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