Mary Shelley Undermines the Horrors of Reality

    In her author’s introduction, Mary Shelley describes the conception for Frankenstein. She writes, “I busied myself to think of a story—a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look around, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart” (xxiii). She writes about her husband’s insistence that she write, and her feelings of what I perceived to be writer’s block. She writes that she wanted to write beyond herself—“not confined to [her] own identity” (xxii). That is until she has a vivid dream which she cannot ignore; she was terrified of what she had thought up, and wrote it down. Shelley, referring to her book as her “hideous progeny,” bids it to prosper. Yet, despite her insistence that her creations trumped her “own sensations,” the beginning of Frankenstein seems to parallel Shelley’s coming to the book itself. In her introduction she describes the notion that creation begins amongst chaos. Robert Walton, I viewed, can serve as the chaos that brings us to Victor Frankenstein; he functions almost as if to mirror Shelley, fostering “new spirit of life animated the decaying frame to the stranger” (11). After befriending this stranger he helped save, we are all included in his harrowing tale.

From this, I deduce that Shelley was wrong in her assumption that her own identity would or could hinder her writing. After all, it was the union of her creative and herself which led to her greatest work.