficient time to create a sophisticated mechanical creature, Winston opted to create a hand puppet. A cast was made of makeup artist Lance Anderson's arm and head, around which the Dog-Thing was sculpted in oil-based clay. The final foam-latex puppet, worn by Anderson, featured radio-controlled eyes and cable-controlled legs, and was operated from below a raised set on which the kennel was built. Slime from the puppet would leak onto Anderson during the two days it took to film the scene, and he had to wear a helmet to protect himself from the explosive squibs simulating gunfire. Anderson pulled the tentacles into the Dog-Thing and reverse motion was used to create the effect of them slithering from its body. Winston refused to be credited for his work, insisting that Bottin deserved sole credit; Winston was given a "thank you" in the credits instead.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: In the "chest chomp" scene, Dr. Copper attempts to revive Norris with a defibrillator. Revealing himself as the Thing, Norris-Thing's chest transforms into a large mouth that severs Copper's arms. Bottin accomplished this scene by recruiting a double amputee and fitting him with prosthetic arms filled with wax bones, rubber veins and Jell-O. The arms were then placed into the practical "stomach mouth" where the mechanical jaws clamped down on them, at which point the actor pulled away, severing the false arms. The effect of the Norris-Thing's head detaching from the body to save itself took many months of testing before Bottin was satisfied enough to film it. The scene involved a fire effect, but the crew were unaware that fumes from the rubber foam chemicals inside the puppet were flammable. The fire ignited the fumes, creating a large fireball that engulfed the puppet. It suffered only minimal damage after the fire had been put out, and the crew successfully filmed the scene. Stop-motion expert Randall William Cook developed a sequence for the end of the film where MacReady is confronted by the gigantic Blair-Thing. Cook created a miniature model of the set and filmed wide-angle shots of the monster in stop motion, but Carpenter was not convinced by the effect and used only a few seconds of it. It took fifty people to operate the actual Blair-Thing puppet.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The production intended to use a camera centrifugea rotating drum with a fixed camera platformfor the Palmer-Thing scene, allowing him to seem to run straight up the wall and across the ceiling. Again, the cost was too high and the idea abandoned for a stuntman falling into frame onto a floor made to look like the outpost's ceiling. Stuntman Anthony Cecere stood in for the Palmer-Thing after MacReady sets it on fire and it crashes through the outpost wall.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Cundey worked with Bottin to determine the appropriate lighting for each creature. He wanted to show off Bottin's work because of its details, but he was conscious that showing too much would reveal its artificial nature, breaking the illusion. Each encounter with the creature was planned for areas where they could justify using a series of small lights to highlight the particular creature-model's surface and textures. Cundey would illuminate the area behind the creature to detail its overall shape. He worked with Panasonic and a few other companies to develop a camera capable of automatically adjusting light exposure at different film speeds. He wanted to try filming the creature at fast and slow speeds thinking this would create a more interesting visual effect, but they were unable to accomplish this at the time. For the rest of the set, Cundey created a contrast by lighting the interiors with warmer lights hung overhead in conical shades so that they could still control the lighting and have darkened areas on set. The outside was constantly bathed in a cold, blue light that Cundey had discovered being used on airport runways. The reflective surface of the snow and the blue light helped create the impression of coldness. The team also made use of the flamethrowers and magenta-hued flares used by the actors to create dynamic lighting.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The team originally wanted to shoot the film in black and white, but Universal was reluctant as it could affect their ability to sell the television rights for the film. Instead, Cundey suggested muting the colors as much as possible. The inside of the sets were painted in neutral colors such as gray, and many of the props were also painted gray, while the costumes were a mix of somber browns, blues, and grays. They relied on the lighting to add color. Albert Whitlock provided matte-painted backdrops, including the scene in which the Americans discover the giant alien spaceship buried in the ice. A scene where MacReady walks up to a hole in the ice where the alien had been buried was filmed at Universal, while the surrounding area, including the alien spaceship, helicopter, and snow, were all painted.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Carpenter's friend John Wash, who developed the opening computer simulation for "Escape from New York", designed the computer program showing how the Thing assimilates other organisms. Model maker Susan Turner built the alien ship approaching Earth in the pre-credits sequence, which featured 144 strobing lights. Drew Struzan designed the film's poster. He completed it in 24 hours, based only on a briefing, knowing little about the film.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The lack of information about the film's special effects drew the attention of film exhibitors in early 1982. They wanted reassurance that "The Thing" was a first-rate production capable of attracting audiences. Cohen and Foster, with a specially employed editor and Universal's archive of music, put together a 20-minute showreel emphasizing action and suspense. They used available footage, including alternate and extended scenes not in the finished film, but avoided revealing the special effects as much as possible. The reaction from the exclusively male exhibitors was generally positive, and Universal executive Robert Rehme told Cohen that the studio was counting on "The Thing"s success, as they expected "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" to appeal only to children. While finalizing the film, Universal sent Carpenter a demographic study showing that the audience appeal of horror films had declined by seventy percent over the previous six months. Carpenter considered this a suggestion that he lower his expectations of the film's performance. After one market research screening, Carpenter queried the audience on their thoughts, and one audience member asked, "Well what happened in the very end? Which one was the Thing...?" When Carpenter responded that it was up to their imagination, the audience member responded, "Oh, God. I hate that."


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: After returning from a screening of "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", the audience's silence at a "The Thing" trailer caused Foster to remark, "We're dead". The response to public pre-screenings of "The Thing" resulted in the studio changing the somber, black-and-white advertising approved by the producers to a color image of a person with a glowing face. The tagline was also changed from "Man is the warmest place to hide"written by Stephen Frankfort, who wrote the "Alien" tagline, "In space, no one can hear you scream"to "The ultimate in alien terror", trying to capitalize on "Alien"s audience. Carpenter attempted to make a last-minute change of the film's title to "Who Goes There?", to no avail. The week before its release, Carpenter promoted the film with clips on "Late Night with David Letterman". In 1981, horror magazine "Fangoria" held a contest encouraging readers to submit drawings of what the Thing would look like. Winners were rewarded with a trip to Universal Studios. On its opening day, a special screening was held at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre, presided over by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, with free admission for those in costume as monsters.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Thing" was released in the United States on June 25, 1982. During its opening weekend, the film earned $3.1million from 840 theatersan average of $3,699 per theaterfinishing as the number eight film of the weekend behind supernatural horror "Poltergeist" ($4.1million), which was in its fourth weekend of release, and ahead of action film "Megaforce" ($2.3million). It dropped out of the top10 grossing films after three weeks, and ended its run earning a total of $19.6million against its $15million budget, making it only the 42nd highest-grossing film of 1982. It was not a box office failure, nor was it a hit.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The film received negative reviews on its release, and hostility for its cynical, anti-authoritarian tone and graphic special effects. Some reviewers were dismissive of the film, calling it the "quintessential moron movie of the 80's", "instant junk", and a "wretched excess". "Starlog"s Alan Spencer called it a "cold and sterile" horror movie attempting to cash in on the genre audience, against the "optimism of "E.T.", the reassuring return of "Star Trek II", the technical perfection of "Tron", and the sheer integrity of "Blade Runner"".


