Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Biographical Notes
Mary was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two famous
and controversial figures married in an England rocked in the 1790s by radical
reverberations from the revolution across the channel (the French Revolution).
Godwin was a minister who turned atheist and anarchist; he wrote influential
philosophical works championing the power of human reason to enable people to
live in harmony without laws and institutions. Wollstonecraft was perhaps the
first important radical feminist writer of note. She was vilified in her time
as "an unsexe'd female," a "whore," and "a hyena in
petticoats" for writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792),
in which she argues with passion and reason for the political, economic, and
legal equality of women. Mary Wollstonecraft died from bacterial infection gotten
when she gave birth to Mary Shelley.
The death of her mother in childbirth haunted Mary Shelley all of her life,
and legend has it that in her youth she spent countless hours reading on her
mother's grave. When she was sixteen, Mary ran off to Europe with a married
radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, causing her father to disown her. In the
space of two years during which she began to write Frankenstein, Mary
gave birth to two children who soon died, and her half-sister, Fanny Imlay,
and Percy's wife, Harriet, both committed suicide. Soon after, Mary became pregnant
with a third child who died in infancy. Naturally, she was hit hard by all these
deaths, especially those of her own babies. Her gloomy preoccupation with death,
death in childbirth in particular, forms a central motif in Frankenstein,
the only novel still read of the many she wrote.
The Origin of Frankenstein
Confined to their Swiss mountain home by rainy weather,
Mary and Percy Shelley, their neighbor Lord Byron (England's most celebrated
poet at the time), and Byron's doctor, Polidori, all four passed the time indoors
telling ghost stories and discussing such things as the possibility of discovering
the "principle of life." They decided that for fun—this
was long before Nintendo and cable—each
of them would write an original ghost story to entertain the others. After days
of no luck thinking up a good story, one night's discussion of "reanimating
corpses" caused Mary to have a "waking dream" of the monster
that would become the famous Frankenstein in so many bad movies. Mary was the
only one of the four to complete her story. Percy edited her manuscript and
wrote a preface for the novel, which was first published in 1818.
The Myth of Prometheus
The full title of the novel is Frankenstein; or, The
Modern Prometheus. In Greek mythology Prometheus was one of the Titans,
a race of giants who ruled the earth before the all-powerful god Zeus conquered
and eradicated them. Prometheus (whose name means "foresight") stole
fire from Olympus and gave it to humankind, hoping to save them from annihilation
by Zeus: Prometheus took from the gods and gave to the humans—he
was a sort of a mythological Robin Hood. As punishment for his transgression,
Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock, and each day Prometheus's liver was eaten
by a huge bird and then magically restored so it could be devoured anew the
next day. Later myths say that Prometheus created man.
Significantly, perhaps, Zeus sought to counteract the
blessing Prometheus had given mortals by having a woman made from clay and adorned
with gifts from all the gods. Her name was Pandora ("all-giving"),
and when she opened her mysterious jar, "All human ills and evils flew
out and covered the world" (Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia).
Themes and ideas in Frankenstein to consider as you
read
Education—good
and bad
Science and technology—good
or bad
A world abandoned by
its Creator
Birth and childbirth
Prometheus, the champion
of humankind
Importance of family
and social relations
Isolation/alienation
Guilt
Characters as doubles/twins/halves
of one whole
Masculinity and femininity
Concentric narrative
structure (frame tale)
Emotion vs. Intellect
The conscious mind vs.
the unconscious
Sexuality vs. asexuality
or anti-sexuality
The power of the imagination
The "noble savage"
Ambition and pride
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