Themes of Trauma and Political Reflections in the Novels of Mary Shelley

Abstract

Most of Mary Shelley’s novels have reflected the socio-political as well as the scientific aspects to her writings and ideas that we find while going through her novels. Her famous novels were written with a perception against the utopian ideas and deals with the critique beyond her father’s, William Godwin’s utopianism which occurred mostly in the form of narrative and metaphor. Sterrenburg says that Mary Shelley's stories have anti-Jacobin themes like grave robbing, the dead coming back to life, and creatures that kill their creators. In order to appropriate the political images, she gives us a new form which slightly subverts the utopian ideas about revolution. The present research focuses on the depiction of the generation of radicals and the regeneration of man in demonic terms and uses the subjective, complicated, and problematic term "new form" in her works and how Shelley tried to translate politics into psychology. She used revolutionary symbolism and wrote it in the post-revolutionary era when there were no political movements.