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The plot was criticized as "boring", and undermined by the special effects. The "Los Angeles Times"s Linda Gross said that "The Thing" was "bereft, despairing, and nihilistic", and lacking in feeling, meaning the characters' deaths did not matter. Spencer said it featured sloppy continuity, lacked pacing, and was devoid of warmth or humanity. David Ansen of "Newsweek" felt the film confused the use of effects with creating suspense, and that it lacked drama by "sacrificing everything at the altar of gore". The "Chicago Reader"s Dave Kehr considered the dialogue to be banal and interchangeable, making the characters seem and sound alike. "The Washington Post"s Gary Arnold said it was a witty touch to open with the Thing having already overcome the Norwegian base, defeating the type of traps seen in the 1951 version, while "New York"s David Denby lamented that the Thing's threat is shown only externally, without focusing on what it is like for someone who thinks they have been taken over. Roger Ebert considered the film to be scary, but offering nothing original beyond the special effects, while "The New York Times"s Vincent Canby said it was entertaining only if the viewer needed to see spider-legged heads and dog autopsies.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Reviews of the actors' performances were generally positive, while criticizing the depictions of the characters they portrayed. Ebert said they lacked characterization, offering basic stereotypes that existed just to be killed, and Spencer called the characters bland even though the actors do the best they can with the material. "Time"s Richard Schickel singled Russell out as the "stalwart" hero, where other characters were not as strongly or wittily characterized, and "Variety" said that Russell's heroic status was undercut by the "suicidal" attitude adopted toward the film's finale. Other reviews criticized implausibilities such as characters wandering off alone. Kehr did not like that the men did not band together against the Thing, and several reviews noted a lack of camaraderie and romance, which Arnold said reduced any interest beyond the special effects.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The film's special effects were simultaneously lauded and lambasted for being technically brilliant but visually repulsive and excessive. "Cinefantastique" wrote that the Thing "may be the most unloved monster in movie history... but it's also the most incredible display of special effects makeup in at least a decade." Reviews called Bottin's work "genius", noting the designs were novel, unforgettable, "colorfully horrific", and called him a "master of the macabre". Arnold said that the "chest chomp" scene demonstrated "appalling creativity" and the subsequent severed head scene was "madly macabre", comparing them to "Alien"s chest burster and severed head scenes. "Variety" called it "the most vividly gruesome horror film to ever stalk the screens". Conversely, Denby called them more disgusting than frightening and lamented that the trend of horror films to open the human body more and more bordered on obscenity. Spencer said that Bottin's care and pride in his craft were shown in the effects, but both they and Schickel found them to be overwhelming and "squandered" without strong characters and story. Even so, Canby said that the effects were too "phony looking to be disgusting". Canby and Arnold said the creature's lack of a single, discernible shape was to its detriment, and hiding it inside humans made it hard to follow. Arnold said that the 1951 version was less versatile but easier to keep in focus.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Gross and Spencer praised the film's technical achievements, particularly Cundey's "frostbitten" cinematography, the sound, editing, and Morricone's score. Spencer was critical of Carpenter's direction, saying it was his "futile" attempt to give the audience what he thinks they want and that Carpenter was not meant to direct science fiction, but was instead suited to direct "traffic accidents, train wrecks, and public floggings". Ansen said that "atrocity for atrocity's sake" was ill-becoming of Carpenter.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Thing" was often compared to similar films, particularly "Alien", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978), and "The Thing from Another World". Ebert and Denby said that "The Thing" seemed derivative compared to those films, which had portrayed the story in a better way. "Variety" called it inferior to the 1951 version. Arnold considered "The Thing" as the result of "Alien" raising the requirement for horrific spectacle.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Thing from Another World" actor Kenneth Tobey and director Christian Nyby also criticized the film. Nyby said, "If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse... All in all, it's a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch". Tobey singled out the visual effects, saying they "were so explicit that they actually destroyed how you were supposed to feel about the characters... They became almost a movie in themselves, and were a little too horrifying." In Phil Hardy's 1984 book "Science Fiction", a reviewer described the film as a "surprising failure" and called it "Carpenter's most unsatisfying film to date". The review noted that the narrative "seems little more than an excuse for the various set-pieces of special effects and Russell's hero is no more than a cypher compared to Tobey's rounded character in Howard Hawks' "The Thing"". Clennon said that introductory scenes for the characters, omitted from the film, made it hard for audiences to connect with them, robbing it of some of the broader appeal of "Alien".


