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But, I do think that if there’s a sort of “moral” to Frankenstein, that who did Mary Shelley herself most identify with? Probably the creature. You know, as Joey said, the “unnamed creature.” Why? Because that’s how people responded to her. As an intellectual woman and as an unwed mother, she was called a whore. When people found out that she wrote Frankenstein they said what kind of woman would write such a book? Must be something wrong with her. There’s something perverse about a woman who would write such a book.
So later in her life she says, “I wrote it, but that’s because the idea came to me in a dream.” And we know that isn’t true because we have her notebooks. She in fact thought of the idea. She worked on it really hard. She worked on it really hard while young women around her were killing themselves. And also, incidentally, she was reading the history of slavery. So she’s dedicating herself to the ideas of social injustice and the suffering of those who are considered monstrous by their own society, herself included.
So, she sees herself as a woman who’s trying—she wants to publish and be smart in her world, as someone who’s going evoke feelings of monst— [To audience (Joey Eschrich?)] You said a feeling of monstrosity? People will react to her as though she’s a monster, and she’s saying, “Don’t do that.”
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