The Nightmare is a painting by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), an Anglo-Swiss artist whom Mary Shelley knew very well since he was an important member of the circle of her parents’ intellectual friends. The painting is famous for its disturbing eroticism, powerful sense of horror, and its visionary representation of the unconscious. In an eerie chiaroscuro, it shows a woman dreaming, lying on her back with her head and arms hanging down, a toe protruding from a tight purple nightdress underlining her curvaceous body, and her breast bent voluptuously, in a room hung with red curtains and with a mirror and a book on her bedside table. And in an uncanny kind of metalepsis, it also shows what appears to be the contents of the woman’s dream (or nightmare), in the form of an incubus peering out at the viewer, and a horse’s head with bulging eyes and teeth bared.

Interestingly, the first engravings of the painting sold in the 1780s happened to be accompanied by a poem by Erasmus Darwin, the famous English physician, father of natural science and grandfather of Charles Darwin, whom Mary Shelley admired greatly and made one of Victor Frankenstein’s scientist heroes:

So on his Nightmare through the evening fog

Flits the squab Fiend o’er fen, and lake, and bog;

Seeks some love-wilder’d maid with sleep oppress’d,

Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

For an in-depth analysis of the influence of the painting on Mary Shelley, but also of the novel’s complex representation of gender and sexuality, please read this excellent article by Anne K. Mellor:

http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Articles/mellor6.html

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