Frankenstein
The Reality in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
It was a stormy day in Geneva. Mary Shelley was accompanied by her husband and friends when a wager was proposed. Lord Byron, the owner of the villa in which they occupied, wanted to see which one could write the best ghost story (Woodbridge, "The Summer of 1816"). Even though this task was not strongly pursued by the others, Mary Shelley was determined to write a ghost story that would strike horror into her fellow friends. This was the birth of Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein.
In Shelley's Frankenstein, the protagonist is a scientist by the name of Victor Frankenstein. He uses his scientific knowledge to build a creature and give it life. What Frankenstein thought would be a beautiful masterpiece, he soon viewed as a hideous and deformed monster. Frankenstein and the rest of humanity immediately reject the monster. As a result, the monster, the antagonist, turns to revenge against his creator. He kills Frankenstein's family, leaving him in misery and torment.
Frankenstein is full of scientific impossibilities, it is a story created to horrify the reader. However, many researchers have discovered that certain aspects in the story relate to many events in Mary Shelley's life. Even though Shelley wrote Frankenstein to win a wager, the story's origin is directly influenced by the deaths of her mother and stepsister, the books Metamorphosis and Paradise Lost, as well as the scientific discoveries of James Lind.
Shelley's mother was Mary Wollstonecraft. She died in 1797, shortly after giving birth to Shelley. Because of her death, Shelley was deprived of motherly direction and a strong woman in her life (Patterson, "What Sources Influenced"). We can see that Frankenstein lacks the presence of mothers. Most of the mothers die in the story. Victor Frankenstein's mother dies early in the story, Elizabeth's mother dies, the creature is motherless, and even the French family the creature...
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