Frankenstein, Or: The Modern Prometheus was the outcome of a challenge among
friends to write a ghost story. Mary Shelley took this challenge very
seriously and wrote what came to be her most famous novel. The ideas in
Frankenstein have been recreated uncountable times in various forms of media,
and today ? almost two hundred years after the novel was first published ?
most people are familiar with Frankenstein and his monster.
This essay aims to examine whether Mary Shelley depicted male and female
characters in Frankenstein with a political agenda in mind, or not. Mary
Shelley's first novel, written when she was not yet twenty years old, is
filled political implications. To understand how a young girl in the
beginning of the nineteenth century could write such a novel, one must look
at her background. In the first chapter, Acting a Novel, the political events
of the time, Mary's parents and how she chose to live her own life, are
discussed. Mary Shelley was the daughter of two radicals: Mary Wollstonecraft
and William Godwin. Both of her parents were prominent writers:
Wollstonecraft is most famous for the feminist text A Vindication of the
Rights of Women and Godwin for his anarchistic An Enquiry concerning
Political Justice. Both writing and politics seem to have been a part of
Mary's life from an early age. She made some unusual choices for a woman of
her time, the most decisive one was to run away with a married man: Percy
Bysshe Shelley, who later became her husband. The second chapter, My Hideous
Phantom, is an introduction to the novel. Major themes and different
interpretations are presented, and attempts are made to correlate these to
Mary Shelley's life. The chapter shows that when writing Frankenstein Mary
was inspired by both her parents and the political events of the time. In the
third chapter, The Angel in the House, the male and female characters of the
novel are analyzed and compared. Gender specific traits are discussed, such
as the women being passive and concerned mostly with domestic issues and the
men being isolated and miserable beings. ...