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Thing" received nominations from the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films for Best Horror Film and Best Special Effects, but lost to "Poltergeist" and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial", respectively. The film was nominated at the Razzie Awards for Worst Musical Score.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Since its release, cultural historians and critics have attempted to understand what led to "The Thing"s initial failure to connect with audiences. In a 1999 interview, Carpenter said audiences rejected "The Thing" for its nihilistic, depressing viewpoint at a time when the United States was in the midst of a recession. When it opened, it was competing against the critically and commercially successful "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" ($619million), a family-friendly film released two weeks earlier that offered a more optimistic take on alien visitation. Carpenter described it as the complete opposite of his film. "The Thing" opened on the same day as the science fiction film "Blade Runner", which debuted as the number two film that weekend with a take of $6.1million and went on to earn $33.8million. It was also regarded as a critical and commercial failure at the time.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Others blamed an oversaturation of science fiction and fantasy films released that year, including "Conan the Barbarian" ($130million), "Poltergeist" ($121.7million), "" ($97million), "Mad Max 2" ($34.5million), and "Tron" ($33million). Some analysts blamed Universal's poor marketing, which did not compete with the deluge of promotion for prominent films released that summer. Another factor was the R rating it was given, restricting the audience to those over the age of 17 unless accompanied by an adult. In contrast, "Poltergeist", another horror film, received a PG rating, allowing families and younger children to view it.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The impact on Carpenter was immediatehe lost the job of directing the 1984 science fiction horror film "Firestarter" because of "The Thing"s poor performance. His previous success had gained him a multiple-film contract at Universal, but the studio opted to buy him out of it instead. He continued making films afterward but lost confidence, and did not openly talk about "The Thing"s failure until a 1985 interview with "Starlog", where he said, "I was called 'a pornographer of violence'... I had no idea it would be received that way... "The Thing" was just too strong for that time. I knew it was going to be strong, but I didn't think it would be too strong... I didn't take the public's taste into consideration." Shortly after its release, Wilbur Stark sued Universal for $43million for "slander, breach of contract, fraud and deceit", alleging he incurred a financial loss by Universal failing to credit him properly in its marketing and by showing his name during the end credits, a less prestigious position. Stark also said that he "contributed greatly to the [screenplay]". David Foster responded that Stark was not involved with the film's production in any way, and received proper credit in all materials. Stark later sued for a further $15million over Foster's comments. The outcome of the lawsuits is unknown.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: While "The Thing" was not initially successful, it was able to find new audiences and appreciation on home video, and later on television. Sidney Sheinberg edited a version of the film for network television broadcast, which added narration and a different ending, where the Thing imitates a dog and escapes the ruined camp. Carpenter disowned this version, and theorized that Sheinberg had been mad at him for not taking his creative ideas on board for the theatrical cut.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Thing" was released on DVD in 1998 and featured additional content, such as "The Thing: Terror Takes Shape"a detailed documentary on the production, deleted and alternate scenes, and commentary by Carpenter and Russell. An HD DVD version followed in 2006 containing the same features, and a Blu-ray version in 2008 featuring just the Carpenter and Russell commentary, and some behind-the-scenes videos available via picture-in-picture during the film. A 2016 Blu-ray release featured a 2K resolution restoration of the film, overseen by Dean Cundey. As well as including previous features such as the commentary and "Terror Takes Shape", it added interviews with the cast and crew, and segments that focus on the music, writing, editing, Ploog's artwork, an interview with Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the film's novelization, and the television broadcast version of "The Thing" that runs fifteen minutes shorter than the theatrical cut. A 4K resolution restoration was released in 2017 on Blu-ray, initially as a United Kingdom exclusive with a limited run of eight thousand units. The restoration was created using the original film negative, and was overseen by Carpenter and Cundey. A 4KUltra HD Blu-ray was released in September 2021.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: MCA released the soundtrack for "The Thing" in 1982. Varèse Sarabande re-released it in 1991 on compact disc and Compact Cassette. These versions eventually ceased being manufactured. In 2011, Howarth and Larry Hopkins restored Morricone's score using updated digital techniques and arranged each track in the order it appears in the film. The album also includes tracks composed by Carpenter and Howarth for the film. A remastered version of the score was released on vinyl on February 23, 2017; a deluxe edition included an exclusive interview with Carpenter. In May 2020, an extended play (EP), "Lost Cues: The Thing", was released. The EP contains Carpenter's contributions to "The Thing"s score; he re-recorded the music because the original masterings were lost.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: A novelization of the film was published by Alan Dean Foster in 1982. It is based on an earlier draft of the script and features some differences from the finished film. A scene in which MacReady, Bennings, and Childs chase infected dogs out into the snow is included, and Nauls's disappearance is explained: Cornered by the Blair-Thing, he chooses suicide over assimilation.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: In 2000, McFarlane Toys released two "Movie Maniacs" figures: the Blair-Thing and the Norris-Thing, including its spider-legged, disembodied head. SOTA Toys released a set featuring a MacReady figure and the Dog-Thing based on the film's kennel scene, as well as a bust of the Norris-Thing's spider-head. In 2017, Mondo and the Project Raygun division of USAopoly released "The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31", a board game. Players take on the role of characters from the film or the Thing, each aiming to defeat the other through subterfuge and sabotage.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The central theme of "The Thing" concerns paranoia and mistrust. Fundamentally, the film is about the erosion of trust in a small community, instigated by different forms of paranoia caused by the possibility of someone not being who they say they are, or that your best friend may be your enemy. It represents the distrust that humans always have for somebody else and the fear of betrayal by those we know and, ultimately, our bodies. The theme remains timely because the subject of paranoia adapts to the age. "The Thing" focuses on being unable to trust one's peers, but this can be interpreted as distrust of entire institutions.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Developed in an era of cold-war tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the film refers to the threat of nuclear annihilation by mutually assured destruction. "Diabolique"s Daniel Clarkson Fisher notes that MacReady destroys the chess computer after being checkmate, and similarly vows to destroy the Thing, even at the expense of the team. The Cold War-style isolationism hurts the group, while a lack of trust destroys it. "Screen Rant"s Michael Edward Taylor draws allusions between "The Thing" and the accusatory Red Scares and McCarthyism, as the film conveys an anti-communist fear of infection of civilized areas that will lead to assimilation and imitation. "Slant Magazine"s John Lingsan said the men display a level of post-Vietnam War (1955–1975) "fatigued counterculturalism"the rejection of conventional social norms, each defined by their own eccentricities.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: "The Atlantic"s Noah Berlatsky said that unlike typical horror genre films, women are excluded, allowing the Thing to be identified as a fear of not being a man, or being homosexual. "Vice"s Patrick Marlborough considered "The Thing" to be a "scathing examination" of manliness, noting that identifying the Thing requires intimacy, confession, and empathy to out the creature, but "male frailty" prevents this as an option. Trapped by pride and stunted emotional growth, the men are unable to confront the truth out of fear of embarrassment or exposure. Berlatsky noted that MacReady avoids emotional attachments and is the most paranoid, allowing him to be the hero. This detachment works against him in the finale, which leaves MacReady locked in a futile mistrust with Childs, each not really knowing the other.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Nerdist's Kyle Anderson and "Strange Horizons"s Orrin Grey analyzed "The Thing" as an example of author H. P. Lovecraft's cosmic horror. Anderson's analysis includes the idea of cosmic horror in large part coming "from the fear of being overtaken," connecting it to Lovecraft's xenophobia and Blair's character arc of becoming what he most fears. In contrast, Anderson compares Blair to MacReady, who represents a more traditional Hollywood film protagonist. Grey describes the creature as fear of the loss of self. using Blair's character as an example. Discussing The Thing in the context of the first of three films in Carpenter's "", Grey states the threat the monster poses to the world "is less disconcerting than the threat posed to the individual concept of self."


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The Thing never speaks or gives a motive for its actions, and ruthlessly pursues its goal. "Den of Geek"s Mark Harrison and Ryan Lambie said that the essence of humanity is free will, which is stripped away by the Thing, possibly without the individual being aware that they have been taken over. In a 1982 interview, when given the option to describe "The Thing" as "pro-science" like "Who Goes There?" or "anti-science" like "The Thing from Another World", Carpenter chose "pro-human", stating, "It's better to be a human being than an imitation, or let ourselves be taken over by this creature who's not necessarily evil, but whose nature it is to simply imitate, like a chameleon." Further allusions have been drawn between the blood-test scene and the epidemic of HIV at the time, which could be identified only by a blood test.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Since its release, many theories have been developed to attempt to answer the film's ambiguous ending shared by MacReady and Childs. Several suggest that Childs was infected, citing Dean Cundey's statement that he deliberately provided a subtle illumination to the eyes of uninfected characters, something absent from Childs. Similarly, others have noted a lack of visible breath from the character in the frigid air. While both aspects are present in MacReady, their absence in Childs has been explained as a technical issue with the filming. During production, Carpenter considered having MacReady be infected, and an alternate ending showed MacReady having been rescued and definitively tested as uninfected. Russell has said that analyzing the scene for clues is "missing the point". He continued, "[Carpenter] and I worked on the ending of that movie together a long time. We were both bringing the audience right back to square one. At the end of the day, that was the position these people were in. They just didn't know anything... They didn't know if they knew who they were... I love that, over the years, that movie has gotten its due because people were able to get past the horrificness of the monster... to see what the movie was about, which was paranoia." However, Carpenter has teased, "Now, I do know, in the end, who the Thing is, but I cannot tell you."


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: In the years following its release, critics and fans have reevaluated "The Thing" as a milestone of the horror genre. A prescient review by Peter Nicholls in 1992 called "The Thing" "a black, memorable film [that] may yet be seen as a classic". It has been called one of the best films directed by Carpenter. John Kenneth Muir called it "Carpenter's most accomplished and underrated directorial effort", and critic Matt Zoller Seitz said it "is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made".


