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Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (M. Shelley, 1818) is arguably the most famous and most widely adapted work of science fiction and horror of all time. It was written by Mary Shelley when she was a girl in her teens. How is that possible? What life experiences could she possibly have drawn on? How did they come to her? Why did she hide them? Why would this book tower over all of her other literary efforts?
Psychoanalysis cannot answer all of these questions because psychoanalysis cannot explain genius. But psychoanalysis can help to explain the direction genius takes. It can help to explain the “need” that drives the creative act. And when the need is to reckon loss, psychoanalysis can provide a frame to better understand “how I, then a young girl, came to think of and to dilate upon so very hideous an idea” (M. Shelley, 1831, p. xxi). For by the time Mary had sat down to write her “hideous progeny,” she had suffered many losses—more perhaps than most do in a lifetime. Indeed her first loss would be suffered almost with her first breath.
Mary was born on August 30, 1797. Eleven days later, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft would die. That birth and that death would be chronicled by William Godwin (1798) in his book Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, written a year after the birth of his child, a year after the death of his wife. “The child was born at twenty minutes after eleven at night. It was not till after two o'clock on Thursday morning that I received the alarming intelligence that the placenta was not yet removed.” At this point the mid-wife was discharged and “a male practitioner” was summoned. “He immediately proceeded to the extraction of the placenta, which he brought away in pieces, till he was satisfied that the whole was removed” (p. 176). But he was wrong.