Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Frankenstein: Themes
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Isolation
Friendship
Family
Creation
Playing God
Limits of Science
Humanity
Why the Frame Tales?
• Walton’s Letters
• Victor’s Tale
• Creature’s Tale
What Does the Creature Represent?
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The Neglected
The Underprivileged
The Poor
The Ugly
The Social Outcast
The Untouchable
The Working Class?
How Does Frankenstein
Represent The Romantic Period?
• Interest in Individual
• Sympathy for the
Downtrodden
• Relationship Between
Humans and Nature
• Focus on Paradise
Lost
Frankenstein and the
Enlightenment
If we were given
reason to understand
and control the
world (nature), is it
not a logical
conclusion that our
attempts would end
in playing god?
The Creature’s Reading List
• Plutarch’s Lives
• Milton’s
Paradise Lost
• Goethe’s Sorrows
of Young Werter
The Creature’s Adopted Family
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DeLacey
Felix
Agatha
Safie
Compare to other
adoptions.
Frankenstein’s Bride?
• Parallel between
Creator and
Creature
• Victor’s Refusal
• The Results
Coffee Break, Anyone?
Romanticism
Early 1800’s
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Nature, Nature, Nature
Perception and Creation
Political Unrest
Social Disease / Social Cure
The Common People and Beauty
Romanticism: The Big Seven
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William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
George Gordon (Lord Byron)
John Keats
Mary Shelley
John Constable
1776-1837
The Hay Wain (Wagon)
Eugène Delacroix
1798-1863
Liberty Leading the People
Dante and Vergil in Hell
Francisco Goya
1748-1828
Executions of the
Third of May, 1808
Jean-François Millet
1814-1875
The Angelus
Workers at Rest
Family at Rest
The Angelus
Workers at Rest
Family at Rest
John Keats 1694 - 1778
QUIZ
TIME