Locke and Wollstonecraft



Locke and Wollstonecraft

Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft

Mary Shelley Wollstonecraft was a British Romantic novelist, poet, travel writer, and biographer whose most popular novel Frankenstein (1818) is credited with having pioneered the science fiction genre. In addition, the novel, as well as Shelley's oeuvre as a whole, is often read as a nightmare of procreation, contemplated as it is by fears of childbirth and death of family members, especially children (Hunter, 1996, 14).

"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" is about a scientist who has the goal to create life, examining the limits of ethics. The film shows what happen when a person is controlled by science and other technologies. The message of Mary Shelley in the movie "Frankenstein" is that life and morals are more important than scientific progress. Victor Frankenstein and the captain are controlled by the search for knowledge beyond the boundaries of morality. Therefore, they are the real monsters; they are acting unethical and inhuman for the society. In 1796 she began a relationship with William Godwin when she becomes pregnant and they married in 1797, although they never quite live together. Ten days after the birth of her second daughter (later Mary Shelley, author of 'Frankenstein'), she died of an infection.

When, after her death, her husband publishes everything she wrote, even his letters to Gilbert Imlay, its intention is a posthumous tribute, but the result is quite the opposite. Some negative reviews come from everywhere, drawing on his way 'unusual' to live with free sex and suicide attempts, and completely demolish his ideas. For over a century it is called mad bird of ill omen, immoral, in a word: a feminist.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a radical feminist, novelist, translator, and philosopher, overthrew the frivolous female images in romantic fiction to examine the pitfalls of women's real lives. An Anglo-Irish Londoner from the Spitalfields district she was born to semiliterate working-class parents. Her girlhood bore the strains of spousal abuse and alcoholism and the self-doubt that arose from parental favoritism toward her brother (Responses, 1818, 58). She prepared herself for the future by reading philosophy and history and by teaching herself French and German. After working as a widow's companion in Bath, a governess for an Irish family, and a teacher in her own girls' academy at Islington, she began writing and editing for the New Analytical Review. The proceeds paid tuition for her sisters and bought a commission in the English navy for her brother. To aid classroom teachers, she compiled Original Stories from Real Life with Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788). A collection of parables and historical anecdotes illustrated by William Blake, the textbook lauds the ideal mother-nurturer for her influence on the next generation. Ironically the author cites as examples of misguided young women two motherless girls like the two Wollstonecraft daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary, left at her tragic death (Huntington, 1982, 18).

In a professional treatise, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, with Reflections on Female Conduct in ...