Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the Need for Family

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Where would we be without our families? Our Families shape us into the men and women of the future. What determines our morals, desires, happiness, faith, and our all encompassing lives. Mary Shelley’s family helped shape her into the woman that she had become. Having come from a family of great accomplished writers, she herself, set out to be a great writer. In the novel Frankenstein, written by her, there are several similarities between the monster and Shelley herself, all the while revealing to the reader the need for a complete family by the addition or loss of several family members in several different families in the novel, from Victor Frankenstein’s own family, to the De Lacey family, and the several other families that had small appearances in her novel. They all had one thing in common; they all needed an extra family member to complete their families to live happily. Victor Frankenstein shared this unfortunate circumstance and I believe that with the loss of his mother his subconscious mind consumed him and drove to create a being to fill the void that was missing in his family. But in turn created a void in his creature to want to be loved and wanted by another being.

This void to have family members and a complete family was a goal of Mary Shelley’s, albeit as a very underlying goal. This can be seen by the actual life that Mary Shelley led; it appeared to be that everyone that was in Shelley’s family passed away. From Shelley’s mom dying from complications during birth, to all of her children regrettably passing in one way or another and even on her fourth try to be complete she unfortunately had a miscarriage. This, furthermore, led to the passing of her husband as he drowned. All throughout Mary Shelley’s life, ...

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...ankenstein.” Simon and Schuster paperbacks April 2009.

Shoulson, Jeffrey S. “The Embrace of the Fig Tree: Sexuality and Creativity in Midrash and in Milton.” ELH 67.4 (2000): 873-903. Project MUSE 11 June 2010

Miller, Kathleen A. “The Remembrance Haunts Me Like a Crime”: Narrative Control, the Dramatic, and the Female Gothic in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Mathilda.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27.2 (2008): 291-308. Project MUSE 11 June2010

Bentley, Colene. “Family, Humanity, Polity: Theorizing the Basis and Boundaries of Political Community in Frankenstein.” Criticism 47.3 (2005): 325-351. Project MUSE 11 June 2010 < http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/v047/47.3bentley.html>

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