“Knowledge is knowing that Frankenstein is not the monster. Wisdom is knowing that Frankenstein IS the monster.” -Anonymous

There is much to be said on how and why Frankenstein was written, and it is truly fascinating to explore the implications that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein. But, it can be argued that the more a reader knows about Shelley, the less space Frankenstein has to ‘stand on its own’ for how it functions as a novel. It could even be argued that ‘disembodying’ Frankenstein from Shelley is more appropriate because the idea of the relationship between creator and creation, and the complications therein are written about at length in the text itself. This mindset is not inherently wrong if a reader wants to focus on the text for its own sake, however, knowing Shelley’s background and the possible emotional circumstances she faced can lead to an even more poignant reading of Frankenstein. Furthermore, this can also set up Shelley’s ‘emotional credibility’ in knowing how certain relationships and emotional scenarios in the text can function. The most important of these relationships, within the text itself, is undoubtedly, the Creature with Victor. Outside of the text, Shelley’s own relationship with the Creature is particularly interesting because there are moments in the text that inevitably point to Shelley writing herself into Frankenstein.

Shelley’s relationship with the Creature in Frankenstein is intricate and important on a contextual level and a purely textual level. Shelley uses the Creature to project her own self/emotions onto, which creates an amazing dichotomy that makes Shelley both the Creature’s ‘mother’, and the Creature’s equal. While it is not beyond any author to write themselves into any given text, Shelley succeeds in transferring her emotions to the Creature without overtly ‘claiming’ these feelings and pains as her own. She allows the Creature to feel and act out both her pain and his pain without making either feel disingenuous. This is a great feat of authorial talent by itself, but this also creates an extraordinary effect in making Shelley the companion that the Creature desired. In short, Shelley can be read as the Creature, the mother and the bride all at once.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (hereafter referred to as Shelley or Mary Shelley) was born to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Goodwin, both prominent thinkers in their respective fields (Wollstonecraft in feminism and Goodwin in utilitarian philosophy) and accomplished authors. Wollstonecraft passed away a mere ten days after Shelley’s birth in August of 1797, due to puerperal fever, leaving Shelley and her sister Fanny to grow up in the care of their father, and later stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont. Godwin saw no need to alter his children’s education based on their gender, so Shelley was privileged to have a greater education than most young women of the time. Shelley and Clairmont did not get along at all, and Shelley was even denied a formal secondary education while Clairmont’s own daughter was sent away to college. The young Shelly was never beyond opportunities to listen to (and perhaps participate in, albeit at a limited pace) intellectual discussions. She was always in the close company of Godwin and his collogues (including Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth), some of whom were early experimenters of galvanist electricity, Humphrey Davy and William Nicholson (which undoubtedly had their influence on Frankenstein), and was never shy of making use of her father’s massive library. She was bright, inquisitive and imaginative; she wrote stories, read books by her mother’s grave and often daydreamed to escape her tumultuous family life.

Godwin sent her to stay with the family of William Baxter (a close friend of Godwin’s) during the summer of 1812, where she became friends with the young Isabel Baxter. Upon her return to England, she met and became acquainted with the then married, Percy Bysshe Shelley who was an avid student of Godwin. The two fled England together in 1814, which left Godwin feeling ashamed and led to the eventual estrangement of Mary Shelley from her father. It is without question that the two found love and companionship in each other through their mutual love of books and romantic chemistry, even writing a journal of their time and travels together. Despite their intentions, their relationship was not to last and was certainly not without consequences. Apart from the disapproval and ostracization from her family, Shelley was made something of a social scandal for participating in such an inappropriate relationship. Her childhood friend Isabel was also forced to distance herself completely from Shelley. The young couple were penniless for a long time, and often moved repeatedly to avoid creditors. Their first child died shortly after being born.

In the following summer, the pair found themselves in the company of Lord Byron, Mary Shelley’s step sister, Jane and John Polidori, reading and discussing ghost stories. Byron suggested that the party each try their hand at writing their own ghost story; Mary Shelley’s attempt, eventually became Frankenstein. Percy and Mary were wed after Percy Shelley’s first wife committed suicide. Mary Shelley was working on Frankenstein while her the travel journal A History of Six Weeks Tour was being prepared for press in 1817. Frankenstein was published shortly after in 1818 by an ‘anonymous’ author, but because Percy Shelley wrote the introduction people assumed that he wrote the novel in its entirety. Regardless, the novel was hugely successful which afforded the couple some financial stability for the first time in years. They made a home for themselves in Italy, wherein both Mary and Percy Shelley enjoyed advancement in their literary careers and mutual prosperity. Despite Mary Shelley’s devotion to her husband, he was unfaithful and the pair suffered the loss of two more children.

