Born This Way: Reading Frankenstein with Disability

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein is essential reading in the literature of disability. Rejected and abandoned by a creator who manufactured him to be beautiful, the Creature’s plotline suggests a parent’s abandonment of a child with unexpected disabilities and later denial of the disabled adult’s sexual and reproductive agency. The Creature’s first-person narrative of rejection, exclusion, and stigma suggests an experience of learning to inhabit a strictly limited, socially constructed disability identity. Often read as a story about the bioethics of medical and scientific research, Frankenstein has even greater value as a text about the social construction of disability.