"The Mortal Immortal" is a short story from 1833 written by
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic fiction, Gothic novel ''Frankenstein, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an History of scie ...
. It tells the story of a man named Winzy, who drinks an elixir which makes him immortal. At first, immortality appears to promise him eternal tranquility. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is cursed to endure eternal psychological torture, as everything he loves dies around him.
Summary
"The Mortal Immortal" deals with the cursed life of Winzy, a young man who has lived for 323 years. He recollects the events that led to his immortality. Winzy worked for the professor and alchemist
Cornelius Agrippa
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (; ; 14 September 1486 – 18 February 1535) was a German polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's ''Three Books of Occult Philosophy'' published in 1533 drew ...
. At first, he did not accept the employment offer made by Agrippa. However, Winzy's love for Bertha, his childhood sweetheart and love of his life, prompted him to accept the offer in hopes that the money he made could be sufficient to give her a comfortable living.
Cornelius Agrippa spent many days working on an elixir. Winzy was not aware of the complete purpose of the elixir, but he chose to drink it when he felt Bertha had left him for Albert Hoffer, a favorite of her protectress. Winzy drinks it in an attempt to cure himself from love. To his surprise, Winzy wakes up the next day rejuvenated, but with no knowledge of what he has consumed, discovering that Bertha is still true to him. Agrippa sets back to work, unsuccessfully, on the elixir once again since Winzy drank half of it and dropped the rest. Five years later Agrippa is on his deathbed and reveals the purpose of the elixir. Winzy has to live with the fact that Bertha is getting older while he continues to look twenty years old. Bertha is confused, but does not know the reason behind Winzy's continual youthful look. She believes that it is a spell that he must break in order for him to get old with her. Winzy confesses the truth and tells Bertha that he must leave her so that she may continue on with her life. Bertha accepts the situation and tells Winzy that she wants to start a new life with him somewhere neither one of them can be recognized.
Winzy and Bertha move to western France to begin their new life. It is here that Winzy witnesses the slow death of Bertha. He cares for her until she perishes. Bertha's death causes him to realize that there will never be another woman that he can love the way that he has loved Bertha. Winzy also discovers that he feels the effects of old age taking a physical toll on him despite the fact that his outward appearance continues to be that of a twenty-year-old. The elixir does not prevent the aging process, but only keeps the drinker from dying.
Origins
The story was commissioned in 1833 for ''
The Keepsake
''The Keepsake'' was an English literary annual which ran from 1828 to 1857, published each Christmas from 1827 to 1856, for perusal during the year of the title. Like other literary annuals, ''The Keepsake'' was an anthology of short fiction, po ...
'', a prominent
literary annual
Gift books, literary annuals, or keepsakes were 19th-century books, often lavishly decorated, which collected essays, short fiction, and poetry. They were primarily published in the autumn, in time for the holiday season and were intended to be g ...
which married short fiction and poetry with high-quality engraved artworks. It was one of a number of similar commissions; Shelley sold twenty-one stories to annuals over a seventeen-year period, with more than half of those in ''The Keepsake''. For this story, Shelley was given an engraving titled ''Bertha'', from a painting by
Henry P. Briggs engraved by Frederick Bacon, showing a young man and young woman helping an elderly lady descend a staircase. She chose to write a story based around the idea of an immortal male narrator, seeing his wife both as a young woman and as the old woman she becomes.
"The Mortal Immortal" is considered to be an example of the Godwinian confessional narrative. The story has been linked to
''St. Leon'', a 1799 novel by Shelley's father,
William Godwin
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836) was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism and the first modern proponent of anarchism. Godwin is most famous for ...
. Godwin's novel had established the idea of a tragic immortal protagonist, possessed of exceptional powers but unable to use them well. Shelley had developed this theme in ''
Frankenstein
''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ex ...
'' (1818). In "The Mortal Immortal", she applied an ironic twist – the protagonist becomes immortal by accident – and played on the ways that the narrator's immortality drove him and his wife apart from society.
Another source can be found in Apuleius' ''
The Golden Ass
The ''Metamorphoses'' of Apuleius, which Augustine of Hippo referred to as ''The Golden Ass'' (''Asinus aureus''), is the only ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.
The protagonist of the novel is Lucius. At the end of the no ...
'', a second-century Latin satire, in which a miraculous transformation also relies on an accidental potion; Shelley is known to have translated it, at the instigation of her husband, in 1817.
The title stems from "
Endymion Endymion primarily refers to:
* Endymion (mythology), an Ancient Greek shepherd
* ''Endymion'' (poem), by John Keats
Endymion may also refer to:
Fictional characters
* Prince Endymion, a character in the ''Sailor Moon'' anime franchise
* Raul ...
", a poem by
John Keats
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculo ...
.
