Literary Criticism Of 'Frankenstein' By Mary Shelley

Today, we all see Frankenstein as a gothic classic written by Mary Shelley. Though that was not the case during the early 1800s. When Frankenstein, a novel that tells the story of a young man that creates a monster from assembling body parts, was anonymously published, many believed that the author of the novel was Percy Bysshe Shelley rather than his wife, Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley, previously Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, two noted writers (Bloom 8). It is fascinating and interesting how we are able to see how Frankenstein was developed through Shelley’s eyes and how her personal experiences have transformed the novel into a gothic classic.
Mary Shelley experienced many tragedies
She goes on to mention that she had a lot of trouble in coming up with a good story line, but that changed one night (Shelley 17). After a long conversation about supernatural related topics, Shelley had a nightmare that eventually structured the main idea and some of the events that occurred in Frankenstein (Shelley 19). Some of the elements seen in her nightmare are clearly present in the novel. For example, in her nightmare she mentions how the man “would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror-stricken” and in the story itself, it mentions how Victor Frankenstein “escaped and rushed downstairs” due to his fear of the creature (Shelley 19, 57). The morning after her nightmare she began writing the first lines of Frankenstein, “it was on a dreary night of November,” (Shelley 56). Shelley never intended to create a novel. Her objective was to write a short story, but her husband encouraged her to further lengthen her idea, which is one of the reasons why the preface in Frankenstein was written by him (Shelley 19). In the “Author’s Introduction” to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley goes in depth and explains the events that shaped Frankenstein in a way that engages the reader into wanting to know more about Shelley's life during that
In the “Author’s Introduction” to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Shelley further explains some of the conversations held between Lord Byron and her husband. Throughout most of their talks, instead of engaging in the conversations, she listened. She recalls one conversation in specific when they discussed the nature of life and whether there was a possibility of it being discovered (Shelley 18). They also went on to discuss how perhaps “a corpse would be reanimated; … perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth,” (Shelley 18). Certain aspects of this conversation in specific can be seen in Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel which tells the story of a man who gives life to lifeless matter, “sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body… his jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks,” (Shelley 57). It is fascinating how even though Shelley herself never participated and engaged in Lord Byron’s and her husband’s conversations she still listened, learned, and reflected them in her