Mary Shelley was prone to bouts of depression and haplessness, which could only have been made worse by her immense sense of loneliness. This loneliness would be made even worse with the death of Percy Shelley in 1822, leaving Mary Shelley and her only child, Percy Florence (hereafter referred to as Florence) completely alone. Upon her return to England, she was shunned by any respectable person due to her immense indiscretion of the proper societal expectations she was inevitably held to, regardless of the tragedies that followed her (Perhaps a modern audience would have sympathy for Shelley and ‘forgive’ her lack of ‘romantic decorum’ on the idea that she has already been ‘punished’ by the loss of her children and husband). Thankfully, Shelley had her immense writing talents to earn her a living and support her son, despite not having any social backing to help promote her writing. She spent the remainder of her life writing her own fiction and working to ensure her husband’s literary and historical legacy lived on.

It is important to understand where exactly Shelley ‘comes from’ in the literary sense, because her life experience as a sufferer of many personal tragedies creates and reinforces her authorial right to write about tragedy. For all intents and purposes, anyone can write about anything they want, and with enough practice and research, anyone could write a successful piece of fiction about issues, places, people, etc. that they do not have firsthand experience with. Obviously, Shelley does not know what it is like to be a reanimated, male corpse who murders people in cold blood. Nor, does she know what it is like to be a privileged, genius white man who has all the time and resources he needs to go about whatever business he wishes to conduct (granted, Shelley had plenty of experience dealing with and socializing with these kinds of men, it stands to reason that her writing of Frankenstein would have changed had she been this kind of man herself). Of course, it is not these things that make Frankenstein so evocative and successful, but the incredible emotional arcs that happen over the course of the text (The Creature feels irrevocable estrangement and self-loathing, Victor suffers through the deaths of nearly everyone he loves, etc.) which Shelley has undoubtable knowledge of and experience in. Furthermore, by placing more emphasis on the emotionally relatable parts of Frankenstein, Shelley sets herself up for further success by creating common ground for all readers. Not everyone who reads Frankenstein will be a privileged white person, but everyone that reads Frankenstein will have felt some kind of deep, emotional pain or turmoil in their lives. Shelley can be seen as an authority of feeling sad, alone and shunned from regular society, which makes her the perfect author to create the Creature in Frankenstein.

Frankenstein contains three first-person narratives, and the most well executed is the Creature’s. He is the best narrator and cultivates the most intimate relationship with the reader, which is a contradiction to how everyone in the text reacts to the Creature, regardless of his eloquence and empathy. The Creature is simply better at endearing the audience to his story. A particularly powerful example of this is when he first observes the De Lacy’s spending time together. He sees the elderly De Lacy father playing music for his daughter, Agatha.

“…she [Agatha] took something out of a drawer… and she sat down beside the old man, who, taking up an instrument, began to play and to produce sounds sweeter than the voice of the thrush or the nightingale... The silver hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager won my reverence, while the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion… until she sobbed audibly… and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised her and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a peculiar and overpowering nature; they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced… and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions.” (74-75)

The Creature was brought to tears just by the sight of familial kindness and the sound of music. This not only reinforces how truly lonely he is, but it quickly and successfully establishes that he is a sensitive person unlike Victor who, at this point, only behaved to benefit his own interest and selfishly allowed Justine to take the punishment for the Creature’s (and by proxy his) crime. He had a strong suspicion (which turned out to be correct) that the Creature killed his brother. Victor could have faced the court and at least attempt to save Justine’s life, but he remains so absorbed in his own guilt that he says nothing to help Justine. Victor even has the audacity to say that he ‘bore a hell which nothing could extinguish’ (59) throughout the course of Justine’s trial when he only kept quiet for fear that he would be called crazy, or worse, guilty and then would have to face punishment himself.

