Frankenstein

   Frankenstein

Dr. Frankenstein finds himself unable to “mother” the being he creates. Why does Shelley characterize Victor in this way? What does this choice say about the role of women during Shelley’s era? Discuss the significance of parent-child relationships and birth references throughout the novel.

When I first read the novel Frankenstein, it did not shock me, but by the time I could relate it with the Industrial Revolution I thought that it is a really great novel. Throughout her novel Mary Shelley emphasized many drawbacks of this famous revolution that I had never noticed, such as the insensitive way in which women were forced by the society, let’s say, to engender children in order to obtain cheap workforce. The general view has always been that this revolution was really benifecial, but after reading this book, in my view, it was full of downsides, and I would like to describe some of them.

During The Industrial Revolution factories spread rapidly, so the owners of mills, mines and other forms of industry needed large numbers of workers, and children were the ideal employees since they were not big enough or educated enough to argue, to complain or to demand high wages.  It may sound strange, but parents were willing to have children in order to let them work in factories because that way they would have higher incomes. Apparently they never thought about the fact that their children would suffer a lot if they grew up without them, and this was probably what happened with Victor while he was creating his monster. He just prioritized his personal goal, and he did not think about the fact that the being, he was creating, would have feelings, so it would feel abandoned and rejected by society.

More children were necessary, so there was a high birth rate, and this rapid increase in birth rates clearly had an impact upon the physical strength of the mothers. What was more, women had to work right up to and straight after the day of the child’s birth for financial reasons, leaving the care of the newborn child to older relatives, so at those times women did not have neither the time nor the physical capacity to raise their children.  This  is clearly represented in the novel by Justine, a young girl adopted into the Frankenstein household while Victor was growing up, and she was in  charge of bringing him up.

As we can see women were ‘creating’ instead of having babies because they were not looking after their children. They were just giving a helping hand to the owners of the factories. This issue is closely related to the monster that Victor Frankenstein created, and then he found himself unable to ‘mother’ it, since he did not have the capacity to raise that ‘thing’ that he had invented with a specific purpose. All that glitters is not gold, the Industrial Revolution provoked good and bad changes. It generated a lot of new jobs, but it also created many monsters, such as those mothers and those children who were brought up without their caring mothers.

It is important to emphasize the fact that throughout the novel there is clear evidence that Victor Frankenstein keeps his creation in secret, yet the ugly creation  tries to integrate himself into human social patterns. But everyone who saw him dropped out him, and it was his feeling of abandonment which compels him to seek revenge against his creator. That feeling of anger was probably the same that children during the Industrial Revolution felt when they noticed that their mothers were working and they  were always with strangers.

To sum up, I would like to reflect on this: both Victor and those mothers engender people in order to obtain something back. To Victor it was the knowledge that he could create a person, and to the mothers it was the money. But  this matter does not really change their lives in a positive way since they might had felt a deep guilt when they noticed that neither Frankenstein nor those children  had a family that raised them, and included them. That way their creations would never be happy because their ‘parents’ just think about themselves.