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Trace Thurman described it as one of the best films ever, and in 2008, "Empire" magazine selected it as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time, at number 289, calling it "a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror". It is now considered to be one of the greatest horror films ever made, and a classic of the genre. Several publications have called it one of the best films of 1982, including Filmsite.org, Film.com, and "Entertainment Weekly". Muir called it "the best science fiction-horror film of 1982, an incredibly competitive year, and perhaps even the best genre motion picture of the decade". "Complex" named it the ninth-best of the decade, calling it the "greatest genre remake of all time". Numerous publications have ranked it as one of the best science fiction films, including number four by "IGN" (2016); number12 by "Thrillist" (2018); number17 by "GamesRadar+" (2018); number 31 by "Paste" (2018); number 32 by "Esquire" (2015) and "Popular Mechanics" (2017); and number 76 by Rotten Tomatoes (2017) based on its average review score.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Similarly, "The Thing" has appeared on several lists of the top horror films, including number one by "The Boston Globe"; number two by Bloody Disgusting (2018); number four by "Empire" (2016); and number six by "Time Out" (2016). "Empire" listed its poster as the 43rd best film poster ever. In 2016, the British Film Institute named it one of ten great films about aliens visiting Earth. It was voted the ninth best horror film of all time in a "Rolling Stone" readers poll, and is considered one of the best examples of body horror. "GamesRadar+" listed its ending as one of the 25 best of all time. Contemporary review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 83% of 75 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 7.40/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Grimmer and more terrifying than the 1950s take, John Carpenter's "The Thing" is a tense sci-fi thriller rife with compelling tension and some remarkable make-up effects." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 57 out of 100 based on 13 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: In a 2011 interview, Carpenter remarked that it was perhaps his favorite film from his own filmography. He lamented that it took a long time for "The Thing" to find a wider audience, saying, "If "The Thing" had been a hit, my career would have been different. I wouldn't have had to make the choices that I made. But I needed a job. I'm not saying I hate the movies I did. I loved making "Christine" (1983) and "Starman" (1984) and "Big Trouble in Little China" (1986), all those films. But my career would have been different."


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The film has had a significant impact on popular culture, and by 1998, "The Thing" was already considered a cult classic. It is listed in the film reference book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", which says "one of the most influential horror movies of the 1980s, much imitated but rarely bettered... It is one of the first films to unflinchingly show the rupture and warp of flesh and bone into grotesque tableaus of surreal beauty, forever raising the bar of cinematic horror." It has been referred to in a variety of media, from television (including "The X-Files", "Futurama", and "Stranger Things") to games ("Resident Evil 4", "Tomb Raider III", "", and "Among Us"), and films ("The Faculty", "Slither", "The Mist").


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Several filmmakers have spoken of their appreciation for "The Thing" or cited its influence on their own work, including Guillermo del Toro, James DeMonaco, J. J. Abrams, Neill Blomkamp, David Robert Mitchell, Rob Hardy, Steven S. DeKnight, and Quentin Tarantino. In 2011, "The New York Times" asked prominent horror filmmakers what film they had found the scariest. Two, John Sayles and Edgar Wright, cited "The Thing". The 2015 Tarantino film "The Hateful Eight" takes numerous cues from "The Thing", from featuring Russell in a starring role, to replicating themes of paranoia and mistrust between characters restricted to a single location, and even duplicating certain angles and layouts used by Carpenter and Cundey. Pieces of Morricone's unused score for "The Thing" were repurposed for "The Hateful Eight". Tarantino also cited "The Thing" as an inspiration for his 1992 film "Reservoir Dogs".


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The film is screened annually in February to mark the beginning of winter at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station. In January 2010, "Clarkesworld Magazine" published "The Things", a short story by Peter Watts told from the Thing's point of view; it is unable to understand why humans are hostile toward it and horrified to learn that they do not shapeshift. The story received a 2011 Hugo Award nomination. In 2017, a 400-page art book was released featuring art inspired by "The Thing", with contributions from 350 artists, a foreword by director Eli Roth, and an afterword by Carpenter.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: The 2007 Halloween Horror Nights event at Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, featured "The Thing: Assimilation", a haunted attraction based on the film. The attraction included MacReady and Childs, both held in stasis, the Blair-Thing and the outpost kennel.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Dark Horse Comics published four comic book sequels starring MacReady, beginning in December 1991 with the two-part "The Thing from Another World" by Chuck Pfarrer, which is set 24 hours after the film. Pfarrer was reported to have pitched his comic tale to Universal as a sequel in the early 1990s. This was followed by the four-part "The Thing from Another World: Climate of Fear" in July 1992, the four-part "The Thing from Another World: Eternal Vows" in December 1993, and "The Thing from Another World: Questionable Research". In 1999, Carpenter said that no serious discussions had taken place for a sequel, but he would be interested in basing one on Pfarrer's adaptation, calling the story a worthy sequel. A 2002 video game of the same name was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, and Xbox to generally favorable reviews. The game's plot follows a team of U.S. soldiers investigating the aftermath of the film's events.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: In 2005, the Syfy channel planned a four-hour miniseries sequel produced by Frank Darabont and written by David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick. The story followed a Russian team who recover the corpses of MacReady and Childs, as well as remnants of the Thing. The story moves forward 23 years, where the Thing escapes in New Mexico, and follows the attempts at containment. The project never proceeded, and Universal opted to continue with a feature film sequel. A prequel film, also titled "The Thing", was released in October 2011 to a $31million worldwide box office gross and mixed reviews. The story follows the events after the Norwegian team discovers the Thing. In 2020, Universal Studios and Blumhouse Productions announced the development of a remake of Carpenter's "The Thing". The remake was described as incorporating elements of "The Thing from Another World" and "The Thing", as well as the novella "Who Goes There?" and its expanded version "Frozen Hell", which features several additional chapters.


title: The Thing (1982 film)

text: Although released years apart, and unrelated in terms of plot, characters, crew, or even production studios, Carpenter considers "The Thing" to be the first installment in his "Apocalypse Trilogy", a series of films based around cosmic horror, entities unknown to man, that are threats to both human life and the sense of self. "The Thing" was followed by "Prince of Darkness" in 1987, and "In the Mouth of Madness" in 1994. All three films are heavily influenced by Carpenter's appreciation for the works of Lovecraft.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: XXX: State of the Union (released as XXX: The Next Level and XXX: State of Emergency outside North America) is a 2005 American action spy film directed by Lee Tamahori and a sequel to the 2002 film "XXX". It is the second installment of the "XXX


