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 funthis was long before Nintendo and cableeach 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 humanshe 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

Educationgood 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


253 main page

Teaching history
Chip's Home