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He claimed the power to create life and defy death.

One feature common to nearly all religions is the power of the gods over life and death. In taking science too far, he created a monster. Frankenstein of Shelley’s imagination was no hero of the Enlightenment, however. What if a scientist could bring an entire human back to life? Galvani had managed to make a dead frog’s legs twitch by running electric currents through them, but Shelley imagined something greater. One that influenced Mary Shelley greatly was Luigi Galvani’s work that studied the ways in which electromagnetic currents flowed through animals. The Shelleys lived in an age of scientific advancement in which academics like themselves kept informed of the latest discoveries. With the encouragement of her husband, she expanded the story into a full-length novel. Mary won the contest with her tale of a hubristic doctor who defied God to bring the dead back to life. Inspired by the trends of the world around her, as well as her own experiences of loss and loneliness, she dreamt of a tale of a scientist who took his work to impossible extremes. Mary Shelley claimed that she spent days agonizing over what story she could come up with to possibly outdo the older poets she lived with. The three writers challenged one another to write their own tales, inspired by their surroundings and the rising popularity of the Gothic horror genre. It was during a stay in Switzerland that Mary conceived the idea for her most famous work.ĭuring a wet summer the Shelleys, along with friend Lord Byron, entertained themselves by telling German ghost stories. The Shelleys lived a nomadic existence, moving between friends’ houses and rented estates throughout the continent. The two had already been living together for nearly two years, the first of many scandals that would hound their lives. In 1816, Mary had wed poet Percy Blysshe Shelley after the death of his first wife. Her mother died when she was very young and Mary herself had suffered the loss of a child, the first of many such losses she would experience.

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When she started writing the story at age 18, Mary Godwin, as she was called in her youth, had already lived a full and tragic life. The young author was only 20 years old when her novel changed the literary world. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published on January 1st, 1818.

Read on to find out how the author of the first science fiction story drew inspiration from a two thousand year old tale! Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein The answer to that is rooted in ancient divine law, contemporary scientific achievement, and the author’s own troubled life. So what did Mary Shelley mean when she compared the overachieving scientist of her novel to the ancient thief of fire? She subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus, inviting readers to make the connection between the ancient Titan and the modern mad scientist. What could Prometheus and Frankenstein possibly have in common?īut writer Mary Shelley drew the connection herself when she wrote her tale of science gone too far. It might seem like a stretch of the imagination to connect an ancient Greek tale of theft and torture to a 19th-century Gothic horror masterpiece.