But, I do think that if there’s a sort of “moral” to Frankenstein, that who did Mary Shelley her­self most iden­ti­fy with? Probably the crea­ture. You know, as Joey said, the “unnamed crea­ture.” Why? Because that’s how peo­ple respond­ed to her. As an intel­lec­tu­al wom­an and as an unwed moth­er, she was called a whore. When peo­ple found out that she wrote Frankenstein they said what kind of wom­an would write such a book? Must be some­thing wrong with her. There’s some­thing per­verse about a wom­an who would write such a book.

So lat­er in her life she says, “I wrote it, but that’s because the idea came to me in a dream.” And we know that isn’t true because we have her note­books. She in fact thought of the idea. She worked on it real­ly hard. She worked on it real­ly hard while young wom­en around her were killing them­selves. And also, inci­den­tal­ly, she was read­ing the his­to­ry of slav­ery. So she’s ded­i­cat­ing her­self to the ideas of social injus­tice and the suf­fer­ing of those who are con­sid­ered mon­strous by their own soci­ety, her­self includ­ed.

So, she sees her­self as a wom­an who’s trying—she wants to pub­lish and be smart in her world, as some­one who’s going evoke feel­ings of mon­st— [To audi­ence (Joey Eschrich?)] You said a feel­ing of mon­stros­i­ty? People will react to her as though she’s a mon­ster, and she’s say­ing, “Don’t do that.”