Frankenstein (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

reiterate Frankenstein in any way; where her first novel allowed for a dim hope for humankind in the relenting figure of Robert Walton, The Last Man is bleak and hopeless in its indictment of humanity’s weakness and doom. Mary’s sense of isolation after the deaths of her husband, children, and friends clearly color this dark work, giving its proto-existentialism an authentic and close feel.

“... the corpse of my dead mother in my arms ...”
    Though Shelley put much of herself into the creation of works like The Last Man, there is still reason to consider Frankenstein her favored child. It is her first singular creative effort—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817) was begun earlier but had its start in a journal kept by her husband and herself. Unlike Valperga (1823), a historical novel set in thirteenth-century Tuscany, Frankenstein is set in a place and time she knew and loved: the Scottish Highlands that had inspired her as a girl, and the French and Swiss countryside that she had explored with Shelley. Frankenstein was also the only enduring literary work she created while married to Percy. Mary herself seems to have thought of the text in this way: “I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she announced at the end of the “Author’s Introduction” of 1831 (p. 9). Victor, too, made analogies between the labors of the writer and the creator, describing himself as the “miserable origin and author” (p. 90) of the catastrophic scenario. Mary would have been pleased by the description in her obituary of Frankenstein as “the parent of whole generations” of literary descendants (Sunstein, p. 384) .
    Mary’s use of the word “progeny” betrays the fact that two concerns preoccupied her while writing and later reediting Frankenstein: children and motherhood. In 1815 , Mary (still a Godwin) gave birth to a daughter who did not live long enough to acquire a name. “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived ... awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day—not in good spirits,” she wrote on March 19, two weeks after the baby’s death (Journals, vol. 1, p. 70). The death of her first child continued to haunt her every spring, leaving such a dark taint on the season of renewal that Mary declared to her half-sister, Claire: “Spring is our unlucky season” (Letters, vol. 1, p. 226). By the time Mary began writing Frankenstein in July 1816, she was nursing her second child, William. Though he was healthy, Mary’s anxieties regarding the child seem to have worked their way into Frankenstein: Victor’s young brother William meets a horrible death while Victor and Clerval engage in a walking tour of Ingolstadt’s environs.
    Considering how insecure Mary was about her creative and reproductive capabilities, Frankenstein can be read as “a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth,” according to Ellen Moers in the ground-breaking study Literary Women (1976). In the novel, Victor learns the hard way of the consequences of usurping the female progenitive role. As he labors to create his monster, Victor experiences pain and insecurities that are typical of pregnancy’s gestation period; his shock at seeing his deformed and hideous progeny at birth must have been shared by most nineteenth-century women, in their ignorance and fear of the birth process. Most powerful of all (and the subject of most of the novel) are his feelings of depression and detachment after the actual birth. Even in our time, postpartum depression remains a misunderstood and often misdiagnosed condition; for Shelley in 1818 to depict the negative consequences of this disease left untreated was a revolutionary act. “The idea that a mother can loathe, fear, and reject her baby has until recently been one of the most repressed of psychological insights,” writes Barbara Johnson in “My Monster/My Self,” another important feminist