Passion for Passion

Passion is a word with various meanings, but I have personally always associated it with having a deep desire or love for some aspect of life. This word has always stood out to me when I have heard others say I have a passion for this or that or that I need more of a passion for this or that. This word seems to carry a lot of weight when used in this context and that has always intreged me. Now a days passion is used in so many ways that I think it loses meaning in many people's minds. People often say I have a passion for something, but usually I deduce their definition of passion either does not match mine or such merely does not hold true. These factors have driven me to my selection of the word passion and as UCLA's football coach, Rick Neuheisel once said on The Dan Patrick Show, "you have to have your passion bucket full," and trust me my passion bucket for such a paper is filled to the brim.

Monster Mom

Female Gothic:

• "The work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic."
• In Gothic writings the intent is to create fear in it's readers (appealing to physical reactions rather than achieving a deep emotional fear)
• Abnormal: "fantasy predominates over reality, the strange over the common place, and the supernatural over the natural"

Attraction to such literature:

• Readers become so enticed by this suspenseful fear ("the art of freezing blood") that they cannot stop reading 
• Shelley: "curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart."

Personal Experience and it's role:

• Immerses herself in the scientific theory of the day as well as the writings of the time (e.g. Wordsworth and Coleridge)
• Personal woe and depression: first baby dies early on in her life
• Shelly is the monster's mother because of her obsession with having a child which she achieves before she finishes her novel.

Newborn Life:

• feminine appeal
• the consequences stemming from abandonment
• The importance of being a mother to Shelly caused the punishment of Frankenstein in the book
• Frankenstein abandoned the ideals of Shelly with his fleeing
• To "bestow animation on lifeless matter"

Family Importance: 

• The letters in the beginning: to doting parents and to his orphan sister
• Background on family life stress parent-child, child-parent relationships