There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand……
The black tone, the foggy London, the Victorian dress in the not-so-rich life, the only white element is the face of Elle Fanning, dyeing workshops, cemeteries, ghost novels, lighting the bonfire of the soul, is a kind of special Kind of fluorescent flicker.
Although the stepmother interfered with her reading, her father read with Mary when she was insomnia, "to love reading is to have everything within your reach", telling the writing not to imitate others, but to express her own voice. Mary ran to her mother's cemetery, leaning on Mary Wollstonecraft's tombstone, reading Gothic novels, and writing words that she had already familiarized herself with. Scarcely had the demon cast his buring stare upon her in her icy cheeks……
Percy and Mary met for the first time at a party in Scotland. There were countless literary dreams waiting to germinate in her heart, and his eyes were full of jealousy and coldness. It seems that his father’s friends are consciously letting them know. Percy asked Mary what poetry is "substantial" as soon as she opened her mouth. Mary's answer was "anything that curdles the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart". There is no writer. Not sensitive, and no writer does not indulge in subtle awareness of things. When Percy was called by the organizer to recite a poem, he simply left a sentence without audience, ideas remain mere words of a page. What he values most in his writing is that his expression can be seen by others (published) and can have an impact (for example, he wrote the neccesity of Atheism and was dropped out of Oxford), but he didn't really care whether it belonged to his own name. It also paved the way for Mary's incomprehension and her anger when she was asked to publish anonymously and must have a preface written by Percy.
Mary asked Percy angrily why he didn't tell herself the fact that he was married. Percy didn't give a convincing explanation, but Mary said she didn't care about fame. She will only live the life she wants to live, whether it is the sea or the abyss ahead. Although the father admitted that Mary was similar to her mother and also said that you can't be confined too long, he still made Mary the choice between Percy and fatherhood. She said "I fear nothing but let your meaningless words scare me away from my desires" before leaving home. She chose to burn her life, pursue her love, and began a life of "with the world in her heart and poetry in her heart". But Percy believes in the freedom of love, and perhaps Mary believes in Percy Shelley himself. This kind of freedom that Percy yearns for, this kind of freedom that may have been realized in Mary's mother, when Mary saw the painting of her mother's lover Nightmare-the curse of the incubus, she wondered why (freedom) brought her So much pain? If she can't bear it, how can I?
However, she turned the suffering, loss, loneliness, and betrayal that she had had to endure into that Frankenstein, not only a desire to rebirth her dead daughter, but also a projection of her lonely but fiery heart, just as she said: "If I I couldn't find my voice if I couldn't make a way through the pain." In the end, the name of the literary girl who was sitting in front of her mother's tombstone also became a gilded word.
The film takes the tension of the drama to the extreme, and the plot arrangement deliberately sets up a lot of counterparts to set off Mary's choice. For example: Percy saw her ex-wife and daughter pregnant with Mary in the park (ex-wife Harriet and Mary), Claire's feelings for Lord Byron and Mary's feelings for Percy, Polidori's The Vampire was considered Lord Byron's work when it was published and Frankenstein was considered It's Percy's work... even Godwin and Wollstonecraft, an anarchist and pro-marriage freedom couple, is a contrast between Percy and Mary.
I like two clips that are rather chaotic (the sound and the picture are out of sync). One is that Byron and Shelley drank wine and chanted poetry in a nearly crazy state in the castle in Geneva. The doctor and Mary were inserted in the middle of the current resurrection. The discussion of the dead; the other paragraph is when Mary is writing, the scenes in the memories flash past in her mind frame by frame.
What I disagree with the film is that the temperament of Lord Byron is sloppy and even wretched. His own romantic temperament is a failure. Those Byronian heroes like Charhan Harold are himself. Of vigor. With an episode: George Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda's opening inspiration when she saw Byron's granddaughter betting non-stop in a casino in Germany (?), and then she put this plot on Gwendolen.
The movie ends in Godwin's bookstore, the most spatial scene. Her father, who had severed ties, held a celebration for her anonymously published works. Mary hid in a corner wearing a dull skirt. When Percy said that the author of Frankenstein was Mary, he apologized for the many tragedies he had caused Mary to bear the weird and terrible product. The audience gradually receded, and there were only two of them left in the whole world. She said, "I thought You have left me". So did this scene really happen, or was it Mary's imagination?
If the years can stay in the innocent period, if the time can stay still in the youthful years, he is still the young man who handed you poems behind the book, and he is still the one who sits on the altar of the church and picks up a glass of wine to invite you to drink. The atheist is still the poet who talks with you loudly about Coleridge, not the vicissitudes of avoiding creditors and alcoholism. You have to write farewell to the former person like this: He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance. However, close your eyes and the sound of music rang. He is still the affectionate Percy that stuffed you with a small note with verses written on it. You walk to the sun and open it by yourself, and it says "If thou kiss not me". .
Cleverly, the end of the film also stayed at Mary's 18 years old. She said: "My choice determines my life, so I have nothing to regret."
I regret nothing.
[Attachment] Poems mentioned in the movie:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge
Shelley's Queen Mab (1812), Epipsychidion (1821), Love's Philosophy (1819), Absence, On Death
Byron's She Walks in Beauty
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