An Analysis Of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein By Marshall Brown

Frankenstein: A Child’s Tale by Marshall Brown closely examines Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Brown discusses the plots and supernatural characteristics, touches of issues related to the idea of monsters, and analyses the novel in correlation to Mary Shelley’s life as a child.

Despite the many people trying to discern a specific meaning from Frankenstein, Brown stresses that it will not, “settle into any composed pattern of either individual or group meanings... its turbulent energies overwhelm any ideology we may discern in it,” (1). The novel is unpredictable and it means many things to many different individuals. If one looks hard enough, you can find pieces of just about any type of ideology or social commentary in it. Brown describes

As Brown wants to point out, Frankenstein, “is a sense of childhood as a separate race,” that, “lie(s) beyond good and evil in the negative sense that it invalidates the moral questioning supporting ideological readings,” (21 and 20). However, this goes against the Romanticism Frankenstein has so much of, as “Romantic idealization dematerialized childhood...it was no longer a place but only an aura,” (21). This is what truly makes Shelley’s novel stand out. She manages to keep all of the romantic undertones in her story very obvious and clear, while at the same time changing the way we view the Romantic child. As Brown puts it, “We have become accustomed to regarding the romantic child as an image of unspoiled, untainted perfection,” and Mary Shelley challenges that and proves that there is in fact, “a rift,” between Romanticism and childhood (22 and 23.) She, along with other gothic works of her time, evolved the “romantic-period accounts of childhood,” (23). In Frankenstein, the characters and all of their experiences, “are reflexes of the uncomprehending instability and powerlessness of the child,” (23). Shelley has no infant or young children as characters, instead, she thematizes childhood and expresses, “the perversity of childhood,”

Initially, I could not quite wrap my head around that idea. It sounded a bit far-fetched but I stuck it out. I was already fifteen pages in, and there was no way I was going to stop now. I kept reading, and as I kept reading, more and more questions began to arise. How could a novel with nothing but adult characters be making statements about childhood? How could any of these tainted characters be representations of children? How does it fit in with Romanticism? The answer is, it did not fit, at first. It was just as Brown had said, I had become accustomed to,“ the romantic child as an image of unspoiled, untainted perfection,” (22). The way he explained it, that is what made Mary Shelley stand out in the first place. Rather than using a child character to show childhood, she uses her adult ones and simply thematizes childhood. Each character experiences the same hopelessness and powerlessness that comes with childhood, while still being adults in their own