From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social
contract tradition, particularly the educational and political
theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the
radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this
background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,
first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her
masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its
symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its
publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and
literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child,
Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an
original and paradigmatic work of science fiction-it is a profound
reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children
have rights? Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers
to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual
premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life
without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his
scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic
consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot.
Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of
interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed
Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was-a stateless orphan
abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The
novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have
the right to the fundamental means for their development as
humans-namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love,
education, and community. In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein
emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of
children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or
genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent
in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene
editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that
the right to share love and community, especially with parents or
fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their
genesis, membership, or social status.
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