Parenthood: An Exploration of the Grotesque in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein

Vivian Chuang

Mary Shelleys Frankenstein is a novel pervasive in themes of parenthood and

the idea of bringing life into the world. A gothic novel, Frankenstein has a distinct
grotesque tone, the idea of parenthood and birth is distorted into something
unnatural, uncanny and perverse. This distortion of parenthood, birth and the giving
of life, stemming from Mary Shelleys experiences of growing up without a mother
and as a woman who lost a baby after a premature birth. This exploration of the
theme is poignant and passionate, which Shelley weaves into a masterful narrative
about Victor Frankenstein, the man who created life artificially out of its own
remnants. It is because of this Frankenstein is such a pioneering and influential
piece of literature, often regarded as the mother of modern science fiction and
related horror.
Mary Shelley was born Mary Woolstonecraft Goodwin, the daughter of Mary
Woolstonecraft, a noted radical thinker and progressive feminist idealist and William
Godwin, a journalist and political philosopher. Woolstonecraft died from infection
several days after Shelleys birth, leaving young Mary Shelley to grow up with a
distant father and a library full of books. In Frankenstein, this is reflected through
young Victors thirst for knowledge and books, illustrated by the quote here were
books, and here were men who had penetrated deeper and knew more. Much like
Shelley herself, Frankenstein is self-educated, making a case early on that Victor is a
proxy for Mary Shelley, one that she uses to express her pain and morbid curiosity
of birth. Having lost a baby prior to the writing of Frankenstein and being pregnant

some ways through writing the novel, Shelley was very much going through difficult
times. In 1815 she wrote in a diary, Dream that my little baby came to life again;
that it had only been cold and mentions that rubbing it before the fire revived it.
This journal entry invokes Frankensteins desire to infuse a spark of being into a
dead and lifeless thing, and much like real labor and birth, the creation of the
monster was an agonizing process that Frankenstein himself refers as painful
labor. To truly understand the impact of Frankenstein as a piece of powerful
storytelling, it is important to understand that Victor is a proxy character for Shelley,
he represents the pure id, the aggression and unfiltered impulse of her psyche.
As a romantic writer, Shelley writes Frankenstein with a tone that
accepts scientific advancement and the thirst for knowledge, but also warns of the
chaos and beautiful destruction it can cause. Victor Frankenstein toils for years, to
create a being more than human, selecting his features as beautiful. Beautiful!
Great God! Only to face the reality, after being blinded by passion, that his
creation, one he painstakingly selected the most exquisite features for, to come to
life as not a perfect specimen, but what it really was, a collection of dead parts. One
of the most striking things about Frankenstein is that it is a tale largely about the
idea and consequences of the doctors asexual reproduction, a man creating life on
his own, out of death. It goes against all the rules of nature surrounding the bringing
of life into this world, thus the grotesque. The novels many references to Paradise
Lost, notably the tempting by the snake to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge
establishes the idea that such actions are perverted and taboo. Victors creation of
the monster can be interpreted as Mary Shelley trying to process the idea of birth
by projecting it onto a male proxy, where the proxy cannot give birth, and must
create it with science, the art of reason. The asexual nature of the creatures birth

and the fact that the monster was born from the remnants of life is extremely
unnatural, and is an unsettling concept to be presented with. The creature is born
as a fully-formed man, which is also extremely unnatural, to have a grown man to
be born out of dead parts, created by a man alone, without a birth.
The idea of parenthood is also strongly explored in Frankenstein, Victor is a
reflection of a woman who wants a child, is blinded by the desire to have one, only
to be disgusted and surrender in shock by the reality of it. He abandons the child,
only for the consequences of his non-action to return to him and by the end he
wonders if he should have stuck around and been a good parent after all.