preview

Who Is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

Decent Essays

Mary Shelley, the author of science-fiction novel Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, more widely-known as simply Frankenstein, was born in England during 1797, the daughter of a feminist activist and a political writer/philosopher. She began writing Frankenstein at age 18. After being cooped up indoors after year without summer, Mary and her friends decided to have a writing contest to pass the time. Mary struggled to think of a topic to write about, but after having a conversation with her friend about electricity and the possibility of creating life with a spark, she began to write Frankenstein. Although she was 18 when she began writing it, due to personal issues, Frankenstein wasn’t published until two years later, when she was 20. …show more content…

Frankenstein tells the story of scientist Victor Frankenstein who tries to create life in his laboratory, and suffers the consequences of his hubris. He learns not to play god through the losses of family members and close friends, brought on by his own shame and cowardice. He realizes that science should not go too far, and that some things should be left to nature.
After growing up in Geneva Switzerland and attending Ingolstadt university, chemist and natural philosopher Victor Frankenstein seeks, and believes he has found, the secret of life. He creates a monster out of different pieces of corpses and animal body parts, and when he succeeds at creating life, he is horrified and disgusted at the monster he has created. “I beheld the wretch — the miserable monster whom I had created,” (36). Frankenstein abandons the monster out of cowardice, ashamed of his creation, and takes refuge in a tavern, while the monster wanders the countryside. The monster kills Victor’s youngest brother, William, and frames the housekeeper and family friend, Justine. She is tried for murder …show more content…

Victor creates life, the monster, and he regrets it. “I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly made,” (67). The monster himself says “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on,” (188). Both the monster and Victor regret the creation. Also, Victor aborts the female monster partway through creating her. The reason he destroys the female monster is because he was afraid that she and the first monster might reproduce. In Shelley’s own life, she had a lot of trauma relating to birth. Near the beginning of her writing Frankenstein, she delivered a baby that died a few days later. She then made a journal entry reading “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives.” While she was writing the book, she went through two pregnancies, both died young, at ages one and three. Even Shelley’s own mother died from childbirth. By the time she wrote the 1831 intro to Frankenstein, Shelley had survived six pregnancies, and lost four children. Another reference to Shelley’s life in her novel, is that the first victim of the monster was a child, and that character, William, was named after her own child who died as a

Get Access