When a reader reads any text within the context of the author’s own life, they must consider all relevant aspects of the author’s life. In the case of Shelley she clearly is most comparable to the Creature in Frankenstein. But, the question still remains of whom Victor Frankenstein can be compared to in her life, and how important this parallel is to the text as a whole and, consequently Shelley. The most immediate parallels are her father and husband (both incredibly intelligent, male figures she cared for and felt alienated from at one point or another). Granted, it is very possible that Victor can be an amalgam of all intelligent male figures in Mary Shelley’s life (including Byron, Wordsworth, Lawrence etc.), but for the sake of this particular argument, Frankenstein itself points to Victor being mostly a portrayal of Percy Shelley and William Godwin. One of the most powerful scenes in the text can be read as an especially bombastic jab at Godwin.

Godwin’s felt betrayed by Mary and Percy Shelley’s relationship, but later in life he reconciled with Mary Shelley (after she was widowed). Marylin May’s essay, “Publish and perish: William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and the public appetite for scandal” details the various motivations of Godwin and Shelley’s own literary rebuttals. Godwin often marginalized or even rejected female ideals in his own writing, was never shy of writing his own family melodrama into his work, and he did not care much for Mary or Percy Shelley’s taste in the ‘feminine’ aspects of literature, despite their talents for them (both the gothic and the overtly romantic). Shelley takes a rather melodramatic stance against her father in Frankenstein when Victor begins to make then deconstruct the female creature before his first Creature’s eyes.

“… she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness... she, who in all probability was to become a thinking and reasoning animal, might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation… She also might turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man… and he be again alone... one of the first results of those sympathies for which the dæmon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror… I trembled and my heart failed within me, when, on looking up, I saw by the light of the moon the dæmon at the casement… and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged.” (118-119)

This contemplation on the female creature’s behalf certainly feels frenzied and guilty, but a closer reading of this passage shows the true extent of Victor’s moral shortcomings. Victor is not only de-sexing the new creature on the literal level by inhibiting her ability to reproduce and assuming her preferences for ‘male beauty’ (which he could have ‘solved’ by rendering the female creature infertile, which would still allow her to at least have sex), but he reasons that this new creature’s existence would inevitably cause the downfall of the human race, with or without the first Creature’s help.

Returning to the context of Shelley’s life, this scene can illustrate how she feels about Godwin’s feelings of her romantic life, but her feelings on the Victorian female gender role. In essence, Shelley herself might feel ‘de-sexed’ by both society and her father. Granted, her relationship with Percy Shelley was unorthodox for the time, but she (and all women) still had every right to pursue romantic fulfillment with whoever she pleased. The Creature himself being present for Victor’s change of heart furthers this idea because the Creature’s rage towards Victor is renewed, and he swears that he will see that Victor suffers as much as he has in his life (120-121). The Creature can make good on his threats to Victor, not unlike how Shelley can assert her sexuality regardless of the consequences. Furthermore, the female creature’s inability to have children (either from not being completed, or if Victor had the foresight to make her incapable of childbearing) can also be seen as a direct note of Shelley’s own feelings regarding her capability as a mother. She lost three children during her relationship with Percy Shelley, and he was adulterous in their marriage (granted, Shelley should have had the foresight to deduce that if Percy Shelley cheated on his first wife, he would certainly have to propensity to do it again) which she certainly took to heart. Shelley valued her husband’s opinion and affection, so it stands to reason that when she was unable to successfully bear children, and she was no longer the sole object of his sexual desire, her own self-worth as a wife and a woman would be drastically damaged. The Creature manages to have the last laugh over Victor when he murders Elizabeth and watches Victor die alone, whereas Shelley simply owned up to her mistakes and continued living as best she could after Percy Shelley’s death.

Anna E. Clark argues this in her essay, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist” as well as describing the Creature’s ‘protagonism’ and how he has as much protagonist merit as Victor does, just based on his greater talent as a narrator. She defines protagonism as a mechanism that “facilitates identification with many characters, emphasizing evaluation, comparison, and contemplative detachment rather than unreflective absorption in a single perspective.” (246) She also utilizes the Creature’s descriptions of the De Lacy family to show how flawlessly he can describe his own experience as well as the experiences of others, without losing the audience.

