Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a eminent female author who created the novel, Frankenstein. The novel, initially published in 1818 did not have an authors name on it for thirteen years, because of the time it was published. Female authors were not as well established as male authors. Then later developed in 1831, is still today’s most common edition of the text.
Mary Shelley gained inspiration for the story from many aspects, one in particular, her life. Frankenstein belongs to the gothic genre in which she uses many gothic conventions and clichés, to create a redoubtable, tense, negative setting to surprise the reader. Mary Shelley’s fearsome tale, originally conceived abroad in the wet summer of 1816 with Bryon and her husband in a night telling ghost stories.
Shelley was from a fundamental family. Her mother was a campaigner for women’s equal rights while her father was a political free thinker. Her mother died 10 days after her birth, Mary Shelley also lost her own daughter within two weeks of her birth. Her husband, who was a poet, also drowned later on in life. Maybe this is why she was fascinated in bringing the dead back to life.
On 19th March 1815, shortly after the death of the of her first baby, Mary Shelley recorded in her journal: “Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived.” Her anxieties about motherhood and her ability to give life may or may not have had a undeviating stimulus on the conspiracy of the aspiring scientist who accomplishes in creating a presence by anomalous procedures in the distressing novel, Frankenstein.
History was made in literature because of the exceptional novel she wrote.
The story consists of a young Swiss student discovering the secret to animating lifeless matter and by assembling body parts, creates a monster who vows revenge on his creator, after being rejected from society.
Mary Shelley uses three raconteurs to tell the story; Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and his creation. Shelley ingeniously wrote the book in three perspectives in order to create the extreme suspense, in doing so she keeps the reader deferred anxiously by continually switching the perspective of the story, creating tension throughout the novel both in what Shelley writes, and in the way she writes it.
Darkly dramatic moments stand out throughout Mary Shelley’s novel, to add to this effect is the setting of mood and weather,
“dreary night of November”.
By opening chapter five with the dreariness that is felt throughout the novel, along with the desolate isolation, it creates tension because of the cliché in a stereotypical gothic genre of dread and gloom soon to continue throughout the story.
To add to the darkness,
“black and comfortless sky”.
Creating a semantic field of low light referring back to the setting portraying a gothic genre landscape which in itself enhances tension.
Mary Shelley uses the grotesque caucus of a