When she wrote Frankenstein, she revealed her hidden fears and desires through the story of Victor Frankenstein’s creation, putting him symbolically in her place (Murfin, Ross. "Psychoanalytic Criticism and Frankenstein.”). Her purpose, though possibly unconsciously, in writing the novel was to resolve both her feelings of abandonment by her parents, and fears of her own childbirth. Mary Shelley was born in 1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two of the greatest liberal thinkers of the time. Her mother died after two weeks of giving birth to her, leaving Shelley feeling both abandoned by and guilty of her mother’s death.
After having their first son, William, in 1816, Percy’s legal wife committed suicide giving them the opportunity to legally get married (Gilliland 1). The Godwin and Shelley’s relationship began to get better after the marriage. After the wedding, Percy and Mary moved to Marlow, England and had a daughter, Clara (Means 3). Around 1819 when they moved to Pi... ... middle of paper ... ...oyage to visit a poet with a friend (Mary Shelley 3), his boat sank in 1822.In the same year, Mary had a miscarriage. She had a nervous breakdown because of these tragedies and it filled her life with loneliness (Lombardi 1).
“My mother died at 48”, says Sanger “My father died at 80”. Her mother was a victim of tuberculosis not long after her last child was born. Sanger grew up in poverty and soon realized that bigger families were associated with lower means. Sanger was not one for domesticated duties and soon defied social norms and went to nursing school her aspirations included becoming a doctor. She did not complete nursing school she instead married William Sanger, an architect and artist.
Robert Frost's "Home Burial" is a masterfully written example of such works, conceived from his and his wife's anguish at the loss of their first-born son as well as from the estrangement between his sister-in-law and her husband due to the death of their child. In Donald J. Greiner's commentary on Frost's works, "The Indespensible Robert Frost," it is revealed that "Mrs. Frost could not ease her grief following Elliot's death, and Frost later reported that she knew then that the world was evil. Amy in "Home Burial" makes the same observation". "Home Burial" illustrates the cause of the failing marriage as a breakdown of communication, both verbally and physically, between two people who adopt totally different views in the midst of crisis.
“I, the miserable and abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on” (Shelley, 204). Frankenstein is an example of a terrible parent because he creates a creature which he neglects to nurture and take care off. Instead he looks at it in disgust, mistreats it and abandons it as if it were ... ... middle of paper ... ... is guilty for the death off his best friend Henry Clerval. The ‘God’ archetype is used in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in both cases of creation and destruction. The novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley consists of archetypes.
Throughout the novel there are many Gothic elements that all contribute to the events in the book. Victor neglecting his own responsibility and disrupting the natural order of things ultimately leads to the death of the two major characters in the end of the novel. Mary Shelley’s childhood would not be considered easy. Her mother died a little over a week after she was born and her dad got remarried after the death of Mary Shelley’s mother. The women he remarried had two children of her own and the stepmother was not fond of Mary Shelley.
This experience scared Sarah in one of the worst ways it made he go muted for several weeks, and once she got her voice back she had a stutter. But this experience also planted the seed of an early abolitionist. On Sarah’s eleventh birthday Sarah received her own personal slave, named Hetty, But Sarah despised the thought having a slave of her own, so she snuck into her father’s office and wrote up a document declaring that she wished to free Hetty. Sarah latter found the document ripped up by her mother. Sarah was devastated that she had a slave that she could not free.
London was an illegitimate child of an astrologer and Welsh farm girl (Jack London Encyclopedia of World Biography). Unfortunately, when London’s birth father received word of London’s conception, he fled. London’s mother, Flora Wellman, was stricken with Typhoid, a deadly disease that effected vast numbers of people in their day. Due to her sickness, she was unable to nurse her new son. Mrs. Virginia Prentiss was the wet-nurse they hired.
Her sister, Rebecca, had contracted smallpox in November 1766. She passed away soon after. John Noyes, Mary's first husband, had lived with epilepsy longer than the doctors originally expected, but soon he succumbed to death as well. Having her family a distance away, Mary clutched on to John's mother as to a rock. In November 1768, the older Madam Noyes went to bed in good health but was found dead the next morning.
Her feelings of guilt in the wake of these tragedies inspired her to include similar events and outlooks in her character Victor Frankenstein. Biographer Edward Ball recognized this self-faulting nature of Mary Shelley in his essay on her life. He described this disposition in the case of her mother’s passing, writing that, “She was burdened with the suspicion, however irrational, that she was…responsible for her mother’s death” (Ball). Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley’s mother, died from puerperal fever not two weeks after giving birth to her daughter (Ball). Brought up on tales of her mother, whose life ended as a result of her daughter’s birth, Shelley likely developed at a very young age a fear that she was personally at fault for her mother’s passing.