Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Science, Science Fiction, or Autobiography by Ginn - Essay Example

The writer connects Frankenstein to the personal life of Mary Shelley by finding connections to the both as she highlights the usage of notions of motherless child, rejection by the father figure, a mother who laments the death of her child and narration of a student studying in university who is fond of doing wild experiments in seclusion. The author wanted to create a linkage between Mary’s troublesome life and his novel, Frankenstein. She evaluates the fifth and sixth stage of Erikson’s theory in order to assess Mary’s hideous progeny, Frankenstein.

The writer has made right connections of the novel with Mary’s life and the novel talks about issues of procreation and death as central themes of the work. However, this fact cannot be denied that Mary as a novel writer has created a masterpiece showing innate values of a polished writer. She was the one who made use of science fiction in writing the novel. In reality, she was not fully aware of scientific developments, but she, being a insatiable reader of books, retrieved that knowledge from the books she used to read.

She reused her acquired knowledge in the book, Frankenstein. Ginn elaborately gives the reasons in the background of composing such a work. Feminist critics and others have found connections in Mary’s own life and her composed work, Frankenstein. In the thesis statement, Ginn talks about recurring themes of procreation and death, which are quite agreeable to be found in the work. As far as Mary’s life as a person is concerned, it was also a tragic one as she suffered through many losses.

Hence, the thesis statement is quite right. For proving the thesis, Ginn has employed the theory of psychosocial development of Erikson to make her point. Erikson describes about eight stages of personality development of human beings. Ginn uses only two stages to describe the link between the novel and the writer. The two stages are fifth and sixth talking about adolescence and young adulthood. With the support of the mentioned stages, he successfully draws linkage between the life and work of the writer.

Many other critics have also highlighted the themes of procreation and death in Frankenstein such as Lucas (2006) who evaluates the creation of the monster till its death involving features of autobiography of Mary Shelley. Ginn highlights that Mary expressed herself and her life through the portrayal of different characters and incidents in the novel. Many other critics also claim that Mary made use of her life’s incidents in her writing. According to Hoeveler (2005), “There is no question that there are autobiographical elements in virtually everything Mary Shelley wrote…. (p. 367).

The article written by the critic has a lot of support from outside sources as the writer has included a number of authorial works for backing his point of autobiographical connection with Frankenstein. Ginn has conducted an in depth study about the life and the