Frankenstein - Abortion

"I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice." p. 210

I'll be tackling what appears to be a motif of Frankenstein: unwanted life. Ever since Victor first created Mario (Mario of course being the creature), there has been this idea of a life existing that nobody really wanted to exist. Mario was, in fact, alive, but Frankenstein immediately regretted it, and actually set out to destroy the life that he created. There's just this sense that now that some living thing has become an inconvenience, it is acceptable to extinguish that little spark of life. This sounds eerily similar to a process that exists today, and Shelley finally mentions it by name on the second-to-last page: Abortion. BOOM. This blog post just got real.

So how about that? Could this novel actually be a commentary on the abortion of adorable unborn babies? Up until five minutes ago, I had no idea if they even practiced abortions way back in The Olden Times, but apparently abortion has been practiced since The Very Olden Times, and maybe even Way Before Those Times! So I like to think that it's actually extremely possible that Shelley is commenting on abortion. But more importantly, what exactly is she saying? Shelley is a noted feminist, so does she portray abortion as a good right that protects a woman's ability to do whatever she may want with her own body? Well...no. You see, throughout the novel, as Victor's desire to terminate the life he created increases, his resemblance to what we actually consider a monster increases as well. He gradually becomes more brutal and less human, more bloodthirsty and less compassionate. He stops caring about human relationships, the beauty of nature, and even science, his one true love (♥). As he abandons these human qualities and becomes more animalistic, it simply reveals that Shelley is conveying her belief that abortion is in fact a monstrous practice.