ABSTRACT
Mary Shelley's anxiety about her capacity to give birth to a normal, healthy, loving child manifests itself in Frankenstein in forms other than the plot. Mary Shelley thought of her ghost story as her baby: the metaphor is overtly articulated at the end of her Introduction to the 1831, Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein where she bids her novel, “my hideous progeny,” to go forth and prosper. Her metaphor is hardly original: Plato long ago said that men write books to gain the immortality women achieve by having children, while Jean Rhys recently confessed that when she finished her masterpiece Wide Sargasso Sea:
I've dreamt several times that I was going to have a baby—then I woke with relief.
Finally I dreamt that I was looking at the baby in a cradle—such a puny weak thing.
So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it really. I don't dream about it any more. 1