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: Vin Diesel and Rob Cohen, the lead actor and director of the original, had signed onto a sequel before the first film had opened, but both dropped out over scripting issues, while Cohen worked on "Stealth". Cohen remained as an executive producer. Ice Cube took over the lead role as the new Triple X agent and Tamahori was brought in to direct, following the huge commercial success of the James Bond film "Die Another Day", which he directed. Two different scripts were prepared for the film, and the one written by Simon Kinberg was selected; the other script featured a radically different plot.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: "State of the Union" was a box-office bomb and it was criticized by reviewers, mainly for the performances, an illogical story, and overuse of CGI-based visual effects for most of the action sequences. "State of the Union" is the last film in the "XXX" film series to be distributed by Columbia Pictures, as Paramount Pictures became the distributor for its future films, starting with "" in 2017.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: In Virginia, unknown assailants breach into an NSA bunker beneath the horse ranch headed by Agent Augustus Gibbon who fends off the attackers before barely escaping with Toby Shavers. To find help and a XXX with more attitude, Gibbons meets with Lieutenant Darius Stone, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, who is currently 9-years into his 20-year sentence in Leavenworth for disobeying orders and breaking the jaw of ex-four star General George Deckert, who is now the Secretary of Defence. The investigation into the attack on the bunker is led by NSA Agent Kyle Steele, who is informed that concurrently Xander Cage was apparently killed in Bora Bora.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: Gibbons helps break Stone out of prison, who then sets himself up as their leader due to his lack of trust in Gibbons. Leading them to Washington, Stone meets with Zeke, his old partner in crime, and Lola Jackson, his ex-girlfriend, who now runs an exotic car shop. Despite having moved on, Lola agrees to let Stone, Gibbons and Shavers hide in her shop in exchange for the '67 GTO Shavers modified, and a promise that Stone wouldn't interfere in her life. Stone then infiltrates the NSA bunker, where Gibbons instructed him to recover a hard drive, whilst Gibbons returns to his house to recover evidence. However he is attacked in his house by Deckert and Sergeant Alabama "Bama" Cobb, who destroy the house and apparently kill Gibbons whilst covering up the evidence. Stone meets up with Gibbons' contact, Charlie Mayweather, to get information. Charlie directs Stone to a party where Stone recognizes that Deckert's bodyguards are members of his old SEAL Team, before overhearing Deckert getting into an argument with General Jack Pettibone VCJCS. Stone goes to Charlie's safe house but is framed for the murder of General Jack Pettibone, who is apparently her father, realizing that she is involved.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: The police arrive, and Steele arrives to talks with Stone before escaping. While Shavers hacks into the Pentagon to retrieve Deckert's plans, Steele researches Stone and discovers why he was in prison: Deckert ordered his SEAL team to start a fire to clear civilians, but Stone and half of the unit refused and mutinied, resulting in Stone punching Deckert and being court martialed. Stone infiltrates Deckert's troops aboard an aircraft carrier and discovers Gibbons alive, being held prisoner along with the rest of their SEAL team. Stone realises that the men who sided with him against Deckert 9 years ago are prisoners, whilst those who stayed loyal are Deckert's security. Stone's presence is alerted by Mayweather, forcing him to escape.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: After retrieving the plans, Stone learns that Deckert is not only corrupt, but is planning a coup against President James Sanford. Stone makes contact with Steele and shows him the plans. When Steele notes that his plans are not clear proof, Stone leaves in frustration, to Steele's initial disbelief. During a conversation with Deckert, Steele realizes Stone was right. He finds Stone and tells him that Deckert wants to kill Sanford and his successors so he can take Sanford's place as President, in opposition to Sanford's current plans to dismantle various military branches to focus on foreign aid.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: Unable to trust legitimate law enforcement, Stone, Steele, and Shavers enlist the aid of Zeke and his crew. Together, they rob a civilian truck secretly hauling guns and equipment for the Department of Homeland Security under the guise of a cheese truck. They end up hijacking a tank, and Stone helps Steele infiltrate the Capitol building. A shootout starts, and Gibbons kills Mayweather. Deckert and Cobb abduct Sanford while he is making the State of the Union Address, and with Gibbons now free they escape on a bullet train. Lola arrives with a Ford Shelby Cobra Concept, and Stone uses it to chase and infiltrate the train. He engages and kills Cobb before engaging Deckert, while Gibbons flies a helicopter which Steele extracts Sanford by. Stone jumps out after Gibbons derails and destroys the train, killing Deckert.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: The story is covered up, and Deckert is buried and branded as a hero. Sanford awards Steele and the unknown soldier (Stone) the Medal of Honor. Stone is officially released from prison, and making good on his promise not to interfere with Lola's life, says his goodbyes and goes back to his former lifestyle. In the now-rebuilt NSA Headquarters, Gibbons, Steele, and Shavers discuss what kind of person the next Triple X agent should be.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: A soundtrack containing hip hop and alternative rock was released on April 26, 2005, through Jive Records. It peaked at #117 on the "Billboard" 200, #48 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and #5 on the Top Soundtracks chart.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: "XXX: State of the Union" grossed $26.9 million in the United States and Canada and $44.2 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $71.1 million, against a reported production budget of $60 million. According to "The Wrap.com" the production budget was a reported $87 million, but Revolution Studios spent a total of $113.1 million.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: It opened on April 29, 2005 and grossed $12.7 million in its opening weekend, finishing third at the box office.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 17%, based on 137 reviews, with an average rating of 3.84/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Even more absurd and implausible than the first "xXx" movie, "State of the Union" is less inspired and technically competent than its predecessor." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 37%, based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade B+ on scale of A to F.


title: XXX: State of the Union

text: Boo Allen of the Denton Record Chronicle called Ice Cube's XXX character "a chubby, surly, incomprehensible action hero". Brian Orndorf of FilmJerk.com compared watching the film to running "headfirst at top speed into a brick wall". David Hiltbrand of the "Philadelphia Inquirer" said "the plot swings between pathetically implausible and aggressively stupid". Some critics liked the film. Mack Bates of the "Milwaukee Journal Sentinel" praised Ice Cube's "trademark charisma and street sensibility," while Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" called it "that rare B movie that’s rooted in gut-level stirrings of power and retaliation". Paul Arendt of the BBC said, "Viewed on its own trashy terms, it succeeds brilliantly".


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus" (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary's mother died less than a fortnight after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel "Frankenstein". The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at age 53.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel "Frankenstein", which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels "Valperga" (1823) and "Perkin Warbeck" (1830), the apocalyptic novel "The Last Man" (1826) and her final two novels, "Lodore" (1835) and "Falkner" (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book "Rambles in Germany and Italy" (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia" (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his "Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1798), which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, because the "Memoirs" revealed Wollstonecraft's affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. Mary Godwin read these memoirs and her mother's books, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William Godwin's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise the children by himself, he cast about for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own—Charles and Claire. Most of Godwin's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and quarrelsome; but Godwin was devoted to her, and the marriage was a success. Mary Godwin, on the other hand, came to detest her stepmother. William Godwin's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs Godwin had favoured her own children over those of Mary Wollstonecraft.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Together, the Godwins started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books as well as stationery, maps, and games. However, the business did not turn a profit, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going. He continued to borrow to pay off earlier loans, compounding his problems. By 1809, Godwin's business was close to failure, and he was "near to despair". Godwin was saved from debtor's prison by philosophical devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him further money.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. Godwin admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophy as outlined in works such as "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), but Mary Godwin nonetheless received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess, a daily tutor, and read many of her father's children's books on Roman and Greek history in manuscript. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate. Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible."


title: Mary Shelley

text: In June 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. To Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." Scholars have speculated that she may have been sent away for her health, to remove her from the seamy side of the business, or to introduce her to radical politics. Mary Godwin revelled in the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and in the companionship of his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 for a further stay of 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to "Frankenstein", she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in the interval between her two stays in Scotland. By the time she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley had become estranged from his wife and was regularly visiting William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt. Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, which he had imbibed from William Godwin's "Political Justice" (1793), had alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family: they wanted him to follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy, and he wanted to donate large amounts of the family's money to schemes intended to help the disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had difficulty gaining access to money until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice". After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he either could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for one another as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion", leading her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard. Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks". To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved, and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage the "spotless fame" of his daughter. At about the same time, Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father", was confused. She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of "Political Justice" but later retracted. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.


title: Mary Shelley

text: After convincing Mary Jane Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio travelled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826. Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...". As they travelled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. At Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814.


