Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)
Manuscript of “Transformation”
1830
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Manuscript of “Transformation”
Transcript below
SUSAN WOLFSON: “Transformation” is dramatic, it is dynamic, and it is very much on-brand for the author of Frankenstein. I think it’s the best known of her short stories.
NEIL GAIMAN: Dr. Susan Wolfson is a professor of English at Princeton University. Her scholarly edition of Mary Shelley’s “Transformation” appeared in a 2008 book titled Three Tales of Doubles.
WOLFSON: Well, this is a story of a young man—Guido—who screws up, alienates his girlfriend, loses his fortune, is feeling sorry for himself after a night of partying as he walks along the beach, and then something extraordinary happens.
GAIMAN: A demonic troll-like figure with distorted features and a trunk full of treasure appears out of nowhere and offers Guido a way out of his troubles. The price? A temporary body swap.
WOLFSON: He approaches Guido and seduces him with a proposition: “You have a really nice body. I have a lot of money. What do you say?” Seems to be a good deal because its time stamp is only three days. If you’ve read any fairy tales you know that [laughs] this is not likely to be the case.
[brief interlude with character voice and effects]
WOLFSON: Well, I think in looking at the manuscript of “Transformation” you can see Mary Shelley as a writer, transforming her materials, thinking what it is that she really wants to convey.
GAIMAN: If you look toward the end of the eighth line on this page, you’ll see an instance of the author revising her own work, substituting in a better word than the one she had originally used—a word more fitting for her story.
WOLFSON: Notice her decision to cross out the word “power”—“Yet he did gain a kind of power over me”—and substitute “influence,” which is much more evocative. Influence: literally “flowing into.” So it’s not just power over, but it’s possession from the inside. She wanted something, not just “mastery,” but mastery in the way Satan gains mastery, which is that he reads your number, and he gets inside of you, and makes it feel like it’s what you want.
End of Transcript
Among Dr. Wolfson’s many scholarly publications are the Longman Cultural Edition of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ (2002) and ‘The Annotated Frankenstein’ (Harvard University Press, 2012), which she co-edited.
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