Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Introduction

Written by Shelley when she was just nineteen years old and published anonymously in 1818, Frankenstein is one of the most recognizable and enduring novels in English literature. The story began as Shelley's contribution to a friendly competition among several of her literary cohorts. While on holiday in Geneva, Switzerland, a period that Shelley later characterized as "a wet, ungenial summer" during which "incessant rain often confined us for days to the house," she and her companions--her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord George Gordon Byron, and Dr. John Polidori--challenged one another to write a horror story (Bulfinch, 148).

Her tale of an obsessed scientist who creates and then abandons a human being, thus provoking it to horrible vengeance, has maintained the attention of readers and critics since its publication and has vastly overshadowed Shelley's other works of literature. Initial critical reaction to Frankenstein was often unfavorable, but in the twentieth century critics began to analyze the novel from a variety of new perspectives and to recognize in it many devices and themes which are now presented as evidence that Shelley's self-described "hideous progeny" was ahead of its time.

Thesis Statement

How does Mary Shelley provide warnings to scientists and industrialists to be responsible for the creations they unleash on the world, so they do not turn into “monsters”?

The Novel

Critics identify the responsibility and consequences of human creation as the central theme of Frankenstein, signified by Shelley's reference to the mythical Prometheus in the novel's subtitle and by the opening epitaph, from Book Ten of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the classic epic poem which recounts the biblical story of creation. Both allusions invoke characters who attempt to steal knowledge and violate the natural order, and in the process bring about their own destruction.

Frankenstein's negation of the role of woman in giving birth irrevocably disrupts conventional family and societal relationships. Critics trace this theme to Shelley's own life, which was profoundly affected by her ambivalence about childbirth. Frankenstein's concurrent tampering with the sacred finality of death further illustrates the disastrous consequences of meddling in the mysteries of human existence. The motif of the doppelgänger, or double, is also prominent in Frankenstein.

The doctor and his monster represent doubles of one another and their relationship mirrors that of the head and the heart, or the intellect and emotion. In this context, the monster's actions have been viewed as manifestations of the doctor's--and Shelley's--repressed desires. Some critics have speculated as to whether Shelley's omission of a name for the creature was intentional, noting that the result--that casual readers and filmgoers refer to the monster, not the doctor, as Frankenstein--has served to underscore the story's theme of blended identities.

Experimenting on live human beings

Frankenstein is traditionally held to be a novel about getting "too clever with technology, as is the idea that Mary Shelley "was writing at a time of phenomenal transformation in the productive and social structures of English society--in short, the transformation we call the 'Industrial Revolution'. Victor Frankenstein's workshop and the monstrous ...