Frankenstein 3
Frankenstein 3Frankenstein, A Creature of Society.
When Cindy Porter was twenty five, a single mother, and living in the projects of Philadelphia she wrote a novel. Her novel was a story about a teenage boy who had grown up in poverty. The boy's daily confrontations with the hardships of his own life proved him to be incapable of dealing with such matters as he slipped into destructive patterns at school, home, and on the streets. From the known facts about Cindy Porter, it can be assumed that the novel played off of her fears and daily experiences of living in the projects of a major city. Just as it can be seen that Cindy's life and time influenced her writing, many ideals in Mary Shelley's life can be connected with themes in her classic novel Frankenstein. Abandonment, Romanticism, and parenting are all themes that were a part of Mary Shelley's life and highly influential in her writing of Frankenstein.
A theme of abandonment by women is exhibited not only in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but in her own life as well. Just after Mary Shelley's birth, her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died of complications from the childbirth. Mary was left, disastrously, without a female role model (Bloom 15). Her great loss can be seen played out in Frankenstein through the virtual absence of strong women. In the novel Victor Frankenstein's mother dies while he is at the University in Ingolstadt. His stepsister and fianc�e, Elizabeth, is orphaned due to the death of her mother in childbirth. Justine, the
nursemaid of Victor's brother, William Frankenstein, is wrongfully executed. Elizabeth herself is taken from the world just before her own marriage.
The monster is motherless as well. Victor in male pride takes the role of the mother and the father of his creation. The Monster's introduction to the female comes through the peek hole of a hovel in the De Lacey house. Even with the De Lacey family however, the mother is absent. It seems rather obvious that having been denied female companionship, the monster would grow to yearn for it (Florescu 84)
The death of Mary's mother undoubtedly contributed to the persistent theme of the absence and ill fatedness of the women in Frankenstein. There is no better example of the unconscious effects of a world without women than Victor's dream.
" I thought I saw Elizabeth, in the bloom of health, walking in the streets of Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised I embraced her, but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they become livid with the hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud enveloped her form, and I saw grave-worms crawling in the fold of flannel." (Shelley 116)
This paragraph is most obviously interpreted as a...
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