Goddess bless Mary Shelley, mother of my genres. Part of why I took this class was to try and get my feet wet in some of the roots and core ideologies of the genres in which I write. Discussion on this, for example, has helped push me into wanting to pivot the genre of my thesis from straight contemporary fantasy to wanting it to be more neo-southern Gothic.
But I digress! The gothic traditionally is very concerned with questions of mortality. Namely how to escape it or the repercussions of attempting to do so. I’m pushed to think of Edgar Alan Poe, who is constantly grappling with death and what it means in his work—probably because everyone he ever looked at died of TB within 20 minutes of meeting him.
Mary Shelley wasn’t too much better off, so Frankenstein doesn’t come as a shock. But Frankenstein asks what happens when you try to cheat or outwit death. Frankenstein’s monster is the bastardization of life itself, and Doctor Frankenstein realized that immediately, passing out upon its creation. (Why couldn’t people stay awake, by the way? That’s such a Gothic trope, but what were they eating?)
What separates Frankenstein from other gothic works that I know of (besides the fact that it effectively invents a new genre altogether) is that it also deals with questions of parental agency. How responsible is Victor for the thing he created? By cheating death, is he now a father? Shelly’s relationship with her mother’s death and with her father was screwed to high hell, but it is interesting to think how she simultaneously sees the creation of life as its own type of cheating death, but also as a type of danger and a thing to fear.
But when your birth is what killed your mother, what can you expect?
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