Intro to Frankenstein
Hopefully I have finally picked a font color that shows up. I swear I'll figure this thing out one day. But onto the reading...
For starters I think Allan Bloom would have definitely been one of the critics to ask Mary Shelley how a girl could think up such a story. In fact he probably would have torn her to pieces. Being a child of two very controversial people, Mary Shelley would have fallen into his category of the "failing family". Surely Bloom would not have approved of Mary Wollstonecraft's premarital affairs and would have expected Mary Shelley to be another stupid student. If she was brought up in a family that didn't live strictly by the book then there must have been no hope for her. And he would probably have been deafened by stories of the sexual revolution of Mary Shelley's time. And look at her husband!
Mary Shelley shows her knowledge of Shakespeare and other classics in the Introduction, which would have met to Bloom's approval, but this was standard education of the times. I can just hear Bloom now: "That's the only reason she succeeded, because she had a focused education on the classics!" Well, the classics weren't as much classics then. She also shows a respect for religion that Bloom would have appreciated when she says how terrifying it would be for a person, in her story Dr. Frankenstein, "to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." Although further investigation into her morals may not have pleased Bloom as much.
I would like to know what Bloom has to say about Mary Shelley. I think her fame is evidence against Bloom's theory that radical thinking (in the 80s form of rock music and sexual liberation) leads to an unhappy, unsuccessful, uneducated student.