Essay on Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Need for Family

Mary Shelley was a young, well-educated woman from England. She was born on August 30th 1797, in London. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, was the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. She died giving birth to Mary, leaving her daughter in the care of her husband, William Godwin. The atmosphere that Mary Shelley grew up in exposed her to cutting-edge ideas, which are shown all throughout the novel. Mary Shelley’s lover, Percy Shelley was a young poet, and as he was already married, her relationship with him wasn’t the smoothest.

This novel reflects Shelley’s own childhood, which consisted of her feeling obligated to rebel against her own father’s wishes and his choice for her marriage. Frankenstein is a way for Shelley to tell her own experiences with parental conflict and how she feels she was affected by her demanding father and the environment she grew up in, by comparing herself to Victor’s monster. Shelley analyzed her own characteristics, and the characteristics of her father, and placed them within Victor and the

In conjunction with her political ideologies, Shelley used her personal economic hardships as basis for the actions of the Frankenstein family, showing sympathy towards the victims of debt and poverty. Mary Shelley was raised by her father who was always deeply in debt, and the threat of a debtor’s prison persisted even after marriage to the point where they had to flee Britain. This parallels the story of Beaufort in the beginning of the novel: “One of his friends...assistance” (Volume I, Chapter I, p 33, 35). Because of her own struggles with debt, Shelley may have been sympathetic to those in similar circumstances, shown in the grief that the frankenstein family felt when their close friend was suffering through economic hardships. Through historical accounts, literary criticisms and in-text analyses it can be concluded that Frankenstein was much more than a just a fantastical story; it was a commentary on mass revolution, social injustice, and a memento of Shelley’s own life

	In Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, families are a very important part of the structure of the novel. Frankenstein's family is critical because the reason why the monster was created lies within the family. Almost every family mentioned in the novel was either incomplete or was dysfunctional. Frankenstein's family in particular was missing a female role. The Frankenstein family had no mother, but they did have Elizabeth who was the only other female in the house and she was adopted when she was just a child. The monster was created because of this absence, not necessarily to fill the role of the mother, but to fill in the role of the missing family member. However, the monster is shunned away when he is animated and the fall of the

	In Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, families are a very important part of the structure of the novel. Frankenstein’s family is critical because the reason why the monster was created lies within the family. Almost every family mentioned in the novel was either incomplete or was dysfunctional. Frankenstein’s family in particular was missing a female role. The Frankenstein family had no mother, but they did have Elizabeth who was the only other female in the house and she was adopted when she was just a child. The monster was created because of this absence, not necessarily to fill the role of the mother, but to fill in the role of the missing family member. However, the monster is shunned away when he is animated and the fall of the

Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was raised by a single parent, her father William Godwin. She acknowledges the mentally stimulating role a father plays in the development of a daughter, presumably speaking from personal experience. She declares, "There is a peculiarity in the education of a daughter, brought up by a father only, which tends to develop early a thousand of those portions of mind, which are folded up” (Veeder). Shelley offers in Frankenstein a portrait of how children’s minds are shape, and ultimately their fates sealed, due to influences from their fathers. Alphonse, Victor’s father, made mistakes in his parenting that negatively shaped the development of Victor’s mind and how he treated other living things.

The novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley involves the complex issues with the creation of life through an inanimate life. Shelley uses these character archetypes to develop a deeper meaning of the characters intentions. Shelley does an excellent job at allowing the reader to have a peak at the characters inner thoughts and feelings. The archetypes presented in Frankenstein allow readers to identify with the character's role and purpose.

