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Emotional Isolation in Mary Shelley's Life and in Frankenstein

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Emotional isolation in Frankenstein is the most pertinent and prevailing theme throughout the novel. This theme is so important because everything the monster does or feels directly relates to his poignant seclusion. The effects of this terrible burden have progressively damaging results upon the monster, and indirectly cause him to act out his frustrations on the innocent. The monster's emotional isolation makes him gradually turn worse and worse until evil fully prevails. This theme perpetuates from Mary Shelley's personal life and problems with her father and husband, which carry on into the work and make it more realistic.(Mellor 32) During the time she was writing this novel, she was experiencing the emotional pangs of her newborn's death and her half-sister's suicide. These events undoubtedly affected the novel's course, and perhaps Shelley intended the monster's deformed body to stand as a symbol for one or both of her losses. There are numerous other parallels to the story and to her real life that further explain why the novel is so desolate and depressing. Emotional isolation is the prime theme of the novel due to the parallels shared with the novel and Shelley's life, the monster's gradual descent into evil, and the insinuations of what is to come of the novel and of Shelley's life.

Even though Frankenstein was written because of a dare from Lord Byron, it is very much a part of Shelley's life. We see many insights into her distressingly sad life that otherwise would not have been detected. Victor Frankenstein's family is almost an exact parallel to that of her husband, Percy Shelley's family. Frankenstein's creation of life, the monster, is much like Mary Shelley's birth to her daughter w...

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...en Scherf. Broadview Editions. 3rd Edition. June 20, 2012

Works Consulted

Botting, Fred. Making monstrous. Frankenstein, criticism, theory. Manchester University Press, 1991.

Bann, Stephen, ed. Frankenstein: Creation and Monstrosity. NY: Reaktion Books, 1997. Print.

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