Frankenstein as my favorite postpartum depression novel

On body horror, men as creators, and Mary Shelley's motherhood trauma

Anna Rollins

Jul 01, 2025

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Perhaps you don’t think of Frankenstein as a book about early motherhood.

But when I think of powerful examinations of labor, delivery, and postpartum, this novel is what I think of first.

I started teaching Frankenstein while I was pregnant with my first son. I assigned the text to a class of intro English students, and one of the reasons I was drawn to it was because it’s one of those cultural artifacts most people think they understand — but they probably don’t.

You know what I mean — pieces of art that have become ubiquitous in our culture, adapted into films, quoted in memes, fragmented in a million little ways.

For instance, I would suspect that most people consider Frankenstein to be a novel about a monster. And this characterization, I would argue, misses most of the text entirely.

🧟‍♂️Here’s a prompt🧟‍♂️

Think of a cultural artifact that you love. Now, consider how it is often misunderstood.

A few examples: maybe you’re obsessed with Ballerina Farm — but you take issue with her characterization as tradwife. Maybe you love Full House — but you read it as a narrative about grief, not a comedy about family. Perhaps your Nick at Nite viewings of Bewitched spurred some reflection about the way marginalized women have historically been characterized as “witches.”

In other words — take issue with the way the average person interprets a text you love.

Choose a text. Consider how it’s normally read. Now take an alternate reading.

Then — weave your own personal narrative into that reading.

If you read Full House as a show about grief, you probably have your own grief experience to inform that interpretation. If you consider Bewitched through the lens of marginalized, persecuted women, you probably have a relevant personal story that aligns with your interpretation.

A bit of context that informs my reading of Frankenstein and motherhood

Mary Shelley was born to the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman). Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to Shelley. And Shelley, a motherless child, also experienced grief related to her own pregnancies and childbirths, suffering multiple losses of her own.

And when Shelley was tasked by her friends to write a horror story, she wrote about creation (birth) gone wrong. Of course she did. That was the horror of her entire life.

Obviously, Frankenstein as a text that stands on its own is a story about creation — but knowing about the context, the specifics of the author’s life, really deepens your ability to interpret the novel.

I love to write essays where I weave my own narrative in with a text that I’ve read or watched and spent way too much time thinking about. An outside literary text gives me something universal to reference as I discuss a personal experience.

And this is a hallmark of a good personal essay: narrating the particular to discuss the broader human condition.

Depending upon where you’re publishing, sometimes these essays are categorized as Culture pieces, Reflections, or Reviews.

For MUTHA Magazine, I decided to write about myself alongside two related texts, one old, one new: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Louisa Hall’s Reproduction (2023).

This idea came to me around the time I was expecting my third baby. I’d picked up Louisa Hall’s new novel at the library (a sort of modern re-telling of Frankenstein — these are broad strokes, the novel is sweeping and brilliant — you should read it).

While reading Hall’s work, I started thinking about how often I taught Frankenstein to students after I became a mother. I kept meaning to take it off my syllabus each semester, but I would often replace every other text in the course except for that one. I loved lecturing about this horror story as a novel about motherhood — especially while I was in the throes of early motherhood.

So, for an essay, I decided to weave my own narrative of teaching Frankenstein, with a reflection upon the two texts. The broader theme for the essay was the concept of maternal dread.

Unrelated to my work on this essay, a few days after I’d given birth to my third daughter, I made the following observation:

Experienced motherhood is like renovating a house that has already been built; new motherhood is a fresh building project, beginning with the dirt still visible along the foundation.
By now, I’m familiar with the feeling of maternal dread. I experience it at each birth when the baby’s head crowns, the body slips out, and I see it in the doctor’s hands.
The first time, with the first baby, the dread horrified me. I thought it revealed something hideous about my character and worthiness. The second time, too, I was taken by surprise.
But the third time? I rather expected it. And there it was: that feeling of disgust. It arrived right as I remembered it. But I knew it was temporary—not a fixture. A little bit of dirt in the foundation, gone with a gust of wind or a bit of rain. I’d learned that to reach the light of the other side, I first had to journey through darkness.

This journal entry, I realized later, spoke to my reading of the two texts I’d been considering.

And so I wove this personal postpartum experience into my narrative.

Here’s the pitch I sent to MUTHA Magazine:

Dear Meg Lemke,
The night before my water broke, I began reading Louisa Hall's Reproduction (2023). In the novel, the narrator weaves her fertility journey -- one of miscarriages, nausea, molar pregnancy, and disability -- with a reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As I laid on the couch, fire crackling, legs aching, throwing up bits of my spaghetti dinner in my mouth, I had one repetitive thought: I want her (my daughter) out. I had reached the ninth month and was in a liminal space, my world a haze of brain fog, each cramp or ache a possible vehicle to the light of the other side.
Naturally, the only content I could comprehend at this point was about pregnancy: so I read Hall's novel of all that could go wrong -- and right -- in reproduction.
This was my third pregnancy. During my first pregnancy, I taught the novel Frankenstein to undergraduate students. As I assigned the text, I began to think of it as a book about maternal dread. I lectured about the context surrounding the creation of Shelley's book -- Shelley's mother, the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, having died during childbirth and then Shelley herself losing multiple pregnancies and infants. When Shelley was tasked with devising a horror story, she naturally wrote about birth gone wrong. And when the novel was published, critics speculated that she could not have written the text -- something so dark could not have emerged from such a young girl.
In about 1,500 words, I would like to narrate my reading of Louisa Hall's Reproduction and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein during my own pregnancies and births. In Hall's novel, the contemporary Frankenstein -- a scientist who modifies her eggs to reduce future risk -- shares my own name: Anna. This plot point and character resonated with my experience of maternal dread manifesting as the desire to control nature. Despite the familiar critique of human intervention as unnatural, Hall argues that nature can be equally violent. Her novel forces readers to reconsider what is right and wrong behavior for mothers.