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

essay. “What is threatening about [Frankenstein] is the way in which its critique of the role of the mother touches on primitive terrors of the mother’s rejection of the child” (Johnson in Bloom, p. 61) . As a writer who was also a mother (a rare combination in nineteenth-century England, as Johnson points out), Shelley broke down long-standing rules of propriety by retelling the myth of origins from the female point of view.
    But Frankenstein is not just a tale of the consequences of giving birth to hideous progeny; it is also concerned with the feelings of guilt, betrayal, and loneliness experienced by the hideous progeny itself. Suffering from an infection brought on when pieces of placenta remained in her uterus, Mary Wollstonecraft died in great pain on September 10, 1797, eleven days after Mary’s birth. The event is described in detail by Godwin in the last chapter of Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. “The loss of the world in this admirable woman, I leave to other men to collect; my own I well know, nor can it be improper to describe it,” wrote Godwin toward the end of his highly emotional account. “This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished for ever!” Godwin carried a torch for Mary Wollstonecraft the rest of his life: Though he remarried and remained with his second wife for thirty-five years, his wish to be buried with Wollstonecraft was fulfilled upon his death in 1836.
    If it was not enough bearing the same name as her celebrated mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was constantly reminded of her maternal heritage by Godwin and his friends. Mary was strongly encouraged to fulfill her literary legacy at an early age; at fifteen, she wrote a satiric poem entitled “Mounseer Nongtongpaw” that Godwin had published. On her birthday, Godwin planned family visits to Wollstonecraft’s grave; one celebration was held among the tombs in Westminster Abbey, as he lectured on great men and women. Visitors to the Godwin household asked Mary to stand beneath John Opie’s portrait of a pregnant Wollstonecraft, and even Mary’s future husband, Percy, was “from the first very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage” (p. 6). Mary responded to these pressures with enthusiasm and great aspirations, reading her mother’s works over and over and even “com muning” with her at Wollstonecraft’s gravesite in St. Pancras churchyard. “The memory of my Mother has always been the pride & delight of my life; & the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness I have enjoyed,” Mary wrote in 1827. “Her greatness of soul & my father[‘s] high talents have perpetually reminded me that I ought to degenerate as little as I could from those from whom I derived my being” (Letters, vol. 2, pp. 3-4).
    Frankenstein, then, can be read as Mary’s attempt to fulfill her intellectual inheritance from Wollstonecraft. In order for mother to live on through daughter, daughter must produce a work that meets the spectacular standards of Wollstonecraft’s biggest supporters, herself, and the grieving love of her life, her father. The work must also compensate for Mary’s horrific crime: the murder of her namesake. Mary probably wished that she, like Victor, might find out how to bestow life on dead things; she must have also suffered from nightmares like his vision of “the corpse of my dead mother ... I saw the grave-worms crawling in the folds of the flannel” (pp. 51-52). Shelley’s overwhelming sense of guilt over her mother’s death made her feel like a fiend. Indeed, if we look beyond the protective, shroud-like narratives of Robert Walton and Frankenstein to the heart of the novel, we hear Mary speaking through the voice of the monster. Like Mary, it is born into a dysfunctional family with one parent missing; it desperately craves the attention and affection of the remaining parent; and ultimately it is