“… a character who is internally  focalized  is  one  whose  perspective  or  thought-process  we  can not only share, but also occupy, either through first-person narration  that  elides  the  temporal  distance  between  speaker  and  subject,  or  through  a  third-person  perspective  capable  of  incorporating  that  character’s point of view into its own… the  creature’s  narration borders on free indirect discourse, assuming an intimate and yet nearly omniscient narrative stance that allows him to articulate the precise deliberations of this seemingly inconsequential character [Felix De Lacy].” (247-248)

Clark argues that giving the first-person lens to ‘minor’ characters within a text allows the audience to experience said character in the most intimate way without the author having to jump through more hoops to make the reading experience smoother (in essence, it is overcoming the obstacle by choosing to not face it). Shelley does this twice in the text (by switching from Walton’s epistolary narration to Victor’s first person narration and then by switching from Victor’s first person narration to the Creature’s first person narration) but only when she wanted the focus to be on especially important parts of the story. For all intents and purposes, she could have handed Elizabeth or Clerval the microphone and let them wax poetic about their respective interactions with Victor, but this would have made the narrative privilege feel less important, and the story would have been bogged down with too many superfluous details. Conversely, one could argue that the inclusion of Captain Walton could have been omitted from the story overall because he does little more than provide Victor with a motive and in-text audience for him to tell his story. However, Walton serves mostly as an immediate parallel to Victor both in his desire for knowledge and adventure, and when he decides to cut his expedition short after hearing Victor’s tragic cautionary tale (He can also serve as a point of reference for the audience). By choosing to just let the Creature have first person page time, Shelley made it perfectly clear that his side of the story was just as important (if not more so) as Victor’s.

The Creature does not need Shelley’s immediate influence (as in, the reader does not need to know anything about Shelley whatsoever) to be a functional and effective character in Frankenstein. Shelley’s personal influence on the personality of the Creature can be seen a little more clearly with the knowledge of her personal life in mind. However, its without question that the efficacy of the Creature can be attributed to Shelley’s deft treatment of her own emotional pain in the text.

As a purely literary symbol he represents the following: The consequences of unchecked scientific progress as shown by Victor’s initial disgust to, and persistent reviling of the Creature despite his two years of work to create the Creature, “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe…? Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.” (35-36). The creation aspect of the Creator/Creation relationship and how improper care between the two can harbor anger and resentment.

“Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image… yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions… but I am solitary and abhorred.’… Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed.” (91-95).

The negative effects of societal pressure/judgement exemplified by his being reduced to a mindless monster based on his appearance, despite his kindness and intelligence.

“Who can describe their horror and consternation on beholding me?... Felix darted forward, and with supernatural force tore me from his father, to whose knees I clung.. he dashed me to the ground and struck me violently with a stick… But my heart sank within me as with bitter sickness, and I refrained. I saw him on the point of repeating his blow, when, overcome by pain and anguish, I quitted the cottage...” (94-95)

And finally, the idea that knowledge belongs to anyone (including a ‘wretched monster’, not just well-off white men like Victor) willing to learn shown in his time observing the De Lacy family and reading three texts he found outside his hiding place.

“They [the books] produced in me an infinity of new images and feelings, that sometimes raised me to ecstasy, but more frequently sunk me into the lowest dejection… I applied much personally to my own feelings and condition… I found myself similar yet at the same time strangely unlike to the beings concerning whom I read and to whose conversation I was a listener. I sympathized with and partly understood them, but I was unformed in mind... ‘The path of my departure was free,’ and there was none to lament my annihilation... What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” (89)

Both Shelley and the Creature are motherless, looked down upon by most people, but one particular male person does them the most hurt, immensely intelligent despite not having formal educations and feel extreme amounts of alimentation. A reading of the text that favors the side of the Creature (even without knowing Shelley) is tragic, evocative and filled with ethical and metaphysical conundrums just based on how he behaves in the text. These feelings can easily be applied to Shelley herself, if only because she experienced them in life.

Upon a cursory glance at the main characters of Frankenstein and a rudimentary knowledge of all of the death that Shelley experienced in life, one might argue that she can more closely relate to Victor Frankenstein sooner than the Creature. While this is not beyond reason, it is easier and more thematically appropriate to compare Shelley to the Creature. Ronald Britton takes a psychoanalytic approach to Shelley via Frankenstein in his essay, “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: What Made the Monster Monstrous?”. He frames the first part of his argument as if Shelley was a consulting patient during her authorship of Frankenstein, then describes her writing process as Freudian in the sense that the subconscious mind provides the raw material for creativity. “If we see this secondary revision-like daydream as a sort of closure… sometimes I think we could see it working in reverse… Mary’s daydream of scientific experiment opened a door to unconscious phantasies of a dreadful scene of childbirth.” (3) This mention of horrific childbirth is particularly important in this context because Shelley likely felt that she caused her own mother’s death, Shelley herself only having one child to make it past infancy, and Percy Shelley abandoning his first family while his wife (who later committed suicide) while she was pregnant. It is beyond question that she associates childbirth with death and possibly the cruel treatment of the innocent (which is shown in text via the Creature’s many encounters with humans).

