Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother

                The article I chose was by Ellen Moers called, Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother.  Ellen Moers is an American Literary critic, specifically with women’s writings.  She was born in New York and received her education at Columbia, Radcliffe, and Vassar Colleges. http://www.jrank.org/literature/pages/5052/Ellen-Moers.html.  She wrote Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother in 1976 and included it in her own written work called, Literary Women: The Great Writers.  She wanted to bring attention to women writers that had been long ago forgotten.  

In writing about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, she wrote about the young girl’s life and the experiences that she was having at such a young age.  At sixteen she was a mistress, and pregnant which is what her condition would be for the next five years.  She would never actually be able to raise her children, because of death which would shortly follow her baby’s birth.  It was during these experiences that she wrote Frankenstein.  Moers compared Shelley’s book to the horrible pregnancies and tragic deaths of all her babies.  Moers talked of Mary’s experience with child birth ugly and horrific.  She also explains that before this time the mention of child birth is brought to literature only by men.  However, in Frankenstein Shelley brings it to fiction as fantasy.  Moers also talks of the heartache that Mary Shelley continues to experience throughout her life when it comes to love and relationships, not only in her own life but those that are close to her.  Shelley is able to bring all of these experiences together in her strange and abnormal novel, Frankenstein.  http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Articles/moers.html

Ellen Moers definitely read this book differently than I did.  It is almost as though we read two different books.  Moers seems to have read the book looking for an underlying theme, and I was just trying to understand the language and follow the story line.  I learned a lot about reading the article; in fact when I read Frankenstein again I will read it with a totally new frame of mind.    Knowing some of Mary Shelley's personal struggles and disappointments will allow me to look for something that I did not see before.  It also helped me follow the story line a little bit better.  I think that I will be more successful in writing a literary criticism after reading the works of Ellen Moers, and I think that this is a perfect article to use as the subject for an essay.