Mary Shelley And Frankenstein Essays - Romanticism, Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley And Frankenstein Godwin Shelley was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollenstonecraft, a quite dynamic pair during their time. Mary Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, which has transcended the Gothic and horror genres that now has been adapted to plays, movies, and sequels. Her life though scattered with tragedies and disgrace, was one of great passion and poetry, which I find quite fascinating, but not desirable. Shelley's other literary works were mildly successful their time, but are little known today. Her reputation rests, however, on what she once called her "Hideous Progeny," Frankenstein. To understand her writing you must first know her background starting from her parent's lives prior to her birth. Her mother, Mary Wollenstonecraft an early feminist, who, in1792, published A Vindication of the Rights of Man. This was an excellent book that showed Mary W. was way ahead of her time. Two years later she had an illegitimate child Fanny Imlay by the American industrialist Gilbert Imlay. After her failed relationship with Imlay, Wollenstonecraft met the political philosopher and novelist William Godwin in 1796. Five months into her next pregnancy with Mary, she and William decided to marry to ensure their child's legitimacy even though they were both opposed to the institution of matrimony. They were married on March 29, 1797 at St. Pancras church in London. Their daughter Mary Godwin (later Shelley) was born on August 30, 1779. Her mother died ten days later of infections and complications from her delivery, despite expert attention. It was said by certain religious writers that " It was not unfitting that Mary Wollenstonecraft should die in childbirth, a suitably primitive punishment for one who presumed to challenge the ordained place of women in society ." Such a thing would be said probably because that same year (1798) Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" which revealed Mary Wollenstoncraft's extra martial affairs (including their own) and her suicide attempts. Godwin was widely criticized for this publication, and Wollenstonecraft's influence drastically diminished for years to come. Mary Shelley's father remarried in 1801 to his neighbor, the widowed Mary Jane Claremont, who brought two children to the Godwin household, Charles and Claire Claremont. A fifth sibling was added in 1803 with the birth of William Godwin, Jr. Like other girls, Mary was educated at home, in spite of her own mother's persuasive arguments for the institutionalized education of girls in The Rights of Woman. So, she absorbed the intellectual atmosphere created by her father and many of England's leading writers and thinkers, including the poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, scientists like Humphry Davy, and her father's dear friend William Nicholson. Importantly, Davy and Nicholson were the two foremost experimenters with galvanic electricity in the early nineteenth century who later had a noticeable impact on the writing of Frankenstein. Mary's reading included popular gothic novels like William Beckford's Vanthek (1786) as well as books by her own mother, whom she idolized. At the age of ten Mary had her first experience with publication, when the Juvenile Library printed her witty poem, Mounseer Nongtonpaw: or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris. By 1812 it was in a fourth edition. In 1812, when she was fourteen, Mary was exposed to yet another broadening influence. That year when, in order to distance Mary from the stepmother whom she resented and disliked, Mary's father sent her on an extended vacation to the Baxter family in Dundee, Scotland. She stayed there from June to November of 1812 and, again, from June 1813 to March of 1814, developing a strong friendship to the Baxter's teenage daughter Isabel, who became her first close friend. Shortly after her return to the family home, she became reacquainted with her father's youthful admirer, Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she first met in the company of his wife Harriet in November of 1812. Now, he became a frequent visitor to the Godwin household, and the two of them (although not attracted to one another at first) fell in love. At the time, Shelley was twenty-two and he and his wife were expecting their second child. But like Godwin and Wollenstonecraft, Percy and Mary felt ties of the heart outmoded legal ones. In July 1814, one month away from her seventeenth birthday, Mary and Percy along with Claire eloped to the continent. They continued on to Switzerland, Holland, and Germany. During this time, Mary kept a journal of their escapades, which she turned into a