Deconstructing Frankenstein

The definition of a “Frankenstein” is a creation that destroys its creator..

Themes in Frankenstein

• To appreciate a work of literature we need to look at its nuances, at its place in the world and at its underlying themes.

• The critics in the back of the Norton Critical Edition each look at a different theme in the story.

“My Monster, Myself” Barbara Johnson

• Johnson’s theory is that the narrations of the three male characters in the story have autobiographical correlations with Mary’s life. She specifically cites references in recent years to Mary’s mixed feelings about motherhood. In fact, some have claimed that Frankenstein was written during postpartum depression.

Birth and Rejection

• One can easily point to themes of maternal desire and rejection in Frankenstein and in Mary’s life.

• Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with creating a human from dead body parts becomes disgusted with his creation and flees in horror at the creature he has, in a sense, “given birth” to.

Correlations with Mary’s Life• Mary’s mother died due to complications in

childbirth, leaving Mary alone and, likely feeling rejected.

• In the time leading up to the writing of Frankenstein, Mary lived through an unwanted pregnancy from a man married to someone else. That baby died and she became pregnant with a second son, named William—the name of the Victor’s brother and the Monster’s first murder victim.

A Religious Parody• Critics Ellen Moers, Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar all point to elements of religious parody in Frankenstein.

• In “Mary Shelly’s Monstrous Eve” Gilbert and Gubar call the novel “the story of hell: hell as a dark parody of heaven” (225). The also state that Victor Frankenstein has elements of both Adam and Eve, as well as making the transformation from a god-like character to a devil.

Female Gothic

• Moers, in “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother” looks at the novel from the perspective of a Gothic novel and says “At the time when literary Gothic was born, religious fears were on the wane, giving way to that vague paranoia of the modern spirit, for which Gothic mechanisms seem to have provided welcome therapy” (215).

Where do ideas come from?

• Are they in the author’s subconscious and reveal themselves creatively or is it a deliberate act on the part of the artist? When we examine parallels, we can often find intriguing correlations between the author’s life and her work.

The Percy Connection

• Christopher Small in “[Percy] Shelley and Frankenstein” notes that the two people most directly responsible for Mary’s writing of the novel were Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. He also states, “Frankenstein himself is clearly and to some extent must intentionally have been a portrayal of Shelley” (205).