Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

The legacy of Frankenstein is inseparable from the legacy of its author, Mary Shelley, whose life and associations profoundly influenced the book’s writing. Shelley was born in 1797 to two prominent English philosophers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. An advocate of women’s equality, Wollstonecraft rejected conventional expectations of femininity by abandoning her work as a governess—a traditional occupation for a young woman at that time—and becoming a professional writer and editor.

Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Shelley, but Shelley was keenly aware of her mother’s life and opinions growing up. Wollstonecraft’s independent streak, which manifested most strongly in her decision to pursue a writing career, influenced Shelley’s decision to leave home at age 16 to live with her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who was married at the time). Only two years later, Shelley developed the premise behind Frankenstein while on holiday near Lake Geneva during what contemporaries called “The Year Without Summer” because of a massive volcanic eruption in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) that clouded the Earth’s atmosphere with ash, causing historically cold and dreary weather as far away as Europe. Along with Percy, the poet Lord Byron, and the writer and physician John Polidori, Shelley participated in a contest to determine who could write the scariest ghost story—a contest out of which Frankenstein was born.

Scholars have pointed to both her mother’s life and her own life as major influences on Frankenstein’s themes. In 1815, a year after Percy and Shelley eloped, Shelley gave birth to a baby girl two months prematurely; the baby died two weeks later. In her 1976 essay “Female Gothic,” pioneering feminist literary critic Ellen Moers refers to Frankenstein as a “birth myth” through which Shelley copes with the guilt surrounding the dual losses of both her mother and her own child. Of the violence, abandonment, and death that follows Frankenstein’s “birth” of the Creature, Moers writes, “Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what precedes birth, not upon birth itself, but upon what follows birth: the trauma of the afterbirth” (Literary Women. Oxford, England, Oxford University Press, 1976).

Shelley’s father was also a personal and philosophical influence on the author. Taking cues from his wife’s views on women’s education, Godwin tutored Shelley in numerous subjects. He also allowed her to sit in when he entertained prominent intellectuals, including the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Moreover, echoes of Godwin’s political philosophy as an early anarchist appear in Frankenstein. For example, Godwin believed that government institutions constrained societies’ ability to behave rationally, morally, and tolerantly. Societal prejudices like the ones described by Godwin transform the creature from a moral and rational being into a killer who vows revenge on humanity.

Furthermore, Godwin believed that humans are born with no innate proclivity toward evil, writing, “[O]ur virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world” (An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. London, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1793). This maxim is consistent with the character arc belonging to the creature, who is born with an appreciation for beauty and his fellow sentient beings, only to adopt misanthropy as a guiding principle after experiencing mistreatment from Frankenstein and virtually every other human he encounters.