title: Mary Shelley

text: The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was fraught with complications, some of which she had not foreseen. Either before or during the journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's genuine surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They maintained their intense programme of reading and writing, and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock. Percy Shelley sometimes left home for short periods to dodge creditors. The couple's distraught letters reveal their pain at these separations.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Pregnant and often ill, Mary Godwin had to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 and his constant outings with Claire Clairmont. Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused much jealousy on Godwin's part. Shelley greatly offended Godwin at one point when during a walk in the French countryside he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked as it offended her principles. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary Godwin and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the idea, since in principle she believed in free love. In practice, however, she loved only Percy Shelley and seems to have ventured no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-month premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg:


title: Mary Shelley

text: My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be "sleeping" so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find "that" out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now.


title: Mary Shelley

text: The loss of her child induced acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of the baby; but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. With a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-storey cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life, since her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 is lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem "Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude"; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father, and soon nicknamed "Willmouse". In her novel "The Last Man", she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. In "History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817)", she describes the particularly desolate landscape in crossing from France into Switzerland.


title: Mary Shelley

text: The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley". Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night.


title: Mary Shelley

text: "It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: ""Have you thought of a story?" I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted; "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream", her ghost story:


title: Mary Shelley

text: She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life". The story of the writing of "Frankenstein" has been fictionalised several times and formed the basis for a number of films.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her "waking dream" took place "between 2am and 3am" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.


title: Mary Shelley

text: While her husband Percy encouraged her writing, the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics. Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of 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." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was Percy's work "as far as I can recollect." There are differences in the 1818, 1823 and 1831 editions, which have been attributed to Percy's editing. James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator", while Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the "Frankenstein" manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress."


title: Mary Shelley

text: Writing on the 200th anniversary of "Frankenstein", literary scholar and poet Fiona Sampson asked, "Why hasn't Mary Shelley gotten the respect she deserves?" She noted that "In recent years Percy's corrections, visible in the "Frankenstein" notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realized that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today." Sampson published her findings in "In Search of Mary Shelley" (2018), one of many biographies written about Shelley.


title: Mary Shelley

text: On their return to England in September, Mary and Percy moved—with Claire Clairmont, who took lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire's pregnancy secret. At Cologny, Mary Godwin had received two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who alluded to her "unhappy life"; on 9 October, Fanny wrote an "alarming letter" from Bristol that sent Percy Shelley racing off to search for her, without success. On the morning of 10 October, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. On 10 December, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London. Both suicides were hushed up. Harriet's family obstructed Percy Shelley's efforts—fully supported by Mary Godwin—to assume custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on 30 December 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London. Mr and Mrs Godwin were present and the marriage ended the family rift.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on 13 January, at first called Alba, later Allegra. In March of that year, the Chancery Court ruled Percy Shelley morally unfit to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family. Also in March, the Shelleys moved with Claire and Alba to Albion House at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames. There Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Leigh Hunt, worked hard at their writing, and often discussed politics.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Early in the summer of 1817, Mary Shelley finished "Frankenstein", which was published anonymously in January 1818. Reviewers and readers assumed that Percy Shelley was the author, since the book was published with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin. At Marlow, Mary edited the joint journal of the group's 1814 Continental journey, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, along with Percy's poem "Mont Blanc". The result was the "History of a Six Weeks' Tour", published in November 1817. That autumn, Percy Shelley often lived away from home in London to evade creditors. The threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them. They had no intention of returning.


title: Mary Shelley

text: One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living in Venice. He had agreed to raise her so long as Claire had nothing more to do with her. The Shelleys then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place for long. Along the way, they accumulated a circle of friends and acquaintances who often moved with them. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising. The Italian adventure was, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children—Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome. These losses left her in a deep depression that isolated her from Percy Shelley, who wrote in his notebook:


title: Mary Shelley

text: For a time, Mary Shelley found comfort only in her writing. The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on 12 November 1819, finally lifted her spirits, though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Italy provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with political freedom unattainable at home. Despite its associations with personal loss, Italy became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise". Their Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys. While Percy composed a series of major poems, Mary wrote the novel "Matilda", the historical novel "Valperga", and the plays "Proserpine" and "Midas". Mary wrote "Valperga" to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy refused to assist him further. She was often physically ill, however, and prone to depressions. She also had to cope with Percy's interest in other women, such as Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams. Since Mary Shelley shared his belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she formed emotional ties of her own among the men and women of their circle. She became particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos and of Jane and Edward Williams.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In December 1818, the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician. In 1820, they found themselves plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former servants whom Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after the Foggis had married. The pair revealed that on 27 February 1819 in Naples, Percy Shelley had registered as his child by Mary Shelley a two-month-old baby girl named Elena Adelaide Shelley. The Foggis also claimed that Claire Clairmont was the baby's mother. Biographers have offered various interpretations of these events: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise's by Byron. Mary Shelley insisted she would have known if Claire had been pregnant, but it is unclear how much she really knew. The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils, remain shrouded in mystery. The only certainty is that she herself was not the child's mother. Elena Adelaide Shelley died in Naples on 9 June 1820.


title: Mary Shelley

text: After leaving Naples, the Shelleys settled in Rome, the city where her husband wrote where "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals...and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry...The voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man". Rome inspired her to begin writing the unfinished novel "Valerius, the Reanimated Roman", where the eponymous hero resists the decay of Rome and the machinations of "superstitious" Catholicism. The writing of her novel was broken off when her son William died of malaria. Shelley bitterly commented that she had come to Italy to improve her husband's health, and instead the Italian climate had just killed her two children, leading her to write: "May you my dear Marianne never know what it is to lose two only and lovely children in one year—to watch their dying moments—and then at last to be left childless and forever miserable". To deal with her grief, Shelley wrote the novella "The Fields of Fancy", which became "Matilda", dealing with a young woman whose beauty inspired incestuous love in her father, who ultimately commits suicide to stop himself from acting on his passion for his daughter, while she spends the rest of her life full of despair about "the unnatural love I had inspired". The novella offered a feminist critique of a patriarchal society as Matilda is punished in the afterlife, though she did nothing to encourage her father's feelings.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In the summer of 1822, a pregnant Mary moved with Percy, Claire, and Edward and Jane Williams to the isolated Villa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici. Once they were settled in, Percy broke the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo. Mary Shelley was distracted and unhappy in the cramped and remote Villa Magni, which she came to regard as a dungeon. On 16 June, she miscarried, losing so much blood that she nearly died. Rather than wait for a doctor, Percy sat her in a bath of ice to stanch the bleeding, an act the doctor later told him saved her life. All was not well between the couple that summer, however, and Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and debilitated wife. Much of the short poetry Shelley wrote at San Terenzo involved Jane rather than Mary.


title: Mary Shelley

text: The coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat. The boat had been designed by Daniel Roberts and Edward Trelawny, an admirer of Byron's who had joined the party in January 1822. On 1 July 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno. There Percy Shelley discussed with Byron and Leigh Hunt the launch of a radical magazine called "The Liberal". On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boat boy, Charles Vivian. They never reached their destination. A letter arrived at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated 8 July, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious". "The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later. "I trembled all over." She and Jane Williams rushed desperately to Livorno and then to Pisa in the fading hope that their husbands were still alive. Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed up on the coast near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici. Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley's corpse on the beach at Viareggio.


