The exploration of the characters in Mary Shelley's ‘Frankenstein’ Essay

The characters that occur in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein point at the autobiographical nature of the novel, especially when we take a closer look at the aspect of death and the motherlessness. Due to Shelley's own experience, she identifies with her heroes, namely the daughters who are always orphans and also the nameless monster, around which the action of the novel revolves. Almost all of the orphaned daughters in the story, much like the author herself, are left open to the disdain and repudiation or even dehumanization which a culture raised by and additionally, for an accumulation of fathers upon them. The life of the title character, Frankenstein, does not seem to be enthusiastic as well. By the absence of his mother and the further questioning of the humanity of his parentless creature, Victor Frankenstein is presented as the patriarch and creator who creates but cannot love and one of his fears is a sexual reproduction. The author's own experience of living without a mother, vulnerable life and her anxiety of motherhood come through in most of her books, where almost every character as being part of her fiction is someone she knew. According to Peter Dale Scott, Percy Shelley, the husband of Mary, often used to write under the pseudonym Victor, the name of her story's main figure. Percy chose this pseudonym on publishing his first volume of childhood poems including works of his sister Elizabeth, whose namesake in the novel is Victor Frankenstein's cousin and friend 6 or rather his sister". (Frankenstein 94) Moreover, Percy shared with his sister Elizabeth an intensely loving connection", whereas Victor Frankenstein's relationship with his cousin/sister Elizabeth seems to indicate incestuous overtones in the book. More significantly to my goals, however, is that Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley, who wrote the manifesto A Vindication of The Rights of Women, 8 a grim look at the concept of motherhood in England's patriarchal community, died only eleven days after giving birth to her own daughter. Her death aroused in Mary Shelley an enduring feeling of guilt and an image of motherhood as a calamitous effort. Shelley's father, William Godwin, along with her husband is the mirror image in the character of Victor Frankenstein, who brings into life a motherless living creature but abandons it right after its creation. Equally, Godwin abandoned his daughter Mary when she made her own decision to elope with Percy Shelley. After Shelley grew away from her father, she gave birth to her first children, however both of them unfortunately died afterward. Their deaths strengthened Shelley's conviction of motherhood as a thing that induce only fear in a human being. Shelley believed that motherhood is an integral part of death and it can be definitely a source of misfortune and suffering not only in a woman's life, but in children's' one as well. As a confirmation of it is the quote from the introduction of her book, in which Shelley called her creation as a child a hideous progeny".