Frankenstein Theme Essay

My Take on the Themes of Frankenstein The author, Mary Shelley, was the daughter of radicals Mary Wollenscraft and William Goodwin. Mary never knew her mother because of her mother’s death four weeks after she was born. She grew up educating herself amongst her father’s circle of fellow writers. While educating herself she met her husband, fellow writer Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1816 Mary and her husband went too Geneva, and met Lord Byron, the man whose ghost story challenge started the idea for the novel, Frankenstein. Frankenstein started as a ghost story of only a few pages, in 1818 and then died in 1851. While in Geneva Percy and Lord Byron became fascinated with electric shock, Percy had his professor demonstrate how electric shock works.

This need to know more about the world lead him to leave his home, and travel to Ingolstadt for school. Early on his interest was in Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus, great scholars of old science. One of Victor’s professors saw what he had been studying and told him he would have to start his studies entirely new. He also became very interested in chemistry, the subject that would ultimately help create a monster. “One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted his attention was the structure of the human frame. Victors thirst for the forbidden sent his project into action. He began to exhume corpses from the church yard, using them to view and record the progress of decaying flesh. While examining the bodies he kept body parts from different cadavers to build his own creature. According to Alan Raunch, Victors reasoning for making a male monster is because, the female body is troublesome to him due to the fact that woman can reproduce. “You seek the knowledge and wisdom as I once did; and I ardently hope the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been.” (Shelley62) Victor knows from the beginning that his studies required devious acts, but his wants clouded his moral judgement. This could also be viewed as a time where Victor is not comfortable with himself and how he is as a human