Bad Mothers

Charlotte Gordon goes back to the twist she calls the heart of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Victor looks at his completed man and, instead of pride, feels horror, and abandons him. She argues that Byron or Percy Shelley wouldn't have written that scene; their creator heroes from the same summer, in "Manfred" and "Prometheus Unbound," are proud of what they make. Mary knew rejection from the inside: a mother dead after her birth, a father who shut the door, a society that condemned her.

The biographical turn is hard. While writing Volume Two, Mary lost her half-sister Fanny and Percy's first wife Harriet to suicide, both undone by illegitimacy. Gordon suggests this is why the novel switches to the creature's point of view, why Mary never once calls him a monster, and perhaps why the murdered child is named William, after her own son. The film leaves you with the questions she says the book is asking: what happens after the act of creation, and what happens to the neglected creation?