The Monster's Mother: Frankenstein and Female Creation

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at 18, grieving the death of her infant, excluded from formal education, the daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and anarchist William Godwin. The novel is not a horror story — it is a political manifesto about what happens when men play God without accountability. The laboratory is a masculine space of creation that bypasses the female body; the creature is excluded from every domestic and social space; the scientist's hubris destroys everyone he loves. Written at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Frankenstein asks who controls creation, who bears the consequences, and who gets to be human. This episode examines the radical political context of the novel's creation, the Villa Diodati summer of 1816, and why Shelley's warning has only grown more urgent in the age of AI and genetic engineering.SPOILERS! Please note that due to the nature of this podcast, each episode describes a novel in detail, including plot spoilers. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.