Draft of Essay #3

Delaney Abajian
Cline
ENG 102
12 October 2011

Feminism

The bond between a mother and child depends on the will of the mother and how close she is with the child. If the mother neglects her child, the child will do one of two things. The first and most likely thing is that the child will not understand what is happening and at some point will develop feelings of anger and hatred. The second option would be that the kid copes with what has happened and moves on with their life. Unfortunately in the book Frankenstein, the creation tried to choose the second option but in the end became the first. The parent-child relationship with Victor and the creation was never established, so the creation set out to destroy everything that Victor loved and cared about since the creation had no one to feel that way for him. There are some relationships throughout this book that worked and some that didn’t. The ones that worked are Victor and his mother, Victor and Clerval, and Victor and Elizabeth. The ones that end up becoming either ineffective or nonexistent are Victor and the creation. This also can be related to the difference between Mary Shelley’s bond and Victor Frankenstein’s bond since one cared very deeply for their creation while the other didn’t.


“I need not describe the feelings of those dearest ties are rent by that most irreparable evil, the void that presents itself to the soul, and the despair that is exhibited on the countenance. It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose very existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for ever-” ( Shelley, 25). Even though this is Victor talking about his deceased mother, it calls attention to the fact about children who are cared for and treated with kindness by their mother’s, end up showing sympathy and emotions that would not be there if the opposite happened. It shows that Victor’s mother was a nurturer and that she placed her family above all else. This corresponds with Victor and the creation. What could have started off in a loving and nurturing relationship ended in estrangement and dislike of both the parent and the child. Victor speaks of despair at the loss of his mother but the creation tries to speak about the despair of being forever lonely and not having the care of a parent.

Clerval is another example of how Victor has a parent-child relationship whereas the creation does not. Though Clerval has no relation to Victor, other than being his dearest friend, the following quote has Clerval taking on a tone of a brotherly role. “My dear Victor,” cried he, “what for God’s sake, is the matter? Do not laugh in that manner. How ill are you! What is the cause of all this?” (Shelley, 37). Clerval is showing not only his concern for Victor as a friend but in the course of a brother like figure as well, since he has known for a great period of time. This is probably why Mary Shelley had the creature’s next victim be Clerval because he would have seen and noticed how close of a person that Clerval was to Victor and begun to feel emptiness inside of him. The emptiness would keep filling him until he took away from Victor what the creation himself wanted more than anything, a companion.


Ellen Moers brought up amazing points as to how Victor and Mary Shelley were somewhat alike but also different in the way they approached certain situations. Both wanted to create life but each had a different way with dealing with the consequences of what happened after the creation had gained its life. “In February, 1815, Mary gave birth to a daughter, illegitimate, premature, and sickly…The baby died in March. “Find my baby dead,” Mary wrote. “A miserable day.” (Moers, 221). Moers goes on to explain that after the birth of Shelley’s first child, that even though it was born premature and sick, Shelley tried everything she could to nurse it to better health and keep it alive even though the effort would be in vain. This is where she differs from Victor. Victor indeed wanted to create life and that he most certainly did, but when his creation was complete and it was alive and moving, he became scared of what he had done and fled away from the scene immediately. He ran away from the thing that he saw as grotesque and ugly and would not even try to help the creature that he brought life to.


This seems to be where Shelley even got the idea of having something like this become the main storyline for a novel. “Mary Shelley was a unique case, in literature as in life. She brought birth to fiction not as realism but as Gothic fantasy, and thus contributed to Romanticism a myth of genuine originality. She invented the mad scientist who locks himself in his laboratory and secretly, guiltily, works at creating human life, only to find that he has made a monster.” (Moers, 217). Moers could not have better explained it than with this quote. Frankenstein brings to the reader not only birth but originality as well. Birth was not common for female writers but Mary Shelley brought it the forefront of her story and had it carry throughout as it continued on, pointing out the failing parent-child relationship between Victor and the creation, that would in the end result in the deaths of them both.


“As long as domestic relationships govern an individual’s affections, his or her desire will turn outward as love. But when the individual loses or leaves the regulating influence of relationship with others, imaginative energy always threatens to turn back on itself, to “mark” all external objects as its own and to degenerate into “gloomy and narrow reflections upon self” (F, p.32).” (Poovey, 254). Here is another reflection on the difference between the relationships that Victor had and the ones the creation will never learn to know about. Well he did learn about the relationships that the DeLacy family had but that was only through observation and not through real experience of his own. The creation started off with having a happy outlook on life and that he would one day be able to feel love and compassion from humans as he felt for them but as soon as he realized that this was not going to happen, he went into a gloomy and narrow reflection upon himself.


Moers and Poovey talked about how the mother side of Mary Shelley had an impact on the story Frankenstein and that feminism comes out greatly throughout this book in the characters of Caroline and Elizabeth but also somewhat in Victor as well because of wanting to “create something” and “bring life” to it. “Recently, however, a number of writers have noticed the connection between Mary Shelley’s “waking dream” of monster-manufacture and her own experience of awakening sexuality, in particular the “horror story of Maternity” which accompanied her precipitous entrance into what Ellen Moers calls “teen-aged motherhood” (Gilbert & Gubar, 226). Critics of Mary Shelley in the beginning thought of her form of female gothic style as bringing something that shouldn’t be introduced into books but with time, newer critics see why it was brought into the book and why it was the main point. Bringing to life her story of her first child and representing it with the characters Victor and the creation. It brought to the forefront the reality of pregnancies during that time and how much of an effect it had on the mother if she did indeed lose her child.


I thought the story of Frankenstein was only just about a mad scientist creating a creature and it turning out hideous but in reality finding out that there are many themes behind it and within the text itself that my outlook on it as a whole is different now. The one that stuck out to me the most was when I had finished the story and read the article “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother”. Ellen Moers explained in depth the relation to Mary Shelley and Victor Frankenstein. That the death of her first child caused her to begin her story of Frankenstein. I believe that Shelley’s purpose for writing this novel was to introduce a form of birth into a story and take it to where no female writer had gone to before. She wanted not just Gothic but she also wanted the Romance side to it to make it seem like everything would be okay only for it to be crumbled to pieces. Mary Shelley definitely goes into great detail when explaining the different stances that she takes in this story dealing with parent-child relationships.







Works Cited

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1996. Print


Moers, Ellen. “Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.” New York Review of Books. Garden City: Doubleday, 1976. 214-44. Print.

Gilbert M. Sandra and Gubar Susan. “Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve.” The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. 225-40. Print.

Poovey, Mary. “My Hideous Progeny”: The Lady and the Monster.” The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. 251-61. Print.