Frankenstein
Or the feminine alchemy of turning pain into beauty
Some stories become myth because they strike a universal nerve. Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is one of them. Not because of its monsters, but because of the emotional truth it exposes without adornment: what isn’t held becomes distorted. What is born without a place to be supported grows misshapen by abandonment.
Mary Shelley wrote this novel before turning twenty, yet she had already lived enough to understand what psychology would take another century to articulate. She lost her mother at birth, endured rejection, emotional exile, consecutive losses. None of this is accidental in her work. Frankenstein is not a metaphor for technology; it is a meditation on the wound.
The creature enters the world without protection, without a loving gaze, without a name. It isn’t a monster. It is a child without a father. It is a wound without a witness.
The creature: the shadow no one integrates
Shelley didn’t only imagine scientific advances, she intuited the psychic consequences of abandonment. Her creature arrives innocent, curious, longing to belong. But what it finds is fear, rejection, silence. And like any human being, it responds from pain. It isn’t malice that distorts it, but absence. It is the shadow we all avoid looking at: the parts we reject in ourselves, in our families, in our society. The parts that stayed invisible for too long.
In the Internal Family Systems model (Richard Schwartz), there is a word for this: exile. The part of you that was pushed aside in order to survive. It isn’t born broken. It isn’t born dark. It only wants to be seen. But when we ignore these parts, they become noisy, clumsy, sometimes fierce in their attempts to receive love. Like Shelley’s creature pounding on a door that never opened.
How it feels in the body to grow without a safe place
A creature made of human fragments is a perfect image for a psyche that had to split itself in order to adapt. Who I am is built from what I live, what is missing, and what others project onto me.
And before the mind can understand any of it, the body already knows:
• constant hypervigilance
• extreme sensitivity
• difficulty trusting
• love confused with effort
• guilt for existing
• fear of being “too much”
• a sense of having no place of one’s own
This is not personality. Not fragility. It is survival. The body does not forget what the environment failed to hold.
The invisible weight of what is never named
Shelley captured something even deeper: unresolved wounds are inherited.
What one generation refuses to look at, the next carries as an invisible weight. Silence becomes atmosphere. Absence becomes identity. Demands become a mode of survival.
Her novel is also an emotional X-ray of her lineage: abandonment, loss, pain that was never named. A family tree repeating patterns, a twisted root still growing underground. What one generation avoids, the next absorbs. But when someone finally names it, alchemy appears.
The role of the one who breaks the silence
The one who is born inside a system that doesn’t hold, and notices, lives between two worlds: the family that shaped them and the truth they are beginning to sense. It is an uncomfortable place, lonely, sometimes devastating. But it is also where transformation begins.
You name what others silence.
You point to patterns that have repeated for generations.
You open a crack in the family history simply by daring to look.
Writing, for Shelley and for many of us, becomes a way to hold the unbearable. To give language to pain. To create space for what was never welcomed. That is alchemy: turning what breaks you into something you can inhabit, bringing beauty to what was too heavy to hold alone, transforming the wound into a truth that illuminates.
You don’t need to write a masterpiece to do this. Every time you speak your story, something rearranges itself. Every time you choose a different path, you break a pattern. Every time you bring awareness where there once was silence, you create alchemy.
Pain becomes a path when it is expressed. And that path transforms not only the one who walks it, but the world that receives it.
The true heart of Frankenstein
In the end, Frankenstein was never a simple story about monsters.
It is a story about what happens when a creature, a child, an inner part, even an entire generation enters the world without a place to belong.
It reminds us that what is not held becomes distorted. That what is not named repeats itself. That what we call “monstrous” is often just what has not been loved.
Shelley understood this deeply: the creature was never the horror, it was the consequence. And by writing it, she transformed it. And in transforming it, she transformed us. Because alchemy always begins in the same place: when someone has the courage to say, “this hurts, but there is truth here.”
With love,
Maria Luisa.
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