Adriana Steele
Cline
English 102
October, 2011
Guided by Life
Our past, our choices, and our situation in life, ultimately affects what we do with our life and contributes to determining our future. Feelings and emotions also play an important role in how we perceive life and how we react. People may say that they are neutral or indifferent, but personal beliefs and feelings will always be prominent and influential in our lives. I believe this is particularly true in the case of the story of Frankenstein. Frankenstein is a story about loneliness and finding the place and the people that you belong with.
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, never knew her mother, and her father wasn’t happy with her marriage to Percy Shelley (Gilbert and Gubar, 227). Mary’s relationship with her family was distant, but over the course of five years she was pregnant many times and all of her children died during the pregnancies or shortly after they were born (Moers, 216-217). She did have her husband, but prior to their marriage, she was his mistress. I believe that her feelings of loss, especially the loss of her children, contributed to the plot and themes of Frankenstein.
In the story, Victor begins the creation of the monster when he is away at school and while he is separated from his family and friends. At first it seems as though he is in the pursuit of creating life only to fill a scientific curiosity. Subconsciously, his purpose of creating life is more personal and it also parallels Shelley’s feelings. “Surely no outside influence need be sought to explain Mary Shelley’s fantasy of the newborn as at once monstrous agent of destruction and piteous victim of parental abandonment” (Moers, 222). Clearly, Moers is discussing not only Victor’s relationship with the creature, but she is also is expressing how Mary most likely felt after losing so many children. We can’t know precisely how Shelly felt, but the loss of her children would suggest she was heartbroken and that she expressed her feelings in her writing.
“One can never be sure how far Shelley’s accounts of persecution were founded on fact” (Small, 207). These words perfectly convey that Shelley’s life had an influence on her work. The monster and Victor represent and symbolize Mary’s personal life and parallel her own tragic experiences. Victor represents Shelley because he is the creator of the monster, like Shelly is the mother of several failed pregnancies and children whom all died. Also, Victor, like Shelly, is a character who is not intimately tied to his own family. These feelings are evident as Shelley depicts the monster’s feelings, especially when he is telling Victor his story.
The monster’s loneliness is the underlying current that determines his decisions; it’s his companion as he proceeds through the story. All he wants is somewhere to belong and to have a family of his own. One of the things Mary Shelley was lacking in her life was a strong, close knit family:
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing…I had never yet seen a being resembling or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I (Shelley, 81)
These words were spoken by the monster, but Shelly’s voice resonates here as if she were speaking them for herself. These words clearly depict what Shelly’s life was like for her and the suffering she had to endure.
Shelley also resembled Victor because of the loneliness and despair that he feels. Ultimately, it is his loneliness that compels him to create the monster. When Victor succeeds and finds that he has successfully created a monster, he falls into a state of fear and depression. After the loss of some of her children, Shelley began writing and also began the creation of her own ‘monster’, that being the story of Frankenstein. The story was Shelly’s distraction from her loneliness. The story of Frankenstein, I believe, was Shelley’s way of expressing her acute pain and loss.
In the story, Victor expresses his pain by seeking revenge on the monster, and he hopes to eventually kill it for killing the people he cared about the most. All Victor really wanted was to start a family, but this is the hope of the monster as well. If the reader pays close attention though, we can interpret that Shelley put aspects of herself in to both the monster and Victor. The reader cannot help but to have deep empathy for Shelly’s characters. The ability to sense Shelly’s emotional state and connect the author to the story makes it a powerful read; “…the more than mortal enthusiasm and grandeur of the Being’s speech over the dead body of his victim- is an exhibition of intellectual and imaginative power…” (Percy Shelley, 186).
Frankenstein was meant to be a scary story, but subconsciously, I believe that it was meant to be a story about family and love, not horror. Throughout the story, it is obvious that Victor and his creation both long for a sense of family and they have a driving need to belong. Because Shelley’s life was disjointed and riddled with deep tragedy, one can make the argument that the author’s feelings and emotions influenced the outcome of her characters and the story of Frankenstein. Would Frankenstein even have been written if Mary Shelly’s past has been different? If it was written, would it have been as overwhelming and as significant as it is today?
Works Cited
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. "Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve." Print. Rpt. In Frankenstein. Norton Critical ed. 225-240. Print.
Moers, Ellen. "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother." Print. Rpt. in Frankenstein. Norton Critical ed. 214-224. Print.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Norton Critical ed. Print.
Shelley, Percy B. "On Frankenstein." Print. Rpt. in Frankenstein. Norton Critical ed. 185-186. Prin Small, Christopher. "[Percy] Shelly and Frankenstein." Print. Rpt. in Frankenstein. Norton Critical ed. 205-208. Print.
