Knowing the facts of Mary Shelley’s life is essential to understanding her writing and attitudes of the key characters in Frankenstein: Robert Walton, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster. Walton, Frankenstein, and the monster all pose traits of Shelley somewhere in the novel; whether it was a feeling of loneliness, the mutuality of self-educating oneself, or the mass of the imagination.
Mary Shelley never had a perfect life. Death seemed to surround her, and loneliness seemed to follow constantly. Shelley always felt enclosed by death. Ten short days after her birth, Shelley’s mother passed away, and three years before Shelley began writing Frankenstein, her first-born child died. Her sister and sister-in-law also committed suicide a year before Frankenstein was published (Mellor xv-xvii). These deaths are just a few examples of how Shelley was abandoned by the ones she loved
Shelley began writing Frankenstein during the midst of the Industrial Revolution, a “worldwide movement to replace man with machines” (Brackett). Many citizens around the world feared the new technology and how it could change the world. A worldwide phenomenon of …show more content…
Contradicting Walton & Victor, the monster is forced to be isolated upon his difference from the expectations of society. The monster’s most desperate desire was attention from anyone, but most specifically he wanted attention from Frankenstein, his creator. Immediately after the monster’s creation, Frankenstein “rushed out of the room” (Shelley 43) and abandoned the monster from fear of his ugliness. The creation of the monster could also be Shelley displaying her want for the deaths in her life to come back to this earth. Shelley had several family members close to her pass away, and her need/want for these family members to be brought back was significant in her work through the