title: Mary Shelley

text: After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On 23 July 1823, she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby. Sir Timothy Shelley had at first agreed to support his grandson, Percy Florence, only if he were handed over to an appointed guardian. Mary Shelley rejected this idea instantly. She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited annual allowance (which she had to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate), but to the end of his days, he refused to meet her in person and dealt with her only through lawyers. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavours, but concern for her son restricted her options. Sir Timothy threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of the poet were published. In 1826, Percy Florence became the legal heir of the Shelley estate after the death of his half-brother Charles Shelley, his father's son by Harriet Shelley. Sir Timothy raised Mary's allowance from £100 a year to £250 but remained as difficult as ever. Mary Shelley enjoyed the stimulating society of William Godwin's circle, but poverty prevented her from socialising as she wished. She also felt ostracised by those who, like Sir Timothy, still disapproved of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In the summer of 1824, Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London to be near Jane Williams. She may have been, in the words of her biographer Muriel Spark, "a little in love" with Jane. Jane later disillusioned her by gossiping that Percy had preferred her to Mary, owing to Mary's inadequacy as a wife. At around this time, Mary Shelley was working on her novel, "The Last Man" (1826); and she assisted a series of friends who were writing memoirs of Byron and Percy Shelley—the beginnings of her attempts to immortalise her husband. She also met the American actor John Howard Payne and the American writer Washington Irving, who intrigued her. Payne fell in love with her and in 1826 asked her to marry him. She refused, saying that after being married to one genius, she could only marry another. Payne accepted the rejection and tried without success to talk his friend Irving into proposing himself. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's plan, but how seriously she took it is unclear.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as husband and wife. With the help of Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple. In 1828, she fell ill with smallpox while visiting them in Paris. Weeks later she recovered, unscarred but without her youthful beauty.


title: Mary Shelley

text: During the period 1827–40, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer. She wrote the novels "The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck" (1830), "Lodore" (1835), and "Falkner" (1837). She contributed five volumes of "Lives" of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French authors to Lardner's "Cabinet Cyclopaedia". She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines. She was still helping to support her father, and they looked out for publishers for each other. In 1830, she sold the copyright for a new edition of "Frankenstein" for £60 to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their new Standard Novels series. After her father's death in 1836 at the age of eighty, she began assembling his letters and a memoir for publication, as he had requested in his will; but after two years of work, she abandoned the project. Throughout this period, she also championed Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. By 1837, Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired. In the summer of 1838 Edward Moxon, the publisher of Tennyson and the son-in-law of Charles Lamb, proposed publishing a collected works of Percy Shelley. Mary was paid £500 to edit the "Poetical Works" (1838), which Sir Timothy insisted should not include a biography. Mary found a way to tell the story of Percy's life, nonetheless: she included extensive biographical notes about the poems.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Shelley continued to practice her mother's feminist principles by extending aid to women whom society disapproved of. For instance, Shelley extended financial aid to Mary Diana Dods, a single mother and illegitimate herself who appears to have been a lesbian and gave her the new identity of Walter Sholto Douglas, husband of her lover Isabel Robinson. Shelley also assisted Georgiana Paul, a woman disallowed for by her husband for alleged adultery. Shelley in her diary about her assistance to the latter: "I do not make a boast-I do not say aloud-behold my generosity and greatness of mind-for in truth it is simple justice I perform-and so I am still reviled for being worldly".


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. In 1828, she met and flirted with the French writer Prosper Mérimée, but her one surviving letter to him appears to be a deflection of his declaration of love. She was delighted when her old friend from Italy, Edward Trelawny, returned to England, and they joked about marriage in their letters. Their friendship had altered, however, following her refusal to cooperate with his proposed biography of Percy Shelley; and he later reacted angrily to her omission of the atheistic section of "Queen Mab" from Percy Shelley's poems. Oblique references in her journals, from the early 1830s until the early 1840s, suggest that Mary Shelley had feelings for the radical politician Aubrey Beauclerk, who may have disappointed her by twice marrying others.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley's first concern during these years was the welfare of Percy Florence. She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow. To avoid boarding fees, she moved to Harrow on the Hill herself so that Percy could attend as a day scholar. Though Percy went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and dabbled in politics and the law, he showed no sign of his parents' gifts. He was devoted to his mother, and after he left university in 1841, he came to live with her.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1840 and 1842, mother and son travelled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in "Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843" (1844). In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower", as Mary put it. For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. In 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. A friend of her son's bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Shortly afterwards, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also in 1845, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary Shelley refused.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and accompanied them on travels abroad.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour. According to Jane Shelley, Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father; but Percy and Jane, judging the graveyard at St Pancras to be "dreadful", chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem "Adonaïs" with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by composing letters, and her favourite occupation as a child was writing stories. Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year. Her first published work is often thought to have been "Mounseer Nongtongpaw", comic verses written for Godwin's "Juvenile Library" when she was ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."


title: Mary Shelley

text: Certain sections of Mary Shelley's novels are often interpreted as masked rewritings of her life. Critics have pointed to the recurrence of the father–daughter motif in particular as evidence of this autobiographical style. For example, commentators frequently read "Mathilda" (1820) autobiographically, identifying the three central characters as versions of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley herself confided that she modelled the central characters of "The Last Man" on her Italian circle. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, as she wrote in her review of Godwin's novel "Cloudesley" (1830), she did not believe that authors "were merely copying from our own hearts". William Godwin regarded his daughter's characters as types rather than portraits from real life. Some modern critics, such as Patricia Clemit and Jane Blumberg, have taken the same view, resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley's works.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley employed the techniques of many different novelistic genres, most vividly the Godwinian novel, Walter Scott's new historical novel, and the Gothic novel. The Godwinian novel, made popular during the 1790s with works such as Godwin's "Caleb Williams" (1794), "employed a Rousseauvian confessional form to explore the contradictory relations between the self and society", and "Frankenstein" exhibits many of the same themes and literary devices as Godwin's novel. However, Shelley critiques those Enlightenment ideals that Godwin promotes in his works. In "The Last Man", she uses the philosophical form of the Godwinian novel to demonstrate the ultimate meaninglessness of the world. While earlier Godwinian novels had shown how rational individuals could slowly improve society, "The Last Man" and "Frankenstein" demonstrate the individual's lack of control over history.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Shelley uses the historical novel to comment on gender relations; for example, "Valperga" is a feminist version of Scott's masculinist genre. Introducing women into the story who are not part of the historical record, Shelley uses their narratives to question established theological and political institutions. Shelley sets the male protagonist's compulsive greed for conquest in opposition to a female alternative: reason and sensibility. In "Perkin Warbeck", Shelley's other historical novel, Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity, and equality. Through her, Shelley offers a feminine alternative to the masculine power politics that destroy the male characters. The novel provides a more inclusive historical narrative to challenge the one which usually relates only masculine events.


