Frankenstein is Really about Childbirth?

Perhaps!

From a piece in the New Republic...

But Mary Shelley at 18 was far more experienced than the ordinary young girl. She had met her future husband in May 1814, when she was 16 and he, a few years older, was a pupil of Godwin’s; the two ran off together that summer, to the dismay of Mary’s father and Shelley’s wife. The following February, eight months later, she gave birth prematurely to a girl, who died after a few days. Soon Mary was pregnant again, and in January 1816 her son William was born. She and Shelley were married in December 1816, and she gave birth to their daughter Clara the following September.

In other words, not only was Mary Shelley pregnant during much of the period that she was writing Frankenstein, but she had already suffered the birth and death of an infant. Unsurprisingly, she was tormented by the loss: A journal entry in 1815 reads, “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lives.” The echoes of Frankenstein—in which the scientist, who hopes to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet,” at last sees it open its eyes and breathe—are unmistakable. And the birth of the “creature,” as he calls it at first, occurs only after “days and nights of incredible labor and fatigue”; later he refers again to the “painful labor.”

The monster is born fully formed, but his intellectual development follows the ordinary process of a human infant. While hiding out by a cabin, he learns language simply by watching and listening to the inhabitants, just as a child learns to speak. He even experiences the infant’s characteristic moment of recognizing its own reflection: “How was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool!” And he feels his creator’s rejection as keenly as he would the rejection of a parent. “Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?” he asks the scientist. The monster has a face that only a mother could love—but he has no mother.