Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother

Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother

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                The article that I chose was by Ellen Moers called Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother. Ellen Moers is an American Literary critic, focusing mainly on woman’s writing. Moers was born in New York, she received her education from Columbia, Radcliffe, and Vassar. Moers was also very important in founding Anglo-American feminist critical practice (http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/5052/Ellen-Moers.html).

                When Moers wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein she gave the reader light into Shelley’s life at the time. Shelley was the daughter to a brilliant mother and father, was the mistress turned wife to the poet Shelley, she read in five languages, she had access to writings and conversations to writers that were the most original of her time, and how her life experiences at such a young age set her apart from the writers of her own time.  Shelley was pregnant and a mistress at the age of sixteen, and would be constantly pregnant for the next five years of her life. She would never be an actual mother because she lost most of her babies and wouldn’t be able to raise them due to their untimely death shortly after birth. At the age of eighteen, and during these experiences, Shelley began to write Frankenstein. Moers compares Shelley’s hardship with her children dying to “monsters born” in choosing to write Frankenstein. Moers states how Shelley invented the mad scientist who locks himself in his lab to create human life only to find that he has created a monster and flees from it. Moers shows us how the mad scientist can be like a mother in Shelley’s eye with the “revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences” (Frankenstein pg 218). Moers goes on to talk about the hardships in Shelley’s life with the dying of her children, romance, death of close ones, and her journal. Shelley’s journal holds a key to Frankenstein that a lot of other critics never really thought to be a key link in fully understanding the fiction behind Frankenstein.

                Moers read this book completely differently than I did the first time.  It’s like we both read to completely different books. While I was reading it to just understand the language and the book itself, Moers was trying to find some other meaning that was underneath it all. After reading Moers article on Mary Shelley I decided to go back and read a few passages out of Frankenstein so I could see if what Moers was saying did make since to me and it did. It opened up my mind to a deeper meaning of the novel than just to be scary. After rereading some passages and Moers article I think that I will be able to come out in the end with a much better criticism than I originally thought that I would be able to write. This was by far my favorite article out of them all and will be a great thing to write an essay on.  

http://corinnesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2011/04/frankenstein-by-mary-shelley.html