Introducing the Dead Celebrity Crush

In this era of ever-present media, it’s possible to delude oneself into believing that it’s possible to really know that star of your favorite TV show, that athlete, that “American Idol” contestant who you just know you would have so much in common with, if you ever met. (And that’s how stalkers are born.) But the more mentally healthy of us recognize that what we read online or see of said celebrity in a five-minute “Daily Show” appearance doesn’t represent everything that person has going on. But escapism is fun, and that’s why God gave us celebrities.

Maybe I’m the only one, but I kind of feel like my generation’s crop of celebs is a bit lacking. Is it because we now have the tools to rip them apart before they can achieve that mythical, untouchable super-stardom? Or are the starlets upchucked by Entertainment Weekly, et al., really just a pale imitation of the past?

I have my celebrity crushes. But I have a great deal more invested in what I call my Dead Celebrity Crushes. Maybe the people on this list really did have more substance…or maybe they benefit from not having People magazine and TMZ camping out on their doorsteps. Maybe, like any good celebrity, they say more about who I am than about who they were.

I can’t begin to imagine how long this post would be if I listed all of them…so I’m just going to take them one at a time, in no particular order…

Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Why do I love me some Mary Shelley? Let me count the ways. At age 21, she wrote one of the world’s great novels, Frankenstein, also one of the first of what we would recognize as a novel, period. (Between Shelley, Jane Austen and the Brontes, one could argue that women invented the modern novel. But I’ll leave that for an English major to handle.)

Her biography fascinates me…it would make such a great film if it weren’t for the fact that the last two-thirds of the movie would be either shamefully unrepresentative of her life, or just monumentally depressing. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote the brilliant feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, then promptly died days after giving birth to her daughter. Mary herself married the Romantic poet and all-around man-whore Percy Bysshe Shelley, who may have cheated on Mary with her step-sister Claire. Then Percy drowned in 1822, leaving Mary with an infant son.

One biography I read posited that Mary, all her life, wanted the stability of a family that she never had in her own childhood. If so, boy, did she marry the wrong guy. Her post-Frankenstein novels haven’t gotten the same recognition as that first effort; in fact, some of them are difficult to find in print. It’s only in the last few decades that Mary Shelley, despite her brilliantly conceived first novel, has been given credit by the literary community as anything other than her husband’s editor.

So, was Mary Shelley a feminist before her time, undermined by the male establishment? Or was she just a girl who would’ve gladly traded in her writing skill for the proverbial white picket fence and 2.5 kids with Percy? I don’t know. If I ever run into her in the afterlife, I’ll ask her. Whatever the answer is, I feel like I would understand, and sympathize at least a little.

She may have died more than a century before even my own mother was born, but I feel a certain kinship to Mary Shelley. And, holy shizznit, did her little horror story keep me up at night.