HUMN 303 Week 7 Assignment
Sheri A. Green
DeVry University
Professor Gessford
August 23, 2014

Frankenstein, a novel first published in the year 1818, stands as the most talked about work of Mary Shelley’s literary career. She was just nineteen years old when she penned this novel, and throughout her lifetime she could not produce any other work that surpasses this novel in terms of creativity and vision. In this novel, Shelley found an outlet for her own intense sense of victimization, and her desperate struggle for love. Traumatized by her failed childbirth incidents, troubled childhood, and scandalous courtship, many of Shelley’s life experiences can be seen reflected in the novel. When discussing the character and development of the monster, Shelley launches an extensive discussion on the need for a proper environment and education for a child’s moral development. When we explore the novel in depth, we can see that it exudes the true horror of childbirth felt by Shelley, and articulates the fears and anxieties she had regarding her reproductive and nurturing capabilities.
Shelley’s life was marked by a series of pregnancies, miscarriages, childbirths, and deaths. Her firsthand experience of a bereavement started early in her life, when her mother died when she was eleven days old, because of a puerperal fever contacted because of childbirth. This marked her first encounter with pregnancy and related complications, but unfortunately, it was not the last one. When she grew up, she had a scandalous affair with the married poet Percy Shelley, and their first child was born prematurely and did not survive. In total, she had four childbirths and life-threatening miscarriage, before the age of twenty-five. Only one of those children, Percy Florence Shelley, survived and outlived her. A pregnant Harriet Shelley, the first wife of her husband