Like Caroline and Safie, Elizabeth Lavenza’s father causes her unhappiness. However this is drastically confounded by the egotism of Victor Frankenstein who seeks to take on the vitally female role of the creator. Elizabeth is constructed by Shelley as an extremely positive character, whose ‘saintly soul’ shines ‘like a shrine dedicated lamp’ in the Frankenstein’s ‘happy home’. She, like her foster mother Caroline, keeps the family together ‘veiling her grief’ for the benefit of the children. However, when victor attempts to take on the role of a woman and ‘create life’ Shelley shows us that it is an unfortunate masculine characteristic to doom idealism with egotism and the pursuit of glory. Despite his noble goals of ‘unfolding the mysteries of creation’, to confer ‘inesteemable benefit’ on all mankind, Victor’s masculine egotism endures

    In any novel the author is free to create and shape their characters in whatever way they see fit. In Frankenstein, Shelley does an excellent job of shaping her characters, be it however minute their part in the story, so that the reader gets a clear picture of Shelley's creations. It seems that each character in Shelley's Frankenstein is created by Shelley to give the reader a certain impression of the character. By doing this Shelley creates the characters the way she wants us to see them. She tells us certain things about them and gives them certain traits so that they will fit into the story the way she wants them to. In particular I will examine the characters of the

Elizabeth longs to understand how Victor is doing in his studies at Ingolstadt. However, since she is a woman and she is approved to become part of the Frankenstein family by “They [Victor Frankenstein’s parents] consulted their village priest, and the result was that Elizabeth Lavenza became the inmate of my parents’ house … (Shelley 30)”, she can only visit Victor Frankenstein under the approval of Victor’s father. Even though Victor cannot see his beloved Elizabeth, he realizes that through his first letter that she writes, she acts like a spirit in Victor’s mind waiting for him to come home by mentioning, “Get well – and return to us. You will find a happy, cheerful home, and friends who love you dearly” (Shelley 57).

A predominant theme throughout the novel Frankenstein is that of a parental figure, poor parenting techniques and furthermore the rearing of the child. The main family that brings this theme to light in the novel is Victor and the monster’s, where there really

A romantic life full of pain and abandonment could only be given the monstrous form of "Frankenstein." Mary Shelley 's life gave birth to an imaginary victim full of misery and loneliness and placed him as the protagonist of one of her most famous and greatest works of art. As most people would assume, he is not just a fictional character, but in fact a creature who desperately demonstrates Shelley 's tragedies and losses during the age of the Romantic Era. Since Mary Shelley 's birth there have been numerous losses in her life. One extremely dominating event in Shelley 's life was the death of her mother. Soon after, her father remarried and Shelley entered a battle as the victim of a fight for love. In her

The main components of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein come from her own personal experiences and the society she lived in. Being a woman, Mary Shelley was subject to the social norms and traditions of treating women as lesser equals to men. In Johanna Smith’s critical analysis of Frankenstein she says that “ the man’s public sphere of commerce and … the woman’s private sphere of home and passivity” (313) were very much present in Mary’s society. Mary was left alone to deal with very troubling events, “the deaths of [her] two daughters... and the death of [her] three-and-a-half-year-old son William” (10). It is very difficult for a parent to comprehend the loss of a child, much less a mother.

Throughout her life, Mary Shelley was consistently plagued by familial obligations, not only from her extended family but also her consanguinal family and close circle of friends. Beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century, kinship structures were a system that ideally provided support – whether in the form of material gifts, help in the raising of children, or connections and assistance in finding employment (Ben-Amos, The Culture of Giving). For Shelley, her perceived obligations within this system became destructive and isolating, since members of her family failed to participate in the exchange network and instead merely reaped the benefits. My Master’s research will aim to quantify and analyze Shelley’s conceptual representations of the family by answering the following questions: does Shelley’s representation of family,

Mary Shelley’s book, Frankenstein, parallels her own experiences. Shelley’s mother died in childbirth, and she was left “dependent on none and related to none.” Her father, William Godwin, abandoned his daughter emotionally when he remarried a woman who treated Mary poorly. Shelley often searched for an understanding of who she was. She did not have a mother to give her an education, so Mary taught herself by seeking answers to self searching questions. Shelley dealt with other deaths and losses of significant others in her life which left her feeling isolated, and, at times rejected.