> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Introduction - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/frankenstein-introduction/ - Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:17.000Z - Description: Gordon argues that Frankenstein is a protest novel: Mary Shelley's answer to a world that gave women no power and let male ambition run rampant. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Charlotte Gordon on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, #video Charlotte Gordon opens with a confession: at 16 she thought Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* was boring. Her teacher called it the first science fiction novel, made a big deal of Percy Shelley, and never mentioned that the author was a girl two years older than she was. She wrote her paper on Einstein as the modern Prometheus, probably got an A, and missed the point. Then she walks through what she missed: Mary Wollstonecraft's *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*, the legal position of wives in 19th century England, and a daughter who learned her letters from her dead mother's name on a gravestone. The turn is Gordon's claim that Wollstonecraft's influence shows up as absence. With one exception, kept entirely off stage, the women in the novel can't act on their own lives, and that gap is where she locates the book's argument. You leave with a question to carry into Walton's letters: where are the women? ## Transcript Did you think that Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* was the first science fiction novel? Well, you can say that it is, but it is so much more. Come read it with me on Rebind and you'll find out what else is hidden in this amazing novel. Hi, I'm Charlotte Gordon. I am so excited to be reading Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* with you on Rebind. But first, let me introduce myself. I wrote the Introduction to Penguin's new edition of the 1818 edition of Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein*, and I also wrote *Mary Shelley: A Very Short Introduction*. My dual biography of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, *Romantic Outlaws*, won the National Book Critics Award for biography. I'm the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Endicott College just outside of Boston. When I was 16, if anyone had ever told me that I would become an expert on *Frankenstein*, I would've laughed. I hate to admit this now, but back then I thought *Frankenstein* was so boring. Now, it's one of my favorite books, and I can't wait to talk about it with you, but when I was in high school, the book didn't seem to have anything to do with me. There were no strong women, no spirited young girls. My teacher said it was the first science fiction novel and an extremely important commentary on science and technology. If my teacher had mentioned that the book was written by a girl only two years older than me, I might've been interested, but he never talked about Mary Shelley. He didn't seem to think she was important at all, although he made a big deal out of her husband, the poet, Percy Shelley. He even said that most people thought that Percy was actually the author, which by the way is completely untrue. We have Mary's notebooks to prove it. Anyways, how he could have maligned and neglected Mary, wild, romantic teenager that she was, is beyond me. But in those days, we weren't supposed to get distracted by who wrote a book or by its historical context. And besides, no one knew anything about Mary Shelley back then. We were just supposed to analyze the text and search for themes. And in *Frankenstein*, there were all sorts of big ideas, man versus nature, man versus man, man versus monster. Men, men, men. Where were the women? I didn't say this out loud, but still that's what I thought. When it came time to write a paper on the novel, the assignment was to discuss the subtitle, *The Modern Prometheus*, as in Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from the gods to give to human beings. It was the 1970s. It was the Cold War. And so I wrote about nuclear weapons, how the nuclear bomb was our Promethean fire, and how Einstein was clearly the modern Prometheus. I probably got an A on the paper, even though I know now that I missed most of the central themes in the book. But then so had my teacher; we just didn't know any better. Looking back, I think we couldn't see the novel's complexities because none of us realized some important truths about Mary Shelley. First, the condition of women in 19th century England, the world in which Mary Shelley lived, and her reverence, her deep admiration for her amazing mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. Who was Mary Wollstonecraft? Mary Wollstonecraft was a radical political philosopher who shocked the world by publishing *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*. In 1792, Wollstonecraft argued that women deserved independence and should be allowed to direct their own lives. Shocking. At the time, these claims seemed as bizarre as granting chimpanzees rights. People thought that women were like children, and that their brains were smaller than men's. The experts said they lacked moral fiber, reason and judgment. If you were a woman, you were supposed to submit to the men in your life because God only knows what you would get up to on your own. Legally, wives could not own property or initiate divorce. Children were the father's property. Husbands were encouraged to beat their wives, to keep them in line. They could shut their wives up in mental asylums. The list of horrors goes on and on. And so what you may not realize, at least I didn't when I first read the book, is that in many ways, *Frankenstein* is Mary Shelley's response to this misogyny. From an early age, Mary had sworn to live according to her mother's ideals, to advocate for women and women's