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Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley form one of the most revolutionary mother-daughter couples in history; they lived during the 18th and 19th centuries, in a society that considered women irrational and intellectually hollow beings who merely existed for the sake of beauty and procreation. The subjection of women was considered justified, given women’s supposed lack of rationality and their physical and emotional frailty. These two women have proved all this wrong, leaving an indelible mark in history not only by breaking all the rules imposed on women at the time (an achievement already great in itself, considering their situation), but also by writing revolutionary books, such as “The Vindication of the Rights of Women” and “Frankenstein”. Thanks to this, their opinions and actions weren’t buried with them after their death, but continue to live on and will never be extinguished or forgotten.

The fact that most interests me about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley is their relationship, in fact the mother (Wollstonecraft) died eleven days after giving birth to her child (Shelley); but this did not prevent her from deeply influencing her daughter, who learnt much from her by reading obsessively everything her mother had written.

For instance, one of the books that most influenced Mary Shelley was her mother’s last novel, “Maria or, The Wrongs of Woman”. It talks about Jemima, an attendant working in the asylum where Maria has been unjustly imprisoned and unfolds the story of the cruelties to which she had been subjected by a vicious stepmother. Lonely and rejected by the world Jemima attributes the greater part of her misery to a single factor: the absence of parental love. Reading those words in a book written by the mother she had never known, during the time when her disapproving father had exiled her from his house, how could Mary Shelley not identify with Jemima’s despair and project it onto her artificially manufactured creature?

In fact, four years later, Mary Shelley published her most famous novel “Frankenstein”; where she sums up the most important moral lesson that she learned from her mother’s work: the value of taking a generous and fearless attitude of love toward the whole world, including obviously artificial machines, which in her opinion should be treated, by their creators, as children.


We can also notice how in detail Mary Shelley treats the family theme in her novel “Frankenstein”, she does it in two ways: firstly, describing Victor’s relationship with his family, his parents loved him, he was free to live his life and carve his own path, which was a luxury that most kids were not given. However, once he left for school and started to pursue his independent studies and career, he completely stopped talking to the people who had loved him, and eventually he lost all of them. This may have been Mary Shelly’s way of warning the reader that it is important to allocate time for family before it is too late.


(Mary Shelley)


Secondly, in contrast, Shelley describes how the creature that Frankenstein created was not given a happy environment like the one his creator had received. He was despised from the very beginning, which affected him deeply. The creature even tried to create a family with people that weren’t his creator. Unfortunately, the creature was never able to find a group of people that would accept him as a family member because of his appearance and eventually became the notorious monster we all know.

Although there is a contrast between their situations, a similarity between the creature and Frankenstein exists as well. They both suffer from not having anyone to love and who loved them. Both Mary Shelley and her mother felt this kind of pain during specific periods of their lives; they precisely and remarkably described it in many novels and essays, so that people who read them can perfectly relate to their words.


When I first read about Mary Shelley’s life and story, I was struck, not only by her opinions, but also by how she managed to emerge despite the great presence of her mother who could easily have overshadowed her abilities. In fact, not only did she manage to achieve results as great as those of her mother but also she managed to do it without losing the respect and complete devotion to her. Besides, it seems to me that there was never any jealousy, envy or desire of fame on the part of Shelley and perhaps this is also due to the fact that she never actually knew her mother; so their mother-daughter relationship was definitely different from a normal and conventional one. (Mary Wollstonecraft)


It seems to me that Shelley's vision of Wollstonecraft grew to an almost non-human level, enhancing her ideas, actions, goals, etc. but also dissolving the human sense of competition that everyone feels when compared with someone else.

Finally, I believe that these two women have contributed to a great step forward in female-history. If right now what they achieved may seem obvious and not that much revolutionary, we must keep into consideration that it is thanks to women like them if at the present moment we can afford to take for granted rights that were in the past obtained with much effort and struggle. So, since we know that the road to women’s equal rights is still long I believe that in the future we will continue to move forward especially thanks to women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley.


Laura Bonanno 2C LCE

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