Frankenstein's Grandmother [1]
- Thomas Redoubt
- 14 hours ago
- 2 min read
by Thomas Redoubt
Oh!
What a monster she created!
Oh!
What terror she raised
in
the hearts and minds of men!
Oh!
From what an unnatural
mind
her colossus sprung!
Oh!
How
white hot was her fever
while
she assembled her creation[2]
with
surgical precision
from
the graveyards
of
discarded women!
Oh!
What havoc she caused
that fateful day
when
she released her furious leviathan
upon
the unsuspecting
18th century countryside!
Oh!
What unstoppable power she unleashed
with
her quilled hand
against
the staid civilization
of
men and women everywhere!
Oh!
How violently the world quaked
when
her beast first roared out
its blasphemies
in
its freakish female voice!
Oh!
How the earth still shakes and trembles
centuries later
from
the uncontrollable,
unrelenting,
unceasing march
of
her overwhelming,
still-growing giant -
FEMINISM!
*
[1] Mary Wollstonecraft, born 1759 London, England, died 1797. She was the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus”, which was first published in 1818.
[2] Wollstonecraft wrote her 274 page-long pamphlet “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Moral and Political Subject” in 1792 in just six weeks.
***
Thomas Redoubt is from Freedom, Pennsylvania, a small town on the Ohio River north-west of Pittsburgh and now lives in Allison Park, Pennsylvania. He was trained in science and law spent the first half of his non-literary career as a materials science researcher and the second half as a lawyer and law school adjunct professor. Redoubt has a passion for writing poetry and sees poetry as the epitome of one person to communicate his/her thoughts and feelings to another.
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