Frankenstein's Monster

"Mother Monster" Lady Gaga

Mary Shelley wrote the Frankenstein book when she was only eighteen years old, in 1816.

Ellen Moers wrote in 1974 a classic article on the book bringing out for the first time the fact that it is very much a birth issues book:
 

Much in Mary Shelley's life was remarkable. She was the daughter of a brilliant mother (Mary Wollstonecraft) and father (William Godwin). She was the mistress and then wife of the poet Shelley. She read widely in five languages, including Latin and Greek. She had easy access to the writings and conversation of some of the most original minds of her age. But nothing so sets her apart from the generality of writers of her own time, and before, and for long afterward, than her early and chaotic experience, at the very time she became an author, with motherhood. Pregnant at sixteen, and almost constantly pregnant throughout the following five years; yet not a secure mother, for she lost most of her babies soon after they were born; and not a lawful mother, for she was not married -- not at least when, at the age of eighteen, Mary Godwin began to write Frankenstein. So are monsters born.

I recently bought the Norton Critical Edition of the book because I had the idea that it was especially relevant to currents of thought in the nineteenth century in which I am interested: Enlightenment-Romantic issues, post-Revolution and post-Napoleon issues, “Great Man” ambition issues.

I, like most others up until Moers, had the idea that it was principally about the over-reach of enlightenment and science, a Sorcerer's Apprentice kind of book. Many people had noted several other themes in it, including Milton's Paradise Lost and the Prometheus legend. But no one had brought out the motherhood theme the way Moers did. It seems incredible to me that it took almost two hundred years of widespread exposure before anyone realized that motherhood/childbirth is right there at the center of it.
 

One of my neighbors is this morbidly obese woman who has two children under five whom she did not want. I hear her screaming at them sometimes in a blood-chilling, breath-stopping way. They seem like dear, cute little kids from a distance – I've never actually met them – but everyone who knows them says they are “monsters.” That is exactly the word they use, the word Mary Shelley uses for her Creature.

It's so obvious that it's just painful to realize that Frankenstein has been read, seen in plays and film with different versions and sequels, for two hundred years and been so under-appreciated. Perhaps creators/parents can't easily admit that they shouldn't have brought children into the world or they believe that it's somehow “unnatural” to be not wanting their children. Perhaps it's difficult for a child to grasp fully and validly that their creators/parents truly did not want them. I think women are more sensitive than men to the hurt involved in such situations, although Frankenstein's Monster, a male, is highly sensitive, intelligent, perceptive, articulate.

This thing about a child feeling abandoned by its Creator in some way is clearly a fundamental issue. It's the issue of “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Some people are able to work through it, but many are definitely like Frankenstein's Monster and become fiendishly murderous despite, perhaps even because of, their great sensitivity - desperately lonely, unhappy, destructive of self as well as others in this situation.

I was struck by Eben Alexander, in the last chapter of this Proof of Heaven which I recently discussed, writing about how the matter of his being adopted was so important to him. My first thought was that a man of his experience and education and wisdom would have got beyond that concern. But no. And I've noticed this, without understanding, in the cases of many other people whom I've known who were, or felt they were, abandoned in some form or other by their natural parents.

I feel embarrassed that it took me this long, seventy-one years, and a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for the “click.”

Lady Gaga with Kiss

Lady Gaga is very much about acceptance, and coming to terms with being born this way. She comes out and tells her “Little Monsters” that It's all right, you're OK now, I'm here. That's what Frankenstein's Monster longed to hear and asked to hear and needed to hear.

Gaga's Little Monsters in Indonesia