independence. She was dedicated to carrying on her mother's mission. We'll talk about this later, but for now, let's just say that *Frankenstein* is much more than a science fiction story. Mary Shelley paints a dystopian universe, a world where women have no power, and male ambition is allowed to run rampant. And so *Frankenstein* is also a protest novel, an indictment of the laws and prejudices that restricted women in 19th century England. But I didn't realize any of this until I was forced to reread *Frankenstein* for a class I was teaching called Women in Literature. I'd inherited the class and its syllabus from a senior colleague. Otherwise, I would never have taught *Frankenstein*. I'd avoided the book since high school, though I realize now that this is strange, as I'd always been interested in women authors. I'd even written books about them. But I was interested in women authors who thought about what it meant to be a woman, who wrote about their struggles and triumphs as females. To me, Mary Shelley seemed like an outlier, a writer with traditionally male concerns who seemed to have little interest or awareness of her identity as a female author. But when I started to prepare grudgingly for teaching *Frankenstein*, I quickly realized how wrong I had been. Mary Shelley was born at the end of the 18th century, 1797, to be exact. Like her mother, Mary Shelley was a complete rebel. When she was 16, the same age I was when I first read *Frankenstein*, she ran away with Percy Shelley, a married man, breaking one of the cardinal rules of the era. Do not have sex with a man unless you're married to him. If you did, your future was ruined forever. Society would turn their backs on you, and if the man abandoned you, then what? No one else wanted to marry damaged goods. And if you didn't have your own money, your choices were prostitution, the poor house or an asylum. After she ran away with Percy, Mary didn't have to go to the poor house, but she was iced out of London society. Even her father, William Godwin, refused to let her into the house. This was particularly shocking since many years earlier, Godwin had come out against marriage, writing that the legalized possession of a woman is odious selfishness. But now that his own daughter had broken the rules, he rejected her entirely. A terrible blow for Mary and one she would never fully recover from. And yet, even though it hurt, Mary knew that this was the price of living by a different set of rules. Her mother had broken all the rules too. Not only had Wollstonecraft written outrageous books, she lived an outrageous life. She was completely opposed to marriage, regarding it as a legalized form of prostitution. She had a child out of wedlock named Fanny before she met Mary's father, and she was not married to Godwin when she got pregnant with Mary. The couple did end up marrying, but only reluctantly and only to save their child, Mary, from being illegitimate. At any rate, for the entirety of her adult life, Wollstonecraft advocated for women's freedom and was called a whore and a hyena in petticoats for her efforts. And yet, despite the criticism she faced, Wollstonecraft never stopped fighting until she died, which was tragically 10 days after giving birth to Mary Shelley. Even though Mary never knew her mother, she was still profoundly influenced by Wollstonecraft. Her grief-stricken father, Godwin, taught young Mary to read by tracing the letters on her mother's gravestone, never thinking about the impact this might have on his daughter. After all, Mary shared her mother's name before she married Shelley. Mary's name was Mary Godwin, and when Wollstonecraft married Godwin, she took the name Godwin. And so there were two Mary Godwins, one dead, one alive, mirror images for young Mary. Tracing the letters of her own name and her mother's was a formative and disturbing experience. Their identities seemed merged, or at the very least doubled. Who was alive? Who dead? Were they one being? Was it her fault her mother was dead? Her father hung a huge portrait of Wollstonecraft in his office and encouraged Mary to read her mother's books. By the time she was 16, Mary had committed herself to keeping her mother's ideas alive. Maybe she could bring her back to life, if not literally, at least spiritually, psychically, and politically. And so she set herself two goals: to write books like Wollstonecraft and to live according to Wollstonecraft's ideals, with freedom and according to the rules of the heart, which is why she ran away with Percy, or at least one of the reasons. What I realized after reading about Mary Shelley and her mother is that categorizing *Frankenstein* as a book about science had led me to overlook some of the most significant ideas. Once I understood how important Wollstonecraft was to Mary Shelley, I looked for Wollstonecraft's themes in the book, and I found them. I don't want to give too much away, but I can say that Wollstonecraft's influence can be difficult to detect, as her ideas are revealed through what's missing, the gaps and holes and absences in the novel. But they are still there. With the exception of one female character who exists entirely off stage, the female characters are unable to exert any influence on the men or to make any independent decisions about their own lives. Ultimately, this absence, the absence of strong women, holds the key, is perhaps the key to *Frankenstein's* main themes. When women are not allowed to have a voice or to play important roles in society, Mary Shelley suggests disaster ensues. Without strong women, the world devolves into darkness, injustice, and devastation. But I'm worried I'll ruin the novel if I keep talking. So it's time to start reading. You might be mystified by the first pages. I was, but don't worry. All will become clear. And after you read, we can talk about it in the Rebind discussions at the end of each section.