title: Mary Shelley

text: With the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, Mary Shelley's works, particularly "Frankenstein", began to attract much more attention from scholars. Feminist and psychoanalytic critics were largely responsible for the recovery from neglect of Shelley as a writer. Ellen Moers was one of the first to claim that Shelley's loss of a baby was a crucial influence on the writing of "Frankenstein". She argues that the novel is a "birth myth" in which Shelley comes to terms with her guilt for causing her mother's death as well as for failing as a parent. Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that, from a feminist viewpoint, it is a story "about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman ... ["Frankenstein"] is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction". Victor Frankenstein's failure as a "parent" in the novel has been read as an expression of the anxieties which accompany pregnancy, giving birth, and particularly maternity.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in their seminal book "The Madwoman in the Attic" (1979) that in "Frankenstein" in particular, Shelley responded to the masculine literary tradition represented by John Milton's "Paradise Lost". In their interpretation, Shelley reaffirms this masculine tradition, including the misogyny inherent in it, but at the same time "conceal[s] fantasies of equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage". Mary Poovey reads the first edition of "Frankenstein" as part of a larger pattern in Shelley's writing, which begins with literary self-assertion and ends with conventional femininity. Poovey suggests that "Frankenstein"<nowiki>'</nowiki>s multiple narratives enable Shelley to split her artistic persona: she can "express and efface herself at the same time". Shelley's fear of self-assertion is reflected in the fate of Frankenstein, who is punished for his egotism by losing all his domestic ties.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Feminist critics often focus on how authorship itself, particularly female authorship, is represented in and through Shelley's novels. As Mellor explains, Shelley uses the Gothic style not only to explore repressed female sexual desire but also as way to "censor her own speech in "Frankenstein"". According to Poovey and Mellor, Shelley did not want to promote her own authorial persona and felt deeply inadequate as a writer, and "this shame contributed to the generation of her fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction".


title: Mary Shelley

text: Shelley's writings focus on the role of the family in society and women's role within that family. She celebrates the "feminine affections and compassion" associated with the family and suggests that civil society will fail without them. Shelley was "profoundly committed to an ethic of cooperation, mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice". In "Lodore", for example, the central story follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotiate. The novel is engaged with political and ideological issues, particularly the education and social role of women. It dissects a patriarchal culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men. In the view of Shelley scholar Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life invariably brings". However, "Falkner" is the only one of Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs. The novel's resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.


title: Mary Shelley

text: "Frankenstein", like much Gothic fiction of the period, mixes a visceral and alienating subject matter with speculative and thought-provoking themes. Rather than focusing on the twists and turns of the plot, however, the novel foregrounds the mental and moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and Shelley imbues the text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism, one that criticised the individualism and egotism of traditional Romanticism. Victor Frankenstein is like Satan in "Paradise Lost", and Prometheus: he rebels against tradition; he creates life; and he shapes his own destiny. These traits are not portrayed positively; as Blumberg writes, "his relentless ambition is a self-delusion, clothed as quest for truth". He must abandon his family to fulfill his ambition.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley believed in the Enlightenment idea that people could improve society through the responsible exercise of political power, but she feared that the irresponsible exercise of power would lead to chaos. In practice, her works largely criticise the way 18th-century thinkers such as her parents believed such change could be brought about. The creature in "Frankenstein", for example, reads books associated with radical ideals but the education he gains from them is ultimately useless. Shelley's works reveal her as less optimistic than Godwin and Wollstonecraft; she lacks faith in Godwin's theory that humanity could eventually be perfected.


title: Mary Shelley

text: As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, "The Last Man", more so than "Frankenstein", "in its refusal to place humanity at the centre of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism." Specifically, Mary Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts". As in "Frankenstein", Shelley "offers a profoundly disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution, which ends in a total rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation". Not only does she reject these Enlightenment political ideals, but she also rejects the Romantic notion that the poetic or literary imagination can offer an alternative.


title: Mary Shelley

text: There is a new scholarly emphasis on Shelley as a lifelong reformer, deeply engaged in the liberal and feminist concerns of her day.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In 1820, she was thrilled by the Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution. In 1823, she wrote articles for Leigh Hunt's periodical "The Liberal" and played an active role in the formulation of its outlook. She was delighted when the Whigs came back to power in 1830 and at the prospect of the 1832 Reform Act.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Critics have until recently cited "Lodore" and "Falkner" as evidence of increasing conservatism in Mary Shelley's later works. In 1984, Mary Poovey influentially identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic. Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote "Falkner" to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum. Mellor largely agreed, arguing that "Mary Shelley grounded her alternative political ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois family. She thereby implicitly endorsed a conservative vision of gradual evolutionary reform." This vision allowed women to participate in the public sphere but it inherited the inequalities inherent in the bourgeois family.


title: Mary Shelley

text: However, in the last decade or so this view has been challenged. For example, Bennett claims that Mary Shelley's works reveal a consistent commitment to Romantic idealism and political reform and Jane Blumberg's study of Shelley's early novels argues that her career cannot be easily divided into radical and conservative halves. She contends that "Shelley was never a passionate radical like her husband and her later lifestyle was not abruptly assumed nor was it a betrayal. She was in fact challenging the political and literary influences of her circle in her first work." In this reading, Shelley's early works are interpreted as a challenge to Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley's radicalism. Victor Frankenstein's "thoughtless rejection of family", for example, is seen as evidence of Shelley's constant concern for the domestic.


title: Mary Shelley

text: In the 1820s and 1830s, Mary Shelley frequently wrote short stories for gift books or annuals, including sixteen for "The Keepsake", which was aimed at middle-class women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages. Mary Shelley's work in this genre has been described as that of a "hack writer" and "wordy and pedestrian". However, critic Charlotte Sussman points out that other leading writers of the day, such as the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took advantage of this profitable market. She explains that "the annuals were a major mode of literary production in the 1820s and 1830s", with "The Keepsake" the most successful.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Many of Shelley's stories are set in places or times far removed from early 19th-century Britain, such as Greece and the reign of Henry IV of France. Shelley was particularly interested in "the fragility of individual identity" and often depicted "the way a person's role in the world can be cataclysmically altered either by an internal emotional upheaval, or by some supernatural occurrence that mirrors an internal schism". In her stories, female identity is tied to a woman's short-lived value in the marriage market while male identity can be sustained and transformed through the use of money. Although Mary Shelley wrote twenty-one short stories for the annuals between 1823 and 1839, she always saw herself, above all, as a novelist. She wrote to Leigh Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines."


title: Mary Shelley

text: When they ran off to France in the summer of 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley began a joint journal, which they published in 1817 under the title "History of a Six Weeks' Tour", adding four letters, two by each of them, based on their visit to Geneva in 1816, along with Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". The work celebrates youthful love and political idealism and consciously follows the example of Mary Wollstonecraft and others who had combined travelling with writing. The perspective of the "History" is philosophical and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it addresses the effects of politics and war on France. The letters the couple wrote on the second journey confront the "great and extraordinary events" of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo after his "Hundred Days" return in 1815. They also explore the sublimity of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc as well as the revolutionary legacy of the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.


title: Mary Shelley

text: Mary Shelley's last full-length book, written in the form of letters and published in 1844, was "Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843", which recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends. In "Rambles", Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's "Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark" and her own "A History of a Six Weeks' Tour" in mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of sensibility and sympathy. For Shelley, building sympathetic connections between people is the way to build civil society and to increase knowledge: "knowledge, to enlighten and free the mind from clinging deadening prejudices—a wider circle of sympathy with our fellow-creatures;—these are the uses of travel". Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view", she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy. She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes associated with Percy Shelley. According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives "Rambles" the unity of a prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes". At the same time, Shelley makes an egalitarian case against monarchy, class distinctions, slavery, and war.