These themes of family are obsessively used throughout Frankenstein as Shelley explores her own understanding of motherhood and parenthood but also adapts and changes the universal concept of these themes. The universal concept of motherhood in the 18th century was the care-taker, educator and punisher, the mother had little else to do besides caring for the children. Mary Shelley lost her mother due to post-natal complications and thus was raised by her father and later step-mother, exhibiting her own tragic understanding of motherhood as well as her the loss of several of her own children. Her own tragic understanding of motherhood is used to explore several different material roles within Frankenstein, from the loss of mothers to the absent
