Frankenstein is often referred to as the definitive Romantic novel. The Romantic novel is easily identifiable by it’s revolutionary spirit that often ends in tragedy and sensory descriptions of the beauty of nature. Romanticism was a movement that started in the late 1700s and reached it’s peak in the early 1800s. Romanticism and Mary Shelley had relatively the same life span. It is mostly thought to be a backlash against the Industrial Revolution and valued things like nature, wildness, intuition, and heavy emotions like awe, terror, and passion over intellect. Frankenstein in particular puts emphasis on these emotions. The ideas behind this movement no doubt affected Mary Shelley when she was writing it.
Her father was an anarchist author and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft was a famous feminist of the time, so Shelley would have been exposed to these ideals as a child. Shelley’s mother died just 11 days after she was born, and if you look at Frankenstein through a biographical lense, then you can see the effect that this had on Shelley’s writing. Frankenstein is, after all, the story of a tragic and monstrous birth. In fact, more than one of Shelley’s experiences with birth were unfortunate. Percy and Mary Shelley’s first child died when she was just a few weeks old and Shelley recounts in her journal having a recurring dream about bringing the child back to life. She would even occasionally refer to the book itself as her child. This reading is interesting, but limited and tends to lean towards an intentional fallacy.
However, there was no denying that Mary Shelley’s idea for this book came from the changes that she saw in the world around her. She even claimed that the concept for the novel came from when she overheard her husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron discussing how electricity could be used to make a dead frog twitch it’s legs. This idea came from a scientist named Galvani. He had a theory called “spontaneous generation”, which meant that life could be microscopically restored to dead matter. In 1803, some followers of his actually tried to bring an executed murderer back to life using electrodes. This really changes the way that one can look at the novel because it suggests the idea that what Victor Frankenstein was doing was neither extreme nor unheard of for the time.
Another facet of Mary Shelley’s life that factors into a biographical interpretation of Frankenstein is her relationship with Percy Shelley. His love life was complicated to say the least. His first marriage was to a woman named Harriet. Percy left Harriet to be with, but not marry, the 16 year old Mary, and Harriet would commit suicide shortly after while pregnant with Percy’s child. Mary’s half sister Fanny was also in love with Percy Shelley and would also go on to commit suicide. Together, Percy and Mary would travel all of Europe, living in sin, ruining their reputations, and estranging their relatives until they got married after the birth of their second child. Percy’s tendency to “ruin women” may have been an element in the way that Mary Shelley wrote about women in her novel. The novel has a lot to say on the subject of what happens to women when men pursue single-minded goals.
In the novel, when Mary Shelley personifies nature, she refers to it in the feminine. When she does, the reader is given the distinct impression that Victor is violating it. “...The moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.” There is also a suggestion that, like Percy Shelley, women close to Victor are doomed to die as a result of his reckless carelessness. The relationship that perhaps most closely communicates this is the one between Victor and his cousin. He claims to love Elizabeth, yet abandons her for years at a time. Later, when the creature specifically says that he will be with them on their wedding night, Victor leaves Elizabeth alone on their wedding night.
Another example of Victor’s apparent contempt for women is the death of the female monster. He claims that making a female monster would be infinitely worse than what he had already done, and could, in fact, destroy the world. So, rather than perform a simple hysterectomy, he destroys her while the creature watches. He tells Walton how, “trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged,” which is a statement that suggests something sexual in his violence.
Nearly all of the female characters in this novel are both passive and tragic. It is easy to read the novel as an exploration of what happens when men fear and ignore women. This could have stemmed from her experiences with Percy. The purpose of Victor’s experiments are, in part to bypass one of the functions of women in life. He is essentially giving birth without the need for an egg or a womb.
There are suggestions throughout the novel that the experiment was always doomed to fail because of this fact. It was inherently unnatural, so of course nature would reject it. Victor says at one point that the creature “would bless me as its creator and source…. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”
It is a story about what happens when men overstep, but in some ways, it claims that curiosity is a natural and honorable part of the human spirit. This could be seen as all of the disparate elements in Mary Shelley’s life making an appearance in her novel. She was influenced by Romantic movement that her husband, father, and friends were all a part of. She was influenced by technological theories affecting the world around her. She was influenced by her own role as a woman in an age when women were marginalized and used.
Victor is certainly punished for meddling with the laws of nature. He sees his friends and family murdered and dies a tragic icy death at the age of 25. His story as told to the Arctic explorers, wondering whether or not to risk their lives for science, seems at first like a cautionary tale. However, when the crew decides that they should turn back to save the lives of everyone on board, Victor gets angry. “Oh! be men, or be more than men,” he says. “Return as heroes who have fought and conquered, and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.”
The novel is not arguing that people should live quiet lives away from knowledge, but it also does not argue that they should risk the pursuit of information. This ambivalence is typical of the times and of Mary Shelley herself. She once wrote in her journal, “I am not a person of opinions because I feel the counterarguments too strongly.”
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