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Parental Development In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

1419 Words6 Pages

Frankenstein a classic gothic novel has a main theme of portraying advancements in technology as a bad thing, but it also contains an underlying theme that represents parental development along with a feminist perspective underlying in this representation. When Frankenstein creates his monster he without knowing it becomes involved in a parental relationship and to be frank, Frankenstein is a terrible parent, he is a deadbeat dad and a forgetful mother all in one. His lack of parent skills is a huge engine to the plot, it can be argued that if Victor parented his “child” in the slightest he may have not turned as evil as he did. The creature was forsaken by his parent and had to go elsewhere for development, without that support and love that …show more content…

Mary Shelley adds a very interesting perspective to this book by having Victor portrayed as the mother/parent to the monster and having the gender role of the parent to be enforced. Shelley doesn’t portray Victor as a good parent which makes sense during her time because he lacks many of the qualities that are essential to being a good parent such as “being a woman”. This lack of parenting drives the monster away from Victor and he learns morals from another source, Victor is in turn portrayed as a very irresponsible mother. Mother is a term that should be used to describe Victor, should. However, this term is not used as all because Shelley uses Victor’s lacking maternal qualities to exemplify the feminist point of view of the novel. The feminist view of the novel shows Shelley’s motivation for writing the book in the first place. She was challenged to write a book and so she used this book to idealize the qualities of woman and faults of man. The monster turned bad because Victor was lacking the motherly qualities that a woman would have and this is why his monster went bad. Shelley, wrote a classical gothic novel with a feminist twist, parental conflict, gender role idealism, and a riveting story, all of this is the reason Frankenstein has withstood the test of

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