the standard anti-Jacobin motifs as grave-robbing, revival of the dead, and monsters who destroy their own creators in her writing. Conservatives popularly had often used such images to warn the public against the dangers of reform and rebellion, portraying the radical actions of man in demonic terms.
Shelley however does modify them to not be as politically instigating while appropriating these images for her novel. The modified images are more subjective, complex, and problematic than the political monster fictions that were in circulation previously. Translating politics into psychology, she internalizes debates by using revolutionary symbolism. Her characters’ actions act as physical manifestations of political ideas, which through personal psychology convey Shelley’s views. She domesticates the vision of
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The Conservatives of this period consistently used the grotesque to deflate Godwin's utopian theories about the regeneration of humanity. Godwin and his writings were depicted as nascent monsters that had to be eradicated, to prevent England from having the same fate as France. The political theorist and philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in 1796 of "metaphysical" social theorists,
“. . . a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed dephlegmated, defecated evil.”
William Godwin was like meat served on a platter for such thinkers. Burke called Godwin's opinions "pure defecated atheism . . . the brood of that putrid carcase the French Revolution." Horace Walpole, art historian and politician of the period, called Godwin "one of the greatest monsters exhibited by