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We have all heard of the name Frankenstein– one of the most famous titles in British literature. Despite the fact that many of us associate the title with the creature he brings to life, Victor Frankenstein is the main character.
Mary Shelley wrote this gothic novel during a time where the novel genre was new and unfamiliar to the world. The narrative has grown to hold extensive reign over popular culture, as the story’s concept invites the mind to explore the ever-entertaining concepts of mystery and horror. However, there’s a lot more to it than being a frightening tale.
If you don’t know or can’t recall the content in Frankenstein, it opens with Robert Walton’s writings, who is leading an expedition through the Arctic. This is where he finds Victor Frankenstein, and the bulk of the novel revolves around his narrative to Walton. Victor explains how he ran an experiment to create a human using deconstructed body parts and scientific materials. He accounts successfully bringing this Creature to life, and his quick regret for doing so. The story of mutual destruction between Victor and the Creature unfolds over a few years until the Creature finds a moral ground in an attempt to make up for everything that has ensued. He knows what he must do when he finds Victor dead on Walton’s ship. The Creature lights a fire around himself, walking off into the Arctic surroundings. This is most commonly read as a cautionary tale against unchecked experimentation and the consequences, whether immediate or long-lasting. Shelley opens the story to a discussion on ethics, and how Victor’s and the Creature’s actions explore who the true monster appears to be.
Although most critical readers of the novel are well aware of its allegory of ethical awareness surrounding the pursuit of knowledge, there’s a lot more to Shelley’s writing.
Mary Shelley was born in 1797 and lived to see the 1850s at 53 years old. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, a prominent proto-feminist of the time who pushed for women’s rights in her writings. Wollstonecraft passed away eleven days after her daughter Mary was born, which prompted Shelley’s familial traumas. She grew up with only a father and a strained relationship with her stepmother.
Shelley then met her husband, Percy, in the 1810s when he came to her home to meet her quite famous father, William Godwin. They fell in love although Percy was married at the time, and they ran away together. The relationship between Shelley and her father tensed over this for a long time, because Godwin disapproved of their relations.
Shelley faced a large amount of hardships in her lifetime. The lack of a mother growing up on top of harshened relations with her father and stepmother materialized in her writings through her feelings of abandonment and loneliness. Her husband’s first wife committed suicide shortly after the two ran away together. To make matters worse, Shelley’s half-sister fell victim to suicide around the same time in her life. Shelley went on to give birth to four children, three of which passed away very young. Her first child was born prematurely and died a few days after birth. This combination of grievances had a severe impact on Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein, as she struggled with depression over the years.
Throughout the compilation of Robert Walton’s letters to his sister and Victor Frankenstein’s tale, Shelley incorporates her personal traumas through heavy themes. She presents the hardships of childbirth and parenting, the importance of ethical education and criticism on the treatment of women as secondary to men.
While conducting his experiment, Victor is inspired at the potential to create a human, but thinks little of what he will do after it is alive. When the Creature comes to life, it is not as grand as Victor expected, and he runs away in horror. Through the Creature’s abandonment, Shelley channels how she felt alienation from her own family early on in life. She may feel as if she had to grow up early and on her own, which is exactly what the Creature must do. This serves as a criticism of uneducated parenting and warns parents of how childbirth can have unanticipated challenges they must be ready for.
Do you remember how we established the literary credibility of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft? Perhaps you’re already familiar with her name. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a monumental piece in the consequent feminist movement. It’s an essay that pushed for the societal recognition that women are rational and sensible and should not be looked at as less than men. She advocates for the rights of women as a general concept, regarding workplace wages and motherhood, but Wollstonecraft is in large part asserting women as deserving of proper education. Shelley not only respected her mother’s teachings through frequent visits to her grave, but continued to uphold her spirit through her own writings, and here’s how she does so through Frankenstein:
Rather than character-building any of the women in Frankenstein, Shelley leaves them in the background. Every female character is an extension of the male character they are related to—the lack of autonomy makes them forgettable. Very few women are even mentioned at all throughout the entire novel, while the most memorable ones are not given any distinguishing features. Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor’s adopted sister and later wife, is told in the sole perspective of Victor, who sees her as pure and blank. This connection—or lack thereof—is paralleled by Walton’s letters to his sister Margaret back home. Both women represent the separate spheres Shelley sees between men and women, as they serve as domestic comforts to the men pursuing life outside of the home. In creating this warped narrative of each woman (particularly Margaret Walton Saville, with whom she shares initials with), Mary Shelley calls attention to how practically everything in the world was fundamentally structured for male preference—how even women’s autonomy was regulated through the male gaze.
While Frankenstein may seem like a fictional tale of monsters on a surface level, there’s so much more to Mary Shelley’s allegorical teachings. Frankenstein is set up as a frame narrative: a story inside of a story. In between the lines of Walton’s letters to his sister, we learn Victor’s story, and further connect the dots of how the characters compare in their simple outlook of the women of their lives. When we pick apart the layers of Shelley’s writing, it can teach us a lot about the male-dominated world at the time, and how important it was for proto-feminist authors like Shelley to have blazed a trail for the very beginnings of gender equality.