The Creature has one trait that Shelley does not, which is a kind of freedom to ‘go forth and prosper’ as she puts it in her 1831 introduction (169). Both Shelley and the Creature are bound by x amount of societal constraints (the Creature’s appearance and Shelley’s gender roles), but the Creature still has the ability to lash out at others. After being discovered by the younger members of the De Lacy family, he burns down their house and, eventually murders William Frankenstein on the principle that he is the brother to his hated creator, Victor. The Creature’s motivation for these acts is that he knows he is not a helpless being and can therefore seek justice from others, including his ‘father’. “I gazed on my victim, and my heart swelled with exultation and hellish triumph… ‘I too can create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable; this death will carry despair to him, and a thousand other miseries shall torment and destroy him.’,” (100). Even in his anguish, the Creature found a reason to spare Victor’s life and a chance to end is loneliness. He attempts to convince Victor to create him a ‘bride’ so he can lead a peaceful existence with a perfect companion.

“I am malicious because I am miserable… tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me?... Let him live with me in the interchange of kindness, and instead of injury I would bestow every benefit upon him with tears of gratitude at his acceptance. But that cannot be; the human senses are insurmountable barriers to our union… if I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear, and chiefly towards you my arch-enemy, because my creator… if any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them a hundred and a hundredfold; for that one creature’s sake I would make peace with the whole kind!... I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself;… It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another. Our lives will not be happy, but they will be harmless and free from the misery I now feel. Oh! My creator, make me happy; let me feel gratitude towards you for one benefit! Let me see that I excite the sympathy of some existing thing; do not deny me my request!” (102-103)

This relays both Shelley’s own inherent and her desire for true companionship, but it is by Victor’s will that this dream never comes to fruition (which also furthers the argument that the Creature acts as a better protagonist than Victor, as the Creature better facilitates practical solutions and, consequently sympathy from the audience).

Finally, Britton argues that each main narrator can be used as a symbol for each part of her thoughts. Walton being a kind of allusion to her childhood daydreams, Victor Frankenstein as a culmination of some male figures in her life, and the Creature being her subconscious thoughts due to his immense eloquence and emotional evocation (7). Britton also notes on how the ending of Frankenstein can be read as an allegory for Shelley’s mind and how it copes.

“… only Robert Walton, of her three narrators, survives… the intrepid explorer, remains, judiciously but reluctantly turning for home. The Monster of the ‘deep unconscious’ is returned to ashes, Frankenstein, the ego ideal, is safely housed in idealized prosperity and Robert, the ego, steers back into more mundane and safer waters.” (9)

It can be confirmed, with this analysis, that Shelley found the most appropriate end for her own pain was to just bury it and preserve the best parts of her life. This can be reinforced with the fact that Shelley dedicated most of her life to her husband (first in ignoring social decorum and her own father’s wishes to pursue a relationship with Percy Shelley, and again after his death when she spent much of her time keeping his legacy alive in lieu of her own) and in her own introduction in the 1831 edition of the text when she claims that Frankenstein was written when grief and death were just words that did not have places in her heart (Shelley 1831, p. 169). Britton notes this, and poses the question of whether the audience should accept this claim or whether this is Shelley being retroactively in denial of the pain she suffered at the loss of her loved ones (10). The Creature, like Shelley, suffered loneliness and emotional abuse at the hands other others, but Shelley bore her pain quietly, whereas the Creature sought vengeance. More importantly, he is the epitome of not only the negative things Shelley felt about herself, but everything she wanted to have in a child: He is kind, intelligent, capable of greatness and alive against the improbable odds.

Mary Shelley earned her title as the mother of the science fiction genre by writing Frankenstein, which sets up the groundwork for science fiction in establishing thematic cues and incorporating science as a literary mechanism to introduce the main conflict of the story. Frankenstein a staple in the English canon overall, so much so that it can be considered hyper-canonical at this point. Frankenstein can more than easily holds its own, as a work of fiction on the grounds of its pure literary merit alone because it reads perfectly well and all thematic cues can be gleaned easily, without knowing anything about Shelley as an author or person.

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