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We speak student!

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Frankenstein a la Shmoop

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The Purpose of Creation

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Why the creation scene?

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It's pretty easy to see

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that this is a birthing scene, right?

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It's a creation scene

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on one side.

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And we can talk a lot about,

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you know, how Victor Frankenstein is playing God.

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We'll talk about that a little bit later in the course.

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But, if we're thinking about this from Mary Shelley's perspective,

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it is an actual childbirth scene.

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If you read the passage,

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the creation scene,

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there are words like

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"agony,"

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"toil."

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These words that we really associate with childbirth.

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And childbirth in the early 1800s

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was not easy.

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You know, it wasn't like you go in,

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get your epidural, and everything's done.

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It was painful.

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Postpartum depression was actually a huge issue.

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Back then they didn't call it that.

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But the entire scene and what happens during and after it

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is really supposed to recall childbirth.

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As I mentioned, Mary Shelley,

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who we say, "Oh, well, she was only 18.

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What does the she know about childbirth?"

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She had already given birth twice at that point.

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And, kind of, these labor pains

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are a metaphor for childbirth, a metaphor for writing the book,

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et cetera, et cetera.

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And you can read this scene in so many different ways.

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Just one reading is to say

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she's kind of showing what childbirth is like.

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Why would she be so intent on doing that

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other than the fact that she'd given birth twice?

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She was living and writing

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in a society dominated by men.

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And men could do everything in this period. And they did.

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The one thing men could not do

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was create life.

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That was the one thing that women could do

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that men couldn't.

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So she wants to kind of show the scene of

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here's a man trying to create life

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- and -- - Things go awry.

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- Yeah. - So in the whole vein of trying to create life,

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there's the notion of trying to control life

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and destroy life.

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And, you know, you have to think about

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a child -- She was probably 15 when she got pregnant

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the first time.

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and there have been a number of readings of Frankenstein

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as an abortion, as a living abortion.

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It's a woman taking control of her body

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in a way that you couldn't do before,

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you wouldn't want to do.

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And you can imagine the technology of abortion

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back then was a whole different animal.

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- Yeah. - How does all that play

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in its time frame?

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And with her as a person who's like --

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I think of her as this very smart, lonely woman

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whose time was 200 years early in some way.

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What we risk doing is reading

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onto Frankenstein something that was not there

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because we now have these, you know, huge controversies

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and things like that about abortion now.

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But that's not to say that we

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A - should not do that

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or B - that that was not actually the case back then.

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But, yeah, there is a lot of this idea of a woman

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being able to control the birthing process.

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What's interesting about Frankenstein is that

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if we're thinking about it in terms of an abortion,

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like you said, it's a living abortion.

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Frankenstein gets created.

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He's not aborted as a fetus or whatever you would say.

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He is born

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and then his creator abandons him.

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We can talk about it as an abortion,

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but I think the bigger issue,

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or the issue that would have been more important at the time,

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was this abandonment issue.

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And this child was born and then immediately

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his father, the creator, just completely abandoned him.

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Which brings into bigger questions of,

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you know, nature versus nurture,

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which we'll talk about in a bit.

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Was the monster born bad

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- or was, you know, badness thrust upon him? - The environment bad.

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- Yes. - [ laughs ]

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What does the creation scene represent in Frankenstein

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and why is it included?

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What controversies arise?

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