Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein primarily to explore the boundaries of human ambition, the consequences of scientific overreach, and the tensions between creation and responsibility. The idea arose during the famous summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, when Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori were forced indoors by inclement weather. To pass the time, they challenged each other to invent ghost stories, and Shelley conceived a vision of a scientist who reanimates a body—an idea that crystallized into Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. This origin story is often framed around a dream she had of a “pale student of unhallowed arts” kneeling beside a creature he had assembled, which became the novel’s seed image.
Several context threads help explain why Shelley chose this subject and form:
- Scientific curiosity and anxiety: The early 19th century was a moment of rapid experimentation with electricity, galvanism, and theories about life and generation. Frankenstein uses the figure of Victor Frankenstein to probe what happens when human ingenuity attempts to master life and death, and it dramatizes fears about the costs of unchecked progress.
- Personal loss and bereavement: Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died shortly after giving birth to her, and Shelley herself suffered multiple personal losses, including the death of her children. Critics often read the novel as a meditation on death, motherhood, and the human price of pursuing knowledge without ethical constraints.
- Romantic and Gothic tensions: The work sits at the intersection of Enlightenment confidence in reason and Romantic emphasis on emotion, nature, and the limits of human power. The monster’s craving for companionship and societal rejection highlight humane concerns about responsibility and empathy.
Common misconceived facts and clarifications:
- It wasn’t simply a one-off horror tale; Shelley’s narrative engages with questions of responsibility for one’s creations and the social implications of science. The monster’s experience—rejection, learning, longing, violence—serves as a critique of how society treats difference and the responsibilities of creators.
- The subtitle “the Modern Prometheus” situates Victor’s overreaching ambition in the myth of Prometheus, who defies the gods to bring fire to humanity. This framing emphasizes both the Promethean drive for knowledge and the tragedy that follows when power is misused.
If you’d like, I can tailor this to a specific angle—for example, a literary analysis focusing on science and ethics, biographical influences on Shelley, or how Frankenstein reflects Romantic vs. Enlightenment tensions.
