Mary Shelley, Frankenstein & Politics

• Mary Wollstonecraft's political views and upbringing influenced Frankenstein.
• Mary Wollstonecraft's father often had radical thinkers visiting the house and she was a keen reader of her parents’ works.
• In Frankenstein, some sections reflect Mary Wollstonecraft's vindication of the Rights of Women 1792 and Williams Godwins An Enquiry into Political Justice 1793.
• Mary Wollstonecraft was also familiar with her father's novel The Adventures of Caleb Williams in 1794, which addresses social injustice and abuses of power, and her mother's unfinished fiction The Wrongs of Women.
• Mary Wollstonecraft widely read into history and philosophy and discussed political and social issues with her husband and his circle.
• Mary Wollstonecraft developed an understanding of cruelty that may be inherent to human and social-political establishments.
• The monster in Frankenstein may represent an uncontrollable force at loose in society, reflecting Mary Wollstonecraft's anxiety about the possibility of revolutionary mob violence.
• The monster in Frankenstein may also represent a type of outsider regarded as an inferior with no place in society, similar to how slaves were denied a sense of individuality.
• The monster in Frankenstein may also represent a dangerous force, reflecting Mary Wollstonecraft's anxiety about the growing strength and demands of industrial workers.
• The image of the monster in Frankenstein has been used in writings by Thomas Carlyle, both in the French Revolution of 1837 and many other works commenting on the growing strength and demands of industrial workers.
• Charles Dickens inherited from his reading of Carlyle that society had become mechanised so people began to transform into a mechanical state.
• Elizabeth Gaskell also used the image of the monster in Mary Barton 1848 which is about the growing industrial presence in Manchester.
• Elizabeth Gaskell tended to confuse the name of the monster with frankensien but her comment is clear ‘The actions of the uneducated seem to me typified in those of Frankenstein, that monster of many human qualities, ungifted with a soul or a knowledge of the difference between good and evil.' (Mary Barton, chapter 15).