[Marshall, Mrs. Julian. ]
The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
'. London: R. Bentley and Son, 1889. PDF
Volume 2
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Publication history
The story was originally published in '' The Keepsake for 1834'' (Dec. 1833), a literary annual
Gift books, literary annuals, or keepsakes were 19th-century books, often lavishly decorated, which collected essays, short fiction, and poetry. They were primarily published in the autumn, in time for the holiday season and were intended to be g ...
. It was later republished in 1873, as part of ''The Casquet of Literature, being a Selection of Prose and Poetry from the Works of the Most Admired Authors'', edited by Charles Gibbon
Charles Gibbon (1843–1890) was a British novelist specialising in popular romances.''XIX Century Fiction'', Part I, A–K (Jarndyce, Bloomsbury, 2019).
Life
Gibbon was born in the Isle of Man, and moved with his parents to Glasgow at an early ...
, and reappeared in similar editions in 1890, 1891 and 1896, both in London and Philadelphia. During the 1930s, it was published in three separate collections of "thrillers", and in 1974 in the ''Masterpieces of Science Fiction'' series. Editions of it were later included in two scholarly collections of Shelley's work, in 1976 and 1990, as well as in a ''Norton Anthology''.[Conger et al., p. 324.] In 1996, it was used as the title story in a collected edition of Shelley's supernatural short stories.
The Italian author Iginio Ugo Tarchetti
Iginio (or Igino) Ugo Tarchetti (; 29 June 1839 – 25 March 1869) was an Italian author, poet, and journalist.
Life
Born in San Salvatore Monferrato, his military career was cut short by ill health, and in 1865 he settled in Milan. Here h ...
, one of the first Gothic novelist
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name is a reference to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of ea ...
s practicing in Italian and a prominent member of the Scapigliatura
''Scapigliatura'' () is the name of an artistic movement that developed in Italy after the Risorgimento period (1815–71). The movement included poets, writers, musicians, painters and sculptors. The term Scapigliatura is the Italian equivalent of ...
movement, wrote an Italian version of the story, as ''Il mortale immortale''; later critics have noted that this version bears such a close resemblance to the original that it is in effect an unauthorised and unattributed translation.
A sequel to the story was written by Gary Jennings in 1973, published in ''Fantasy and Science Fiction
''The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction'' (usually referred to as ''F&SF'') is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher a ...
'' as "Ms. Found in an Oxygen Bottle".
Themes
"The Mortal Immortal" is one of several Gothic tales that Shelley published in ''The Keepsake''. Others include "Ferdinando Eboli
''Ferdinando Eboli'' is a Gothic tale written by Mary Shelley and published in ''The Keepsake'' for 1829. It is set in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars and tells the story of an Italian man named Count Ferdinando Eboli whose identity is stolen by ...
" (1829), "The Invisible Girl" (1830), "Transformation" (1831), "The Dream" (1832), and "The Evil Eye" (1833).
The story uses themes and motifs common to Romantic Gothic fiction, including immortality and the figure of The Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. In the original legend, a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion was then cursed to walk the Earth until the Second Coming. Th ...
, thwarted love, and alchemy
Alchemy (from Arabic: ''al-kīmiyā''; from Ancient Greek: χυμεία, ''khumeía'') is an ancient branch of natural philosophy, a philosophical and protoscientific tradition that was historically practiced in China, India, the Muslim world, ...
. Its fragmentary form and confessional style are characteristic of this genre and Shelley's other short stories, such as "Transformation." These themes, motifs, and narrative techniques are also evident in Shelley's novels, including ''Frankenstein
''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ex ...
''.
Critical response
Despite the popularity of ''The Keepsake'' and the status of its contributing authors, the fiction and poetry it contains were seen as unimpressive by contemporary reviewers and are still largely disregarded by literary critics today. The ''Gentleman's Magazine'' described them as "none of any remarkable interest..." and described the ''Mortal Immortal'' itself as "a tissue of monstrous and appalling impossibilities".
Some modern critics have described it, along with the other ''Keepsake'' stories, simply as commercial hackwork, while others have seen it as highlighting her "gift for humour",[Markley, p. 101.] and as a "vigorously inventive" quasi-autobiographical piece.
References
* ''"Laughing That I May Not Weep": Mary Shelley's Short Fiction and Her Novels.'' A. A. Markley (1997). ''Keats-Shelley Journal'', Vol. 46, pp. 97–124.
* ''Iconoclastic departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein : essays in honor of the bicentenary of Mary Shelley's birth''. Susan M. Conger ''et al.'' 1997.
Online edition
* ''Stories for the Keepsake'', Charlotte Sussman. . In: ''The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley'', Cambridge University Press, 2003.
External links
a Romantic Circles electronic text
*
The Mortal Immortal
in Mary Shelley's Gothic Tales in ''The Keepsake''
''The Mortal Immortal'' audiobook at Libsyn
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mortal Immortal, The
Works by Mary Shelley
1833 short stories
Fiction about immortality