Real Women of Gaming

The relationship between a person and their parents is complex. Most of the time it is many things at once. No matter how good the parent is, there will always be expectations for children. How they look, how they act, how intelligent they are and what is success for them. Perhaps that is one reason why Mary Shelley wrote one of the most famous stories of a creator and what they have made gone wrong.

Before we can dive into Frankenstein I think it is important to first know a little bit about Mary, since I cannot talk about one without the other. Mary is not the first writer in the family. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote about women’s rights in 1790! Unfortunately her mother died when she was quite young. Mary grew up in a household with half-siblings, until she started an affair with poet Percy Shelley who she would eventually run away with and marry. On one eventful trip Mary, Percy and her half-sister went to visit Lord Byron. During one dark and stormy night a challenge was made, who could tell the best ghost story and Mary was determined to win. 

Young Victor Frankenstein has a problem in Frankenstein. Perhaps when you grave rob and use untested theories to create life in your dorm room the results may not be what you are expecting. It would, also, seem that passing out and ignoring this creation may have negative consequences. Those consequences may be life or death in nature. Now Victor is trying to track down the creation he abandoned before more damage is done. 

Mary Shelley took a good hard look at her life when she wrote this novel. Her relationships, or lack thereof, with her parents. She also looked at the world around her. Suddenly there was the promise of life after death with very real experiments that involved still very newly harnessed electricity. It makes sense that she would see horror and beauty in all of this. Later she would be told to rewrite the novel to make it more palatable by the men selling it. 

This is why there are two different versions of the novel. Both are valid reads and will give you a mostly similar experience. However, going into the second version you should know that by the time of the rewrite, Mary had gone through more struggles. She had lost her husband and a child. She desperately needed money while trying to make sure both her works and her late husbands’ were published.

Frankenstein is a novel about failed relationships. People are constantly leaving each other in one form or other and it leads to disaster. There are also beautiful moments. A few characters show real love. Perhaps those moments make the novel even more heartbreaking. 

I would highly recommend this novel, though I do want to give a few warnings first. The verbiage, the words used, are not easy to read. I think we can mostly thank Percy’s influence in editing the first version for that. There are some racist moments, not nearly as bad as most “classics” but they are there. In short this is not an easy book. I will never understand why schools think it is tailored for teenagers. I got a lot more out of it as an older reader last year. 

Take your time with Frankenstein. You can put it down. Share space with it while you digest scenes. School makes you think you have to push through novels or you are failing. That is not the case. You can take pauses and a pause can be years long. It will be more enjoyable to take that pressure off of yourself as a reader. 

My last words of advice are not to go in expecting it to be like any movie of the same name. None of them are like the novel. So just go in forgetting most of what you know about the story. Revel in the fact that a woman with a very complicated life tried to write all her pain and love into a monster. She was a weird girl who turned into a brilliant woman and we wouldn’t have multiple genres if not for her influence. 

Happy reading!

ALWAYS KEEP SPARKLING!!!