Germain Greer argues that Mary Shelley had to have written Frankenstein because, well,
The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster. Monsters are not simply grossly deformed foetuses. Every mass murderer, every serial killer, the most sadistic paedophile has a mother, who cannot disown him. Percy was capable perhaps of imagining such a nightmare, but it is the novel's blindness to its underlying theme that provides the strongest evidence that the spinner of the tale is a woman. It is not until the end of the novel that the monster can describe himself as an abortion. If women's attraction to the gothic genre is explained by the opportunity it offers for the embodiment of the amoral female subconscious, Frankenstein is the ultimate expression of the female gothic.
Actually, the merits of this Romantic novel are more medical than literary. A friend of my sister's wrote her PhD. (as part of an MD/PhD program) on the scientific accuracies of Shelley's work, no doubt made all the more impressive by the fact that Frankenstein was begun over the course of one opium-addled summer at Lake Geneva, during which the daughter of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women) was crushing big time on the echt cad and unbeatable modern Prometheus, Lord Byron.
You want life imitating art in creepy fashion? Percy Shelley drowned after his schooner, Don Juan sunk off the coast of Viareggio, Italy under circumstances that still remain mysterious. Some think the Italian navy, mistaking Shelley for the more wanted Mediterranean man of intrigue, Byron, attacked the boat, while a recent hiccup in Serbian academe, of all places, has advanced the theory that British agents assassinated Shelley for his atheism and subversive writings. He was working, at the time of his demise, on the radical journal The Liberal, which he co-edited with Leigh Hunt.
During his famous beachfront funeral — captured with such Romantic and fact-iffy flourish by the painter Louis Edouard Fournier in 1889 — Shelley's comrade Edward Trelawny rescued the dead poet's heart from the pyre and later presented it to Mary. She kept this desiccated organ, which she had pressed like the petals of a flower, in a book for the rest of her life.
The heart is what the monster snatches, albeit while it's still moist and beating, from the chest of Victor Frankenstein's bride, thus exacting Oedipal revenge on the father that would not love him and the mother who probably wouldn't have loved that face.
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