Grief In Frankenstein

The novel Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, is a romantic/gothic classic with strange similarity to Mary's own personal life: the losses, the stages grief, the heartbreak, all relating back to life of Mary Shelley. Oddly enough, her own life experiences are what she uses as building blocks for this story line and creatively worked into the character own personal lives throughout the novel. Is this just a coincidence or was this book written for her own personal therapy session? This novel is more than a classic example of gothic literature; writing this piece was a way for Mary Shelley to alleviate the constant pain and suffering she had encountered while demonstrating her remedies of coping when stricken with grief. When try to consider
Mary gave birth to William, eleven months after her first child had passed away. The death of her first son sent into Mary into a deep, depressed state of mind. This distress sparked something in her, inspiring her to write Frankenstein. During this time, Shelley became pregnant with her third child but as we know, “She was to lose both this child and William” (Johnson 8). Strangely enough, Mary Shelley created a child in her novel, named William, who died at a young age as well. Shelley uses the same name as her son who passed, in her novel Frankenstein. This coincidence could be explained by her grief of losing her dear
In this stage, you can not accept the fact a loved one is no longer present. Expressing her sorrows through her work, Mary Shelley was pushing her own grief into the novel. Using William as representation of her own grief, making Williams’ family, in her novel, feel the same grief of losing little william as Mary Shelley felt when she lost both William and the first baby. Victor Frankenstein, Shelley’s main character in the novel, seems to be another way Shelley portrayed her grief and uses it for self therapy. In the novel, Victor receives a notice that his mother has passed. The news of his mother's passing sent him into a chemical craze. Frankenstein began to be fascinated in biology and in chemistry in order to bring back life. This was his way of coping, and although Mary Shelley did not try to create life, she herself was trying to find a way to cope with the death of her mother. Shelley’s way of coping involved her modeling the work Frankenstein after her own