Mary Shelley's personal life was quite tragic and many modern critics, especially feminist ones, discuss Frankenstein in terms of the recurring themes of procreation and death. This paper will examine these issues more fully by applying Erik Erikson's theory of psych
Mary Shelley's personal life was quite tragic and many modern critics, especially feminist ones, discuss Frankenstein in terms of the recurring themes of procreation and death. This paper will examine these issues more fully by applying Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial development to Shelley's life. Most particularly we will examine how Shelley's lack of maternal and paternal care led her to conceive of her Creature. The audience will be encouraged to look beyond the exterior of the Creature and decide exactly who is the monster in this classic novel. Understanding identity issues is also critical to understanding Mary's life and fiction. Her husband's untimely death had adverse effects on Mary's identity and she tried, with varying degrees of success, to establish her own career beyond merely being Percy's literary executor. Indeed many people in her own time were convinced that Percy B. Shelly had actually written Frankenstein.
Many scholars have analyzed the life and fiction of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (see for example, Fisch, Mellor, & Schor, 1993; Levine & Knoepflmacher, 1979). Most of the focus has been upon her most famous work, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (for example, Mellor, 1988; Bennett & Robinson, 1990; Van Luchene, 1980). Written when only 19 years old, Frankenstein tells the tale of a man obsessed with creating life, but then abandoning that life once it breathes. It has been repeatedly suggested that the tale of Frankenstein's creature is autobiography, Mary's own tale as seen through the eyes of a 19-year-old woman (see for example, Mellor, 1988). Some claim the novel to be the first legitimate example of the genre we now call science fiction. Some study the novel in terms of its depiction and frank indictment of science. Indeed, study of the scientific aspects of the novel is so popular and timely that the present author and others have presented or published papers on this theme (Ginn, 2003; Ketterer, 1997). The National Library of Medicine has developed a traveling exhibit (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/frankenstein/frankhome.html) examining Frankenstein's science, and a conference dedicated to this theme (Frankenstein's Science: Theories of Human Nature in the 18th and 19th Centuries) was held in Canberra, Australia in 2003.
The present paper will discuss all of these themes briefly. However the major focus on the paper will be to briefly analyze Mary's life from a psychosocial perspective. I will discuss Mary's life before and after Frankenstein within the framework of Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, and the revisions of portions of the theory as proposed by Marcia and colleagues (1980; 1987; 1989; 1994; Patterson, Sochting, & Marcia, 1992).
The essential elements of Frankenstein's story, taken from Mary's own life, have been identified as (1) a white gravestone; (2) a motherless child; (3) a beloved father turning his back on his child; (4) a university student conducting wild experiments; and (5) dreams of rekindling the life of a dead child. A number of excellent biographies have been written about Mary (Mellor, 1988; Nichols, 1988; Seymour, 2000; Sunstein, 1989), and I will only summarize her life here. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797, the second daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. She was the only daughter of William Godwin, author of Caleb Williams and A Certain Justice. Unfortunately, MWG died 9 days af