Frankenstein
Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley (1797-1851)
• Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a
writer and pioneering feminist, and
William Godwin, an English journalist,
political philosopher and novelist.
• When she was 18, she eloped with
the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
• After her husband died in a
shipwreck in 1822, Mary Shelley fell
into poverty. She continued to write
fiction to support herself. Frankenstein
(1818) was her first and by far her
most successful work of fiction.
Fig.
1
Story behind the story:
Mary Shelley spent a summer near Lake Geneva with
Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and other friends. In the
evenings, they told each other compelling ghost stories.
Mary, in a letter some years later, recorded that she was
the last one to come up with a ghost story. One night she
had a dream in which she envisioned "the pale student of
unhallowed arts" kneeling beside his creation—the
monster. She began writing the story that became
Frankenstein the next morning.
Setting: Switzerland, France, England,
Scotland, and the North Pole in the 18th
century
Title
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
Allusion:
Fig. 2
The entire book is rife with allusions to other
works→ critics have noted that Shelley created
a living book out of pieces of other books, just
as Frankenstein created his monster.
(1)
“A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that
once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and
actions. I am glad that I can, even upon these terms, converse with the dead,
with the wise and the good of revolving centuries.”
― William Godwin, Fleetwood
• Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) overtly referred to on the
title page (Adam’s challenge to God) and throughout the
novel
• Biblical references → the monster’s request for a mate
echoes Adam’s loneliness before Eve was created
• Rousseau (a native of Geneva, as was Victor
Frankenstein) → ideas re: education for citizenship; his
introspective Reveries of a Solitary Walker →
pre-Romanticism
• Creation myths
Fig.
3
Motifs
• bifurcation
(nature itself, the creature, Frankenstein)
• happy domestic life (Frankenstein’s youth and
the De Lacey family) / exclusion and rejection
Themes
• Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil?
• Political injustice (and the psychology of an individual being unjustly charged)
• Feminism→ Mary Shelley drew on her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas re:
interdependence of the private/feminine sphere and public/masculine sphere.
Notice that Victor’s downfall truly begins when he has completely separated
himself from the domestic/feminine sphere in his single-minded pursuit.
• Gender is a social construct→the monster is both feminized and masculinized
and swings between extremes of these two→identifies with both Adam and Eve
as portrayed in Paradise Lost, esp. Eve’s awakening. Ugliness and horror
rather than narcissism at awakening, however.
Fig. 4
Themes
• Do we possess free will (the capacity for meaningful moral choice) or are we
driven by our natures and experiences?
• Solitude (necessity of and danger of), being “alone in the midst of humankind”
• The failure of human sympathy → Shelley’s focus on the epistemology of
sympathy raises questions about identity, disgust, and our ability to learn from
and share fellow feeling with others.
• Distortion: the creature’s physical state; Victor Frankenstein’s single-minded
focus; our perception of others’ motives; what else?
Form: Epistolary Novel
The book itself is made up of letters, or
epistles.
Form: Tragedy
• How is Frankenstein saturated with the
tradition of tragedy?
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Romanticism
• Nature reflects inner state; nature is graceful and uplifting and yet merciless
and deadly.
• A sense of the sublime: the feeling of transcendence; the weight of the world
lifts in the face of beauty
Gothic Literature
• so called because the earliest works in the genre were set in castles and were
a type of imitation medievalism (2)
• Terrifying experiences
• The macabre
• Mysterious, supernatural elements
Plot
The beauty of this plot lies in the dynamic between the
surprising and the inevitable.
Plot arc: the education of the monster: three novels found
in a satchel
Goethe: domestic ways of being
Plutarch: political insights
Milton: cosmic ideas
observation of the De Lacy family, realization of rejection
and abandonment
Characterization
•To what extent is the monster a “noble
savage”? (Romanticism/Rousseau)
• juxtaposition→ monster is counterpart of
Victor→ ties in to theme “was man, indeed, at
once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent,
and yet so vicious and base?”
Diction and Syntax
• Diction is lyrical, melodious, nostalgic,
picturesque, sentimental, ornate, and also
passionate, bitter, and strident.
• Shelley’s use of varying sentence structures
for her different narrators serves to create the
“nested story” sense.
If you loved Frankenstein,
• Interactive fiction
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/
• woodcut illustrations: Lynd Ward
• scholarly article on “The Spectacle of Masculinity”
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/462596?uid=2&uid=4&sid=21104155842
011
• BBC documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf4w8heMmKA
• Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot,
Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Print.
Sources
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/frankenstein_remixed_salpart/
1) preface and introduction, Frankenstein, second edition
2) https://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_2/welcome.htm
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg
Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Print.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg
Fig. 1 http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DlKdVR17k4I/SpgSLP-BZcI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/uw5tHHz-J2A/s1600-h/Mary+Shelley.jpg
Fig. 2 http://zsr.wfu.edu/special/files/frankenstein-009.jpg
Fig. 3 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg
Fig. 4 http://uploads8.wikiart.org/images/lynd-ward/not-detected-272492.jpg
Fig. 5 http://www.brianruckley.com/uploaded_images/ward_frankenstein_110-742862.gif
Fig. 6 http://alancook.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/five.jpg
Fig. 7 http://alancook.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/three.jpg