The Burdens We Carry: Biographical Backgrounds
To begin to understand the connection between author and work, my students first need to recognize the complexity of Mary Shelley's personal background. Given the obvious parallels between Mary Shelley and the situations depicted in her novel, it is extremely beneficial for my students to see the how the realities of an author can have the same validity and purpose as told in a fictional account, using a fictional character as opposed to a non-fiction piece of literature. More importantly, my students have their own valid experiences and stories when it comes to the connection (or disconnection) between their own family background and dynamics and the formation of their own personalities and identities. This is not to suggest (as my students are quick to point out) that who their parents are will guarantee who they themselves will become in the future. Family background is just one factor we may use in order to understand our own values, concepts, and attitudes of the world and of those around us.
Mary Shelley had the luxury (and burden) of being the offspring of two very prominent and established writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Mary's own parental bonding was short-lived, as her mother died eleven days after giving birth to her. Before her death, Mary Wollstonecraft recognized that "before there can be an interplay of love between father and child, the father has to fulfill his duties", a statement Mary was familiar with from her mother's literary work. 12 For various reasons, Godwin did not fulfill his duties as a father, remaining a distant parent after Mary Wollstonecraft's death. In addition, Mary's relationship to his second wife was not without its problems. In essence, Mary became familiar with rejection as her mother's death signaled a type of "desertion" and "abandonment" by the one who gave her life. 13 Mary's sense of abandonment continued as her elopement with an already-married Percy earned her the scorn, and disownment, from her father, someone who embodied her "God" and whom she had a strong attachment to.
As if Mary didn't have enough sorrow in her life, she continued to face loss and suffering. Death seemed to be a constant and complex theme in Mary's life, as she may have felt indirectly guilty for each individual's demise. As already noted, Mary's mother died as a result of complications in giving birth to her. Secondly, Mary encountered death by means of the infant deaths of three of her four children. Interestingly enough, her first daughter died at eleven days old, the same age Mary was when her own mother died. Next, her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, committed suicide six weeks into Mary's beginning her drafting of Frankenstein. Also, Harriet Shelley (Percy's wife) committed suicide two and a half months after Mary began her novel. The death of her friend Lord Byron also had an impact on her. To complete her string of sorrow, Percy died in a boating accident, after which her closest friends, Jane Williams and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, betrayed her in publicly labeling her as an unloving wife. Her ongoing struggle with depression has been evidenced through her journals spanning the 1820's. 14
These themes of abandonment and death are at the forefront of Frankenstein, thus bridging the life of the author with the lives in the book. As a stark example of this connection, we need only view Victor's visions and dreams of resurrecting life with a page from Mary Shelley's journals detailing her dream of reviving her dead child. Mary's journal noted, "Dream that my little baby came to life again- that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived". 15 While Mary was still grieving for the loss of her child, her father continued in his insensitive advice and warning not to grieve too much for her dead child or else risk losing the love and affection of those around her, which mirrors Alphonse's ultimate advice to Victor after his mother dies of the Scarlet fever. 16
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